Why is it that revisionism is now taken to mean the deliberate misrepresentation of history? Surely the evolution of historical interpretations can only be a good thing, since it offers more viewpoints for those wishing to understand an historical even to bounce off one another?
Pic unrelated.
Because the holocaust happened no matter how many mental gymnastics you try to perform and 6 million Jews were killed in death camps at the order of the Nazi government.
Because the normie opinion of history is that it's factual and objective, and they don't consider historiography.
So "revising history" is taken as twisting the established facts to fit an agenda, rather than merely reconsidering the accepted historiographical opinion.
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Thousands of survivors. Or did they all come to an agreement about the lie they're going to tell? Makes perfect sense.
Right wing "logic" and "facts", ladies and gentlemen.
>Why is it that revisionism is now taken to mean the deliberate misrepresentation of history?
Because of political agendas which require a particular view of history to remain coherent. When a different view of history happens to challenge someone's politics, then revisionism becomes a dirty word threatening some deep convictions beyond dry, historical narrative.
The six million figure is completely inaccurate. After WWII the allies took the total number of Jews living in Europe pre-1939 and compared it to the amount living in Europe post-1945 and did the math, they refused to take into account the obvious millions who had fled the continent during the war.
Also many of deaths happened not because of "gassing" but rather starvation and spread of diseases such as Typhus. Many holocaust survivors such as Elie Wiesel have admitted to exaggerating in this regard.
(Disclaimer) I'm not denying the systemic detention and killing of Jewish people by the German state in the 1940s, nor am I advocating any kind of anti-semitism. (Disclaimer)
>The six million figure is completely inaccurate
and yet it has been the figure arrived at by historical research for many years, decades in fact, now
if only they had the insight of a Veeky Forums comment
This is incorrect, the number has shifted around throughout the decades, at one point it was as low as four million.
>After WWII the allies took the total number of Jews living in Europe pre-1939 and compared it to the amount living in Europe post-1945 and did the math, they refused to take into account the obvious millions who had fled the continent during the war.
Yeah, because those "obvious millions who had fled the continent" never wound up appearing outside of it.
Because of Pure Ideology.
>as low as 4 million
>low
wew
Higher estimates say 48 million people died in the Chinese Revolution yet I don't see you crying over them.
Because historical revisionism is almost always about whitewashing OP.
You see it with Nazis and the Holocaust and you see it with Marxist-Leninists and the Great Leap Forward. None of them are willing to admit it happened, or if they are willing they will argue that it wasn't as bad as it was, or that the people who suffered in some sense deserved it.
What? There are more Jews in America then there are in Israel, and most of them immigrated during the war.
>Why is it that revisionism is now taken to mean the deliberate misrepresentation of history?
Because of holocaust deniers, who describe themselves as simple revisionists (a perfectly respectable approach in history) but are actually pseudohistorians.
Completely wrong.
ushmm.org
>By 1952, 137,450 Jewish refugees (including close to 100,000 DPs) had settled in the United States.
For contrast, that's less than the number of Jewish immigrants in 1905-1906, which brought in about 154,000
myjewishlearning.com
> From 1881 to 1914, more than 2.5 million Jews migrated from Eastern Europe, i.e. some 80,000 each year. Of these, some two million reached the United States, some 300,000 went to other overseas countries (including Palestine), while approximately 350,000 chose Western Europe.
but history is often twisted for political reasons
>Let's look at their claims one at a time:
>Supposedly the only evidence, "the postwar testimony of individual survivors."
First of all, consider the implicit conspiracy theory. Notice how the testimony of every single inmate of every Nazi camp is automatically dismissed as unconvincing. This total dismissal of inmates' testimony, along with the equally-total dismissal of the Nazis' own testimony (!), is the largest unspoken assumption of Holocaust-denial.
>This assumption, which is not often spelled out, is that the attempted Jewish genocide never took place, but rather that a secret conspiracy of Jews, starting around 1941, planted and forged myriad documents to prove that it did; then, after the war, they rounded up all the camp survivors and told them what to say.
>The conspirators also supposedly managed to torture hundreds of key Nazis into confessing to crimes which they never committed, or into framing their fellow Nazis for those crimes, and to plant hundreds of documents in Nazi files which were never discovered until after the war, and only then, in many cases, by sheer luck. Goebbels' diary, for example, was barely rescued from being sold as 7,000 pages of scrap paper, but buried in the scattered manuscript were several telling entries (as translated in Lochner, The Goebbels Diaries, 1948, pp. 86, 147-148):
>February 14, 1942: The Führer once again expressed his determination to clean up the Jews in Europe pitilessly. There must be no squeamish sentimentalism about it. The Jews have deserved the catastrophe that has now overtaken them. Their destruction will go hand in hand with the destruction of our enemies. We must hasten this process with cold ruthlessness.
>March 27, 1942: The procedure is a pretty barbaric one and not to be described here more definitely. Not much will remain of the Jews. On the whole it can be said that about 60 per cent of them will have to be liquidated whereas only 40 per cent can be used for forced labor.
>Michael Shermer has pointed out that the Nazis' own estimate of the number of European Jews was eleven million, and sixty percent of eleven million is 6.6 million. This is fairly close to the actual figure. (Actually, forty percent was a serious overestimate of the survival rate of Jews who were captured, but there were many Jews who escaped.)
>In any case, most of the diary is quite mundane, and interesting only to historians. Did the supposed Jewish conspiracy forge seven thousand pages to insert just a few lines? How did they manage to know Goebbels' affairs intimately enough to avoid contradictions, e.g. putting him or his associates in the wrong city at the wrong date?
>As even the revisionist David Cole has admitted, revisionists have yet to provide a satisfactory explanation of this document.
>Regarding postwar testimony from Nazis, were they all tortured into confessing to heinous crimes which they supposedly did not commit? This might be believable if only a few Nazis were captured after the war, or maybe if some had courageously stood up in court and shouted to the world about the supposed attempt to silence them. But hundreds testified regarding the Holocaust, in trials dating from late 1945 until the 1960s. (For example, see Böck, Hofmann, Hössler, Klein, Münch, and Stark.)
>Many of these Nazis testified as witnesses and were not accused of crimes. What was the basis for their supposed coercion?
>Many of these trials were in German courts. Did the Germans torture their own countrymen? Well, Holocaust-deniers sometimes claim that the Jews have secretly infiltrated the German government and control everything about it. They prefer not to talk too much about this theory, however, because it is clearly on the lunatic fringe.
>The main point is that not one of these supposed torture victims -- in fifty years, not one -- has come forth to support the claim that testimony was coerced.
>On the contrary, confirmation and reconfirmation of their testimony has continued across the years. What coercion could have convinced Judge Konrad Morgen to testify to the crimes he witnessed at the International Nuremberg Trial in 1946, where he was not accused of any crime? And to later testify at the Auschwitz trial at Frankfurt, Germany, in 1963-65? What coercion was applied to SS Doctor Johann Kremer to make him testify in his own defense in 1947, and then, after having been convicted in both Poland and Germany, emerge after his release to testify again as a witness at the Frankfurt trial? What coercion was applied to Böck, Gerhard Hess, Hölblinger, Storch, and Wiebeck, all former SS men, all witnesses at Frankfurt, none accused of any crime there?
>Holocaust-deniers point to small discrepancies in testimonies to try to discredit them. The assumption, unstated, is that the reader will accept minor discrepancies as evidence of a vast, over-reaching Jewish conspiracy. This is clearly ludicrous.
>In fact, the discrepancies and minor errors in detail argue against, not for, the conspiracy theory. Why would the conspirators have given different information to different Nazis? In fact, if all the testimonies, from the Nazis' to the inmates', sounded too similar, it is certain that the Holocaust-deniers would cite that as evidence of a conspiracy.
>What supposed coercion could reach across four decades, to force former SS-Untersturmführer Dr. Hans Münch to give an interview, against the will of his family, on Swedish television? In the 1981 interview, he talked about Auschwitz:
>Interviewer: Isn't the ideology of extermination contrary to a doctor's ethical values?
>Münch: Yes, absolutely. There is no discussion. But I lived in that environment, and I tried in every possible way to avoid accepting it, but I had to live with it. What else could I have done? And I wasn't confronted with it directly until the order came that I and my superior and another one had to take part in the exterminations since the camp's doctors were overloaded and couldn't cope with it.
>Interviewer: I must ask something. Doubters claim that "special treatment" could mean anything. It didn't have to be extermination.
>Münch: "Special treatment" in the terminology of the concentration camp means physical extermination. If it was a question of more than a few people, where nothing else than gassing them was worthwhile, they were gassed.
>Interviewer: "Special treatment" was gassing?
>Münch: Yes, absolutely.
>And what supposed coercion could reach across four decades, to force former SS-Unterscharführer Franz Suchomel into giving an interview for the film Shoah? Speaking under (false) promises of anonymity, he told of the crimes committed at the Treblinka death camp (from the book Shoah, Claude Lanzmann, 1985, p. 54):
>Interviewer: You are a very important eyewitness, and you can explain what Treblinka was.
>Suchomel: But don't use my name.
>Interviewer: No, I promised. All right, you've arrived at Treblinka.
>Suchomel: So Stadie, the sarge, showed us the camps from end to end. Just as we went by, they were opening the gas-chamber doors, and people fell out like potatoes. Naturally, that horrified and appalled us. We went back and sat down on our suitcases and cried like old women.
>Each day one hundred Jews were chosen to drag the corpses to the mass graves. In the evening the Ukrainians drove those Jews into the gas chambers or shot them. Every day!
>Ask the deniers why they shrug off the testimony of Franz Suchomel. Greg Raven will tell you that "it is not evidence...bring me some evidence, please." Others will tell you that Suchomel and Münch were crazy, or hallucinating, or fantasizing.
>But the fantasy is obviously in the minds of those who choose to ignore the mass of evidence and believe instead in a hypothetical conspiracy, supported by nothing but their imaginations.
>That total lack of evidence is why the "conspiracy assumption" almost always remains an unspoken assumption. To our knowledge, there has not been one single solitary "revisionist" paper, article, speech, pamphlet, book, audiotape, videotape, or newsletter which provides any details about this supposed Jewish/Zionist conspiracy which did all the dirty work. Not one.
>At best, the denial literature makes veiled references to the World Jewish Congress perpetuating a "hoax" (in Butz, 1976) -- no details are provided. Yet the entire case of Holocaust-denial rests on this supposed conspiracy.
>As for the testimony of the survivors, which the "revisionists" claim is the only evidence, there are indeed numerous testimonies to gassings and other forms of atrocities, from Jewish inmates who survived the camps, and also from other inmates like POWs. Many of the prisoners that testified about the gassing are not Jewish, of course. Look for instance at the testimony of Polish officer Zenon Rozansky about the first homicidal gassing in Auschwitz, in which 850 Russian POWs were gassed to death, in Reitlinger, The Final Solution, p. 154:
>Those who were propped against the door leant with a curious stiffness and then fell right at our feet, striking their faces hard against the concrete floor. Corpses! Corpses standing bolt upright and filling the entire corridor of the bunker, till they were packed so tight that it was impossible for more to fall.
Favoring well crafted lies over the truth is the true road to hell.
>Which of the "revisionists" will deny this? Which of them was there? Which of them has the authority to tell Rozansky what he did or did not see?
>The statement that "no 'survivor' claims to have actually witnessed any gassing" is clearly false; this was changed to "few survivors" in later versions, which is close to the truth.
>But we do not need to rely solely on testimony, from the survivors, Nazis, or otherwise. Many wartime documents, not postwar descriptions, specifically regarding gassings and other atrocities, were seized by the U.S. armed forces. Most are in the National Archives in Washington, D.C.; some are in Germany.
>Regarding the gassing vans, precursors to the gas chambers, we find, for example, a top secret document from SS Untersturmführer Becker to SS Obersturmbannführer Rauff (from Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, 1946, Vol. I, pp. 999-1001):
>If it has rained for instance for only one half hour, the van cannot be used because it simply skids away. It can only be used in absolutely dry weather. It is only a question now whether the van can only be used standing at the place of execution. First the van has to be brought to that place, which is possible only in good weather. ...
>The application of gas usually is not undertaken correctly. In order to come to an end as fast as possible, the driver presses the accelerator to the fullest extent. By doing that the persons to be executed suffer death from suffocation and not death by dozing off as was planned. My directions now have proved that by correct adjustment of the levers death comes faster and the prisoners fall asleep peacefully.
And most people don't realize that. To the average person, history, as it was taught to them is the true version of what happened. And most of them don't like that truth being challenged, even by accurate narratives.
It's actually much worse than that. We all have a strong bias towards "facts" that support our beliefs and a strong instinct to deny anything that seems to contradict our beliefs. This is why it's so hard to teach critical thinking, if you teach people how to research sources and analyse arguments logically, all you do is give them more effective tools to reinforce their own biases.