On Taking on Holocaust Deniers

[_canpakes]

I have before me a document prepared by the Institute for Historical Review, Costa Mesa, California. It can be purchased from that so-called historical institute at a price of $2.00 for ten copies. This so-called document professes to prove that the Holocaust never happened. It asserts that there is no evidence to prove that any member of the Jewish faith was ever persecuted or died at the hands of the Nazi Government of Germany. Among other things, it is claimed that gas chambers and crematoriums were constructed after the war as tourist attractions. The document contains a total of 66 questions and answers to prove that the Holocaust never happened.

I beg to disagree with the authors of this totally sick and false literature. I am in a good position to disagree. On the morning of April 29th, 1945, I was a lieutenant colonel commanding an infantry battalion of the United States 45th Infantry Division, with the mission of breaching the defenses of the city of Munich, Germany, in my assigned combat sector. Shortly after I had launched an attack against the outer defenses of Munich, I received an order to immediately proceed to the Dachau Concentration Camp. I knew nothing about the camp, nor had I ever heard of it.

Our first experience with the camp came as a traumatic shock. The first evidence of the horrors to come was a string of forty railway cars on a railway spur leading into the camp. Each car was filled with emaciated human corpses, both men and women. A hasty search by the stunned infantry soldiers revealed no signs of life among the hundreds of still bodies, over 2,000 in all.

It was in this atmosphere of human depravity, degradation and death that the soldiers of my battalion then entered the camp itself. Almost all of the SS command guarding the camp had fled before our arrival, leaving behind about two hundred lower ranking members of the command. There was some sporadic firing of weapons. As we approached the confinement area, the scene numbed my senses. Dante’s Inferno seemed pale compared to the real hell of Dachau.

A row of small cement structures near the prison entrance contained a coal-fired crematorium, a gas chamber, and rooms piled high with naked and emaciated corpses. As I turned to look over the prison yard with un-believing eyes, I saw a large number of dead inmates lying where they has fallen in the last few hours or days before our arrival. Since all of the bodies were in various stages of decomposition, the stench of death was overpowering.

The men of the 45th Infantry Division were hardened combat veterans. We had been in combat almost two years at that point. While we were accustomed to death, we were not able to comprehend the type of death that we encountered at Dachau.

Many of the prisoners were still alive, but many were dying as we arrived and continued to die at the rate of over a hundred a day for about two weeks after our arrival. There were over six hundred troops from the 45th Infantry Division who were in Dachau on the day of liberation, along with some troops from the 42nd Infantry Division. During the month of April, 1945, several hundred other slave labor and death camps were liberated by American, British and Russian soldiers.

Most certainly, there were well over a hundred thousand Allied soldiers who were eyewitnesses to the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust, along with a considerable number of Holocaust survivors. To those sick people in our society who say that it never happened, I say:

Tell us who were there that it never happened, instead of trying to disseminate your bigotry and hatred by total revision of the Holocaust history. Your efforts will never prevail. This remarkable United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in which we are all assembled today will always stand as a living monument to remind us forever that caring men and women must always actively resist those forces of evil which practice intolerance, bigotry, hatred and slavery.

Felix L. Sparks
Brigadier General, AUS (ret)

[_canpakes]

Harry J. Herder, Jr. - excerpt from the Liberation of Buchenwald:

High up above the opening for the gate was a heavy wooden beam with words carved into it in German script, Arbeit Macht Frei. In a clumsy way I attempted to translate the inscription to Bill and Tim as, “Work will make you free”. The three of us headed through the gate, through the twenty or thirty feet to the other side of the building. We were slightly apprehensive of what we might see. Our antennae were up. We had been teased by bits of information, and we wanted to know more. The lane we were walking on bent to the right as we cleared the building. We had barely made the turn, and there it was. In front of us a good bit, but plainly visible.

The bodies of human beings were stacked like cord wood. All of them dead. All of them stripped. The inspection I made of the pile was not very close, but the corpses seemed to be all male. The bottom layer of the bodies had a north/south orientation, the next layer went east/west, and they continued alternating. The stack was about five feet high, maybe a little more; I could see over the top. They extended down the hill, only a slight hill, for fifty to seventy-five feet. Human bodies neatly stacked, naked, ready for disposal. The arms and legs were neatly arranged, but an occasional limb dangled oddly. The bodies we could see were all face up. There was an aisle, then another stack, and another aisle, and more stacks. The Lord only knows how many there were.

Just looking at these bodies made one believe they had been starved to death. They appeared to be skin covering bones and nothing more. The eyes on some were closed, on others open. Bill, Tim, and I grew very quiet. I think my only comment was, “Jesus Christ.”

I have since seen the movie made about Buchenwald. The stack of bodies is vividly displayed in the movie, just as I saw it the first day, but it is not the same. In no way is it the same. The black and white film did not depict the dirty gray-green color of those bodies, and, what it could not possibly capture was the odor, the smell, the stink. Watching the movie was, in a way, a reliving of the first walk through those stacks of bodies.

The three of us looked, and we walked down the edge of those stacks. I know I didn’t count them–it wouldn’t have mattered. We looked and said not a word. A group of guys from the company noticed us and said, “Wait till you see in there.”

They pointed to a long building which was about two stories high, and butted up tightly to the chimney. It had two barn-like doors on either end of the building we were looking at, and the doors were standing open. We turned and walked back to the building where we found others from our company, along with some of the prisoners milling around in the space between the bodies and the building. We moved gently through those people, through the doors and felt the warmth immediately. Not far from the doors, and parallel to the front of the building, there was a brick wall, solid to the top of the building. In the wall were small openings fitted with iron doors. Those doors were a little more than two feet wide and about two and a half feet high; the tops of the doors had curved shapes much like the entrances to churches. Those iron doors were in sets, three high. There must have been more than ten of those sets, extending down that brick wall. Most of the doors were closed, but down near the middle a few stood open. Heavy metal trays had been pulled out of those openings, and on those trays were partially burned bodies. On one tray was a skull partially burned through, with a hole in the top; other trays held partially disintegrated arms and legs. It appeared that those trays could hold three bodies at a time. And the odor, my God, the odor.

I had enough. I couldn’t take it any more. I left the building with Bill and Tim close behind me. As we passed through the door someone from the company said, “the crematorium.” Until then I had no idea what a crematorium was.

It dawned on me much later–the number of bodies which could be burned at one time, three bodies to a tray, at least thirty trays–and the Germans still couldn’t keep up. The bodies on the stacks outside were growing at a faster rate than they could be burned. It was difficult to imagine what must have been going on.

[_canpakes]

Heinrich Himmler speaking on October 6, 1943 to a meeting of Gauleiters and Reichsleiters in Poznam:

“I must ask you only to listen to what I tell you in this group and never to speak about it. We were asked: What about the women and children? I made up my mind to find a clear solution here too. You see, I did not feel I had a right to exterminate the men – i.e. kill them or have them killed – while allowing the children to grow up and take revenge upon our sons and grandsons. We had to reach the difficult decision of making this nation vanish from the face of the earth.”

“Albert Speer: The End of a Myth” by Matthias Schmidt page 196 (English version St. Martins’ Press, New York, 1984)

[_canpakes]

From Smokey's mentor, Joseph Goebbels:

"In nature life always takes measures against parasites; in the life of nations that is not always the case. From this fact the Jewish peril actually stems. There is therefore no other recourse left for modern nations except to exterminate the Jew….”

“The Goebbels Diaries” Doubleday, 1948 – Louis P. Lochner, Editor. Copyright 1948 by the Fireside Press

[_Smokey]

Just want to note for posterity the demented argument made by this Holopologist.

Doubting the Soviet Union’s Holocaust Propaganda story means I was mentored by Joseph Goebbels, it says.

These kinds of emotional responses and bad faith arguments are not the responses you get from serious people with the truth on their side.

This is how the Church of Scientology’s apologists (Scienpologists?) respond to critics and S.P’s

This is Holopologetics.

[_Maksutov]

I read the book. I didn’t know it had been made into a movie.

It's very good. Recommended.

[_Chap]

Doubting the Soviet Union’s Holocaust Propaganda story means I was mentored by Joseph Goebbels, it says.

Not at all. When canpakes posted this, he was just reminding you that one of the closest associates of Adolf Hitler, a man for whom I believe you have a certain admiration, stated clearly that the extermination of Jews was a necessary act. Do you think he was insincere or untruthful when he said that? If not, why not take him at his word as a representative of the highest circles of Nazi policy making?

And what, may I ask, do you have against Joseph Goebbels? He was an intelligent and thoughtful man, with immense powers of persuasion. (I don't happen to like his thoughts very much, but your mileage may differ.)

From Smokey's mentor, Joseph Goebbels:

"In nature life always takes measures against parasites; in the life of nations that is not always the case. From this fact the Jewish peril actually stems. There is therefore no other recourse left for modern nations except to exterminate the Jew….”

“The Goebbels Diaries” Doubleday, 1948 – Louis P. Lochner, Editor. Copyright 1948 by the Fireside Press

[_canpakes]

From Smokey's mentor, Joseph Goebbels:

"In nature life always takes measures against parasites; in the life of nations that is not always the case. From this fact the Jewish peril actually stems. There is therefore no other recourse left for modern nations except to exterminate the Jew….”

“The Goebbels Diaries” Doubleday, 1948 – Louis P. Lochner, Editor. Copyright 1948 by the Fireside Press

Just want to note for posterity the demented argument made by this Holopologist.

Doubting the Soviet Union’s Holocaust Propaganda story means I was mentored by Joseph Goebbels, it says.

These kinds of emotional responses and bad faith arguments are not the responses you get from serious people with the truth on their side.

This is how the Church of Scientology’s apologists (Scienpologists?) respond to critics and S.P’s

This is Holopologetics.

Rather, it’s Smokey huffing paint fumes.

I could ask you to explain the connection between my posting the Goebbels quote and your daft statement here, but I know that you’ll not be able to do so and will instead just go slink back into the corner, to continue huffing Krylon.

[_Smokey]

Not at all. When canpakes posted this, he was just reminding you that one of the closest associates of Adolf Hitler, a man for whom I believe you have a certain admiration, stated clearly that the extermination of Jews was a necessary act. Do you think he was insincere or untruthful when he said that?

Do you even realize this person is using a fake quote, playing the role of “useful idiot” by spreading this Soviet Union Propaganda?

If not, why not take him at his word as a representative of the highest circles of Nazi policy making?

For starters, the quote is fake.

Fake evidence and deception are not hallmarks of a true story.

[_canpakes]

For starters, the quote is fake.

I’ve posted a source. Feel free to post your own that sheds light on the authenticity or lack thereof.

Now, how about your visibly fake oven pic from earlier, where the body has been photoshopped out?