Question Is it true that nothing can be compared to the Holocaust?

I was reading a political article and the author was comparing the MAGA movement to the Nazi movement.

A dissenting commenter noting some statistics argued that nothing in history can be compared to the Holocaust.

Is that really true? What about the Soviet purges? And the Soviet famines? What are those death counts? What about the Chinese purges? The Southeast Asia purges......what are those death counts?

I have read much higher death counts for these events. I don't study these kinds of things, maybe someone here knows the facts of the matter.

Anyone here familiar with these "holocaust" histories?

If the covid virus was man made, would the 6+ million that have died so far, be a accidental holocaust?

Maybe I mis-understand the meaning of "holocaust". Is it the number of dead, ...or the manner and intent of the aggressor, that defines the word?

Would the millions murdered in Asia recognize the difference?

Or am I totally wrong on these death counts? And nothing can be compared to the Holocaust?
 
Hayseed -

I studied modern German history with a minor in German language for my undergrad degree.

The difference between the Holocaust and the Soviet gulag system is the mechanization of the modern state, Germany, which was dedicated and harnessed solely to murder.

Concerning the gulag system, I recommend Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, which demonstrates that the gulags of all types were designed first and foremost as a labor system, regardless of how destructive it was.

For instance, The White Sea Canal was built with zhek labor who were only issued hand tools to construct it. Only one ship ever traversed it, Stalin's, for its opening. And even then it had to be specially constructed with a shallow draft due to the minimal depth of the hand constructed waterway.

The Nazis, on the other hand, established, operated and later partially destroyed Auschwitz with Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka which were termed Vernichtungslager, or extermination camps, wholly designed to murder and then turn to ash vast incoming volumes of humanity. The massive amounts of generated ash at Auschwitz was dumped in the Sola River which ran near the camp.

This operation, called Aktion Reinhard after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich of the SS in 1942 in Prague by Czech operatives, perfected over the years by individuals like Rudolf Höss, the next to the last commandant at Auschwitz. Höss was brought back from the concentration camp inspectorate by Heinrich Himmler, the Reich leader of the SS and Police, especially because of his previous success in mass murder in order to rapidly gas with Zyklon B, a cyanide derivative usually employed to fumigate and kill rats and mice, and then cremate the 438,000 Jews from Hungary.

Here are some statistics from 1944 at Auschwitz alone to give you the scale of the SS murder operation.
  • 16 May – The railroad siding, which is located just inside the camp is released for use. It permits deportees to be taken from the train, selected for the gas chambers and then transported directly to Gas Chambers Nos. II and III at Auschwitz II-Birkenau. The start of deportation to Auschwitz of almost 438,000 Jews from Hungary.
  • 10–12 July – Liquidation of the so-called Theresienstadt family camp. The Nazis murder about 7,000 Jews in the gas chambers.
  • August – Start of deportation to Auschwitz of 67,000 Jews from the ghetto in Litzmannstadt (Łódź) in Poland.
  • 2 August – Liquidation of the “family Gypsy camp” – the SS murder almost 3,000 Romanies (Gypsies) in the gas chambers.
  • 12 August – Start of deportation to Auschwitz of 13,000 Poles, arrested en masse after the start of the Warsaw Uprising, which was crushed by SS troops. The commander of the operation, Jürgen Stroop, had a book made about this Action, entitled Die jüdische Wohnbezirk in Warschau ist kein mehr - The Jewish living quarters in Warsaw is no more.
Operations at Auschwitz ceased in November of 1944 as the Red Army approached Silesia where the camps, Auschwitz, Auschwitz II - Birkenau and Auschwitz III - Monowitz, were located.

Of the 1.3 million deportees who arrived at Auschwitz, 1.1 million, or some 85%, were murdered shortly after their arrival, often within an hour or two.

Read the following, in any order you please, in an attempt to grasp the scope, scale and management of this murder of men, women and children:

books by Primo Levi.
The War Against the Jews by Lucy Dawidowicz
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William R. Shirer - particularly the section captioned "The New Order"
Twelve books selected about the Holocaust: https://www.panmacmillan.com/blogs/history/the-best-books-about-the-holocaust
Another 12 books on the Holocaust: https://www.rd.com/article/holocaust-books/
The trial documents on Adolf Eichmann
The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy by Martin Gilbert
The Master of Auschwitz: Memoirs of Rudolf Höss
Books on Josef Mengele - https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/josef-mengele
The Theory and Practice of Hell by Eugen Kogon
The SS: Alibi of a Nation by Gerald Reitlinger
The Waffen SS by George Stein
Soldiers of Destruction by Brian Sydnor

There are two motion pictures I urge you to see: Shoah directed by Claude Lanzman, which covers the Holocaust in nine hours, and Conspiracy with Kenneth Branagh, which explains The Wannsee Conference in January of 1942, which established the elements and the coordination for solving the "Jewish question" in occupied Europe.

I was fortunate enough to have directed studies with visiting professors Carole Fink of The Ohio University and George Stein of Cornell while I was studying German history at SUNY Binghamton. My undergrad advisor and thesis director was Prof. Dr. Dietrich Orlow at Boston University, who has written extensively on the Nazi Party.

If I may answer any questions or direct you to sources, feel free to ask.

Hartmann352
 
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Most older folks know the Nazi stats. My question is was that the worse history of murder? Does the word holocaust have a special meaning? Is it a holocaust because of number? Or manner? Or motive? Or victim identity? Or does holocaust mean Germany did it?

How many lives did Stalin kill and starve? What was the death count of WWII Japan? What about China and Cambodia political purgings?

The "Jews" are only one tribe of Israel. There are 11 more tribes of Israel. People guess but no one knows who or where they are. Or their habits and traditions. Judah is only 1/12 of Israel. 1/12 of a race or people. However, the lost tribes will have common DNA with Judah. A way to identify them. A fine research project. A solvable puzzle. It will not be easy.

It may have always been brother against brother.

Just one other point. In WWII, Germany slaughtered Jews, Japan slaughtered everybody.

The hatred for the "Japs" was much stronger than the Germans. Without the Jap camps, many American Japs would have been murdered. Today with modern delusional study......they call this a war crime! And of course we all know the beatings, rape, murder, slavery and starvation that took place in those interment camps. We'll never live it down. Such shame!

Covid is close to 7 million deaths so far. If it turns out that the virus is man-made, will that make it a holocaust?

It's funny how the value of life changes. In the early 70s after 10 years and losing 50k young lives in Asia, everyone screamed to stop the tragedy. And abortion was illegal. Today we have 80-100k young die every year with drugs, unlimited abortion in many states, and I hear no screaming.

We are devolving. And the modern pastime is judging other people. It's very sick.
 
Hayseed -

To fully understand the breadth and scope of the years 1922-1953, takes a lot of dedicated reading and study.

You ask about many issues, all of which can be gleaned from reading lists involved in each area mentioned.

Both the war in the East, that fought in Soviet Russia, Ukraine, Byelorussia, etc., and that fought by the US in the Pacific, were racial wars in addition to being the response to clear threats which impinged on the future of the nation states involved.

The war in Soviet Russia covered the murder of the Jews in the occupied areas. But it also resulted in the deaths of over 30 million Russians, all of whom were classified as Untermensch, or subhumans, and ran the gamut from peasants to Red Army soldiers.

The Nazis killed hostages, those in reprisal raids, due to forced labor, "euthanasia," starvation, exposure, medical experiments, politruks, in terror bombing, and in the concentration and death camps, where overall the Nazis murdered from 15,003,000 to 31,595,000 people, most likely 20,946,000 men, women, handicapped, aged, sick, prisoners of war, forced laborers, camp inmates, critics, homosexuals, Jews, Slavs, Serbs, Germans, Czechs, Italians, Poles, French, Ukrainians, and many others. There were 1,000,000 were children under eighteen years of age. And none of these monstrous figures even include civilian and military combat or war-deaths related to offensive and defensive warfare.

The Holocaust, from my studies, arises from the sheer rapidity of the murder of the Jews once it began in the East on June 22, 1941, which offered a cover for this increasing murder, with initial advances allowing the Einsatzgruppen to effect" the Holocaust by bullets," killing some 1.2 million people inside Soviet Russia with bullets alone.

On the other side of the coin, being two of the most blood thirsty dictators in history, Hitler's party ruled from January of 1933 to May of 1945, a mere 12 years, whereas Stalin ruled, singularly, from 1922, following the incapacitation of Lenin, to his death in 1953, a reign of 31 years.

I suggest, in closing for the last time, that if you are truly interested in this areas and wish to understand them - read the books I mentioned before, take a few college courses with directed studies in the area of the holocaust, Hitler and Stalin, racial war, WWII, the Treaty of Versailles, Weimar Republic, history of the German police, major Nazi figures and their ties to mass murder, the Nazification of the Wehrmacht, explore both the NS and the SS states, Nazi economic policy and Max Heiliger. The refinements in historiography are endless.

Hartmann352
 
The key elements which separates the Holocaust, between 1938-1945, is the harnessing of the modern industrial state, through the use of trains, troops, Hollerith punch cards, Zyklon B (pronounced like cyclone), selections on the arrival ramp of the few to live and those to be murdered done by trained physicians operating for the health of the German volk, for the total elimination of entire groups - Jews identified by their wearing the yellow Star of David, gypsies, mentally ill and those with chronic problems with addiction like alcoholism, homosexuals, captured Soviet POWs, clerics, Jehovah's Witnesses, nationalists - through industrialised murder.

The Holocaust by bullets is the history of the Einsatzgruppen, the SS/SD mobile commandos who followed the three German army groups and were directed to shoot Soviet Red Army politruks, Jews, nationalists and anyone posing a threat to the rear areas. There was no need for trials, the victims were rounded up and shot in large numbers in areas like Ponary, Babi Yar, Rumbula Forest, the ninth fort at Kovno. Sometimes the mere presence of German troops in the vicinity was sufficient to for a massacre and Wehrmacht troops, signals battalions and German police units often performed this task. The Einsatzgruppen, led by lawyers and economists represented the educated elite of the Nazi SS and the SD or the Security Service. The Einsatzgruppen A, B, C and D and fifth Einsatzgruppen "for special employment" killed approximately 1.5 million people by bullets.

The Soviet gulag system did not operate gas chambers with attached crematoria for the murder of entire peoples. They, on the other hand, adopted a callous disregard towards the prisoners, the zeks, as they built canals, felled trees, railroad lines, worked in lead and uranium mines, etc. all with hand tools resulting from the needs for machinery in the factories and in the kolkhozes, the vast collective farms.

For a start, kindly read:

The Empire of Destruction by Alex J. Kay
The Gulag Archipelago by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
The SS: Alibi of a Nation by Gerald Reitlinger
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer, especially the chapter captioned: The New Order
Ordinary Men: Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher Browning
Heydrich by Gunther Deschner
The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest's Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews by Father Patrick Desbois
Female SS Guards and Workaday Violence by Wendy Lower
Stalin by Adam Ulam

Look into these personalities: Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, Artur Nebe, Otto Ohlendorf, Theodor Eicke, Karl Adolf Eichmann, Rudolf Höss.

On the Soviet side, examine the NKVD leaders: Yezhov, Yegorov and Beria.
Look into Stalin, Voroshilov

These are two vast areas of writing and investigation to delve into. But no one has ever adopted sheer industrial murder on a scale like the Nazis did, from homes to ghettos to the extermination camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sobibor, Chelmno, Treblinka, Majdanek-Lublin and Belzec.

Hartmann352
 
Here's my final comment on the Holocaust:

The Holocaust differs from other genocides in recent history for one main reason: there is no other example in which a minority was systematically annihilated and as completely as possible on the orders of a head of state and through the apparatus of a modern industrial state. To reconstruct Hitler’s central role in the Final Solution represents a particular challenge. Hitler treated the murder of the Jews as a matter of the utmost secrecy and was careful wherever possible not to leave behind any written orders, relying on subordinates like Göring, Himmler, Heydrich, and camp commanders like Rudolf Höss. Wherever Hitler's instructions on this matter are recorded he has used codified language like resettlement, evacuation to the East, final solution and cleansing. He kept away from the implementation of the orders and feigned ignorance, to his closest friends and colleagues, until his suicide.

As an example of Heinrich Himmler's complicity and that of the SS senior leadership, investigate Himmler's speech in Posen (Poznan), Poland.

See: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/himmler-s-posen-speech-quot-extermination-quot

See: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/german-railways-and-the-holocaust

See: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/articl...ust-remembrance-day-photos-auschwitz-birkenau

Hartmann352
 
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Yeah it would be quite a feat to perpetuate such a scam that allows you to emotionally blackmail the entire western hemisphere then make it illegal to do any critical thinking concerning the veracity of the claims made when having no physical evidence other than buildings and eye witness testimony in 18 countries. I mean what else causes a chemist to free a country for not finding cyanide in the walls of purported gas chambers and writing a book on it
 

A Study of the Cyanide Compounds Content in the Walls of the Gas Chambers in the Former Auschwitz and Birkenau Concentration Camps


by Jan Markiewicz, Wojciech Gubała, Jerzy Łabędź

Published: 2016-12-17

In a widespread campaign to deny the existence of extermination camps with gas chambers the “revisionists” have recently started using the results of the examinations of fragments of ruins of former crematoria. These results (Leuchter, Rudolf) allegedly prove that the materials under examination had not been in contact with cyanide, unlike the wall fragments of delousing buildings in which the revisionists discovered considerable amount of cyanide compounds. Systematic research, involving most sensitive analytical methods, undertaken by the Institute confirmed the presence of cyanide compounds in all kinds of gas chamber ruins, even in the basement of Block 11 in Auschwitz, where first, experimental gassing of victims by means of Zyklon B had been carried out. The analysis of control samples, taken from other places (especially from living quarters) yielded unequivocally negative results. For the sake of interpretation several laboratory experiments have been carried out.

As early as the first years after the end of World War II single publications began to appear in which the authors attempted to “whitewash” the Hitlerite regime and to call various signs of its cruelties into question. But it was not till the fifties that the trend may be defined as “historical revisionism” arose and started developing; its supporters claim that the history of the World War II has been fabricated for the purposes of anti-German propaganda. According to their statements there was no Holocaust, i. e. no mass extermination of Jews and in that case the Auschwitz- Birkenau Concentration Camp could not have been an extermination camp – it was only a “common” forced labour camp and no gas chambers existed in it.

Historical revisionism is now put forward by members of various nations, who already have their own scientific circles, own publications and also use the mass media for their purposes. Up to 1988 the “revisionists”[1] most frequently manipulated historical sources or simply denied the facts. Then, after the appearance of the so-called[17|18]Leuchter Report (2), their tactics changed distinctly. The above-mentioned Report, worked out on the basis of a study of the ruins and remains of the crematoria and gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau, has been considered by them to be specific evidence in support of their allegations and evidence of judicial validity at that, since it was commissioned by the court of law in Toronto (Canada). F. Leuchter, living in Boston, worked on the design and construction of gas chambers still in use to execute the death penalty in some States of the USA. This is considered to give him authority to take the role of expert as regards gas chamber issues. In this connection Leuchter came to Poland on 25 February 1988 and stayed here for 5 days, visiting the camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau and at Majdanek. In his report based on this inspection he states that “he found no evidence that any of the facilities that are usually alleged to have been gas chambers were actually used as such”. Moreover, he claims that these facilities “could not be used as gas chambers for killing people” (Item 4000 of the Report).

Leuchter tried to confirm his conclusions with the help of chemical analysis. For this purpose he took samples of material fragments from the chamber ruins to subject them to an analysis for hydrogen cyanide, the essential component of Zyklon B, used – acc. to the testimony of witnesses – to gas the victims. He took 30 samples altogether from all the five structures used formerly as gas chambers. At laboratory analyses performed in the USA the presence of cyanide ions at concentrations of 1.1 to 7.9 mg/kg of material examined was found in 14 samples. He also took one sample from the delousing building at Birkenau, which he treated as a “control sample”, and in which cyanides were found to be present at a concentration of 1060 mg kg of material. The positive results of the analyses of samples from the former gas chambers are explained by Leuchter by the fact that all the camp facilities were subjected to a fumigation with hydrogen cyanide in connection with a typhoid epidemic which really broke out in the camp in 1942.

A later investigation, carried out by a G. Rudolf (4), confirmed the high concentrations of cyanogen compounds in the facilities for clothes disinsectization. This may be so since, being undamaged, these facilities were not exposed to the action of weather conditions, especially rainfall. Moreover, it is known that the duration of disinsectization was relatively long, about 24 hours for each batch of clothes (probably even longer), whereas the execution with Zyklon B in the gas chambers took, according to the statement of the Auschwitz Camp Commander Rudolf Hoess (7) and the data presented by Sehn (6), only about 20 minutes. It should also be emphasized that the ruins of these chambers have been constantly exposed to the action of precipitation and it can be estimated, on the basis of the climatological records, that in these last 45 years or so they have been rinsed rather thoroughly by a column of water at least 35 m in height (!).[18|19]

In our correspondence with the Management of the Auschwitz Museum in 1989, not knowing the Leuchter Report then, we expressed our anxiety as to the chances of detection of cyanogen compounds in the chamber ruins; nevertheless, we offered to carry out an appropriate study. At the beginning of 1990 two workers of the Institute of Forensic Research arrived on the premises of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Camp and took samples for screening analysis: 10 samples of plaster from the delousing chamber (Block No 3 at Auschwitz), 10 samples from gas chamber ruins and, in addition, 2 control samples from the buildings which, as living quarters, had not been in contact with hydrogen cyanide. Out of the 10 samples from the delousing chamber, seven contained cyanogen compounds at concentrations from 9 to 147 µg in conversion to potassium cyanide (which was used to construct the calibration curve) and 100 g of material. As far as the ruins are concerned, the presence of cyanide was demonstrated only in the sample from the ruins of Crematorium Chamber No II at Birkenau. Neither of the control samples contained cyanides.

When the dispute on the Leuchter Report arose, we undertook a closer study of the problem, availing ourselves, among other publications, of J. C. Pressac’s comprehensive work (5). In consequence, we decided to start considerably more extensive and conscientiously planned researches. To carry them out, the Management of the Auschwitz Museum appointed their competent workers, Dr F. Piper (custodian) and Mr W. Smrek (engineer) to join the commission, in which they co- worked with the authors of the present paper, representing the Institute of Forensic Research. Under this collaboration, the Museum workers were providing us on the spot with exhaustive information concerning the facilities to be examined and – as regards the ruins – a detailed topography of the gas chambers we were concerned with. And so they made it possible for us to take proper samples for analysis. We tried to take samples – if at all possible – from the places best sheltered and least exposed to rainfall, including also as far as possible – fragments of the upper parts of the chambers (hydrogen cyanide is lighter than air) and also of the concrete floors, with which the gas from the spilled Zyklon B came into contract at rather high concentrations.

Samples, about 1-2 g in weight, were taken by chipping pieces from bricks and concrete or scrapping off, particularly in the case of plaster and also mortar. The materials taken were secured in plastic containers marked with serial numbers. All these activities were recorded and documented with photographs. Work connected with them took the commission two days. The laboratory analysis of the material collected was conducted – to ensure full objectivity – by another group of Institute workers. They started with preliminary work: samples were comminuted by grinding them by hand in an[19|20]agate mortar, their pH was determined at 6 to 7 in nearly all samples. Next the samples were subjected to preliminary spectrophotometric analysis in infrared region, using a Digilab FTS-16 spectrophotometer. It was found that the bands of cyanide groups occurred in the region of 2000-2200 cm–1 in the spectra of a dozen samples or so. However, the method did not prove to be sensitive enough and was given up in quantitative determinations. It was determined, using the spectrographical method, that the main elements which made up the samples were: calcium, silicon, magnesium, aluminium and iron. Moreover, titanium was found present in many samples. From among other metals in some samples there were also barium, zinc, sodium, manganese and from non-metals boron.

The undertaking of chemical analysis had to be preceded by careful consideration. The revisionists focussed their attention almost exclusively on Prussian blue, which is of intense dark-blue colour and characterized by exceptional fastness. This dye occurs, especially in the form of stains, on the outer bricks of the walls of the former bath-delousing house in the area of the Birkenau camp. It is hard to imagine the chemical reactions and physicochemical processes that could have led to the formation of Prussian blue in that place. Brick, unlike other building materials, very feebly absorbs hydrogen cyanide, it sometimes does not even absorb it at all. Besides, iron occurring in it is at the third oxidation state, whereas bivalent iron ions are indispensable for the formation of the [Fe(CN)6]–4 ion, which is the precursor of Prussian blue. This ion is, besides, sensitive to the sunlight.

J. Bailer (1) writes in the collective work “Amoklauf gegen die Wirklichkeit” that the formation of Prussian blue in bricks is simply improbable; however, he takes into consideration the possibility that the walls of the delousing room were coated with this dye as a paint. It should be added that this blue coloration does not appear on the walls of all the delousing rooms.

We decided therefore to determine the cyanide ions using a method that does not induce the breakdown of the composed ferrum cyanide complex (this is the blue under discussion) and which fact we had tested before on an appropriate standard sample. To isolate cyanide compounds from the materials examined in the form of hydrogen cyanide we used the techniques of microdiffusion in special Conway-type chambers. The sample under examination was placed in the internal part of the chamber and next acidified with 10% sulfuric acid solution and allowed to remain at room temperature (about 20oC) for 24 hrs. The separated hydrogen cyanide underwent a quantitative absorption by the lye solution present in the outer part of the chamber. When the diffusion was brought to an end, a sample of lye solution was taken and-the pyridine-pyrazolone reaction carried out by Epstein’s method (3). The intensity of the polymethene dye ob-[20|21]tained was measured spectrophotometrically at a wavelength equal to 630 nm. The calibration curve was constructed previously and standards with a known CN- content were introduced into each series of determinations to check the curve and the course of determination. Each sample of materials examined was analysed three times. If the result obtained was positive, it was verified by repeating the analysis. Having applied this method for many years, we have opportunities to find its high sensitivity, specificity and precision. Under present circumstances we established the lower limit of determinability of cyanide ions at a level of 3-4 ug CN- in 1 kg of the sample.

The results of analyses are presented in Tables I-IV. They unequivocally show that the cyanide compounds occur in all the facilities that, according to the source data, were in contact with them. On the other hand, they do not occur in dwelling accommodations, which was shown by means of control samples. The concentrations of cyanide compounds in the samples collected from one and the same room or building show great differences. This indicates that the conditions that favour the formation of stable compounds as a result of the reaction of hydrogen cyanide with the components of the walls, occur locally. In this connection, it takes quite a large number of samples from a given facility to give us a chance to come upon this sort of local accumulation of cyanide compounds.

To complete this research on the cyanide compound content in various camp facilities, we decided to carry out several pilotage experiments. The renovation of the Institute building, just in progress, provided us with materials for this investigation. We divided particular constituents of these materials (bricks, cement, mortar and plaster) into several 3-4 gram pieces and placed them to glass chambers, in which we generated hydrogen cyanide by reacting potassium cyanide and sulphuric acid. We used high concentrations of this gas (about 2%) and wetted some of the samples with water. Fumigation took 48 hours at a temperature of about 20oC (Table V). Another series of samples were treated with hydrogen cyanide as well, but now in the presence of carbon dioxide. According to calculations, in the chambers in which people had been gassed the carbon dioxide content produced in the breathing process of the victims was rather high and in relation to hydrogen cyanide may have been even as high as 10:1. In our experiment we applied these two gases (CO2 and HCN) in the 5:1 ratio. Having been subjected to gassing, the samples were aired in the open air at a temperature of about 10-15oC. The first analysis was conducted 48 hours after the beginning of airing.

This series of tests allows the statement that mortar absorbs and/or binds hydrogen cyanide best and also that wet materials show a noticeable tendency to accumulate hydrogen cyanide whereas brick, especially old brick, poorly absorbs and/or binds this compound. [21|22]

TABLE I. CONCENTRATION OF CYANIDE IONS IN CONTROL SAMPLES TAKEN FROM DWELLING ACCOMODATIONS, WHICH WERE PROBABLY FUMIGATED WITH ZYKLON B ONLY ONCE (IN CONNECTION WITH TYPHOID EPIDEMIC IN 1942)
SiteBlock NoSample NoConcentration of CN–
in µg/kg
Auschwitz390
100
8110
120
Birkenau3600
610
620
630
Note: In screening tests of 1990 two control samples also produced 0 results.
TABLE II. CONCENTRATION OF CYANIDE IONS IN SAMPLES TAKEN IN THE CELLARS IN WHICH THE FIRST GASSINGS OF CAMP PRISONERS TOOK PLACE ON NOVEMBER 3rd, 1941
SitePlaceSample NoConcentration of CN–
in µg/kg
Auschwitzcellars of Block 111328, 24, 24
1420, 16, 16
150
Note: The CN– content in a sample of diatomaceous earth – a component of Zyklon B (material from the Museum, sample No 24) – was 1360 µg/kg, 1320 µg/kg and 1400 µg/kg.
[22|23]

TABLE III. CONCENTRATIONS OF CYANIDE IONS IN SAMPLES TAKEN FROM THE CREMATORIUM CHAMBERS (OR THEIR RUINS) IN WHICH THE VICTIMS WERE GASSED.
A – Sample No;
B – Concentration of CN– (µg/kg).
Crematorium I
A17171819202122
B287600288080
288000292080
268000288080
Crematorium II
A25262728293031
B640280820168296
592280816156288
620280816168292
Crematorium III
A32333435363738
B68121216121656
688121281652
68881681656
Crematorium IV
A3940414243
B4036500trace16
4432496012
4436496012
Crematorium V
A46474849505152
B244369212116560
248289612120600
232329612116600
Notes:
Crematorium I at Auschwitz – building preserved but reconstructed several times
Crematorium II-IV[*] at Birkenau – ruins. Only the ceiling of the chamber of Crematorium III[*] is in part fairly well preserved.
* Transcriber’s Note: This is an obvious error. The first instance should read “II-V,” and the second “II.”
[23|24]

TABLE IV. CONCENTRATIONS OF CYANIDE IONS IN SAMPLES COLLECTED IN THE FACILITIES FOR THE FUMIGATION OF PRISONERS’ CLOTHES
SitePlaceSample NoConcentration of CN~ in µg/kg
14,4,4
20
3, iron hook0
4, piece of wood from a door0
Block No. 3(2)
50
6900,840,880
70
816,12,16
Two series of determinations were made in block No 3 in 1990I.70,30,74,142,422
II.118,52,80,60,214
53(3)24, 20, 24
53a(3)224, 248, 228
54(3)36, 28, 32
55(3)736, 740 ,640
56(4)4, 0, 0
57(5)840, 792, 840
58(5)348, 324, 348
59(6)28, 28, 28
Notes:
(1) Dwelling quarters next to cobbler workshop and disinfection chambers.
(2) Disinfection facilities
(3) Materials taken from the outer side of the building wall
(4) Mortar taken from the outer side of the building wall
(5) Plaster taken from dark-blue stains on the inner side of the building wall
(6) Plaster from white walls inside the building
[24|25]

TABLE V. CONCENTRATIONS OF HYDROGEN CYANIDE AND/OR ITS COMBINATIONS IN MATERIALS SAMPLED 48 HOURS AFTER FUMIGATION
Fresh plasterFresh mortarNew brickOld brick
Sort of materialdrywetteddrywetteddrywetteddrywetted
Concentration of CN– in µg/kg244801762700452200
After a lapse of one month the concentration of hydrogen cyanide and its combinations in the materials examined decreased on the average by 56% (from 28% to 86%). An apparent rise in the concentration occurred only in single samples. That is so because the samples used for examination were not always the same. When they had been used up in the first run, they had to be replaced by new samples taken from the same bigger lumps of material. This supports the thesis on the local binding of hydrogen cyanide.

The results obtained in the next series of tests, in which the materials were subjected to gassing with a mixture of HCN + CO2 are presented in Table VI.

TABLE VI. CONCENTRATIONS OF HYDROGEN CYANIDE AND ITS COMBINATIONS IN MATERIALS SAMPLED AFTER FUMIGATION WITH HCN+CO2
Fresh plasterOld mortarFresh mortarNew brickOld brick
Sort of materialdrywetteddrywetteddrywetteddrywetteddrywetted
Concentration of CN– in µg/kg592012800100024449238852362460
In this case the CN– content in mortar (old and fresh) and in new brick was for the most part lower in the wetted materials than in the dry ones. It seems that here a tendency is revealed towards the competitive action of carbon dioxide, which dissolves in water. In this series of tests fresh plaster showed an exceptionally high affinity to hydrogen cyanide.

After an interval of a month the mean decrease of hydrogen cyanide content in this material was 73% and so it was markedly greater than in the run with hydrogen cyanide only. In as many as four samples that loss ranged from 97% to 100% and then airing was nearly complete. This statement is significant in as much as in their[25|26]reasoning the revisionists did not take into consideration certain circumstances, namely, the simultaneous action of cyanides and carbon dioxide on the chamber walls. In the air exhaled by man carbon dioxide constitutes 3.5% by volume. Breathing for 1 minute, he takes in and next exhales 15-20 dm3 of air, comprising on the average 950 cm3 CO2; consequently, 1000 people breathe out about 950 dm3 of carbon dioxide. And so it can be estimated that, if the victims stayed in the chamber for 5 minutes before they died, they exhaled 4.75 m3 of carbon dioxide during that period. This is at least about 1% of the capacity, e. g. of the gas chamber of Crematorium II at Birkenau, the capacity of which was about 500 m3, whereas the concentration of hydrogen cyanide virtually did not exceed 0.1% by volume (death occurs soon at as low HCN concentrations as 0.03% by volume). Therefore, the conditions for the preservation of HCN in the gas chambers were not better than in the delousing chambers, despite what the revisionists claim. Besides, as has already been mentioned, the chamber ruins have been thoroughly washed by rainfall.

The following experiment illustrated to what extent water elutes cyanide ions. Two 0.5-gram plaster samples, previously subjected to a fumigation with hydrogen cyanide (after the determination of cyanide combinations in them) were placed on filter paper in glass funnels and either of them was flushed with 1 l of clean, deionized distilled water. The results of the test are presented in Table VII.

TABLE VII. RESULTS OF EXAMINATION CONCERNING THE EFFECT OF WATER UPON THE CONCENTRATION OF CYANIDE IONS IN PLASTER
SampleInitial concentration
(CN– in µg/kg)
Concentration after flushing
with water (CN– in µg/kg)
Loss, in %
I1602882.5
II120011290.7
Consequently, water elutes cyanide compounds in considerable measure. The fact that they have survived so long in the chamber ruins is probably due to the possible formation of cyanide combinations in the walls of those chambers at the time of their utilization from about mid-1943 to the last weeks of 1944 (except for Crematorium IV, which was blown up earlier). The significance of rainfall in the process of elution of these combinations out of the ruin walls is exemplified by Crematorium II in the Birkenau camp, where we have found the highest (mean) concentrations of cyanide compounds, because many fragments of the gas chamber were to a great degree protected from precipitation.[26|27]

Final Remarks

The present study shows that in spite of the passage of a considerable period of time (over 45 years) in the walls of the facilities which once were in contact with hydrogen cyanide the vestigial amounts of the combinations of this constituent of Zyklon B have been preserved. This is also true of the ruins of the former gas chambers. The cyanide compounds occur in the building materials only locally, in the places where the conditions arose for their formation and persistence for such a long time.

In his reasoning Leuchter (2) claims that the vestigial amounts of cyanide combinations detected by him in the materials from the chamber ruins are residues left after fumigations carried out in the Camp “once, long ago” (Item 14.004 of the Report). This is refuted by the negative results of the examination of the control samples from living quarters, which are said to have been subjected to a single gassing, and the fact that in the period of fumigation of the Camp in connection with a typhoid epidemic in mid-1942 there were still no crematoria in the Birkenau Camp. The first crematorium (Crematorium II) was put to use as late as 15 March 1943 and the others several months later.

References

  1. Amoklauf gegen die Wirklichkeit. Praca zbiorowa (B. Gallanda, J. Bailer, F. Freund, T. Geisler, W. Lasek, N. Neugebauer, G. Spenn, W. Wegner). Bundesministerium fuer Unterricht und Kultur Wien 1991.
  2. Der erste Leuchter Report, Toronto 1988, Samisdat Publishers Ltd., Toronto 1988.
  3. Epstein J., Estimation of Microquantities of Cyanide, Analytical Chemistry 1947, Vol. 19, p. 272.
  4. Gauss E., Vorlesungen ueber Zeitgeschichte, Grabert Vlg. Tuebingen 1993.
  5. Pressac J. C., Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, B. Klarsfield Foundation, New York 1989.
  6. Sehn J., Ob6z Koncentracyjny Oswiecim-Brzezinka. Wydawnictwo Prawnicze, Warszawa 1960.
  7. Wspomnienia Rudolf . Hoessa, komendanta obozu oswiecimskiego. G16wna Komisja Badania Zbrodni Hitlerowskich w Polsce. Wydawnistwo Prawnicze, Warszawa 1956.
The study was performed and funded by the Committee for Scientific Research under Research Project No 2 P 30 3088 04. Leader of the Project Prof. Jan Markiewicz.

See: https://codoh.com/library/document/a-study-of-the-cyanide-compounds-content-in-the/en/

The claims that remnants of Zyklon-B did not exist have been disproved by this in depth study completed on the remaining construction materials used in the construction of the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.
Hartmann352
 

Eisenhower’s Foresight: Protecting the Truth of the Holocaust​


ike ohrdruf.jpeg
During a tour of the newly liberated Ohrdruf concentration camp in Germany, an Austrian Jewish survivor describes to General Dwight D. Eisenhower and his entourage the use of the gallows in the camp. National Archives

While Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower had studied his World War II enemy, he was unprepared for the Nazi brutality he witnessed at Ohrdruf concentration camp in April 1945. Bodies were piled like wood and living skeletons struggled to survive. Even as the Allied Forces continued their fight, General Dwight D. Eisenhower foresaw a day when the horrors of the Holocaust might be denied. He invited the media to document the scene. He compelled Germans living in the surrounding towns and any soldier not fighting at the front to witness the atrocities for themselves.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, visited the camp on April 12, 1945, with General George S. Patton and General Omar Bradley. After his visit, Eisenhower cabled General George C. Marshall, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, describing his trip to Ohrdruf:

. . .the most interesting—although horrible—sight that I encountered during the trip was a visit to a German internment camp near Gotha. The things I saw beggar description. While I was touring the camp I encountered three men who had been inmates and by one ruse or another had made their escape. I interviewed them through an interpreter. The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said that he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to “propaganda.”
Seeing the Nazi crimes committed at Ohrdruf made a powerful impact on Eisenhower, and he wanted the world to know what happened in the concentration camps. On April 19, 1945, he again cabled Marshall with a request to bring members of Congress and journalists to the newly liberated camps so that they could bring the horrible truth about Nazi atrocities to the American public. He wrote:

We continue to uncover German concentration camps for political prisoners in which conditions of indescribable horror prevail. I have visited one of these myself and I assure you that whatever has been printed on them to date has been understatement. If you could see any advantage in asking about a dozen leaders of Congress and a dozen prominent editors to make a short visit to this theater in a couple of C-54's, I will arrange to have them conducted to one of these places where the evidence of bestiality and cruelty is so overpowering as to leave no doubt in their minds about the normal practices of the Germans in these camps. I am hopeful that some British individuals in similar categories will visit the northern area to witness similar evidence of atrocity.
That same day, Marshall received permission from the Secretary of War, Henry Lewis Stimson, and President Harry S. Truman for these delegations to visit the liberated camps.

Ohrdruf made a powerful impression on General George S. Patton as well. He described it as “one of the most appalling sights that I have ever seen.” He recounted in his diary that

In a shed . . . was a pile of about 40 completely naked human bodies in the last stages of emaciation. These bodies were lightly sprinkled with lime, not for the purposes of destroying them, but for the purpose of removing the stench.
When the shed was full—I presume its capacity to be about 200, the bodies were taken to a pit a mile from the camp where they were buried. The inmates claimed that 3,000 men, who had been either shot in the head or who had died of starvation, had been so buried since the 1st of January.
When we began to approach with our troops, the Germans thought it expedient to remove the evidence of their crime. Therefore, they had some of the slaves exhume the bodies and place them on a mammoth griddle composed of 60-centimeter railway tracks laid on brick foundations. They poured pitch on the bodies and then built a fire of pinewood and coal under them. They were not very successful in their operations because there was a pile of human bones, skulls, charred torsos on or under the griddle which must have accounted for many hundreds.
The discovery of the Ohrdruf camp opened the eyes of many US soldiers to the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

See: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/ohrdruf

On the night of July 22-23, 1944, soldiers of the Red Army came upon Majdanek, the first of the Nazi extermination camps to be liberated. They freed just under 500 prisoners and occupied the nearby city of Lublin on July 24. What Soviet and Polish researchers uncovered and documented behind the camp’s electrified barbed wire, soon reinforced by the investigative work conducted by others outside of the USSR, definitively shaped our understanding of the Nazi genocide. While still largely unfamiliar to most Americans, the liberation of Majdanek was one of the most significant moments in the history of World War II and the Holocaust.

majdanek soviets.jpeg
Soviet soldiers inspect the crematory ovens at Majdanek, July 1944. Courtesy of Deutsche Fotothek.

In 1942-43, Majdanek was transformed from a labor camp to an extermination camp (Vernichtungslager). As the Nazi mass annihilation of European Jews escalated, the SS installed gas chambers and crematoria there. Polish, Czech, Slovakian, and Hungarian Jews were deported directly or diverted to Majdanek because of backed up trains and overcrowding at other killing centers. The Nazis also transported Jews from Germany, France, and the Low Countries to the camp. In 1943, SS personnel at Majdanek murdered thousands from the Warsaw and Bialystok Ghettos in Poland after Himmler called for their liquidation. The camp’s “efficiency” increased as its usefulness to the “Final Solution” expanded.

A combination of the rapid Soviet advance following Operation Bagration, launched on June 22, 1944, and SS incompetence meant that most of Majdanek’s infrastructure of murder remained intact when Soviet units seized the camp a month later. Posterity will be forever grateful for both the Red Army’s speed and the Nazis’ incompetence.

The Polish People’s Army’s Film Crew, under the direction of Aleksander Ford, created a powerful documentary about the camp. Released in 1944 and called Majdanek—The Cemetery of Europe, the film spares the reader little of the horror of the killing. The crew took shots of the excavations of mass graves and showed Majdanek’s piles of shoes, shoes that once belonged to real, flesh-and-blood human beings. Viewers can also lay eyes on the gas chambers and ovens and hear the testimony of liberated inmates removed from all over the European continent and sent to this hell. While the film says little about the special targeting of Jews—a major problem with much of the early Soviet and Communist coverage of the genocide, it is a landmark work in the history of Holocaust cinema and leaves deep imprints on viewers to this day.

Soviet journalist, Konstantin Simonov, struck a similar note when he authored a pamphlet, The Lublin Extermination Camp, in the summer of 1944. The pamphlet was quickly translated into many languages, including English. Reading Simonov exposes one to the fragility of human comprehension—how to find an adequate language and set of categories that can grasp the inhumanity and terror of a place like Majdanek. He introduces the text with a warning that there was so much more to learn about the camp and its operations, so many more witnesses to interview, and so many more of the dead to identify. “But having only this,” Simonov declares, “I cannot remain silent, I cannot wait. I want to speak at once, today, about the first traces of this crime that have been revealed, about what I have heard during the past few days, and what I have seen with my own eyes.” To edge his audience toward some limited understanding of what he saw, he lists the names of many of the murdered, names he extracted from a mountain of documents collected by the SS. “This frightful heap of documents was the grave mound of Europe, squeezed into one room.” Simonov notes how Jews and Soviet and Polish prisoners were among the earliest victims. He also records stories from witnesses about the horrors of November 3, 1943. The pamphlet then escorts the reader on a nightmarish journey through Majdanek, accompanied by photographs of the barbed wire and barracks, and, unforgettably, the crematoria surrounded by the charred remains of innumerable victims. If Simonov errs in the pamphlet in estimating the numbers of deaths in the camp at several hundred thousand (contemporary estimates range from 95,000 to 200,000), this is forgivable.

The works of Ford and Simonov were truly momentous. They grappled, visually and through the written word, with a genocide, before “genocide,” as a word and concept (it was only coined by Rafael Lemkin in 1944), really existed. For that matter “Holocaust,” the not uncontroversial term which has become the central designator for the annihilation of European Jews, had not yet emerged as an organizing concept either. Thus, the Red Army’s liberation of Majdanek and the vital research which followed soon thereafter should find a deeper place in our historical awareness of the Third Reich’s crimes. The camp’s discovery yielded irrefutable evidence of the Nazi extermination system and gave even greater impetus to the quest for justice for the victims comprising this “cemetery of Europe.”

See: https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/liberation-of-nazi-camp-majdanek-1944

The prescience of General Dwight Eisenhower, Alexsander Ford and Konstantin Simonov provided documentary and photographic evidence of the first concentration camps to be liberated. Majdanek was the first, though initially unheralded, extermination camp to be liberated.
Hartmann352
 
Comparing historical events and determining their scale of tragedy can be a sensitive and complex matter. The Holocaust, which refers to the systematic genocide of six million Jews by the Nazi regime during World War II, is often considered a unique and unprecedented event due to its scale, industrialized nature, and the deliberate targeting of an entire ethnic group for extermination. It's important to approach such discussions with care and respect for the historical context and the experiences of those who suffered.
Volaland - a great summation.

There is often a problem in determining the exact size and the victim's groupings to add to your succulent and accurate statements above.

The Nazis, physicians and members of the SS, used the “national emergency” of war as a cover. In 1939 the regime escalated their policies against individuals with disabilities. They targeted for murder disabled patients living in mental health and other care institutions. A total of 250,000 people were killed in the secret “T-4”, resulting from their address at 4 Tiergarten Strasse in Berlin, and related “euthanasia” programs carried out inside Greater Germany following the timely public release of statistics showing the overall costs associated with caring for these unfortunates. Most of the victims were ethnically German, not Jewish, and some 7,000 children were among the victims. Victims of the T-4 program were killed in gas chambers disguised as showers, the first time this method of murder and deception was used, and which became the final means used in the extermination centers like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Majdanek, Sobibor and Chelmno.

In addition to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, additional racial, religious and social groups can be added to the lists of victims and they correspondingly increase the death toll when counted. They are the gypsies (Roma and Sinti were considered as the “Gypsy nuisance,” a racially “inferior” people with criminal habits).

Jehovah's Witnesses a religious organization of about 20,000 members in Germany in 1933. As part of the strictures of their faith, Jehovah's Witnesses refused to swear allegiance to any worldly government and would not bear arms for any nation. Small as the movement was, it threatened Nazi demands for total loyalty to Hitler, the state and the needs of the Wehrmacht for manpower. Approximately 1,900 Jehovah’s Witnesses died in the camps. Most of the victims were men of German nationality., Russian prisoners of war, homosexuals, those with hereditary diseases, alcoholics, the chronically work shy, Poles and slavs, all of whom were considered "untermensch" by the Nazis.

However, just before the Nazis began and enlarged the Holocaust under his 1939 purview, the Soviets, as demanded by Iosif Stalin, directed what has come to be called the Holodomor, man-made famine that convulsed the Soviet republic of Ukraine from 1932 to 1933, peaking in the late spring of 1933.

It was part of a broader Soviet famine (1931–34), resulting from the sale of grain abroad for foreign cash and the shipment of a majority of the grain, both seized and harvested, to the cities for the feeding of the rising tide of industrial and urban workers, that also caused mass starvation in the grain-growing regions of Soviet Russia and Kazakhstan.

The Ukrainian famine, however, was made deadlier by a series of political decrees and decisions that were aimed mostly or only at Ukraine. In acknowledgement of its scale, the famine of 1932–33 is often called the Holodomor, a term derived from the Ukrainian words for hunger (holod) and extermination (mor).

Causes of the famine

Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Holodomor
Holodomor
The origins of the famine lay in the decision by Soviet leader Joseph Stalinto collectivize agriculture in 1929. Teams of Communist Party agitators forced peasants to relinquish their land, personal property, and sometimes housing to collective farms, and they deported so-called kulaks—wealthier peasants—as well as any peasants who resisted collectivization altogether. Collectivization led to a drop in production, the disorganization of the rural economy, and food shortages. It also sparked a series of peasant rebellions, including armed uprisings and an increase of banditry, in some parts of Ukraine.


Holodomor
Holodomor
Holodomor
Holodomor

The Ukrainian rebellions worried Stalin because they were unfolding in provinces which had, a decade earlier, fought against the Red Army during the Russian Civil War. He was also concerned by anger and resistance to the state agricultural policy within the Ukrainian Communist Party. “If we don’t make an effort now to improve the situation in Ukraine,” he wrote to his colleague and toady Lazar Kaganovich in August 1932, “we may lose Ukraine.”

That autumn the Soviet Politburo, the elite leadership of the Soviet Communist Party, took a series of decisions that widened and deepened the famine in the Ukrainian countryside. Farms, villages, and whole towns in Ukraine were placed on blacklists and prevented from receiving food. Peasants were forbidden to leave the Ukrainian republic in search of food. Despite growing starvation, food requisitions were increased and aid was not provided in sufficient quantities. The crisis reached its peak in the winter of 1932–33, when organized groups of police and communist apparatchiks ransacked the homes of peasants and took everything edible, from crops to personal food supplies to pets. Hunger and fear drove these actions, but they were reinforced by more than a decade of hateful and conspiratorial rhetoric emanating from the highest levels of the Kremlin.

From famine to extermination

Holodomor
Holodomor
Holodomor
Holodomor

The result of Stalin’s campaign was a catastrophe. In spring 1933 death rates in Ukraine spiked. Between 1931 and 1934 at least 5 million people perished of hunger all across the U.S.S.R. Among them, according to a study conducted by a team of Ukrainian demographers, were at least 3.9 million Ukrainians and possibly more. Police archives contain multiple descriptions of instances of cannibalism as well as lawlessness, theft, and lynching. Mass graves were dug across the countryside where freshly buried corpses were often dug from the ground and partially consumed.

Hunger also affected the urban population, though many were able to survive thanks to ration cards. Still, in Ukraine’s largest cities, corpses could be seen on the street.

Holodomor
Holodomor
Holodomor
Holodomor

The famine was accompanied by a broader assault on Ukrainian identity. While peasants were dying by the millions, agents of the Soviet secret police were targeting the Ukrainian political establishment and intelligentsia. The famine provided cover for a campaign of repression and persecution that was carried out against Ukrainian culture and Ukrainian religious leaders. The official policy of Ukrainization, which had encouraged the use of the Ukrainian language, was effectively halted. Moreover, anyone connected to the short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic—an independent government that had been declared in June 1917 in the wake of the February Revolution but was dismantled after the Bolsheviks conquered Ukrainian territory—was subjected to vicious reprisals. All those targeted by this campaign were liable to be publicly vilified, jailed, sent to the Gulag (a system of Soviet prisons and forced-labour camps), or executed. Knowing that this Russification program would inevitably reach him, Mykola Skrypnyk, one of the best-known leaders of the Ukrainian Communist Party, committed suicide rather than submit to one of Stalin’s show trials.

See: https://www.britannica.com/event/Holodomor

Thus it can be seen from both the Nazis and the Soviets the roots of the pre-war Holocaust. While that practiced in Nazi Germany was primarily practiced out of the fear engendered by the pseudo-social and pseudo-occult racism as promulgated by Hitler and Himmler, that in Russia seems to be of a more pragmatic nature: feeding the urban eleites and workers and throughout the use of grain to obtain foreign currencies needed to purchase industrial and harvest equipment - but murder is murder regardless of the motives. Later, Vldimir Putin would use the Ukrainian assistance rendered the Nazis after their Soviet starvation as the partial grounds for invading them in 2022.
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I was reading a political article and the author was comparing the MAGA movement to the Nazi movement.

A dissenting commenter noting some statistics argued that nothing in history can be compared to the Holocaust.

Is that really true? What about the Soviet purges? And the Soviet famines? What are those death counts? What about the Chinese purges? The Southeast Asia purges......what are those death counts?

I have read much higher death counts for these events. I don't study these kinds of things, maybe someone here knows the facts of the matter.

Anyone here familiar with these "holocaust" histories?

If the covid virus was man made, would the 6+ million that have died so far, be a accidental holocaust?

Maybe I mis-understand the meaning of "holocaust". Is it the number of dead, ...or the manner and intent of the aggressor, that defines the word?

Would the millions murdered in Asia recognize the difference?

Or am I totally wrong on these death counts? And nothing can be compared to the Holocaust?
I think that whenever they use the term Holocaust it was for a social event lol I'm sure there's many things that can be worse than the Holocaust such as PTSD from instances which the person has suffered your own personal version of the Holocaust and the atrocities individual has to endure for personal survival
 
Sadly, my spellcheck destroyed the meaning of the following: "There is often a problem in determining the exact size and the victim's groupings to add to your succulent and accurate statements above."

It should read: "There is often a problem in determining the exact size and the victim's groupings to add to your succinct and accurate statements above."

dustin jones said: "I think that whenever they use the term Holocaust it was for a social event lol I'm sure there's many things that can be worse than the Holocaust such as PTSD from instances which the person has suffered your own personal version of the Holocaust and the atrocities individual has to endure for personal survival"

My answer to dustin jones is a simple one - read a few hundred of the books by learned scholars on the Nazi Holocaust, which occurred between 1939 and 1945, when Germany surrendered to the Allies..

Worse than the Holocaust you say?

What simply sets the Holocaust apart from your concerns and the other mass murders, like the Holodomor in Ukraine, was the harnessing of a modern industrialized state for mass murder: collecting the victims in ghettoes, railway transportation scheduled using the IBM punch card system (read IBM and the Holocaust, available on amazon); the selection process on the ramps by SS doctors who determined who was fit for slave labor and who would be immediately murdered by poison gas and then incinerated in special gas fired ovens (The Theory and Practice of Hell, available on Amazon); and the operation of the death camps (die Vernichtungslagers in German), read Auschwitz: A Doctor's Report, available on Amazon.

If you are interested in obtaining real knowledge about the Nazi's industrialized murder, take a gander at Amazon's lisitngs under simply: Holocaust. On the other hand, your remarks appear a bit glib, or possibly portly formulated, concerning the Holocaust. I have over a thousand volumes on this topic and my undergrad major was German language and culture and the Nazi Party. If I can assist you in this process, inquire about me through amazon under the name Hannes Dürscheimer.

See: https://www.jta.org/archive/new-list-of-holocaust-victims-reignites-dispute-over-figures

There was one inmate at Auschwitz who claims to have kept an accurate count. Rudolf Vrba, a professor of pharmacology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, was a Jewish prisoner at Auschwitz whose job was to count the number of people arriving each day by transport.

Vrba managed to escape from the death camp in April 1944. His estimates of the number of Jews killed at Auschwitz were used as key testimony during the Eichmann trials.

“Hilberg’s estimate of 1 million killed is a gross error bordering on ignorance,” says Vrba. “According to my observations, there were 1,765,000 victims which I counted.”

Vrba estimates the total number killed in Auschwitz at roughly 2.5 million, bringing the total Holocaust death toll closer to 7.5 million.

Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wies-enthal Center in Los Angeles, sounded a word of caution. “We have to be very careful that statistics added on account of the death books are not counted twice. We have to carefully analyze how the 6 million figure came up. In a time when revisionism is prevalent, we have to be very careful about reassessing the question (of how many Jews died).”

Hartmann352
 
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Would not the treatment of Uyghurs in China come close to be viewed as a holocaust?
Rapes, starvation, slaughtered for bodyparts, forced labour, forced sterilizations, and probably a whole lot more
 
The Holocaust was an organised and carefully planned attempt, as the 1942 Wannsee Conference showed, to eradicate the entire Jewish race from the face of the planet, nothing less. Wherever the Nazis were in control, Jews were destined to be murdered. That would have applied in the United States as well, had the Nazis ever gained control here. A few precipitous rolls of the dice with different outcomes might have changed the earth to one controlled by the Nazis and the Empire of Japan.

This makes the Shoah, perhaps a better term than Holocaust - immolation by fire, different from other genocides and mass murders, where the root causes included racial rivalry often going back centuries, political ideologies or the settling of religious or ethnic disputes. For example, we rightly condemn without reservation the tragic murder at Srebrenica of over 8,000 Muslims, yet nobody is seriously suggesting that the Bosnian Serb perpetrators had plans to kill every Muslim in the world. Much more materially, we condemn Pol Pot’s regime in Cambodia for killing almost 2 million people between 1975 and 1979 – a quarter of that country’s population. Yet the determining factor here was not racial - it was to take a class war against that country’s formerly prosperous upper and middle classes to the level of extermination. The mass murders committed by Stalin are another similar example.

The Holocaust was one unique element of the Nazi murder macine which killed a total of ca. 17 million people including Jews between 1939 and 1945 - this number does not include those who perished as collateral damage on the European continent during WWII.

We must always condemn all other genocides and mass murders, but we must ensure that there is never another Shoah or Holocaust, or even an attempt at one. We must focus on the war against antisemitism first and foremost. It has been historically shown that if the Jews do not do so, nobody else will.
Hartmann352
 
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I was reading a political article and the author was comparing the MAGA movement to the Nazi movement.

A dissenting commenter noting some statistics argued that nothing in history can be compared to the Holocaust.

Is that really true? What about the Soviet purges? And the Soviet famines? What are those death counts? What about the Chinese purges? The Southeast Asia purges......what are those death counts?

I have read much higher death counts for these events. I don't study these kinds of things, maybe someone here knows the facts of the matter.

Anyone here familiar with these "holocaust" histories?

If the covid virus was man made, would the 6+ million that have died so far, be a accidental holocaust?

Maybe I mis-understand the meaning of "holocaust". Is it the number of dead, ...or the manner and intent of the aggressor, that defines the word?

Would the millions murdered in Asia recognize the difference?

Or am I totally wrong on these death counts? And nothing can be compared to the Holocaust?
The Selk'nam genocide was the genocide of the Selk'nam people, one of three indigenous tribes populating Tierra del Fuego in South America, from the second half of the 19th to the early 20th century. The genocide spanned a period of between ten and fifteen years. The Selk'nam had an estimated population of 4,000 people around the 1880s but saw their numbers reduced to 500 by the early 1900s. The natives were plied with alcohol, deported, raped, and exterminated, with bounties paid to the most ruthless hunters. Martin Gusinde, who visited the island towards the end of 1918, recounted in his writings that the hunters sent the skulls of the murdered Selk'nam to foreign anthropological museums, actions undertaken "in the name of science". The large ranchers tried to drive out the Selk'nam, then began a campaign of extermination against them, with the complicity of the Argentine and Chilean governments. Large companies paid sheep farmers or militia a bounty for each Selk'nam dead, which was confirmed by the presentation of a pair of hands or ears, or later a complete skull. They were given more for the death of a woman than a man. In addition, missionaries disrupted their livelihood through forcible relocation and inadvertently brought with them deadly epidemics. Ranching became the center of controversy in the Magellanic colony. The colonial authorities were aware of the indigenous group's plight, but sided with the ranchers' cause over the Selk'nam, who were excluded from their worldview based on "progress" and "civilization". Ranchers typically exercised their own judgement, including the financing of violent campaigns. Considerable numbers of foreign men were hired and quantities of arms were imported for these campaigns, with the goal of eliminating the Selk'nam, who were perceived as a major obstacle to the success of colonists' investments. Farm employees later confirmed the routine nature of such campaigns.
Little is known of those responsible for said actions; they included many ranch owners, who were the direct superiors of the employees that participated in the ventures. Among them was Mauricio Braun, who acknowledged having financed some campaigns, justifying them as only intending to protect his investments (he was the employer of another known exterminator, Alexander A. Cameron). Another figure is the father-in-law of Mauricio Braun, José Menéndez Menéndez, one of the men who acted with the most severity against the Selk'nam in the Argentine territory of Tierra del Fuego. The owner of two cattle ranches that occupied more than 200,000 hectares in the center of Selk'nam territory, Menéndez was the boss of Alexander Mac Lennan. Mac Lennan, or "Chanco Colorado", known widely as a murderer of indigenous people, participated in the massacre at Cabo Penas, where 17 indigenous people died. When he retired after 12 years of service, Menéndez gave Mac Lennan a valuable gold watch in recognition of his outstanding service. The shareholders of the Company for the Exploitation of Tierra de Fuego (Sociedad Explotadora de Tierra de Fuego) strove to hide details from the public. This was both a means for the company to avoid questioning and a strategy to lower its controversial profile. Special attention was paid to these events after the intervention of the Salesians, who condemned the farmers' actions.