""You have to respect them for their fighting skill"?" Topic

Very eloquently put Mark, as always.

You have known me for many years now across multiple forums.

I consider you a friend as well.

I was trying to give Chortle the benefit of the doubt.

I find it hard to believe that anyone can deny the evil of the Nazi regime…there is just too much evidence too many places, too many people with personal experiences or loved ones or friends that experienced it firsthand.

If I have been naïve in my perception of others it is because I would rather err on the side of caution and give them the benefit of the doubt…

Frank

Some things are part of the holocaust and some things are not. I read that the body of knowledge we call the holocaust developed in the decades after the war with some things being rejected e.g. "shrunken heads". Those things which I mentioned never became part of the holocaust. They were used as evidence in the Nuremberg trials but, when people looked at the evidence later, they were understood to be Soviet lies.

Other people challenge the holocaust. Here is a young Jewish man "David Cole" talking about the Auschwitz camp. He doesn't agree with the official account. He got death threats and had to go into hiding for decades. If he has another view he shouldn't be criminalised for it. His points should be contradicted.

YouTube link

Norman G. Finkelstein, in his book "The Holocaust Industry", complains that "American Jewish establishment exploits the memory of the Nazi Holocaust for political and financial gain".

Someone objected to censorship "to enforce particular interpretations of history under the guise of combating racism and xenophobia"… "the task of the historian is to investigate, confront, challenge and, if necessary, correct society's collective memory. In this process, the state ought to have no role whatever, none at all."

You can look up that quote if you like .

I find it hard to believe that anyone can deny the evil of the Nazi regime

I don't. Hitler was bad. Crimes were committed. They should be investigated and the guilty brought to justice. If someone did A, B, C but not D then I have to say they didn't do D. A, B, and C can all be capital charges so denying D makes no practical difference. But I will still deny D. Just because I say that one thing did not happen does not mean that I say the others didn't happen. I don't mention them because I expect people's comprehension to tell them exactly what I am and am not saying, or to ask whether I am denying one thing with another. The thread will never be absent of actual SS crimes but, if it was, then I would put in some of their crimes in the west which we actually do know about from reliable sources. My objection is to taking Soviet evidence on face value. I don't have to chime in with everyone else, saying what has already been said that the Nazis did bad things.

I think things happen for understandable reasons.

PAUSE

This is the perfect opening statement for blame shifting

No. It includes statements like "The bear escaped from the zoo and killed people because the lock broke on his cage". It means "causality". It does not mean acceptability.

I, too, was stunned by the eugenics remark

Yes, I argue against eugenics. I think that no one should interfere with the natural process. If you try to create supermen you will instead make something superficial.

But exterminating rabbits is just necessary. Right Chortle?

Remember lads-- Tar Baby…

don't touch the Tar Baby.

But exterminating rabbits is just necessary. Right Chortle?

If you are hinting that you have floppy ears drop me a PM and I will see if I can keep you off Hasenpfeffer's list

Looking at the discussion just some brief comments:

1) There were Concentration Camps and Death Camps – towards the end of the war they were practically undistinguishable (just look at pictures from Bergen Belsen); the first Concentration Camps were established in 1933, the first Death Camps much later.
2) In the early years quite a few people were let out of the Concentration Camps again. They usually kept their heads low (no interest in getting back there…), and the stories told secretly scared their former friends.
3) Germans knew about the Concentration Camps (my father, born 1929, told me that as kids talked about it between friends), but it was not a good idea to mention them openly.
4) I doubt that Death Camps were as widely known. However, the SS did 'personnel exchange' with camp guards, so it is a good guess that the older Waffen SS members knew about them.
5) Atrocities were also committed by the German Army, Police Battalion, so while the SS was the worst, the other parts of the military establishment were hardly blame free (there was a long and bitter discussion in Germany about that).
6) You were drafted, so you had no choice but to go to war, but SS was a volunteer unit.
7) A lot of the SS soldiers joined at around 17, having been exposed to Nazi ideology practically all their life. Personally I wouldn't be too judgemental about their choice.
8) Those who said 'I wouldn't have lived long under the Nazis' – I doubt that (of course this is different if you are a Jew, a fervent communist…). People have families and want to survive, so they adapt to a regime (even if they never became Nazis). Also, a lot of the 'Nazification' got implemented slowly, conditions didn't just jump from 'democratic' to '1944 oppressive regime'.

1) There were Concentration Camps and Death Camps – towards the end of the war they were practically undistinguishable (just look at pictures from Bergen Belsen); the first Concentration Camps were established in 1933, the first Death Camps much later.

The active plan to genocide a people is incomparably worse than a mix of people dying through bad conditions, neglect, whatever. Genocide makes the extermination camps worse. I guess you agree with this and are only saying that people died in both types of camp.

As I was the one who explicitly said Belsen was not a death camp I would like to point out I was not giving anyone associated with that place, nor anyone who was making excuses about it, a free pass.

I said it in response to Chortle's nitpicking attempts to undermine the evidence of the Nuremberg Tribunals, when he selected a piece of Soviet testimony about that camp which appears to be incorrect.

My point was that no, it was not set up as an extermination centre (any deaths were a 'happy bonus' for the Nazis) but it was most certainly part of the whole apparatus of extermination.

The death camps were not worse in any meaningful sense than the other camps, they were all part of the same sick machinery of delivering Nazi ideology from flawed theory to appalling fact. Those in the other camps were starved, worked to death very often and then shipped to death camps for 'processing'.

By the by Chortle – you have chutzpah I'll say that!

Ernst Zundel! and David Cole/Stein (hope the Republicans are reading) are your big hitters? Wow, scrape the barrel.

Finkelstein is not a holocaust denier at all. He thinks there has been misuse of the memory for profit but his parents' entire family was murdered in the Holocaust. So he knows it happened. He is a political scientist not a historian and he has a whole anti-Zionist thing going on but he did some interesting work on claims against the Swiss. The main point being not that the basic claims were wrong but the wrong people often got the compensation.

I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed person.

I like bunny rabbits. It is hard to imagine that you could have a conflict of interest with bunnies. Yet Rabbits have caused the loss of millions of dollars of crops in Australia.

And I like you, Chortle. 'Bunny rabbit' is a much nicer rodent analogy than the classic Nazi 'Jew = rat' equation.

link

but it's still a rodent analogy, and we all understand that people must control rodent populations, whether they're cute li'll bunnies or nasty sewer rats.

When you acknowledge me and mine to be not pests but persons, much like you and yours, then I will think you are not a Nazi.

Chortle wrote

I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed person

As graceless an admission of defeat as I could expect.

How embarrassing for you…losing a battle of wits to an unarmed man.

Agreed.

Game, set, and match to Gwydion.

PSA: Bunnies aren't rodents, they're lagomorphs! :)

We will now return to your regularly scheduled programming…

Thanks Steve, that makes the comparison okay. Ennh, what's up, doc?

And that's another thing I like about Chortle. He can tell when he's gotten in so deep that it's time to shut his mouth.

- Special Agent zippy of the Hasbarah!

Ennh, what's up, doc?