Holocaust:True Or False ?

[SanteeFats]

Originally Posted by Puhbear69

And the US have always been nice to the "Japanese" ?.

Not in WWII which is what I think you meant(?). Of course not IMO it is a dark, dark time in American history. The only reason the Japanese where unfairly incarcerated is their physical appearance allowed the terrible round up due to basically the white response to Pearl Harbor. German-Americans were not rounded up only because they looked white. A major stain on American honor and shows just what stupidity panic can do. The 442 Nisei was one of the most decorated units in WWII. I can only applaud those who served after the way they and their people were treated. I am not sure I would have gone to serve if my people were so unjustly pinned up.

[scoundrel]

Originally Posted by Puhbear69

And the US have always been nice to the "Japanese" ?

I mean such, who were US-citizens, born in the US but for their "mistake" or "fault" they were of Japanese origin sometime in the past.

The internment of the Japanese-Americans was a injustice which lives in infamy. We British did something rather similar to several thousand people of Italian descent who were British citizens. But no one was murdered. The Imperial Japanese Army and Navy were nothing like so particular.

[danton]

I am responding to a point made earlier about the contention that the Royal Air Force could and should have bombed Auschwitz. This idea was late coming and had a revival recently, at the end of the last century. It seems based on some general ideas that have little to commend them. Only decades after the war was the miserable performance of the night time area bombing strategy disclosed. Even in 1945 bombing German cities at night was proving to be efficient in only killing British and Commonwealth aircrew. Germany's production rose as the war grew to a climax and famously more aircraft were produced in the final years of the war from German factories.

Finding and bombing Auschwitz had it been conceived would have to had taken place in daylight, or partly so. The Warsaw Uprising was supplied by air and the losses among Allied aircrew was significant. In war gestures are generally expensive of lives for little result militarily.

No one had nor could consult the inmates of the camps – whose full horror was not revealed until after hostilities ceased. How did they feel about the idea they would be better dead? An attack made on a Gestapo prison in the Netherlands was undertaken to kill everyone; it failed. The building was badly damaged so much so many prisoners, Resistance people and some agents, escaped by default. Subsequently the intention of the raid was hushed up and it was hailed as a stunning example of precision bombing.

The aim to defeat Germany on the battlefield was correct. It turned out to be easily the best solution to the Nazi Question.

Bletchley histories mention only that certain code systems were broken 'regularly'. Interception at range was difficult – the German did not then believe it possible. Many messages de-coded were in fact mundane and never would one come across exacting details of policy and so forth; as if it were the decisions made at the Wansee Conference. Coded messages on railway operations were broken for the reason that these were of a lower order type and because of their significance to troop movements. Many such movements were apparently held up because routes were 'blocked' by trains taking victims to the camps for extermination, though I have no idea if that reason was known in the U.K. at the time. Railways and railway junctions were heavily bombed in any case.

Precision bombing was something of a daydream then, less so now. Yet precision bombing attacks had not improved much by 1991. The U.S.A.'s Congressional accounts committee, the General Office of Accounting, was unsuccessful in seeking to publish figures for the accuracy of smart bombs and cruise missiles due to concerns about undermining public faith in the glowing accounts given to the media in Gulf War I. In 2003 the 'decapitation raid' that preceded 'Shock and Awe' failed to land a bomb closer than a few hundred yards of its target, widely assumed to have been Saddam Hussein.

[scoundrel]

In 1942, when the British first took official notice of the Holocaust, there would have been little possible. Auschwitz is about 100km west of Krakow, close to what is now the extreme eastern end of the Czech Republic. It is rather more than 900 miles each way from the nearest British airbases, in Kent and East Anglia. This was too far for a Mosquito to be used, and the raid would need to have been carried out by strategic bombers, which in 1942 couldn't hit a barn from the inside.

But as time passed, the options broadened and so did intelligence on the concentration camps. The Tehran conference in December 1943 agreed that British and US aircraft could mount shuttle raids using Russian airfields, bringing Auschwitz potentially within range of Mosquito bombers. Other promising targets would have the camp's rail connections, hitting which would have had other benefits. But war is always about priorities, and I would be surprised if the British government was fully aware of the sheer magnitude of the slaughter. I'd like to think we would have thought again if we had known in those days that the potential target was the machinery for killing over 12 million people. But we did know that a dreadful crime was being committed and I suppose we had a very hard choice to make. Defeating Germany was the only true way to bring the crime to an end; after it was finished, the British gave a lot of effort to her share in the task of finding and hanging the criminals behind the Holocaust. I can't help thinking though that in March 1944 Auschwitz and other death camps could have been reached and attacked if we had wanted to do it badly enough, and that in 1944 it wasn't yet too late to severely hamper Eichmann's efforts against the Jews of Hungary. I wish we could have done it.

[danton]

Further to my thoughts and other well informed comments above, I think it necessary to add that, appalling as the crime of Auschwitz was and remains, this was not how the estimated (by the United Nations post war) 6 million European Jews and additionally other victims of the Nazis were murdered. By far the most were killed by Zonderkammando 'actions' in the open aided by enthusiastic helpers the Germans recruited in almost all their eastern conquests.

A personal reflection is that it strikes me as an odd idea that the Allies might have killed Jews and other inmates to spite the Nazis has anything to commend it. As has been highlighted here again, the bombing of the crematoria would have been difficult even if these had been within easy range. In any case the Germans were, as the British also, adept at rebuilding quickly what seemingly had been pulverised by bombs.

As the west is about to learn once again in the Near and Middle East today, bombing is of limited impact, useful but never final, where it does not form part of a strategy comprising land forces.

The Jews of Europe were murdered on an industrial scale by a wicked and evil enterprise that thanks only to obstinacy in these islands was brought to an end far more quickly than anyone in 1943-44 thought possible.

[Puhbear69]

At my information the allies had the much earlier than 1942 the knowledge, passed through Switzerland on German resistant groups, by the Polish resistant (through the Netherlands), by the IRC at lower ranks, and by countless "boat people" denying any harbors.

Only a blind couldn't see, what was going on.

It would be counter-productive, to bomb any of the camps; because of the luck of pinpoint-acuracie. But one could bomb the railways and streets .

[danton]

Originally Posted by Puhbear69

At my information the allies had the much earlier than 1942 the knowledge, passed through Switzerland on German resistant groups, by the Polish resistant (through the Netherlands), by the IRC at lower ranks, and by countless "boat people" denying any harbors.

Only a blind couldn't see, what was going on.

It would be counter-productive, to bomb any of the camps; because of the luck of pinpoint-acuracie. But one could bomb the railways and streets .

Following the fall of France in 1940 there would be 'few harbours to deny' any fleeing the Nazis. Portugal was a route taken by a fortunate few, but nothing could have saved the millions far to the east, except carrying on the war, which was done by Britain at an enormous disadvantage.

The information coming from Switzerland – if this refers to the Lucy Ring – is believed to have been a means of supplying Stalin with information from the west in a form he would accept. He would apparently trust nothing he did not receive from his own spy networks. Alexander Foote, the radio operator for the Lucy Ring, was a British double agent.

The defeat of the Nazis was accomplished much more quickly than many thought possible; in far away Alaska a young Gore Vidal serving in the US Navy, recalled that the optimists among his detachment thought 1949. The crimes of the Nazis were cut short by the actions of many who did not survive except as names on war memorials scattered across the Europe they liberated.

But the title of this thread is about denial and I observed some while ago the scenarios of counter factual history raised to the degree of absolute veracity. Since the appearance of 'Holocaust', an American mini-series in which the roles of Nazis were played by men from the only country to have fought on every day of World War Two, the seeds were sown by that disingenuous title and the falsification of history enabled. This was no holocaust of all consuming fire but a specific crime of a geographic place and time with detailed records, that did not erupt in incontrollable destruction but was a terrifying scheme planned by bureaucrats. It was inspired by a demented philosophy that can be traced and evaluated through the careers of many individuals involved in this crime (c.f. Hoess in scoundrel's account above; there are many. many more such, if less egregious reputation by only a matter of obscurity).

Richard Crossman, a post war Labour politician and diarist, gave orders from his position in the Political Warfare Executive, that the name rank and number of all British personnel entering Belsen concentration camp in 1945 be kept. When asked why this should be done he replied that one day people will say this did not happen.

[retro72]

I would actually dare anyone who is stupid enough to deny the holocaust took place to visit the Auschwitz museum and come out with the same dumb opinion. Sobering isn't the word for it, and that's on top of the plethora of evidence that many posters have more than ably alluded to in this thread itself.

[Puhbear69]

Originally Posted by danton

[...]

The information coming from Switzerland – if this refers to the Lucy Ring – is believed to have been a means of supplying Stalin with information from the west in a form he would accept. He would apparently trust nothing he did not receive from his own spy networks. Alexander Foote, the radio operator for the Lucy Ring, was a British double agent.

[...]

I haven't heard of the Lucy Ring until now.
My information are based on ordinary two businessman, got the knowledge more or less per chance what was happening in those concentration camps (info was mainly of Poland). They had informants (must been friends of both) who leaked those info.

They spoke to the British and the US ambassadors in Geneva at their own risk. If they (the allies) mistrust the businessman - I can comprehend - wasn't the information worth of some secretky verification?

At their next journey about 1/2 a year or a year later they informed London and Washington directly per telegram:

(Autotranslation

received alarming report in fuehrerhauptquartier was discussed plan and considered three and a half to four million Jews in the occupied and controlled by Germany halt after deportation and concentration in the east with an impact should be destroyed to a for to solve the Jewish question in Europe all - stop - action is for autumn planned method of execution is not specified - stop - the talk was of hydrocyanic acid - stop - by mediation of the object with all en offered subject because we the correctness can not check - stop - informant should have close relationships to provide highest de slide around and is as reliably known

Wasn't this worth of any verification ? No, it has been qualified as "to fantastic". British Labour MP Janette Silverman got the info (the telegram) on detour from the British World Jewish Congress. How much time meanwhile passed by I cannot know.
Nothing happened so far.
They didn't stop collecting info on this issues and one or both of them were shot 1943/1944. The sad is, that they were no professional spies, just ordinary people who held Hitler and the Nazis for gangster; got into this per just chance. Not to mention it had been enormous dangerous at this time and you could trust no one, because he/she could be a Nazi or just a Nazi informant.

Not tho forget the hundreds or thousands of boat people. They were denied in England, they were denied in the US and they were denied in Palestine. I can't remember all details, is was more than one ship and I think the passengers sunk one ship very near the coast of Palestine. But not 100% sure of it.

[danton]

Even if evidence was filtering through about what Winston Churchill described at the time as "a crime without a name" there would be nothing that could have been done until Germany's immense power was crushed. Until mid 1941 Britain's nearest major ally was Canada. In any case numerous leaks and stories were treated with suspicion; still are. The pre-war leaked document 'The Oslo Report' was long regard as a plant. Though not entirely reliable it is now regarded as genuine.

Jews were not then stateless Jews. They were Germans or Austrians and a few from elsewhere in eastern Europe. Just twenty years earlier German Jews had served with distinction in the Kaiser's armies, a fact not forgot in Britain. Even so, the vast majority of Hitler's victims were found far to the east, foreign even to the sophisticates of Berlin and Vienna. It took too long to overcome this perception that people who spoke German, looked like Germans and lived like Germans were not in fact Nazis. To us is seems a terrible, stupid mistake. But then few people were prepared for the war, particularly the sudden onset of aerial bombardment and isolation from the world ('the Empire', no less). With much to do, not least conscience searching, what is remarkable is the humane manner in which the few who got out of Nazi Germany were interned. This internment ended with many German Jews joining the Allied war effort.

Psychologically and by instinct British and especially English society was remarkably complacent and inward looking. I know someone who thought to travel to London from the north would involve a sea crossing. It was simply another world and one of the reasons many of us are more sophisticated in our outlook has been due to these wartime experiences. Our thinking has been altered by these events.

Great Britain and the U.S. refused Jewish refugees at least in part because they did not wish to encourage what we call today ethnic cleansing. I readily agree anti-semiticism was also factor. Harry Hpkins wrote that when he asked FD Roosevelt about 'the Jews' before the 1940 Presidential election Roosevelt replied he dare not mention them. The German American Bund has been air brushed from history, less so America First. These widely popular movements were I suspect in FDR's mind when he spoke. Meanwhile Germany's assimilated Jews had a saying 'Give them (the Nazis) six months' that became a sort of joke; a relaxed notion of how soon the Hitlerite state would collapse of itself; it didn't.

My own view is that behind these justified questions about strategy and responsibility is a half hidden accusation and it has to be stated without rancour here: That is the Allies, particularly Great Britain, stood back deliberately from intervening for geo-political reasons resting on inherent anti-semtic hostility. I think that might be my own inference; I hope so. A supporter of Israel all my adult life I certainly believe it to be false.