Holocaust mythologies

So far I have concentrated on the evolution debate but I have pretty much exhausted that subject, so I finally decided to post an article on the holocaust.

Holocaust revisionism is by far the biggest taboo in our society. As soon as you question official holocaust history, people will smear you as a neo-Nazi and anti-Semite and will refuse to hear what you have to say on other subjects. Lunatic Iranian president Mahmoud What's-his-name was at least right about one thing -- saying that the holocaust has been exalted above god, religion, and the prophets. When you try to contradict official holocaust dogma, it doesn't matter how reliable your information sources are or how logical your arguments are -- you are going to be denounced as a crackpot.

My criticism of official Holocaust dogma consists of two parts here -- one concerns the official death counts for Auschwitz and the other concerns the issue of Jew identification.

Auschwitz:

Despite claims that official holocaust history is based on "meticulous" Nazi records, there have been wild inconsistencies in something as simple as the number of deaths at Auschwitz. Official figures have been as low as 1 million and as high as 4 million. Nizkor says,

"Deniers often use the 'Four Million Variant' as a stepping stone to leap from an apparent contradiction to the idea that the Holocaust was a hoax, again perpetrated by a conspiracy. They hope to discredit historians by making them seem inconsistent. If they can't keep their numbers straight, their reasoning goes, how can we say that their evidence for the Holocaust is credible? One must wonder which historians they speak of, as most have been remarkably consistent in their estimates of a million or so dead. In short, all of the denier's blustering about the 'Four Million Variant' is a specious attempt to envelope the reader into their web of deceit, and it can be discarded after the most rudimentary examination of published histories."

However, it took many decades for official holocaust historians to reach a consensus that the correct figure was likely in the range of 1-1.5 million. The official holocaust historians' excuse that they knew all along what the correct figure was does not hold any water.

Jew Identification:

Also, I assert that a "systematic" Jewish holocaust was virtually impossible because the Nazis had no reliable way of distinguishing Jews from non-Jews. We don't even know what a Jew is. Is a Jew someone who practices Judaism? Someone who eats kosher food, observes the Sabbath and Jewish holidays, and goes to synagogue? Or is a Jew just someone who is a descendant of someone who did those things? How much Jewish blood does a person need to be defined as a Jew? It seems that if there had been a Jewish holocaust, we would have heard some complaints from who believed that they were mistakenly identified as Jews. Also, it seems that a lot of non-Jews would have been afraid that they would be mistaken for Jews.

This issue of Jew identification should be central to the study of holocaust history, but this issue is generally ignored by both mainstream holocaust historians and holocaust revisionists. For the most part, it is just assumed that the Nazis "just knew" who the Jews were -- this is just like the "just-so" stories of evolution theory. There are various theories of how the Nazis identified Jews, but these theories are all very fishy. It is argued that the Jews lived in ghettos and shtetls, but supposedly many of the Jewish victims of the holocaust were assimilated Jews. It is argued that Jews were identified by "informers," but there could not have been enough informers to account for more than a tiny fraction of the alleged 6 million Jewish victims of the holocaust, and the Nazis could not have trusted these informers. It is argued that Jews were identified by "Jewish-sounding" last names, but many non-Jewish German and other non-Jewish European names sound Jewish (just ask Jesse Jackson -- he thought that Nixon's aides Ehrlichman and Haldeman were Jewish). It is argued that Jews carried Jewish "papers" -- but it is doubtful that Europeans at that time carried any kind of identification (even here in the USA, the driver's license or a facsimile has become the de facto ID). It is argued that the Nazis kept "meticulous" genealogical records, but most of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust lived in other countries that did not have the Nazis' obsession with identifying Jews. The drastic changes in the national boundaries of Europe that occurred after WW I also made record-keeping extremely difficult, and even the pre-Nazi records of Germany itself were probably poor in regard to Jewish genealogy. There were no fingerprint records or anything like that to aid in identification. The Nazis just rounded up victims en masse -- there was no time for individual identification. A lot of people were scattered by the war, making identification even more difficult. Since Jews were hard to identify, it seems that the Nazis would have permanently marked any that were found (e.g., by tattooing them), rather than depending on unreliable means of ID like Star of David.armbands.

A fairly recent book titled "IBM and the Holocaust" argues that the Nazis identified all the Jews of Europe by using Hollerith card-reading and card-sorting machines to cross-correlate data stored on billions of IBM Hollerith punched cards, but those primitive machines obviously did not have such data-processing capability -- all they could do was just read and sort a few cards at a time. Also, a lot of the data for the cards would have been difficult or impossible to collect. The introduction to the book says,

Only after Jews were identified could they be targeted for asset confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, and ultimately extermination. To search generations of communal, church, and governmental records all across Germany -- and later throughout Europe -- was a cross-indexing task so monumental, it called for a computer. But in 1933, no computer existed.

In fact, a Jewish source -- Washington Jewish Week --- completely contradicts the book by claiming that the Hollerith machines were not used to identify individual Jews:

Milton [former senior historian at the U.S. Holocaust Museum] adds today, "We have no proof that the Hollerith was ever used to target individuals for deportation lists. It was a back-up system because it was too broad a system, providing aggregate counts of population groups," she explains. "However, when they would check a deportation list against what is known as the number of Jews in a town, then the Hollerith list would provide the evidence that, 'Yes, this figure is reasonable. We know we have X number of Jews, X number of Roma [Gypsies] registered' in a town like Heidelberg, and therefore, we know that this might have been used as back-up material."

The book "IBM and the Holocaust" was not intended to be a scholarly work --- it was designed to sell, as is evidenced by its sensational, defamatory and unsubstantiated charge that IBM USA had a "mission" to help exterminate European Jews. The only worthwhile contribution of the book was to raise a question that both mainstream historians and holocaust revisionists have been ignoring: how were the Jews identified?

Even the bible has examples of Jews who were mistaken to be non-Jews -- Moses and Esther.

I am now bracing myself for a flood of comments containing no rational arguments but lots of insults and ad hominem attacks.

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"I'm from Missouri -- you'll have to show me." Willard Duncan Vandiver, US Congressman from Missouri