Discussion UsefulNotes / TheHolocaust

I think that can go in the other World War II sub-page titled https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/WorldWarII/TheAftermath.

Since that's part of the general aftermath rather than the aftermath of the Holocaust itself. And in any case putting Nazis killed by vigilantism in the same page dedicated to the far greater numbers of Nazi victims of genocide fosters a precedent of equivalency and minimization of the Shoah which should never be encouraged under any circumstances.

I didn't mean to suggest a false equivalency. It's just that the "Aftermath" page here makes it look like the perpetrators of the holocaust largely got away scot-free. I thought that mentioning cases where nazis were extra-judicially killed by survivors or relatives of victims would demonstrate that the survivors had agency and that the there were those who weren't willing to show leniency even if the government was.

Well since you didn't mention that angle first, I had to make clear. I am still not okay with that in any case. Especially because the idea that the only agency survivors can have being revenge killing or pay evil unto evil isn't actually a really popular idea among survivors, and Holocaust researchers.

The majority of the perpetrators except for the cases of the inner party-types at the Nuremberg Trials and so on were largely sent back to civilian life without fuss. That part is true. Some of them like Werner Von Braun who used slave labor to built his rockets driving many of them to death were pardoned and rewarded. So in general, the implication that most perpetrators evaded justice is a correct historical judgment.

This page could use some correction. In that it's too verbose and academic and so on. But I have no issue with the bleakness of it. This is supposed to be a downer of a story.

That's fair enough.

I don't think Holocaust denial is worth getting into too much. It's always been a Vocal Minority and a bunch of fringe nuts who want to grab attention.

In any case, the article while not explicitly addressing it, does talk about and refute the Holocaust denial complaints. Hitler being the lazy layabout that he was, wasn't big into written orders or clear instructions, so the Holocaust as it eventually happened wasn't some grand plan hatched from the outset, since Hitler was incompetent in all the actual fields that would require him to plan that. You would need to know demographics, logistics, legalities and so on. So deniers who say there's no "written order" are shot down and it's clear that Hitler definitely sanctioned and commissioned it.

Likewise the exact numbers of the people killed in the Holocaust is hard to know for certain because well, the Nazis destroyed a lot of evidence. Three extermination camps almost totally destroyed before liberation. A historian once said, "The Nazis were the first Holocaust deniers, they denied to themselves what they were doing." We can't know if missing people died because of the war or disease or explicitly under the death camps.

So I think the article explains all of this and debunks the deniers without actually addressing them and that is how it should be.

Actually mentioning and rebutting its arguments does feel like we're taking them too seriously... but on the other hand the anti-semitic worldviews of US and Arab citizens is fascinating. It's so similar and yet so different to the Nazis' own views...

There are good grounds for thinking Hitler's non-signing of orders after 1939 was deliberate. Hitler actually signed an order mandating the secret euthanasia of Germany's disabled population in October 1939, in response to some lady's supposed but probably faked request that their kid be euthanised. But in 1940(?) the programme was outed due to insufficient secrecy, and there was a damaging rumour that Hitler had used his own authority as Chancellor to order it in writing. So he cancelled the program with a written order, and verbally ordered the program resumed on a more secrective and decentralized basis that would allow him to maintain plausible deniability, ASAP.

So I find Holocaust Denial fascinating and would love to find out more, but don't think it should be on here. We could do with a few more asides explaining the inbuilt secrecy and some of the confusion about exact numbers - things which refute Holocaust Denial without 'taking it seriously' enough to address it specifically...

Well I think an article on the Holocaust should focus on the victims and the people who murdered them, how they did it and where they did it, which is what it does at present.

You can put an aside in the (rather lengthy I must say) overview of anti-semitism and how it's changed in the origins. Medieval anti-semitism being different from Nazi antisemitism, and you can add two lines about how it differed from post-Nazi anti-semitism.

As for holocaust denial...well the fact is we have a separate section for the JFK conspiracy, a lengthy aside for the Authorship question in William Shakespeare's page mostly because these conspiracies and historical revisionism were represented in other works of art. Holocaust denial has yet to have a single work of art to its credit and this page is largely about issues which are represented in media. So in terms of the site purpose and general information directive, I don't think it's necessary. About the only movie that deals with holocaust denial is the Documentary Mr. Death which is about Fred Leuchter and that pretty much debunks holocaust denial thoroughly, and it doesn't have a page on this site.

The reason we have a page on the holocaust on this TV tropes page is largely because its events and implications influenced a range of writers, musicians, philosophers and poets and it is represented in many workpages of this site.

Some of this Holocaust Denial stuff is just.... amazing. I haven't been this amused, or disappointed in humanity, for days! My favourite has to be:

"Simple arithmetic tells us that the Germans would have had to have had hundreds of camps, or else they would have had to exterminate 137 people PER HOUR, in order for six million Jews to have been exterminated at such small camps as Auschwitz, a feat that would have been humanly impossible considering that, according to Douglas Reed's Behind the Scene and The Controversy of Zion, a mere 850,000 soldiers and others were killed by the entire German and Japanese war machines combined during WW 2!"

Seriously though, this whole website (http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/holohoax.htm) is just amazing. I have no words.

Auschwitz is a "small camp"(!)

My favorite holocaust denial work is the documentary Mr. Death by the documentary film-maker Errol Morris. He interviews a guy called Fred Leuchter who went to Auschwitz took pieces of rocks and pebbles (from the camp memorial site in the 80s which he illegally snuck into) and ran analysis in the lab to show no poison gas was there in the residue...therefore no holocaust. I mean the total lack of logic, the whole shoddy approach to evidence...

There is a page for Conspiracy Theories so maybe you can add this there, or in Insane Troll Logic.

Uh...just for the record, not affiliated with that dude, and was unaware of his existence when I came up with this handle a decade and a half ago.

Re: Ag Prov's original post,

The problem with acknowledging the existence and extent of The Holocaust is that it makes racism in general and anti-semitism in particular seem evil when, in fact, they are good and necessary beliefs.

So while you yourself may be perfectly aware that The Holocaust happened... just think of the good you could do, if you could instil doubt in others or even convince them that The Holocaust was a complete fabrication. Yes, it may be dishonest - but you are lying for the sake of the greater good.

After all, The Jew is still out there - still plotting the downfall of the white man, and his genocide at the hands of the more-easily-controlled (and more naturally submissive) asiatic and negroe.

Disclaimer: I'm not actually an antisemitic white supremacist.

Listen to someone who doesn't have faith in the holocaust and they'll explain why they don't share that belief.

Survivors

David Irving

David Cole

Ernst Zundel

Ryan Dawson

The biggest value I can think of in mentioning Holocaust deniers is that they're some of the safest Acceptable Targets in modern media. They're inherently a combination of racism, low intelligence, and gullibility. But that can certainly just go on the Acceptable Targets page. I wouldn't fight to have it on here as well.

^^ Great stuff. Some of the mental gymnastics is simply breathtaking. I love some of the comments, such as this one on the 21/9/16 video:

"The holocaust myth is the grail and key for jews. To them is justifies their evil actions throughout the world. To tell their own army (the jews) that their people were literally gassed it convinces them they need a world of their own, hence the need to destroy all others so jews of all stamp work in unison to overthrow and destroy the culture and lives of all others. Jews are the enemy of humanity because of THEIR OWN lies and subversions."

Could it be that one of the emotional roots of Holocaust Denial is the hope that we live in a Just World, where entire peoples "get what's coming to them" in karmic terms?

^ I'd argue that intelligence has nothing to do with it: in fact, the more intelligent they are the better they are at rationalising their beliefs. It's a fantastic illustration of Confirmation Bias in action.

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Moving on, I don't see the harm in explaining the emotional reasons for wanting to believe in the non-existence of The Holocaust. Deniers already believe we're gullible sheeple, and readers may be interested in learning why some highly intelligent people are so credulous about favourable facts and incredulous about unfavourable ones in a way that allows them to be Holocaust Deniers.

But the thing is, that's not what this page, and really site, is for.

The point of any Useful Notes page is a reference to help writers and viewers understand the subject as it appears in media in order to make it easier to enjoy the work. It is not to psychoanayize people, or even look into the real world effects and causes. It's here to help with troping, and unless that sort of information is useful to that (and it might be. I'm not saying it isn't, but I certainly haven't seen instances where it has been).

That said, I do think that little tidbit of information should go on the general Conspiracy Theorist page.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UsefulNotes:

To debunk common media stereotypes. To help you understand some media better. To educate, inform, and sometimes entertain.

Holocaust deniers exist, and exist in media.

However, you're right: this is not a page about holocaust deniers, which are a type of conspiracy theorists.

Actually, in the July 1932 elections Hitler's party got 37,3% of the votes in the Reichstag, so the last sentence isn't correct.

The National Socialist Party elected Adolf Hitler their Fuhrer and the Deutschvolk elected the NSDAP.

Well there are already a lot of images...but adding monuments to the Aftermath page seems okay to me, there's an image of Auschwitz I put there, I mean yes Auschwitz is a monument today and its important to preserve it, but maybe it's too gloomy (especially compared to the earlier images we put up).

I especially recommend images of Eisenman's German memorial. Germany to its credit has done well remembering and preserving this. I think if we can put that about how countries have memorialized these events, it would be good. Yad Vashem and so on.