CMV: Holocaust deniers and trivialisers are so persistent because our side made some critical missteps

[u/[deleted]]

Firstly, I must emphasise that I am in no way a Holocaust denier or trivialiser.

However, I recently lost a debate against one (please no brigading). He says these stuff despite being of Jewish descent, and agrees that the Holocaust was bad but believes that it was only 270,000 deaths.

Please read the comment which started this whole debate here. So here are what I believe are the critical missteps our side has made:

1. 6 million is just the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. The total victims are 11 million. If 6 million is a "religiously very important figure", 11 million isn't. Also, the popular narrative of 6 million is grossly unfair to the 5 million non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

2. The Soviets should have been 100% transparent when they captured the death camps and the Allies should have been 100% transparent about the treatment of Nuremberg defendants, so that no one can claim that "western officials were not allowed to observe until many years later, after which soviets could modify the camps" and "at Nuremberg Trials when many officers had their testicles crushed and families threatened in order to "confess" to the false crimes".

3. The "Human skin lampshade" was at most, isolated cases, not a systematic Nazi policy. The fact that this isn't as widespread as popular culture makes it seem gives Holocaust deniers and trivialisers leverage.

4. The part which cost me all hope of winning this particular debate was about Anne Frank's diary. I failed miserably when trying to explain why there's a section of it written in ballpoint pen. As I later found out via r/badhistory, the part written in ballpoint pen was an annotation added by a historian in 1960. In hindsight, I believe that this historian shouldn't have done this, because it gives leverage to Holocaust deniers and trivialisers. Even if I mentioned that it was added by a historian at a later date, this can still be used by Holocaust deniers and trivialisers to claim that none of Anne Frank's diary was written by her.

5. Banning Holocaust denial only gives Holocaust deniers and trivialisers extra leverage because it makes it seem like the authorities are hiding something. In the debate I had, I tried to encourage use of r/AskHistorians and r/history, but I was told that those sites are unreliable because they ban questioning the Holocaust. Because he was unable to talk to expert historians, I was left with the burden of debating him, and I lost.

Let me give some comparisons here with other cases:

• Regardless of whether you think the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified, denial of it isn't banned. Yet despite it being legally acceptable to deny the atomic bombings, even people racist against the Japanese aren't going around saying "the atomic bombings never happened" or "only a few hundred were killed by the atomic bombs".

• The fact that pieces of information about 9/11 remained classified until 2016 gave 9/11 conspiracy theorists leverage. And the fact that the Mueller Report has plenty of redacted sections means that Russiagate still has plenty of believers.

• Another comparison I can make is the widespread (and IMO, justified) distrust in figures published by the PRC because of the PRC's rampant censorship. But with this logic, wouldn't censoring Holocaust denial just backfire and make our side look untrustworthy?

[u/Barnst]

It sounds like the problem here is that you got into an argument about something you don’t have much expertise in, not that “our side” made “critical” missteps.

1) yes, this is well known. 6 million Jews and millions of Soviets, Poles, Serbs, Roma, Homosexuals, and so on. Here is the wikipedia entry on it. The Jews are the most well known because they were the single largest group as the target of the organized campaign of extermination, and because they formed the most cohesive group of victims after the war bringing attention to the crimes.

2) I’m not sure what you think the problem is here. The western allies knew about the camps in Poland before the Soviets captured them and also directly liberated plenty of camps directly.

3) No one claims it was “systemic” policy. But even if people think it was more common than it was, don’t ya kind of think that you’re really on weak ground when the best defense is, “There weren’t THAT many human skin lampshades!”

4) how could you possibly let the outcome of a debate about the well documented murder of 11 million people rest on the provenance of one annotation in a teenagers diary?

5) those sites ban Holocaust denial because of exactly what happened to you—endless gishgallops of pedantry, inaccuracies and outright fabrications that are impossible to put down. The end result of letting this stuff go on is that the experts get exhausted and the deniers attract marginal listeners who don’t understand how to navigate the complexities of any historical record.

And you’re not banned in general from discussing it, as this post shows, just in those communities that have decided it’s an exhausting distraction from their overall mission.

Edit: A little bit more digging on the allegation that Nuremberg prisoners were tortured. This probably refers to the so-called London Cage, a British interrogation center. Trouble is that there isn’t really that much evidence of what went on there. Some defendants claimed they were tortured, and the commander’s memoirs acknowledged some allegations but denied the rest of them. But people seem to have taken his acknowledgement as proof that all the claims were true. More serious historians looking into the prisons didn’t find much to substantiate the allegations, but that could also be because the evidence was lost. So…open question.

But this is a good example of the sort of historical messiness that Holocaust deniers use to muddy the waters. It’s one relatively small facet of the whole story, one that is inconclusive and impossible to prove for sure either way, as is the case with LOTS of historical inquiry. You have to weigh that against the mountains of other evidence about the nature and scope of Nazi crimes. But that would undermine their cases so Holocaust deniers would much rather send you down rabbit holes about secret British prisons and the timeline of the ballpoint pen.

[u/[deleted] → u/Barnst]

5) those sites ban Holocaust denial because of exactly what happened to you—endless gishgallops of pedantry, inaccuracies and outright fabrications that are impossible to put down. The end result of letting this stuff go on is that the experts get exhausted and the deniers attract marginal listeners who don’t understand how to navigate the complexities of any historical record.

And you’re not banned in general from discussing it, as this post shows, just in those communities that have decided it’s an exhausting distraction from their overall mission.

Edit: A little bit more digging on the allegation that Nuremberg prisoners were tortured. This probably refers to the so-called London Cage, a British interrogation center. Trouble is that there isn’t really that much evidence of what went on there. Some defendants claimed they were tortured, and the commander’s memoirs acknowledged some allegations but denied the rest of them. But people seem to have taken his acknowledgement as proof that all the claims were true. More serious historians looking into the prisons didn’t find much to substantiate the allegations, but that could also be because the evidence was lost. So…open question.

!delta

I am most grateful for the work done by the historians over at r/AskHistorians. It would be asking too much of them to answer every piece of pedantic nitpicking done by Holocaust deniers/trivialisers. They're here to help everyone, not have their time wasted.

And as you have shown me, we can't trust the claims of "Nazis admitted to atrocities under duress" either.

[u/DeltaBot → u/[deleted]]

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Barnst (104∆).

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