Holocaust Evidence

Why? The GERMANS did that themselves! How do you know anything. Have you seen Armstrongs footsteps on the moon?

The issue here is fast becoming not whether the holocaust is real, but how can it be proven to you, while you uncritically look at Leutner's fraud. How do you know he went to Poland to investigate? You weren't there.



They did try that. It wasn't fast enough and the ammunition was needed for the war effort. The Germans left much documentation on this. There's a huge meeting on this very topic with a plan signed by Eichmann among others. This was called the "final solution", ever hear of that one.

Your claim to be skeptical falls away by your own "evidence" promoting Holocaust denial.

Be skeptical but at least look at the evidence. Otherwise you're just a garden variety denier.

The Wannsee Conference (German: Wannseekonferenz) was a meeting of senior officials of Nazi Germany, held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee on 20 January 1942. The purpose of the conference, called by director of the SS-Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Main Security Office; RSHA) SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, was to ensure the cooperation of administrative leaders of various government departments in the implementation of the final solution to the Jewish question, whereby most of the Jews of German-occupied Europe would be deported to Poland and murdered. Conference attendees included representatives from several government ministries, including state secretaries from the Foreign Office, the justice, interior, and state ministries, and representatives from the Schutzstaffel (SS). In the course of the meeting, Heydrich outlined how European Jews would be rounded up from west to east and sent to extermination camps in the General Government (the occupied part of Poland), where they would be killed.

Legalized discrimination against Jews began immediately after the Nazi seizure of power on 30 January 1933. Violence and economic pressure were used by the Nazi regime to encourage Jews to voluntarily leave the country. After the invasion of Poland in September 1939, the extermination of European Jewry began, and the killings continued and accelerated after the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. On 31 July 1941 Hermann Göring gave written authorization to Heydrich to prepare and submit a plan for a "total solution of the Jewish question" in territories under German control and to coordinate the participation of all involved government organisations. At the Wannsee Conference, Heydrich emphasised that once the deportation process was complete, the exterminations would become an internal matter under the purview of the SS. A secondary goal was to arrive at a definition of who was Jewish and thus determine the scope of the exterminations.

One copy of the Wannsee Protocol, the circulated minutes of the meeting, survived the war to be found by Robert Kempner, lead U.S. prosecutor before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, in files that had been seized from the German Foreign Office. The Wannsee House, site of the conference, is now a Holocaust Memorial.


Background

The ideology of Nazism brought together elements of antisemitism, racial hygiene, and eugenics, and combined them with pan-Germanism and territorial expansionism with the goal of obtaining more Lebensraum (living space) for the Germanic people.[1] Nazi Germany attempted to obtain this new territory by attacking Poland and the Soviet Union, intending to deport or kill the Jews and Slavs living there, who were viewed as being inferior to the Aryan master race.[2]

Discrimination against Jews, longstanding but extralegal throughout much of Europe at the time, was codified in Germany immediately after the Nazi seizure of power on 30 January 1933. The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, passed on 7 April of that year, excluded most Jews from the legal profession and the civil service. Similar legislation soon deprived Jewish members of other professions of the right to practise.[3] Violence and economic pressure were used by the regime to encourage Jews to voluntarily leave the country.[4] Jewish businesses were denied access to markets, forbidden to advertise in newspapers, and deprived of access to government contracts. Citizens were harassed and subjected to violent attacks and boycotts of their businesses.[5]

In September 1935 the Nuremberg Laws were enacted. These laws prohibited marriages between Jews and people of Germanic extraction, extramarital relations between Jews and Germans, and the employment of German women under the age of 45 as domestic servants in Jewish households.[6] The Reich Citizenship Law stated that only those of Germanic or related blood were defined as citizens. Thus Jews and other minority groups were stripped of their German citizenship.[7] A supplementary decree issued in November defined as Jewish anyone with three Jewish grandparents, or two grandparents if the Jewish faith was followed.[8] By the start of World War II in 1939, around 250,000 of Germany's 437,000 Jews emigrated to the United States, Palestine, Great Britain, and other countries.[9][10]

After the invasion of Poland in September 1939, Hitler ordered that the Polish leadership and intelligentsia should be destroyed.[11] The Sonderfahndungsbuch Polen (Special Prosecution Book Poland)—lists of people to be killed—had been drawn up by the SS as early as May 1939.[11] The Einsatzgruppen (special task forces) performed these murders with the support of the Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz (Germanic Self-Protection Group), a paramilitary group consisting of ethnic Germans living in Poland.[12] Members of the SS, the Wehrmacht (German Armed Forces), and the Ordnungspolizei (Order Police; Orpo) also shot civilians during the Polish campaign.[13] Approximately 65,000 civilians were killed by the end of 1939. In addition to leaders of Polish society, they killed Jews, prostitutes, Romani people, and the mentally ill.[14][15]

On 31 July 1941 Hermann Göring gave written authorization to SS-Obergruppenführer (Senior Group Leader) Reinhard Heydrich, Chief of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), to prepare and submit a plan for a "total solution of the Jewish question" in territories under German control and to coordinate the participation of all involved government organisations.[16] The resulting Generalplan Ost (General Plan for the East) called for deporting the population of occupied Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to Siberia, for use as slave labour or to be murdered.[17] The minutes of the Wannsee Conference estimated the Jewish population of the Soviet Union to be five million, with another three million in Ukraine.[18]

In addition to eliminating Jews, the Nazis also planned to reduce the population of the conquered territories by 30 million people through starvation in an action called the Hunger Plan. Food supplies would be diverted to the German army and German civilians. Cities would be razed and the land allowed to return to forest or resettled by German colonists.[19] The objective of the Hunger Plan was to inflict deliberate mass starvation on the Slavic civilian populations under German occupation by directing all food supplies to the German home population and the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front.[20] According to the historian Timothy Snyder, "4.2 million Soviet citizens (largely Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians) were starved" by the Nazis (and the Nazi controlled Wehrmacht) in 1941–1944 as a result of Backe's plan.[21][22]

Harvests were poor in Germany in 1940 and 1941 and food supplies were short, as large numbers of forced labourers had been brought into the country to work in the armaments industry.[23] If these workers—as well as the German people—were to be adequately fed, there must be a sharp reduction in the number of "useless mouths", of whom the millions of Jews under German rule were, in the light of Nazi ideology, the most obvious example.[24]

At the time of the Wannsee Conference, the killing of Jews in the Soviet Union had already been underway for some months. Right from the start of Operation Barbarossa—the invasion of the Soviet Union—Einsatzgruppen were assigned to follow the army into the conquered areas and round up and kill Jews. In a letter dated 2 July 1941 Heydrich communicated to his SS and Police Leaders that the Einsatzgruppen were to execute Comintern officials, ranking members of the Communist Party, extremist and radical Communist Party members, people's commissars, and Jews in party and government posts.[25] Open-ended instructions were given to execute "other radical elements (saboteurs, propagandists, snipers, assassins, agitators, etc.)."[25] He instructed that any pogroms spontaneously initiated by the occupants of the conquered territories were to be quietly encouraged.[25] On 8 July, he announced that all Jews were to be regarded as partisans, and gave the order for all male Jews between the ages of 15 and 45 to be shot.[26] By August the net had been widened to include women, children, and the elderly—the entire Jewish population.[27] By the time planning was underway for the Wannsee Conference, hundreds of thousands of Polish, Serbian, and Russian Jews had already been killed.[28] The initial plan was to implement Generalplan Ost after the conquest of the Soviet Union.[17][29] European Jews would be deported to occupied parts of Russia, where they would be worked to death in road-building projects.[28]
Planning the conference
Letter from Heydrich to Martin Luther, Undersecretary at the Foreign Office, inviting him to the Wannsee Conference (Wannsee Conference House Memorial, Berlin)

On 29 November 1941, Heydrich sent invitations for a ministerial conference to be held on 9 December at the offices of Interpol at 16 Am Kleinen Wannsee.[30] He changed the venue on 4 December to the eventual location of the meeting.[30] He enclosed a copy of a letter from Göring dated 31 July that authorised him to plan a Final Solution to the Jewish question. The ministries to be represented were Interior, Justice, the Four Year Plan, Propaganda, and the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories.[31]

Between the date the invitations to the conference went out (29 November) and the date of the cancelled first meeting (9 December), the situation changed. On 5 December, the Soviet Army began a counter-offensive in front of Moscow, ending the prospect of a rapid conquest of the Soviet Union. On 7 December, the Japanese attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor, causing the U.S. to declare war on Japan the next day. The Reich government declared war on the U.S. on 11 December. Some invitees were involved in these preparations, so Heydrich postponed his meeting.[32] Somewhere around this time, Hitler resolved that the Jews of Europe were to be exterminated immediately, rather than after the war, which now had no end in sight.[33][a] On 12 December he met with top party officials and made his intentions plain.[34] The war was still ongoing, and since transporting masses of people into a combat zone was impossible, Heydrich decided that the Jews currently living in the General Government (the German-occupied area of Poland) would be killed in extermination camps set up in occupied areas of Poland, as would Jews from the rest of Europe.[35]

On 8 January 1942, Heydrich sent new invitations to a meeting to be held on 20 January.[36] The venue for the rescheduled conference was a villa at 56–58 Am Großen Wannsee, overlooking the Großer Wannsee. The villa had been purchased from Friedrich Minoux in 1940 by the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Force; SD) for use as a conference centre and guest house.[37]
Attendees

Heydrich invited representatives from several government ministries, including state secretaries from the Foreign Office, the justice, interior, and state ministries, and representatives from the SS. The process of disseminating information about the fate of the Jews was already well underway by the time the meeting was held.[38]

Proceedings
Eichmann's list

In preparation for the conference, Eichmann drafted a list of the numbers of Jews in the various European countries. Countries were listed in two groups, "A" and "B". "A" countries were those under direct Reich control or occupation (or partially occupied and quiescent, in the case of Vichy France); "B" countries were allied or client states, neutral, or at war with Germany.[40] The numbers reflect actions already completed by Nazi forces; for example, Estonia is listed as Judenfrei (free of Jews), since the 4,500 Jews who remained in Estonia after the German occupation had been exterminated by the end of 1941.[41]

Heydrich opened the conference with an account of the anti-Jewish measures taken in Germany since the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. He said that between 1933 and October 1941, 537,000 German, Austrian, and Czech Jews had emigrated.[42] This information was taken from a briefing paper prepared for him the previous week by Eichmann.[43]

Heydrich reported that there were approximately eleven million Jews in the whole of Europe, of whom half were in countries not under German control.[40] He explained that since further Jewish emigration had been prohibited by Himmler, a new solution would take its place: "evacuating" Jews to the east. This would be a temporary solution, a step towards the final solution of the Jewish question.[44]

Under proper guidance, in the course of the final solution the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labor in the East. Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex, will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes. The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as the seed of a new Jewish revival.[45]

German historian Peter Longerich notes that vague orders couched in terminology that had a specific meaning for members of the regime were common, especially when people were being ordered to carry out criminal activities. Leaders were given briefings about the need to be "severe" and "firm"; all Jews were to be viewed as potential enemies that had to be dealt with ruthlessly.[46] The wording of the Wannsee Protocol—the distributed minutes of the meeting—made it clear to participants that evacuation east was a euphemism for death.[47]
The conference room at the Wannsee Conference House, 2006

Heydrich went on to say that in the course of the "practical execution of the final solution", Europe would be "combed through from west to east" but that Germany, Austria, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia would have priority "due to the housing problem and additional social and political necessities".[45] This was a reference to increasing pressure from the Gauleiters (regional Nazi Party leaders) in Germany for the Jews to be removed from their areas to allow accommodation for Germans made homeless by Allied bombing, as well as to make space for laborers being imported from occupied countries. The "evacuated" Jews, he said, would first be sent to "transit ghettos" in the General Government, from which they would be transported eastward.[45] Heydrich said that to avoid legal and political difficulties, it was important to define who was a Jew for the purposes of "evacuation". He outlined categories of people who would not be killed. Jews over 65 years old, and Jewish World War I veterans who had been severely wounded or who had won the Iron Cross, might be sent to Theresienstadt concentration camp instead of being killed. "With this expedient solution," he said, "in one fell swoop many interventions will be prevented."[45]

The situation of people who were half or quarter Jews, and of Jews who were married to non-Jews, was more complex. Under the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, their status had been left deliberately ambiguous. Heydrich announced that Mischlings (a Nazi pejorative for mixed-race persons) of the first degree (persons with two Jewish grandparents) would be treated as Jews. This would not apply if they were married to a non-Jew and had children by that marriage. It would also not apply if they had been granted written exemption by "the highest offices of the Party and State."[48] Such persons would be sterilised or deported if they refused sterilisation.[48] "Mischlings of the second degree" (persons with one Jewish grandparent) would be treated as Germans unless they were married to Jews or Mischlings of the first degree, had a "racially especially undesirable appearance that marks him outwardly as a Jew",[49] or had a "political record that shows that he feels and behaves like a Jew".[50] Persons in these latter categories would be killed even if married to non-Jews.[49] In the case of mixed marriages, Heydrich recommended that each case should be evaluated individually and the impact on any German relatives assessed. If such a marriage had produced children who were being raised as Germans, the Jewish partner would not be killed. If they were being raised as Jews, they might be killed or sent to an old-age ghetto.[50] These exemptions applied only to German and Austrian Jews, and were not always observed even for them. In most of the occupied countries, Jews were rounded up and killed en masse, and anyone who lived in or identified with the Jewish community in any given place was regarded as a Jew.[51][c]
Facsimiles of the minutes of the Wannsee Conference and Eichmann's list, presented under glass at the Wannsee Conference House Memorial

Heydrich commented, "In occupied and unoccupied France, the registration of Jews for evacuation will in all probability proceed without great difficulty",[52] but in the end the great majority of French-born Jews survived.[53] More difficulty was anticipated with Germany's allies Romania and Hungary. "In Romania the government has [now] appointed a commissioner for Jewish affairs", Heydrich said.[52] In fact the deportation of Romanian Jews was slow and inefficient despite a high degree of popular antisemitism.[54] "In order to settle the question in Hungary," Heydrich said, "it will soon be necessary to force an adviser for Jewish questions onto the Hungarian government".[52] The Hungarian regime of Miklós Horthy continued to resist German interference in its Jewish policy until the spring of 1944, when the Wehrmacht invaded Hungary. Very soon, 600,000 Jews of Hungary (and parts of Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia occupied by Hungary) were sent to their deaths by Eichmann, with the collaboration of Hungarian authorities.[55]

Heydrich spoke for nearly an hour. Then followed about thirty minutes of questions and comments, followed by some less formal conversation.[56] Otto Hofmann (head of the SS Race and Settlement Main Office (RuSHA)) and Wilhelm Stuckart (State Secretary of the Reich Interior Ministry) pointed out the legalistic and administrative difficulties over mixed marriages, and suggested compulsory dissolution of mixed marriages or the wider use of sterilisation as a simpler alternative.[57] Erich Neumann from the Four Year Plan argued for the exemption of Jews who were working in industries vital to the war effort and for whom no replacements were available. Heydrich assured him that this was already the policy; such Jews would not be killed.[58][d] Josef Bühler, State Secretary of the General Government, stated his support for the plan and his hope that the killings would commence as soon as possible.[59] Towards the end of the meeting cognac was served, and after that the conversation became less restrained.[57] "The gentlemen were standing together, or sitting together", Eichmann said, "and were discussing the subject quite bluntly, quite differently from the language which I had to use later in the record. During the conversation they minced no words about it at all ... they spoke about methods of killing, about liquidation, about extermination".[56] Eichmann recorded that Heydrich was pleased with the course of the meeting. He had expected a lot of resistance, Eichmann recalled, but instead he had found "an atmosphere not only of agreement on the part of the participants, but more than that, one could feel an agreement which had assumed a form which had not been expected".[51]
Wannsee Protocol
View of the Großer Wannsee lake from the villa at 56–58 Am Grossen Wannsee, where the conference was held

At the conclusion of the meeting Heydrich gave Eichmann firm instructions about what was to appear in the minutes. They were not to be verbatim: Eichmann ensured that nothing too explicit appeared in them. He said at his trial: "How shall I put it — certain over-plain talk and jargon expressions had to be rendered into office language by me".[59] Eichmann condensed his records into a document outlining the purpose of the meeting and the intentions of the regime moving forward. He stated at his trial that it was personally edited by Heydrich, and thus reflected the message he intended the participants to take away from the meeting.[60] Copies of the minutes (known from the German word for "minutes" as the "Wannsee Protocol"[e]) were sent by Eichmann to all the participants after the meeting.[61] Most of these copies were destroyed at the end of the war as participants and other officials sought to cover their tracks. It was not until 1947 that Luther's copy (number 16 out of 30 copies prepared) was found by Robert Kempner, lead U.S. prosecutor before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, in files that had been seized from the German Foreign Office.[62]
Interpretation
Reinhard Heydrich

The Wannsee Conference lasted only about ninety minutes. The enormous importance which has been attached to the conference by postwar writers was not evident to most of its participants at the time. Heydrich did not call the meeting to make fundamental new decisions on the Jewish question. Massive killings of Jews in the conquered territories in the Soviet Union and Poland were ongoing and a new extermination camp was already under construction at Belzec at the time of the conference; other extermination camps were in the planning stages.[28][63] The decision to exterminate the Jews had already been made, and Heydrich, as Himmler's emissary, held the meeting to ensure the cooperation of the various departments in conducting the deportations.[64] According to Longerich, a primary goal of the meeting was to emphasise that once the deportations had been completed, the implementation of the Final Solution became an internal matter of the SS, totally outside the purview of any other agency.[65] A secondary goal was to determine the scope of the deportations and arrive at definitions of who was Jewish, who was Mischling, and who (if anybody) should be spared.[65] "The representatives of the ministerial bureaucracy had made it plain that they had no concerns about the principle of deportation per se. This was indeed the crucial result of the meeting and the main reason why Heydrich had detailed minutes prepared and widely circulated", said Longerich.[66] Their presence at the meeting also ensured that all those present were accomplices and accessories to the murders that were about to be undertaken.[67]

Eichmann's biographer David Cesarani agrees with Longerich's interpretation; he notes that Heydrich's main purpose was to impose his own authority on the various ministries and agencies involved in Jewish policy matters, and to avoid any repetition of the disputes that had arisen earlier in the annihilation campaign. "The simplest, most decisive way that Heydrich could ensure the smooth flow of deportations", he writes, "was by asserting his total control over the fate of the Jews in the Reich and the east, and [by] cow[ing] other interested parties into toeing the line of the RSHA".[68]
Wannsee House Holocaust Memorial

In 1965, historian Joseph Wulf proposed that the Wannsee House should be made into a Holocaust memorial and document centre. But the German government was not interested at that time. The building was in use as a school, and funding was not available. Despondent at the failure of the project and the German government's failure to pursue and convict Nazi war criminals, Wulf committed suicide in 1974.[69] On 20 January 1992, on the fiftieth anniversary of the conference, the site was finally opened as a Holocaust memorial and museum. The museum also hosts permanent exhibits of texts and photographs that document events of the Holocaust and its planning.[70] The Joseph Wulf Bibliothek / Mediothek on the second floor houses a large collection of books on the Nazi era, plus other materials such as microfilms and original Nazi documents.[70]
See also

Reich Chancellery meeting of 12 December 1941
Conspiracy (film)
The Wannsee Conference (film)

Notes

German historian Christian Gerlach has claimed that Hitler approved the policy of extermination in a speech to senior officials in Berlin on 12 December. Gerlach 1998, p. 785. This date is not universally accepted, but it seems likely that a decision was made at around this time. On December 18, Himmler met with Hitler and noted in his appointment book "Jewish question – to be exterminated as partisans". Browning 2004, p. 410. On 19 December, Wilhelm Stuckert, State Secretary at the Interior Ministry, told one of his officials: "The proceedings against the evacuated Jews are based on a decision from the highest authority. You must come to terms with it." Browning 2004, p. 405.
This information was contained in the briefing paper Eichmann prepared for Heydrich before the meeting. Cesarani 2005, p. 112.
At a meeting of 17 ministerial representatives held at the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories on 29 January, it decided that in the eastern territories all Mischlings were to be classed as Jews, while in western Europe the relatively more lenient German standard would be applied. Browning 2004, p. 414.
Göring and his subordinates made persistent efforts to prevent skilled Jewish workers whose labour was an important part of the war effort from being killed. But by 1943 Himmler was a much more powerful figure in the regime than Göring, and all categories of skilled Jews eventually lost their exemptions. Tooze 2006, pp. 522–529.
The minutes are headed Besprechungsprotokoll (discussion minutes).

References

Evans 2008, p. 7.
Longerich 2010, p. 132.
Longerich 2010, pp. 38–39.
Longerich 2010, pp. 67–69.
Longerich 2010, p. 41.
Kershaw 2008, p. 346.
Evans 2005, p. 544.
Kershaw 2008, p. 347.
Longerich 2010, p. 127.
Evans 2005, p. 555.
Longerich 2010, p. 144.
Longerich 2010, pp. 144–145.
Longerich 2012, p. 429.
Evans 2008, p. 15.
Longerich 2012, pp. 430–432.
Browning 2004, p. 315.
Snyder 2010, p. 416.
Roseman 2002, p. 112.
Snyder 2010, pp. 162–163, 416.
Tooze 2006, p. 669.
Snyder 2010, p. 411.
Gerhard 2009.
Tooze 2006, p. 539.
Tooze 2006, pp. 538–549.
Longerich 2012, p. 523.
Longerich 2010, p. 198.
Longerich 2010, p. 207.
Longerich 2010, p. 309.
Kershaw 2008, p. 683.
Roseman 2002, p. 57.
Browning 2004, p. 406.
Browning 2004, p. 407.
Longerich 2000, p. 2.
Browning 2004, pp. 407–408.
Longerich 2010, pp. 309–310.
Browning 2004, p. 410.
Roseman 2002, p. 65.
Browning 2004, pp. 410–411.
Roseman 2002, p. 66.
Roseman 2002, pp. 111–112.
Longerich 2010, pp. 237, 239.
Roseman 2002, p. 110.
Cesarani 2005, p. 112.
Roseman 2002, pp. 110–111.
Roseman 2002, p. 113.
Longerich 2010, pp. 189–190.
Roseman 2002, p. 77.
Roseman 2002, p. 115.
Roseman 2002, pp. 115–116.
Roseman 2002, p. 116.
Browning 2004, p. 414.
Roseman 2002, p. 114.
Marrus & Paxton 1981, pp. 343–344.
Cesarani 2005, pp. 151–155.
Cesarani 2005, pp. 159–195.
Browning 2004, p. 413.
Cesarani 2005, p. 113.
Roseman 2002, p. 71.
Cesarani 2005, p. 114.
Roseman 2002, p. 68.
Cesarani 2005, pp. 117–118.
Roseman 2002, p. 1.
Breitman 1991, pp. 229–233.
Longerich 2010, p. 310.
Longerich 2000, p. 14.
Longerich 2010, pp. 306, 310.
Longerich 2000, p. 7.
Cesarani 2005, pp. 110–111.
Lehrer 2000, p. 134–135.
Lehrer 2000, p. 135.

Bibliography

Breitman, Richard (1991). The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press.
Browning, Christopher R. (2004). The Origins of the Final Solution : The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 – March 1942. Comprehensive History of the Holocaust. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 0-8032-1327-1.
Cesarani, David (2005) [2004]. Eichmann: His Life and Crimes. London: Vintage. ISBN 978-0-099-44844-0.
Evans, Richard J. (2005). The Third Reich in Power. New York: Penguin. ISBN 978-0-14-303790-3.
Evans, Richard J. (2008). The Third Reich at War. New York: Penguin. ISBN 978-0-14-311671-4.
Gerhard, Gesine (February 2009). "Food and Genocide. Nazi Agrarian Politics in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union". Contemporary European History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) 18 (1): 57–62. doi:10.1017/S0960777308004827.
Gerlach, Christian (December 1998). "The Wannsee Conference, the Fate of German Jews, and Hitler's Decision in Principle to Exterminate All European Jews" (PDF). Journal of Modern History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) 70 (4): 759–812. doi:10.1086/235167.
Kershaw, Ian (2008). Hitler: A Biography. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-393-06757-6.
Lehrer, Steven (2000). Wannsee House and the Holocaust. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. ISBN 0-7864-0792-1.
Longerich, Peter (2000). "The Wannsee Conference in the Development of the 'Final Solution'" (PDF). Holocaust Educational Trust Research Papers (London: The Holocaust Educational Trust) 1 (2). ISBN 0-9516166-5-X.
Longerich, Peter (2010). Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-280436-5.
Longerich, Peter (2012). Heinrich Himmler: A Life. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-959232-6.
Marrus, Michael R.; Paxton, Robert O. (1981). Vichy France and the Jews. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ISBN 0-8047-2499-7.
Roseman, Mark (2002). The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution. London; New York: Allen Lane. ISBN 0-71-399570-X.
Snyder, Timothy (2010). Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-00239-9.
Tooze, Adam (2006). The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. London; New York: Allen Lane. ISBN 978-0-713-99566-

Don't the photographs prove anything? Doesn't the testimony at Nurnburg carry any weight? What gives Leutner the qualification to research anything?

But I'll ask you once again: Assume you are right. The Holocaust never happened. Who is promoting the Holocaust hoax and why?

The International Tracing Service (ITS) has about 3 (three) million related documents. What they don't have stored in their own archives, is listed there as well with easy access to other archives.
You can either >go there< (it's just 30 minutes from my place) or try the >online search<

There were some 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe between 1933 and 1945, and eight extermination camps (which are in English usually called "death camps", and which were situated mainly in Poland).

When you visit the ITS, I suggest, you go to Wewelsburg as well. On the one side, you can worship there you can see what was planned as Reich-House of the SS-group-leaders, on the other hand, it's a really interesting regional museum. And certainly you'll find a lot sources "backing" your queer ideas in the adjunct museum about the smallest German KZ, Niederhagen (Wewelsburg) prison and labour camp.

Every German KZ or Nazi camp or Ghetto had either an own registry office or the data were done at that of the local municipality. From around 1940 onwards all had own offices ... to avoid 'civil' questions.
Besides that, all who were imprisoned, were registered at the "Einwohnermeldeamt" (resident registration office), at least until short before these camps were freed or otherwise closed.

Most of those data are in the above mentioned archive(s), or still in the municipality's archives.

I ask for the counting of dead bodies and I have been sent to online sites with pure propaganda.

Lets analyze the killings in concentration camps for a minute.

Germany is losing the war. The allies are now gaining ground and the battles are closer to Germany each day.

We have months and months of hard times for Germans. Their food, ammunition, and other good supplies start to suffer delays and in several occasions never arrive.

We go now to the concentration camps. The far away concentration camps from Berlin won't receive any goods either. So, they will have problems with food.

What is next? German soldiers will prefer to have the leftover food for themselves and hell with the rest. This is not happening in concentration camps near Berlin where the allies found the prisoners in good health and well fed.

When dead bodies started to increase due to starvation and contagious diseases, there was no time for burial. The most known method to avoid a plague is the burning of corpses.

And this is the preventive measure made by Germans in concentration camps.

By following the events and making concordance between the losing ground by Germans and the increasing of starvation in far away from Berlin concentration camps, the whole hypothesis of a campaign to eliminate an ethnic group from the planet becomes ridiculous.

It is against history that the bad guys take so much unnecessary work (train mobilization, obtaining a dangerous poison gas, and so forth) to kill people to whom the Germans just can shoot to death where Jewish people were found and end of the story.

No, taking prisoners happened for other purposes but to kill them "later on". It is hard to swallow such an argument.

The best way to understand the starvation and mass death in concentration camps is by comparing these events with the beginning of the losing the war by Germans.

This chronological comparison will help a lot.

You certainly have no clue at all about how German bureaucracy worked (and works).

And with the rest of your post: you really are ignoring the facts.
Fortunately - or unfortunately - I've been able to talk to witnesses
a) people who have survived the camps,
b) people who had "visited" those camps,
c) people, who had lived in the nearest surroundings of those camps.


What I really hate (and mean this in very sense of the words) is that some people judge with high demands about facts, they have totally no idea about.

Except Leuchter didn't provide any science. He provided crap that any HVAC person will tell you is crap. Rather than respond to my showing you that a single fan could turn over the air in the room in 2 minutes you just return to Leucther who is an idiot that claimed he was an expert on gas chambers. In reality, you don't need a hermetically sealed door and you can change over the air in minutes with an exhaust fan.

As to the walls of the chambers:


Here is the Polish report:
http://www.holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/chemistry/iffr/report.shtml

Last month it was published that now archaeologists found the gas chambers at Sobibor, an extermination camp from 1942 until 1943.
Estimates for the number of people killed at Sobibor between 1942 and 1943 range from 167,000 (that's the number which can be documented) to upward of 250,000 (this number is a guess, because no documents are known of the last weeks of the camp). Though most were gassed upon arrival, some prisoners were spared immediate death, only to be forced to help with the gas chamber's operations and the disposal of dead bodies.
In October 1943, about 600 prisoners revolted at Sobibor and killed nearly a dozen of their Nazi guards. But of the 300 prisoners who managed to break out of the camp after the revolt, many were eventually captured and killed, and only about 50 escapees were believed to have survived the war. After the uprising, the camp was shut down and everything destroyed.

How would you like us to provide a recount of the official count of those who perished during the War? Would you like us to order the exhumation of all the dead? I really hope you are not an American, because if our people have become so irrationally stupid during the last 70 years, it shows little hope for the future.

You have posted nothing but nonsense AND now you have the breathtaking audacity to deny facts that have been verified by scientists and historians from many countries. They are still finding information all these years after the war. Some stories never saw the light of day until combatants died and diarys, photos, artifacts were discovered.

You sir, personify gross stupidly. You give morons a bad name. Shame on you, you flaming no nothing.

That's why I'm not casting pearls before the swine ...

Carlos are you calling the Nazis liars caught in their own lies? They never ever denied the Holocaust, they made excuses about following orders. You ignore Nazi government documents, making a compact and a plan to "exterminate" all European Jews.

Once again, who benefits from a Holocaust hoax and how? Stop dancing aroung.

He wants them dug up and counted when the Germans counted them alive and dead. Insane.

Genesis states that Methuselah lived 969 yrs - So it MUST be true?

Bobsal - You must lose sleep on the prospect of a holocaust thread not forthcoming:)

Not exactly germane, do you think? The Bible is relating "history" 3,000 years old. The Holocaust is current. There are surviving witnesses and official documents generated by the perpetrators themselves.

Nah. I retired early and can pretty much do what I want, when I want. My Jewish progenitors (both my mother and father sides) came here escaping the German army from Holland and Belgium in WWI, and I have family that disappeared into the Holocaust. I take it seriously. Its not something on my mind all that much except that I won't have Nazism and the Holocaust trivialized and I don't want it to ever happen again. Not to any class of humans.

There are survivors, I agree, but none of them witnessed the event in its entirity.
Thus - We are stuck with differing evidence.
The point is - Innocent people suffered so others could benefit - That pisses me off.
I refuse to carry the burdens of humankind, but if I had the ability - Noone, not plant or animal, would ever suffer.