The Holocaust is an irrefutable fact.
1. What proof exists that the Nazis practiced genocide or deliberately killed six million Jews?
Deniers claim:
None. The only evidence is the postwar testimony of individual "survivors." This testimony is contradictory, and no "survivor" claims to have actually witnessed any gassing. There are no contemporaneous documents and no hard evidence whatsoever: no mounds of ashes, no crematoria capable of disposing of millions of corpses, no piles of clothes, no human soap, no lamp shades made of human skin, no records, no credible demographic statistics.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lie piled upon lie, with not a shred of proof.
This is as good a place as any to present some detailed evidence which is consistently ignored, as a sort of primer on Holocaust denial.
Let's look at their claims one at a time:
Supposedly the only evidence, "the postwar testimony of individual survivors."
First of all, consider the implicit conspiracy theory. Notice how the testimony of every single inmate of every Nazi camp is automatically dismissed as unconvincing. This total dismissal of inmates' testimony, along with the equally-total dismissal of the Nazis' own testimony (!), is the largest unspoken assumption of Holocaust-denial.
This assumption, which is not often spelled out, is that the attempted Jewish genocide never took place, but rather that a secret conspiracy of Jews, starting around 1941, planted and forged myriad documents to prove that it did; then, after the war, they rounded up all the camp survivors and told them what to say.
The conspirators also supposedly managed to torture hundreds of key Nazis into confessing to crimes which they never committed, or into framing their fellow Nazis for those crimes, and to plant hundreds of documents in Nazi files which were never discovered until after the war, and only then, in many cases, by sheer luck. Goebbels' diary, for example, was barely rescued from being sold as 7,000 pages of scrap paper, but buried in the scattered manuscript were several telling entries (as translated in Lochner, The Goebbels Diaries, 1948, pp. 86, 147-148):
February 14, 1942: The Führer once again expressed his determination to clean up the Jews in Europe pitilessly. There must be no squeamish sentimentalism about it. The Jews have deserved the catastrophe that has now overtaken them. Their destruction will go hand in hand with the destruction of our enemies. We must hasten this process with cold ruthlessness.
March 27, 1942: The procedure is a pretty barbaric one and not to be described here more definitely. Not much will remain of the Jews. On the whole it can be said that about 60 per cent of them will have to be liquidated whereas only 40 per cent can be used for forced labor.
Michael Shermer has pointed out that the Nazis' own estimate of the number of European Jews was eleven million, and sixty percent of eleven million is 6.6 million. This is fairly close to the actual figure. (Actually, forty percent was a serious overestimate of the survival rate of Jews who were captured, but there were many Jews who escaped.)
In any case, most of the diary is quite mundane, and interesting only to historians. Did the supposed Jewish conspiracy forge seven thousand pages to insert just a few lines? How did they manage to know Goebbels' affairs intimately enough to avoid contradictions, e.g. putting him or his associates in the wrong city at the wrong date?
As even the revisionist David Cole has admitted, revisionists have yet to provide a satisfactory explanation of this document.
Regarding postwar testimony from Nazis, were they all tortured into confessing to heinous crimes which they supposedly did not commit? This might be believable if only a few Nazis were captured after the war, or maybe if some had courageously stood up in court and shouted to the world about the supposed attempt to silence them. But hundreds testified regarding the Holocaust, in trials dating from late 1945 until the 1960s.
Many of these Nazis testified as witnesses and were not accused of crimes. What was the basis for their supposed coercion?
Many of these trials were in German courts. Did the Germans torture their own countrymen? Well, Holocaust-deniers sometimes claim that the Jews have secretly infiltrated the German government and control everything about it. They prefer not to talk too much about this theory, however, because it is clearly on the lunatic fringe.
The main point is that not one of these supposed torture victims -- in fifty years, not one -- has come forth to support the claim that testimony was coerced.
On the contrary, confirmation and reconfirmation of their testimony has continued across the years. What coercion could have convinced Judge Konrad Morgen to testify to the crimes he witnessed at the International Nuremberg Trial in 1946, where he was not accused of any crime? And to later testify at the Auschwitz trial at Frankfurt, Germany, in 1963-65? What coercion was applied to SS Doctor Johann Kremer to make him testify in his own defense in 1947, and then, after having been convicted in both Poland and Germany, emerge after his release to testify again as a witness at the Frankfurt trial? What coercion was applied to Böck, Gerhard Hess, Hölblinger, Storch, and Wiebeck, all former SS men, all witnesses at Frankfurt, none accused of any crime there?
Holocaust-deniers point to small discrepancies in testimonies to try to discredit them. The assumption, unstated, is that the reader will accept minor discrepancies as evidence of a vast, over-reaching Jewish conspiracy. This is clearly ludicrous.
In fact, the discrepancies and minor errors in detail argue against, not for, the conspiracy theory. Why would the conspirators have given different information to different Nazis? In fact, if all the testimonies, from the Nazis' to the inmates', sounded too similar, it is certain that the Holocaust-deniers would cite that as evidence of a conspiracy.
What supposed coercion could reach across four decades, to force former SS-Untersturmführer Dr. Hans Münch to give an interview, against the will of his family, on Swedish television? In the 1981 interview, he talked about Auschwitz:
Interviewer: Isn't the ideology of extermination contrary to a doctor's ethical values?
Münch: Yes, absolutely. There is no discussion. But I lived in that environment, and I tried in every possible way to avoid accepting it, but I had to live with it. What else could I have done? And I wasn't confronted with it directly until the order came that I and my superior and another one had to take part in the exterminations since the camp's doctors were overloaded and couldn't cope with it.
Interviewer: I must ask something. Doubters claim that "special treatment" could mean anything. It didn't have to be extermination.
Münch: "Special treatment" in the terminology of the concentration camp means physical extermination. If it was a question of more than a few people, where nothing else than gassing them was worthwhile, they were gassed.
Interviewer: "Special treatment" was gassing?
Münch: Yes, absolutely.
And what supposed coercion could reach across four decades, to force former SS-Unterscharführer Franz Suchomel into giving an interview for the film Shoah? Speaking under (false) promises of anonymity, he told of the crimes committed at the Treblinka death camp (from the book Shoah, Claude Lanzmann, 1985, p. 54):
Interviewer: You are a very important eyewitness, and you can explain what Treblinka was.
Suchomel: But don't use my name.
Interviewer: No, I promised. All right, you've arrived at Treblinka.
Suchomel: So Stadie, the sarge, showed us the camps from end to end. Just as we went by, they were opening the gas-chamber doors, and people fell out like potatoes. Naturally, that horrified and appalled us. We went back and sat down on our suitcases and cried like old women. Each day one hundred Jews were chosen to drag the corpses to the mass graves. In the evening the Ukrainians drove those Jews into the gas chambers or shot them. Every day!
Ask the deniers why they shrug off the testimony of Franz Suchomel. Greg Raven will tell you that "it is not evidence...bring me some evidence, please." Others will tell you that Suchomel and Münch were crazy, or hallucinating, or fantasizing.
But the fantasy is obviously in the minds of those who choose to ignore the mass of evidence and believe instead in a hypothetical conspiracy, supported by nothing but their imaginations.
That total lack of evidence is why the "conspiracy assumption" almost always remains an unspoken assumption. To our knowledge, there has not been one single solitary "revisionist" paper, article, speech, pamphlet, book, audiotape, videotape, or newsletter which provides any details about this supposed Jewish/Zionist conspiracy which did all the dirty work. Not one.
At best, the denial literature makes veiled references to the World Jewish Congress perpetuating a "hoax" (in Butz 1976) -- no details are provided. Yet the entire case of Holocaust-denial rests on this supposed conspiracy.
As for the testimony of the survivors, which the "revisionists" claim is the only evidence, there are indeed numerous testimonies to gassings and other forms of atrocities, from Jewish inmates who survived the camps, and also from other inmates like POWs. Many of the prisoners that testified about the gassing are not Jewish, of course. Look for instance at the testimony of Polish officer Zenon Rozansky about the first homicidal gassing in Auschwitz, in which 850 Russian POWs were gassed to death, in Reitlinger, The Final Solution, p. 154:
Those who were propped against the door leant with a curious stiffness and then fell right at our feet, striking their faces hard against the concrete floor. Corpses! Corpses standing bolt upright and filling the entire corridor of the bunker, till they were packed so tight that it was impossible for more to fall.
Which of the "revisionists" will deny this? Which of them was there? Which of them has the authority to tell Rozansky what he did or did not see?
The statement that "no 'survivor' claims to have actually witnessed any gassing" is clearly false; this was changed to "few survivors" in later versions, which is close to the truth.
But we do not need to rely solely on testimony, from the survivors, Nazis, or otherwise. Many wartime documents, not postwar descriptions, specifically regarding gassings and other atrocities, were seized by the U.S. armed forces. Most are in the National Archives in Washington, D.C.; some are in Germany.
Regarding the gassing vans, precursors to the gas chambers, we find, for example, a top secret document from SS Untersturmführer Becker to SS Obersturmbannführer Rauff (from Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, 1946, Vol. I, pp. 999-1001):
If it has rained for instance for only one half hour, the van cannot be used because it simply skids away. It can only be used in absolutely dry weather. It is only a question now whether the van can only be used standing at the place of execution. First the van has to be brought to that place, which is possible only in good weather. ...
The application of gas usually is not undertaken correctly. In order to come to an end as fast as possible, the driver presses the accelerator to the fullest extent. By doing that the persons to be executed suffer death from suffocation and not death by dozing off as was planned. My directions now have proved that by correct adjustment of the levers death comes faster and the prisoners fall asleep peacefully.
And Just wrote of the gas vans to Rauff, on June 5, 1942, in a letter marked both "top secret" and "only copy". This is a horrific masterpiece of Nazi double-talk, referring to killing as "processing" and the victims as "subjects" and "the load." (See Kogon, Nazi Mass Murder, 1993, pp. 228-235.)
Since December 1941, for example, 97,000 were processed using three vans, without any faults occurring in the vehicles. ...
The normal capacity of the vans is nine to ten per square meter. The capacity of the larger special Saurer vans is not so great. The problem is not one of overloading but of off-road maneuverability on all terrains, which is severely diminished in this van. It would appear that a reduction in the cargo area is necessary. This can be achieved by shortening the compartment by about one meter. The problem cannot be solved by merely reducing the number of subject treated, as has been done so far. For in this case a longer running time is required, as the empty space also needs to be filled with CO [the poison exhaust gas]. ...