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Recommended: Holocaust denial
Even in today’s modern society of advanced technologies and research methods, there are still people who believe that history has recounted the horrific genocide of over six million European Jews incorrectly. These deniers are known as Holocaust revisionists. Now, these people do not believe that the Holocaust simply did not happen. Instead, they believe that historians have hyperbolized the death toll and that they have morphed the extermination camps into something that they are not. Some even believe that Hitler has been portrayed wrongly as the villain. They think that Hitler was one of the Jewish peoples’ best friends and was a great aid to them. Also, revisionists have conjured up the outrageous idea that the Jewish people were the real antagonists. Revisionists state that the Jews wanted land in the Middle-east, so they seized the opportunity to scream to the world that they were being oppressed and discriminated against. As a result, they received what is now known as Israel for compensation. Now, the previous examples are only a small percentage of the total number of revisionist ideas of how the Holocaust really played out (Lipstadt). Holocaust revisionists strive to dispel the widely accepted idea of the Jewish genocide during World War Two. However, the plethora of proof which historians have uncovered through war trials, film evidence, and written evidence, makes it blatantly obvious that history has been recounted correctly.
There are four arguments that revisionists have conjured up that are completely illogical and absurd. The first is that the extermination camps used to massacre six million European Jews were not really extermination camps at all. According to revisionists, when the Sov...
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...an extremely difficult concept to grasp. However, history must always be remembered correctly. Otherwise, as Geoffrey Keynes stated, “history will repeat itself”.
Works Cited
Butz, Arthur. “A Brief Introduction to Holocaust Revisionism.” Institute for Historical Review.
1991. Web. 3 April. 2014.
“Combating Holocaust Denial: Evidence of the Holocaust Presented at Nuremberg.”
Holocaust Encyclopedia. 10 Jun. 2013. Web. 3 April. 2014.
Lipstadt, Deborah. “Denying the Holocaust”. BBC. 17 Feb. 2011. Web. 10 April. 2014.
“The Holocaust Never Happened”. Youtube. 13 Jul. 2010. Web. 10 April. 2014.
Revisionism is the re-examination of previously determined historical to determine if they are false, and attempting to change people’s opinions on the facts. While this is possible with some areas of history, such as events that took place before written history, there are some topics that should just be left alone. The Holocaust is one event many have tried to revise but at which none have really succeeded. James Keegstra attempted to teach to his students his version revision on the Holocaust in his school classes and was met with legal repercussions.
The Holocaust or the Ha-Shoah in Hebrew meaning ‘the day of the Holocaust and heroism’ refers to the period of time from approximately January 30,1933, when Adolf Hitler became the legal official of Germany, to May 8,1945. After the war was over in Europe, the Jews in Europe were being forced to endure the horrifying persecution that ultimately led to the slaughter of over 6 million Jews with about 1.5 million of them being children as well as the demolition of 5,000 Jewish communities.
During the Holocaust the mass murder of jews was a worldwide tragedy and when a tragedy happens usually your first question is why? The two groups of devoted researchers for the Holocaust are split into the Intentionalist group and the Functionalist group. As said by Mimi-Cecilia Pascoe in Intentionalism and Functionalism: Explaining the Holocaust “The intentionalist position suffers greatly from a lack of adequate evidence, and consequently cannot prove Hitler’s intentions beyond reasonable doubt. On the other hand, the functionalist position is better able to compensate for the lack of evidence, and thus provides a more solid historical explanation for the Holocaust (Pascoe 1).” The on going argument of whether the Holocaust was intentional or a choice in the moment is the Intentionalist vs. Functionalist case and either side has many different ways of portraying their evidence on the topic; the arguments are both have convincing arguments but in
Holocaust Facts The Holocaust has many reasons for it. Some peoples’ questions are never answered about the Holocaust, and some answers are. The Holocaust killed over 6 million Jews (Byers.p.10.) Over 1.5 million children (Byers, p. 10). They were all sent to concentration camps to do hard labor work.
Anyone who believes that the Holocaust was not a form of genocide is misleading and to prevent it from happening again, people should do research. The Holocaust in fact was one of the largest cases of genocide, but this is the one where nearly 11 million people, not just Jews, were brutally murdered.
The holocaust is a incredibly difficult for some people to discuss with others depending on their extent of connection to the event. It is believed to be the worst genocide known to man by many people. This explains discomfort many people experience when discussing the subject. People debate if the absolutely horrific events of World War II will be forgotten as generations pass. Survivors have many different ways of never forgetting the events that happened to them. Some people feel that it is better to completely wipe these events from memory because they do not want to remember what happened to them, while others want to tell all of society of tragic events hoping to prevent similar events from occurring in the future. Many people debate which method is best to never
The Holocaust is one of best-documented events in history, however, nearly 20 percent of Americans still question if the Holocaust ever happened (Darnell). Holocaust denial is defined as the belief or assertion that the Holocaust did not happen or was greatly exaggerated (Google). The Holocaust was a deliberate plan of termination of groups including Jews, Communists, homosexual people, mentally handicapped and non-Aryans. In the Holocaust, Nazis killed six million Jews and six million non-Jewish people. Many Holocaust deniers claim the victims were never intentionally killed, and died coincidently from typhus, starvation or bombings. Deniers also believe the gas chambers were never used to kill large groups of people. According to biblebilievers.org, a website wrote by the editor of the Institute for Historical Review, the doors and windows in the chambers were not “hermetically sealed”. Without this closure, the gas would have escaped the chambers and killed everyone in the area, including Nazis. Holocaust deniers also believe the facts of the Holocaust were extremely exaggerated. A primary resource of the Holocaust, The Diary of Anne Frank, is considered forged due to the fact that portions of the journal were written in ballpoint pen, which was not used at the time the diary was written (“Hoax”).
Before it can be understood why the claims of these people are so outrageous, the two sides to the issue of the occurrence of the Holocaust must be explained. The majority of people believe that it did occur and use pictures, memoirs, letters, and other primary sources from the time to prove its existence. On the other hand, there is the smaller community of people who claim that there was no Holocaust. These are radical groups and self-described “revisionists. Those denying the event say that concentration camps were built after World War II was over as propaganda, and that the death toll numbers were simply made up. In their opi...
The Holocaust, the mass killing of the Jewish people in Europe, is the largest genocide in history to this date. Over the course of the Holocaust nearly six million Jewish people were killed by the Nazi Party and Germany led by Adolf Hitler. There are multiple contributing factors to the Holocaust that made it so large in scope. Historians argue which of these factors were most significant. The most significant contributing factor is the source of the Holocaust, the reason it occurred. This source is Adolf Hitler and his hatred for Jewish people. In comparison to the choices of the Allies to not accept Jewish refugees and to not take direct military action to end the Holocaust, the most significant contributing factor of the Holocaust is that Adolf Hitler was able to easily rise to power with the support of the German people and rule Germany.
When I signed up for this course, I had limited knowledge of the holocaust and was not very interested in its history. This course ended up being one of my favorites and the most informational courses that I have taken. Other Political leaders such as Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin had committed mass murders that caused a much higher victim rate than Hitler, so my thoughts were that the holocaust was just another tragedy in human history. This class has given me a different perspective in the way I view the holocaust. It has personalized this horrific event in that it begs a person ask themselves how could this tragedy take place? How come the Jews and the world did not do more to prevent it from happening? The course has spiked my interested in the the holocaust in that I have found that if I come across a holocaust program while watching the television, I will stop to watch that show or read a holocaust article that I would not have read in the past. The four books assigned for reading by Browning, Sierakowiak, Lengyel, and Rajchman expounded on the personalization of the holocaust by giving insight into the experiences of
After Adolf Hitler killed himself and the whole regime fell, the Allie powers charged war crimes on the individuals in power. By doing so many military officers were killed, people who were one guards were put in the very cells they put Jews, and anyone who had political power that didn’t escape prosecution was most often found guilty. This has prompt people who were deeply affected by these events to try and cover the truth. Even though there are signed documents of statements people have made stating that the events of the holocaust took place; people have still worked their way to try and deny the actions and the events of the holocaust. In some cases, this stems from people having some sort of gain if they can “prove” nothing happened and by rewriting history they, can have an excuse for doing/ getting the results wanted. Part of the reason the grudge is still held is from the notion “I hurt you, you hurt be; now I’m mad”. Maybe a more understanding approach should have taken place. However, it’s safe to say that because of the differences with both events, the prosecution of individuals involved with mass genocide is
Many historical events took place in the 20th century that will be remembered forever, but the one occurrence that everyone knows of and will forever be remembered was World War Two. World War Two, the greatest tragedy that has ever happened on the face of the earth, the genocide of Jewish people, a complete nightmare. When people think of WW2, many of the time the image of “those poor Jewish people” comes to mind. Many ask themselves how this could have happened. It just doesn’t make sense to them. Did people around the world at the time of WW2 have these kinds of deliberations? If they did have this kind of reflection then how did six million people perish? During the time leading up to the outbreak of World War II, the Western Press consistently carried numerous reports of the German's anti-Jewish policies and their purposeful victimization of the Jews living in Nazi Germany as well as the annexed territories. The general public cannot claim that they did not know what was going on, that they were uninformed. Whether or not they chose to believe it however, is a completely different story. The public were indeed outraged in many of the cases but the governments of the major European democracies felt that it was not for them to intervene for they felt that the Jewish problem classified as an internal affair within a sovereign state. The attempt to discover what exactly the people around the world did to save the Jewish race is not going to be an easy task but it is going to be a worthwhile one which should uncover a lot of unknown facts to many people.
Gottfried, Ted, and Stephen Alcorn. Deniers of the Holocaust: Who They Are, What They Do, Why They Do It. Brookfield, CT: Twenty-First Century, 2001. Print.
- It is important to remind people of history because it teaches them about previous happenings. It shows that for every action there is a consecuence, therefore every action or decision you make will have an effect that will impact your life and the life of the people around you. It also gives you an insight of what happened years ago so that in the near future, we are prepared well enough to make the right decisions in order to avoid reliving similar or previous events.
“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it” is a famous quote by George Santayana. Although the r...