Annnd it only took 13 pages for yet another thread about the Holocaust to turn in to a mildly amusing clusterfuck by and large not worth reading due to a couple people staunchly in the denial/revisionist camp. Bravo.
Here's the thing about threads like this. The people who accept the common narrative about the topic at face value are little better than the ones who outright deny it happening.
The topic is completely politically fraught, and I honestly think it should be approached with a healthy dose of
skepticism, but never outright denial. There is a world's difference in simply wanting to see proof of alleged crimes on a level so broad, heinous and inhumane as what is generally seen as "conventional wisdom" surrounding this event. Not only because it's fraught politically, but also because it's simple in the extreme to twist it emotionally to the point it becomes a cudgel used to beat at people who raise inconvenient questions from the top of a moralistic pedestal figuratively composed of the bones and ashes of the murdered.
I have been studying the events of the Holocaust off and on since 1992, which makes me no great scholar of it or any sort of authority on the topic. However, I can probably put a few misconceptions that keep getting raised here to rest for a while until people gloss over or skip this post when the thread drags on to 30+ pages of pointless arguing and recriminations, since that's the constant trajectory of any online thread about the Holocaust.
Firstly, there is a huge misconception of what the central Auschwitz complex actually was, and many people conflate the first camp, (usually known as Auschwitz I, which was a repurposed WWI Polish military base) a designated work camp/holding center/administrative center, with Auschwitz II on the site of a former small town a few kilometers away. This was Birkenau, infamously known for it's large entry gate for trains. If you wound up in Auschwitz I, you could be at least somewhat confident that the Nazis weren't ready to kill you immediately. If you wound up in Birkenau, you basically had no hope. Birkenau was the main extermination camp in central Poland, and where the alleged 4 gas chambers that were reported to murder so many are located. I forget who exactly said it in this thread, but someone said that the SS would have not wanted to remove the bodies of the gassed to the crematoria. This is correct, the gas chamber/cremo building were staffed by mostly J.ewish workers known as the sonderkommando. They were fed a bit better than others, but every few months they were supposedly killed themselves to silence them.
In mid to late 1944 is when Birkenau went into overdrive according to survivor testimony with the occupation of Hungary. Many J.ews of means had fled there when shit went south for them post Kristallnacht, and it was not really a bad idea at that point in time. But once it was occupied, the nazis now had not only those who fled there, but also a fairly sizable native J.ewish Hungarian population to deal with as well, and by that time the Reinhard camps were erased, plowed over, and turned into farms staffed by resettled Ukranians. During this period, the iconic numbered tatoos were not given out to any but people who were supposed to stick around for a time. This time period is also when the largest number of inconvenient questions can be raised, since corroboration of claims during this period is almost impossible, and if you dig a bit online, you will not find written evidence of much of anything from the nazis, although you may turn up documents that refer to the documents that could possibly corroborate claims, outlandish or as credible as anything else from this period, as being destroyed. This, to me at least, is completely believable, while the nazis were obsessed with efficiency to an almost collectively autistic degree in recording everything, there's plenty of evidence pointing to them being just as ruthlessly efficient in covering their asses, as well.
There was also a 3rd major subcamp in the complex, known as Monowitz or "buna" that was a slave labor late war synthetic rubber factory owned almost wholly by I.G. Farben. As far as other subcamps administered from Aushwitz I there was a whole damn constellation of them all across occupied Europe. One of those is likely what
@Ihavetinyweewee's grandfather helped liberate. They were mostly small concentration camps or transit camps, but some were midsized as far as nazi camps went.
Secondly, the allies were aware of what went on at the Auschwitz complex once they had air superiority and could take aerial photos to corroborate the horrible and fantastical claims brought by survivors, and in a handful of cases, deliberate infiltrators. I'm not sure if it's true or not, but I have heard of one supposed agent who's name escapes me who not only once, but twice got captured on purpose to be sent to Auschwitz I to be able to report on the then current conditions there. Ultimately, nothing much was ever done with that gathered intel because not only was the complex out of the way, by the time they had the ability to do anything militarily, the writing was basically on the wall for the nazis, and bombing the tracks leading to the camp to stop the dwindling number of prisoner transport trains would have greatly exacerbated the misery going on in both camps. Bombing the 2 major camps themselves was never really an option, as you would just be doing the nazi's work for them in turning the prisoners into kibble and craters. They did bomb Monowitz, however. It wasn't highly effective, everything I've read about that mentions the factory still being operational (but under new management) in a semi-reduced capacity at the time of surrender. I'm not 100% on that one though, so don't quote me on that.
Thirdly, and this is what people miss the most, is the hugely secretive nature of not only the alleged gassing ops at Birkenau, but also the T4 program, and the Aktion Reinhard camps. These were all in the formerly Soviet administered eastern partition of Poland, and were used not only as killing centers (especially in the case of Belzec, thought to be responsible for the systematic murder of around 1 million people, mostly from the Lvov ghetto and surrounding areas), but also as testbeds for streamlining the gruesome process. Chelmno was the first real known camp where gassing was tried, with vans (which could have been based on the soviet ideas mentioned upthread, but could also have been completely indigenous), but they were messy, inefficient, and at that point in time, not much more than an awful curiosity when a simple bullet would kill your intended victim quicker with less mess. Belzec supposedly used a Maybach tank engine that was prone to malfunction and failure, but documents regarding that particular camp are very scarce, and anything "new" that surfaces about it should be taken with a few bags of salt. The rest of the Reinhard camps have somewhat more documentation, especially Treblinka and Majdanek, but when it comes to anything regarding actual numbers, this is by far the easiest time frame to manufacture them to attempt to prove a narrative, one way or the other.
Do not be credulous about the Reinhard camps. They did exist, they did kill many, but the numbers will likely be impossible to prove beyond reasonable doubt for the rest of time.
Lastly, to wrap this TL;DR post up, is something that may get me some flak, and that is
why the holocaust happened, it's underlying motivations, and why it remains such a controversial topic all these years later. We can't bring back those who were allegedly murdered by a historical political regime born from the ashes, mismanagement, and despair caused by the effects of the First world war and the treaty of Versailles any more than we can resurrect those unjustly murdered for any other genocide in our bloody history, so what makes the holocaust such an ironically immortal topic of debate and contention? Is it the brutal efficiency, the soulless apparent automation of the process put forth by the prevailing horrific narrative? Is it the perceived dishonesty of a particular ethnic group known for their religious based arrogance and invention of, and subsequent overuse of, usury leading to centuries of distrust, expulsions and pogroms across Europe far before them being subjected to an industrialized eradication attempt?
Or is it so simple a matter as the nazis being so arrogant themselves that, in their hubris, they stretched themselves so thin that they literally had no choice but to exterminate a group they already had no love for when the worm turned on them in the Soviet winter?
I personally believe that after Barbarossa and the assassination of Heydrich, it was simply the perfect storm of latent European anti-semitism (which is a term I dislike using, as it refers to nearly all Levantine ethnicities, not only the 12 tribes) combined with a burning desire for revenge on the part of the nazis. This is by far not an attempted defense of the nazi regime, but I refuse to be anything but skeptical of some of the claims made at the Nuremberg trials and over time, which is on it's own a lens that distorts.
To repeat,
skepticism should be encouraged, denial should be vilified, but not subject to punishment. Anti-J.ewish sentiments and thought will not go away simply because you toss the "wrongthinkers" in jail for being offensive and inconvenient. That just tends to cement their convictions.
Textwall over, thank you for reading if you manged to get through all that.
