The Holocaust: A Warning From History

Sources for the first 39 posts: The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans ( London: Allen Lane, 2003) The Third Reich in Power by Richard J. Evans ( London: Allen Lane, 2005) The Third Reich at War by Richard J. Evans ( London: Allen Lane, 2008) The Hitler Conspiracies by Richard J. Evans ( London: Allen Lane, 2020) Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Rendezvous with Destiny by Frank Freidel (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990) Nuremberg Diary  by G.H. Gilbert (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.: New York, 1947) Never Again: A History of the Holocaust  by Martin Gilbert (Universe Publishing: New York, 2000) The Nazis  by Robert Edwin Herzstein (Time-Life Books Inc., 1980) Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?  By Michael Shermer & Alex Grobman (University of California Press: Berkeley, CA, 2000) FDR by Jean Edward Smith ( New York: Random House, 2007) Adolf Hitler  by John Toland (Random House: New York, 1976) -- And their ...

Raul Hilberg was a Jewish émigré from Nazi-occupied Vienna who helped begin the field of Holocaust studies with his long and minutely detailed 1961 study of the massacre of European Jews. In his landmark work,  The Destruction of the European Jews , Mr. Hilberg said the Holocaust had been the result of a huge bureaucratic machine with thousands of participants, not the fulfillment of a preconceived plan or a single order by Hitler. As uncountable separate instructions were passed on, formally and informally, to a range of actors that included train schedulers and gas chamber architects, responsibility became ever more diluted, he argued, even as the machinery of death churned inexorably ahead. "For these reasons, an administrator, clerk or uniformed guard never referred to himself as a perpetrator," Mr. Hilberg said in an interview with  The Chicago Tribune  in 1992. "He realized, however, that the process of destruction was deliberate, and that once he had stepped into ...

In 1979 the CIA published a report titled  The Holocaust Revisited: A Retrospective Analysis of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination Complex . The two authors, Dino A. Brugioni and Robert G. Poirier, claimed that aerial photographs taken by the Allies prove extermination activities. On February 15, 1979, after the report was published, newspapers proclaimed: "Photos of Auschwitz Extermination Unit Produced" ( New York Times ) "'44 Photos Showed Auschwitz Camp" ( Washington Post ) "'44 Photos Showing Auschwitz Camp Spur Questions on Failure to Bomb It." ( Los Angelas Times ) "The World Knew -- Kept Silent" ( Washington Post ) But according to one Holocaust denier, the aerial photographs, including the negatives, were tampered with, marked, altered, or faked by the CIA. The denier does not accuse Brugioni and Poirier of doctoring the photographs; rather, he argues that they were interpreting already altered photos, marked to show exterminat...

Additional evidence regarding the use of gas chambers comes from the confessions of guards such as  Unterscharfuehrer  (Sergeant) Pery Broad, captured on May 6, 1945, by the British in their zone of occupation in Germany. Broad began work at Auschwitz in 1942 in the "Political Section" and stayed there until the liberation of the camp in January 1945. After his capture, he worked as an interpreter for the British and, in the process, wrote a memoir that was passed on to the British Intelligence Service in July 1945. That December, he declared under oath that what he wrote was true. On September 29, 1947, the document was translated into English and presented at the Nuremberg trials as evidence of the use of gas chambers as mechanisms of mass murder. Later that year Broad was released. In April 1959 Broad was called to testify at a trial of captured Auschwitz SS members and acknowledged the authorship of the memoir, confirmed its validity, and retracted nothing. Deniers try to...

Holocaust deniers do not deny the  existence  of gas chambers and crematoria. Rather, they claim that the gas chambers were used strictly for delousing clothing and blankets and that the crematoria were used to dispose of the bodies of those who died of "natural" causes in the camps. How can we distinguish between gas chambers used for delousing and gas chambers used for mass murder? How can we prove that the bodies disposed of in crematoria were murdered and had not just died of so-called natural causes like disease, starvation, and overwork? To find out, Shermer and Grobman went to the camps at Mauthhausen, Majdanek, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Dachau, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. As they discovered, there is far more to the story than meets the eye through books and film alone. Consider in general how we might prove through a convergence of evidence from various sources that the Nazis used gas chambers and crematoria for mass murder: Written documents  -- orders for Zyklon-...