David Irving

Reekwind wrote: »

I think there is a fundamentally flawed understanding of how historical research operates at work here.

+1. There's a huge gulf between public perception(and often the media) and Historians and historical research. EG a historian would never claim there were gas chambers at Belson, even though a couple of witnesses claimed this, but many people might believe this and it might be disseminated in some media. Big difference.

Since the unimaginable horror of the sordid end of the Third Reich first came to light many wild theories have come up, from flying saucer superweapons, to Hitler escaping Berlin and living out his days in Argentina and the Shoah had a few wild theories of it's own, but it was the historians who shuffled through the data, evidence and documentation to winnow out such stuff and give us a truer picture of what occurred. Historians are not the issue(if one exists).

DEFTLEFTHAND wrote: »

He claimed disease and lack of supplies in the last months of the war led to most deaths

In the case of Belson and a couple of other concentration camps there would be some truth to this D. Germany was crumbling, food was running out and this would have obviously impacted camps more than the general populace. However to extend that to the wider policy and actions towards those marked out as undesirable by the Nazi philosophy would be simplistic at best.

jonniebgood1 wrote:

A historian disproving a lie about the Holocaust does not do anything to change the facts about what happened.

Sorry JB am I missing something here? That makes no sense to me. Historians(not your Irving types) have shed a lot of light on the history of these events and have "debunked" some of the more fanciful stories(people being turned into soap/gas chambers at Belson/Dachau) while shedding light on the wider atrocities of the time that may have gone unrecorded.

Mister Trebus wrote: »

GideonMcGranes post proves my point exactly!

To be fair I'd have to agree with this. G's post was as historically incorrect as it could be, regardless of whether one is debating the actual number involved or not. It massively simplifies a very complex and horrific set of events. It's the Hollywood version of events. It's not even that.

The problem with this particular discussion can be its hot potato vibe. It's a sacred cow for the west, that is bound up in too much emotion at times. This leads, or can lead to hyperbole, or even simple ignorance/mistruths, See above "6 million gassed" as an example. Worse it can lead to a blanket ban on debate about the details.

Personally I think this discussion gets far too bogged down in specific numbers. The basic and plain facts should speak for themselves. The Nazis and their allies from very early on and publicly declared open season on "undesirables" in their societies, chief among them Jews and Bolsheviks, but encompassing the "non Aryan", the disabled, the "antisocial". They cast a wide and repugnant net and many millions were caught up in that net and millions of men women and children never came home because they were destroyed by all means at the Nazis disposal. Anyone who can with a straight face deny that is in my humble and not very academic view a thundering fcukwit.

jonniebgood1 wrote: »

The history of these events does not change because somebody invents a story about soap (to use example given). Thousands of people died at Belsen- this is a fact and is widely recorded and recognised. If a person says (or comes up with a theory) that there was a gas chamber at Belsen and a Historian then disproves this, it does not change the fact that thousands of people died at Belsen. Neither does it uncover any new historical data about Belsen as this data is already well explored. With respect I think that is clear?

Not really JB, though clearer. If part of the narrative about an event is discovered to be hearsay, this changes that part of the narrative. It doesn't change the wider facts, but it does change the facts within it. If historians hadn't come out and said "eh no, that was innaccurate" these "facts" would be believed. That said I note the wikipedia page on Shaul Ladany, still has this down as "fact" with no discussion I can see, so some work yet to be done on getting things right, in the wider world at least.

jonniebgood1 wrote: »

To be fair I believe it was presented as a journalistic account (feel free to quote where it is presented as 'historically important and accurate account'). It should be considered for what it is, a first hand account.

However it's not a first hand account, unless that definition has changed. It's a secondhand account based on some witness testimony.

RW said this back in the thread;

Reekwind wrote: »

Aside from being an excellent writer, Grossman is a good and genuinely reliable source. Any issues from his account stem from the fact that he was a journalist (and journalists, in any country at any time, are not historians) and not that he was Soviet

Incidentally, keep in mind that this was published in 1944 in sources independent of the West and already the gas chambers are being noted and their operation detailed

Passersby reading that might conclude, yep genuinely reliable source, but subsequent historical research has proven it's inaccurate on more than a few scores. Numbers involved are tripled, the chronology of the camp is wildly out(by a whole year) and the operation of the gas chambers is muddled and contradictory, never mind the tearing apart of children by guards and genital biting dogs(the latter is at least physically possible).

Christ lads and lasses I'm really concerned I'm coming across as a gobshíte denialist here and I am most certainly not. I do find it weird that in places clearly dubious source material is apparently accepted with no filter, or critique, even lauded as a reliable source. Like I said earlier if a report on Hiroshima bombing written by someone who wasn't there, listening to a few witnesses, claimed three times the amount of casualties, 5 different bombs and a date out by a year it would be added to the "interesting take, but not good history" pile. No way would it be deemed a reliable source. Put it yet another way, if Grossman's report was the only one in existence it would be quite simply wrong in many aspects of the historical facts we know today.

Mister Trebus wrote: »

You know precisely what was believed about soap and lampshades for years, confronted and challenged by deniers and now accepted as not fact at all.

No, not even close MT. You're again confusing the world of the historians and historical narrative and the wider cultural narrative world. GideonMcGrane's "six million gassed" is an example of the latter. It's incorrect. Not by much to be fair, if he had written "six million murdered" it would be fine. The other stuff, like G's example may have been believed and promulgated in the non historian world, but no historian of any repute bought into it, not after the 60'70's anyway. It was not considered historical fact. From pretty early on too.

These are however examples of publicly believed half arsed theories that deniers always latch onto and claim some sort of historian(or wider, usually Jewish/Israeli/New world order/smurfs conspiracy where none existed in the first place.

Put it another way MT, the denialists harp on about numbers being changed. OK, but is that not a perfect example of good historical research at work? If there was some mad conspiracy going on then numbers would have remained the same. After all the deniers would still be considered odd, or extremists, so no issue there.

People also forget that the Holocaust was largely ignored, brushed aside in the immediate post war years. Germany was vanquished but needed to be born again as good guys, a bulwark against the commies. Anti German feeling in the west was not encouraged. If there was any truth to the denier point of view then you can be damn sure the post war allies would have ran with it. Raul Hilberg who undertook the first real decent historical approach to the subject struggled to get his paper published and this went on for over a year and through various publishers. This was in the 1960's. If any conspiracy existed it was to keep the whole thing quiet, not ramp it up. The Soviets took the opposite approach and kept the anti German feeling going. Now when you consider that both sides of the Iron Curtain pointing nukes at each other at the very height of the cold war agreed over the basic facts of the period, this says a helluva lot.

GideonMcGrane wrote: »

Ok, I'm obviously in over my head and I dont mean to harp on but this is rather confusing.

The figure of 6 million hasn't been altered despite the fact that the Auschwitz 4 million is officially down to 1 million?

Can someone explain to me how this is so?

Back in the 70's I recall a ten million figure overall. It varied quite a bit, except it was accepted it was many millions.

I'm probably way off here, but I think when the Berlin wall came down etc historians had much more access to each other and access to more records and documentation and the sites themselves(and witnesses too). While there were concentration camps throughout Nazi territory(and of their allies), the extermination camps were in the east in areas within the Soviet Bloc. So more solid detail emerged and what had been guesstimates to some degree became much more solid.

Just to add sometimes there is confusion about concentration camps versus extermination camps and often the two are conflated. Very broadly concentration camps were work/punitive camps for various types of prisoners, whereas extermination camps had but one purpose as the name suggests. Of course concentration camps inmates died/were murdered in their droves, starved or were simply worked to death, but it wasn't an automatic death sentence. Many more survived such camps. On the other hand extermination camps were essentially slaughterhouses and had significantly fewer survivors. Some camps were at times depending on the need for labour a mixture of both, Auschwitz for example.

Mister Trebus wrote: »

So let me ask you how many tonnes of soap were made from humans and how many lampshades were made from skin?

And the refutation of these stories had nada to do with deniers. Those stories were being questioned by historians and researchers long before the modern denier demographic came along. IIRC back in the 70's/80's it was an American Jew, an amateur historian who was among the first to question the lampshade story. He had heard these stories from people and went looking for examples(human skin bound books were another item in the meme) and could find none, nor no evidence that satisfied him they ever existed. It was always third hand "oh a friend of an uncle saw them" kind of thing. The human soap story was known to be very dubious by the 1970's.

In the wider public mind however...

Reekwind wrote: »

I stand by the notion that he is a reliable source (ie not a rabid propagandist) but as a journalist.

I just can't get my head around this RK. How can someone(or something) be a reliable source if they get so many things wrong? For a start how can one gauge the veracity of the rest of the source material? Some of it has been subsequently corroborated(not least by a Nazi guard in the place, secretly filmed for the film Shoah).

Again I'll use my Hiroshima analogy. Would you consider it a reliable source if a journalist report got the casualty number wrong by a factor of 3, described 5 different bombs, described US planes strafing the street and got the date wrong by a year and they were in Tokyo at the time? I seriously doubt it.

I don't doubt Grossman himself. He was trying to piece together something unimaginable and got the gist of it, from hearsay and from second hand sources.

Even more impressively so as we can easily forget how unimaginable and fantastic it must have been to hear such stories at that time. Today unless you've lived under a rock you will have been exposed to books, documentaries, films about the subject. Even so it still shocks and as the deniers prove it still sounds almost too fantastical to be true(if the evidence wasn't deep and wide in time and documentation). Imagine putting yourself in the shoes of someone hearing about this for the first time carried in whispers and rumour in the wind of war. Even with anti Nazi propaganda you would be well forgiven for thinking "ah c'mon, pull the other one". Even some heavy duty Nazi's struggled to believe it*. To his credit he didn't.

TL;DR? I'd consider him a source, a good source from the early days on investigation into these crimes, but a reliable one? My jury would still be out on that one. Maybe it's me being a semantics nazi. Better yet RK we'll agree to disagree and put it to bed We can at least agree he was a source and a bloody important one.







*Hanna Reitsch, woman test pilot, only female winner of the iron cross, a very well connected Nazi and an admirer of Hitler to her dying day, didn't believe it when first she heard the whispers. Confronted Himmler about it and he denied it/skirted around the issue. In the end when the evidence of the horror was clear to even the blindest, she considered it a stain on the German people, but blamed it entirely on Himmler and believed her dear Adolf had no knowledge of such a crime.