The Holocaust was not solely a German phenomenon. Far from it. But it did begin many years before the outbreak of war. It is estimated of the 6 million Jews who perished at the hands of the Nazis, only 180,000 were German. The vast majority of Germany's Jews had been emigrating from persecution since the early 30's, mostly to America. The ones who remained were either in their own form of denial or too poor to leave. It was ethnic cleansing nonetheless, but to most German citizens the Holocaust as it became known of post-war, was out of sight and mind. The Allies were aware of the gas chambers and the arrival and disappearance of thousands of people. But it was only after the liberation of the camps that the scale became apparent. One of the big controversies/dilemmas of the war was the indecision on whether to bomb the death camps and whether to destroy the death machine at the expense of truly innocent people.
Gas chambers were not on the original plans because the gas chambers were the shower blocks. There were simply too many reliable British witnesses.
One thing that's always troubled me about it is The Germans are pretty decent folk now and I'd imagine their mentality wasn't much different 100 years ago. My understand is that Germany was going through a major depression yet there was a perception that Jewish people weren't as badly affected by it due to the nature of their businesses...but surely even in the most desperate circumstances the vast majority of the population surely wouldn't put up with wiping a whole section of the population off the earth, or at least trying to. You'd need hundreds of thousands of people to play ball, ie the armed forces, but surely even if you have the numbers the majority of these are going to rebel against it. If things did happen the way they are told (which to be honest you can guarantee no war or terrorist attack as been told to us as 100% truth) then it must have been that people and soldiers didn't know what was happening, or they were made to fear for their own life if they went against the agenda of Hitler and his cronies. These days, too many people in the so-called "West" or "Westernised Contries" believe that they/we are the good guys when it comes to the current issues in the world like the Middle East and places like North Korea - but are we? When the Russians invaded Afghanistan the Americans and us were massively critical of it, some countries boycotted the Olympics in Moscow and British Athletes competed without the support of the government and were essentially individuals competing under the Olympic Flag...2001, us and the yanks invade for reasons which were much more vague than the Russians and we've been there longer than the Russians were. It all stinks.
I can remember watching the events of that day unfold as if it were yesterday, saw the second plane hit the tower live while the news presenters were saying a "light aircraft" had accidentally hit the North Tower of the WTC...I remembered the bombings there a few years before and never doubted it was anything other than a terrorist attack. A few years later the conspiracy theories started to emerge and I initially dismissed it as attention seeking, but as time went on and the conspiracy theorists started to question more things I started to wonder if they were on to something with some of their arguments but still thought a lot of what they were highlighting wasn't really evidence of a conspiracy. What really got me thinking was building 7 - huge skyscraper but obviously modest in comparison to the twin towers - wasn't hit by anything, yet fell to ground in a neat pile within the building's original footprint. It actually looked like a controlled demolition as well with the roof appearing to tip inwards from both sides before all the building fell just as they do when they drop some old council flats in London. The BBC actually reported that building 7 had "collapsed" about half an hour before it actually did, they also commissioned a documentary to "debunk" the conspiracy theories, however it was highly suspicious that they only focused on trying to explain a lot of things that the conspiracy theorists were convinced by anyway, none of the major discussion points were mentioned and building 7, seen by many as the "smoking gun", wasn't discussed in the documentary at all. It was basically a female narrator with a very condescending tone of voice telling the good people of Britain to stop being so silly and believe everything our government and it's allies tells you!
It makes a nonsense of Whitey's video. Auschwitz was a series of camps and was built primarily as a forced labour camp, it was only later as the Nazi agenda changed following Wannsee that camps were augmented to kill and dispose of bodies on a mass scale.. Treblinka was built for no other purpose than killing innocent people, it was small - no bigger than the Oakwell complex and was a pure factory of death, accounting for 900,000 in just over a year.
[video=youtube;E0YsjVE1Bmg]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0YsjVE1Bmg[/video] Amazing performance from Stanley Tucci as Adolph Eichmann.
To be fair it took a long time for the Allies to accept that a modern,cultured nation,the home of some of the greatest artists,composers and thinkers could possibly be murdering innocent people deliberately and on an industrial scale,I have a book I read about 30 years ago written by a Pole who escaped from Auschwitz,contacted the Allies through the Polish underground and wasn't believed for a very long time.
Its a well known fact in the South of England that Bournemouth won the FACUP in 1912. The game on the north at Bramall Lane was to keep all the Northern Monkeys quiet. The real game went off on the back lawn of Buckingham Palace with a winner from King George himself after a cross from Herbert Asquith (PM). You look in any WH Smiths the other side of Hemel Hemstead and the FA CUP holders were Bournemouth.
For anyone interested: <iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/5xnAWWlf_RE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> I just watched it. It's painfully sobering.
having visited Bergen/belsen on numerous occasions ( I was stationed in Soltau 12kms up the road and all our armour was in hohne) and been around the museum the only thing you can dispute is the numbers and not to forget it wasn't just the jews
In his next trick, this guy goes on to 'prove' how it was impossible for neolithic man to erect Stonehenge and therefore concludes it isn't really there. On the plus side, he's put a hell of a lot of thought in to how you would go about murdering and disposing of millions of people, so if we ever fancy getting all genocidetastic again, we know where to go.
50 mins of Holocaust denial! Think I'd rather not, I've seen such things before - just go to Auschwitz and then try to say it didn't happen. Ask people who lost relatives. Such claims are nothing short of disgraceful. Many of these conspiracy theories are so way out you do wonder why people are more at ease believing that then the more widely held belief. More often than not the most obvious explanation is the correct explanation!
Similarly, my brother in law (American from a Ukrainian father). I was looking through some of his old family photos, and came across one of a man in a German army uniform, it was his grandfather. When the Nazi's went into Ukraine they conscripted many of the local men into the army to fight on the Eastern front.
I don't believe it was an inside job - and the question I always put to any 9/11 conspiracy theorist is "Why?"