BBC reporting 'survey shows 5% of public either deny it happened or it is grossly exaggerated' !! I can honestly say in my entire life, I have never met anyone who holds that p.o.v. . The survey did only involve 2000 respondents so it is difficult to say whether they are representative of the population as a whole but that is quite a shocking percentage given the overwhelming evidence that it happened. Even if you argue that documents can be forged there is sufficient visual evidence and eye witnesses (no one who can see/hear Richard Dimbleby reporting when 'liberating' a concentration camp can deny it happened).
Before the advent of social media i reckon not one person questioned here would have been a 'denier'. The 5% will be those often seen shouting loudly on twitter/fbook that the twin towers was an inside job and that the earth is flat.
I heard this on the radio too. It is beyond comprehension that today we still have people who either deny or dispute the Holocaust. I had the misfortune to get into a discussion with one such person just before Xmas, who incidentally also believed the flat earth theory.
I’ve been to Terezin camp in the Czech Republic. I’ve been to Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland. I’ve been to Dachau in Germany. It happened alright. At Auschwitz you can literally smell the horror.
Tell em to visit the Holocaust exhibition at the imperial war museum london. (Free) A very haunting and emotional experience.
People have been denying the Holocaust and trying to change the numbers since the camps were liberated. Social media has definitely give more people access to the theories and the space to discuss them. It used to be a handful of disgraced academics and the frighteningly hardcore racists who would even question it. It's a reminder of how people shouldn't ever be treated as 'things' either as population numbers or cheap labour or less human because they aren't the same as you.
I used to have a mate that denied it. He's no longer a mate, for obvious reasons. He also thinks that 9/11 was an inside job, and that the moon landings never happened. He refuses to admit that computer viruses exist, even though I still get spam emails from him telling me how to increase the size of m......you get the picture. I've never asked him about the flat earth principle, and never will.
I have been to Bergen Belsen when we did a gig nearby in the '80s and our guitarist had relative who died there. It was very emotional for him and so for all of us since when you tour with a band you become like family. Whilst Belson was a holding camp not an extermination camp, many thousands died from starvation and dysentery. All the buildings were gone, it was just an empty lifeless place a small memorial and museum. There were mounds everywhere with long low concrete walls stating 'here lie 8,000' here lie '10,000" etc. An army artillery firing range was some distance away and the muffled sound of artillery fire combined with the fact that there was no birdsong or any birds whatsoever flying over the site made it all the more eerie. It was a cold grey damp November. and an experience I will never forget
I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau with the Holocaust memorial trust 12 years ago. The sheer calculated beaurocratic brutality of it makes me sick. Using hair shaved from those arriving and making it into fabric for army uniforms and the attempt to profit from the murder of millions is vile.
I was stationed in soltau just up the road from belsen ( bergan/hohne) and we used to take new sqn members on driver training. I went back a couple of years ago and there's now a big visitors centre and museum and a restaurant ( honest the f***ing irony of a restaurant) and after prob 200 visits it still freaked the beajasus out of me
The Germans tried to sanitise the whole thing, and hide their shame, by levelling these sites. Dachau, which is near Munich, is little more than a museum surrounded by neat houses. You could be forgiven for thinking nothing bad happened there. Terezin/Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, however, are quite different. The Czechs and the Poles, quite rightly, don’t want any of it swept under the carpet of history.
I was in Berlin in the early 1990s, just after the Wall came down and the whole city was still a place of dread and foreboding, except of course for the designer shopping streets like the “Ku’damm”
