*EVIDENCE FOR HOLOCAUST, HERE IS ALL THE EVIDENCE FOR THE HOLOCAUST, ALL OF THIS COMES FROM ACTUAL FACTS*:
“I made the visit [to the Gotha concentration camp] deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to "propaganda."”
—General Dwight D. Eisenhower
Deniers might use the one single proof gambit to confuse the opponent, and request very specific evidence, such as
a written order by Hitler to exterminate the Jews
an autopsy record concluding that a Jewish prisoner died from gassing
or some other remnants. However, though the Nazi government tried massively to hide evidence for mass murder by tearing down buildings and burning documents, plenty of the remains have survived.
A refutation: such an event as the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, apparently connected to gangster Al Capone, has never been linked to any written order. Capone typically gave spoken orders, and Hitler could have given a verbal order without putting it in writing. Also, the Nazis typically did not perform autopsies on deceased persons who had been gassed.
Nazi documents, speeches etc.
This is just a sample of the wealth of documentary evidence from the Nazi government itself.
(Caveat: Holocaust deniers reason that, since the Holocaust did not happen, any evidence to the contrary is a forgery created by the Jews as part of their International Jewish Conspiracy™.)
“They claim that forgers created these and other documents — complete with complex internal reference markings, on typewriters that perfectly matched those used by the various German units said to have written the documents — and then planted thousands of these perfect forgeries in numerous different archival collections (in exactly the right file and in precisely the right sequence) all over Europe. Not only is such a scenario fantastically improbable, it fails to explain why these supposedly incredibly talented forgers did not succeed in producing the one piece of paper that deniers demand as 'proof' that genocide took place under the Third Reich — an order from Hitler authorising the destruction of the Jews.”
—Deborah Lipstadt
Indeed, a few counterfeit Nazi documents — notably The Hitler Diaries — have been exposed since the war. However, several of the documents mentioned here have been authenticated by forensics, or are accepted as genuine by Holocaust deniers such as David Irving.
In 1922, Hitler told a journalist that:
“Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews. As soon as I have the power to do so, I will have gallows built in rows — at the Marienplatz in Munich, for example — as many as traffic allows. Then the Jews will be hanged indiscriminately, and they will remain hanging until they stink; they will hang there as long as the principles of hygiene permit. As soon as they have been untied, the next batch will be strung up, and so on down the line, until the last Jew in Munich has been exterminated. Other cities will follow suit, precisely in this fashion, until all Germany has been completely cleansed of Jews.”
— Adolf Hitler, 1922.
(Caveat #2: While some serious historians see this as evidence that Hitler had planned the Holocaust long before coming to power, other serious historians don't believe that any plan for the Holocaust existed so early, and see Hitler's words as simply an expression of his virulent antisemitism rather than a sign that he had any concrete plans at that date.)
In a speech to the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, he made his intentions clear with this quote, which was even used in the 1940 Nazi propaganda film "Der ewige Jude" (The Eternal Jew):
“…if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevizing of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe![93][94]
Note that this is one of the best examples of how whacked-out Hitler had become, as he was conflating international capitalism and Soviet Bolshevism as the exact same thing.”
Hitler also gave The Obersalzberg Speech in August 1939, a week before the invasion of Poland, and expressed intentions of mass murdering the Polish population.
On 18 December 1941, Himmler asked Hitler, "What to do with the Jews of Russia?", to which Hitler replied, "als Partisanen auszurotten" ("exterminate them as partisans"). This remark is probably as close as historians will ever get to a definitive order from Hitler for the Holocaust.
MEIN KAMPF:
“If at the beginning of the war and during the war twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the nation had been subjected to poison gas, such as had to be endured in the field by hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers of all classes and professions, then the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain.”
—Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
Many historians, including Ian Kershaw (one of the world's leading experts on both Hitler and Nazi Germany), have pointed out that several passages in Mein Kampf are of an undeniably genocidal nature. Among these passages, Hitler also overtly suggested that:
“The nationalization of our masses will succeed only when, aside from all the positive struggle for the soul of our people, their international poisoners are exterminated.”
—Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
The suggestion that a future genocide was intended from day one by Hitler is also corroborated by excerpts from the first edition of Mein Kampf, in which Hitler emphasizes that the literal destruction of the "weak and sick" (terms meant by him to encapsulate his enemies, and not to objectively describe fragility) is, quote, "far more humane than their protection." while also having the intrinsic purpose of providing what he saw as the proper space and purity for the "strong".
GOBBELS’ DIARIES:
German Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels' extensive diary notes contain several references to the ongoing mass murder of the Jews. Example:
“The intellectual does not have the natural means of resisting the Jewish peril because his instincts have been badly blunted. Because of this fact the nations with a high standard of civilization are exposed to this peril first and foremost. In nature life always takes measures against parasites; in the life of nations that is not always the case. From this fact the Jewish peril actually stems. There is therefore no other recourse left for modern nations except to exterminate the Jew…"[102]
Considering David Irving had access to the entirety of Goebbels's diaries, using them as the basis for a book, he presumably accepts these accounts as true.”
JAGER REPORT:
Page 6 of the Jäger report
The Einsatzgruppen were four special task units (A, B, C, D) under the direction of Heinrich Himmler. Their stated task was securing the territories following the German advance into the Soviet Union, but their actual primary task was "the annihilation of Jews, Gypsies, communist officials and other who were considered enemies of the Nazi regime."
Karl Jäger (1889–1959) was the leader of the Einsatzkommando subunit number 3 within Einsatzgruppe A. A report written in December 1941 by SS commander Jäger describing the killing of 137,346 people (mostly Jews) in the Baltic states. The literal descriptions in this document are unusual to the Nazis, who typically used euphemisms for mass killings (see below).
The report itself is 6 pages of dates, locations, and numbers. It begins:
Complete list of executions carried out in the EK 3 area up to 1 December 1941[.]
Security police duties in Lithuania taken over by Einsatzkommando 3 on 2 July 1941.
(The Wilna [Vilnius] area was taken over by EK 3 on 9 Aug. 1941, the Schaulen area on 2 Oct. 1941. Up until these dates EK 9 operated in Wilna and EK 2 in Schaulen.)
On my instructions and orders the following executions were conducted by Lithuanian partisans:
[....]
Following the formation of a raiding squad under the command of SS-Obersturmführer Hamman and 8-10 reliable men from the Einsatzkommando, the following actions were conducted in cooperation with Lithuanian partisans:
Not everyone killed was a Jew -- but the vast majority were. For example, from 22.8.41 to 29.8.41, those killed included:
In Algona: "Mentally sick: 269 men, 227 women, 48 children"
In Panevezys: "1,312 Jews, 4,602 Jewesses, 1,609 Jewish children"
In Kreis Rasainiai: "466 Jews, 440 Jewesses, 1,020 Jewish children"
In Obeliai: "112 Jews, 627 Jewesses, 421 Jewish children"
In Seduva: "230 Jews, 275 Jewesses, 159 Jewish children"
In Zarasai: "767 Jews, 1,113 Jewesses, 1 Lith[uanian] Comm[unist], 687 Jewish children, 1 Russ[ian] Comm[unist] (f[emale])"
In Pasvalys: "402 Jews, 738 Jewesses, 209 Jewish children"
In Kaisiadorys: "All Jews, Jewesses, and Jewish children" [1,911 people]
In Prienai: "All Jews, Jewesses, and Jewish Children" [1,078 people]
In Dagda and Kraslawa: "212 Jews, 4 Russ[ian] POW's"
In Joniskia: "47 Jews, 165 Jewesses, 143 Jewish children"
In Wilkia: "76 Jews, 192 Jewesses, 134 Jewish children"
In Kedainiai: "710 Jews, 767 Jewesses, 599 Jewish children"
In Rumsiskis and Ziezmariai: "20 Jews, 567 Jewesses, 197 Jewish children"
In Utena and Moletai: "582 Jews, 1,731 Jewesses, 1,469 Jewish children"
Jäger concludes:
Today I can confirm that our objective, to solve the Jewish problem for Lithuania, has been achieved by EK 3. In Lithuania there are no more Jews, apart from Jewish workers and their families.
The distance between from the assembly point to the graves was on average 4 to 5 Km.
I consider the Jewish action more or less terminated as far as Einsatzkommando 3 is concerned. Those working Jews and Jewesses still available are needed urgently and I can envisage that after the winter this workforce will be required even more urgently. I am of the view that the sterilization program of the male worker Jews should be started immediately so that reproduction is prevented. If despite sterilization a Jewess becomes pregnant she will be liquidated.
The Jäger report is the most important of the Einsatzgruppen reports because of its meticulous detail. The Jäger report was not discovered until after the Nuremberg trials, but other such reports served as evidence at the Einsatzkommando trial at Nuremberg. The Einsatzgruppen together with their collaborators killed more than 1 million people, mainly Jews.
WANNSE CONFERENCE:
A March 1942 letter from Reinhard Heydrich, following up on the Wannsee Protocol regarding the Endlösung der Judenfrage (Final Solution of the Jewish Question)
A conference on 20 January 1942, documented by the Wannsee Protocol (Protokoll is the German word for "minutes"). As with most official Nazi records, the protocol uses euphemisms instead of literal orders to kill all Jews. However, Adolf Eichmann provided demographic data estimating the Jewish population in Europe to be around 11 million, consistent with the scholarship:
“Under proper guidance, in the course of the final solution the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labor in the East. Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex, will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes. The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as a the seed of a new Jewish revival (see the experience of history.)
The minutes of the conference were the basis for two films: the 1984 West German made-for-TV film Die Wannseekonferenz (The Wannsee Conference),[108] and the 2001 HBO/BBC co-production Conspiracy.”
HIMMLER’S 1942 REPORT:
The 29 December 1942 report from Himmler to Hitler
On 29 December 1942, Himmler presented Hitler with the Meldung an den Führer über Bandenbekämpfung ("Report to the Führer on fighting against gangs") Nr. 51. This report, which covered the period from August to November 1942, and which referred only to a part of the occupied Soviet area (southern Russia, Ukraine and the district of Bialystok); included the following numbers concerning persons imprisoned or executed:
1. Bandits
a) Established number of deaths after combat 1,337
b) Prisoners executed immediately 737
c) Prisoners executed after lengthy thorough interrogation 7,828
2. Gang helpers and suspects
a) Arrested 16,553
b) Executed 14,257
c) Jews executed 363,211[110]
This is one of the few Nazi records that explicitly mentioned the killing of Jews, without euphemisms.
HIMMLER’S SPEECH IN POSEN:
In 1943, Heinrich Himmler, leader of the SS, spoke openly about the extermination of the Jewish people, as well as the equivocation used to cover it up, during a speech to SS Officers in the Posen (Polish: Poznań) town hall. An audio recording, as well as a transcription of the original German, is available.
“I also want to mention a very difficult subject before you here, completely openly.
It should be discussed amongst us, and yet, nevertheless, we will never speak about it in public.
I am talking about the "Jewish evacuation": the extermination of the Jewish people.
And none of them has seen it, has endured it. Most of you will know what it means when 100 bodies lie together, when there are 500, or when there are 1000. And to have seen this through, and — with the exception of human weaknesses -- to have remained decent, has made us hard and is a page of glory never mentioned and never to be mentioned.
Because we know how difficult things would be, if today in every city during the bomb attacks, the burdens of war and the privations, we still had Jews as secret saboteurs, agitators and instigators. We would probably be at the same stage as 1916-17.”
2 days later, Himmler said:
“We came to the question: what to with the women and children? I decided to find a clear solution here as well. I did not consider myself justified to exterminate the men — that is, to kill them or have them killed — and allow the avengers of our sons and grandsons in the form of their children to grow up. The difficult decision had to be taken to make this people disappear from the earth. For the organisation which had to execute this task, it was the most difficult which we had ever had. But it was accomplished, and without — I believe I can say — our men and their leaders suffering any mental or spiritual damage.”
ODILO GLOBOCNIK REPORTS:
The Odilo Globocnik (1904–1945) reports describe Aktion Reinhard, with special mention of confiscated immobile and mobile property.
KORHERR REPORT:
Written in March 1943, by Dr. Richard Korherr (1903–1989) of the SS. Describes that 2.5 million European Jews have been "evacuated" to "special treatment" (German: Evakuierung, Sonderbehandlung), and estimates that European Jewish population had declined by 1.5 million by emigration, uprisings and harsh living conditions in ghettos and camps, totalling a decline of 4 million European Jews (out of more than 10 million).[115]
HOFLE TELEGRAM:
The Höfle Telegram is in two parts and was sent on January 11, 1943 by SS Sturmbannführer Hermann Höfle. The first part was sent to Adolf Eichmann, and the second part to SS Obersturmbannführer Franz Heim. The document was discovered in England in 2000 among declassified World War II documents. It was originally decrypted from an intercepted Enigma Machine transmission, though its significance was not understood during the war. The telegram confirms the Korherr Report that 1,274,166 Jews were subject to Sonderbehandlung (special treatment) under Operation Reinhard by the end of 1942.
Other wartime documents
There is an abundance of documents from the concentration camps by guards and leaders describing the details of the death camps and even "death vans".
KURT GERSTEIN:
SS officer Kurt Gerstein (1905–1945) witnessed mass murders in Bełżec and Treblinka during 1942 and told foreigners, among them Swedish diplomat Göran von Otter, and officials of the Vatican, about what he had seen. He wrote a report in 1945. Gerstein's stories are unreliable but are significant as an early testimony from the Holocaust.
"Sonderbehandlung" and other euphemisms
As mentioned before, mass executions were rarely described literally (the Jäger Report being a notable exception). The Nazi documents used euphemisms instead; more than twenty different euphemisms were in frequent use, such as Umsiedlung (resettlement) and Endlösung (Final Solution).
Perhaps the most infamous one was Sonderbehandlung ("Special treatment"). Holocaust deniers might claim that Sonderbehandlung meant delousing and disinfection (e.g., denier Carlo Mattogno),[118] introduced in the Nazi camps in Poland.
However, Sonderbehandlung was an established term for killing, confirmed by police documents from 1939, and reports from Action T4, a program for killing people with disabilities. Adolf Eichmann testified that Sonderbehandlung meant "killing."[119]
TESTIMONIES:
A sketch from the 40-page 1944 Vrba-Wetzler report, written by two escapees from Auschwitz, Rudolf Vrba and Alfréd Wetzler
The truth of the Holocaust has been supported by many thousands of oral and written testimonies by several groups, including but not limited to (a few references are given to provide a general picture):
Concentration camp prisoners (including but not limited to Jews, Poles, Roma and Sinti, homosexuals, and political opponents). Sonderkommandos (prisoners recruited for corpse disposal) witnessed the extermination campaign directly.
Auschwitz guards.
Railroad crews, civil servants, commanders and other off-site soldiers and civilians.
Allied soldiers from various countries.
Humanitarian expeditions from various countries.
Secret wiretaps were made of German prisoners of war, where they freely discussed the war, including extermination of Jews. These recordings were transcribed and edited by Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer in the book Soldaten: Protokolle vom Kämpfen, Töten und Sterben.
Soldiers and Nazi officials
This section is limited to soldiers, SS men and other members of the German armed forces, who testified about the Holocaust before the German surrender in 1945.
GUNNAR EKLOF (1922–1991): a Swedish Waffen-SS volunteer in the Nordland Division. The 2014 book Hitlers svenska SS-soldater ("Hitler's Swedish SS Soldiers") by Bosse Schön describes his career extensively. During his 1943 furlough back home in Sweden, he bragged about murdering Jews on the Eastern front. His scandalous behaviour and his stories from the mass murders were noticed by the press and the police (which is confirmed by archives); however, he never faced investigation or trial.
GOSTA BORG (1915–2000): a Swedish SS volunteer and Kriegsberichter (war correspondent) who reported from the Eastern Front; including summary executions of Communists and Jews. During the war, he shared his observations with the Swedish Legation in Berlin.
MAX TAUBNER: an SS-Untersturmführer with the 1st SS Infantry Brigade. In May 1943, he and four other SS men were prosecuted for having participated in unauthorized and sadistic killings of Jews on the Eastern Front in a manner "unworthy of a German man" (i.e. showing a lack of discipline in his violence), and for threatening the security of the Reich by showing photos of the killings to his family and friends. In its judgement against him the court stated that Täubner "should have recognised that the extermination of the Jews was the duty of the Kommandos which were set up especially for this purpose", a clear admission that the Einsatzgruppen were committing genocidal actions against the Jews.
WALTER MATTNER: an Austrian police official who served in the SS and Police Division for Mogilev from 1941-42. In letters to his wife he described in detail participating in the massacre of hundreds of Jews in Mogilev and gloated that it would soon be "the turn of our local Jews".
PRISONERS, SONDERKOMMANDOS, and KAPOS:
The guards intentionally tried to keep the extermination campaign secret from prisoners. Those who arrived at the eastern camps were either killed on arrival, or kept at a labour section, separate from the gas chambers.
Sonderkommandos were the only prisoners allowed to see anything of the mass murders. Still, Sonderkommandos were regularly killed and replaced by new prisoners, so very few of them survived the war.
DIARY OF ANNE FRANK:
The Diary of Anne Frank is one of many written testimonies from Holocaust victims. Deniers such as Robert Faurisson have claimed that the text was forged, but the Dutch government has conducted a forensic investigation confirming the book's authenticity.[137] The Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam has issued a press release entitled Ten questions on the authenticity of the diary of Anne Frank, refuting many of the claims against the diary. One of the most common arguments against the diary's legitimacy is the claim that it was written using a ballpoint pen, which wasn't commonly used in the Netherlands at the time the diary was written. However, this claim is simply false; analysis shows that ballpoint pen was only used to write a couple of looseleaf pages of annotations that were added years later.
The diary, the one that was originally published, was indeed edited; this was because it was the private diary of a girl going through puberty, and records things ranging from masturbation and homosexuality to various arguments amongst family members. Obviously, her father Otto Frank didn't want all of his daughter's (and family's) personal moments open to the public. This provides avenues of attacks from two different sets of crazies. The first, the aforementioned deniers who will latch on to any alteration being "proof" of a coverup, and when the unedited version became published, the moral guardians who didn't want kids learning about the little man in the boat.
Claims to dissenting testimonies
Holocaust deniers have made some really lame efforts to find a "second opinion".
PAUL RASSINIER (1906–67): a French journalist, called "the father of Holocaust revisionism." Rassinier participated in the French Resistance and was therefore imprisoned at Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora. He claimed that the Nazi government had no plan for extermination of Jews and that the death toll was not more than roughly a million.
RICHARD BAER (1911–1963):the commander of Auschwitz I. After the war, he lived undercover in Hamburg, until he was seized in 1960 following the arrest of Adolf Eichmann. He refused to testify and died in detention in 1963. Deniers might claim that the government killed Baer behind locked doors because he supposedly told interrogators that there were no gas chambers in Auschwitz.[141] This is, of course, a hypothesis without support and does not in any way qualify Baer as a dissenting witness. If Baer had something to tell the world, why didn't he make use of his 15 years as a fugitive? And anyway, Baer in fact told his interrogators that there were no gas chambers in Auschwitz I, which historians have never claimed, and went on to clarify that there were gas chambers in Auschwitz II-Birkenau.
RED CROSS REPORTS: The Red Cross famously visited Theresienstadt in the present-day Czech Republic, and reported relatively good conditions among the inmates. After the war, they could show that the Nazis had deceived the observers. Among the false evidence given to the Red Cross was the Nazi-staged propaganda film Theresienstadt: Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet (Terezin: A Documentary Film from the Jewish Settlement Area), also known as Der Führer Schenkt Den Juden Eine Stadt (The Führer Gives the Jews a City), supposedly showing the humane environment the Jews lived in.[144][145] Deniers such as the Institute for Historical Review have also pointed to a 1944 Red Cross report on the conditions at Auschwitz which states that rumours of gas chambers could not be verified, which ignores the fact that the Red Cross delegates were not permitted to enter the part of the camp where the gassing facilities were housed.
JOSEF KRAMER (1906–1945): the commander of the Bergen-Belsen and Natzweiler-Struthof camps and sub-commander of Auschwitz, executed for war crimes after the Belsen trial of 1945. While under interrogation before his trial, Kramer initially denied that Auschwitz was an extermination camp or that he had witnessed any prisoners being mistreated. Arthur Butz argues in The Hoax of the Twentieth Century—The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry that this is proof that Auschwitz was not an extermination camp, which ignores not only all the evidence to the contrary but also the obvious fact that Kramer did not want to admit to crimes that would result in his execution. Butz also acknowledges that Kramer later admitted Auschwitz was an extermination camp once it became obvious no-one would believe him but speculates that he was lying to save himself by distancing himself from the murders, for which he provides no evidence.
OTTO ERNST REMER (1912–1997): a Wehrmacht General who fought in the Soviet Union during the war. After the war he became a leading figure in Holocaust denial and the Clean Wehrmacht myth, claiming that no major war crimes were committed by the Germans during the invasion of the Soviet Union. One of his main claims was that there was no widespread antisemitism in Germany and the murders of Jews in Poland and the Soviet Union were the result of pogroms by the locals due to war crimes perpetrated by the Soviet commissars, who he claimed were mostly Jews.There is no credible evidence to support this claim, which it should be kept in mind came from a former Wehrmacht general who would have a vested interest in sanitizing the German war effort he participated in.
DR. CHARLES LARSON: an American forensic pathologist who performed hundreds of autopsies on victims in around 20 Nazi concentration camps. Deniers have often quoted Larson as stating that none of his autopsies uncovered a person who had been killed by poison gas. However, this is a misquote: in the interview cited he stated that "only a few" of the bodies he examined were killed through gassing, which makes sense as he was referring to inmates from Dachau where only a few experimental gassings took place. Furthermore, the vast majority of the gassings took place at the extermination camps in the East, where the victims bodies were cremated after they were killed, thus preventing an autopsy from being performed.
EMIL LACHOUT (1928–2018): an Austrian civil servant who "discovered" a document from Allied Command in 1987 which stated that an Allied investigation had proved that there were no murders by poison gas in German concentration camps and all statements to the contrary were obtained through coercion. The document was quickly proven to be a clumsy fake (among other things, it referred to Allied organizations which did not exist and was written in German despite supposedly being by the Allies)[150], which has not stopped Holocaust denial websites from citing it as fact.
THIES CHRISTOPHERSEN (1918–1987): Christophersen had lived near Auschwitz and claimed that there were no gas chambers or shootings of inmates there, or else he would have noticed. Even members of the Holocaust denying Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust have criticized Christophersen's claims, pointing out that they relied almost entirely on what he was told by Auschwitz staff and included ridiculous statements such as claiming that Auschwitz had no crematoria, which is disproved by photos taken of the camp from above while Christophersen was there. In the Holocaust documentary Wahrheit Macht Frei Christophersen was caught on camera admitting that he had lied about what he saw in Auschwitz. Additionally, like the aforementioned Remer, Christopherson was a neo-Nazi activist seeking to rehabilitate and sanitize the ideology he believed in.
WILHELM STAGLICH (1916–2006): a German financial judge and far-right activist who had previously worked as an orderly officer stationed near Auschwitz, giving him unlimited access to the camp. He claimed that he had visited Auschwitz multiple times and had seen that there were no gas chambers. However, his unfamiliarity with the basic layout indicates that he never visited Birkenau, the part of the camp where the gas chambers were.
WALTER SCHRIEBER (1908–1999): an Austrian civil engineer who supposedly built crematoria at Auschwitz. In 1998 he was allegedly questioned about his work at Auschwitz and claimed that no gas chambers had been in the crematoria when they were built and the layout of the crematoria was unsuitable for the construction of such installations. He claimed to have built the crematoria in 1943, by which time all five were already fully operational. His claim that the crematoria were unsuitable for gas chambers is also based on faulty assumptions, as in reality there are few technical prerequisites for a room to be used for homicidal gassing; technically speaking, any room where people can be locked in could be converted into a gas chamber. His "confession" was not published until after his death supposedly at his own request, conveniently rendering it impossible to question Schreiber about what actually happened.
BRUNO BAUM (1910–1971): communist resistance fighter who spent time imprisoned in Auschwitz and Mauthausen and later served as an official in East Germany. He stated in a 1949 book about his time in the resistance that he and fellow Auschwitz prisoners had written "the majority of all Auschwitz propaganda" up until the last day before the camp was evacuated, which many have taken to mean that he admitted to making up lies about Auschwitz being an extermination camp. This is based on the fact that "propaganda" in modern terms carries negative connotations, but this was not the case in 1940s Germany, when the term merely referred to spreading information supportive of a certain cause. This is clear from the fact that the very next sentence in the book states that Baum and his associates were making public what was actually happening. At no point does Baum state or even imply that the rumours about Auschwitz being an extermination camp were made up.
ALLIES KNOWLEDGES’ DURING THE WAR:
On December 17, 1942, British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden read the Joint Declaration by Members of the United Nations on behalf of the Allies, where he condemned the ongoing mass murder of Jews. About this time, a document prepared by the Polish government-in-exile was also disseminated: The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland, which accurately identified the locations of a number of Nazi extermination camps (such as the one at Treblinka), as well as the fact that they were extermination camps. A private letter from Catholic resistance sources around this same time (dated December 14, 1942 and sent by a German Jesuit) notified the Vatican of similar happenings. It indicated that "up to 6,000 Jews and Poles were being gassed each day in German-occupied Poland."
SWEDISH JOURNALISTS: VALENTIN AND ARVID FREDBORG
Swedish journalist and historian Hugo Valentin (1888–1963) wrote in newspaper Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning (GHT) during 1942, about an ongoing extermination of Jews. In October, he wrote that at least 700,000 Jews had been murdered in Poland. Many other Swedish newspapers quoted Valentin's articles.
Though neutral, the Swedish government was under pressure from Nazi Germany, at least until 1943. On behalf of Germany, the Swedish government censored anti-German propaganda and obstructed GHT at several occasions.
Arvid Fredborg (1915–1996) was a Swedish correspondent in Berlin from 1941 and 1943. His 1943 book Behind the Steel Wall estimates that 2 million Jews and 1 million Poles had been executed.
DEATH TOLL AND CENSUS DATA:
According to censuses, there were about six million more Jews in Europe in early 1942 (as the Holocaust began) than there were at the German surrender in 1945. The Wannsee Protocol from 1942 said that there were 11 million Jews in Europe, of which roughly 6 million were living in German-controlled territories (as the Third Reich was at its peak by 1942). WHERE DID THEY GO, THEN?
Deniers, such as the IHR, have claimed that the Jewish population within the Nazi-occupied area was just 4 to 6 million. This contradicts the Wannsee Protocol, as well as other demographics.
Physical evidence:
The preserved camps contain plenty of physical evidence for mass murder: remnants of human bodies (piles of ashes, bones, hair, etc.), belongings (clothes, prosthetics, bags, etc.) and equipment (gas chambers, etc.). Some of this material has undergone forensic examination.
The Red Army managed to recover 300,000 pairs of prisoners' shoes from Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek. 20,000 pairs were predicted to be collected each day, around the rate of gassings at Auschwitz II. Even at Chełmno, which had been successfully demolished by the SS, Soviet investigators uncovered thousands of half-burnt personal effects belonging to murdered Jews from a burn pit.
TRY DENYING THIS NOW, GABBERS!