Historical Denial: The Modern Evil

~ beetleypete

***WARNING! DISTRESSING IMAGES***

I have been upset to discover that the old chestnut of ‘Holocaust Denial’, is going the rounds again. Far right propagandists in Britain, some other European countries, and even parts of America are going on record as claiming that the murders in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany never happened. They claim that they were ‘staged’ later, by the Allies, hoping to blacken the name of Germany throughout history.

This poor young woman was about to be subjected to obscene medical experiments.

Her name, and the details of those experiments, were meticulously recorded by the Nazis.
She could be your daughter.

There have been millions of pages of documented evidence of this staggering atrocity. Not least the careful records kept by the Nazis themselves, as well as the film records they were happy to shoot at the time. Then there is the heartbreaking testimony of the all-too-few survivors, the books written, and the tragic personal stories. In addition, we have the film records of those who liberated the camps; soldiers from Britain, Russia, and The United States.

But none of this seems to be enough for those vile people who continue to insist that none of it happened.

I have found these photos online, for the benefit of those of you who might be too young to have seen such images, or perhaps chose not to look at them.

Please look at them now. Never forget what happened, and how it could so easily happen again.

I have decided not to caption any of the photos. They speak for themselves.

These are people, not objects. Not ‘things’. People, like you and me.
They had hopes and expectations, ambitions and aspirations. Families.
Try to imagine this happening to your family. I doubt you can
Neither can I.







84 thoughts on “Historical Denial: The Modern Evil”

  1. Seeing these Images shows that we have to do better as human beings, we cannot have another holocaust happen ever again. The power of images will definitely help change a lot of people’s perspectives on the evil that we can do to each other. We do not need anymore hate in the world, just more love and empathy for one another. If we we show these two more I believe that we would finally be able to really make progress in this world and hopefully true world peace.

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  3. They did not really teach my children in High school about the holocaust. We home schooled our kids until they were teens and then they went back into the public school system here in America.

    Our family (some from England and Italy) attacked our decision to home school but in the end our kids have better values and are more empathetic then the family member’s children who stayed in the school system.

    One of the subjects I brought up with my son and daughter when they were 12/13 years of age was the war in Germany and the Holocaust. We watched the movie The Pianist together and I stressed to them how important it was to never forget…never.

    We talked to our children about the horrors of wars and how people became afraid to speak around each other. Neighbors turned on neighbors and people closed their eyes to what was actually happening around them. But there were good people, heroes and they tried to help others as much as possible.

    We are not a Jewish family but we are all the same human being and it could happen to anyone. To kill and torture like the Nazis is a nightmare that I pray my children and their future children will never have to live through. We must never forget that this did happen and it could happen again.

    Thank you for being one of the people out there making sure we never forget. Although these photos are very disturbing they speak a thousand words through their images. I hope to never see photos like this again.

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  4. Pingback: Historical Denial: The Modern Evil – Additional survival tricks

  5. Thank you for the historical reminder Pete! Such thinks never can be denied, but here in Germany more and more its seems some people try to create something like a by Nazis overtaken Germany, without any German guilt. Remember how long Auschwitz was called a “polish concentration camp”.
    Only 20 km from my hometown was the concentration and extermination camp Flossenbürg. Immediately after 1945 a lot of people frome here used the area on Sundays for weekend holidays. Horrible in my meaning. Not far away was in 1944 a camp with over 30.000 prisoners of war, most from the USSR. First they try to kill them with arsenic in bread, then like a wonder shortly before the arrival of the American troops, all 30,000 people had disappeared. No one frome these came home No one here in Germany is interested in this circumstance, on inquiries you get no answer. Some elder people told about a lot of mass graves, not yet been registered nor opened. ;-(.

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  6. As a person born in 1952. I can’t believe we have to keep “defending” (not the right word) these truths as being self evident. The deniers honestly do believe it will go away. Of course as those who witnessed these events are growing fewer and fewer, it’s so easy to decry and delegitimise the records that do exist. It fiends help that if you tried to post those images on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram they would be removed immediately as “breaching their community standards”.

    It’s similar to the way historians often revisit known events. For eg Ghengis Khan during his waves of terror back in the 13th C is reputed to have massacred millions with awful tales of brutality. But you can read in books where these numbers are considered an exaggeration. He prob wasn’t that bad. It was “just the times”. And don’t get me started on Putins cleansing of the deaths Stalin was responsible for.

    So well done Pete for this timely reminder.

    Take care, John

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    1. Thanks, John. I once read that the Mongols were supposed to have killed so many people, but the population of the known world at the time was actually less than the numbers they were alleged to have massacred. 🙂
      Best wishes, Pete.

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  7. Never forget! When I was 16, the cover of Life magazine was about Treblinka. I will never, ever forget that. I didn’t know much about the holocaust, because most war survivors didn’t talk. They were all my parent’s generation. I remember where I was in the kitchen, asking my mother so many questions. All she could say was, “We didn’t know.” Then I read Anne Frank’s diary. I haven’t been to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. I hear that people leave there crying. Denial is something I cannot understand. Thank you, Pete.

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  8. These pictures make me realise how less I know about humans. I always thought that nobody is black or white and we were all shades of grey, but these pictures question my belief. Humiliating people by denying them clothes, denying the food, Killing so many people and then throwing them in a pit like they were dead rats… I don’t think I will be able to eat tonight.

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    1. Was this the first time you had seen such images, Shaily? They have been shown here since I was very young, and were once familiar to all of us. The shock effect of showing them is deliberate, to make us realise just how terrible those atrocities were, and that they might never happen again
      Sadly, many young people have never heard of them, and the idea that they didn’t happen is being touted once again by ‘modern Nazis’.
      Best wishes, Pete.

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  10. It is compulsory for all school children to visit Auschwitz here in Poland, a practice thats should be spread around the world, even if it is some kind of virtual experience such as film. It needs to be studied in some sort of way.
    Mind you, despite this, I still sense an undertone of anti-Semitism in some circles in Poland. Very worrying.

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    1. The dislike of Jews in Poland goes back a long time before WW2 of course. Hopefully, this will fade with time, better education, and wider assimilation within the EU.
      Good to hear about the school trips, though I hope they wait until the kids are old enough to comprehend the full enormity of it.
      Best wishes, Pete.

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  11. It’s appalling how holocaust deniers seem to be increasing in numbers and being ever more vocal with their disgusting views. The rise of the far right is terrifying, particularly because we seem unable to learn from past mistakes. Thanks for reminding people – keep shouting.

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  12. Here there are people who maintain that the Sandy Hook school shootings didn’t take place and are all staged. These people talk to one another to support their warped thinking. The same happens with the murder of 6.000.000 people by the Nazis. I am not sure the motives for the denial, though it does seem to let people believe that they know the truth. The same people now bring us “alternative facts” such as the climate isn’t changing.(Why is another issue. But to deny the change is ridiculous.)

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    1. I suppose those pathetic people seek recognition, and confirmation of their extreme beliefs. That’s why it is up to very ordinary people like me to keep trying to promote the truth.
      Thanks, Elizabeth.
      Best wishes, Pete.

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  13. Tragically, too many people try to deny the Holocaust ever happened – and not just that act of genocide. I’ve been reading about the Soviet atrocities in Ukraine – the Holodomor – in the 1920s, and subsequent purges under Stalin. And the evils persist with their deniers.

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      1. I agree that Nazi Germany was the industrial killing machine, although Stalin killed probably 7 million in the Ukraine alone; and the figures for other ‘enemies of the state’ purged numbers in the millions, including Axis POWs. The horror is worse when people deny mass killings, whether the Holocaust, the Trail of Tears, the Cambodian Killing Fields, Sandy Hook, or even the Harrowing of the North (1069-70). Will humanity every learn? Or will there be global genocide?

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        1. My suspicion is that there would be much more genocide without 24/7 news. I think the Burmese were trying that with the Rohyngia people, but instant news coverage made them ’embarrassed’ to continue.

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          1. What happened in Burma has, unfortunately, been happening for almost 50 years. I know that because that was how my husband’s family settled in India. His grandfather lost his entire family in a riot in Burma. He was studying in India then and was urged by friends to stay because it was not safe to return.

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  15. When I was in third grade here in the US, my class had to watch the Holocaust films, and I was sick for days. We must never forget this chapter. There are more chapters that were not captured on film, here in the USA. Glad you posted this Pete. Very glad.

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    1. Thanks, Lara. I am sorry that it made you sick, but that shows how you have never forgotten it, and that in itself is so very important.
      When I was 12 years old, we were taken to see Leni Riefenstahl’s film, ‘Triumph Of The Will’. It is a wonderfully made film, about a terrible subject. (The Nuremberg Rally) At that young age, I could easily understand how seductive that propaganda was, to so many Germans.

      Best wishes, Pete.

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  17. Very powerful post, Pete. It’s distressing to look at the photos and think about what happened, but it is very necessary so that we never forget what occurred. It sickens and saddens me that there are those amongst us who say this didn’t happen, or that there are those who don’t know about it at all. It happened. It has also sadly happened since then in other countries too.

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      1. I agree. It wasn’t even that long ago when it did happen again in Rwanda for example. I’m alarmed by the amount of incidents of people being openly racist and hateful to other people right now. Some have learnt nothing from the horrors of the past.

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  19. (1) “I even watched Schindler’s List and read the book.” (Arlene) Same here.
    (2) So, there are folks who deny the Holocaust, and others who are unaware it ever happened. Political agenda or feigned/true ignorance at work.
    (3) Those are staged photographs featuring happy and healthy government actors? I don’t think so!
    (4) I’ve been to Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a well-known haven for Jews that fled from the Nazis. If the Holocaust was fictitious, what were they fleeing from—Oktoberfest?
    (5) Those sickening photos show what happens when people, who have but one chance at life, are stripped of all human value and become expendable “things.”
    (6) People who fear for their health and dignity at the doctor’s office or hospital should look at these photos.

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  20. I think Primo Levi’s book, If this is a man, should be compulsory reading in the last year of school. But it’s probably not allowed, for fear of offending some minority, or disturbing the young (who meanwhile watch heads rolling in Game of thrones on a daily basis)

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    1. Thanks, Marina. When my step-children were studying history at school in 2001, they were still only doing the Romans, and The Middle Ages. Nothing wrong with that, but WW2 (and WW1) was not even mentioned. They asked me if I fought in both world wars, having no idea that they happened 38 years and twelve years before I was born.
      Best wishes, Pete.

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  21. Thank you Pete for going there. Those of us–thank God, most of us–live in freedom amongst a few putrid, vile individuals who reject all manner of decency and scoff at proof as solid as the purist DNA in regards to the Holocaust. How dare they deny it! Bastards. Bitches. Filth. We don’t want to go there; we the decent, but because of them, those who were lost to evil and because of them, those who perpetrated it, we must.

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  22. i have been to Auschwitz and saw first hand the remnants of evil. the people claiming that it never happened are sickening. all they want is attention and making people upset. i will never give them that satisfaction. great post, Pete. thank you. we should not forget.

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  23. In my native Germany – the worst perpetrator – Holocaust denial is a crime, as it is in other states. As abhorrent as the Holocaust was, to my mind making the denial of it a crime is not a good idea. You can never stop idiocy by making it a crime.
    Pit

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  25. Thank you for touching upon this important topic. 66% of US Millennials don’t know what Auschwitz is…. If there is one nearly universally observable truth in this world is that history always punches in the face those who fail to learn its lessons. On a somewhat related note, I highly recommend Hannah Arendt’s The Banality of Evil. It examines the trial of one of the Holocaust organizers Adolf Eichmann and shows how often evil is, well, banal, buried in paperwork, in bureaucracy, in statistics. Which is why humans are able to dissociate themselves from it and commit such horrid acts again and again and again.

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  27. I have taught Holocaust studies for years. I thought there would never come a time when it was necessary to rebuke a new crowd who seem certain it never happened. I also teach German and have tried to image teenagers whose legacy they inherited was Nazi Germany.
    I can only hope the press is highlighting a few and saying it represents a large group. The distortion by the media on both sides sickens me.

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    1. It has been starting up again in Hungary, where an elected member of parliament was reported as saying it never happened. Also in parts of Britain, where some far right extremists are becoming ’emboldened’ by some of the rhetoric around Brexit.
      Best wishes, Pete. x

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  28. Great post Pete. It’s outrageous that ore and more of these night crawlers are squirming from beneath their rocks to spout such nonsense. I had a second cousin on my mother’s side who survived one of the camps. I remember seeing the number tattooed on her lower arm even though she took pains to cover. These vile (you picked the right word) attempts to deny the atrocities that took place must be fought against wherever they raise their ugly heads.

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  29. I read so much about the atrocities of the war. I even watched Schindler’s List and read the book. That is why I also love those books by Leon Uris, I learned so much from them. I also read Irena’s Children, a true story on how Irena Sendler, the female Oskar Schindler save 2,500 children from death and deportation in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II.

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  31. I was just reading the other day that one-third of European had never heard of the Holocaust. One-third!!! That’s not just mind-boggling, it shows how fertile the ground is for this “revisionist” history… and how easy it is for these things to happen again. Thanks for posting this, Pete.

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  32. I am so glad that you posted this. It is indeed happening all over the place.

    Not long ago my husband and I went to an Exhibition about Anne Frank. We went into a coffee shop after the Exhibition, and a young man joined us at our table. He tried to tell us that the Holocaust had never happened. He stayed for a long time. We stood our ground. He had watched us in the Exhibition and then followed us to the coffee shop.

    This happened in the City of Lincoln, England.

    This outrageous belief is all too prevalent. It is horrific and disgusting, and I do not know what is in the mibds of those who deny it. Words fail me.

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