Anyone spoken to or understand holocaust deniers?

[masraum]

I was reading this article, Mel Mermelstein Survived Auschwitz, Then Sued Holocaust Deniers in Court. It's not the first time that I've heard of or read about folks that say the holocaust never happened, but it's still amazing every time I hear it.

Has anyone ever met someone that believes this or spoken to someone or have any insight as to why someone could think this? I can almost (if I squint really hard) understand the folks that think we didn't go to the moon. I'm not that surprised by the flat earthers (there are enough crazy folks for that to not be surprising), but the holocaust seems like one of those things that should be impossible to refute.

Not the whole article

In October 1981, Judge Thomas Johnson made an announcement. After deliberation, he had accepted a fact into judicial notice—a legal term for a fact accepted in a court as true without the need to produce evidence. The Holocaust, said Johnson, was an indisputable fact.

The pronouncement seems slightly ludicrous given the weight of evidence that has emerged since the extent of Hitler’s “Final Solution” was revealed at the end of World War II. But for the plaintiff in the case, Mel Mermelstein, it was nothing less than a triumph—a critical moment in a decades-long struggle to tell the world that what he experienced in the Holocaust happened.

In 1944, Mermelstein, then 17 years old, was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. He was not alone: Despite the attempts of Hungarian Regent Miklós Horthy to prevent it, the deportation of Hungary’s Jews to camps kicked off within weeks of Germany’s occupation of the country in spring of that year.

Mermelstein was the only one in his family to survive the Holocaust. He recounted his experiences in the 1979 memoir By Bread Alone. Not long after the book’s publication, Mel would live to tell his story again—this time, in Johnson’s court, as he and lawyer William John Cox took on a group of Holocaust deniers who dared Mermelstein to prove the Holocaust happened at all.

“I would not let them get away with it,” Mermelstein, 91, said via e-mail.

Mermelstein’s long journey to becoming a public witness to Nazi inhumanity began in January 1945. He was one of the 60,000 Jews set forth on the infamous death marches. Over three weeks, Mermelstein and 3,200 other prisoners walked roughly 155 miles from Auschwitz-Birkenau to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp in the savage Polish winter. It’s estimated a mere ten percent survived. To keep going, Mermelstein took a pair of shoes off a warm corpse, a recent shooting victim on the wayside whose body hadn’t frozen yet.

From Gross-Rosen, Mermelstein was packed onto a train for three days and nights—without food or water—and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp. He arrived in February, stricken with typhus and weighing 68 pounds. He was shunted to the predominantly Jewish “Little Camp” section, a series of barns built for 450 that were filled with more than 10,000 sick, dying, emaciated prisoners. The hunger he experienced there, he said, was “vicious torture …by bread and bread alone.”

After two months, on April 11, Buchenwald was liberated by U.S. forces. The next day, Generals Dwight Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, and George Patton toured Ohrdruf, a subcamp of the larger concentration camp and found 3,200 naked bodies in shallow graves, some showing evidence of cannibalism. Three days later, Eisenhower cabled General George C. Marshall asking for members of Congress and journalists to visit the liberated camps to report the atrocities to the American people.

“I visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that ‘the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda’” Eisenhower wrote in his 1948 memoir Crusade in Europe, presaging the Holocaust denial Mermelstein would fight head-on more than three decades later.

After a few weeks of recuperation, Mermelstein returned to Munkacs, but the 18-year-old quickly realized all of his immediate family was gone. His household obliterated, Mermelstein decided to leave Europe. About the only thing he kept was a box of family photos, which had been safeguarded by a friend. During his travels, Mermelstein would say the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, every chance he got.

Mel knew he had an Uncle Adolf and an Aunt Florence in the United States. He didn’t know them well, but it was enough to begin anew. On August 31, 1946, he arrived in New York harbor aboard the SS Marine Perch.

“Dad didn’t speak English, but he had a great ability for languages and picked it up quickly,” says Edie Mermelstein, Mel’s daughter. “He was also fluent in Hungarian, Czechoslovakian, Hebrew, Russian, Polish, Yiddish, so he was able to get a job at the United Nations.”

Mel worked for a number of years in New York City. Along the way, he fell in love and married Jane Nance. The couple didn’t want to raise a family in Manhattan, so they headed out west and settled in Long Beach, California. In 1965, Mel started a manufacturing company that makes wooden pallets, and is still in operation today.

Owning a successful family business gave Mermelstein the resources to travel overseas and begin building his personal collection of Holocaust-related artifacts. At first, he didn’t speak publicly about his concerns that the world would forget the slaughter of the Jews. In 1967, the Six-Day War stirred him to action. “I saw [Egyptian President Gamal Abdel] Nasser shaking his fists and saying he was going to drive the Jews into the sea,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1988. “It reminded me of Hitler.”

From then on, the Holocaust was omnipresent in the Mermelstein household.

“I grew up with the Holocaust. As a child, my father took me to a screening of Night and Fog at the public library he was hosting,” says Edie, 54. “No second-grader should see a movie filled with actual Nazi footage, but Dad was never afraid to talk about it. Confronting the Holocaust became his mission.”

At the height of the Cold War, Mermelstein repeatedly returned to the extermination camps —more than 40 times. He always brought back objects to the Auschwitz Study Foundation, the Huntington Beach-based nonprofit he started in 1975. Mermelstein was an Indiana Jones-type, crossing the Atlantic to visit the camps and (with the blessing of the employees overseeing the grounds) take home various artifacts including light posts, barbed wire, Zyklon B canisters, human teeth and bone fragments, and bricks caked with ash. Mermelstein even found personal evidence: a photograph of himself in the barracks with a group of starving men and pieces of the oven where his mother and sister were cremated.

Mermelstein built a private 1,000-square-foot museum in the back of his lumber plant and started speaking to schools, synagogues, and community groups. As this was years before the Simon Wiesenthal Center was founded, the film Shoah was released, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum was opened, his mission was a solitary, under-the-national-radar one. It was his 1979 memoir, By Bread Alone, that made him the target of rabid hatemongers.

[Noah930]

I've never met a Holocaust denier (or when I probably have in the past, it was not a topic of conversation), but if it did come up, I'd probably pay as much attention to them as I would the other two groups you mention: the flat-earthers and faked-the-moon-landing believers. Not worth the effort to actually engage them in those veins of conversation.

[pavulon]

Add 9/11 conspiracy theorists, birthers and cloud seeders...

[Por_sha911]

I talk to people from all walks of life each day. I have a little sign on my desk:
"Don't argue with stupidity"

If anyone could be offended by Holocaust Deniers, I have a right. My great grandparents died in Auschwitz. Deniers aren't worth my time. Ignore them.

OBTW, as a Meteorology major, lots of folks in my department were members of the Flat Earth Society. It was fun. To me it was in the same league as Dudeism. A joke that should never be taken seriously.

[DanielDudley]

If you are a certain type of Muslim, then the Holocaust was made up to have an excuse to give Jerusalem to the Jews. If you are a White Supremacist, the Holocaust was made up as part of a secret plot that Jews, (and others) have to take over the world

There have been a lot of conspiracy theories about the Jews taking over the world in the last 100 years. It fits in very well with a certain type of narrative that will get this thread pushed over to PARF in short order. These theories dovetail very well with other agendas and with other narratives. You would be surprised how many people buy into them at some level.

FWIW, the kind of antisemitism that buys into this is on the rise in Poland, Germany, and a few other places you might live closer to. It is in some ways a useful tool for some to consolidate demographics into solid political blocks. Like a lot of things, it doesn't have to be true to be appealing and motivating.

It can be very motivating, and it can be used very effectively.

[DaveE]

I argued with a holocaust denier in a Topix forum once. That place is almost as bad as PARF.

[pavulon]

Flat earthers must not own cats...they push everything off anything flat.

[biosurfer1]

I'm not a moon landing denier at all, but that one I could see being faked easily, to try and best the Russians, show American technological power, etc. I'm sure we landed there but there is a strong argument to fake it if that had been the case.

The others are just whacked out.

[ckissick]

I've never met any such people. But the Turkish government still denies the Armenian genocide and actively hides and destroys any evidence of it.

[masraum]

Originally Posted by Por_sha911

I talk to people from all walks of life each day. I have a little sign on my desk:
"Don't argue with stupidity"

If anyone could be offended by Holocaust Deniers, I have a right. My great grandparents died in Auschwitz. Deniers aren't worth my time. Ignore them.

OBTW, as a Meteorology major, lots of folks in my department were members of the Flat Earth Society. It was fun. To me it was in the same league as Dudeism. A joke that should never be taken seriously.

I've always assumed that some flat-earthers we in it as a joke. I saw a very nice Mercedes or something (not one of the entry level models) with a plate that said "flatrth" or something like that the other day.

I assume that the folks that deny the holocaust are either 1 crazy conspiracy theorists or 2 anti-semitic or 3 all of the above. If I met one and it somehow came up, I'd probably ask them about it, and then ignore and disengage which is my usual practice with crazy/stupid folks.

[onewhippedpuppy]

Don’t argue with crazy, they’ll drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.

[sc_rufctr]

Originally Posted by onewhippedpuppy

Don’t argue with crazy, they’ll drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.

This has been my experience.

A long time ago a Skin head (complete with Nazi tattoos on his head & neck) tried to convince me that it would be impossible to kill 6,000,000 Jews.

I said what about the other 5,000,000? (11,000,000 total were murdered in the Nazi concentration camps)

Hitler was a lot worse than most people realize.
Even when he knew Germany would loose the war he continued making no attempt to stop the slaughter.

"We" often forget that the German people suffered horribly because of the Hitler and the Nazis.

[LWJ]

I have met Holocaust survivors.

I have been to Dachau.

I have flow 1/2 way around the world.

There are people that I just can't communicate with. We don't share a common world view.

[Por_sha911]

Originally Posted by DanielDudley

It fits in very well with a certain type of narrative that will get this thread pushed over to PARF in short order.

I suspect the narrative you speak of is found in the best selling book of all of human history.

[Bill Douglas]

I've never thought those people looking through the wires, all skin and bone were Hollywood actors. Extras even.

Deniers are a different breed. Who knows what their motives are. Similar; my sister spends a lot of time on conspiracy web sites. It's kind of hard explaining to her that big business and the dreaded Americans - and Catholics are not out to get us. In fact they mean well for us.

[Scott R]

Yup, in PARF, Dipso is both, Holocaust denier, 911 truther and he's dead serious about it.

[GH85Carrera]

It is like the moon landing conspiracies. To believe that NASA fooled the American people, and even more difficult, the Soviets. The Soviets were trying all they could to get there before us, and would have seen a fake in a heartbeat. It happened. Like the holocaust. It is real history.

[Por_sha911]

Originally Posted by Por_sha911

Deniers aren't worth my time. Ignore them.

Originally Posted by Scott R

Yup, in PARF, Dipso is both, Holocaust denier, 911 truther and he's dead serious about it.

And this is why I have an Ignore List with folks like the above. Frankly, if more folks ignored the trolls they would go away. When you argue with them it encourages their behavior.

[Jeff Higgins]

When I was a kid in the '60's and '70's, my mom would haul me and my three siblings to Warburg, Germany every summer to stay with my Oma and Opa. At some point during each stay, our Opa would drive us to the border between East and West Germany and make us look at it. He would tell us how lucky we were to be together as brothers and sister - all of his were on the other side.

On the way home, and at other times during our stay, he would tell us about all of his friends who were taken away and never came back. He was a pig farmer. His friends were the Jewish merchants in town with whom he did business. My mom's best friend was the daughter of one of these merchants - the whole family was taken away and never returned. My mom, my aunt, and my Oma were made to move into that family's home, in town, so as to make the town look occupied. All of the women and young girls out on the farms were made to do this, since removing all of the Jewish businessmen's families left the whole town pretty much unoccupied, which did not look good.

My mom passed away two years ago. When she was alive, however, she could name whole families that she knew personally who were taken away never to be seen again, quite obviously victims of the death camps. Her generation is rapidly leaving us. I shudder to think of the opportunity that presents to those who would brush this horrible crime under the rug. My mom, my aunt and uncles, my Oma and Opa would never stand for it - they saw it firsthand. What is going to happen when the last of them are gone?

[plexiform]

There are a lot of hostile people on this forum. Sometimes very sad to read the offensive things they find entertaining. I try to ignore them but sometimes it is hard. Plenty of holocaust deniers, 9/11 conspiracy theorists, and flat out racists against religions and races other than their own. As sad as this is, this forum is just a small slice of reality. At work I meet people with similar ideologies on a fairly regular basis. I don't engage them and I let it go. From my vantage point engaging them would only take away from my ability to provide my services effectively and without bias.