Did the Holocaust actually happen?
History

OK. Point by point:

mnagi85: The word "holocaust" is intrinsically Jewish. It as a Hebrew word(ha-shoah) used to describe what the Jews, 6 million of them, suffered. Supposedly.

Response: Not sure how the etymology of the word Holocaust applies as an argument for or against the validity of the event actually occurring. To me it seems only logical that if one assumes that the Jewish sect was exterminated in this manner that they would coin the term for the act.

mnagi85: Considering the fact that there were approximately 11 million Jews WORLDWIDE during the year 1945, and in 1950 there were approximately 11.3 million Jews! (JAFI- Jewish Agency For Israel) (source:http://www.jafi.org.il/education/100/concepts/demography/demtables.html#2)

Response: Ok, this is going to come down to a question of several different agencies reporting things differently. Turning to so deeply an invested group as those who actually suffered from the atrocities of the war seems a foolish proposition to me, and I am not aware of what oversight the Jewish agencies have regarding the validity of their data. A publication whose data I do tend to believe is valid, however, is the world almanac, which lists markedly different numbers than what you do. While the World Almanac made it very clear that any numbers between the years of 1945-1948 are based upon 1939 data due to the inability to gather new census data on that group, the numbers for pre and post world war 2 uphold the reality of the holocaust. To whit: 16,643,120 Jews in 1939, 11,266,600 alive in 1949. Incidentally, I use the number that the Almanac later revised their estimation to assuming a greater degree of accuracy. The population decline is still extreme if you use their initial number of 15,713,638. So, at the end of the day, we have the question of which source is more credible, the JAFI or the World Almanac?

mnagi85: According to the USHMM(United States Holocaust Memorial Museum), there were 9.5 million Jews in Europe ALONE. And both websites(JAFI and USHMM) reference to the American Jewish Yearbook. Yet in USHMM, it says, and I quote, "only a third of the world's Jewish population lived in Europe."(source: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005687) What does this mean? This simply means that the USHMM made an INCREDIBLE mistake. If there were 11 million Jews world-wide, yet only a third of world's Jewish population lived in Europe(one third of 11 million is about 3.7 million) lived in Europe, it makes it incontrovertible that a far less amount of Jews were killed during this so called "holocaust". How can you kill 6 million if only 3.7 million existed?

Response: Ok, wow...this is downright misleading good sir! In the future, when quoting, please do not quote out of context in order to misrepresent the facts. Here is the complete sentence that you quoted: "In 1950, most Jews (51 percent) lived in the Americas (North and South combined), while only a third of the world's Jewish population lived in Europe." Gee, ya think? After Hitler annihilated the Jewish people throughout Europe they might have a lower population base there? Perhaps....

The rest of your side of the argument is expositional rather than citing any further hard data facts, so further rebuttal is unnecessary. I would be interested in hearing your response to the rebuttals of your above points however.

To me it seems obvious...I am just interested in what reasons those who believe otherwise have for thinking so.

Yeah, Tell the holocaust survivors who have barcodes on their arm to show, that they are complete bullsh*t and you are right.

You're right. Its way obvious.

My grandmother told me something that haunted her for the rest of her life....

She lived under German Occupation during WWII. One day, she was near her apartment building when she saw a group of emaciated prisoners walking down the street, led by armed German guards/soldiers. In the ditch by the street, somebody had thrown out potato peelings.

One of the emaciated prisoners saw the potato peelings, jumped into the ditch and started devouring them like mad. A guard with a long, thick wooden club with a nail (sharp end) sticking out at the end, jumped into the ditch after the prisoner and beat him to death....

After this, she made it a point to note their route and used to smuggle food to the men as they walked by....she'd go flirt with the guards while some willing kids (who also saw the murder) would slip the prisoners some food.

But she had nightmares about it till the day she died!

The word "holocaust" is intrinsically Jewish. This is wrong. The word HOLOCAUST comes from the Greek ὁλόκαυστος holókaustos: hólos, "whole" and kaustós, "burnt". Yes, Hitler started his antisemitism rant before 1938, and murdered millions of Poles, Serbs, Gypsies, etc. But to say the Jews weren't massacred is a falsehood. Maybe they did get the amount of people annihilated wrong, but their is substantial eyewitness evidence that it did happen.

Point well taken....I don't know what they teach about the holocaust in the English-speaking world, but in Europe, where there are many who still remember exactly what happened, there is no claim that the holocaust was exclusively Jewish.

Hitler had a plan to wipe out anyone who was not sufficiently 'Aryan'...and he hated Gypsies even more than he hated Jews. They went first....and we were taught that a greater percentage of European Gypsies was wiped out by him and his regime that the percentage of European Jews. But, because there were WAY fewer Gypsies, he killed more Jews...

And anyone could face being sent into a concentration camp...there were MANY Catholic priests and Protestant Ministers there, just because they wouldn't 'play along'.... And, when it was convenient to set an example of how people should be controlled, the SS would pick a village, shoot every adult male there and send the rest of the population into a concentration camp.... If you travel through Europe, you will find memorials to many such villages.

So, no, the holocaust was NOT an exclusively Jewish event.

However, there were WAY more Jews in the concentration camps than ALL other people put together...and the persecution of Jews was a well publicized policy - one that helped bring Hitler to power. The reasons for it were practical, political AND pathological....

So, yes, 'Jewish people' were singled out by Hitler and his regime ... and in this way, their suffering WAS unique.

"THE" holocaust never happened because there have been more than one holocausts in history. A HOLOCAUST is the killing of a large number of people. However, in WWII, millions of Jews (people I would like to point out to any nazis) were killed which would fit the definition of holocaust. So a holocaust did happen in WWII, but many more happened before that.

I cannot believe that people are actually saying no, the Holocaust did not occur. It has been proven, we have found documents let alone the concentration and extermination camps near the end of WWII in Europe. My vote goes to an astounding YES that the Holocaust occurred.

It DID happen, we have proof of it. I can not believe that there are people out there that doesn't believe it. But it did happen, it was real. We had soldiers that witnessed the scene, Survivors telling the world what has happened, photos to show the proof of horror, Skeletons/dead bodies lying on the ground at Concentration camp showing the soldiers the horror that has happened and so on. The Nazi went on trial and most of them is executed for what they did to innocent people that was harmed/killed and is scared for life.

So yeah, it DID happen.

You can't ignore the statistics or the evidence. What gets me is that you choose to believe WW11 to be fabricated and then turn around and preach about religion. You don't have very much proof that the events written in the bible are real but you choose to follow them anyways. There is definitly more evidence toward the war than toward any religion. You are saying that the survivors didn't see their friends and family brutally murdered and they are lying. If you think that you are correct then explain what happened to those six million jews, mentally handicapped, homosexual, gypsies, and others.

I don't see why it couldn't have happened; is there any other name for the brutal slaughter of more than 6 million Jews and other, non-Aryan races? No.

It's important that we learn what really did happen in terms of the Holocaust, to prevent it from happening again; to learn from humanity's atrocious mistakes and careless attitudes against other races and religions.

It just goes to show how ignorant and close-minded some people can be; the "Final Solution" started because the Hitler tried to spark extreme nationalism in Germany against the Jews, blaming their troubles during the Great Depression on them since the Jews were one of the few groups of people that weren't doing dreadfully bad during the Great Depression. So, with that in mind, Hitler and the other Nazis did not want to take the responsibility and say that it was their fault for what happened to them during the depression and, instead, blamed the Jews for their troubles. Leading them to commit countless acts of violence against innocent populations of humanity...

That was only when the population went back up after the incident! the 11.6 million!

Yes it did, why do you think that the events called "the Holocaust" are mentioned everywhere

Is there really a debate over this? Is this not already in the history books? ..........Do trees really exist?.....Was there really slavery?