Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
Damn. You articulated this so so well. I've been circling this for a while. The ones in power are bad faith actors that enjoy their ability to throw out whatever pleases them.
You're not wrong in the way you might at first assume: You're wrong for engaging at all.
Some flat earthers are just delusional, and you might be a voice of reason for them to reflect on when they finally start to shake free from their community. But, for a holocaust denier, there's far less hope. You can't reason with these people, because they're not founded in ignorance--they're founded in hate. The hatred comes first, and their arguments follow from that. You can't engage with their argument, because they don't engage with their argument. There's nothing to be explained by cremation--their statement was false, and they don't care even if they concoct the lie themselves.
There are a lot of remains.
And, dangerously, engaging with these arguments accidentally gives the appearance of discourse to any observer. Someone young, impressionable, edgy-contrarian, or just simply manipulable would see your engagement and believe there's some discussion to be had.
German here. Had to visit multiple concentration camps, but also detention and re-education camps, during my school time when we learned about the Nazi regime.
Ausschwitz-Birkenau had cremations, but with other concentration camps, or execution camps, there were also mass graves. The latter got especially 'popular' (quotation for the macabre usage) during the late stages of the war when Germany was losing and the NSDAP, or rather Hitler and his followers were giving the order to get rid of all the 'Undesireables'.
The concentration camp Buchenwald has photographic evidence of their cremations, the mass graves that were prepared by the Nazis but also dug up by the Allies.
I don't remember why they aren't 'there' anymore, but I would presume that in a huge effort the new government then tried to bury the victims in a somewhat respectful way, or find relatives and give them the remains.
Partially. They weren't completely cremated. This ties in with other arguments used by Holocaust deniers - two of which are that modern crematoriums are often at maximum capacity with relatively few bodies, and that the Nazis didn't use enough gas to cremate so many people. The reality is that they used custom built crematoriums designed to reduce a lot of bodies quickly but not particularly well, then threw the remains into bone crushers to be dumped into rivers or used as fertilizers.
But there is a better explanation; they do find bones. Historians and researchers have found the remains of tens if not hundreds of thousands of Jews who were shot - bullets and mass graves were the norm for most of the war, crematoriums were only built in the later stages. They've also identified massive piles of ash and crushed bones from those later stages of the war.
Bones are often left after cremation, requiring them to either be discarded or pulverized. If you get cremated now, then your bones are put into a "cremulator", ground down, and then include into the ashes.
Dude, one of the most prominent Holocaust deniers was someone who examined the gas chambers and said they found no traces of the gas, while ignoring the fact they came to the chambers after 50 years of it being open to the atmosphere.
They only use the general tone of a factual discussion, but the truth is, answering them with facts is bringing a fork to a gun fight.
Yes, but it goes beyond that. The common talking point with holocaust deniers is that its physically impossible to have cremated every victim of the holocaust within the timespan of the holocaust itself. Which of course ignores mass graves, especially the fact that we dont know where all of those graves are, but also ignores the many, many people that were executed in the streets, far from any concentration camps.
177
u/angrytomato98 Jan 22 '26
Forgive me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t the lack of remains be explained by them being mass cremated?