curioussoul wrote: ↑Sat May 10, 2025 7:10 pm
I don't want to be rude, but if you seriously believe there's "hundreds of thousands" of testimonies or witnesses to the Holocaust, you're either stupid or lying.
The USC Shoah Foundation is just a single source but this alone has collected 55,173 audiovisual testimonies. If you want to explain to me why these are all fake and USC is a fraud then go ahead, but it's not nice or accurate to accuse me of being stupid or lying.
https://sfi.usc.edu/collections/holocaust
I'm not sure how well read you are on the Holocaust story, but actual eyewitnesses to gassings number in the low 20's, and are for the most part made up of the self-styled members of the supposed "Sonderkommando", who were allegedly tasked with emptying the gas chambers. These witnesses are notoriously unreliable, and I don't mean that there are minor mistakes or inaccuracies in their testimonies, I mean that every single one of them - without exception - told major falsehoods or verifiable lies that could not have been innocent errors.
There were estimated to be about 2,000 Sonderkommando prisoners at Auschwitz over time although many were murdered. It was estimated that only about 110 to 120 survived but at least 30 significant testimonies in interviews or other written records. Gideon Greif put 8 in-depths interviews in his one book alone.
Perhaps what's most powerful, is that seven manuscripts were found over several decades from Sonderkommandos that were buried in the ground near crematoria. They were buried independently and discovered independently, yet the reports have striking similarities across manuscripts that detail the systematic gassing procedures in detail. I just learned about this but I would say these definitely count as physical evidence of the chambers and I have no idea how you can explain them as being false. These manuscripts were consistent with other Sonderkommando survivors who gave testimony without knowing of the existence of those manuscripts and other Auschwitz survivors who witnessed the selections and saw smoke from the crematoria.
The German witnesses likewise are notoriously inconsistent and no single witness told a story that is compatible with the modern reconstruction of the Holocaust. Significantly, the earliest witness testimonies of gassings from members of the Sonderkommando are the most unreliable and inaccurate, whereas testimonies originating decades after the war (in the 60's, 70's and 80's) are much more streamlined and in-tune with the version of the Holocaust that was established by historians such as Danuta Czech and Raul Hilberg. What modern historians have essentially done in order to historicize the Holocaust is to piece together believable fragments of many different testimonies - none of which on their own can be held up under scrutiny. This is not how the historical method is supposed to work.
You are right that some early testimonies after the war had inconsistencies or even major gaps. That would be expected from some survivors who had just endured something unimaginably traumatic. Many were still starving, sick, and terrified. Memory under that kind of stress is not perfect and is true for all humans, certainly not just people with severe PTSD.
But historians like Czech and Hilberg didn’t start with a story and look for matching testimonies. They looked at many sources and built a picture out of the overlap and consistency in those sources. No one witness to anything, even a car crash, sees the full picture which is why the study of history requires cross-checking things. This is how the historical method inherently works.
Beyond that, there’s actually a huge of amount of agreement between German perpetrator testimonies and survivor accounts. Rudolf Höss confessed to a lot which lines up with what survivors described. We can question sources as a whole or individually, but it's not realistic to say the whole thing is a hoax just because no single person gave a perfect story.
You might be convinced the Holocaust happened, and it theoretically might have. But as a matter of historiography, the Holocaust as a historical event has a low degree of historicity. You'll encounter antirevisionist posters on this forum (and elsewhere) who confidently tell you that the evidence for the Holocaust is well-established, overwhelming and that there is a "scientific consensus" regarding the reality of the Holocaust amongst historians, but they will never debate you on the specifics, but aim rather to overwhelm you with huge lists of names and documents that, upon further inspection, turn out of be nothing but hot air. The Holocaust is not just your average field of history, and neither are its methods.
Most historians don’t spend time arguing with Holocaust deniers not because they can’t, but because they don't want to give the appearance that there’s a legitimate “two sides” to the issue, when there really isn’t.
The Holocaust is studied so much because it’s such a horrifying and well-documented event, not because it gets treated with special rules or methods. It’s probably the most closely scrutinized crime in modern history. The close scrutiny doesn't make it less real, but rather it makes it more substantiated.
I'm curious to spend some time discussing why you specifically think that the Holocaust was not real but please avoid calling me stupid or dishonest and I will do the same for you. If you stick to facts and specific arguments, it will prevent abuse.
The Auschwitz manuscripts or scrolls are really powerful evidence. I didn't know that they existed, largely because I accepted that the Holocaust was real, but upon further scrutiny, I'm curious if you were even aware of those and how you think they aren't iron clad evidence.