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Paul Rassinier, Professor of History and Geography, wrote Debunking the Genocide Myth in 1978 with 15 years of research and personal experience as co-founder of the ‘Liberation-Nord’, a resistance movement in Northern France during WW2. His arrest and temporary living under Nazi rule in Buchenwald and Dora concentration camps granted him distinctive eyewitness experience. Rassinier’s sole purpose was to combat the feelings of his memories immortalised by the misinterpreted words of other people, of other survivors that did write their experiences. He believed it was his duty to remain objective and maintain ‘the proper perspective’ as a “... a false picture of the German camps have been created... I suddenly, felt that by remaining silent, I was an accomplice to a dangerous influence.” Rassinier took significant efforts of publicising his personal experiences, promoting his credibility as a historian writing in truth. Fueled by his contempt for the distortions of the truth that occurred in the camps, he denounced the Holocaust history as it was written as merely to ‘inspire pity...
“I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” (Elie Wiesel) The Holocaust is a topic that is still not forgotten and is used by many people, as a motivation, to try not to repeat history. Many lessons can be taught from learning about the Holocaust, but to Eve Bunting and Fred Gross there is one lesson that could have changed the result of this horrible event. The Terrible Things, by Eve Bunting, and The Child of the Holocaust, by Fred Gross, both portray the same moral meaning in their presentations but use different evidence and word choice to create an overall
The resistance of the Holocaust has claimed worldwide fame at a certain point in history, but the evidence that the evil-doers themselves left crush everything that verifies the fantasy of the Holocaust. For an example, in Poland, the total Jewish population of over thirty-three hundred thousand suddenly plummeted to three hundred thousand. Ten percent of the population survived the Holocaust in Poland. Almost every country that the Nazis have conquered has the same percent of survival as Poland. In Elie Wiesel Wiesel’s memoir Night, the activities in the concentration camps, the suffering of Jews, and the disbelief of the inhumane actions of the Nazis result in making people resist the truth.
Many different responses have occurred to readers after their perusal of this novel. Those that doubt the stories of the holocaust’s reality see Night as lies and propaganda designed to further the myth of the holocaust. Yet, for those people believing in the reality, the feelings proffered by the book are quite different. Many feel outrage at the extent of human maliciousness towards other humans. Others experience pity for the loss of family, friends, and self that is felt by the Holocaust victims.
Gilbert, Martin. "Churchill and the Holocaust: The Possible and Impossible." The Churchill Centre. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Feb. 2014.
Following the beginning of the Second World War, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union would start what would become two of the worst genocides in world history. These totalitarian governments would “welcome” people all across Europe into a new domain. A domain in which they would learn, in the utmost tragic manner, the astonishing capabilities that mankind possesses. Nazis and Soviets gradually acquired the ability to wipe millions of people from the face of the Earth. Throughout the war they would continue to kill millions of people, from both their home country and Europe. This was an effort to rid the Earth of people seen as unfit to live in their ideal society. These atrocities often went unacknowledged and forgotten by the rest of the world, leaving little hope for those who suffered. Yet optimism was not completely dead in the hearts of the few and the strong. Reading Man is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag by Janusz Bardach and Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi help one capture this vivid sense of resistance toward the brutality of the German concentration and Soviet work camps. Both Bardach and Levi provide a commendable account of their long nightmarish experience including the impact it had on their lives and the lives of others. The willingness to survive was what drove these two men to achieve their goals and prevent their oppressors from achieving theirs. Even after surviving the camps, their mission continued on in hopes of spreading their story and preventing any future occurrence of such tragic events. “To have endurance to survive what left millions dead and millions more shattered in spirit is heroic enough. To gather the strength from that experience for a life devoted to caring for oth...
The events which have become to be known as The Holocaust have caused much debate and dispute among historians. Central to this varied dispute is the intentions and motives of the perpetrators, with a wide range of theories as to why such horrific events took place. The publication of Jonah Goldhagen’s controversial but bestselling book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust” in many ways saw the reigniting of the debate and a flurry of scholarly and public interest. Central to Goldhagen’s disputed argument is the presentation of the perpetrators of the Holocaust as ordinary Germans who largely, willingly took part in the atrocities because of deeply held and violently strong anti-Semitic beliefs. This in many ways challenged earlier works like Christopher Browning’s “Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland” which arguably gives a more complex explanation for the motives of the perpetrators placing the emphasis on circumstance and pressure to conform. These differing opinions on why the perpetrators did what they did during the Holocaust have led to them being presented in very different ways by each historian. To contrast this I have chosen to focus on the portrayal of one event both books focus on in detail; the mass shooting of around 1,500 Jews that took place in Jozefow, Poland on July 13th 1942 (Browning:2001:225). This example clearly highlights the way each historian presents the perpetrators in different ways through; the use of language, imagery, stylistic devices and quotations, as a way of backing up their own argument. To do this I will focus on how various aspects of the massacre are portrayed and the way in which this affects the presentation of the per...
Even when US troops liberated the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps, the stories still never made it to the front page of the paper and people still did not believe in the reliability of the stories (Leff 52). In 1943, a survey w...
Gottfried, Ted. Deniers of the Holocaust: who they are, what they do, and why they do it. Brookfield , Connecticut : Twenty-First Century Books, 2001. Print.
"The Myth of Rescue" by William Rubinstein has no doubt been one of the most attacked books by reviewers on this matter of the Holocaust. Rubinstein disagrees with the idea that some scholars supported, that the allies could have done much more to help the Jews, and explains why it was so difficult to assist them. Rubinstein's construction of the situation faced by the Jews of Nazi occupied Europe demonstrates some coherent and thoughtful points about the period of the slaughter of the Jews.
Even in today’s modern society of advanced technologies and research methods, there are still people who believe that history has recounted the horrific genocide of over six million European Jews incorrectly. These deniers are known as Holocaust revisionists. Now, these people do not believe that the Holocaust simply did not happen. Instead, they believe that historians have hyperbolized the death toll and that they have morphed the extermination camps into something that they are not. Some even believe that Hitler has been portrayed wrongly as the villain. They think that Hitler was one of the Jewish peoples’ best friends and was a great aid to them. Also, revisionists have conjured up the outrageous idea that the Jewish people were the real antagonists. Revisionists state that the Jews wanted land in the Middle-east, so they seized the opportunity to scream to the world that they were being oppressed and discriminated against. As a result, they received what is now known as Israel for compensation. Now, the previous examples are only a small percentage of the total number of revisionist ideas of how the Holocaust really played out (Lipstadt). Holocaust revisionists strive to dispel the widely accepted idea of the Jewish genocide during World War Two. However, the plethora of proof which historians have uncovered through war trials, film evidence, and written evidence, makes it blatantly obvious that history has been recounted correctly.
In Laura Purdy’s account of Genetics and Reproductive Risks: Can Having Children Be Immoral?, Purdy’s claim is that conception of a child is immoral when there is reasonable concern of a genetic disorder and if prenatal screening is not done to see how likely it is for your child to obtain that disease, then it is wrong. Purdy thinks it is immoral to reproduce when we are at high risk of transmitting a disease or defect and she says it is wrong to reproduce without knowing the consequences of our genome. The birth of a child at risk of a serious defect could be prevented by abortion or preventing conception of a child. And conception is only allowable once a person has undergone a prenatal screening and if a selective abortion would be done, and for those who are against abortion must be extremely careful not to conceive.
Engelhardt, I. (2002). A Topography of Memory: Representations of the Holocaust at Dachau and Buchenwald in comparison with Auschwitz, Yad Vashem and Washington DC. Presses Interuniversitaires Européennes.
Gottfried, Ted, and Stephen Alcorn. Deniers of the Holocaust: Who They Are, What They Do, Why They Do It. Brookfield, CT: Twenty-First Century, 2001. Print.
World War II was a grave event in the twentieth century that affected millions. Two main concepts World War II is remembered for are the concentration camps and the marches. These marches and camps were deadly to many yet powerful to others. However, to most citizens near camps or marches, they were insignificant and often ignored. In The Book Thief, author Markus Zusak introduces marches and camps similar to Dachau to demonstrate how citizens of nearby communities were oblivious to the suffering in those camps during the Holocaust.
Today - half a century after the conclusion of the Second World War - it would be fair to expect a less emotional environment, one in which historians, researchers and writers were free to examine the actual causes of the war as well as the atrocities committed by both sides in the conflict. However, those and other topics are more forbidden than ever with the greatest taboo surrounding analysis of the fate of Europe's Jews and others in what has come to be known as the Holocaust.