What is a Holocaust denier?I hear its a crime in some countries, with archieve footage, how could it be denied

Answer 1

There are a number of middle eastern countries that deny the holocaust occurred on the principle that they stand in solidarity with their Islamic brethren the Palestinians who had their land given away from them by the allied powers at the end of WW2 to form the state of israel as a safe haven for jews from all over the world. The Palestinians really got the short end of the stick on that one. Prior to that, the jews in the region had been fighting a guerilla war against the palestinian government - so kind of a reverse of what we have now.

The archive footage pretty much makes it undeniable that many Jews died in concentration camps and mass killings. However it only shows so much. Only so much video footage was shot. So then we have to contend with numbers that we dont know where they came from until you start doing some serious digging to find out. Until this summer, in fact, Germany has kept all records from the era locked even from relatives of the victems. Given this 60+ year era of secrecy its not surprising that many don't believe the numbers listed as having died.

I was curious at one point and so I did the math.
Given the amount of time it takes burn a body, the total number of crematories that could be working 24-7 nonstop, and the known information for when the nazis stepped up their incarcerations to a campaign of genocide - a simple mathematical equation can be made that only gets up to a couple million as I recall. One then has to reconcile this does not match up with the 6 million number as listed in so many documentaries.

Now in Germany, just for pointing that fact out I could be arrested and put in prison. The crime would be a holocaust denier. Because in Germany even trying to analyze the official death count is "verboten"(forbidden) even though I am not denying its existance - a couple million people is a huge frickin number of people! - I'm merely suggesting that the number is off by some realistic factor. Could be the real count was only 4 million in the end. or 3 million. or 5 million. Hard to truly say. But one thing that is also undeniable is that the counting of the population after the war was not too accurate and there was some heavy estimation going on in the numbers. There was also some double counting countries claiming the same citizens as theirs for purposes of remuneration after the war.

You gotta remember there were in the realm of 10+ million people displaced from their residences during the war and after when they tried to account for what had happened to put it into the history books. This was before computers. This was before technology made counting so much easier.

And this raises the last point about counting and why the number is almost certainly off. Basically, many of the oppressed and persecuted didn't return to their homes. They feared going through the same thing again and who could blame them. BUT that created a certain problem, the newspapers of the local towns would print the list of the missing and presumed deceased from the war. They were hung up where everyone could read and see. My grandfather was in one of those towns and recognized a number of names on the list. During the after-war-period he left the area travelling towards vienna and discovered that over and over again he kept running into people from list living and far from their previous homes. People who had been counted as deceased.
In the end, even if all the countries open up all their archives that central counting problem is going to remain.