humanspirit wrote:
dogsmilk wrote:
humanspirit wrote:
I can't believe they were promoting the idea that the Nazi's had made a swimming pool for concentration camp prisoners
See that's where a grain of truth becomes bullshit.
Auschwitz had a water reservoir (bear in might Auschwitz peaked at around 100,000 inmates and had its own fire brigade) that got converted for use as a swimming pool. Favoured inmates did get to use it. There's one report a film crew showed up at one point to film it for propaganda purposes. Auschwitx had a multinational population of inmates there for different reasons and a hierarchy. And within that the luck of the draw - if you got made a kapo that gave you some power, but at the same time if the inmates you were responsible for didn't work hard enough or whatever you were responsible and liable to be seriously punished - so these guys were often brutal. But inmates that got privileged positions got perks. It's like you get in prisons today - some guy is running everything, another getting gang raped. At Auschwitz some guy could have landed a decent job in the kitchens, another next to him could be literally starving to death. The actual experiences varied wildly, but the vast majority were having a shit time. The horrible stuff is the focus because that's what was most people experienced and the horrible stuff is what makes it matter.
The mass killing at Auschwitz took place at Birkenau (apart from some smaller scale early ones) - a couple of kilometers away or whatever it is.
How it works is it takes a massive place like Auschwitz that was basically the size of a town and focuses on a perk a small minority of favoured inmates could access. Something that was a miniscule part of the camp is over-amplified to make it sound like it was Butlins. The pool was totally irrelevant to the overwhelming majority of people there.
The other fallacy is invoking the notion that if something wasn't bad, nothing was. To illustrate this, it's like showing footage of Johnny Cash playing San Quentin prison and saying this proves life in San Quentin in the 1960s was easy.
Regarding chosen inmates using the converted water reservoir to swim in at Auschwitz.
Could you provide sources for this information dogsmilk?
If this pool was in fact a swimming pool wouldn't it be exclusively for the camp guards?
Because it's so trivial, outside of the denier literature, it barely gets a mention (and I should add beyond the usual posturing there's virtually no information there - it's scarcely been mentioned by anyone who was actually in Auschwitz - which indicates how few people probably used it, including guards). There were discussions about it on RODOH, but that was suddenly deleted by YUKU (overt racism - the deniers tended to be Nazis who were often quite explicit and there was parody racism taking the piss out of them) and no longer exists. I found just a couple of brief references on HC
In 2001, Faurisson published this article about the swimming pool at Auschwitz I. He claimed that "The pool was a pool. It was meant for the detainees." However, the solitary direct eyewitness that Faurisson quoted in the original article stated that, "It should be noted that only the very fit and well-fed, exempt from the harsh jobs, could indulge in these games..."
This is therefore a direct distortion by Faurisson, contradicted by his own witness. The pool was only meant for a small minority of detainees: the administrative workers in Auschwitz I. We do not know from the extract that any of these were Jews. The workers at Buna (Auschwitz III) and those selected for Birkenau never went near it; nor did those on starvation rations, nor those doing heavy labour. Yet, as was surely Faurisson's intention, deniers have swallowed this evidence as if it related to the whole of Auschwitz. Both astro3 [Kollerstrom] and 'Hannover' [Hargis] do precisely that here. Readers can decide for themselves whether this misreading was done through mendacity or sheer stupidity. With Hargis and Kollerstrom, either answer would be plausible.
Furthermore, in an addendum on the same link, Faurisson quoted a later witness account, written in 1997, stating that "a newsreel director had some deportees filmed swimming there." An honest scholar might conclude that this indicated the true propaganda purpose of the pool, but Faurisson is a dishonest scholar and chooses to call the witness a liar, except in the small part where his testimony supports Faurisson's claim.
holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.co.uk/20...wimming-pool-at.html
also this
holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.co.uk/20...-icon-auschwitz.html
I think it's generally agreed a few inmates did use it. To which the question is yeah, and, so what? As is noted by HC, Auschwitz had a brothel - the BBC interviewed a Polish inmate who got to use it and showed in on prime time TV - it's hardly some secret.
Some prisoners got perks depending on who they were. The Nazis didn't like the Poles, but they weren't out to kill them all - they targeted their intelligentsia for liquidation but wanted the Poles to comprise a serf class. So although Poles did suffer and die there, they weren't treated as badly as the Jews or Soviet POWs. I might be misremembering, but I think there were as few German inmates. Aryan German criminals followed by political prisoners had the highest status - as they were true Aryan Germans, just 'asocial' ones who needed re-educating. You won't have found any Jews or Soviets in the pool.
-, and therefore really fall for the holocaust denial, but the vast majority are pretty sure of what really when on; they just don't like to publicly admit what a degenerate hateful ideology they are supporting and they simply deny all that stuff in front of others. They really have nothing to loose by purposely fomenting this lie; at the contrary, since the atrocities carried out by the Nazis are the main reason why people despises them, denying these atrocities gives them a chance to sell Nazism.
