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In this episode, Trent shows what’s wrong with the recent online trend in denying the Holocaust and why it’s scandalous for Christians to engage in it.
Transcription:
Trent:
I’ve seen lots of people online saying Adolf Hitler wasn’t really so bad or that the Holocaust was just a myth. This has been spurred on by interviews from people who downplay what the Nazis did during World War ii. So in today’s episode I’ll talk about what’s wrong with Holocaust denial and why Christians should reject this malicious form of pseudo history. But first, we need to define our terms. Holocaust denial occurs when someone actively or by conspicuous omission denies that the Nazi regime systematically and intentionally murdered along with other people, approximately 6 million Jews in an attempt to wipe out the Jewish race and that they used instruments like gas chambers to do this. Now, some deniers boldly proclaim the holocaust is a myth, but others are more subtle. For example, when Tucker Carlson interviewed podcaster Daryl Cooper on World War ii, Cooper claimed that Churchill was the chief villain of World War II and only describes the Nazis humanely killing prisoners. They couldn’t feed allegedly because of low supplies.
CLIP:
They launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners and so forth that they were going to have to handle. They went in with no plan for that, and they just threw these people into camps and millions of people ended up dead there. We don’t have the food to feed these people. One of them actually says, rather than wait for them all to slowly starve this winter, wouldn’t it be more humane to just finish them off quickly? Now,
Trent:
Of course, one can only reach that conclusion about Winston Churchill and the Nazis. If you denied the Nazis intentionally tried to exterminate the Jews, which makes Cooper a Holocaust denier by omission. And Tucker Carlson, an odd interviewer for not asking an obvious follow-up question, like what about the evidence for gas chambers or the Nazis plan to exterminate the Jews more overt Holocaust deniers say, only a few hundred thousand Jews died of disease and starvation brought on by the bombing of German supply lines, and they explicitly say there were no gas chambers and there was no plan to eliminate the Jews. Here’s a classic articulation of active Holocaust denial by former SSPX Bishop Richard Williamson. In a 2009 interview,
CLIP:
The bishop said he believed only 300,000 Jews died in World War II and not as part of a deliberate policy.
I believe that the historical evidence is hugely against 6 million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of adult Hitler.
Trent:
The interview aired the same day. Pope Bennett the 16th lifted Williamson’s excommunication for having been illicitly consecrated to bishop back in 1988. This ignited a media backlash which prompted the Pope to demand Williamson publicly recant his views on the Holocaust before he could serve as a bishop. Again, he didn’t. And after being expelled from the SSPX, Williamson was excommunicated again in 2015 for illicitly consecrated bishops without papal approval. Pope Bennett the 16th said in response to the controversy involving Williamson, the hatred and contempt for men, women, and children, that was manifested in the showa, the Holocaust was a crime against God and against humanity. This should be clear to everyone, especially to those standing in the tradition of the holy scriptures, according to which every human being is created in the image and likeness of God, it is beyond question that any denial or minimization of this terrible crime is intolerable and altogether unacceptable.
And Pope Francises likewise said, the remembrance of that extermination of millions of Jews and people of other faiths can neither be forgotten nor denied. Now what the Pope say about Holocaust denial is not an article of faith, but it is prudential advice about something that relates to basic human decency. And Christians should at the very least, be decent people. Denying the suffering of millions of people and their surviving families is an indecent thing to do. Holocaust denial is wrong for the same reason all genocide denial is wrong. Denial further victimizes the people group who risked extermination. It raises the perpetrators to a sinful idolatrous status and it makes future genocidal acts more likely by downplaying the reality of how dehumanizing language contributes to atrocity and that applies to all genocides. For example, Dan Bilzerian, a social media influencer with over a million followers who believes the Jews are behind nine 11, has criticized the nation of Israel for denying the Armenian genocide that involved Turkish Muslims forcing Armenian Christians into things like death marches that killed over a million people between 1915 and 1917.
CLIP:
And they constantly refer to the Holocaust when they’re the biggest holocaust deniers of the planet. They deny the Armenian Holocaust, which half of my people got wiped out. Half of your people got wiped out. They deny that
Trent:
Bilzerian is correct, that the Israeli national government refuses to acknowledge the Armenian genocide. They do this to maintain diplomatic relations with Turkey, a nation that was founded on the effects of that genocide. However, more centrist Israeli politicians like yer lapid of the minority yeat party do recognize the genocide and want Israel to change its policy on the matter. But if it’s wrong for Israel to deny the Armenian genocide, then it’s wrong to deny the Jewish genocide during the Holocaust. Just because Israel does something bad doesn’t justify doing something bad to Jewish people in general. And as I said, almost all genocides and mass killings involve denial, which is why denial is so wrong. It’s an accomplice to an unspeakable evil that hurts past victims and threatens future victims. For example, historians agreed that the Japanese military committed unspeakable atrocities including rape, torture, and mass murder during the 1937 massacre of non Jing in China that resulted in 200,000 civilian deaths in six weeks.
But the Japanese government downplayed the event in textbooks and some radical Japanese authors say the Nanjing massacre never happened at all. The reason this is so evil is because it’s motivated by an either idolatrous love of Japan, a malicious hatred of the Chinese or many cases both. And the same is true of Holocaust denial. It’s often motivated by an idolatrous love of Germany or the Nazis which was condemned in Pope Eleven’s 1937 in cyclical regar soge or it’s motivated by a malicious antipathy towards Jewish people. This antipathy is often evident in the person being willing to believe Jews committed things like organized ritual murder in the middle ages based on flimsy or no historical evidence, but that same person being unwilling to believe that Jews were the victims of organized murder in spite of massive evidence for that proposition. So now that we’ve seen why Holocaust denial is morally wrong, let’s talk about why it’s factually wrong.
It’s wrong because the evidence overwhelmingly supports the view that approximately 6 million Jews, along with other ethnic groups were systematically killed by the Nazis using methods like gas chambers. And the strongest evidence for this claim comes from the Nazis themselves who kept meticulous records of their plans and actions. Here’s just some of the evidence. Hitler’s 1925 manifesto Mein kf painted the Jews as a danger to the social order and he wrote, the nationalization of the masses can be successfully achieved only if in the positive struggle to win the soul of the people those who spread the international poison among them are exterminated. In January of 1939, Hitler addressed the German national parliament saying, if Jews started another world War, the result would be the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe. After the invasion of Poland in September of that year, Hitler signed a note personally authorizing Gaden Todd Mercy death for incurable hospital patients.
Nazi doctors used rooms filled with carbon monoxide to kill mass numbers of sick patients. This program was called Action T four and Nazi scientists like August Brecker in secret memos detailed how to operate gas vans that would suffocate victims in the cargo area. Part of the memo said during the gassing, all the men were to be kept as far away from the vans as possible, so they should not suffer damage to their health by any escaping gases. The action T four doctors later transferred to use their gassing methods in the concentration camps. Mark Weber is director of the Institute of Historical Review, the world’s most famous holocaust denial organization, but even he admits no informed person disputes that Europe’s Jews did in fact suffer a great catastrophe during the second World war. Millions were forced from their homes and deported to brutal internment and crowded ghettos and camps.
Jewish communities across central and eastern Europe, large and small were wiped out. Millions lost their lives. When the war ended in 1945, most of the Jews of Germany, Poland, the and other countries were gone. He continues a major reason for the lack of success in persuading people that conventional Holocaust accounts are fraudulent or exaggerated is that as revisionists acknowledge, Jews in Europe were in fact singled out during the warriors for especially severe treatment. This was confirmed, for example, by German propaganda minister Joseph Bels in these confidential entries in his wartime diary. Weber then quotes from Gerber’s diary February 14th, 1942. The F once again expresses his resolve ruthlessly to clear the Jews out of Europe. There must be no squeamish sentimentalism about it. The Jews have deserved the catastrophe that they are now experiencing. Their destruction will go hand in hand with the destruction of our enemies.
We must hasten this process with cold ruthlessness March 27th, 1942. The Jews are now being deported to the east from this general government, Poland starting around lulin. The procedure is a pretty barbaric one and not to be described here more definitely. And there’s not much left of the Jews. April 29th, 1942 short shrift is being made of the Jews in all Eastern occupied territories. Tens of thousands of them are being wiped out and in spite of denying the Holocaust, Weber does not deny Joseph Gerber’s diary being authentic. He does not consider it a forgery, but we have even more evidence than this because the Nazis also made these kinds of declarations in public venues. In October of 1943, SS Commander Heinrich Himmler gave speeches in PO and Poland where he admitted to the Holocaust. He said, I’m now referring to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people.
It’s one of those things that is easily said. The Jewish people are being exterminated says every party member. This is very obvious. It’s in our program elimination of the Jews extermination. We’re doing it a small matter. Himler also said The Holocaust has made us tough and is a glorious chapter that has not and will not be spoken of, which shows how the Nazis intended on keeping this program a secret. However, a recording of Himler giving this speech has been found and Holocaust deniers agree. It is authentic here he says, which in English means the Jewish people are being exterminated. And in a speech given in 1944, Himmler said this concerns especially the Jewish women and children to allow the children to grow into the Avengers who will then murder our children and our grandchildren. That would’ve been cowardly. There were also aerial photographs of open pits burning thousands of bodies and secret photographs of corpse burning taken inside the camps and original blueprints designating the use of gas chambers at Auschwitz.
Nazi memos detailed that the crematory at Auschwitz could incinerate 4,756 people a day. Crematoria and mass disposal of bodies and pits would only be needed for mass exterminations, not disposing of people who die naturally from things like disease. There were also Nazi memos ordering steel mesh protected thick glass peepholes for gas chamber doors, which wouldn’t be needed if the chambers were just for de laing clothes. Instead, pees were foreseeing if the victims were dead and steel mesh inside kept the victims from breaking the glass. Finally, there are hundreds of eyewitness testimonies in trials from 1945. Well into the 1960s, Nazi officials admitted to their crimes and did not later say they were tortured into giving false confessions. Some admitted to the Holocaust as witnesses at trial even when they weren’t charged with any crimes. There are also the testimonies of survivors of concentration camps, including the Sonder commandos.
These were the Jewish prisoners who were charged with removing corpses from the gas chambers. And the number of approximately 6 million Jews being killed has been reached by numerous scholars who consulted pre and post-war. Population records works like Raul Berg’s the destruction of the European Jews. Lucy Ovitz is the war against the Jews and Wolfgang Benz’s the Holocaust, a German historian examines the genocide all independently arrived at similar death toll figures. And keep in mind, this is just a fraction of the evidence. Mountains of evidence were presented at the Nuremberg trials leading us prosecutor Justice Robert Jackson, to tell President Harry Truman, we must establish incredible events by credible evidence. So in light of all this evidence, how can people deny the Holocaust the same way people deny other obvious things like that the earth is a globe or that we landed on the moon Deniers run a similar playbook.
Instead of analyzing all the data and coming up with a theory that explains all the data, which they cannot do, they just ignore the data. They just say everyone’s lying or it’s a forgery. And then they point out curious facts lay people don’t quite know how to explain and they use those curious facts to cast out on the whole enterprise that they deny. For example, flat earthers and moon landing deniers will say, everyone at NASA is lying. They’re part of a conspiracy for big globe. And then they point to curious facts. Laypeople have a hard time explaining for flat earthers. They point to things like the Chicago skyline being visible 40 miles across Lake Michigan, which they say would be impossible on a round earth because the horizon is only three miles away from any observer or moon landing deniers who say lunar pictures are fake because there are no stars in the background.
But when you know all the facts, the ignorance on display is obvious. The picture of Chicago is taken on a high sand dune and the Mirage effect bends light over Lake Michigan due to temperature differences, which makes the skyline visible. And we’d expect a starless moon photo because the cameras the astronauts use were optimized to shoot in harsh daylight conditions on the moon and would not have had a long enough shutter speed to capture fainter starlight. If you didn’t know these other facts, it could be easy to be taken in by the deniers use of pseudoscience, which is the same way that Holocaust deniers use pseudo history. For example, here’s Niko and Myron from Fresh and Fit talking about the Holocaust using well-worn Deni talking points.
CLIP:
Everyone starved and died at that time. Germans died. Starvation, yeah, starvation, starvation, dying from typists, et cetera.
Trent:
Except when you look at footage of the townspeople who lived around the camps like here in Buchenwald, they aren’t malnourished and the SS guards look pretty well fed. Food insecurity was an issue in urban areas, but not where the camps were located. Instead, the inmates were indeed starved, but as part of a murder protocol.
CLIP:
Why were there pools at these conservation camps? They had soccer teams, they had recreational activities.
Trent:
Well, even murderers enjoy leisure time. Auschwitz did not have a swimming pool. It had a retention pond that was used for firefighting that was later used for swimming because it wasn’t drinking water. And some inmates were forced to play soccer against the guards or perform in orchestras for the officers. Well, they did that until they were no longer useful and then they could be disposed of Hannah Aaron’s book Eichman in Jerusalem. A report on the banality of evil helped show that the Nazis did not act or look like wild-eyed fanatics hell bent on murder. Instead, they were banal boringly normal people who killed other human beings in a bureaucratic way before enjoying leisure time with one another. And that’s what’s so scary about the Holocaust and every mass killing since then. Regular people are capable of carrying out these extreme atrocities. This was later confirmed in experiments like the Milgram experiments, which show how average people when told to follow orders would be willing to kill someone by administering what they thought were electric shocks over an intercom system to attest subject for giving the wrong answers. This is why the motto of the US Holocaust Museum is never again.
CLIP:
And then here’s the other thing too. They couldn’t find a shred of evidence that showed that Hitler said, we need to kill these people.
Trent:
Hitler never gave a written order to invade Poland either, but it still happened. In fact, Hitler received severe backlash from the public, including from Catholic Bishops, for publicly authorizing the T four euthanasia program. One of the men was German Bishop Clemens von Galen, who led protests against the Nazis and was someone Hitler planned to kill after he won the war. These protests are probably why Hitler did not put his other murder plans into writing.
CLIP:
Let’s just use common sense. If they wanted them dead so badly, why would they feed them, shave their heads and give them housing?
Trent:
The camps were for extermination and labor, including extermination by simply working people to death. People weren’t fed. They were slowly starved to death with minimal calories just enough to keep working. For example, Auschwitz had a factory that made synthetic rubber for the war efforts. Bels wrote in his diary, March 27th, 1942, not much will remain in the Jews on the whole. It can be said that about 60% of them will have to be liquidated, whereas only about 40% can be used for forced labor. And there’s lots of other memes and posts online that use similar arguments. There are memes that say, for example, it would’ve been impossible to gas 6 million Jews at Auschwitz in a few years, but not every Jew was gassed or killed at Auschwitz. There are other camps, though many were killed there given that thousands of bodies could be cremated every day. Many Jews were shot in mass killings.
This took place, for example, by the Nazi Special Action Group that spoke about shooting 33,000 Jews in a ravine called Ba and Ya outside the city of Kiev, or people will say Winston Churchill didn’t mention the Holocaust in his sixth volume history of World War ii, but so what Ulysses s Grant doesn’t mention the Emancipation Proclamation in his memoirs of the Civil War, but it still happened. Besides Churchill wrote a letter in 1944 saying, of the massacre of Hungarian Jews. There is no doubt in my mind that we are in the presence of one of the greatest and most horrible crimes ever committed. Deniers will also bring up irrelevant points that sideline the discussion away from their indefensible denial. For example, they’ll complain about laws that criminalize denying the Holocaust, but you can be against the Holocaust and be against hate speech laws. You can say Holocaust denial is immoral, but it’s not so immoral that it ought to be illegal or even that it ought to be banned from social media platforms, especially if these kinds of bans just drive people further into denial.
Or deniers will say that they are just tired of hearing about the Holocaust. Well, so am I, but these are like liberals who say they are tired of hearing the church talk about sex. But the Catholic church only talks about sex a lot because it has to respond to a culture that is obsessed with sexual perversion. Likewise, the only time I think about the Holocaust is when I come across a fair number of people online who seem to be obsessed with Jews being an enemy of humanity and their subsequent denial of the Holocaust. And when you criticize these people and point out that this kind of rhetoric is what led to millions of human beings being killed, they’ll whine and complain and say they’re not allowed to talk about the Holocaust or no one’s allowed to talk about it. But that’s not true. You can talk about it and it’s not censorship in talking about it to tell the other person he is being ignorant or dishonest with history, and so he shouldn’t be taken seriously. The right to free speech does not include a right to be taken seriously. As I said before, though not all Holocaust denial is overt. Some of it is done by omission, by not bringing up the Holocaust when it should be brought up. For example, Candace Owens said on Piers Morgan that she is not a Holocaust deni.
CLIP:
To be clear, you accept the Nazis murder 6 million Jews in the Holocaust.
Yeah, I have never once in any of my appearances ever,
Trent:
No, I’m just
CLIP:
Asking
You to clarify. Denied the Holocaust atrocities ever.
Trent:
And it may be true, she has never said the Holocaust did not happen, but in some of her shows, she acts like it didn’t happen. She commits denial by omission. For example, in her episode on Adolf Hitler, she claims the allies and the axis powers were morally equivalent. So why do we keep making the Nazis out to be the bad guys? She asks. She also claims that each side in World War II engage in ethnic cleansing.
CLIP:
It’s because when you say to people, okay, what is it about Hitler? Why is he the most evil? Well, the first thing people would say is, well, an ethnic cleansing almost took place. And now I offer back, you mean like we actually did to the Germans?
Trent:
Owens is referring to the Germans who were expelled from territories that Germany captured during the war. The Soviets did this partially out of security reasons, given that SS Commander Heinrich Himmler approached the Western allies with an offer to surrender and work together to fight the Soviets when it looked like the Nazis were going to lose the war. And I firmly agree, the Soviet Union engaged in horrible crimes against humanity. In 1933, they starved 6 million Ukrainians to death and a mass murder called the Hello to more. It’s not surprising the Soviets would engage in similar war crimes against innocent Germans who had lived in these areas for generations or to engage in cruel revenge murder. But to be clear, this act displaced 12 million Germans because ethnic cleansing can refer to displacement. According to the German historical museum, the death toll of the forced expulsions was around 600,000.
But two things can be true. At once, the Soviets were evil and the Nazis were evil. This fact does not justify Candace Owens sang The Allies, including England and the United States engaged in ethnic cleansing just like the Nazis. The allied forces in West Germany did not round up millions of Germans and lie to them about free showers that turned out to be gas chambers in order to exterminate the German people. But the Nazis did do that to the Jews and many other innocent people that they murdered through systematic acts of genocide. And the failure to point out these differences between the two groups constitutes Holocaust denial by omission. Owens also uses the bombings in World War II to say both sides of the conflict were equally unjust.
CLIP:
Of course, if we do it, it’s different. It’s different because we’re not literally Hitler. I mean, we drop bombs and entire populations. We fire bomb Christians, we drop a nuke on praying Catholics. And if you know about it, you get screamed at by the propagandists in the West knowing about it is the crime. The crime is not actually dropping a bomb on preying civilians in Nagasaki.
Trent:
But lots of people say the atomic bombings of Japan were immoral. I’ve made that argument here on this channel. All the major powers in World War II indiscriminately bombed civilian areas, including the Nazi Blitz of London that killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians. But only one group in the war attempted genocide by trying to wipe out an entire people group from Europe. And if they could have from the face of the Earth. And those were the Nazis claiming that the us, the British and the Nazis were morally equivalent to one another. In every way is a form of Holocaust denial by omitting the Nazi’s unique plan and execution of the act of genocide. I also want to point out that some Holocaust deniers have so much hatred towards anything Jewish that they will even attack the testament itself. For example, Lucas Gage is a well-known white nationalist who grew up Catholic but is now a pantheist. He says, the following
CLIP:
Yahweh is a demon, right? Did you know that? Look into the Old Testament. I was watching a video the other day. The Old Testament God is not the same as the other testament. God, it’s not even close. So the Jew worships Satan, literally this devil literally satanic, they are literally demon worshipers.
Trent:
And Daryl Cooper, the guy interviewed on Tucker Carlson’s show, says, no, God, in any religious tradition is as consistently brutal and blood thirsty as Yahweh of the Old Testament. But this is the Marcy Night heresy, a complete rejection of our Lord who said in John 4 22 that salvation is from the Jews and a rejection of St. Paul who said in Romans 1128 through 29, that the Jews oppose the gospel, but they are still beloved by God for the sake of their forefathers, for the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable. Finally, we should reject Holocaust denial because it’s a slap in the face to heroic Christians of the past who risked and gave their lives to save Jews and other people from being exterminated. James White, someone I’ve had a fair amount of disagreement with over the years makes this point, and I firmly agree with him. He discusses how absurd it is for online Christians, and I’ve also seen them do this to like and spread memes that openly mock Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
CLIP:
This would be like mocking babies who are torn apart in the womb and thinking it’s funny. Same thing, same thing. There were so many Christians who gave their lives to try to rescue Jews from the Nazi Holocausts. And if you laugh at that meme, you are mocking them. You’re mocking the 10 booms. You’re mocking all the people in that family that died to rescue people. You’re mocking them. And if you can’t see that, what spirit of deception has taken you over
Trent:
Protestants and Catholics gave their lives to save Jews and others from extermination. These are people like Father Bernhard Lichtenberg who was killed by the Gestapo father, Giuseppe Ti, who used false documents to rescue Jews until he was taken to Dachau where he still lies in a mass grave. Father Maximilian Kolby who sheltered Jews in his friary until he was arrested and taken to Auschwitz where he died, a martyr of charity. And then there were the unnamed people within the Vatican who according to Jewish historian Peaches, laity saved hundreds of thousands of Jews from being murdered. If you deny the Holocaust, you are spitting on the graves, not just of the victims, but on the graves of those who risked and even gave their lives to save those victims. I’ll close by noting that Edmund Burke is alleged to have said The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Mass murder doesn’t just happen one day. It begins slowly with a gradual dehumanization of the targeted victims. So if you see racial hatred and genocide denial, no matter who it’s against, say something. I pray. If the time arises, each of us will have the courage to do the heroic good that must be done in the face of unspeakable evil. Thank you all so much for watching, and be sure to check out more resources in the description below if you want to learn about how to debunk Holocaust denial. And I hope you have a very blessed day.