[HighSpeed_LowDrag]

(12-31-2016 02:43 PM)scorpion Wrote:  

This interpretation hinges on the translation of ausrottung as being extermination, implying killing. But the word could just as accurately be translated as extirpation, meaning uprooting or permanent removal. The speeches are very long and those are tiny excerpts. I find it unlikely that a genocide program of such scale (and secrecy, apparently) would be glossed over in such a cursory fashion. A more detailed look at this: http://codoh.com/library/document/891/

This is wilfully misleading. Ausrotten can only have the translation of "permanent removal or uprooting" in the context of non-living things or abstract ideals - things that cannot literally be killed. When referring to people, it means 'complete destruction.' One need only look at a basic German-English dictionary to demonstrate this:



To put this into context for English-speakers, it would be like attempting to claim that exterminate, with its roots in the Latin words ex (meaning 'out of') and terminus (meaning "borders"), is synonymous with "deportation." Any fluent English speaker will tell you that is non-sensical. Native German holocaust deniers themselves admit that ausrotten in the context of Himmler's speeches means 'to exterminate.'

I would even point out that your definition of 'extirpate' is misleading as well.

I dare you to take that translation of Himmler's speech to any of the fluent German speakers on this forum if you are so certain of it.

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But when you tell me that six million Jews were murdered in gas chambers (that were conveniently destroyed)

False strawman. No serious Holocaust scholar claims 6 million Jews were gassed to death. At least half of the Jews murdered were killed outside of the extermination camps, either by the Einsatzgruppe death squads on the Eastern Front, or by systematic ghettoization, or by deaths in the other concentration camps. And I would point out that the Nazis were not completely successful in covering up everything - the Madjanek extermination camp was captured virtually intact, gas chambers, crematoria and all.

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All we're left with is fragments of speeches and diaries taken out of context, confessions obtained through torture and preposterous eyewitness testimony.

If you want to disregard the testimony of all the defendents and witnesses at the Nuremburg Trials, fine. Set aside the fact that Rudolf Hoss, who you earlier mentioned, wrote entire memoirs about the killings at Auschwitz and testified about them in multiple other forums.

Since you seem to discard all testimonies of survivors as either hearsay or fabrications, how do you account for the testimonies of dozens of former SS guards, like Josef Klehr, or Oswald Kaduk, or, Oskar Groening - men who openly admitted to the roles that they played in the killing process, as well as to the purposes of the extermination camps?