Posted on 04/25/2008 9:07:30 PM PDT by HAL9000
Le Pen: Auschwitz didn't have gas chambers
Extreme right-wing leader repeats claim that no Jews were gassed or burned at Nazi death camps, says Auschwitz inmates worked as laborers for factory
Far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen sparked a chorus of outrage in France on Friday by repeating an incendiary claim that the Nazi gas chambers were a "detail of history."
Anti-racism and Jewish groups threatened immediate legal action against the National Front chief - who already holds several similar convictions - after he made the comments in a magazine interview.
"I said the gas chambers were a detail of the history of World War II: that, to me, seems so obvious," the 79-year-old Le Pen told Bretons magazine.
Le Pen was fined 1.2 million francs ($290,000) for making the initial remarks in a radio interview in 1987.
When the Bretons journalist told him that the Nazis "deported people to camps simply to kill them," Le Pen replied: "But that is what you believe. I don't feel obliged to adhere to that view."
"I observe that in Auschwitz there was the IG Farben factory, there were 80,000 laborers working there. As far as I know they were not gassed, anyway, nor burned."
~ snip ~
(Excerpt) Read more at ynetnews.com ...
.
Well done potlatch -
BTW Your home page is AWESOME!
Thank you for your thoughtfulness, potlatch. Well done. I’m emailing it to a few people.
All y’all might like to see this.
He was in one of the units that helped liberate one of the concentration camps, and one of the Stalags too.
One of the POW's (8th Army AirForce) was a fellow that grew up two houses down from him.
One of the few times I saw my father with tears in his eyes, was when he spoke of what he saw at the camps.
Thanks devolve
Good! I’m glad that you can make use of it.
Eh, Jean...even the Boches admit they were gassing Jews. You sad bastard.
I think you are absolutely wrong on this. There are many, many false stories about the Germans' labor and death camps, contra and pro national socialism. To understand really what went on, one should step back from a focus on gas chambers and consider that Auschwitz was a slave labor complex (synthetic fuels, rubber, some armaments, etc.). The complex was centered around Auschwitz-Birkenau and Auschwitz-Monowitz. The place was Utilitarian, in the most evil sense of the term. People were "sorted." Those who could not produce, were eliminated. Diet and disease-suppression were designed "optimally" to manage the input-output of the system. Labor was balanced by costs of nutrition and disease prevention.
The raw human material shoveled into the system came from non-citizen classes - Jews in Nazi occupied areas automatically fell into this group, but others did too, including "criminals." But the main objective of the system was not to kill Jews specifically, nor to kill anyone simply for the purpose of killing. That would have been a waste of resources. The point was to use human beings as industrial raw material. Culling the herd was indeed part of the program, but by focusing on the killing part this actually reduces the horror of what went on.
It is as if we are drawn to the gas chambers because it perversely comforts us. If what the Nazis did would have been irrational, non-human pure evil, we could say that it is not at all like us. We want Hitler to be Satan, his works outside of our comprehension, none of his works to be the logical extension of what we do in our every day lives.
On Auschwitz specifically and the "final solution" more generally, I highly recommend Richard Rubenstein's The Cunning of History.
SNOPES: Holocaust Teaching Ban (University of Kentucky) .... Status: FALSE
Well darn, that could have saved me a couple of hours work as I put it all together on a webpage and then took a screenshot to make it a graphic!!
Sorry. I could paint that part out but it would leave a gap to fill??
I FIXED it!!! Refresh it Lucy.
OK, so maybe the IG Farben factory manufactured chemical products other than Zyklon B. But the fact is that they did manufacture Zyklon B and that Auschwitz was by far the most "efficient" Nazi concentration camp in terms of numbers killed and rapidity of killing of inmates. Something like 1.5 million died there alone, and Zyklon B was a major reason for that "efficiency."
Yes, people were sorted, and some of their lives were saved by "working" at IG Farben, but the ultimate goal was to work them to the point where they were no longer productive in the factory, then send them to the nearby gas chambers or kill them in some other way.
How’d you do that. You must have friends in high places.
Le Pen is an anti-Semetic horse’s ass.
Yet I still have a problem with the French government criminalizing free speech,as absurd as the content of that speech surely is.
No, anyone can change what they post! I took your graphic into a program, painted out the part we didn’t want, did some cropping and rearranging on wording and resaved it.
Then I deleted the original image in Photobucket and uploaded the new one with the exact same name!! If it doesn’t appear at first you just refresh!!
Thanks, potlatch. Now that you’ve explained it, can you believe I actually understand what you did, lol.
Yes, it’s easy, frighteningly easy, lol.
Sometimes when people hotlink too much it even gives me ideas -— but I ‘be nice’, heh.
.
There’s a special key on potlatch’s PC
She just clicks it and an updated image appears
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.