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Critical thinking and the Holocaust

Whatreallyhappened.info is based in the United Kingdom and devoted to free inquiry into historical events.

Disclaimer: We link to a wide variety of sites, videos, etc. You may, will, disagree strongly with some of them, since they represent differing viewpoints; you may even find some offensive. Our linking to them in no way implies our support for any views expressed in them. It implies only that we think that viewing them may help us or you to a better understanding of the issues, even where we reject what is said.

This site exists to promote an open scientific, evidenced-based approach to historical enquiry. We do not believe or reject anything, though naturally we do form opinions. However, they are just that: opinions based on our current understanding of the facts. We are not emotionally attached to them and we would have no problem with changing our current positions on any subject if the evidence suggested we should.

We are mainly, though not exclusively, interested in the Second World War and the German treatment of Jews during that conflict, since this is the area where free enquiry is most actively and efficiently suppressed by force of law and imprisonment in some countries and by taboo in all. The topic is protected from any objective investigation by an electric fence of emotion and insult, with the result that few other than those with a political axe to grind dare question the received story. We have no such axe. We have looked at the orthodox story and at the arguments brought against it by Revisionists, and we find that, at the very least, the Revisionists have raised questions  which so far have not been satisfactorily answered. They are met with insults and ad hominem accusations of political bias, which, even if they are true (they are in some cases but not in others) are irrelevant, since the historical facts of what happened in the 1940s cannot be influenced by anyone's views today on anything. The reality is that those who promote the orthodox story are themselves also largely driven by emotion and political bias. On the whole, whatever their motives, it is the Revisionists, not the proponents of orthodoxy, who have looked for material evidence and applied scientific methodolgy.

We don't like the term Holocaust; we think it represents a dishonest approach used to impose a narrative and to suppress enquiry, rather than encourage actual study of what happened. It has entered the vocabulary relatively recently, promoting a politically-motivated, anti-intellectual, emotional and manipulative memorialism, which was analysed by Dr Norman Finkelstein (a Jewish-American university professor) in his best-selling book The Holocaust Industry.

We are not neo-Nazis; we are not so-called "White Nationalists" or any other kind of racist; we do not believe "it was all a Jewish conspiracy", but we do have genuine and sincere doubts, based on our reading of the historical record and the arguments of both sides, most of which is completely absent from the mass media which serve a hysterical diet of tear-jerking accusations but very few verified facts.

Though individuals behind the site have differing personal views, the one thing we are unanimous on is the right to investigate freely.

We will also point you to aspects of history that, although indisputably true, are almost entirely absent from the mainstream media. For example, take a look at a map of pre-war Germany and compare it with a map of Germany today. The 15 million Germans in that "missing" area, as well as the Sudetenland and other areas, were Germans expelled from Czechoslovakiadriven out with extreme brutality, including mass rape and murder, by Russians, Poles, Czechs, Serbs and others, with hundreds of thousands, perhaps as many as two million deaths. They too were transported in "cattle trucks" (which were actually goods vans, but that doesn't have the same emotive ring). It was the largest of many deportations and expulsions in Eastern Europe. They have fallen into history's memory hole. How much have they received in reparations? When did you last see a TV programme, a film or a newspaper article about any of them? The present writer knows of only one: Shadow Over Europe made by Charles Wheeler for BBC4 in 2002. It has only recently become available on YouTube.


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We welcome views that differ from our own, provided always that they are presented objectively, calmly and courteously without resort to rudeness or invective, and we promise to do our best to show similar courtesy to others. We are looking for historical evidence and dialogue, not polemic and confrontation. We don't seek to demonise, sanctify or whitewash anyone. Not Hitler, not Stalin, not Churchill or anyone else...

Do we deny the Holocaust?

Like "Do we still beat our wives (or husbands)?" the question is impossible to answer as it is based on a false assumption. "Holocaust denial" is a simplistic Newspeak term, designed to shut down discussion by falsely presenting the issue as black or white, all or nothing, and implying that anyone questioning any part of it must have malicious motives. The truth is more complex.

Much of what is called the Holocaust did beyond question take place:

  • The National Socialist or Nazi regime intensely disliked Jews and prior to the war succeeded in expelling two thirds of them from Germany. They had the cooperation of the Jewish Zionist movement, which wanted Jews to move to Palestine.
  • Following the outbreak of war, most Jews in the areas under German control (though not most French Jews) were confined in ghettos, concentration camps and labour camps, where conditions varied from the low standards common in most prisons to the utterly appalling, and where many died (and were cremated) from a wide range of causes which included privation, exposure, disease, neglect, maltreatment (often by the common-criminal prisoners who were placed in authority) and execution.
  • The war on the Eastern front was one of the most barbaric wars in history and civilians were routinely killed by both sides as reprisal or simply to spread terror. It was savage warfare, but it has its parallels in Algeria and Vietnam, for example. Given both official and personal attitudes to Jews on the German side, and the high number of Jews among both partisans and Communist commissars, Jews were likely to figure prominently among the victims.
  • In 1945, conditions of utter horror, with thousands of unburied emaciated dead, were found when camps such as Belsen, Buchenwald and Dachau were liberated.

We in no way dispute these component parts of the larger event which since about 1980 has become labelled as the Holocaust.

But other main components are far from "proven beyond reasonable doubt".

Revisionists argue, with some justification, that there is no material evidence, and only documentary evidence whose provenance has never been adequately tested, that:
  • there was mass murder in gas chambers (There were small gas chambers which were used to kill disease-spreading lice in clothing and bedding using Zyklon B, a legitimate commercial product, stabilised hydrogen cyanide, used in all German military facilities and still produced today under the trade name Uragan D2 - uragan is a direct Czech translation of zyklon, cyclone or storm)
  • the Nazi regime sought to exterminate the European Jews (or any other group)
  • the totemic figure of six million Jewish deaths has a basis in fact
  • the appalling conditions with thousands of dead bodies found in Belsen, Buchenwald and Dachau were a consequence of deliberate German brutality or neglect

The last point should not be at issue. All historians and other knowledgeable people now accept that that these horrific scenes were caused by epidemics and starvation in the total collapse of infrastructure at the end of the war and by massive overcrowding as inmates of the camps in Poland were moved to camps in Germany that had no space for them, but little effort has been made to communicate this knowledge to the general public and photographs taken at these camps are regularly and falsely presented in the media as "proof of the Holocaust".

The accusations of mass killing in gas chambers rely entirely on:

Both gas chambers and extermination were regarded by the Nuremberg Tribunals and the later SS trials in Germany as "facts of common knowledge" and therefore unquestionable. For a defendant to dispute them was a sure way to the hangman's noose or a very long time in prison. The only possible defence or mitigation was to say that these things happened but to deny or play down your own role in them. Some received lighter sentences for confessing or for testifying against others (plea bargaining). The Commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoess, said at Nuremberg that 3 million had died in the camp of whom 2.5 million were murdered. The official figure today is just over 1 million, with no attempt to distinguish, the public being left to assume that all were gassed. So even if we accept the official figure, we know that Hoess was forced to exaggerate three-fold.

No actual homicidal gas chambers or gas vans have ever been found. The alleged gas chamber at Auschwitz 1, shown to tourists, was "reconstructed" by the Russians in 1947 on the site of a crematorium and morgue, later used as an air raid shelter (with gas-tight door). Until the mid-nineties, it was presented to visitors as "original". [See David Cole's video from 1992 where the Chief Archivist admitted the deception.] Auschwitz 1 alleged reconstructed gas chamberEven today the public are encouraged to believe it is in its original state and you will only be told it is a "reconstruction" if you actually ask, or go to a very obscure corner of their web site (last paragraph on that page).[Even this reference has since been removed. The mock-up is referred to simply as "gas chamber and crematorium I"!] At Auschwitz 2 there are only ruins of buildings whose plans and specifications in the Auschwitz Construction Office are for crematoria and morgues, with nothing to identify them as gas chambers; the ovens are standard crematorium design for individual bodies and their capacity is far too low for the mass murderous use claimed for them. Majdanek has gas chambers used to kill lice in clothing and bedding, using Zyklon B, which it is alleged, without evidence, were also used to kill people.

This comes as a great surprise to most people, who have been taught that the Holocaust is "the most documented event in history" and that it is beyond dispute that six million Jews were killed. In reality, the deportations, the camps and the crematoria are thoroughly documented, but that is all.

Since the universal image of the Nazis as unique symbols of evil incarnate is based on these beliefs, we no longer accept this extreme view of the German Hitlerite regime, though we are certainly are in no way apologists for it: we see it as probably a good deal less murderous than the brutal Stalinist regime in Russia, our ally to whom we handed over half of Europe, turning it into a world superpower. We look at the historical record and try to get an objective picture of what happened and to understand why individuals, groups and nations acted as they did. What are viewed as war crimes in comfortable armchair retrospection must be seen in the context both of brutal total war and of similar or comparable actions by our own side.

If there really is little evidence to support these allegations of deliberate mass murder, how can it be that they are near-universally believed?


This is a complex issue, but in outline:


After the war:
  • Wartime propaganda was successful and simply continued to be believed.
  • There was a need to justify the most destructive conflict in history to people at home, to our own troops and to the world in general. It was to be "The Good War" to defeat Evil:
  • Germany was to be occupied and pacified. Any popular sympathy for the former regime had to be destroyed.
  • Attention had to be distracted from Allied carpet bombing of German and Japanese cities, Russian mass murder and rape of civilians and the brutal expulsion of 10-15 million Germans from their homes in the East.
    • An image of gas, showers and burning was created around the actual showers and crematoria, and the small gas chambers where Zyklon B was used for its legitimate purpose:  to destroy lice.
    • It suited the Western powers, the Soviet Union and Jewish organisations alike. The overwhelming majority of those involved almost certainly did not question it.

    That there were gas chambers in Germany is no longer believed since as long ago as 1960. An extraordinary admission. Only the camps in Poland, then conveniently unavailable for inspection behind the Iron Curtain, continued to be considered "death camps". Since they became accessible, Auschwitz 1 has been acknowledged to be a fake by the Auschwitz Museum authorities and ground surveys at Treblinka and Belzec have produced little of substance.


    Since the late 70s:
    • a "Holocaust Industry" has emerged. The subject is ever-present in the media in a way that was never the case in the thirty years that followed the war.
    • belief in "the Holocaust" is imposed on Western society by a combination of:
        • force of law: in most of Europe people are jailed for years or heavily penalised financially for "denying the Holocaust". Most of these laws do not date from the post-war period but were introduced in the last twenty or thirty years, in Hungary as recently as 2011
        • intellectual and academic taboo: academics who raise questions are persecuted and excluded (Joel Hayward for example), with the result that only those who are prepared to toe the party line dare address "the Holocaust"
        • media censorship: critical perspectives are totally absent from the mainstream media, which simply regurgitate everything they are fed by the Holocaust Industry and actively promote it (see above)
        • a campaign of memorialisation that has turned "the Holocaust" into a into a dogmatic religious belief that may not be questioned, on pain of being branded a heretic and an outcast
        • emotional "education" programmes which ignore objectivity, context, evidence and historical methodology in general and are little more than brainwashing; they are often taught in Religious Studies rather than in History
        • branding any attempt at objective assessment as "Holocaust denial" and implying that all "deniers" are antisemitic, racist, neo-Nazi thugs 

      This is the only event in the history of the world that is surrounded by such an electric fence of taboo and criminalisation, forbidding any objective historical investigation. We want to open up the memory holes so that all relevant evidence can be seen and evaluated, and to establish a fair and balanced assessment of what really happened.


      Churchill wrote a 6-volume History of the Second World War. He did not mention gas chambers or extermination. Neither did Eisenhower nor De Gaulle in their memoirs.

      Was the extermination of 6 million people really so unimportant?

      How can such an extraordinary three-fold omission be explained?


      Here is an outline of the Holocaust Revisionist position by Bradley Smith and Mark Weber.

      For those with a little more time we recommend Joel Hayward's thesis. Hayward never identified as a Revisionist; he simply wrote an MA thesis comparing the Revisionist and orthodox arguments. He had a nervous breakdown and was almost driven out of academia. He only managed to survive by leaving his native New Zealand for Britain and abandoning any work connected with the Holocaust. He specialised in air power and has had a brilliant career becoming Dean of the RAF College at Cranwell. He is now       Chair of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi. He converted to Islam, but rejects violence and extremism.