Kaptain Poop said:I, myself, have never toured a concentration camp. I have toured the Magic Kingdom, but I still don't believe that Jimminy Cricket is a real talking cricket. Crematoriums exist in every decently sized city in this country, but that does not tranlate into a holocaust. Besides, I thought Dachau was a camp in West Germany where homicidal gas chambers are now admitted to have never been used. Besides, why would Germans in the middle of brutal war that they were losing try to find expensive inefficient ways of killing people? If they wanted to kill everyone under their own control then they were pretty darn bad at it. Why wouldn't they kill people like their enemies, the Bolsheviks, killed millions of Germans and Russian Christians - with a bullet to the back of their head wherever they found them - or simple starvation? Or they could have used the method that American Lt. Bushyhead used to on Germans at Dachau after liberation - line them up and machine gun hundreds all at once. Did they tell you that on your tour? If not, maybe you should ask yourself why they didn't. How much of Dachau was "reconstructed" to fit the propaganda?
You know they gave Germans tours of these concentration camps immediately after the war. They showed how the Germans used Jewish skin for lampshades, shrunken heads, Jew-fat soap etc. All of that has been exposed as a lie and those claims are no longer made - at least by any reputiable historians. I'm convinced that not one person was killed in any ficticious gas chamber during WWII. After all Germans had the most sophisticated and largest supply of real chemicals warfare available to them and they refused to use it on their enemies even as their own country was being overrun and their cities fire-bombed. It just doens't make sense.
Here is a picture taken on May 3,1945 of the Dachau gas chamber (3 days after the camp was liberated)
Here is a picture taken recently, which is what I saw.
You can see that the room has been virtually unchanged since the liberation. It was not proven one way or the other if the room was used for executions, but it did exist. I am not saying the Holocost did or did not happen. There are two sides to every story and I believe that the truth is somewhere in the middle.
My guess is the gas chambers were built for a more humane method of executing prisoners (not mass extermination), not unlike they have been used in prisons since WW2. There is documentation that Himmler preferred a humane approach to prisoner executions.
Yes they mention the massacre of the SS guards by US troops on the tour. They also present the arguement that the Nazis used the camps to eliminate political opponents, not the common Holocost story where Jews were massacred by the millions. Like I said, only about 1/3 or the documented deaths at the camp were Jews. If they were executed, they were killed not because they were Jews, but because they opposed the Third Reich (according to the tour guide). Based on the history of totalitarian regimes throughout human history, this seems to be a reasonable assumption.Edited by: SteveB