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DID YOU KNOW that there is a movement occurring to deny the authenticity of the Holocaust? The deniers, also known as revisionists, believe Jews were simply deported and that they invented the Holocaust to serve their own financial and political intentions.
Over the years, we have gained an insight into historical records and eyewitness accounts that are used as evidence to prove the validity of the event. The records question the sense of correctness that the revisionists have. For instance, it's hard to believe that one-third of all Jews alive at the time were systematically killed during the Holocaust simply because Jews wanted money.
It becomes even harder to agree with the ideology of the revisionists when you know that Jews weren't the only people sent to concentration camps. Christians standing up to Nazi ideology, communists, socialists, gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, and others seen as having socially deviant behaviour were also forced to be sent there. So are we saying that all these groups in society, along with Jews and people who were fighting for equality, were willing to be killed because of political intentions?
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My answer to the question would be a blunt no. Because we must never overlook how the Holocaust became one of the most devastating events in world history.
It is true that not all concentration camps were death camps. It is true that most concentration camps were used for detention and cheap labour. But it is also true that the exhaustion of the labour and the working conditions of the camps caused the death of many.
And the Nazis chose to target Jews for a very particular reason. The Nazis did not put the names of all the groups in society into a hat before drawing one out.
To the Nazis, Jews were seen as the evil race struggling for world domination. Hitler said so himself in his autobiography, Mein Kampf ("My Struggle"): "Rational anti-Semitism however must lead to systematic legal opposition... Its final objective must unswervingly be the removal of the Jews altogether". But where did this idea of labelling Jews as the ultimate "evil" come from?
The Holocaust wasn't the first time Jews were mistreated. Between the years 250 CE and 1948 CE - a period of 1,700 years - Jews have experienced more than eighty expulsions from various countries in Europe - an average of nearly one expulsion every twenty-one years. Jews were banished from England, France, Austria, Germany, Lithuania, Spain, Portugal, Bohemia, Moravia and seventy-one other countries.
