MAKE no mistake about the mass murder of innocents during World War II. The Nazis were a killing machine that murdered millions of innocent people, including the widely accepted number of six million Jews. Other groups (Roma, Slavs, Africans, mixed races) were also killed based on a racial theory that was part of the eugenics movement for racial purity that had begun since the late 19th century. The extermination extended to the disabled, along with social democrats, and communists, among others.
The evidence for the holocaust is massive and incontrovertible, and we need look no further than the record of the International Military Tribunal, (IMT), popularly referred to as the Nuremberg Trial, where several senior Nazi officers testified to the planned and systematically orchestrated mass executions through orders from the German Führer, and his Wehrmacht.
Among the witnesses were Erwin Lahousen, a Nazi military intelligence officer; Otto Ohlendorf, Commander of the mobile Nazi death squad (Einsatzgruppe); Friedrich Paulus, a German Field Marshall; Rudolf Höss, Commandant of Auschwitz, Walter F. Schellenberg, high-ranking SS intelligence officer; Dieter Wisliceny, an associate of Adolf Eichmann; Eichmann was at the Wannsee Conference where the Final Solution was planned; Eric von dem Bach-Zelewski, a Nazi general. 180 Nazi officers and officials were convicted at Nuremberg. 24 were sentenced to death! Numerous committed suicide before the end of the trials.
Since 1945, numerous countries have established laws against holocaust denial. These countries include Germany, Austria, France, Israel, Canada, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Sweden, Switzerland, and Ukraine. Other countries have even broader laws, and numerous persons have been convicted for holocaust denialism.
Young people ought to learn about the Nazi extermination campaigns, and this not least because, more than anything else, it was based on a theory that some people are inherently superior to others. The IMT was held at Nuremberg because it is there that the anti-Jewish code was announced on September 15, 1935. Among other stipulations, the Nuremberg Laws stated that only “Germans or related blood” could hold German citizenship. In Nazi racial ideology, Jews (and others) were deemed genetically defective and a biological threat to Europe. That theory has been soundly, and scientifically discredited.