Holocaust denial arguments: The Jewish population before, during and after the war barely changed and even increased at first.

I think the Holocaust death figures are essentially a half truth. The Jews can argue conclusively their six million figure, but you can also make other arguments based on other censuses or data, too. Quite surely many Jews did get murdered in camps during the Holocaust.

The reason I say it's a half truth is, more than likely 6 million Jews did disappear in the Holocaust, but more than likely not all of them died. If you think of things logically, if you've just been put in ghettos, had your assets and livelihoods seized, then got put in concentration camps (all of which are undebatable, really awful things to do to a person, and don't really tie into the denial narrative Hitler was shipping them to summer vacation camps with swimming pools...) why exactly then, if you managed to get out of the concentration camps, would you proclaim yourself Jewish to have this happen to you again, especially in a time of political uncertainty post-WWII? I think a great amount of Jews after the war simply stopped being/declaring themselves Jewish, either basically changing their identities, or at the very least not answering Jewish on government forms, etc. Many Jews as well ended up in what's now the USSR or Combloc countries, where this would be easier under an officially atheist state and somewhat forced ethnic integration as state policy. After the USSR collapsed (I think there was a period of immigration for this before in the 1970s as well...) a lot of Jews came out of the woodwork in USSR wanting aliyah in Israel, of course there were tons of fake Jews just wanting to leave the USSR, but presumably most of these people had real Jewish ancestry that they hid for quite a lot of years.

I also think going even further, that quite a lot of people in USA have secret Jewish ancestry like this. I found this out about myself, that likely I'm some amount Jewish from my father's side. I think a lot of Jews came to USA wanting to start a fresh life, as there was real anti-Jewish sentiment in Europe at the time. I think this even explains sects in USA like Seventh Day Adventism. I read a story of a Jewish person converting to SDA Christianity because Ellen G. White wrote things that were only known in Jewish written form, and weren't translated into English after her death. He concluded it was because she was divinely inspired, but I think it's more likely she was just actually Jewish, and this sect formed out of a sort of syncreticism between Judaism and Christianity.

Lastly, hiding your faith or converting to another one out of cowardly or other reasons does happen often. But no religion wants to tell these stories to their adherents, because they're not good stories. Everyone wants to hear stories of martyrdom. Mohammed for example in the middle East certainly did spread Islam with the sword, and Islam did a holocaust of lots of Christians. But one factor of the middle east becoming Islamic was the Nestorian and Monophysite Christian groups most predominant in the middle East were persecuted and excommunicated by the Catholic church at that time, and when Mohammed came along, they were open to the religion as their own brothers weren't treating them that well and the religion wasn't really that convenient. But nobody in Christendom wants to talk about that, for obvious reasons.

I hope this post isn't "anti-Semetic" or constitute holocaust denial, but this is just what I think actually happened. And yes, as another poster said, the actions of a few bad Jewish elites do not give a reason to hate common average Jewish people, especially to the point of justifying violence or any ill treatment towards them. Plenty of Jews have actually helped me greatly in my life, and have been terrific people.

/r/C_S_T Thread