Criticism of Holocaust denial is directed against people who claim that the genocide of Jews during World War II in the Holocaust did not occur in the manner or to the extent described by reputable scholarship. Key elements of such claims are the rejection of any of the following:
- That the Nazi government had a policy of deliberately targeting people of Jewish ancestry for extermination as a people;
- That between five and seven million Jews were systematically killed by Nazi Germany and its allies and collaborators;
- That genocide was carried out at extermination camps using tools of mass murder, such as gas chambers.
The methodologies of Holocaust deniers has been criticized as being based on a predetermined conclusion that ignores the overwhelming historical evidence to the contrary.
Video Criticism of Holocaust denial
Criticism of methods used by Holocaust deniers
The claims of deniers are grounded in flawed research, biased statements, and, in some cases, deliberately falsified evidence. Courts of law have also rejected Holocaust denial claims (see Fred A. Leuchter and David Irving) and laws against holocaust denial have been passed in 14 European countries. The Nizkor Project, a group opposed to Holocaust denial claims, analyzes these claims for instances where the evidence used by Holocaust deniers has been altered or manufactured.
Maps Criticism of Holocaust denial
Hitler's involvement
Policy
Many historians, such as Ian Kershaw, Raul Hilberg, and Martin Broszat, accept that no document exists showing that Hitler ordered the Holocaust. However, other evidence indicates that Hitler knew about and ordered the genocide. Statements from Adolf Eichmann, Joseph Goebbels, and Heinrich Himmler also indicate that Hitler orchestrated the Holocaust and statements from Hitler himself reveal his genocidal intentions toward Jewry.
In a letter dated 1919 Hitler mentions that an "unshakable" aim of a strong national government must be "the removal of the Jews".
In Mein Kampf, Hitler argued that a war against Jews would have saved Germany from losing World War I:
If at the beginning of the war and during the war twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers in the field, the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain.
Hitler declared in his infamous speech to the Reichstag on 30 January 1939:
Today I want to be a prophet once more: if international Jewry succeeds in plunging the nations into another world war, the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe!
In a speech on 30 January 1942, Hitler repeated his prophecy of 1939:
... [T]he war will not end as the Jews imagine it will, namely with the uprooting of the Aryans, but the result of this war will be the complete annihilation of the Jews. Now for the first time they will not bleed other people to death, but for the first time the old Jewish law of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, will be applied. And - world Jewry may as well know this - the further these battles [of the war] spread, the more anti-Semitism will spread. It will find nourishment in every prison camp and in every family when it discovers the ultimate reason for the sacrifices it has to make. And the hour will come when the most evil universal enemy of all time will be finished, as least for a thousand years.
During the war, Goebbels often published articles which included Hitler's prophecy of 1939, in 1943 he published an article entitled "The War and the Jews" which stated:
None of the Führer's prophetic words has come so inevitably true as his prediction that if Jewry succeeded in provoking a second world war, the result would be not the destruction of the Aryan race, but rather the wiping out of the Jewish race. This process is of vast importance, and will have unforeseeable consequences that will require time. But it can no longer be halted. It must only be guided in the right direction.
In his political testament, dictated on 29 April 1945 just a day before his suicide, Hitler openly describes ordering the murder of the European Jews:
I have also made it quite plain that, if the nations of Europe are again to be regarded as mere shares to be bought and sold by these international conspirators in money and finance, then that race, Jewry, which is the real criminal of this murderous struggle, will be saddled with the responsibility. I further left no one in doubt that this time not only would millions of children of Europe's Aryan peoples die of hunger, not only would millions of grown men suffer death, and not only hundreds of thousands of women and children be burnt and bombed to death in the towns, without the real criminal having to atone for this guilt, even if by more humane means.
Order and responsibility
In a draft of an internal memorandum, dated 18 September 1942, Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler wrote that "in principle the Fuehrer's time is no longer to be burdened with these matters;" the memorandum goes on to outline Himmler's vision, including "The delivery of anti-social elements from the execution of their sentences to the Reich Fuehrer of SS to be worked to death. Persons under protective arrest, Jews, Gypsies, Russians and Ukrainians, Poles with more than 3-year sentences, Czechs and Germans with more than 8-year sentences according to the judgement of the Minister of Justice [Thierack]. First of all, the worst anti-social elements amongst those just mentioned are to be handed over; I shall inform the Fuhrer of this through Reichsleiter Bormann."
Nevertheless, and in contrast to the T4 euthanasia program, no document written or signed by Hitler ordering the Holocaust has ever been found. Deniers have claimed that this lack of order shows genocide was not Nazi policy.
When David Irving unsuccessfully sued Deborah Lipstadt for libel, he considered that a document signed by Hitler ordering the 'Final Solution' would be the only convincing proof of Hitler's responsibility, yet was content to accuse Winston Churchill responsible for ordering the assassination of General Sikorski, despite having no documentary evidence to support this claim. Mr Justice Gray concluded that this was a double standard.
Historians have documented evidence that as Germany's defeat became imminent and the Nazi leaders realized they would most likely be captured and brought to trial, great effort was made to destroy all evidence of mass extermination. In the spring of 1942, Heinrich Himmler ordered all traces of murdered Russian Jews and prisoners of war to be removed from occupied territories of the Soviet Union. As one of many examples, the bodies of the 25,000 mostly Latvian Jews whom Friedrich Jeckeln and the soldiers under his command had shot at Rumbula (near Riga) in late 1941 were dug up and burned in 1943.
In mid-1942, SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, through SS-Gruppenführer Heinrich Mueller, Chief of the Gestapo, ordered SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel in Sonderaktion 1005 to remove all traces of the mass executions in the East carried out by the Einsatzgruppen. After Blobel and his staff developed a special incineration process, destruction of evidence at Belzec and Sobibor followed in late 1942. In February 1943, Heinrich Himmler personally visited Treblinka and ordered the commandants to destroy records, crematoria, and other signs of mass extermination.
In the infamous Posen speeches of October 1943 such as the one on October 4, Himmler explicitly referred to the extermination of the Jews of Europe and further stated that the genocide must be permanently kept secret:
I also want to refer here very frankly to a very difficult matter. We can now very openly talk about this among ourselves, and yet we will never discuss this publicly. Just as we did not hesitate on June 30, 1934, to perform our duty as ordered and put comrades who had failed up against the wall and execute them, we also never spoke about it, nor will we ever speak about it. Let us thank God that we had within us enough self-evident fortitude never to discuss it among us, and we never talked about it. Every one of us was horrified, and yet every one clearly understood that we would do it next time, when the order is given and when it becomes necessary.
I am now referring to the evacuation of the Jews, to the extermination of the Jewish people.
Historian Peter Longerich states that Hitler "...avoided giving a clear written order to exterminate Jewish civilians." Wide protest was evoked when Hitler's authorisation of the T4 program became public knowledge in Germany, and he was forced to put a halt to it as a result (nonetheless it continued discreetly). This made Hitler realise that such undertakings must be done secretly in order to avoid criticism. Critics also point out that if Hitler did sign such an order in the first place, it would have been one of the first documents to be destroyed."
Felix Kersten wrote in his memoirs that after a discussion with Himmler, the SS-Reichsführer revealed that the extermination of the Jews was Hitler's express order and had indeed been delegated to him by the Führer.
According to Nazis
Many statements from the Nazis from 1941 onwards addressed the imminent extermination of the Jews.
In a draft of an internal memorandum, dated October 25, 1941, Heinrich Himmler wrote:
As the affairs now stand, there are no objections against doing away with those Jews who are not able to work, with the Brack remedy.
Joseph Goebbels had frequent discussions with Hitler about the fate of the Jews, a subject which they discussed almost every time they met, and frequently wrote about it in his personal diary. In his personal diary he wrote:
February 14, 1942: The Führer once again expressed his determination to clean up the Jews in Europe pitilessly. There must be no squeamish sentimentalism about it. The Jews have deserved the catastrophe that has now overtaken them. Their destruction will go hand in hand with the destruction of our enemies. We must hasten this process with cold ruthlessness.
March 27, 1942: A judgment is being visited upon the Jews that, while barbaric, is fully deserved by them. The prophecy which the Führer made about them for having brought on a new world war is beginning to come true in a most terrible manner. One must not be sentimental in these matters. If we did not fight the Jews, they would destroy us. It's a life-and-death struggle between the Aryan race and the Jewish bacillus.
In November 1941, Goebbels published an article "The Jews are to blame" which returned back to Hitler's prophecy of 1939 and stated that world Jewry was suffering a "gradual process of extermination".
On March 13, 1945, Goebbels wrote in his diary that the "rest of the world" should follow Germany's example in "destroying the Jews", he wrote also about how the Jews in Germany at that point had been almost totally destroyed. This diary contains numerous other references to the mass extermination of Jews, including how "tens of thousands of them are liquidated" in eastern occupied territory, and that "the greater the number of Jews liquidated, the more consolidated will the situation in Europe be after this war." When speaking about this document under oath, David Irving is quoted as saying "There is no explicit reference...to the liquidation of Jews" and critics of Holocaust denial consequently state that it is dishonest to say such a thing when it is entirely contradicted by the diary of one of Hitler's closest associates. David Cole has previously stated that those who consider themselves revisionists have yet to provide an adequate explanation of this document.
When questioned by interrogators if orders for the extermination of Jews were delegated in writing by Himmler, Adolf Eichmann states:
I never saw a written order, Herr Hauptmann. All I know is that Heydrich said to me: "The Führer has ordered the physical extermination of the Jews." He said that as clearly and surely as I'm repeating it now.
Critics state that Eichmann gives a virtually identical account of this in his memoirs, and state that it is also asserted that Eichmann never even asked for a written order, on the basis that "Hitler's wish as expressed through Himmler and Heydrich was good enough for him". Eichmann's memoirs were recorded by Willem Sassen before he was captured, and Eichmann's lawyer tried to prevent them from being presented as evidence to avoid any detriment against his case.
In a speech, David Irving states that Heydrich told Eichmann, "The Führer has given the order for the physical destruction of the Jews". Irving admits that this contradicts his view that "Hitler wasn't involved", but explains it by suggesting that a completely different meaning can be construed, i.e. "the extirpation of Judaism" as opposed to the physical destruction of Jews if one changes "just one or two words". Critics of this view state that historians should not change words if their documents contradict their claims, and consequently point out five instances where Eichmann unambiguously states "physical extermination" during his interrogation.
At a conference in 1941 discussing the Jewish Question, Alfred Rosenberg said:
Some six million Jews still live in the East, and this question can only be solved by a biological extermination of the whole of Jewry in Europe. The Jewish Question will only be solved for Germany when the last Jew has left German territory, and for Europe when not a single Jew stands on the European continent as far as the Urals... And to this end it is necessary to force them beyond the Urals or otherwise bring about their eradication.
Awareness
Congruent with the evidence that shows Hitler was responsible for the order to kill Jews, there is also evidence that shows he was made aware of the process. In December 1942 Hitler received a document from Himmler entitled, "Report to the Führer on Combating Partisans", stating that 363,211 Jews had been killed by Einsatzgruppen in August-November 1942. This document was marked "Shown to the Führer".
As noted by Peter Longerich, Gestapo Chief Heinrich Müller sent a telegram on August 2, 1941, ordering that "especially interesting illustrative" material should be sent to Berlin because, "the Führer should be presented with continuous reports on the work of Einsatzgruppen in the East from here". Because of this, critics of Holocaust denial reject the suggestion that Hitler lost interest in anti-semitism after attaining power in 1933, finding it "hard to believe that a man who had lost his anti-semitism was so interested in situational reports on the killings of Jewish men, women and children while engaged in a war."
Himmler's speeches and "Ausrottung"
Critics of Holocaust denial state that the claim by deniers of no Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews is completely discredited by Himmler in a speech made on October 4, 1943 to a gathering of SS officers in Pozna?, where he said:
In addition to the Posen speeches, studies have shown that the mass of ordinary Germans at the time knew about the existence of the death and concentration camps:
"Hitler exterminated the Jews of Europe. But he did not do so alone. The task was so enormous, complex, time-consuming, and mentally and economically demanding that it took the best efforts of millions of Germans... All spheres of life in Germany actively participated: Businessmen, policemen, bankers, doctors, lawyers, soldiers, railroad and factory workers, chemists, pharmacists, foremen, production managers, economists, manufacturers, jewelers, diplomats, civil servants, propagandists, film makers and film stars, professors, teachers, politicians, mayors, party members, construction experts, art dealers, architects, landlords, janitors, truck drivers, clerks, industrialists, scientists, generals, and even shopkeepers--all were essential cogs in the machinery that accomplished the final solution." - Konnilyn G. Feig
Use of gas chambers
There have been claims by Holocaust deniers that the gas chambers which mainstream historians believe were for the massacre of civilians never existed, but rather that the structures identified as gas chambers actually served other purposes. These other purposes include cadaver storage, delousing, and disinfection. A similar argument is sometimes used that claims gas was not used to murder Jews and other victims, and that many gas chambers were also built after the war just for show. A document advancing this theory is the Leuchter report by Fred A. Leuchter, a paper stating that only traces of cyanide were found when he examined samples taken from one of the Auschwitz gas chambers in 1988. This is often cited as evidence that gas was not used in the chambers, as no trace amounts remain. Despite the difficulty of finding traces of this material 50 years later, in February, 1990, Professor Jan Markiewicz, Director of the Institute of Forensic Research in Kraków, redid the analysis. Markiewicz and his team used microdiffusion techniques to test for cyanide in samples from the suspected gas chambers, from delousing chambers, and from control areas elsewhere within Auschwitz. The control samples tested negative, while cyanide residue was found in high concentrations in the delousing chambers, and lower concentrations in the homicidal gas chambers. This is consistent with the amounts required to kill lice and humans.
The search for cyanide in the bricks of buildings said to be gas chambers was important, because the pesticide Zyklon B would generate such a residue. This was the gas most often cited as the instrument of death for prisoners in the gas chambers, supported by both testimony and evidence collected of Nazi policy.
Another claim made by Holocaust deniers is that there were no specially-constructed vents in the gas chambers through which Zyklon B could be released. The BBC offers a response showing that this requires disregard of much documentation:
Deniers have said for years that physical evidence is lacking because they have seen no holes in the roof of the Birkenau gas chamber where the Zyklon was poured in. (In some of the gas chambers the Zyklon B was poured in through the roof, while in others it was thrown in through the windows.) The roof was dynamited at war's end, and today lies broken in pieces, but three of the four original holes were positively identified in a recent paper. Their location in the concrete matches with eyewitness testimony, aerial photos from 1944, and a ground photo from 1943. The physical evidence shows unmistakably that the Zyklon holes were cast into the concrete when the building was constructed.
Leuchter's comment that the camp was "untouched" has been dismissed as nonsense by the Holocaust scholar Robert Jan van Pelt, who explains that the absence of most of the would-be rubble from the crematoria is because the local Polish population returning to the area after the war rebuilt farmhouses to the west with bricks salvaged from rubble in the camp area including from the Birkenau crematoria.
Another piece of evidence Holocaust deniers frequently question is what happened to the ash after the bodies were cremated. The amount of ash produced in the cremation of a person is about a shoebox full, if done in a proper crematorium. However, eyewitness testimonies documented by Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews describe the burning process used in Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec to have carried out in multiple open-air grills where stacks of bodies were burned on top of metal bars. These grills were operated by burning piles of wood underneath. It has been questioned by Holocaust deniers if it would have been possible to burn hundreds of thousands of corpses using the method as documented by Hilberg, especially when the low efficiency of such burning process, the high amounts of wood required and the often windy weather conditions of the camps are taken into account.
Cremation in the open at the Reinhard death camps (Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec) was discussed at Nuremberg on the 7th April 1946 by Georg Konrad Morgen, SS judge and lawyer who investigated crimes committed in Nazi concentration camps. He stated: "The whole thing was like an assembly line. At the last stop they reached a big room, and were told that this was the bath. When the last one was in, the doors were shut and the gas was let into the room. As soon as death taken place in (sic), the ventilators were started. When the air was breathable, the doors were opened, and the Jewish workers removed the bodies. By means of a special process which Wirth had invented, they were burned in the open air without the use of fuel."
There is well-documented evidence that other ash was used as fertilizer in nearby fields. Photographs of Treblinka taken by the camp commandant show what looks to be ash piles being distributed by steam shovels.
Another argument used by Holocaust deniers is that testimony on the gas chambers is unreliable. The Institute for Historical Review is one of the organizations which make this assertion. In the words of the IHR:
"Hoss [Hoess] said in his confession that his men would smoke cigarettes as they pulled the dead Jews out of the gas chambers ten minutes after gassing. Isn't Zyklon-B explosive? Highly so. The Hoss confession is obviously false."
The Nizkor Project and other sources have stated that the minimal concentration of Zyklon-B to be explosive is 56,000 parts per million, while the amount used to kill a human is 300 parts per million, as is evidenced in "The Merck Index" and the "CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics". In fact, the Nazis' own documentation stated "Danger of explosion: 75 grams of HCN in 1 cubic meter of air. Normal application approx. 8-10 grams per cubic meter, therefore not explosive."
The Institute for Historical Review publicly offered a reward of $50,000 for verifiable "proof that gas chambers for the purpose of killing human beings existed at or in Auschwitz." Mel Mermelstein, a survivor of Auschwitz, submitted his own testimony as proof but it was ignored. He then sued IHR in the United States and the case was subsequently settled for $50,000, plus $40,000 in damages for personal suffering. The court declared the statement that "Jews were gassed to death at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Poland during the summer of 1944" was a fact.
Death toll
Six million
The figure of "six million" (which refers only to Jewish victims, and is larger when counting the other ethnic, religious, and minority groups targeted for extinction) is often minimized by such claims to a figure of only 1 million deaths, or only 300,000 deaths. By contrast, the vast majority of scholars, institutions, and even Nazi officials estimate between five and six million Jews perished during the Holocaust, while some claim the number could possibly be even higher. With over 3 million Jewish victims' names collected by Yad Vashem, numerous documents and archives discovered after the war gave meticulous accounts of the exterminations that took place at the death camps (such as Auschwitz and Treblinka). The Nizkor project conducted a thorough research about this claim as well, and found the number of Jewish death to be at least 5.65 million.
Deniers claim that these documents are based on Soviet propaganda, primarily from Ilya Ehrenburg's Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, and are therefore unreliable. Complicating the matter is that various instances have been reported where the death tolls of particular death camps were claimed to be overstated. These claims vary in verifiability and objectivity. A much-quoted instance of disputing the toll is the "Breitbard Document" (actually a paper by Aaron Breitbart), which describes a commemorative plaque at Auschwitz to the victims that died there, which read, Four million people suffered and died here at the hands of the Nazi murderers between the years 1940 and 1945. In 1990, a new plaque replaced the old one. It now says, May this place where the Nazis assassinated 1,500,000 men, women and children, a majority of them Jews from diverse European countries, be forever for mankind a cry of despair and of warning. The lower numbers are due to the fact that the Soviets "purposely overstated the number of non-Jewish casualties at Auschwitz-Birkenau," according to the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Holocaust deniers insist that the number of Jews killed therefore be lowered by at least 2.5 million. However, the plaque had never been used as an accurate historical source by mainstream historians. As early as the 1950s, Raul Hillberg estimated 1.1 million Jewish deaths in Auschwitz.
Pre-war accounts of six million Jews facing threat of extermination
Holocaust deniers argue that the multiple pre-World War II claims of precisely six million Jews facing extermination, like former New York Governor Martin Glynn's 1919 article The Crucifixion of Jews Must Stop!, suggests the reported death toll is inaccurate and was invented to fit propaganda.
International Committee of the Red Cross
Holocaust deniers misrepresent and omit information contained in ICRC reports that contradict their claims. Critics argue that Richard Harwood in his "Did Six Million Really Die?" pamphlet could only claim that the ICRC had found no evidence of a policy to exterminate Jews by ignoring key sections of the 1948 report, where the ICRC explicitly states that the systematic extermination of Jews was Nazi policy.
Harwood disputed the notion that homicidal gas chambers were disguised as shower facilities by citing references in the report where ICRC officials inspected bathing facilities. He used their responses to argue that showers functioned as showers and were not part of a killing installation. However this is considered misrepresentation by critics, as the passage Harwood cited is in reference to Allied camps for civilians in Egypt and thus had nothing to do with Nazi concentration camps.
Harwood also claimed that Die Tat, a Swiss tabloid newspaper, published statistics that concluded the number of people who died in Nazi prisons and camps from 1939 to 1945 based on ICRC statistics was "300,000, not all of whom were Jews". The January 19, 1955 edition of Die Tat did indeed give a 300,000 figure, but this was only in reference to "Germans and German Jews" and not nationals of other countries. In the 1978 official bulletin, entitled "False Propaganda", the ICRC denounced Holocaust denial and confirmed that the agency "Never published--or even compiled--statistics of this kind which are being falsely attributed to it" and stated that its mission was "to help war victims, not to count them", and questioned how they would have even been able to obtain such statistics had they wanted to, given that they were "only able to enter only a few concentration camps...in the final days of the war". The agency states that the figures used are "the number of deaths recorded by the International Tracing Service on the basis of documents found when the camps were closed", and accordingly bear no relation to the total death tolls, since the Nazis destroyed much documentation, and that many deaths occurred in camps where prisoners were generally not registered. The ICRC considers this misrepresentation as "propaganda", and because these claims regarding the ICRC were used for the defense of Ernst Zündel at his trial in 1985, critics state that despite the agency's attempts to demonstrate the truth, Holocaust deniers have continued to rely on ICRC based disinformation. Archives of the International Tracing Service (located in Bad Arolsen) responding to such misrepresentation can be found here. In 1979, the ICRC stated a second time that they have "never tried to compile statistics on the victims of the war", nor "certified the accuracy of the statistics produced by a third party", and state that the authors of such material have "falsified" both claims that the document originates from the ICRC and refers exclusively to Jews.
As well as in personal correspondence, the ICRC has also addressed this misrepresentation by several other means. In 1975, the ICRC wrote to the Board of Deputies of British Jews in London regarding Harwood's citations, stating:
The figures cited by the author of the booklet are based upon statistics falsely attributed to us, evidently for the purpose of giving them credibility, despite the fact that we never publish information of this kind.
Baseler Nachrichten
Similarly, Harwood wrote that the June 4, 1946 edition of Baseler Nachrichten, another Swiss newspaper, reported that "a maximum of only one and a half million Jews could be numbered as casualties. Harwood fails to mention that a later article in a later edition of the newspaper acknowledges that the previous article was incorrect, and 5,800,000 was an accurate number of victims. Critics cite this as an example of deniers using partial information to distort legitimate sources.
Jewish population
One Holocaust denial argument is the comparison of the population of Jews before and after the Holocaust. They state that the 1940 World Almanac gives the world Jewish population as 15,319,359, while the 1948 World Almanac gives the world Jewish population as 15,713,638. They therefore claim that either the figures are wrong, or the Holocaust, meaning the deaths of millions of Jews, cannot have happened to any extent similar to the claimed 6 million. Ken McVay writes:
Only in 1949 are postwar estimates employed, the figures given are for estimates made in 1948. A year or two lag seems to be common for various other population estimates given by the World Almanac. The difference between the 1938 and 1948 figures is thus 4,481,491. In 1949, however, the World Almanac gives a revised 1939 population of 16,643,120 giving a difference of between 1938 and 1947 of 5,376,520. Where the extra population between 1938 and 1939 came from is not cited, though one might speculate that it was based upon the Nazi estimates made in 1942 for the Wannsee Conference. Despite the apparent exactness of the numbers listed, the World Almanac warns that all numbers listed are estimates.
Other sources confirm similar numbers--and earlier than the 1949 World Almanac--for the Jewish population before and after the war. The 1932 American Jewish Yearbook estimate the total number of Jews in the world at 15,192,218, of whom 9,418,248 resided in Europe. However, the 1947 yearbook states: "Estimates of the world Jewish population have been assembled by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (except for the United States and Canada) and are probably the most authentic available at the present time. The figures reveal that the total Jewish population of the world has decreased by one-third from about 16,600,000 in 1939 to about 11,000,000 in 1946 as the result of the annihilation by the Nazis of more than five and a half million European Jews. In Europe only an estimated 3,642,000 remain of the total Jewish pre-war population of approximately 9,740,000." These numbers are also consistent with the findings of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, Appendix III, in 1946.
Nazi documentation
The Nazis used figures of between 9 and 11 million for the Jewish population of Europe, as evidenced in the notes of the Wannsee Conference. In fact, the Nazis methodically recorded the ongoing reduction of the Jewish population, as in the Korherr Report, which gave the status of the Final Solution through December 1942. The Höfle Telegram was sent by SS-Sturmbannführer Hermann Höfle on January 11, 1943 to SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann in Berlin and detailed the number of deaths of Jews in the concentration camps. In the year 1942 alone, the telegram lists 1,274,166 Jews were exterminated in the four camps of Aktion Reinhard. The Korherr Report compiled by an SS statistician, gave a conservative total of 2,454,000 Jews deported to extermination camps or killed by the Einsatzgruppen. The complete status reports of the Einsatzgruppen death squads were found in the archives of the Gestapo when it was searched by the U.S. Army, and the accuracy attested to by the former Einsatzgruppen members who testified during war crime trials and at other times. These reports alone list an additional 1,500,000 or so murders during mass shootings, the vast majority of these victims were Jews. Further, surviving Nazi documentation spells out their plans to murder the Jews of Europe (see the Wannsee Conference), recorded the trains arriving at various death camps, and included photographs and films of many atrocities.
Testimonies
There are voluminous amounts of testimony from thousands of survivors of the Holocaust, as well as the testimony of captured Nazi officers at the Nuremberg Trials and other times. Holocaust deniers discount the testimony of officers claiming that these witnesses were tortured or that Rudolf Höss allegedly signed a confession written in a language he did not understand (English) or that the Nuremberg Trial did not follow proper judicial procedures. However, Höss's testimony did not consist of merely a signed confession; while in jail he also wrote two volumes of memoirs and gave extensive testimony outside of the Nuremberg proceedings. Further, his testimony agrees with that of other contemporary written accounts by Auschwitz officials, such as Pery Broad, an SS man stationed at Auschwitz while Höss was the commandant and the diary kept by SS physician at Auschwitz Johann Kremer, as well as the testimony of hundreds of camp guards and victims. In addition, former SS personnel have criticised Holocaust denial. SS-Oberscharführer Josef Klehr has said that anyone who maintains that nobody was gassed at Auschwitz must be "crazy or on the wrong". SS-Unterscharführer Oswald Kaduk has stated that he does not consider those who maintain such a thing as normal people. Hearing about Holocaust denial compelled former SS-Rottenführer Oskar Gröning to publicly speak about what he witnessed at Auschwitz, and denounce Holocaust deniers, stating:
I would like you to believe me. I saw the gas chambers. I saw the crematoria. I saw the open fires. I was on the ramp when the selections took place. I would like you to believe that these atrocities happened because I was there.
Sonderkommandos provide another key piece of testimony. There were Jewish prisoners who helped march Jews to the gas chambers, and later dragged the bodies to the crematoria. Since they witnessed the entire process, their testimony is vital in confirming that the gas chambers were used for murderous purposes and the scale to which they were used.
Other key testimony comes from non-Jewish survivors of the camps such as Catholic French Resistance member André Rogerie who was held in seven different camps, and who as a member of the Resistance was not targeted for extermination but for hard labor and survived. After the war Rogerie wrote and testified extensively about his experiences in the camps including Auschwitz-Birkenau where he viewed and produced the oldest contemporary sketch of a camp crematorium.
Denial as antisemitism
Holocaust denial is generally viewed as antisemitic. Walter Reich, professor of international affairs at George Washington University and former director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, stated, "The primary motivation for most deniers is anti-Semitism." The Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity describes Holocaust denial as "a new form of anti-Semitism, but one that hinges on age-old motifs." According to the Anti-Defamation League, "Holocaust denial is a contemporary form of the classic anti-Semitic doctrine of the evil, manipulative and threatening world Jewish conspiracy." French historian Valérie Igounet wrote, "Holocaust denial is a convenient polemical substitute for anti-semitism." In 2005, the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia published a working definition of antisemitism that included "denying the fact, scope, mechanisms (e.g. gas chambers) or intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of National Socialist Germany and its supporters and accomplices during World War II (the Holocaust)".
See also
- Rainer Höss, grandson of Rudolf.
- Historical revisionism (negationism)
- Deborah Lipstadt
- Laws against Holocaust denial
Notes
References
External links
- The Holocaust History Project
- The Nizkor Project
- Holocaust Denial on Trial, Emory University
- Voices on Antisemitism Interview with Deborah Lipstadt from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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