holocaust.txt - A Reply to the IHR/Zündel's "Q&A" Number 1

                                   QAR 1:

                 A Reply to the IHR/Zündel's "Q&A" Number 1

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1. What proof exists that the Nazis practiced genocide or deliberately
killed six million Jews?

The IHR says (original, Samisdat, and revised versions combined):

     None. The only evidence is the postwar testimony of individual
     "survivors." This testimony is contradictory, and no "survivor"
     claims to have actually witnessed any gassing. There are no
     contemporaneous documents and no hard evidence whatsoever: no
     mounds of ashes, no crematoria capable of disposing of millions
     of corpses, no piles of clothes, no human soap, no lamp shades
     made of human skin, no records, no credible demographic
     statistics.

Nizkor replies:

     Lie piled upon lie, with not a shred of proof.

     This is as good a place as any to present some detailed evidence
     which is consistently ignored, as a sort of primer on Holocaust
     denial. It will make this reply much longer than the other
     sixty-five, but perhaps the reader will understand the necessity
     for this.

     Let's look at their claims one at a time:

   * Supposedly the only evidence, "the postwar testimony of
     individual survivors."

     First of all, consider the implicit conspiracy theory. Notice how
     the testimony of every single inmate of every Nazi camp is
     automatically dismissed as unconvincing. This total dismissal of
     inmates' testimony, along with the equally-total dismissal of the
     Nazis' own testimony (!), is the largest unspoken assumption of
     Holocaust-denial.

     This assumption, which is not often spelled out, is that the
     attempted Jewish genocide never took place, but rather that a
     secret conspiracy of Jews, starting around 1941, planted and
     forged myriad documents to prove that it did; then, after the
     war, they rounded up all the camp survivors and told them what to
     say.

     The conspirators also supposedly managed to torture hundreds of
     key Nazis into confessing to crimes which they never committed,
     or into framing their fellow Nazis for those crimes, and to plant
     hundreds of documents in Nazi files which were never discovered
     until after the war, and only then, in many cases, by sheer luck.
     Goebbels' diary, for example, was barely rescued from being sold
     as 7,000 pages of scrap paper, but buried in the scattered
     manuscript were several telling entries (as translated in
     Lochner, The Goebbels Diaries, 1948, pp. 86, 147-148):

          February 14, 1942: The Fⁿhrer 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: The procedure is a pretty barbaric one
          and not to be described here more definitely. Not much
          will remain of the Jews. On the whole it can be said
          that about 60 per cent of them will have to be
          liquidated whereas only 40 per cent can be used for
          forced labor.

     Michael Shermer has pointed out that the Nazis' own estimate of
     the number of European Jews was eleven million, and sixty percent
     of eleven million is 6.6 million. This is fairly close to the
     actual figure. (Actually, forty percent was a serious
     overestimate of the survival rate of Jews who were captured, but
     there were many Jews who escaped.)

     In any case, most of the diary is quite mundane, and interesting
     only to historians. Did the supposed Jewish conspiracy forge
     seven thousand pages to insert just a few lines? How did they
     manage to know Goebbels' affairs intimately enough to avoid
     contradictions, e.g. putting him or his associates in the wrong
     city at the wrong date?

     As even the revisionist David Cole has admitted, revisionists
     have yet to provide a satisfactory explanation of this document.

     Regarding postwar testimony from Nazis, were they all tortured
     into confessing to heinous crimes which they supposedly did not
     commit? This might be believable if only a few Nazis were
     captured after the war, or maybe if some had courageously stood
     up in court and shouted to the world about the supposed attempt
     to silence them. But hundreds testified regarding the Holocaust,
     in trials dating from late 1945 until the 1960s. (For example,
     see B÷ck, Hofmann, H÷ssler, Klein, Mⁿnch, and Stark.)

     Many of these Nazis testified as witnesses and were not accused
     of crimes. What was the basis for their supposed coercion?

     Many of these trials were in German courts. Did the Germans
     torture their own countrymen? Well, Holocaust-deniers sometimes
     claim that the Jews have secretly infiltrated the German
     government and control everything about it. They prefer not to
     talk too much about this theory, however, because it is clearly
     on the lunatic fringe.

     The main point is that not one of these supposed torture victims
     -- in fifty years, not one -- has come forth to support the claim
     that testimony was coerced.

     On the contrary, confirmation and reconfirmation of their
     testimony has continued across the years. What coercion could
     have convinced Judge Konrad Morgen to testify to the crimes he
     witnessed at the International Nuremberg Trial in 1946, where he
     was not accused of any crime? And to later testify at the
     Auschwitz trial at Frankfurt, Germany, in 1963-65? What coercion
     was applied to SS Doctor Johann Kremer to make him testify in his
     own defense in 1947, and then, after having been convicted in
     both Poland and Germany, emerge after his release to testify
     again as a witness at the Frankfurt trial? What coercion was
     applied to B÷ck, Gerhard Hess, H÷lblinger, Storch, and Wiebeck,
     all former SS men, all witnesses at Frankfurt, none accused of
     any crime there?

     Holocaust-deniers point to small discrepancies in testimonies to
     try to discredit them. The assumption, unstated, is that the
     reader will accept minor discrepancies as evidence of a vast,
     over-reaching Jewish conspiracy. This is clearly ludicrous.

     In fact, the discrepancies and minor errors in detail argue
     against, not for, the conspiracy theory. Why would the
     conspirators have given different information to different Nazis?
     In fact, if all the testimonies, from the Nazis' to the inmates',
     sounded too similar, it is certain that the Holocaust-deniers
     would cite that as evidence of a conspiracy.

     What supposed coercion could reach across four decades, to force
     former SS-Untersturmfⁿhrer Dr. Hans Mⁿnch to give an interview,
     against the will of his family, on Swedish television? In the
     1981 interview, he talked about Auschwitz:

          Interviewer: Isn't the ideology of extermination
          contrary to a doctor's ethical values?

          Mⁿnch: Yes, absolutely. There is no discussion. But I
          lived in that environment, and I tried in every
          possible way to avoid accepting it, but I had to live
          with it. What else could I have done? And I wasn't
          confronted with it directly until the order came that I
          and my superior and another one had to take part in the
          exterminations since the camp's doctors were overloaded
          and couldn't cope with it.

          Interviewer: I must ask something. Doubters claim that
          "special treatment" could mean anything. It didn't have
          to be extermination.

          Mⁿnch: "Special treatment" in the terminology of the
          concentration camp means physical extermination. If it
          was a question of more than a few people, where nothing
          else than gassing them was worthwhile, they were
          gassed.

          Interviewer: "Special treatment" was gassing?

          Mⁿnch: Yes, absolutely.

     And what supposed coercion could reach across four decades, to
     force former SS-Unterscharfⁿhrer Franz Suchomel into giving an
     interview for the film Shoah? Speaking under (false) promises of
     anonymity, he told of the crimes committed at the Treblinka death
     camp (from the book Shoah, Claude Lanzmann, 1985, p. 54):

          Interviewer: You are a very important eyewitness, and
          you can explain what Treblinka was.

          Suchomel: But don't use my name.

          Interviewer: No, I promised. All right, you've arrived
          at Treblinka.

          Suchomel: So Stadie, the sarge, showed us the camps
          from end to end. Just as we went by, they were opening
          the gas-chamber doors, and people fell out like
          potatoes. Naturally, that horrified and appalled us. We
          went back and sat down on our suitcases and cried like
          old women.

          Each day one hundred Jews were chosen to drag the
          corpses to the mass graves. In the evening the
          Ukrainians drove those Jews into the gas chambers or
          shot them. Every day!

     Ask the deniers why they shrug off the testimony of Franz
     Suchomel. Greg Raven will tell you that "it is not
     evidence...bring me some evidence, please." Others will tell you
     that Suchomel and Mⁿnch were crazy, or hallucinating, or
     fantasizing.

     But the fantasy is obviously in the minds of those who choose to
     ignore the mass of evidence and believe instead in a hypothetical
     conspiracy, supported by nothing but their imaginations.

     That total lack of evidence is why the "conspiracy assumption"
     almost always remains an unspoken assumption. To our knowledge,
     there has not been one single solitary "revisionist" paper,
     article, speech, pamphlet, book, audiotape, videotape, or
     newsletter which provides any details about this supposed
     Jewish/Zionist conspiracy which did all the dirty work. Not one.

     At best, the denial literature makes veiled references to the
     World Jewish Congress perpetuating a "hoax" (in Butz, 1976) -- no
     details are provided. Yet the entire case of Holocaust-denial
     rests on this supposed conspiracy.

     As for the testimony of the survivors, which the "revisionists"
     claim is the only evidence, there are indeed numerous testimonies
     to gassings and other forms of atrocities, from Jewish inmates
     who survived the camps, and also from other inmates like POWs.
     Many of the prisoners that testified about the gassing are not
     Jewish, of course. Look for instance at the testimony of Polish
     officer Zenon Rozansky about the first homicidal gassing in
     Auschwitz, in which 850 Russian POWs were gassed to death, in
     Reitlinger, The Final Solution, p. 154:

          Those who were propped against the door leant with a
          curious stiffness and then fell right at our feet,
          striking their faces hard against the concrete floor.
          Corpses! Corpses standing bolt upright and filling the
          entire corridor of the bunker, till they were packed so
          tight that it was impossible for more to fall.

     Which of the "revisionists" will deny this? Which of them was
     there? Which of them has the authority to tell Rozansky what he
     did or did not see?

     The statement that "no 'survivor' claims to have actually
     witnessed any gassing" is clearly false; this was changed to "few
     survivors" in later versions, which is close to the truth.

     But we do not need to rely solely on testimony, from the
     survivors, Nazis, or otherwise. Many wartime documents, not
     postwar descriptions, specifically regarding gassings and other
     atrocities, were seized by the U.S. armed forces. Most are in the
     National Archives in Washington, D.C.; some are in Germany.

     Regarding the gassing vans, precursors to the gas chambers, we
     find, for example, a top secret document from SS Untersturmfⁿhrer
     Becker to SS Obersturmbannfⁿhrer Rauff (from Nazi Conspiracy and
     Aggression, 1946, Vol. I, pp. 999-1001):

          If it has rained for instance for only one half hour,
          the van cannot be used because it simply skids away. It
          can only be used in absolutely dry weather. It is only
          a question now whether the van can only be used
          standing at the place of execution. First the van has
          to be brought to that place, which is possible only in
          good weather. ...

          The application of gas usually is not undertaken
          correctly. In order to come to an end as fast as
          possible, the driver presses the accelerator to the
          fullest extent. By doing that the persons to be
          executed suffer death from suffocation and not death by
          dozing off as was planned. My directions now have
          proved that by correct adjustment of the levers death
          comes faster and the prisoners fall asleep peacefully.

     And Just wrote of the gas vans to Rauff, on June 5, 1942, in a
     letter marked both "top secret" and "only copy". This is a
     horrific masterpiece of Nazi double-talk, referring to killing as
     "processing" and the victims as "subjects" and "the load." (See
     Kogon, Nazi Mass Murder, 1993, pp. 228-235.)

          Since December 1941, for example, 97,000 were processed
          using three vans, without any faults occurring in the
          vehicles. ...

          The normal capacity of the vans is nine to ten per
          square meter. The capacity of the larger special Saurer
          vans is not so great. The problem is not one of
          overloading but of off-road maneuverability on all
          terrains, which is severely diminished in this van. It
          would appear that a reduction in the cargo area is
          necessary. This can be achieved by shortening the
          compartment by about one meter. The problem cannot be
          solved by merely reducing the number of subject
          treated, as has been done so far. For in this case a
          longer running time is required, as the empty space
          also needs to be filled with CO [the poison exhaust
          gas]. ...

          Greater protection is needed for the lighting system.
          The grille should cover the lamps high enough up to
          make it impossible to break the bulbs. It seems that
          these lamps are hardly ever turned on, so the users
          have suggested that they could be done away with.
          Experience shows, however, that when the back door is
          closed and it gets dark inside, the load pushes hard
          against the door. The reason for this is that when it
          becomes dark inside, the load rushes toward what little
          light remains. This hampers the locking of the door. It
          has also been noticed that the noise provoked by the
          locking of the door is linked to the fear aroused by
          the darkness.

     Slip-ups occurred in written correspondence regarding the gas
     chambers themselves, some of which, fortunately, escaped
     destruction and were found after the war. A memo written to SS
     man Karl Bischoff on November 27, 1942 describes the gas chamber
     in Krema II not with the usual mundane name of "Leichenkeller,"
     but rather as the "Sonderkeller" "special cellar."

     And two months later, on January 29, 1943, Bischoff wrote a memo
     to Kammler, referring to that same chamber as the
     "Vergasungskeller." (See Gutman, Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death
     Camp, 1994, pp. 223, 227.) "Vergasungskeller" means exactly what
     it sounds like: "gassing cellar," an underground gas chamber.

     Holocaust-deniers turn to Arthur Butz, who provides a specious
     explanation for the Vergasungskeller: "Vergasung," he says,
     cannot refer to killing people with gas, but only to the process
     of converting a solid or liquid into gas. Therefore, he says the
     "Vergasungskeller," must have been a special room where the fuel
     for the Auschwitz ovens was converted into gas -- a "gasification
     cellar."

     There are three problems with this explanation. First,
     "Vergasung" certainly can refer to killing people with gas; Butz
     does not speak German and he should not try to lecture about the
     language. Second, there is no room that could possibly serve this
     function which Butz describes -- years after writing his book, he
     admitted this, and helplessly suggested that there might be
     another building somewhere in the camp that might house a
     gasification cellar. Third, the type of oven used at Auschwitz
     did not require any gasification process! The ovens burned solid
     fuel. (See Gutman, op. cit., pp. 184-193.)

     So what does the term "gassing cellar" refer to?
     Holocaust-deniers have yet to offer any believable explanation.

     An inventory, again captured after the war, revealed fourteen
     showerheads and one gas-tight door listed for the gas chamber in
     Krema III. Holocaust-deniers claim that room was a morgue; they
     do not offer to explain what use a morgue has for showerheads and
     a gas-tight door. (See a photograph of the document, or Pressac,
     Auschwitz: Technique and Operation, 1989, pp. 231, 438.)

     A memo from the Auschwitz construction office, dated March 31,
     1943, says (Hilberg, Documents of Destruction, 1971, pp.
     207-208):

          We take this occasion to refer to another order of
          March 6, 1943, for the delivery of a gas door 100/192
          for Leichenkeller 1 of Krema III, Bw 30a, which is to
          be built in the manner and according to the same
          measure as the cellar door of the opposite Krema II,
          with peep hole of double 8 millimeter glass encased in
          rubber. This order is to be viewed as especially
          urgent....

     Why would morgues have urgently needed peepholes made out of a
     double layer of third-of-an-inch-thick glass?

     The question of whether it can be proved that the cyanide gas was
     used in the Auschwitz gas chambers has intruiged the deniers.
     Their much-heralded Leuchter Report, for example, expends a great
     deal of effort on the question of whether traces of cyanide
     residue remain there today. But we do not need to look for
     chemical traces to confirm cyanide use (Gutman, op. cit., p.
     229):

          Letters and telegrams exchanged on February 11 and 12
          [1943] between the Zentralbauleitung and Topf mention a
          wooden blower for Leichenkeller 1. This reference
          confirms the use of the morgue as a gas chamber:
          Bischoff and Prⁿfer thought that the extraction of air
          mixed with concentrated prussic acid [cyanide] (20 g
          per cu m) required a noncorroding ventilator.

     Bischoff and Prⁿfer turned out to be wrong, and a metal fan ended
     up working acceptably well. But the fact that they thought it
     necessary demonstrates that cyanide was to be routinely used in
     the rooms which deniers call morgues. (Cyanide is useless for
     disinfecting morgues, as it does not kill bacteria.)

     Other captured documents, even if they don't refer directly to
     some part of the extermination process, refer to it by
     implication. A captured memo to SS-Brigadefⁿhrer Kammler reveals
     that the expected incineration capacity of the Auschwitz ovens
     was a combined total of 4,756 corpses per day (see a photograph
     of the document or Kogon, op. cit., p. 157).

     Deniers often claim that this total could not be achieved in
     practice (see question 45). That's not the point. These
     crematoria were carefully designed, in 1942, to have sufficient
     capacity to dispose of 140,000 corpses per month -- in a camp
     that housed only 125,000. We can conclude that massive deaths
     were predicted, indeed planned-for, as early as mid-1942. A camp
     designed to incinerate its full capacity of inmates every four
     weeks is not merely a detention center.

     Finally, apart from the abundant testimonies, confessions, and
     physical evidence of the extermination process, there is
     certainly no want of evidence of the Nazis' intentions and plans.

     Here are just a few examples. Hans Frank's diary (from Nazi
     Conspiracy and Aggression, 1946, Vol. I, pp. 992, 994):

          But what should be done with the Jews? Do you think
          they will be settled down in the 'Ostland' [eastern
          territories], in [resettlement] villages? This is what
          we were told in Berlin: Why all this bother? We can do
          nothing with them either in the 'Ostland' nor in the
          'Reichkommissariat.' So liquidate them yourself.

          Gentlemen, I must ask you to rid yourself of all
          feeling of pity. We must annihilate the Jews, wherever
          we find them and wherever it is possible, in order to
          maintain the structure of the Reich as a whole. ...

          We cannot shoot or poison these 3,500,000 Jews, but we
          shall nevertheless be able to take measures, which will
          lead, somehow, to their annihilation....

          That we sentence 1,200,000 Jews to die of hunger should
          be noted only marginally.

     Himmler's speech at Posen on October 4, 1943 was captured on
     audiotape (Trial of the Major War Criminals, 1948, Vol. XXIX, p.
     145, trans. by current author):

          I refer now to the evacuation of the Jews, the
          extermination of the Jewish people. This is one of
          those things that is easily said: "the Jewish people
          are being exterminated," says every Party member,
          "quite true, it's part of our plans, the elimination of
          the Jews, extermination, we're doing it."

     The extermination effort was even mentioned in at least one
     official Nazi court verdict. In May 1943, a Munich court wrote in
     its decision against SS-Untersturmfⁿhrer Max Taubner that:

          The accused shall not be punished because of the
          actions against the Jews as such. The Jews have to be
          exterminated and none of the Jews that were killed is
          any great loss. Although the accused should have
          recognized that the extermination of the Jews was the
          duty of Kommandos which were set up especially for this
          purpose, he should be excused for considering himself
          to have the authority to take part in the extermination
          of Jewry himself.

     And Hitler spoke quite clearly in public on no fewer than three
     occasions. On January 30, 1939, seven months before Germany
     invaded Poland, he spoke publicly to the Reichstag (transcribed
     from Skeptic magazine, Vol. 2, No. 4, p. 50):

          Today I want to be a prophet once more: if
          international finance Jewry inside and outside of
          Europe should succeed once more in plunging nations
          into another world war, the consequence will not be the
          Bolshevation of the earth and thereby the victory of
          Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in
          Europe.

     By the way, this last phrase is, in German, "die Vernichtung der
     jⁿdischen Rasse in Europa," which German-speakers will realize is
     quite unambiguous.

     In September, 1942:

          ...if Jewry should plot another world war in order to
          exterminate the Aryan peoples in Europe, it would not
          be the Aryan people which would be exterminated but
          Jewry...

     On November 8, 1942:

          You will recall the session of the Reichstag during
          which I declared: if Jewry should imagine that it could
          bring about an international world war to exterminate
          the European races, the result will not be the
          extermination of the European races, but the
          extermination of Jewry in Europe. People always laughed
          about me as a prophet. Of those who laughed then,
          countless numbers no longer laugh today, and those who
          still laugh now will perhaps no longer laugh a short
          time from now.

     There are many other examples of documents and testimonies that
     could be presented.

     Keep in mind that the IHR's answer to "what proof exists?" is
     "none." It has certainly been demonstrated already that this pat
     answer is totally dishonest. And this is the main point we wish
     to communicate: that Holocaust-denial is dishonest.

     We continue by analyzing the remaining, more-specific, claims
     about what evidence supposedly does not exist.

   * "No mounds of ashes" is an internal contradiction. In an article
     in the journal published by the same IHR that publishes these
     Q&A, the Journal's editor reported that a Polish commission in
     1946 found human ash at the Treblinka death camp to a depth of
     over twenty feet. This article is available on Greg Raven's web
     site.

     (Apparently some survivors claimed that the corpses were always
     thoroughly cremated. Because uncremated human remains were mixed
     with the ash, the editor suggested that the testimonies were
     false. Amazingly, he had no comment on how a twenty-foot layer of
     human ashes came to be there in the first place. Perhaps he felt
     that to be unworthy of mention.)

     There are also piles of ashes at Maidanek. At Auschwitz-Birkenau,
     ashes from cremated corpses were dumped into the rivers and
     swamps surrounding the camp, and used as fertilizer for nearby
     farmers' fields.

   * "No crematoria" capable of disposing of millions of corpses?
     Absolutely false, the crematoria were more than capable of the
     job, according to both the Nazis' own internal memos and the
     testimony of survivors. Holocaust-deniers deliberately confuse
     civilian, funeral-home crematoria with the huge industrial ovens
     of the death camps. This is discussed in much detail in the
     replies to questions 42 and 45.

   * "No piles of clothes"? Apparently, the IHR considers piles of
     clothes to be "hard evidence"! This is strange, because they do
     not deny the other sorts of piles found at Nazi camps: piles of
     eyeglasses, piles of shoes (at Auschwitz, Belzec, and Maidanek),
     piles of gold teeth, piles of burned corpses, piles of unburned
     corpses, piles of artificial limbs (see Swiebocka, Auschwitz: A
     History in Photographs, 1993, p. 210), piles of human hair (ibid,
     p. 211), piles of ransacked luggage (ibid, p. 213), piles of
     shaving-brushes (ibid, p. 215), piles of combs (ibid), piles of
     pots and pans (ibid), and yes, even the piles of clothes (ibid,
     p. 214) that the IHR claims do not exist.

     Perhaps the authors of the 66 Q&A realized that it was dangerous
     for them to admit that these piles were hard evidence, because
     then they would also be forced to admit a number of other things
     as "hard evidence." Perhaps this is why they removed this phrase
     from the revised 66 Q&A.

     If items were not generally found in mass quantities, it is only
     because the Nazis distributed them to the German population. A
     memo on this was captured, revealing that they even redistributed
     women's underwear.

   * "No human soap"? This is true, but misleading. Though there is
     some evidence that soap was made from corpses on a very limited
     experimental scale, the rumored "mass production" was never done,
     and no soap made from human corpses is known to exist. However,
     there is sworn testimony, never refuted, from British POWs and a
     German army official, stating that soap experiments were
     performed, and the recipe for the soap was captured by the
     Allies. To state flatly that the Nazis did not make soap from
     human beings is incorrect.

   * "No lamp shades made of human skin?" False -- lampshades and
     other human-skin "ornaments" were introduced as evidence in both
     trials of Ilse Koch, and were shown to a U.S. Senate
     investigation committee in the late 40s. We know they were made
     of human skin because they bore tattoos, and because a
     microscopic forensic analysis of the items was performed. (A
     detailed page on this is being prepared.)

   * "No records"? This is nonsense (which may explain why this claim
     was removed from the "revised" versions of the 66 Q&A). True,
     extermination by gassing was always referred to with code-words,
     and those victims who arrived at death camps only to be
     immediately gassed were not recorded in any books. But there are
     slip-ups in the code-word usage that reveal the true meanings, as
     already described. There are inventories and requisitions for the
     Krema which reveal items anomalous with ordinary use but perfect
     for mass homicidal gassing. There are deportation train records
     which, pieced together, speak clearly. And so on. Several
     examples have been given above.

   * "No credible demographic statistics"? This is the second internal
     contradiction -- see question 2 and question 15. The
     Anglo-American committee who studied the issue estimated the
     number of Jewish victims at 5.7 million. This was based on
     population statistics. Here is the exact breakdown, country by
     country:

             Germany -                       195,000
             Austria -                        53,000
             Czechoslovakia -                255,000
             Denmark -                         1,500
             France -                        140,000
             Belgium -                        57,000
             Luxemburg -                       3,000
             Norway -                          1,000
             Holland -                       120,000
             Italy -                          20,000
             Jugoslavia -                     64,000
             Greece -                         64,000
             Bulgaria -                        5,000
             Rumania -                       530,000
             Hungary -                       200,000
             Poland -                      3,271,000
             USSR -                        1,050,000

             Less dispersed refugees        (308,000)

             Total number of Jews killed   5,721,500

     (This estimate was arrived at using population statistics, and
     not by adding the number of casualties at each camp. These are
     also available -- for instance, a separate file with the ruling
     of a German court regarding the number of victims in Treblinka is
     available. The SS kept rather accurate records, and many of the
     documents survived, reinforced by eyewitness accounts).

     Some estimates are lower, some are higher, but this is the
     magnitude in question. In an article in CMU's student newspaper,
     the head of CMU's History Department, Peter Stearns, is quoted as
     saying that newly discovered documents -- especially in the
     former USSR -- indicate that the number of victims is higher than
     six million. Other historians claim not much over five million.
     The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust uses 5,596,000 as a minimum and
     5,860,000 as a maximum (Gutman, 1990, p. 1799).

   * In summary:

     "Revisionists" often claim, correctly, that the burden of proof
     is on historians. The proof, of course, has been a matter of
     public record since late 1945, and is available in libraries
     around the world. The burden has been met, many, many times over.
     You've just seen a brief presentation of some of the highlights
     of that immense body of proof; much more is readily available.

     To even argue that the Holocaust never happened is ludicrous. To
     claim straight-faced that none of this proof even exists is
     beyond ludicrous, and it is a clear example of "revisionist"
     dishonesty.

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The Nizkor Project
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Director: Ken McVay OBC
Writers: Daniel Keren, Jamie McCarthy, and John Morris
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August 24, 1996


- Bjørn Stærk, staerk@fix.no