Holocaust Documents, Part 4: The Holocaust by numbers
Written by Sir Aaron Richards
Mirrored from https://imgur.com/a/725A7
This next section will deal with the numerical extent of the holocaust, the mass graves and medical horrors that are part of it, and includes genocide via Einsatzgruppen and Gas Vans. But first we will begin by debunking supposed "official records" that state very few by comparison, died.
CONTENTS:
Deniers like to implicate the International Red Cross in their holocaust denial
Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 12, p.11 (1978)
International Red Cross letter debunking the denier figure in 1975 already
1984 Arolsen document tallying the documented deaths in some German concentration camps
Swiss newspaper "Die Tat", Jan 19, 1955 mentioning 300,000 victims in jails & concentration camps
Once again, the IRC responds to denier allegations
Conflicting numbers of the Babi Yar massacre
Another denier picture, this time using "World Jewish Almanacs" as proof
Estimate of the American Jewish Committee of Jewish population in the world in 1933
1948/49 "compilation of the latest available data", American Jewish Year Book
The Auschwitz numbers claim
"What about Rudolf Hoess? Surely he spoke of several million victims?"
Debunking the myth about the 6 Million figure already being referenced by newspapers before WW2
Holocaust by country
So where did the Jews go?
Concluding the Holocaust by numbers
Deniers like to implicate the International Red Cross in their holocaust denial
One denier gambit is the claim that the International Red Cross got to visit all concentration and extermination camps, recorded all those that died there, and their numbers only tally up to a low six figure amount. Apart from Theresienstadt, the Potemkin village of Nazi Germany specifically built for propaganda purposes, the IRC was, in fact, not allowed proper and complete access to concentration camps, nevermind the extermination camps.
Pic related shows a poorly made neo-Nazi infographic showing a widely circulated scan of what is supposed to be a purported letter from the Bad Arolsen International Tracing Service from 1979, addressed to a certain "Herr", a Mr.
That this is a letter in German with English words thrown in should already raise the alarm, but we'll continue anyway: the document lists only registered deaths ("beurkundete Sterbefälle") at some Nazi concentration camps. The vast majority of people who died at the death camps were never registered since they didn't enter the camp (e.g. at Auschwitz, see my article about the Auschwitz death books for more) and were marched on immediately to the gas chambers if they failed the Selektion, or in the case of the AR camps, weren't meant to be absorbed into the camp in the first place. So this Bad Arolsen letter and similar correspondence is frequently misrepresented as the absolute death toll of the Holocaust by deniers and attributed to the Red Cross.
Another such widely circulated document among the far right is an essay titled:
"The Jews And The Concentration Camps: A Factual Appraisal By The Red Cross."
sometimes you will find it under an even more self-incriminating title:
"A Factual Appraisal Of The 'Holocaust' By The Red Cross - The Jews And The Concentration Camps: No Evidence Of Genocide"
http://www.rense.com/general69/factua.htm
One such example is featured on Jeff Rense's website. This isn't a report written by the Red Cross (it saying 'By The Red Cross' doesn't make it so), but rather a report about a report: It is a report penned by a denier (probably Richard Harwood, as this article is one of the chapters of the 1974 booklet: "Did Six Million Really Die?"), about the three-volume Report of the International Committee of the Red Cross on its Activities during the Second World War, Geneva, 1948 (which is posted in the link below).
The latter contains key sections where the IRC explicitly states that the systematic extermination of Jews was Nazi policy, but they are ignored and left out in the aforementioned "report of the report", for obvious reasons (what, you thought holocaust deniers did not have an agenda?)
For instance, 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 the passage Harwood cited is in reference to Allied camps for civilians in Egypt and thus had nothing to do with Nazi concentration camps.
I will proceed to post original documentation that is official correspondence, and the response, of the International Red Cross to various queries sent to them after this "truth bomb" was dropped on the general public through the publication of Richard Harwood/Verrall's booklet. Of course, deniers will casually claim the IRC was infiltrated by Jews or coerced by Jews into adjusting their position without providing further proof. So if you do not accept the letters I will post below as the IRC's genuine response on the grounds that they are nothing but damage-control of an agency caught red-handed, then I invite you to go and read the original, neutral three volume report of the IRC yourself, and try and find the passages that allegedly contain what Richard Harwood claimed in his essay:
I'll make life easy for you and say you won't find them, but if you don't trust me, feel free to peruse the entire report, find/cite those passages in question and prove us all wrong.
Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 12, p.11 (1978)
Patterns of Prejudice is a journal about historical and contemporary social exclusion published by Taylor & Francis. Founded in 1967, it is a peer-reviewed journal published five times a year devoted to study racial and religious prejudice throughout the world and report on contemporary political events.
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 rather "the number of deaths recorded by the International Tracing Service (ITS) 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 disinformation pinned on the ICRC for the subsequent three decades.
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.
International Red Cross letter debunking the denier figure in 1975 already
In case it isn't perfectly clear already, this letter is dated 22nd August 1975, where Francoise Perret of the IRC responds to letters landing in his office after the publication of "Did Six Million Really Die?" a year earlier, which nevertheless was to be used a decade later by Ernst Zündel's defence. No wonder he lost.
Read again what the letter said: Either Francoise Perret who held a law degree, was active in Poland, and worked for the IRC as delegate for 3 decades is a liar, or the Red Cross never published those numbers and holocaust deniers cooked up a nice hoax saying the IRC had compiled and published it.
Another funny observation is that the aforementioned list only mentions a fraction of all concentration camps, and doesn't mention any of the extermination camps with the exception of Auschwitz. And lastly, the numbers seem to be compiled in 1979, 4 years after the IRC's letter above.
1984 Arolsen document tallying the documented deaths in some German concentration camps
Sometimes deniers spread these figures without dragging the IRC into it, and just basing it on the ITS records in the Bad Arolsen archive. The numbers vary slightly compared to the previous Neo-Nazi infographic. Still, the order of magnitude remains the same. And again, nothing said about Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor, Maly Trostenets, Janowska, and a whole host of other camps.
Deniers who love to spread the Bad Arolsen figures around, love to ignore (either deliberately or due to the lack of German skills) the underlined sentence clearly visible in the document, which says:
"The documented numbers of the Sonderstandesamt [Bad Arolsen] do not allow for any conclusions to be made over the actual number of dead in the concentration camps."
There is some secrecy (and backlog) surrounding Bad Arolsen, and deniers interpret this as the institute being afraid - very afraid - of releasing its records "because they fear the holohoax will come crumbling down"...in reality, it has more to do with strict data protection laws in Germany, e.g. even historians who quote eye-witnesses something cannot cite their full name if e.g. the witness is a perpetrator but was not convicted. For more, read:
http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.co.at/2006/03/arolsen-archive-controversy-cold.html
and
http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.co.at/2006/05/arolsen-aaargh-all-those-names.html
Swiss newspaper "Die Tat", Jan 19, 1955 mentioning 300,000 victims in jails & concentration camps
There is another source for the roughly 300,000 number deniers use: this time, an article titled "The harrowing tally of two world wars" appearing in the German newspaper "Die Tat" in Switzerland, January 19th, 1955. I have marked the article in question.
Source: https://www.nb.admin.ch/themen/02074/02076/03887/05009/index.html?lang=en
This newspaper article is often misquoted by the deniers as another reputable source of how many people perished in German concentration camps.
Except: that's not what the newspaper is saying. After publishing a tally of all military deaths as well as German civilian deaths as a result of bombing and expulsion, the newspaper goes on to list 300,000 as a figure only for Germans, including German Jews (Deutsche, einschließlich der deutschen Juden), who perished in jails and concentration camps between 1939-1945 as a result of political, racial or religious persecution. Which is a very wonky statement, as such a loose definition could also include gulags, but woe is me if I tell a holocaust denier that this is the official figure of all those Germans who died also in Allied POW camps including Soviet gulags as well, given that the article doesn't specify which facilities in Europe it means by "jails and concentration camps"...
In the first sentence, the article says "Vor einigen Tagen wurden die amtlichen Zahlen [...] bekanntgegeben", which translates to "A couple of days ago the official numbers [...] were made public". Except it does not go on to say who released these numbers. As a source, at the end of the article we have the following: (Ar). Could this mean Arolsen? Or just the initials of the journalist who wrote the article? In any case, note how the International Red Cross isn't mentioned at all.
The bottom line is: The 300,000 figure supplied here says nothing about any non-Germans, including non-German Jews, who perished in jails and concentration camps. And given that even revisionists agree non-Germans and non-German Jews died in the camps, this 300k figure simply CANNOT be used to support their claim that this is "a realistic tally" of all camp deaths.
Once again, the IRC responds to denier allegations
This German letter penned by the IRC in 1976 is a response to allegations raised presumably after the publication of Richard Verrall's "Did Six Million Really Die?" in 1974. However, the letter makes responsible as the source of all this misinformation the aforementioned 1955 "Die Tat" Swiss newspaper article, and goes on to draw attention to the newspaper article saying the 300,000 are German victims only (Jewish and non-Jewish), and now nowhere in the newspaper article the IRC is claimed as source.
The letter goes on to explain how their organization is falsely implicated in these figures to lend them more weight and credibility. Therefore, case closed.
To summarize:
1) We have a poorly sourced 1955 swiss newspaper article talking about 300k Jew & gentile German dead
2) Some camps' Bad Arolsen ITS figures the organization has stressed are registered deaths are misused
3) One chapter in "Did Six Million Really Die?" (1974) falsely reviews the 3 volume IRC report (1948)
4) A ton of letters flood the IRC office and as a result the organization points out these false allegations.
5) Some 10 years later Ernst Zündel is tried for publishing the booklet in 1974, loses, but goes on appeal.
6) Holocaust deniers continue to use this IRC/Bad Arolsen gambit 30 years later and counting...
Conflicting numbers of the Babi Yar massacre
Germar Rudolf likes to present the above table of differing victim numbers as proof that nobody really has any clue how many people died in this massacre, but he couldn't be further from the truth. Anybody can write a book and publish numbers, but only those who hold a degree in history are generally relied on as a secondary source, and the primary sources THEY use, are then accepted as legitimate. Let's go through this list, shall we?
- Vitaly Korotych is a Ukrainian writer and journalist
- Vladimir Posner is a Russian journalist
- New York Times is a newspaper
- Hennadiy Udovenko was a Ukrainian politician and diplomat
- The Polish resistance figure is realistic (hmm, maybe because it stems from first hand experience).
- Leni Yahil was a HISTORIAN - oh look! His number is very close to the death toll accepted today (33,771)
I have no idea what this "Encyclopedia of Ukraine" is, but it does not seem to be written by any qualified person (Rudolf does not provide the source of the encyclopedia's figure - I am sure it should have one, maybe he should check that, and if it doesn't, then the encyclopedia can be safely discredited), and the same can be said about the Grand Dictionnaire Encyclopédique Larousse, as this is the first time I have heard about it. Must be a local, low profile publisher.
Once again, let me stress: newspaper articles, novels and journalists are not historiographers. Historians are. So we can only then have a debate, when conflicting figures are presented by different historians. Which is not the case in the above table. Therefore, case dismissed.
But let us address the 33,771 figure. Deniers have asked, how this very specific number has been arrived at, given that the corpses buried after the mass execution at the Babi Yar site were, similar to what happened in the Aktion Reinhard camps, exhumed and cremated to cover up traces of the crime committed and therefore no longer exist, so that they can be counted. We have this figure from a series of dispatches known as the "Ereignismeldungen UdSSR".
When the German military forces invaded the Soviet Union in the early summer of 1941, four groups consisting of battalions of the Sicherheitspolizei (Security Police; SiPo) and the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service; SD) followed the Heeresgruppen (army groups). Assigned by Reinhard Heydrich with the broad mission of a security policy involving pacification, and effectively deprived off any control by the military administration, these Einsatzkommandos, in cooperation with the higher SS and police officers (HSSPF) employed by Heinrich Himmler began to carve a bloody path in the newly conquered territories behind the army front lines: using the perpetrators' records during the period leading up to spring 1942 we can already ascertain 535,000 mass murders of Jews and others. The commanders had to report on their missions to the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) in Berlin. This is how 195 daily "Ereignismeldungen UdSSR" (Soviet Union event dispatches) were produced, and modified from May 1942 onward in the form of 55 weekly "messages from the occupied Eastern territories". They were stamped "Geheime Reichssache" and distributed to a selected circle of readers, providing proof of the barbaric practices occupying German forces undertook in the East.
With regard to the historical classification of the activities of the Einsatzgruppen into the context of the Holocaust, an essential prerequisite for the radicalization towards the Holocaust was the careful and deliberate selection of the Einsatzgruppenchefs (Dr. Franz Walther Stahlecker, Arthur Nebe, Emil Otto Rasch, Otto Ohlendorf). The Einsatzberichte not only reflect this ongoing radicalization, but also display a rivalry, a "race for the highest quotas" among the various Einsatzkommandos' executors. The deadliest single mass-murder event of 1941 is the notorious massacre of Babi Yar near Kiev, attributable to Einsatzgruppe C, reflected in the Ereignismeldung UdSSR No. 101 of October 7, 1941:
http://i.imgur.com/Z1vUeCT.jpg
where the relevant passage reads: "In collaboration with the Group-staff and 2 Commanders of Police-Regiment South, Sonderkommando 4a executed 33,771 Jews on the 29th and 30th September." We have circumstantial photographic evidence of a mass event involving civilians happening at Babi Yar. Photos from before the event (undressed women):
and after the event (piles and piles of clothing, colorized):
leave little room for doubt. Deniers will resort to their usual tactics of evading photographic evidence, e.g. pointing out 33,771 Jews aren't on the photo, or that this could have been a mass delousing event where everybody got fresh clothes for free and were then sent on their merry way, which is why I wont go down this line any further.
Returning to the document, revisionists such as Fritz Berg, in their attempt to prove it is a forgery, have tried to shed doubt on the Einsatzbericht No. 101 by claiming the line containing the 33,771 figure appears too long compared to the length of any other line on the same page. Berg's theory is that the word "exekutiert" (10 characters) has been superimposed on an alleged former word "evakuiert" (9 characters) when the document was reworded by a forger and therefore sticks out. Too bad for Berg that this Einsatzbericht contains other pages as well, and there you also have a similar situation of a line being "too long" compared to others, e . g. the one containing the innocuous word "auffallend" (remarkably):
Other revisionists have asked where the "Geheime Reichssache" stamp is. It is on the first page of the Ereignismeldung, as it should be:
Yet others have asked why no code-words like "Judenevakuierung" have been used here and say directly typing "exekutiert" casts doubt about the authenticity of the document. But keep in mind the wide-spread use of code-words only became customary from 1942 onward.
You then have revisionists asking how the Nazis did not destroy this incriminating document? Because they were too many documents floating around among too many different offices to rigorously destroy every single one of them in the war chaos. Suppose this were the only copy of the report, then the Germans had destroyed 98% of the copies, which is pretty good, but 2% too little to hide this atrocity.
And finally, deniers like to pretend this is the only surviving document of the Babi Yar massacre, when in fact there are over 60 contemporary sources on the Babi Yar massacre. The 60+ sources include 3 other Ereignismeldungen UdSSR (no . s 97, 106, and 112) and TuLB no. 6.
Another denier picture, this time using "World Jewish Almanacs" as proof
This is one of the holocaust deniers' Golden Oldies. They clearly don't know how almanacs work. They do censuses every decade or so, but keep publishing their books almost annually. Doesn't that seem odd? It isn't - during peacetime. The sharper tools in the shed are capable of understanding that the annual figures are nothing but mathematical projections, aka "reasonable estimates".
In 1945, the world just got out of a war that cost the lives of some 60 million people all over the world. Do deniers really think that the world Almanacs will already have the correct numbers one or two years later? Those kind of death tolls take years to assess, as censuses have to be conducted in dozens of countries and countless lists of dead have to be analyzed. Unsurprisingly, the 1949 addition of the Almanac does show a decrease of the world's Jewish population to 11,266,600 people for the year 1947 (see the left page here: http://fathersmanifesto.net/jews/jews1949z.jpg) , while in 1939 it was around 16 Million, as shown here: http://fathersmanifesto.net/jews/1949WorldAlmanacJewsMissing.pdf).
The funny thing is, the denier who made the above infographic was stupid enough to even include it without noticing (or included it on purpose to show us how stupid and incriminating a fraud a Jewish population plummet AFTER world war 2 would be, right? err..right guys? g-guys?). It is indeed the sharp drop that appears around 1948-49.
The icing on the cake, of course, is that despite each almanac specifically pointing out that all figures are estimates and which last obtained hard data they are based on (in this case, pre-war), we are treated (yet again) to the epic hilarity of watching the less sophisticated deniers use almanacs as proof.
More detail here: http://www.nizkor.org/features/denial-of-science/worldalmanac.html
To recap: Wartime and immediate post-war estimates were projections using pre-war data. These weren't updated in the Almanac until 1949 when the Jewish total did in fact plummet.
As usual, dickhead deniers cite Almanac figures as entirely credible....but if they somehow know which brave committee was conducting accurate census surveys in Europe during wartime when bombs were flying all over the place, I would be glad to let them tell me who these brave souls were...
E.g. for 1940: http://fathersmanifesto.net/jews/jews1940z.jpg
and 1941: http://fathersmanifesto.net/jews/jews1941z.jpg
To think almanacs published during these war years are accurate is the height of (denier) stupidity.
Estimate of the American Jewish Committee of Jewish population in the world in 1933
Ca. 9.5 million Jews in Europe in 1933
I once came across a denier who tried to use this to prove to me there were no 6 million Jews in Germany that could be killed. Talk about idiocy.
Now let's talk about the immediate post-war years. The following scans are from almanacs published in the years listed below, including a source that shows you the original scan, respectively. What the deniers do not explicitly mention (after all, it would destroy their argument) is how in the top-left corner the almanac says "compilations from the latest available data 1938":
1945 = 15,688,259 Jews worldwide.
source: s/jews1945z.jpg
1946 = 15,688,259 Jews
source: http://fathersmanifesto.net/jews/jews1946z.jpg
1947 = 15,688,259 Jews
source: http://fathersmanifesto.net/jews/jews1947z.jpg
1948 = 15,688,259 Jews
source: http://fathersmanifesto.net/jews/jews1948z.jpg
So according to these almanacs deniers wave around as evidence, for four consecutive years, the World Jewish Population didn't increase or decrease by even one Jew. Well, deniers, what is it? A miracle? Or the more likely case of almanacs continuing to be published every year, but the lazy committee using old, pre-war data?
The bottom line is: Deniers cannot make the case that the almanacs published in the immediate aftermath of the war were using accurate figures, as demonstrated by the four examples above. So when did the first, proper revision of almanac data happen? As early as May 1946 by the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, in their Thirty-Ninth Annual Report (source: http://ajcarchives.org/AJC_DATA/Files/1946_1947_13_Statistics.pdf), but the almanacs remained inaccurate till 1949.
1948/49 "compilation of the latest available data", American Jewish Year Book
Ca. 9.74 million Jews in Europe in 1939
Ca. 3.78 million Jews in Europe in 1948/49
Ca. 16.64 million Jews in the World in 1939
Ca. 11.37 million Jews in the World in 1948/49
Also, see the World Almanac of 1949 here:
http://fathersmanifesto.net/jews/1949WorldAlmanacJewsMissing.pdf
The Auschwitz numbers claim
A frequent claim some of the less gifted holocaust deniers make, is to keep pointing us to the fact that once upon a time, there was a sign at Auschwitz saying 4 million had died there, and since the 1990s it has been reduced to 1.5 million. The particularly dumb deniers go on to add: "Well, if it has been 6 million Jews all along, how can it still be 6 million Jews if the death count quietly dropped by 2.5 million?"
Even the dimmest observer will have noticed that first of all the old sign said 4 million people, not 4 million Jews, and therefore does not directly attack the 6 million Jewish death toll of the Holocaust at all. Secondly, the confusion stems from the fact that there are two quite separate - and completely different - interpretations of the four million figure in this context:
1) The Western figure, which is the total number of Jews believed murdered in all camps - not just in Auschwitz. This figure was given to the International Military Tribunal (IMT) by Wilhelm Höttl:
"Approximately 4,000,000 Jews had been killed in the various concentration camps, while an additional 2,000,000 met death in other ways, the major part of whom were shot by operational squads of the Security Police during the campaign against Russia."
source: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/12-14-45.asp
...was accepted by the tribunal, and appears in the Judgement:
"Adolf Eichmann, who had been put in charge of this programme by Hitler, has estimated that the policy pursued resulted in the killing of 6,000,000 Jews, of which 4,000,000 were killed in the extermination institutions."
source: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/judwarcr.asp
Note that it says nothing at all about the number of deaths at Auschwitz.
2) The Soviet figure, which was the number of people (not specifically Jews!) the Soviet Union claimed were killed at Auschwitz alone. Their conclusion was based on an assessment of the capacity of the crematoria. It was submitted to the IMT in the Count Three Indictment, but NOT accepted.
source: http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2006/09/some-misconceptions-related-to.html
The Soviets, however, retained it for propaganda purposes, and it remained on the sign (and quoted by various western magazines and newspaper articles as well) until the regime collapsed in the early 90s. It was never really accepted by Western holocaust historians though, because it was based on the assumption that the Kremas functioned on a 100% duty cycle.
Proof that this figure was not accepted by Western historians is that as early as 1946, Nachman Blumental came to an informed guess that the number of Auschwitz victims ought to have been somewhere between 1 . 3 and 1 . 5 million. In the early 1950s, Gerald Reitlinger also arrived at a similar estimate of the number of victims on the basis of the number of deportees (see G. Reitlinger, "Die Endlösung", S. 522). Pre-eminent holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, who did important statistical analysis into the number of victims of the Holocaust, also supported the lower figure of 1 million (see: R. Hilberg, "Die Vernichtung der europäischen Juden", S. 1299).
Six million is the total number of Jews believed to have been killed in the Holocaust, by all means, and in all locations - not just the camps. It is based on a comparison of legitimate pre- and post-war census data, deportation lists, documentation, and cross-referencing - not by adding up the number of all deaths in all camps and then doing guesswork on the death toll of the Einsatzgruppen, death marches and so on. Though Raul Hilberg did offer a detailed tally of some 5 . 1 million Jewish victims, he never claimed "this was it". So much for the notion that "6" is some kind of ritual, cabalistic number invented by the Jews.
Up to 1.5 million is the number of people (not specifically Jews) western historians believe died at Auschwitz alone. Its earliest appearance, as far as I can tell, is March 25 1947, when the Central Jewish Historical Committee presented an expert report to the Krakow-Auschwitz trial, stating that the total killed there was 1,500,000 - not four million.
So when Poland freed itself from communism, and the museum staff changed the sign which displayed the Soviet claim of 4 million, to the western one of 1 . 5 million, they were simply changing a number they knew was wrong, to one they were confident was right. This explains why the six million Jewish total remained the same - because it was never based on four million Jews having been killed at Auschwitz to begin with! If you are going to insist that the Soviet figure of 4 million was part of the 6 million, then why not also insist on the Soviet figure of 2 million dead at Majdanek? 4 + 2 = 6. If these two figures were part of the 6 million, it would mean no Jew ever died in any other camp ever, or anywhere else in Europe either, but that's not what anyone back then claimed. The holocaust death toll in its entirety, is 6 million Jews, and millions of other non-Jews, whose number varies on how one defines the holocaust, e . g. whether you include all those non-Jewish, non-combatants dying from unnatural causes not related to collateral damage during war, i . e. Soviet prisoners of war who perished during internment, Soviet civilians who perished during the Siege of Leningrad, the persecution and murder of Roma and Sinti people, homosexuals, political opponents, those considered spies, Jehovah's Witnesses and other clergymen, etc., and for these purposes Simon Wiesenthal's 11 million figure (5 million non-Jews) is a good approximation, though the number is likely higher.
"What about Rudolf Hoess? Surely he spoke of several million victims?"
Some holocaust deniers are eager to point out that it wasn't just the Soviets with their now discredited "4 million" figure, but the most infamous camp commander of Auschwitz himself, who claimed a death toll several million in number for the camp: Rudolf Höss (alternately spelled Rudolf Hoess or Rudolf Höß, and not to be confused with Rudolf HESS, the dindu nuffin, who became a martyr for modern neo-nazis due to his "unjust and long imprisonment").
Let's investigate on what Höss really had to say, shall we? Keep in mind the deniers also claim this "several million" confession was extracted under torture and that he was made to sign a document in English, a "language he did not understand". So we have three allegations here:
1) Hoess spoke about several million killed at Auschwitz, a number that has been quietly revised
2) Hoess was tortured by his captors
3) to sign a document in English, a language he did not understand
These three points, when presented in the above format seem convincing that mass murder on an industrial scale is a fairy tale cooked up by holohoaxers. But let us examine each of these claims separately, one after the other. Let us begin with the last claim, namely the allegation that Höss could not understand English: THIS IS WRONG. Just like how deniers question every fact thrown at them by historians, we have to stop and question every "fact" thrown at us by deniers. Where is proof that Rudolf Höss did not understand English? Surely deniers have some proof beyond "gut feeling" and "umm...he was like...a German guy from the 40s so the chance is slim". Exactly. Deniers have no proof. But we have proof that Höss understood English. To begin with, if you read the IMT transcripts you will see how Hoess is asked whether he understands English, the language many of the documents shown to him have been transcribed into. He repeatedly says yes. Of course, this isn't proof by itself because he could have been coerced into saying "yes" when asked, right? Which is why we need to dig deeper into Hoess' past. It turns out that during the 1920s, Rudolf Höss was arrested and sent to prison. You see, Höss played a leading role in at least one political assassination for which he spent several years in jail.[1]
On 31 May 1923, in Mecklenburg, Höss and members of a paramilitary he had joined called the Freikorps attacked and beat to death local schoolteacher Walther Kadow. Kadow was believed to have tipped off French occupational authorities that Höss' fellow Nazi, paramilitary soldier Albert Leo Schlageter, was carrying out sabotage operations against French supply lines. Schlageter was arrested and executed on 26 May 1923; soon afterwards Höss and several accomplices took revenge on Kadow. In 1923, after one of the killers confessed to a local newspaper, Höss was arrested and sentenced in May 1924 to 10 years in Brandenburg Penitentiary for the crime, but released in July 1928 as part of a general amnesty and in 1929, he married Hedwig Hensel. The point is, during his time in prison, Rudolf Hoess learned English, and I quote him as having said:
"...In my free time I eagerly studied English. I even had textbooks sent to me. Later I had them regularly send me books and magazines in English, so that in about a year I learned this language without anyone helping me. This was terrific discipline for my mind."[2]
So much for the revisionist insistence that Hoess signed an affidavit in a language he couldn't understand, huh? LAWL.
Let us move on to 1):
During his initial interrogations, Höss indeed confirmed an initial assessment done by his interrogators that three million people had been killed in Auschwitz. But here's where it gets tricky:
In Nuremberg, he gave DIFFERENT numbers at DIFFERENT occasions (surely a scandal for his torturers!) During his interrogations he gave a detailed list of numbers for each nationality that came to over 1.1 million deportees. In his affidavit, however, he stated that "at least 2,500,000 victims were executed and exterminated [in Auschwitz] by gassing and burning, and at least another half million succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total dead of about 3,000,000."[3]
He confirmed this number in a conversation with the American military psychologist Dr. Gustave Gilbert. "He readily conformed that approximately 2.5 million Jews have been exterminated under his direction."
But wait! In a short memorandum which he wrote for Dr. Gilbert later in April 1946, Höss returned to the lower number. He now stated that the number of 2.5 million referred to the technical potential. "[T]o the best of my knowledge, this number appears to me much too high. If I calculate the total of the mass operations which I still remember, and still make allowance for a certain percentage of error, I arrive, in my calculation, at a total of 1.5 million at the most for the period from the beginning of 1941 to the end of 1944."
Finally, in Poland, Höss re-affirmed that the number of victims had been most likely less than 1.2 million persons, commenting that "I regard the number of 2.5 million as far too high. Even Auschwitz had limits to its destructive capabilities."[4]
It seems that he had gotten the 2.5 million number rather from his conversations with Adolf Eichmann, than personal assessment. And Eichmann obviously had propagandistic reasons to report to his higher ups about how many Jews had been sent to Auschwitz.
This back-and-forth by Höss repeatedly revising his numbers absolutely destroys the revisionist notion that Rudolf Höss was forced to confess to a specific number of Auschwitz dead his captors had cooked up.
Which leaves us with point 2): Was he tortured? What the deniers have gotten right is that yes, Rudolf Höss’ family was harshly interrogated by the British (verbally only), including having one of Höss' sons being threatened with being shipped off by train to the Soviet Union [5], until they (Höss' wife Hedwig) told them where Höss was. When captured by British troops on 11 March 1946 in Gottrupel, Rudolf Höss was disguised as a gardener and called himself Franz Lang. Again, ask yourself the following question: If Auschwitz was a by-the-book labor camp as the revisionists claim, why would its commander go into hiding, under a new identity? If Josef Mengele was a doctor who merely saved lives at Auschwitz, why did he do the same (go into hiding, in fact, successfully until he died)? Anyway, the British force that captured Höss was led by Hanns Alexander, a young Jewish man from Berlin who was forced to flee to England with his entire family during the rise of Nazi Germany. And again, Höss denied his identity until Alexander noticed his wedding ring and demanded to inspect it. It had the names Rudolf and Hedwig inscribed inside. After being questioned and roughed up, Höss confessed his real identity.
And here is what the revisionists do not tell you: While Höss may have been manhandled during his capture, it’s interesting that during the Nuremberg trial, or his later trial in Poland, he was NOT TOUCHED. In his two long autobiographies in Polish jail, WHICH DENIERS OBVIOUSLY HAVEN'T BOTHERED TO READ, Höss confessed he was astonished by how well the Poles treated him, considering the scale of his murders. Just before his execution, he stated to both his son, and his daughter Ingebirgitt, that he had been treated well, particularly by his Polish captors. They are on tape explaining this, and have published the same. So I call revisionist bullshit out. If he had been tortured to sign a confession he did not want to sign, he would have explicitly said so, particularly if he was about to be executed....but he went out of his way, unnecessarily (despite clearly knowing what awaited him anyway), to say that he was treated well.
Nevertheless, deniers keep insisting he was tortured (the dumber ones bringing up the "testicle crushing" incident that has nothing to do with Höss but rather the Malmedy Massacre trial), and as source for the alleged torture, cite a novel written by a journalist who interviewed one of Höss' captors who bragged about roughing up Höss, mostly by playing psychological tricks on him (sleep deprivation, sent him outside in the cold morning etc. rather than brute force) to get him talking. I have debunked this in the IMT section here: imgur.com/FLz3laH. And once again, to prove that Höss was not tortured in the classic sense, keep in mind deniers have so far conveniently not mentioned the absolute lack of scars, bruises or anything of the sort on Höss' post-war photographs, and there are many of them.
As you can see, even this point, as alleged by deniers, has been debunked.
Sources:
[1]: "Death dealer: the memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz" p. 52
[2]: ibid p. 76 or https://i.imgur.com/o4ZfTHD.png
[3]: Modern History Sourcebook: Rudolf Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz: Testimony at Nuremberg, 1946. http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1946Hoess.html [4]: Höß, Kommandant in Auschwitz, S. 252 [5]: Hanns and Rudolf: The True Story of the German Jew Who Tracked Down and Caught the Kommandant of Auschwitz. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-0 434 02236 6.
Debunking the myth about the 6 Million figure already being referenced by newspapers before WW2
There are a couple of youtube videos circulating where a denier shows you a whole bunch of pre-war newspaper clippings talking about 6 million Jews. Or you may come across a video that talks about a "holocaust" of some other group before WW2. From what I understand, both of these "revelations" are supposed to be a huge eye-opener, a truly shocking "woah" moment that should convert you to questioning "the" holocaust of six million Jews, given that we have proof that these things pop up BEFORE WW2 even happened! One huge conspiracy, right? Long-planned and in the making ever since the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion were first laid out? Wrong.
I'll tell you why: did you come across the pre-war newspaper articles that spoke of 5 million Jews??? No? How about 4 million Jews? No? What about 7 million Jews? No? Well I have, see the pic above. All these other newspaper articles exist. It's just that the guy who posted the "omfg 6 million" pre-war newspaper clippings conveniently does not show the other numbers also listed in pre-war newspaper snippets. Why should he? It would detract from his intended message of somehow making the 6 million number unique and prophetic.
The Google News Archive returns these hits for the period 1905-1939:
"Five Million Jews": 42
"Six Million Jews": 44
"Three Million Jews": 57
Stories relating to the imminent starvation, deportation or annihilation of 5 million (not six) can be found
here: http://bit.ly/2Gymkvi
and here: http://bit.ly/2BEbYpG
and here: http://nyti.ms/2FwFv7f
In reality, all of these were rough estimates of the Jewish population in Eastern Europe and Western Russia, being in danger due to the turbulent events of the early 20th century happening there (war, famine, revolution etc.).
Some deniers also try to claim there are references to a "holocaust" or a "6 million" in the Torah and Talmud, though when I asked them to give me the verse so I could look it up myself, they balked and changed the topic. The best they could come up with, is rather than citing scripture itself, to cite a book supposedly citing from the scripture, which is "Keystone of the New World Order: The Holocaust Dogma of Judaism", written by a guy called Ben Weintraub. Makes you think he is Jewish, and therefore in the know, right? Wrong: "Ben Weintraub" is the pen name of presumably one Robert L. Brock, a Jew-hater[1]. Others refer me to the respected Rabbi Benjamin Blech instead. I have tackled Blech's POST WAR prophecy here: imgur.com/WVi1AgE
Keep in mind the Nazi genocide on the Jewish and non-Jewish non-combatant population of Europe was not given a proper name immediately after the war. It took some time. Today, we only think of the Nazi genocide when hearing the word "holocaust", because no other such large scale deliberate genocide of entire peoples marked as "undesirable" by a regime has happened that was not the result of famine or other natural factors. Therefore, it is perfectly natural for our current understanding of the word "holocaust" to find its meaning in the atrocities committed by the Nazis.
Source:
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Holocaust-Dogma-Judaism-Keystone-World/dp/0972416005
Holocaust by country
source: https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005161
In 1933, approximately 9.5 million Jews lived in Europe (11 million if you take the Nazis' own estimate at the Wannsee conference), comprising 1.7% of the total European population. This number represented more than 60 percent of the world's Jewish population at that time, estimated at 15.3 million. The majority of Jews in prewar Europe resided in eastern Europe. The largest Jewish communities in this area were in Poland, with about 3,000,000 Jews (9.5%); the European part of the Soviet Union, with 2,525,000 (3.4%); and Romania, with 756,000 (4.2%).
In pre-war central Europe, the largest Jewish community was within the German Reich, which around 1933 was about 500,000 members (<1% of the total Reich population), but which, by means of Jews fleeing Germany to other countries, including to neighboring European countries, had reduced itself by 1939 to 234,000 members, excluding Jews in the newly annexed Austria and Sudetenland. This was followed by Hungary with 445,000 (5.1%), Czechoslovakia with 357,000 (2.4%), and Austria with 191,000, most of whom resided in the capital city of Vienna (2.8%). For a more detailed breakdown of the Jewish population within Germany in the years leading up to the Holocaust, see:
https://www.bundesarchiv.de/gedenkbuch/einfuehrung.html.de?page=2
In western Europe the largest Jewish communities were in Great Britain, with 300,000 Jews (0.65%); France, with 250,000 (0.6%); and the Netherlands, with 156,000 (1.8%).
As you can see, the numbers vary slightly depending on the source, but in both instances the fact remains that after 1945, millions of Jews in Europe had disappeared, even if you account the emigration to regions like USA, Canada and the Levant, as census data is readily available for these countries. Therefore, where did all the still missing European Jews vanish to? The Soviet Union? The small autonomous "Jewish" Oblast of Birobidzhan on practically the other side of Russia (of which only the tiniest fraction actually has Jewish ancestry), is meaningless. Deniers who keep yapping about Treblinka and so on only being transit train stations (instead of terminal stops where the genocide of these peoples happened, along with camps such as Chelmno, Belzec and Sobibor) have so far not been able to produce any verifiable evidence to convince us Hitler really "evacuated" all the Jews into the East after all. Instead, what they have been able to provide are a handful of interviews of Jews who got transferred from, say, Treblinka to Majdanek, another camp relatively close by and well within the German occupied territories. Or documents showing the transfer of a few thousand Jews from Germany and into ghettos outside Minsk or Riga. Again, both were well within German-occupied territory in 1941, 42, etc. Or, holocaust deniers will show you one or two newspaper articles where a Jew who had e . g. fled to the US and who had thought his brother had died ends up being reunited with him after all, as the brother had been trapped on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The deniers argue that, for every such case covered in the newspapers, there's surely a hundred, or a thousand, or ten thousand such cases that didn't make the papers. And hundred thousands of cases where there was no post-soviet reunion. Or that millions of Jews changed their names and their faiths for whatever reason, and never spoke about having been Jews ever again. This is the kind of mental gymnastics denier "historians" do to be able to explain away the big question, the gaping hole in holocaust revisionism, namely the still missing several million Jews. Bottom line is: the denier hypothesis, that millions upon millions of Jews really were evacuated to the East (that is, into Russia, past the frontline!), and that "Judenevakuierung" isn't a code-word for physical extermination at the Aktion Reinhardt camps, is nonsense. The Holocaust happened.
One might think that the Nazis’ crimes during World War II amounted mainly or exclusively to killing Jews in the gas chambers of a number of extermination camps, especially Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor. For this is what holocaust deniers, generally motivated by admiration of the Nazi regime and/or hatred of Jews, predominantly focus on.
Yet the gas chambers of the extermination camps Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka and the dual purpose camps Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek were but one aspect of the Nazi genocide of the Jews. According to Raul Hilberg’s "The Destruction of the European Jews", Table B-1 on page 1219, about 800,000 Jews died as a result of "ghettoization and general occupation" in ghettos in German-occupied Eastern Europe, in Theresienstadt and the Transnistria colonies of Nazi Germany’s Romanian ally or due to privation outside of ghettos, 1.3 million were killed in open air shootings by Einsatzgruppen, SS and police units and Wehrmacht or Romanian army units, and about 300,000 perished in the concentration, labor or transit camps or mass killings by Nazi Germany’s Croatian ally or other causes. So a total of 2.4 million out of the 5.1 million Jewish victims of the Nazi genocide estimated by Hilberg, or 47 % of the total, were not killed by mass gassing in camps with installations dedicated to this purpose. More recent research, including but not limited to the country studies published in Wolfgang Benz et al., "Dimensionen des Völkermords", points to an overall Jewish death toll above 6 million and to an even higher proportion of deaths outside such camps, especially open air shootings in mobile killing operations. Yet "revisionist" concern with mobile killing operations is dwarfed by their obsession with gas chambers (especially those of Auschwitz-Birkenau), and Jewish mass mortality due to privation in ghettos and camps is hardly addressed by them at all. True to the populist nature of holocaust denial, this weighting is a mirror image of public knowledge of either aspect of the Nazi genocide of the Jews.
To find out how the Jewish population in Europe developed in the post war decades that followed, see:
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/02/09/europes-jewish-population/
So where did the Jews go?
Once again, let me make things really simple:
- Ca. 1933, there lived about 9.5 million Jews in Europe
- in 1946 there lived about 3.7 Million Jews in Europe
- Ca. 1931, there lived about 175,138 Jews in the British Mandate of Palestine
- Through the Haa'vara Agreement only some 50,000-60,000 Jews poured into Palestine 1933-1939
- In 1945 there lived about 553,600 Jews in the British Mandate of Palestine
- Ca. 1933 there lived about 4.2 million Jews in the United States and 155,000 in Canada
- in 1946 there lived a total of 5.2 million Jews in the United States and Canada combined
- Ca. 1933 there lived 2.6 million Jews in the entire Soviet Union
- In 1959 despite territorial gains, there only lived close to 2.3 million Jews In the entire Soviet Union
Keep in mind that these figures include population increase by birth as well, not just immigration.
And given that the borders of countries in Europe shifted around quite a bit in the 1930s and early 40s, different surveys will yield slightly differing results, but on a continental basis the numbers will remain similar. What ultimately matters, is the order of magnitude.
So while it is much easier to do a comparison of the total world Jewish population, that will not answer the question of how many emigrated where.
Despite including the births in both the already existing native Jewish populace and that of those that immigrated into the US and Canada, between '33 and '46 the North American Jewish figure barely increased by a million, which leads me to believe just a few hundred thousand Jews fled Europe to the American continent.
I don't have to remind you that the US and UK (including her colonies) imposed harsh immigration laws and set quotas rather than welcome Jews fleeing Nazi persecution, so the population increase by immigration is smaller than you think.
A landmass of even greater size, and supposed final destination of Jewish "evacuation to the East" by Nazis according to holocaust deniers, the number of Jews from '33 till even much later '59 actually was a net loss in the Soviet Union. And in the Israel region, once again taking native population increase by birth into account, between '33 and '45 probably less Jews as went to the American continent fled Europe to here by various means, most of which was through the Haavara Agreement.
None of these can explain away a European population net loss of some 6 million. And keep in mind that according to the Nazi statistic during the Wannsee Conference, the number of Jews in Europe by the early 40s was in fact 11 million rather than 9.5, and by the early 1940s quite a chunk had already fled Europe to the aforementioned countries, as emigration was rendered all the more difficult during wartime compared to the years earlier. Furthermore we have not counted the increase of the European Jewish population by birth between 1933 and 1941, so it is quite credible that the figure was between 9.5 and 11 million in Europe at the time, despite the < 1 million that had emigrated in the years prior.
Keep in mind that this is just a very crude, amateur analysis of mine and in no way represents that of a statistician and census records analyzer. Bottom line is: the Holocaust cannot be explained away by emigration. The seven figure revisionist emigration claims into the Soviet Union have no basis in reality, and the emigration to the American continent or the Levant region is not enough by a long shot.
Concluding the Holocaust by numbers
I have shown the false allegations put on the International Red Cross by deniers to drag the organization into their denial
I have shown some of the IRC's responses
I have shown how the Bad Arolsen figures are fraudulently used to "prove" denier numbers regarding the holocaust death toll
In the case study of Babi Yar, I have exposed the denier tactic of listing different death tolls without evaluation of the authors in question, to deliberately confuse the reader
I have shown typical denier deception by quoting World Almanachs between 1939 and 1948
I have compared pre-war and post-war census data showing the huge drop in World Jewish Population
I have explained why Auschwitz's 4 million death toll was reduced and how this does not affect the 6 million Jewish death toll of the holocaust
I have shown how historiography does not really rely on Hoess's confession "extracted under torture"
I have shown pre-war newspaper articles mentioning "6 million" to be cherry-picked, meaningless drivel
I have provided a breakdown of the Holocaust by country