What is ‘Holocaust Denial’? The Criminal Prosecution of ‘Holocaust Denial’
- Titus 1:14 New King James Version (NKJV)
14 not giving heed to Jewish fables and commandments of men who turn from the truth.
– - Criminal Prosecution of ‘Holocaust Denial’
by Barbara Kulaszka, www.ihr.org
In recent years, more and more attention has been devoted to the supposed danger of “Holocaust denial.” Politicians, newspapers and television warn about the growing influence of those who reject the Holocaust story that some six million European Jews were systematically exterminated during the Second World War, most of them in gas chambers.
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In several countries, including Israel, France, Germany and Austria, “Holocaust denial” is against the law, and “deniers” have been punished with stiff fines and prison sentences. Some frantic Jewish community leaders are calling for similar government measures in North America against so-called “deniers.” In Canada, David Matas, Senior Counsel for the “League for Human Rights” of the Zionist B’nai B’rith organization, says: (note 1)
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The Holocaust was the murder of six million Jews, including two million children. Holocaust denial is a second murder of those same six million. First their lives were extinguished; then their deaths. A person who denies the Holocaust becomes part of the crime of the Holocaust itself.
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Often overlooked in this controversy is the crucial question: Just what constitutes “Holocaust denial”?
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Six Million?
Should someone be considered a “Holocaust denier” because he does not believe — as Matas and others insist — that six million Jews were killed during World War II? This figure was cited by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945-1946. It found that “the policy pursued [by the German government] resulted in the killing of six million Jews, of which four million were killed in the extermination institutions.” (note 2)
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Yet if that is so, then several of the most prominent Holocaust historians could be regarded as “deniers.” Professor Raul Hilberg, author of the standard reference work, The Destruction of the European Jews, does not accept that six million Jews died. He puts the total of deaths (from all causes) at 5.1 million. Gerald Reitlinger, author of The Final Solution, likewise did not accept the six million figure. He estimated the figure of Jewish wartime dead might be as high as 4.6 million, but admitted that this was conjectural due to a lack of reliable information.
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Human Soap?
Is someone a “Holocaust denier” if he says that the Nazis didn’t use Jewish fat to make soap? After examining all the evidence (including an actual bar of soap supplied by the Soviets), the Nuremberg Tribunal declared in its Judgment that “in some instances attempts were made to utilize the fat from the bodies of the victims in the commercial manufacture of soap.” (note 3)
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In 1990, though, Israel’s official “Yad Vashem” Holocaust memorial agency “rewrote history” by admitting that the soap story was not true. “Historians have concluded that soap was not made from human fat. When so many people deny the Holocaust ever happened, why give them something to use against the truth?,” said Yad Vashem official Shmuel Krakowski. (note 4)
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Wannsee Conference?
Is someone a “Holocaust denier” if he does not accept that the January 1942 “Wannsee conference” of German bureaucrats was held to set or coordinate a program of systematic mass murder of Europe’s Jews? If so, Israeli Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer must be wrong — and a “Holocaust denier” — because he recently declared: “The public still repeats, time after time, the silly story that at Wannsee the extermination of the Jews was arrived at.” In Bauer’s opinion, Wannsee was a meeting but “hardly a conference” and “little of what was said there was executed in detail.” (note 5)
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Extermination Policy?
Is someone a “Holocaust denier” if he says that there was no order by Hitler to exterminate Europe’s Jews? There was a time when the answer would have been yes. Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, for example, wrote in the 1961 edition of his study, The Destruction of the European Jews, that there were two Hitler orders for the destruction of Europe’s Jews: the first given in the spring of 1941, and the second shortly thereafter. But Hilberg removed mention of any such order from the revised, three-volume edition of his book published in 1985. (note 6) As Holocaust historian Christopher Browning has noted: (note 7)
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In the new edition, all references in the text to a Hitler decision or Hitler order for the “Final Solution” have been systematically excised. Buried at the bottom of a single footnote stands the solitary reference: “Chronology and circumstances point to a Hitler decision before the summer ended.” In the new edition, decisions were not made and orders were not given.
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A lack of hard evidence for an extermination order by Hitler has contributed to a controversy that divides Holocaust historians into “intentionalists” and “functionalists.” The former contend that there was a premeditated extermination policy ordered by Hitler, while the latter hold that Germany’s wartime “final solution” Jewish policy evolved at lower levels in response to circumstances. But the crucial point here is this: notwithstanding the capture of literally tons of German documents after the war, no one can point to documentary evidence of a wartime extermination order, plan or program. This was admitted by Professor Hilberg during his testimony in the 1985 trial in Toronto of German-Canadian publisher Ernst Zündel. (note 8)
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Auschwitz
So just what constitutes “Holocaust denial”? Surely a claim that most Auschwitz inmates died from disease and not systematic extermination in gas chambers would be “denial.” But perhaps not. Jewish historian Arno J. Mayer, a Princeton University professor, wrote in his 1988 study Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?: The ‘Final Solution” in History’: … From 1942 to 1945, certainly at Auschwitz, but probably overall, more Jews were killed by so-called ‘natural’ causes than by ‘unnatural’ ones.” (note 9)
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Even estimates of the number of people who died at Auschwitz — allegedly the main extermination center — are no longer clear cut. At the postwar Nuremberg Tribunal, the Allies charged that the Germans exterminated four million people at Auschwitz. (note 10) Until 1990, a memorial plaque at Auschwitz read: “Four Million People Suffered and Died Here at the Hands of the Nazi Murderers Between the Years 1940 and 1945.” (note 11) During a 1979 visit to the camp, Pope John Paul II stood before this memorial and blessed the four million victims.
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Is it “Holocaust denial” to dispute these four million deaths? Not today. In July 1990, the Polish government’s Auschwitz State Museum, along with Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust center, conceded that the four million figure was a gross exaggeration, and references to it were accordingly removed from the Auschwitz monument. Israeli and Polish officials announced a tentative revised toll of 1.1 million Auschwitz dead. (note 12) In 1993, French Holocaust researcher Jean-Claude Pressac, in a much-discussed book about Auschwitz, estimated that altogether about 775,000 died there during the war years. (note 13)
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Professor Mayer acknowledges that the question of how many really died in Auschwitz remains open. In Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? he wrote (p. 366):
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… Many questions remain open … All in all, how many bodies were cremated in Auschwitz? How many died there all told? What was the national, religious, and ethnic breakdown in this commonwealth of victims? How many of them were condemned to die a ‘natural’ death and how many were deliberately slaughtered? And what was the proportion of Jews among those murdered in cold blood among these gassed? We have simply no answers to these questions at this time.
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read more.
- “It can be stated in summary that German policy toward the Jews prior to World War II consisted mainly of legislative pressure, and of a few public occasions of violence in which, however, no Jews were actually killed. No doubt some Jewish lives were lost in German concentration camps prior to World War II, but certainly there was no deliberate policy of killing Jews as such, and the proportion of Jews affected was far smaller than that of Germans subjected to similar treatment. “ – Quote page 9/62 from pdf book, emphasis mine
– - “In the early days of the launching of the extermination legend it was maintained that there were gas chambers in all of the German concentration camps and that great numbers of Jews were exterminated in all of them. But after the occupation of West Germany by the Americans, British and French -there were many honest observers in the occupation forces who visited these camps and found and reported that no gas chambers existed there. It was then contended that most of the gas ovens were concentrated at Auschwitz in southern. Poland, which was then under Russian control. The Russians refused to allow any visitors there for about ten years after the war, by which time the Russians were able to revamp Auschwitz in such a manner as to give some plausibility to the claim that large numbers of Jews had been gassed there. It is significant, however, that no living, authentic eye-witness of the gassing of Jews at Auschwitz has ever been produced and validated.” – Quote page 12/62 from pdf book
– - “… there is no evidence that the Germans adopted any program of mass extermination of Jews during the war or that any German National Socialist leader ever gave any order to do so. “ – Quote page 12/62 from pdf book, emphasis mine
– - The Myth of the Six Million: An Examination of the Nazi Extermination Plot
By Prof. David L. Hoggan. Since the first day of its publication, The Myth of the Six Million has generated controversy and heated debate. Prof. David L. Hoggan, the author of this work—and a history professor at Stanford University at the time it was written—at first refused to attach his name to the manuscript for fear of academic retribution.
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The original text was therefore first published under “Anonymous.” Other publishers deemed the book “too hot to handle” and refused even to bring it to press. What is it that is so “dangerous” about this little book? Why has it been suppressed again and again during its short lifetime? And why is it now so important to get the information contained herein out to as many citizens as possible?
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