Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,soc.history Subject: The Auschwitz Gambit: The Four Million Variant Summary: The oft-repeated claim that Auschwitz death tolls cited by the Communist government of Poland were revised downward due to pressure from the "revisionist" camp debunked, along with the related claim that "scholars" long insisted that the Communist claim of 4.1 million killed was correct. Followup-To: alt.revisionism Organization: The Nizkor Project, Vancouver Island, Canada The following letter appears in a recent issue of the magazine _Anarchy._ It's a response from Bradley Smith to a letter from journalist Bill Weinberg in a previous issue. In Weinberg's letter, he scolded the editors of _Anarchy_ for not being critical enough of "holocaust revisionism" in a review of Smith's book _Confessions of a Holocaust Revisionist._ (For those of you not familiar with the magazine, they have made it clear that they think the "revisionists" are nazis and hardly worth wasting time or ink on. _Anarchy_ is generally an excellent magazine.) Example: we were told for half a century that Auschwitz claimed four million murdered victims (mostly Jews). In 1990 the Auschwitz State Museum lowered the figure to 1.1 million. Mr. Smith carefully overlooks the facts here - that "we" have never been "told" any such thing. Western scholars have never accepted, even remotely, the figure cited by the Communist government of Poland, and Mr. Smith is certainly well aware of that reality. Revisionists believe there are a few questions that need to be asked about this development. The short list include these: where are the documents that "proved" the original 4-million figure? Where are the documents that in 1990 "disprove" the 4-million figure? Where is the scholarly paper that addresses the judicial proces through which the Nuremberg Court accepted the 4-million figure as historically accurate? How did the court go wrong? How many Germans were the victims of judicial murder because of the Court's lack of professionalism, or its political bias? Where is the paper that reveals to us the scholarly, half-century long road our valiant historians traveled to come to the conclusion that the 4-million figure was wrong? How were revisionist investigators able to figure it out 40 years earlier (see the writings of Paul Rassinier and others in the 1950s)? To which one might add "How were Western historians able to arrive at a figure of less than _half_ of the one Smith cites 38 years earlier (see the writings of Poliakov and others in the 1950s)?" The short answers? 1) None of these papers or documents exist or ever did exist. 2) Revisionists were able to figure out the scam in the 1950s because they took a run at it. (Smith, Anarchy) (One must assume Poliakov also "took a run at it" in his excellent text, "Harvest of Hate," published in 1956...) Smith's claim about the "loss" of three million victims was also included within his CODOH campus advertisement, which appeared in the IHR Newsletter in April of 1992, and which includes the following paragraphs: The Auschwitz State Museum has recently revised its half-century- old claim that 4 million humans were murdered there. The Museum now says maybe it was 1 million. But what proof does the Museum provide to document the 1 million figure? None! The communist propagandists who manage the museum have put on display piles of hair, boots and eyeglasses, etc. While such displays are effective propaganda devices, they are worthless as historical documentation for "gassings" or a program of "extermination." Meanwhile, Revisionists want to know where those 3 million souls have been the last 45 years. Were they part of the fabled Six Million? (Smith, Campus) _The Journal of Historical Review_ repeated the Variant in an article dealing with penalities imposed upon Robert Faurisson: France's Fabius-Gayssot law is free of any such hypocrisy. With perfect cynicism, the "Lex Faurissonia" establishes historiographical dogma. Not even Stalin ever proclaimed a comparable law. When, for instance, the Soviet dictator persecuted the opponents of a quack biologist Lysenko (who was also a member of the Soviet commission that "established" that the Germans killed four million people at Auschwitz), it was not in the name of a specific Soviet law declaring Lysenko's theories to be correct, nor was there ever such a Soviet law. The Fabius-Gayssot law is not Stalinist: it is worse. (JHR, French Court) Writing in the same journal about six months later, Walter Luftl repeated the by now "formula" Variant when answering the question "What is the Holocaust?" In the view of those who believe--or cause others to believe--in the [Holocaust], mass gassings, especially of Jews, were carried out in the concentration camps of the Third Reich. Above all in Auschwitz (hence the term "Auschwitz Myth"), four million Jews were gassed. [The Nuremberg Tribunal "established" that four million PEOPLE (Jews and non-Jews) had been KILLED (by all means) at Auschwitz.] Currently, though, unimpeachable sources are seeking to reduce this [sic] figure to 1.5 million. On mathematical grounds alone, the "symbolic figure of Six Million" should be reduced by 3.5 million. Of course, such a reduction does not lessen the [gravity of the] crime in any way, because even one victim is one too many. (Luftl) In what appeared to be a major assault upon what revisionists insist upon calling the "Auschwitz Myth," _The Spotlight's_ front page offered the following, in January of 1993: Like most Americans, since his youth Cole had been instructed in the "irrefutable fact" that homicidal gassings had taken place at Auschwitz. The number of those so executed - also declared irrefutable - was 4.1 million. Then came the Leuchter Report in 1988. This was followed by a "re-evaluation" of the total deaths at Auschwitz (down to 1.1 million). As a budding historian - and a Jew - Cole was intrigued. The intimation that the figure of 4.1 million was revised downward as the direct result of Leuchter's report is repeated in the following paragraph, just in case readers missed it the first time around: Previous to 1992, anyone who publicly doubted the 4.1 million "gassing" deaths at Auschwitz was labeled an anti-Semite, neo-nazi skinhead (at the very least). Quietly, because of revisionist findings, the official figure was lowered to 1.1 million. No mention of that missing 3 million. (Foner, Spotlight) The Auschwitz FAQ, which was written as a direct result of the publication of Foner's _Spotlight_ article, deals with the above claim at length, and has now been updated to include the 1956 Poliakov material noted below. It is readily apparent to anyone researching Foner's claim about charges made against those disputing the figure above that it is patent nonsense. Western scholars have never accepted the Communist claim, and Holocaust deniers have failed repeatedly to provide evidence to the contrary. On April 12, 1993, _Spotlight_ readers were offered yet another invocation of the now familiar routine: The Establishment numbers on the holocaust are suspect, according to revisionist historians. For instance, deaths at Auschwitz were reported for decades to be 4.1 million gassing victims. However, since revisionist scholars began focusing on the numbers, the figure was officially lowered to 1.1 million. Shortly after the Polish government lowered the figures, the long-lost "death books" listing persons who died at Auschwitz throughout its history were discovered in Moscow in which full information was given on all deceased. Although two years are missing, scholars estimate that the total number of deaths is around 150,000, and none were gassed. (Arnold, Spotlight) In view of the above, users may find the following citation, from Poliakov's "Harvest of Hate," published in _1956_, of more than passing interest: "After some thirty months of intense activity, the Auschwitz balance sheet showed close to two million immediate exterminations (this figure can never be fixed exactly), (8) to which one must add the deaths of some 300,000 registered prisoners - Jews for the most part, but not entirely - for whom the gas chamber was only one of any number of ways by which they might have perished." (Poliakov, 202) Poliakov also shed light upon the Hoess testimony in this note appended to the citation above: "(8) In his affidavits, Hoess spoke of two and a half million, 'a figure set officially,' he wrote, under the signature of [Eichmann], in a report to Himmler. This figure has been accepted by several authors, and it appears in the verdict at the trial of the major war criminals. However, there is no reason for accepting without question the statistics attributed to Eichmann, which may err on either side. Adding the number of victims to those deported from different countries gives a lower figure, although we have little data, for example, on the number of Polish Jews sent to Auschwitz. An approximate figure in the neighborhood of two million seems closer to the truth." (Ibid.) In short, the Four Million Variant is a specious attempt to envelope unwary readers into the denial web of deceit, and can be safely discarded after the most rudimentary examination of published histories. (My thanks once again to Friedrich Berg for citing Poliakov in one of his articles - the book is a rich and extremely well documented source of material, and I was delighted to receive the 1956 edition in the mail this week. It will provide a great deal of useful information, and pointers to original source material dealing with the Holocaust, much of which is now being added to the archives here.) It is time for Bradley Smith put his modem to good use and join us here. The lightweights (Dan Gannon, mysteriously silent of late, and Greg Raven, perhaps now too embarrassed to participate here, and, of course, our own Mr. Berg, who has lately begun to display increasing amounts of spittle on his chin) have failed to impress anyone here with their pseudohistory; perhaps Mr. Smith, who often demands "open debate" on Holocaust issues, should put his money where his mouth is. -- "Everything I do is done with the full knowledge of the Fuehrer." (Himmler, Heinrich. See Jochen von Lang, "Der Adjutant: Karl Wolff," Munich: Herbig, 1985, pp . 140ff)
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