Examination of Holocaust denial
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Many historians and commentators examine the phenomenon of Holocaust denial. These arguments are of two types: criticisms of the methods of Holocaust deniers, and documentary evidence of the Holocaust.
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Methods used by Holocaust deniers
Much of the controversy surrounding the claims of deniers centres upon the methods used to present arguments that the Holocaust allegedly never happened. Numerous accounts have been given (including evidence presented in court cases) of claimed "facts" and "evidence"; however, independent research has shown these claims to be based upon flawed research, biased statements, and even deliberately falsified evidence. Opponents of Holocaust denial have compiled detailed accounts of numerous instances where this evidence has been altered or manufactured (see below, also see Nizkor Project). Evidence presented by Holocaust deniers has also failed to stand up to scrutiny in courts of law (see Fred A. Leuchter and David Irving), as well as never meeting the standards of independent peer-reviewed journals.
Ken McVay, an activist who works to counter such claims on the Internet, described the modus operandi of Holocaust deniers in a 1994 interview:
"They'll cite a historical text: 'K.K. Campbell says on page 82 of his famous book that nobody died at Auschwitz.' Then you go to the Library of Congress and look up K.K. Campbell, page 82, and what you find he really said was, 'It was a nice day at Dachau.' They get away with this because they know goddamn well most people don't have time to rush off to the Library of Congress. But people read that and say to themselves, 'Who would lie about such a thing when it's so easy to prove them wrong? They must be telling the truth.'" -- Eye magazine (online Web-based magazine), November 10, 1994
In some cases, while some facts presented are sound, the application of those facts to specific arguments is meaningless or distorted. For example, a plaque placed by the Soviet authorities at Auschwitz read that that 4 million people had been killed at the death camp. Western historians never believed that figure, as estimates of the number of people killed at Auschwitz were consistently estimated at 1-1.5 million people. After the fall of the Communist government of Poland, the plaque was changed to 1.1 million victims. Holocaust deniers frequently argue that this proves that the numbers of the Holocaust were exaggerated, when the plaque was never part of any historian's calculations of victims at Auschwitz.[1]
In other cases, conflation of facts is used to mislead. A frequently-used photo shows a fairly flimsy gas chamber door. The intent is to confuse the reader into believing that gas chambers could not be practically used for extermination, because the victims would break down the door rather than be executed. While the photo is a real gas chamber door, it is not a door that was known to be used on an extermination gas chamber; it is a door likely used on a de-lousing gas chamber.
Denial as anti-Semitism
Many publications and statements by Holocaust deniers have been tainted by anti-Semitism. Critics of Holocaust denial have cited many examples where the arguments and proffered evidence have moved from neutral, scholarly presentations to blatant, biased personal attacks. As a brief search of the Internet for such terms will reveal, Holocaust deniers have frequently used terms such as "Zionist Collaborator" or "Jew-lover" to describe their opponents.
The continuing, persistent efforts by Holocaust deniers to portray such a human disaster as a mere fiction in the face of overwhelming evidence has led scholars and authorities to question their motives. "Why," it has been asked, "do people deny the Holocaust?" On July 24, 1996, a missive by Harold Covington (the leader of the National Socialist White People's Party, formerly the American Nazi Party) was sent via email to a number of neo-Nazi supporters (many of whom were Holocaust deniers). In this message, Covington explained Holocaust denial in a manner that has been used by its opponents and critics as a definitive answer to the question of why:
"Take away the Holocaust and what do you have left? Without their precious Holocaust, what are the Jews? Just a grubby little bunch of international bandits and assassins and squatters who have perpetrated the most massive, cynical fraud in human history...I recall seeing a television program on revisionism a few years ago which closed with Deborah Lipstadt making some statement to the effect that: the real purpose of Holocaust revisionism is to make National Socialism an acceptable political alternative again. I normally don't agree with anything a Jew says, but I recall exclaiming, 'Bingo! Got it in one! Give that lady a cigar!'" -- "On Revisionism" by Harold Covington (writing under the pseudonym Winston Smith), NSNet Bulletin #5, July 24, 1996
Burden of proof
Holocaust denial is widely viewed as unreasonable because it fails to adhere to rules for the treatment of evidence, rules that are recognized as basic to rational inquiry.
To support a proposition or allegation, a claimant must offer evidence. The merits of this evidence, and the conclusion it can support, will depend on its nature; for example, hearsay would not normally be considered good evidence, but an eyewitness account would be. A second-hand story would not, but an official, dated and signed document testifying to the alleged incident would be. After evidence has been adduced, the claimant's case is then considered to have been made, and the evidence can be evaluated. The claimant's burden of proof has been carried. If an interlocutor would then like to call the claimant's evidence into question, that interlocutor will have to make a claim of his own -- for example, that this or that piece of evidence is a forgery. The burden of proof then shifts to the interlocutor, and the standard of proof will be commensurate with the surety with which the original claim was established. The claimant's evidence has, prima facie, whatever force it has in virtue of its merit as evidence. The interlocutor can't simply continue demanding more proof to answer any conceivable skeptical conjecture or hypothetical possibility he can invent to challenge the claimant; this raises the claimant's burden of proof to an unreasonable level.
In the case of the Holocaust, the survivors, eye witnesses, and historians may collectively be considered the claimants. The prevailing consensus among the informed is that their evidence is overwhelming, and that it proves beyond a reasonable doubt that the Holocaust occurred, and that it occurred as they say it occurred. It is unreasonable to ask the claimants to prove that their evidence is "really real" any more than they already have, unless there is some particular demonstrably credible reason for thinking that it is suspect. If Holocaust deniers would like to cast doubt on this evidence, the burden of proof shifts to them, and they will have a very high standard to meet. They would have to prove, at least with a balance of probabilities, that the greater part of the entire body of evidence attesting to the Holocaust has been fabricated, misrepresented, or misconstrued by thousands upon thousands of critical evaluators. Until they can do that, they have not satisfied the rules for the treatment of evidence recognized to be integral to reason. In the meantime, Holocaust denial will continue to be recognized as an unreasonable position.
All of this makes Holocaust denial different from conspiracy theories generally speaking, since the latter aspire to play by the rules of evidence, but the evidence they adduce is judged poor. Holocaust deniers attempt to set unreasonable standards for evidence, so that they can judge the historian's evidence as poor. This is why Holocaust deniers portray Holocaust scholarship as a conspiracy theory. Still, Holocaust denial is often accompanied by a conspiracy theory of a different sort, namely that Holocaust scholars are conspiring to depict what they allege to be a fictional event as if it were fact.
Evidence of the Holocaust
Image:Einsatzgruppen Killing.jpg Evidence of the existence of the Holocaust was well documented by the heavily bureaucratic German government itself. It was further well documented by the Allied forces who entered Germany and its associated Axis states towards the end of World War II. Among the evidence produced was film and stills of the existence of prisoner camps, as well as the testimony of those freed when the camps were entered.
The Holocaust was a massive undertaking that lasted for years across several countries, with its own command and control infrastructure. Although the Nazis made attempts to destroy the evidence of the Holocaust when they could see that their defeat was imminent, they left many tons of documents relating to the Holocaust. Due to the extremely rapid collapse of the Nazi forces at the end of the war, attempts to destroy evidence in Germany were for the most part unsuccessful.
After their defeat, many tons of documents were recovered, and many thousands of bodies were found not yet completely decomposed, in mass graves near many concentration camps. The physical evidence and the documentary proof included records of train shipments of Jews to the camps, orders for tons of cyanide and other poisons, and the remaining concentration camp structures. Interviews with survivors completed the picture.
As a result of the records produced, all mainstream historians agree that Holocaust denial is contrary to the facts of history.
Evidence for Hitler's complicity in the Holocaust
- Argument: There was no specific order by Adolf Hitler or other top Nazi officials to exterminate the Jews.
Holocaust deniers cite the fact that there was never a blatant, unquestionable order written or signed by Adolf Hitler that specifically ordered the death of the Jewish populations of Germany or Poland. Critics counter this argument by noting that very few Nazi documents used such obvious terms as "murder" or "death" when addressing their actions. Almost always, they spoke and wrote with suggestive phrases such as "the final solution to the Jewish question" rather than "the destruction of the Jewish people." The most often-cited quote from Hitler regarding the intention to eliminate the European Jewry comes from his January 30, 1939 speech to the Reichstag, where he is quoted as saying:
- "Today I want to be a prophet once more: If international Jewish financiers inside and outside Europe again succeed in plunging the nations into a world war, the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and with it the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe." (Source: [2])
Provided here is a photographic image of a report from Himmler to Hitler regarding the executions of prisoners in Nazi-occupied Bialystok, Poland. This was presented as evidence during the Trials of War Criminals Before the Nürnberg Military Tribunals, of Hitler's knowledge and approval of the executions of Jews and other targeted groups. A translation of the report can be found by clicking on the image.
Evidence that gas chambers were used for killing
- Argument: Nazis did not use gas chambers to mass murder Jews. Small chambers did exist for delousing and Zyklon-B was used in this process.
Image:Majdanek-1944.jpg Image:Ground-detail-Auschwitz-Gaschamber.jpg There have been claims by Holocaust deniers that the gas chambers built to massacre civilians never existed, and the structures identified as gas chambers actually served other purposes. However, the more common argument has been to claim that gas was not used to murder Jews and other victims, and that many gas chambers were also built after the war just for show. An often-quoted document advancing this theory is the "Leuchter Report" by Fred A. Leuchter, a paper stating that no traces of cyanide were found when he examined samples taken from one of the Auschwitz gas chambers in 1988. This paper is used to further a common debating tactic, namely the suggestion that because no traces of cyanide were found in 1988, then no cyanide was used at all in Auschwitz, over forty years earlier. Even with the difficulty of finding traces of this material 50 years later, in February of 1990, Professor Jan Markiewicz, Director of the Forensic Institute of Cracow, redid the analysis.[3] Markiewicz and his team used microdiffusion techniques to test for cyanide in samples from the suspected gas chambers, from delousing chambers, and from control areas elsewhere within Auschwitz. The control samples tested negative, while cyanide residue was found in both the delousing chambers and the gas chambers. The amount of cyanide found had a great variability (possibly due to 50 years of exposure to the elements to varying degrees[4]), but even so, the categorical results were that cyanide was found where expected, and not in the control samples.
The cyanide used in Auschwitz and other extermination camps was created through activation of the pesticide Zyklon-B, which was used to exterminate prisoners by the thousands. Further investigation into the death camps revealed that the most difficult part of the operation was the disposal of thousands of corpses after the executions had taken place; this required the construction of huge ovens to cremate the corpses.
Another claim made by Holocaust deniers is that there were no vents in the gas chambers through which Zyklon B could be inserted, in the words of Leuchter, "No holes - no Holocaust." The BBC offers a response showing that this requires disregard of much documentation:
Deniers have said for years that physical evidence is lacking because they have seen no holes in the roof of the Birkenau gas chamber where the Zyklon was poured in. (In some of the gas chambers the Zyklon B was poured in through the roof, while in others it was thrown in through the windows.) The roof was dynamited at war's end, and today lies broken in pieces, but three of the four original holes were positively identified in a recent paper. Their location in the concrete matches with eyewitness testimony, aerial photos from 1944, and a ground photo from 1943. The physical evidence shows unmistakably that the Zyklon holes were cast into the concrete when the building was constructed.[5]
Another piece of evidence Holocaust deniers frequently question is what happened to the ash after the bodies were cremated (see, for example the IHR's list of questions about the Holocaust). The amount of ash produced in the cremation of a person is about a shoebox full, and disposing of it was not difficult. Aerial photographs of Auschwitz indicate that some ash was piled into the nearby river and marsh, and there is well-documented evidence that other ash was used as fertilizer in nearby fields. Photographs of Treblinka taken by the camp commandant show ash piles being distributed by steam shovels.
A number of other common Holocaust denial claims about gas chambers rely on misdirection, similar to the Auschwitz plaque example given above. For example, the Institute for Historical Review has claimed that Holocaust testimony on gas chambers is unreliable, because, in the words of the IHR: "Hoss said in his confession that his men would smoke cigarettes as they pulled the dead Jews out of the gas chambers ten minutes after gassing. Isn't Zyklon-B explosive? Highly so. The Hoss confession is obviously false." This claim is clearly false, as the Nizkor Project and other sources has pointed out, the minimal concentration of Zyklon-B to be explosive 56,000 parts per million, while the amount used to kill a human is 300 parts per million, as is evidenced in any common reference guide to chemicals, such as the "The Merck Index" and the "CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics". In fact, the Nazis' own documentation stated "Danger of explosion: 75 grams of HCN in 1 cubic meter of air. Normal application approx. 8-10 grams per cubic meter, therefore not explosive." (Nuremberg document NI-9912)
Another example is the claim that "at Birkenau (part of Auschwitz), on the site of the so-called gas chamber and incinerator, there is not nearly enough rubble to represent the remains of a building that size." Historians point out that after liberation the local Polish farming population returned, and, needing materials to rebuild houses before winter, removed large amounts of re-usable bricks from the ruins. There is by the crematorium site a big pile of waste that the salvagers threw aside as they searched for usable bricks.
The Institute for Historical Review publicly offered a reward of $50,000 for verifiable "proof that gas chambers for the purpose of killing human beings existed at or in Auschwitz." Mel Mermelstein, a survivor of Auschwitz, submitted proof, which was then ignored. He then sued IHR and won the $50,000 reward, plus $40,000 in damages for personal suffering as well as having the court declare the occurrence of the Holocaust a legally indisputable fact.
- External Link: Gassing as a "remedy" for Jews
- External Link: A detailed refutation of the Leuchter-Report
Evidence for the death toll
- Argument: The figure of six million Jewish deaths is an irresponsible exaggeration, and many Jews who actually emigrated to Russia, Britain, Israel and the United States are included in the number.
Six million figure
The figure "six million" (which may actually be closer to eleven million, when counting the other ethnic, religious, and minority groups targeted for extinction) is often downgraded by claims to a figure of only one million deaths, or only three hundred thousand "casualties." Numerous documents archived and discovered after the war gave meticulous accounts of the exterminations that took place at the "death camps" (such as Auschwitz and Treblinka). Deniers claim that these documents are based on Soviet propaganda, primarily from Ilya Ehrenburg's Soviet anti-Fascist League, and are therefore unreliable.
Complicating the matter is that various instances have been reported where the death tolls of particular death camps were claimed to be overstated. Any possible ambiguity in death toll figures has been seized upon by deniers as evidence for their position. Nevertheless, the evidence for the large death figures quoted by mainstream sources is overwhelming.
A much-quoted instance of disputing the toll is the "Breitbard Document" (actually a paper by Aaron Breitbart), [6] which describes a commemorative plaque at Auschwitz to the victims that died there, which read, Four million people suffered and died here at the hands of the Nazi murderers between the years 1940 and 1945. In 1990, a new plaque replaced the old one. It now says, May this place where the Nazis assassinated 1,500,000 men, women and children, a majority of them Jews from diverse European countries, be forever for mankind a cry of despair and of warning. The lower numbers are due to the fact that the Soviets "purposely overstated the number of non-Jewish casualties at Auschwitz-Birkenau," according to the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Holocaust Deniers seize on this discrepancy and insist that the number of Jews killed must be immediately brought down at least 2.5 million. If their presumption that Historians had used this statistic to reach their overall estimate was correct they would be partly right, however, they ignore the facts that
- the 4 million figure of the Soviets included almost 2 million non-Jews, and
- historians in any event did not use the 4 million figure in calculating the total number of Jews killed.
Jewish population
Deniers consider one of their stronger arguments to be the population of Jews before and after the Holocaust. They claim that the 1940 World Almanac gives the world Jewish population as 15,319,359, while the 1949 World Almanac gives the world Jewish population as 15,713,638. In their view this makes it impossible that 6 million Jews died, even given an extremely high birth rate. They therefore claim that either the figures are wrong, or the Holocaust, meaning the deliberate extermination of millions of Jews, cannot have happened.
However, as is typically the case, the evidence given by Holocaust deniers does not stand up to closer scrutiny. In fact, the 1949 World Almanac gives the world Jewish population as 11,266,600. Moreover, it revises its estimate of the World Jewish population in 1939 upwards, to 16,643,120. Thus, according to the 1949 World Almanac the difference between the pre and post war populations is over 5.4 million.
In addition, rather than using more accurate census figures and other records, Holocaust deniers rely on a popular compendium whose methodology of assessment is unknown, and whose estimates have varied significantly. For example, the 1982 World Almanac gives the world Jewish population as 14,318,000, while the 1990 World Almanac gives the world Jewish population as 18,169,000, and the 1996 World Almanac gives the world Jewish population as 13,451,000. Either 3.7 million Jews appeared unnoticed between 1982 and 1990, and then 4.5 million Jews disappeared equally unnoticed between 1990 and 1996, or the World Almanac is not a particularly reliable source for accurate estimates of worldwide Jewish population.
Finally, the Holocaust deniers are very selective in the sources they choose; other sources give very different figures for the Jewish population before and after the war. For example, the 1932 American Jewish yearbook estimate the total number of Jews in the world at 15,192,218, of whom 9,418,248 resided in Europe. However, the 1947 yearbook states: "Estimates of the world Jewish population have been assembled by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (except for the United States and Canada) and are probably the most authentic available at the present time. The figures reveal that the total Jewish population of the world has decreased by one-third from about 16,600,000 in 1939 to about 11,000,000 in 1946 as the result of the annihilation by the Nazis of more than five and a half million European Jews. In Europe only an estimated 3,642,000 remain of the total Jewish pre-war population of approximately 9,740,000."
This selectivity means that Holocaust deniers often ignore the documents produced by the Nazis themselves, who used figures of between 9 and 11 million for the Jewish population of Europe, as evidenced in the notes of the Wannsee Conference. In fact, the Nazis methodically recorded the ongoing reduction of the Jewish population, as in the Korherr Report, which gave the status of the Final Solution through December, 1942:
The total number of Jews in the world in 1937 is generally estimated at around 17 million, thereof more than 10 million in Europe... From 1937 to the beginning of 1943 the number of Jews, partially due to the excess mortality of the Jews in Central and Western Europe, partially due to the evacuations especially in the more strongly populated Eastern Territories which are here counted as off-going, should have diminished by an estimated 4 million. It must not be overlooked in this respect that of the deaths of Soviet Russian Jews in the occupied Eastern territories only a part was recorded, whereas deaths in the rest of European Russia and at the front are not included at all.... On the whole European Jewry should since 1933, i.e. in the first decade of National Socialist German power, have lost almost half of its population.
Nazi documentation
Image:Hoefletelegram.jpg The Nazis themselves documented many of their crimes. For example, the Höfle Telegram sent by SS-Sturmbannführer Hermann Höfle on January 11, 1943 to SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann in Berlin listed 1,274,166 Jews killed in the four camps of Aktion Reinhard during 1942 alone, while the Korherr Report compiled by an SS statistician, gave a conservative total of 2,454,000 Jews deported to extermination camps or killed by the Einsatzgruppen. The complete status reports of the Einsatzgruppen death squads were found in the archives of the Gestapo when it was searched by the U.S. Army, and the accuracy attested to by the former Einsatzgruppen members who testified during war crime trials and at other times. These reports alone list an additional 1,500,000 or so murders during mass shootings, the vast majority of these victims were Jews. Further, surviving Nazi documentation spells out their plans to murder the Jews of Europe (see the Wannsee Conference), recorded the trains arriving at various death camps, and included photographs and films of many atrocities.
Testimonies
The most telling evidence is the testimony of thousands of survivors of the Holocaust, as well the testimony of captured Nazi officers at the Nuremberg Trials and other times. Holocaust deniers discount these testimonies claiming that these witnesses were tortured, or that Rudolf Hoess allegedly signed a "blood stained confession" written in a language he did not understand (English) or that the Nuremberg Trial did not follow proper judicial procedures. This argument again ignores publicly available material, including the fact that Hoess's testimony did not consist of merely a signed confession; he also wrote two volumes of memoirs before being brought to trial and gave extensive testimony outside of the Nuremberg proceedings. Further, his testimony agrees with that of other contemporary written accounts by Auschwitz officials, such as Pery Broad, an SS man stationed at Auschwitz while Höss was the commandant and the diary kept by SS physician at Auschwitz Johann Kremer, as well as the testimony of hundreds of camp guards and victims.[7]. The result is that Holocaust deniers have needed to construct an elaborate conspiracy theory involving a massive "Jewish plan" to plant forged documents across the continent of Europe, aided by the torture and forced confession of every captured Nazi officer, soldier, and worker who testified at the war crimes tribunal.
References
- Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, Plume (The Penguin Group), 1994.
- Richard J. Evans, Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial, Basic Books, 2002 (ISBN 0465021530).