I cannot believe that this document passed academic review by anyone
remotely involved in historical research. It isn’t just routine
holocaust denial, it’s BAD routine holocaust denial, with enough holes
in it that any review would have exposed them. Is Canterbury a degree
factory, or what? Not only did Hayward get his masters, but a
doctorate, too, AND a job from the university. Some history
department!
The Fate of Jews in German Hands:
An Historical Enquiry into the Development and Significance of
Holocaust Revisionism
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
Degree of
Master of Arts in History in the University of Canterbury by J.S.A.
Hayward
(CONCLUSION)
As “Operation Desert Shield” was gaining momentum in the last months
of 1990 and the first months of ‘ 1991 it was widely reported that the
Iraqis had carried out appalling atrocities in Kuwait. The worst of
the individual, atrocities, which made headlines around the world,
involved over three hundred premature babies who died after Iraqi
soldiers took them from their incubators in order to cart the
equipment off to Iraq. The Red Crescent Society,, ,the Muslim
equivalent of the Red Cross, was the first organisation to report the
terrible incident. Several eyewitnesses, including a young, obviously-
distressed Kilwaiti woman who remained anonymous for reasons of
security, appeared in dozens of -television news items. and confirmed
the verity of the story. Kuwait’s embassy in Washington publicly
condemned Iraq , for this act of barbarity, and numerous world
leaders, including President Bash on several occasions, cited it as
evidence of Iraq’s brutal maltreatment of innocent Kuwaiti a
civilians. That the incident occurred was said to haye been proven
“beyond doubt”.
Nonetheless, within weeks of the US-led Coalition’s stunning victory
over Iraq, it was discovered by ABC journalists that the “incubator
atrocity” never occurred. Many premature babies had indeed died, but
not as a result of Iraqi brutality. Basically, they died because the
nursing staff deserted them and because the matemity hospital itself
locked the incubators away in storage rooms. Dr. Mohammed Matar, who
ran the hospital, admitted that the widelycirculated atrocity claims
were `just for propaganda”.<Cf. Seattle Times, March 16, 1991> It
later turned but that the much-publicised “eyewitness” was he daughter
of a Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, that she had not even
been in Kuwait at the time the atrocity was said to have been
committed, and that her story was entirely concocted.
This case has nothing to do with the Holocaust. Yet other now-
discredited Gulf War atrocity claims are similar in nature and
substance, although not in scope, to certain Holocaust claims. For
example, at the height of the Gulf War The Jewish Press, which
promotes itself as “the world’s] largest independent Anglo-Jewish
weekly newspaper”, reported that on Suddam Hussein’s orders Iraq had
constructed gas chambers for extenninating all Jews in the Middle
East. The February 15, 1991 issue carried the headline, in huge
letters: “IRAQIS HAVE GAS CHAMBERS FOR ALL JEWS”.<The Jewish Press,
Vol. XLI, No. 7, Week commencing February 15, 1991, pp 4>. The Iraqi
gas chamber claim appeared in a number of other newspapers, both
Jewish and non-Jewish. <Cf. Citizen (Auburn, New York), February 11,
1991> Similarly, a number of newspapers reported that the Iraqis had
constructed “death camps in occupied Kuwait” where civilians,
including children, were being executed en nasse.<“Iraqis reportedly
run camps of death”, Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio) February 12, 1991>
These claims, although supported by seeminglygenuine eyewitness
accounts and citations to official sources, were later proven to be
entirely groundless.
It would, of course, be extremely irresponsible to conclude from these
examples of blatant propaganda falsehood that Nazi atrocities against
Jews must also have been the invention of propaganda. These examples
are intended only as a useful reminder that during wartime truth is
often abandoned in favour of propaganda, and that( atrocity propaganda
is still used as a weapon against enemies.
Atrocity propaganda is one of the hallmarks of modem warfare due
mostly to the development of the mass media. During the First. Word
War the German public was told that staff members of French and
Belgian hospitals were gouging out the eyes of captured German
soldiers. The British public was told by their own newspapers, and the
propaganda ministry set up by Charles Masterman in Scptember 1914,
that babies in Belgium were thrown up and caught on the end of German
bayonets, that Belgian children had their arms or hands cut off, and
that the Germans were making soap from human cadavers. After the
introduction of gas onto the battlefield in 1915, homicidal gassings
of civilians began to feature in atrocity propaganda. For example, in
March 1916 the Daily Telegraph reported that the Austrians and the
Bulgarians had murdered hundreds of thousands of Serbians using poison
gas. In one case, stated this newspaper, three thousand women,
children and elderly men were gassed in a church in Belgrade.
Government sources, documents and seeminglycredible eyewitness
accounts were provided to support these sorts of claims.
During the Second World War Josef Goebbels and his Reich Ministry of
Information and Propaganda were not the only propagandists
disseminating untrue stories of atrocities committed by their enemies.
The British Government, like those of its allies, was active in
spreading anti-German and anti-Japanese atrocity propaganda. The
Political Warfare Executive and the Ministry of Information were two
of the government agencies involved in disseminating this type of
misinformation. In his book on Allied diplomacy <E. J. Rezek, Allied
Wartime Diplomacy A Pattern in Poland (New York John Wiley, 1958)>,
for instance, Edward Rozek notes that the following memorandum was
sent in June 1944 from the Ministry of Information to high-level
civil servants, leading media figures and to the higher British
Clergy:
(begin quoted document)
Sir,
I am directed by the Ministry to send you the following circular
letter It is often the duty of the good citizens and of the pious
Christians to rum a blind eye on the peculiarities of those associated
with us. But the time comes when such peculiarities, while still
denied in public, must be taken into account when action by us is
called for.
We know the methods of rule employed by the Bolshevik dictator in
Russia itself from, for example, the writing and speeches of the Prime
Minister himself during the last twenty years. We know how the Red
Army behaved in Poland in 1920 and in Finland, Estonia, Latvia,
Galicia and Bessarabia only recently.
We must, therefore, take into account how the Red Army will certainly
behave when it overruns Central Europe. Unless precautions are taken,
the obviously inevitable horrors which will result will throw an undue
strain on public opinion in this country.
We cannot reform the Bolsheviks but we can do our best to save them —
and ourselves –from the consequences of their acts. The disclosures
of the past quarter of a century will render mere denials
unconvincing. The only alternative to denial is to distract public
attention from the whole! subject.
Experience has shown that the best distraction is atrocity propaganda
directed against the enemy. Unfortunately the public is no longer so
susceptible as in the days of the .”Corpse Factory” and the “Mutilated
Belgian Babies” and the “Crucified Canadians.”
Your cooperation is therefore earnestly sought to distract public
attention from the doings of the Red Army by your wholehearted support
of various charges against the Germans and Japanese which have and
which will be put into circulation by the Ministry.
Your expression of belief in such may convince bothers.
I am, Sir, Your obedient servant,
(signed) H. HEWETT, ASSISTANT SECRETARY
The ministry can enter into no correspondence of any kind with regard
to this communication which should only be disclosed to responsible
persons.
(ends quoted document)
These few words about atrocity propaganda am not intended to cast a
shadow of doubt upon the nature of the Holocaust. They are intended
only to illustrate the need for historians to approach all reported
wartime atrocities — including those by Nazis against Jews-with a
heightened sense of circumspection. However, throughout ibis study it
was noted that many people, including historians, have incautiously
accepted a number of allegations of brutality or crimes against Jews
which, in fact, cannot survive the standard tests of historical
evidence. For example, for almost fifty years it was claimed (and is
still claimed by many nonspecialists) that the skin of murdered Jews
was tanned by certain Nazis and used to make book covers and lamp
shades. Physical samples of these human-skin products were even
produced at the International military tribunal, and eyewitnesses came
forward to testify that they had seen these atrocities occurring. It
is now known, however, that the samples produced as evidence were made
of goat skin and the testimonies of the eyewitnesses were fraudulent.
It is the same with the allegation that Nazis turned Jewish cadavers
into soap. Plentiful evidence for the soap story was presented at the
International Military Tribunal. Eyewitnesses testified or signed
affidavits, providing the prosecutors with specific details such as
the names of those involved in the soap production, the names and
locations of factories where the soap was made, chemical `recipes’ and
so forth. A cake of human soap was also produced as evidence. Even Sir
Hartley Shawcross, chief British prosecutor, stated in his closing
address that the bodies of the Nazis’ victims were “used to make good
the wartime shortage of soap”. Although one or two historians rejected
the human soap story in the 1980s, it was not until 1990 that
historians, following the lead of Yehuda Bauer really began to abandon
it. They apparently did so because Revisionists were easily disproving
such claims.
A careful and impartial investigation of the available evidence
pertaining to Nazi gas chambers reveals that even these apparently
fall into the category of atrocity propaganda. Because of the
seriousness of this statement it is necessary to make the following
defence.. First, the RSHA monitoring service for foreign broadcasts
discovered’ that the BBC and other Allied radio stations were
broadcasting right across Europe a number of atrocity claims. These
included allegations that Jews were being exterminated in gas
chambers. These broadcasts, sent regularly throughout the second half
of -the war, were in a number of languages, including German, Polish
and Spanish. On July 2, 1,944, for example, the BBC broadcast in
Spanish the claim that 400,000 Jews had been deported from Hungary to
Germany and killed in gas chambers.<Czech, Auschwitz Chronicle, p.
657. Of course, no historians now believe, that mass gassings of Jews
occurred in Germany. Cf. also the BBC’s German-language broadcast of
June 15, 1944 regarding gassings in Birkenau (ibid., p. 647); et al.>
These radio broadcasts would have been received by . a number of
resistance organisations in the concentration and labour camps, which,
as numerous memoirs by former internees attest, had secret radio sets.
Although it is difficult to age the influence these broadcasts had on
those who received them in the camps, they doubtless contributed to
the widespread belief that such atrocities were occurring.
Second, Allied aeroplanes dropped large numbers of leaflets, written
in German and Polish, over the Auschwitz camps stating that gassings
were occurring. One source worth quoting, because it describes both
these pamphlet drops and the Allied radio broadcasts, is the affidavit
of Charles J. Coward which was submitted to the Nuremberg Military
Tribunal in 1947. Coward, a Battery Sergeant in the 8th Reserve
Regimental Royal Artillery, was captured by the Germans in May 1940
and placed in a succession of different Stalag camps. In December 1943
he was transferred to Auschwitz to work at the I.G. Farben industrial
complex, and was housed in camp E715. The relevant section of Coward’s
affidavit states:
Even while still at Auschwitz we got radio broadcasts from the outside
speaking about the gassings and bumings at Auschwitz. I recall one of
those broadcasts was by Anthony Eden himself. Also, there were
pamphlets dropped in Auschwitz and the surrounding territory, one of
which I personally read, which related what was going on in the camp
at Auschwitz. These leaflets were scattered all over the country-
side…<Affidavit of July 24, 1947, in NMT, Volume VIII, p. 606; cf.
Coward’s testimony before the Tribunal, in ibid., pp. 608ff.>
Third, the rumour that people were being gassed by, the Nazis was
widespread in certain regions of Europe during the war, and led to
some people believing in gassings without seeing any evidence for
them. Others, of course, heard the rumours and believed them for a
time, only to reject them later. For example, in December 1942 Maria
van Herwaarden was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau for having sexual
intercourse with a Polish forced labourer who worked with her on an
Austrian farm. During the train journey from Vienna to Auschwitz
Herwaarden was told by a Gypsy woman that they would all be gassed on
arrival. Shortly after she arrived in Auschwitz Herwaaden was taken
with other women into a building where their hair, both head and
pubic, was shaved and their clothes were taken from them. They were
then moved into a large, , cold concrete room without windows. They
were told they were to have a shower. The women were absolutely
terrified because they were sure they mere about to be gassed, as the
Gypsy had said. However, to their great relief, only water flowed from
the shower heads. Herwaaden remained in Auschwitz until January 1945,
and although she witnessed numerous deaths by suicide on the electric
fences land thousands of deaths by disease, she saw no evidence of
gassings, shootings or any other types of extermination.<SZTR, 25-6623-
6651> There are numerous examples of internees even hearing ands
believing rumours of gassing in camps where gassings are now claimed
by orthodox scholars not to have taken place.
Fourth, gas chambers were only one of a number of apparatus originally
claimed in Allied reports to have been used by Nazis to exterminate
Jews. As already noted, both during the war and at the main Nuremberg
trial it was seriously claimed that Jews were also killed in steam
chambers or by electrocution in mechanically-operated vats of water.
Even the OSS, the United States’ main intelligence agency, reported
that Jews were steamed to death in Treblinka. It was also claimed by
the Polish government that Jews were killed in chambers by suffocation
when the air was extracted by huge pumps. The evidence produced at
that time in support of these now-discredited claims is not
qualitatively different from the evidence produced in support of the
gassing claims. Eyewitnesses even came forward to testify or sign
affidavits about the steamings, electrocutions and suffocations. Their
accounts of the killing processes were detailed and contained
descriptions of the machinery and buildings involved. However, despite
the similar evidence for these killings, allegations of steamings,
electrocutions and suffocations have been quietly dropped whilst the
gassing claims remain. Historians have never explained why they
considered the evidence for gassings more credible than the evidence
for these other methods of extermination.
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Fifth, at the International Military Tribunal (and for the next two
decades or so) it was claimed that the Nazis systematically gassed
Jews not only in camps in occupied territories but also in camps on
German soil. At Buchenwald, Dachau and several other German camps
murder was conducted, said Sir Hartley Shawcross, “like some mass
production industry in the gas chambers and crematories.” 230,000
persons were said to have died in Dachau alone, many of them in the
gas chamber. Eyewitnesses testified and signed affidavits about these
gassings, which they sometimes described in gruesome detail. The gas
chambers were mentioned in official government reports, were inspected
and photographed, and Dachau’s was even opened up to the public. In
fact, the evidence provided for the existence of these gas chambers is
not qualitatively different from the evidence for the gas chambers in
the camps in Poland now referred to as `death camps’.
However, despite the fact that the evidence for gassings in Germany is
no less credible than the evidence cited for gassings in Poland,
specialists in the field now state that no systematic exterminations
in gas chambers occurred on German soil. The claims about gassings in
Germany were quietly abandoned decades ago. Systematic mass gassings,
according to accepted opinion, only occurred in six camps in Poland:
Auschwitz (I and II), Majdanek, Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmno and
Treblinka. Historians have never explained why they consider the
evidence for gassings in the east more credible than for gassings in
the west.
Sixth, it ‘s apparent that the descriptions of gassings. in the
eastern death camps given by former internees and SS personnel contain
many lapses, errors, fabrications and distortions. A number of these
flaws are major, aid seriously diminish the sources’ overall
reliability and credibility. We noted, for example, that the so-called
`confession of Kurt Gerstein’, is amongst the most a widely-cited
sources for’ gassings at Belzec. Yet Gerstein insisted that “at least
twenty million persons” had been gassed in the Nazi concentration
camps, that in Belzec 700-800 persons were gassed at a time in rooms
the size of an average bedroom, that he saw in Belzec a pile of shoes
the height of a ten story building, and that he saw in Treblinka a
pile of clothes the same height. He also insisted that “in Auschwitz
alone millions of children were murdered by having a pad [translated
by many scholars as “tampon”] of hydrocyanic acid held under their
noses”. It is the same with Miklos Nyiszli’s widely-cited account of
gassings in Birkenau. Aside from the number of other errors and
fabrications in his account, the fantastic .gas chambers he described
are almost the same length as two New Zealand rugby fields end on end.
These sources are unfortunately typical of the evidence supporting
claims of gassings in the eastern camps. They will not survive the
standard methodological tests of historical evidence.
Seventh, the scores of original German blueprints and architectural
plans for the crematory buildings in Auschwitz allegedly housing gas
chambers contain no evidence that these buildings were ever used for
homicidal purposes. On the contrary, the specifications revealed in
the blue prints and plans show that the rooms now designated as gas
chambers could not possibly have held anywhere near the numbers of
persons purportedly gassed in them at a lime. It would have been
physically impossible. The blueprints and plans, which also record all
structural changes made to the buildings, clearly indicate that the
only ventilation devices in the morgues (the alleged gas chambers)
were ordinary morgue air ventilators. The rooms had no air exhaust
devices suitable for gas extraction. They also had no air heating or
circulation systems, both of which would be necessary for gassings
with Zyklon-B.
Eighth, inspections of the physical remains of the crematory buildings
in Auschwitz and Majdanek (nothing is left at the other camps) confirm
that the buildings were constructed in accordance with the blueprints
and architectural plans, and that no additional structural changes
were made to transform them into gas chambers. Moreover, whilst blue
staining (indicating the presence of .iron-cyanide compounds) is
clearly visible on the surfaces of the delousing chambers, no staining
can be detected o the surfaces of the alleged gas chambers. Physical
samples taken from these rooms by specialists (including scientists
from the Krakow institute) and submitted for chemical analysis also
show that the rooms wire never exposed to significant amounts of
cyanide.
Ninth, whilst the specifications, and layouts of the buildings’
physical remains match identically those town in ft. original
blueprints, descriptions of, the gas chambers given in the already-
contradictory and implausible eyewitness accounts resemble neither the
physical remains nor the buildings shown in the plans. Nyiszli, for
example, described multiple corpse elevators and automatically-opening
cremation ovens. Building plans and contemporary photographs clearly
reveal that these never existed. Similar, in the WRB report of
November 1944 the layout of the rooms, the layout and number of ovens,
and the method of removing corpses bear no resemblence `either to
other eyewitness accounts, to the original blueprints, or to the
physical remains of the buildings. Of course, we now know that the
authors of that section of the WRB report never actually entered the
buildings they described, but relied instead on hearsay evidence.
Tenth, it is not possible even today with our.-sophisticated and
technologically-advanced equipment to cremate human cadavers at
anywhere near the rate claimed in most books on the Holocaust. Whereas
today an average-sized adult body can be cremated in around eighty
minutes, in the early 1940s it took two hours or more. Claims that
corpses were incinerated in ten or twenty minutes (or even less, if we
are to believe some `eyewitnesses’) are extremely far-fetched, to say
the least. In order to be sure of his facts on such a grisly matter
the present writer consulted cremation experts and even took the
opportunity to observe the cremation of a average-sized male body in a
modem oven which reached almost 1900° F. He can confirm that even
after thirty minutes the corpse was well burned but still very much
intact. Therefore, the claims of historians of the Holocaust and
former internees that 6,000 or more bodies of gassed Jews were
cremated each day in the forty-six retorts in Birkenau are very
irresponsible. The highest claim the present writer is aware of is
17,280 per day, which is preposterous<Lengyel, Five Chimneys: the
Story of Auschwitz, p. 69>. Including `down time’, no more than 250
bodies could have been cremated each day.
Eleventh, detailed aerial photographs of the entire Auschwitz complex
taken on random
occasions throughout the period in 1944 when the gassing process was
supposed to be at its height (ten thousand or so per day) show no
signs that any murderous activities were occurring. Despite the claims
of many former internees that smoke and flame emanated continually
from the crematory chimneys, and was visible for miles around, not’
even one of the detailed photographs show any flames or smoke. In any
event, having studied the blueprints of the ovens and chimneys and
having submitted them to an American cremation expert for his opinion
the present writer can confirm that the Auschwitz crematories, like
the crematories in Christchurch and all other: major cities, could not
emit any flames or dense smoke. Additionally, and clearly more
importantly, none of the photographs show any signs of the piles of
corpses, large pyres, burial pits, and so forth that are claimed to
have been in Auschwitz at this time.
Finally, the gassing’ claim is irreconcilable with the overwhelming
weight of evidence on the nature of official Nazi policy on the Jewish
question. That policy, our careful and unbiased reading of the
evidence suggested, was not one of total extermination, but was a brut
policy of deportation and forced labour.
This departure from accepted opinion on the gas chambers dots not
represent an ideological defence of one school of historical thought
on ibis issue against the other. Nor is it an attempt to rehabilitate
the Third Reich The present writer considers the Nazis’ brutal and
destructive treatment of Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, Communists, Jehovah’s
Witnesses, the physically and mental ill and other such groups to be
abhorrent. As a libertarian he also finds repugnant the Nazis’ assault
on freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press,
and considers their persecution of political dissenters and academic
and artistic free-thinkers worthy of the international condemnation it
was and continues to be met with.
Moreover, although the weight of evidence supports the view that the
Nazis did not systematically exterminate Jews in gas chambers or have
an extermination policy as such, it cannot be denied that Jews in
German hands suffered terribly during the Second Worth War. Even
Hitler threatened that “brutal methods could be used, if necessary” to
force the Jews to the east and to put them to work. “Really, the Jews
should be grateful to me for wanting nothing more than a bit of hard
work from them”, exclaimed the exasperated Fuehrer after learning of
an Allied radio broadcast that the Jews were being
exterminated.<Recorded by Heinrich Heim, in Irving, Hitler’s War, p.
332> To understand what exactly Hitler meant by his understatement
“wanting nothing more” it is appropriate to return to his comments to
Horthy in April 1943: “The Jews are just parasites …. If the Jews
there [in Poland] refused to work, they were shot. Those who could not
work just wasted away.” Gas chambers or no gas chambers, Hitler was
responsible for the terrible maltreatment of the Jewish people.
The total number of Jewish deaths is probably impossible to determine,
as even scholars upholding orthodox opinion agree. Figures range from
four million to six or more million. No estimate has been offered in
this thesis, although the total would undoubtedly be more than one
million and far less than the symbolic figure of`six million. Random
atrocities, pogroms by local inhabitants in occupied territories
(particularly Latvia and Lithuania), and the actions of the murderous
Einsatzgruppen claimed the lives of many hundreds of thousands. As
Himmler himself revealed in his above-cited speech to the naval
officers in Weimar on December 16, 1943, thousands of innocent Jewish
women and children were killed along with the men in the occupied
Soviet territories as the Einsatzgruppen carried out various reprisals
and hunted out commissars, partisans, political agitators, criminals
and other security threats and undesirables. Sometimes hundreds of
Jews or more at a time were robbed of their possessions, lined up in
front of ditches, and mowed down by rifle or machine-gun fire. Because
of the squalid conditions they were, forced to live and work in,
hundreds of thousands more Jews died of typhus, diarrhoea and a
variety of other diseases. Tens of thousands more died during the
deportations and of malnutrition and overwork, and routine brutality
claimed the lives of countless more. These deaths cannot by justified.
But what of the Revisionists? It is worth repeating one point made
above: some Revisionist books and articles (such as those by Weber,
Irving and Faurisson) are balanced and authoritative, containing both
solid research and highlydeveloped analysis. They contribute
substantially to the accumulated body of knowledge about the
Holocaust, and should not be ignored or discounted out-of-hand by
historians upholding received opinion. The truth-seeking historian has
nothing to fear from these scholars.
The present writer recently read in an American newspaper an excellent
letter from Laird Wilcox, the political commentator described in the
introduction to this study.<Christian News, Volume 27, No. 39, October
23, 1989> Because they seem to sum up nicely, albeit slightly more
harshly, the points made in this thesis it is worth using Wilcox’s
words to round off this conclusion.
(begin quoted newspaper letter)
I think revisionists have an exaggerated faith in their own beliefs
and arguments, as though if you can disprove Jewish holocaust claims,
then all the Jews will say, “Son-of-a-gun! You guys sure caught us on
that one. I guess all we can do now is march into the sea and
disappear!”
This, however, is not to be. Even absent gas chambers and six million
dead, Adolf Hitler’s onslaught against human rights, civil liberties,
and basic human rationality are only exceeded by the Marxist-
Leninists. There is still one helluva lot to explain about the
mistreatment of Jews and others. The Nazi regime was horrible even by
the most generous standards, and no amount of debunking one claim or
another can erase the totality of their brutality. Even if Jews are
removed from the issue entirely, Nazism was brutal beyond any
justification ….
Extremists and fanatics on both sides have tended to make this subject
a “no man’s
land” where most scholars fear to tread. I think it’s especially
important to keep a clear head, to give full recognition to the human
factors involved, and to be as honest and objective as possible. If
there are errors in contemporary accounts of the holocaust, they
should be investigated and brought to light. But this is not the same
as ameliorating the responsibility of Adolf Hitler and his evil
regime, and it is; not an indictment against the Jews should they
prove to be wrong about the holocaust in some respect or other.
Now having said all of this, I also believe that Jewish organizations
have been incredibly heavy-handed and repressive in confronting the
holocaust revisionist issue. Typically, they revert to name-calling
and harassment and advocating silencing revisionists. What this has
done is give revisionists a decided underdog image arid lend
credibility to their charges that Jews are -afraid to debate the
issues because they fear the results. This argument has some mefits,
and one has to really wonder what they have to fear.
What they have to fear is not that the holocaust will be debunked. I
think the Jewish community has the resources and personnel to give the
revisionist movement a serious challenge in a debate situation. In
terms of the bulk of expert testimony alone the Jewish community could
snow their opposition. What the Jewish community fears is that to
allow the holocaust to even be debatable is an admission of
uncertainty, and that cannot happen. There is probably no issue so
central to Jewish identity as the holocaust. One can argue whether
this should or shouldn’t be, but it nevertheless is.
In my view, this inflexibility and stridency is a mistake. Its like
putting all your eggs in one basket. Had I been in charge of this
issue I would have anticipated that someday I might have to say, “OK,
so maybe our figures aren’t etched in stone, and maybe gas chambers
weren’t as prevalent as we thought. So what? It really doesn’t change
anything much, does it? However extensive it was, or wasn’t, it was
still terrible and deserves the universal condemnation of mankind.”
Had they done this, they wouldn’t have boxed themselves into a corner
as they have. What could happen (and I think it will happen) is that
no amount of repression and name-calling will keep scholars from
investigating this issue (some might even be attracted by it on those
grounds alone), and it’s probably just a matter of time until some
mainstream scholar, possibly nearing retirement, will publish the
revisionist book that will break the dam and then all this effort has
been for naught.
(ends quoted newspaper letter)
