Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time (43 page)

While estimates do vary, historians using different methods and different source materials independently arrive at five to six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust. The fact that the estimates vary actually adds credibility; that is, it would be more likely that the numbers were "cooked" if the estimates all came out the same. The fact that the estimates do not come out the same yet all are within a reasonable range of error variance means somewhere between five and six million Jews died in the Holocaust. Whether it is five or six million is irrelevant. It is a large number of people. And it was not just several hundred thousand or "only" one or two million, as some deniers suggest. More accurate estimates will be made in the future as new information arrives from Russia and former Soviet territories. The overall figure, however, is not likely to change by more than a few tens of thousands, and certainly not by hundreds of thousands or millions.

The table below presents estimated Jewish losses in the Holocaust by country. The figures were compiled by a number of scholars, each working in his or her own geographic area of specialty, and then combined by Yisrael Gutman and Robert Rozett for the
Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
The figures were derived from population demographics, taking the number of Jews registered Uving in every village, town, and city in Europe, the number reported transported to camps, the number liberated from camps, the number killed in "special actions" by the Einsatzgruppen, and the number remaining alive after the war. The minimum and maximum loss figures represent the range of error variation.

ESTIMATED LOSS OF JEWS IN THE HOLOCAUST

SOURCE:
Encyclopedia of the Holocaust,
editor in chief Yisrael Gutman (New York: Macmillan, 1990), p. 1799.

Finally, one might ask the denier one simple question: If six million Jews did not die in the Holocaust, where did they all go? The denier will say they are living in Siberia and Kalamazoo, but for millions of Jews to suddenly appear out of the hinterlands of Russia or America or anywhere else is so unlikely as to be nonsensical. The Holocaust survivor who does turn up is a rare find indeed.

Conspiracies

There were many millions more killed by the Nazis, including Gypsies, homosexuals, mentally and physically handicapped persons, political prisoners, and especially Russians and Poles, but Holocaust deniers do not worry about the numbers of these dead. This fact has something to do with the widespread lack of attention to non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust, yet it also has something to do with the antisemitic core of Holocaust denial.

Coupled with deniers' obsession with "the Jews" is an obsession with conspiracies. On the one hand, they deny that the Nazis had a plan (i.e., a conspiracy) to exterminate the Jews. They reinforce this argument by pointing out how extreme conspiratorial thinking can become (a la JFK conspiracy theories). They demand powerful evidence before historians can conclude that Hitler and his followers conspired to exterminate European Jewry (Weber 1994b). Fine. But they cannot then claim, on the other hand, that the idea of the Holocaust was a Zionist conspiracy to obtain reparations from Germany in order to fund the new State of Israel, without meeting their own demands for proof.

As a part this latter argument, deniers claim that if the Holocaust really happened as Holocaust historians say it did, then it would have been widely known during the war (Weber 1994b). It would be as obvious as, say, the D-day landing was. Plus, the Nazis would have discussed their murderous plans among themselves. Well, for obvious reasons, D-day was kept a secret and the D-day landing was not widely known until after it began. Likewise for the Holocaust. It was not something that was casually discussed even between fellow Nazis. Albert Speer, in fact, wrote about this in his Spandau diary:

December 9, 1946.
It would be wrong to imagine that the top men of the regime would have boasted of their crimes on the rare occasions when they met. At the trial we were compared to the heads of a Mafia. I recalled movies in which the bosses of legendary gangs sat around in evening dress chatting about murder and power, weaving intrigues, concocting coups. But this atmosphere of back room conspiracy was not at all the style of our leadership. In our personal dealings, nothing would ever be said about any sinister activities we might be up to. (1976, p. 27)

Speer's observation is corroborated by SS guard Theodor Malzmueller's description of his introduction to mass murder upon his arrival at the Kulmhof (Chelmno) extermination camp:

When we arrived we had to report to the camp commandant, SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Bothmann. The SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer addressed us in his living quarters, in the presence of SS-Untersturmfuhrer Albert Plate. He explained that we had been dedicated to the Kulmhof extermination camp as guards and added that in this camp the plague boils of humanity, the Jews, were exterminated. We were to keep quiet about everything we saw or heard, otherwise we would have to reckon with our families' imprisonment and the death penalty. (Klee, Dressen, and Riess 1991, p. 217)

The answer to the deniers' overall contention that there was a conspiracy by Jews to concoct a Holocaust in order to finance the State of Israel (Rassinier 1978) is straightforward. The basic facts about the Holocaust were established before there was a State of Israel and before the United States or any other country gave it one cent. Moreover, when reparations were established, the amount Israel received from Germany was not based on numbers killed but on Israel's cost of absorbing and resettling the Jews who fled Germany and German-controlled countries before the war and the survivors of the Holocaust who came to Israel after the war. In March 1951, Israel requested from the Four Powers reparations, to be calculated on this basis.

The government of Israel is not in a position to obtain and present a complete statement of all Jewish property taken or looted by the Germans, and said to total more than $6 thousand million. It can only compute its claim on the basis of total expenditures already made and the expenditure still needed for the integration of Jewish immigrants from Nazi-dominated countries. The number of these immigrants is estimated at some 500,000, which means a total expenditure of $1.5 thousand million. (Sagi 1980, p. 55)

Needless to say, if reparations were based on the total number of survivors, then any Zionist conspirators should have exaggerated not the number of Jews killed by the Nazis but the number of survivors. In fact, given the provisions of the reparation settlement, if the deniers are right and only a few hundred thousand Jews died, then Germany owes Israel far more in reparations, for where else could those five to six million survivors have gone? Deniers might argue that the Zionist conspirators traded reparation money from Germany for a greater prize: money and long-term sympathy from all over the world. But here we really go off the deep end. Why should the supposed conspirators have risked sure money for some uncertain future payoff? In reality, the State of Israel as the recipient of German money is a myth. Most of it went to individual survivors, not to the Israeli government.

Moral Equivalency

When all else fails, deniers shift from wrangling about intentionality, gassings and crematoria, and the number of Jews killed to arguing that the Nazi's treatment of the Jews is really no different from what other nations do to their perceived enemies. Deniers point out, for example, that the U.S. government obliterated with atomic weapons two entire Japanese cities filled with civilians (Irving 1994) and forced Japanese-Americans into camps, which is just what the Germans did to their perceived internal enemy—the Jews (Cole 1994).

The response to this is twofold. First, just because another country does evil does not make your own evil right. Second, there is a difference between war and the systematic state-organized killing of unarmed people within your own country, not in self-defense, not to gain more territory, raw materials, or wealth, but simply because they are perceived as a type of Satanic force and inferior race. At his trial in Jerusalem, Adolf Eichmann, SS Obersturmbannfiihrer of the RSHA and one of the chief implementers of the Final Solution, tried to make the moral equivalence argument. But the judge didn't buy it, as this sequence from the trial transcript shows (Russell 1963, pp. 278-279):

Judge Benjamin Halevi to Eichmann:
You have often compared the extermination of the Jews with the bombing raids on German cities and you compared the murder of Jewish women and children with the death of German women in aerial bombardments. Surely it must be clear to you that there is a basic distinction between these two things. On the one hand the bombing is used as an instrument of forcing the enemy to surrender. Just as the Germans tried to force the British to surrender by their bombing. In that case it is a war objective to bring an armed enemy to his knees.

On the other hand, when you take unarmed Jewish men, women, and children from their homes, hand them over to the Gestapo, and then send them to Auschwitz for extermination it is an entirely different thing, is it not?

Eichmann:
The difference is enormous. But at that time these crimes had been legalized by the state and the responsibility, therefore, belongs to those who issued the orders.

Halevi:
But you must know surely that there are internationally recognized Laws and Customs of War whereby the civilian population is protected from actions which are not essential for the prosecution of the war itself.

Eichmann:
Yes, I'm aware of that.

Halevi:
Did you never feel a conflict of loyalties between your duty and your conscience?

Eichmann:
I suppose one could call it an internal split. It was a personal dilemma when one swayed from one extreme to the other.

Halevi:
One had to overlook and forget one's conscience.

Eichmann:
Yes, one could put it that way.

During his trial, Eichmann never denied the Holocaust. His argument was that "these crimes had been legalized by the state" and therefore the people that "issued the orders" are responsible. This was the classic defense used at the Nuremberg trials by most of the Nazis. Since the higher-ups all committed suicide—Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, and Hermann Goring— they were off the hook, or so they thought.