The Six Million: Fact Or Fiction?

by Peter Winter

Genres: Holocaust

102 pages, Paperback

First published April 16, 2014

Reviews

[Eric Gustafsson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Have I been fooled?

This book gives a lot of alternate facts of the Holocaust and I recommend everyone to read and form your own opinion.

[Antonino Coppola · Rating 4 out of 5]

Apply logic not passion

If one take out the passion about the subject, step aside and look at the bigger picture then this book asks some serious questions which any logic person would like an answer to!
Worth the time with the author having done some serious research!

[N · Rating 5 out of 5]

I cannot criticise the contents at all. However, the outer format is a let down: 11" x 8 1/2" is a horrible size, and their is no title down the spine. Other than that the book is a fantastoc read.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow!Alot of good points were raised that make you question everything youve heard.Not denying the Holocaust but questioning aspects of it.Couldnt put it down.

[جلال · Rating 3 out of 5]

دعوى محرقة اليهود اُتخذت ذريعة لعدم مسائلة أو انتقاد الصهاينه في اي عمل. سُنّت قوانين تعاقب من ينكر المحرقة. هل كانت حقيقية؟ أو على الأقل بهذا الحجم والطريقة التي يصورها الإعلام (والذي يتحكم به اليهود)؟

هذا الكتاب ينظر في تهالك هذه الدعاوى، ولو على مستوى الكيف والكم. خصوصا وأن إفادات شهود العيان والناجين من السجون - والتي بني عليها جزء كبير من قصة المحرقة - تتضارب فيما بينها ومع بعض المستندات المحفوظة في المتاحف ومراكز البحث (كمخططات البناء لهذه السجون)، كما ينقل الكاتب.

لا انكر ان بعض الصفحات كادت تصور هتلر كرجل سلام...

اخيرا، التاريخ يكتبه المنتصرون..

الكتاب صغير نسبياً. إذا لم تبالي بمراجعة المصادر، فستكون قراءة سريعة جدا....

[Maya Molly · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is racist counterfactual drivel.

Extreme conspiracy theorists like these cherry-pick facts to cast doubt where there really isn't any. They point out small details where there is some discrepancy and act as if they represent the broader picture.

Here's just one paragraph, chosen more or less at random:

According to the official Holocaust Storyteller line, the Nazis did not pipe gas to the “gas chambers” but instead used Zyklon-B, an insecticide, to kill thousands of Jews in underground chambers at Auschwitz. Leaving aside the technical impossibility of killing thousands of people simultaneously in an underground chamber, (for example, the involuntary—and perfectly normal— defecation by executed persons as their bowel muscles relax, replicated by “thousands” of “victims” being killed simultaneously in a crowded, supposedly airtight, underground chamber, would quickly block up the room and make it unusable after even one such “mass gassing”) the Nazis would never have started an execution with thousands of people without making sure all the logistics were in place.

Note the quotation marks around "gas chambers" and "victims." I imagine the author's voice dripping with sarcasm as he says this. He also calls the historical record "the official Holocaust Storyteller line."

What he writes is probably based in the discredited "Leuchtler report" which cast doubt on the functioning of gas chambers at the Auschwitz death camp. From the Auschwitz.org website: http://www.auschwitz.org/en/history/h...

I think that last paragraph from this link is the most important to read and describes the people who like this book: those who believe reports like this "are looking for precisely the sort of conclusions that Leuchter offers" and have no interest in the mounds of evidence, such as actual German documents and statements from the Auschwitz commandant, which confirm that the historical record about Auschwitz is accurate. This page doesn't debunk the rather bizarre claim that cleaning up human feces would have been too difficult for it to be true that humans were gassed at Auschwitz, but given that the Auschwitz commanders made Jewish prisoners collect dead bodies and put them in the crematoriums, I can't imagine that they would have had any compunctions about making the prisoners clean up human excrement.

Among the conclusions that this book draws at its end are two that are BLATANTLY anti-Semitic:

Secondly, the tales of persecution of Jews have served to create a highly profitable business for large numbers of Jews, something which the honest Jewish professor Norman Finkelstein described as the “Holocaust Industry” in his book of the same name (The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suf ering, Verso Books, 2003).

It is certainly true that some people have earned money by telling the story of what happened to them during the Holocaust, and it's legitimate to critique the so-called "Holocaust Industry," as Finkelstein did. However, to claim that the Holocaust was made up TO make money is an anti-Semitic trope that accuses Jews of only being interested in money.

Then:

Finally, “the Holocaust” has served as a tool for those who seek to suppress any discussion of race, immigration, or ethnic issues. This last factor has led to, for example, any group which advocates the preservation of its national identity or homogeneity, being dismissed as “Nazi” and therefore “one step away from the gas chambers.”

What he's complaining about there is the memory of the Holocaust has made it impossible to be a white supremacist anymore without being called a Nazi.

Now, every potent conspiracy theory has grains of truth in it, and that's how it can take hold. For example, Hitler did initially consider just expelling all Jews to Palestine or to somewhere else. Here's a good explanation of this: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo... The Holocaust was NOT monolithic, and it certainly did evolve over time. However, this book claims that the real number of Jews who died in the Holocaust was probably 150,000, not 6 million:

As to the real number of Jews who died in the war: as pointed out, the Nazis themselves at the Wannsee Conference estimated that there were 4,536,500 Jews under their direct control. They would have no reason to lie to themselves over a topic dear to their hearts, and this figure ties in with all other estimates as well. Yet there have been to date 4,384,138 individual claims for compensation by “victims” against the German government. Simple mathematics reveals then that the difference between the number of claims and the total number of Jews represents those who died during the war (and were thus unable to make a claim, unlike the survivors). This figure is 152,362. Even if this figure is an underestimate, and the number is doubled or even tripled, it would still be a fraction of the claimed “Six Million” figure.

Again, there is a small grain of truth here: that the six million number is just an estimate, though ironically, it's an estimate that comes from a Nazi source: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/6...


What you can see here is that there IS legitimate debate about exactly how many Jews died in the Holocaust-- all of these estimates, which were arrived at using different methods, came up with a number between 4 and 7 million. Clearly, any one of those numbers is devastating. By contrast, the 150,000 number that the author of this denial book came up with through ONE "simple" little calculation is obviously completely low. I am not an expert on every detail here, but one problem with the estimate is that, obviously, not only Jews currently in the custody of the German government sought out compensation. My husband's paternal grandparents, for example, were entitled to compensation, even though neither of them was ever in German custody-- they were entitled to compensation because they lost their homes and their entire families. Interestingly, they refused to apply for compensation, because they didn't want to take a penny from the German government. Furthermore, many Jews were killed without going into custody-- their parents were shot in a pit outside their town. Furthermore, no Jew already murdered in a death camp would be currently in "custody." This racist author chose two numbers that SEEM similar enough to appear related and used them to make a completely bogus calculation that is by all legitimate estimates at least 4 million too low.

[Aerik · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very accessible book, and pretty well updated. Unfortunately it is aesthetically cheap looking, which does not help it get its points across to the skeptical. There are also some different ways I would have tackled certain subjects, some facts I would have included, and other subjects/facts I would have discarded completely. For instance, there's little to no reason to talk about the legitimacy of Anne Frank's diary in a book about the holocaust; the diary never mentions gas chambers.

Those nitpicks aside, I do recommend this for purchase. It's a good refresher, and the internal format is easy to read.

[Peter J.]

I won’t waste the reader’s time on the claims and evidence the author puts forward. That is what the book is for. I will simply state that it is well worth both the read and any subsequent reflection.