Underground Knowledge — A discussion group discussion

Excerpt from DEBUNKING HOLOCAUST DENIAL THEORIES: Two Non-Jews Affirm the Historicity of the Nazi Genocide:

MYTH #7: "I have seen various figures thrown around regarding the number of Jews who died in Europe. It's hard to know which statistic to believe! There is almost no unbiased data about this subject! The way Jews play with the statistics, increasing the number of fatalities every year or so, is evidence of the Holocaust being more of a Holohoax!" –Anonymous Holocaust denier #7


Death tolls of all wars and genocides are always estimates and cannot ever be 100% precise. For example, nobody can estimate how many precisely died in the Vietnam War. (Some historians say three million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans, others say 3.2 million Vietnamese and 65,000 Americans).

There will always be slight variances in death tolls of any war, especially ones spanning entire continents and especially if you go as far back as WW2.

However, these slight variances are not supporting evidence for the facile arguments of Holocaust deniers who are simply looking for any avenue possible to try to revise history to support their hate-filled agendas.

Remember, deniers claim 90 to 100% of all Holocaust deaths are some fantasy concocted years after the war.

Rest assured the only books anywhere that talk about the tiny death toll numbers deniers believe in (i.e. tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands instead of millions) are Holocaust-denying books written by anti-Semitic “historians,” religious zealots or neo-Nazis.

No mainstream history books ever published since 1945 mention a death toll that isn't in the millions for the Holocaust. Period.

To deny the reported six million (approximately) Jews who died, or the 11 million people in total, is to ignore all the eyewitness accounts from Holocaust survivors, the non-Jewish witnesses of the millions who died the open-air massacres around Europe, the concentration camp guards, Nazi officers who admitted to gassings and other related crimes immediately after WW2, and the universal agreement of all mainstream historians who have studied this historical event inside out – not to mention every single scientist who has ever analyzed forensic evidence retrieved from the Nazi genocide.

Not even the most corrupt courtroom on Earth could ignore this much evidence – for collectively these confirmations of the Holocaust equate to irrefutable proof that the reported death toll is indeed correct.

It is possibly the most well-documented crime of the 20th Century, but remember for religious extremists, Nazi apologists or other anti-Semites it would never matter how much evidence you put in front of them. They would always deny the Holocaust because to admit the event occurred would be to stop believing the Jews are inferior to them. It would also require such bigots to admit the very uncomfortable truth to themselves: that their ‘own kind’ did these despicable things to the Jewish people.

Another common argument the deniers bring up is the death toll relating to Auschwitz – a concentration camp where there have been conflicting reports about the number of those murdered.

Specifically, deniers often bring up the Breitbard Document, a paper by Aaron Breitbart who draws attention to a commemorative plaque at Auschwitz. This plaque, as the deniers repeatedly and triumphantly point out, did indeed read, “Four million people suffered and died here at the hands of the Nazi murderers between the years 1940 and 1945.”

This overestimation of the number of deaths at Auschwitz was the result of Soviet propaganda. According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Soviets “purposely overstated the number of non-Jewish casualties at Auschwitz-Birkenau.”

The old plaque Breitbart referred to has long since been replaced. It now reads: “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.”

Deniers claim this revised plaque is an admission that the death toll statistics were initially exaggerated and that the new plaque at Auschwitz reveals that the six million figure should be reduced by 2.5 million people.

However, what deniers miss, or perhaps purposefully ignore, is that the original plaque, based on the Soviet propaganda, was never used as an accurate historical source by mainstream historians. Nor was it included in the six million figure.

For example, Austrian-born American historian Raul Hilberg, widely considered to be the world's preeminent scholar of the Holocaust, was stating as early as the 1950s that approximately 1.1 million Jewish people died in Auschwitz.

Most deniers never research the Holocaust deeply enough to appreciate this nuance of WW2 historical reports, although there are some who are well aware of the truth, but decide to conceal it from their legion of followers to further their anti-Semitic aims.

And as for the idea that there is a Jewish conspiracy to increase the numbers of fatalities each year, then consider the 1989 publication of Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, by Israel Gutman, in which it’s estimated total losses from 5,596,029 to 5,860,129. This roughly matches current estimates.

So, if the “global Jewish cabal” are increasing the death toll year after year, then why hasn’t the estimated death toll increased in the decades that have elapsed since publication of the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust and similar mainstream history books of that era and earlier?

Another crucial thing to question is why deniers even bother to quibble about the number of deaths. If one day it were proven only five million or 5.5 million Jews were exterminated, would it be any less an atrocity? What number would deniers suggest is low enough to say that genocide didn't occur and that it’s not important that humanity remembers the Holocaust and the lessons learnt?

For example, a Holocaust denier wrote (using a pseudonym) the following to us on social media in relation to the exaggeration he assumes has occurred regarding the number of Jewish deaths: “We know terrible things happened, even without exaggerating, but exaggeration is still wrong. Not only because it is inaccurate, but because it sets a standard against which new atrocities are measured. New war criminals can always say, well what we are doing is still not as bad as the Holocaust. This alone makes it worth looking at whether all the deaths were really murders or whether many of them were indirect consequences of a bad policy and the general collapse in Germany as the war turned to defeat.”

Could it be, yet again, such deniers have no real argument to offer and are simply trying to find minor anomalies in Holocaust records in order to purposefully distort and undermine history?

Denial: Holocaust History on Trial (relates to the new release movie DENIAL) by Deborah E. Lipstadt



Encyclopedia Of The Holocaust