"You're a Holocaust denier!"
Such was the charge levelled against me in a conversation with friends
and acquaintances last Tuesday evening. Am I? Well, you be the judge
as I lay out my position.
1. The Jews in Europe did indeed suffer a Holocaust in which vast numbers of them were killed and otherwise lost their lives during WW II.
2. The numbers come nowhere near the mythical (and it is mythical) figure of six million. I don't know what the number was, maybe nobody does but I suspect it was closer to a tenth of that figure.
3. Other peoples suffered a Holocaust as well during this time, at least as bad as that suffered by the Jews. I have in mind the Poles, Russians, Ukrainians and of course the Germans themselves. The ratio of Tutsis slaughtered in Rwanda dwarfs the ratio of Jews killed in their Holocaust. Yet Jews have cornered the genocide market.
4. There was no plan to exterminate Europe's Jews. The plan was to get them into work camps, slave labour camps if you will, and at the end of the war expel them to Israel, Uganda, Madagascar or the steppes of Russia.
5. The majority of Jewish deaths resulted from the actions of the Einsatzgruppen and their local allies. These forces operated behind German lines after Operation Barbarossa to suppress local resistance. Such resistance was strongly associated with Jews who were in any event an easily identifiable target. Vast numbers were murdered and buried in mass graves. The local forces allied to the Einsatzgruppen undoubtedly took the opportunity to settle many an old score as part of the process. Typhus outbreaks in the camps were also a major contributor...possibly the largest.
6. The idea of the gas chambers as a form of mass slaughter is a complete fabrication.
7. The piles of skeletal bodies as seen in the iconic photos from Belsen and elsewhere represented the victims of typhus and starvation, the latter brought on by the bombing of German supply lines.
I have not arrived at these conclusions casually or quickly. I truly believe that they represent what really occurred.
1. The Jews in Europe did indeed suffer a Holocaust in which vast numbers of them were killed and otherwise lost their lives during WW II.
2. The numbers come nowhere near the mythical (and it is mythical) figure of six million. I don't know what the number was, maybe nobody does but I suspect it was closer to a tenth of that figure.
3. Other peoples suffered a Holocaust as well during this time, at least as bad as that suffered by the Jews. I have in mind the Poles, Russians, Ukrainians and of course the Germans themselves. The ratio of Tutsis slaughtered in Rwanda dwarfs the ratio of Jews killed in their Holocaust. Yet Jews have cornered the genocide market.
4. There was no plan to exterminate Europe's Jews. The plan was to get them into work camps, slave labour camps if you will, and at the end of the war expel them to Israel, Uganda, Madagascar or the steppes of Russia.
5. The majority of Jewish deaths resulted from the actions of the Einsatzgruppen and their local allies. These forces operated behind German lines after Operation Barbarossa to suppress local resistance. Such resistance was strongly associated with Jews who were in any event an easily identifiable target. Vast numbers were murdered and buried in mass graves. The local forces allied to the Einsatzgruppen undoubtedly took the opportunity to settle many an old score as part of the process. Typhus outbreaks in the camps were also a major contributor...possibly the largest.
6. The idea of the gas chambers as a form of mass slaughter is a complete fabrication.
7. The piles of skeletal bodies as seen in the iconic photos from Belsen and elsewhere represented the victims of typhus and starvation, the latter brought on by the bombing of German supply lines.
I have not arrived at these conclusions casually or quickly. I truly believe that they represent what really occurred.
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