What Holocaust Revisionists Do Not Deny

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Unfortunately some people, not understanding the issues, actually believed the media's

claims that the revisionists said that "there was no Holocaust." For that reason the IHR took

the stand that it was vital for the historical revisionists to, frankly, get their act together. This

was a major task, in many ways, particularly because the revisionist movement was spreading

worldwide.

In many countries revisionists who were, in some cases, not yet even affiliated with the

IHR, were engaged in their own research: France, Germany, Sweden, England and elsewhere.

It truly was global in scope. However, it was the IHR that gave historical revisionism the

leadership that the movement needed to keep it energized and dynamic and reaching out to

more and more people in the world at large.

By the time that historical revisionism became a part of the historical debate (perhaps

largely, ironically, because of publicity arising from the Mermelstein Affair, which we will

examine in these pages), Establishment historians were becoming obsessed with combating

revisionism.

In their effort to combat revisionism, in the end, they were forced to address its

contentions – something they had, in the past, refused to do. Now to fight the revisionists

they had to tell the public just what it was the revisionists were thinking.

In early 1993, historian Paul Johnson, no friend of revisionism, described revisionism

in a critical – and not necessarily accurate – review as follows:

"It takes many forms. Some deniers say that the Holocaust was a complete fabrication from

start to finish. Others, such as President Tudjman of Croatia, claim that the numbers of Jews killed has

been hugely and deliberately exaggerated: Tudjman insists that only 900,000 Jews died." [Tudjman has

since recanted under pressure, however.]

"Another approach is to produce 'scientific evidence' that Jews who died in the death camps could not have been killed in the way historians and war-crimes tribunals have asserted. In particular, deniers claim that Zyklon-B gas was totally inappropriate as a homicidal agent. A Boston engineer called Fred A. Leuchter, who specialized in construction [ofl execution apparatuses, was sent out to Auschwitz and Madjdanek to collect 'forensic samples' and on his return produced a report that concluded there had never been homicidal gassings at these sites.

"Yet another common tactic is to attack the authenticity of The Diary of Anne Frank, which has

sold over 20 million copies in scores of countries as well as being made into a prize-winning play and

movie. For countless people, it personifies the tragedy and horror of the Holocaust. But deniers claim

that the Diary is a post-war invention, written by a professional New York playwright in collaboration

with Anne Frank's father." (1)

Contrary to Johnson's often-inaccurate assessment of what historical revisionism is all

about, here, according to a survey of historical revisionism by the IHR, are the things the

revisionists don't deny and have never denied:

• The existence of a vast network of concentration camps throughout Germany and

Nazi-occupied Europe.

• The existence of a forced-labor program for inmates of these camps.

• The fact that the Nazi regime was anti-Jewish and sought to physically remove the

Jews first from Germany and then from all of Europe under its control.

• The fact that in order to accomplish this segregation, a vast program called the

"Endlösung" or ("Final Solution") was developed and implemented, which involved, first,

the segregation of Jews in ghettoes, and then their mass transport (the "combing through of

Europe from West to East") to concentration camps and other labor centers in the Eastern

occupied territories.

• The fact that Jewish, and other, practitioners of illegal behind-the-lines partisan

warfare were executed by German Einsatzgruppen (Action Group) units in rear security

operations which were basically of a "preventative guerrilla warfare" character. And the fact

that in these round-up operations some innocent people were indeed killed. (In a bitter and

desperate war situation it was difficult to separate the innocent from the guilty, especially in

partisan warfare where combatants hid behind civilian clothes.)

• The fact that many Jews perished among the more than 40 million Europeans who

perished during the Second World War, and that their casualties from all causes — including

natural attrition, disease, malnutrition, bombings, military actions, pogroms conducted by

indigenous Eastern European populations, Einsatzgruppen actions, nameless ad hoc

atrocities, and general wartime havoc – numbered unquestionably in the hundreds of

thousands.

• The fact that many Jews in concentration camps were separated from and lost contact

with their relatives or friends and that many of these people indeed perished during this time.

• The existence of crematorium ovens in the larger concentration camps, for the purpose

of efficiently and sanitarily disposing of the corpses of inmates who died from the periodic

raging epidemics of typhus.

• The [existence of gas chambers] in the camps using the disinfectant cyanic gas

Zyklon-B to disinfect clothing, bedding, etc.

• The fact that British and American troops at the liberation of the camps in Germany

(Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, etc) encountered horrible scenes of strewn and piled

corpses, as well as many inmates who were in terrible physical condition, barely alive.

• The fact that some atrocities did occur, above and beyond the scope of legitimate

martial or judicial punishment, on an ad-hoc basis and perpetrated by the types of persons

that are unleashed by all wars, and found on all sides in a war.

None of this is denied. What is denied is that there was a deliberate Germany

area of six million or even more. The "Holocaust," if defined in these terms, is a myth. It

never happened.

It is important to understand, further, that it is no mere "numbers game" the

revisionists are playing. They are not just saying: "Well, it wasn't as many as six million."

They are saying that there was no German "extermination program." (1)

Regardless of what "The Holocaust" actually was, it is the common perception or image of that word which is important, exactly as perception, not reality is the stock in trade of all salesmen, advertisers and promoters.

While one Holocaust survivor, Mel Mermelstein – whom we have already met – was to

describe himself as the "best witness" to the events we mean when we speak of the Holocaust,

then the alleged events themselves come into question. So the question of "What is 'The

Holocaust' ?" must be explored. This is precisely what the IHR has done.

What, then, is the Holocaust ? The answer, of course, depends on the definition. To the

average American, the phrase "The Holocaust" has a very clear meaning: the cold-blooded

killing of six million Jews in "gas ovens."

This definition, in light of all scholarship today (particularly that by the IHR and its

associates), is ludicrous. Most Jewish historians today will admit that the six million figure

is impossible to sustain and forensic evidence, hundreds of articles printed in the IHR's

Journal of Historical Review as well as dozens of papers presented to the IHR's international

revisionist conferences confirm this.

However, there may have been a "Holocaust" in the sense that many Jews were killed in

cold blood on their Eastern front by the German Einsatzgruppen, although there is no

evidence this happened on Germany's Western front. To explore this further it is important to

remember the Geneva Conventions, the terms of which attempted to define what was

permissible and what was impermissible during war.

The Geneva Conventions were ratified by most of the great powers by 1929. The one

major power which refused to sign was the Soviet Union due to the fact that at that time its

leader, Josef Stalin, a beloved favorite of the Anglo-American press, such as the New YorkTimes, was engaged in the task of eliminating millions of Russians, Ukrainians, Balts and

others whom he found ill-fitting as the "New Communist Man" which enamored Western and

Jewish intellectuals.

The Geneva Conventions, among other things, prescribed rules for the treatment of

military prisoners. And, contrary to popular misconception, the record shows that muchreviled

National Socialist Germany observed these rules incomparably better than the U.S. or

Great Britain.

On Germany's Eastern Front it was different. Not being a signatory to the convention,

Stalin ignored it and the war sank to the lowest level of barbarism. As a matter of Soviet

policy, German prisoners were either shot or marched off to work in Siberian mines. Out of

approximately 3,000,000 Germans taken prisoner, only some 300,000 returned to Germany

after the war.

The Germans had no option but to conduct war with equal savagery. As a matter of

policy the German troops on the Eastern Front would simply shoot all Communist political

commissars they captured. These commissars – many of them, in fact, Jewish – were

assigned to Red Army combat units to see that abject obedience to Stalin's Communist Party

was observed.

Since the Germans, rightly or wrongly, believed that the Jews were the backbone of

Soviet Communism, they were often shot on sight while Russians and others were spared.

In fact, in the latter days of the war the Germans formed many divisions out of non-

Jewish Soviet soldiers the German forces captured. Many of these captives had actually

deserted the Red Army. And there are stories of German units, and other units allied with the

Germans, such as the Hungarians, shooting the entire Jewish population of some villages.

(The idea that the Jews, as a people, were a driving force behind international

communism was, however, not unique to the Germans or their Eastern European

collaborators.

(None other than Winston Churchill himself-later British prime minister-wrote an

article published in the February 8, 1920 edition of the Illustrated Sunday Herald of London

in which he declared that the issue of what he called "Zionism vs. Bolshevism" constituted

nothing less than "a struggle for the soul of the Jewish people.")

In short, war was indeed – as the old adage goes – Hell. So if there was a "Holocaust,"

this is what the Holocaust really was – a far cry from the "cold-blooded killing of six million

Jews in 'gas ovens."'

Having reached these determinations, and having defined what was – and what wasn't –

"The Holocaust," the IHR and its associates struggled for an effective method to make their

revisionist research known to the general public which had been conditioned to accept the standard definition of "The Holocaust."

It was, in fact, the IHR's first major public relations effort – critics called it a

"gimmick" – that ultimately brought Holocaust revisionism to perhaps more people than even

the IHR ever thought possible.

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