The Holocaust​—Yes, It Really Happened!

SURPRISINGLY, there is a small minority of people who allege that the Holocaust did not take place as it is depicted in modern history. In his publication Did Six Million Really Die? The Truth at Last, Richard Harwood states: “The allegation that 6 million Jews died during the Second World War, as a direct result of official German policy of extermination, is utterly unfounded.”

So the questions are raised: Did the Nazis command the extermination of the Jews during World War II? Did four to six million Jews really die in the concentration camps? Were there such things as gas chambers? Or are these distortions of German history?

Certain revisionist historians have alleged that these events did not take place. They argue that, at most, only a few thousand Jews died and that the majority were evacuated to other countries.

A recent court case in Canada highlighted this controversy. A German immigrant to Canada was prosecuted for “knowingly publishing false information which was likely to cause harm to social or racial tolerance” by denying that the Holocaust ever happened, reported The Globe and Mail of Toronto, Canada. The result was a 15-month jail sentence and a ban on the publication of his revisionist views of the Holocaust.

In West Germany an antidefamation law was amended in 1985 to allow even non-Jewish persons to lay complaint against “anyone who insults, slanders, libels or disparages people who ‘lost their lives as victims of National Socialist or other forms of tyrannic or despotic rule.’” The effect of this law is that it “makes the denial of the murder of Jews in concentration camps during the Nazi dictatorship a punishable offense,” stated the Hamburger Abendblatt.

The denying of the Holocaust is commonly called the “Auschwitz lie.” Auschwitz (now Oświȩcim) was the infamous concentration camp in Poland where the Nazis committed mass murder. According to the West German media, right-wing extremists have tried to hide or deny these events and thus the term “Auschwitz lie.”

Emigration or Extermination?

The existence today of millions of Jews of European origin proves that the Nazis did not succeed in destroying European Jewry. That many Jews escaped the attempted annihilation in the concentration camps is confirmed by historian William L. Shirer, who wrote in his book 20th Century Journey​—The Nightmare Years 1930-1940: “Not all the Austrian Jews perished in the Nazi camps and prisons. Many Jews were allowed to buy their way out of captivity and go abroad. Usually, it cost them their fortune. . . . Perhaps nearly half of Vienna’s 180,000 Jews managed to purchase their freedom before the Holocaust began.” This policy was especially in effect in the 1930’s.

However, Shirer explains that although the Office for Jewish Emigration was set up, under Reinhard Heydrich, “later it would become an agency not of emigration but of extermination, and organize the systematic slaughter of more than four million Jews.” This “final solution” was directed by Karl Adolf Eichmann, who was eventually executed in Israel for his war crimes.

The concentration camps were not the only means of eliminating what the Nazis regarded as subhuman and inferior races. There were also the feared Einsatzgruppen (Special Action Groups), extermination squads that went in behind the invading army “and whose sole objective was the wholesale slaughter of the Jews. . . . Moving close behind the advancing front line so that few could evade their net, the Einsatzgruppen brutally shot, bayoneted, burnt, tortured, clubbed to death or buried alive almost half a million Jews in the first six months of the campaign.”​—Hitler’s Samurai—​The Waffen-SS in Action, by Bruce Quarrie.

Is that figure hard to believe? It works out to an average of less than one murder per day per member of the 3,000 member group. When these special action groups reached the Soviet territories, partial death tolls give a figure of “more than 900,000, account[ing] for only about two thirds of the total number of Jewish victims in mobile operations.”​—The Destruction of the European Jews, by Raul Hilberg.

Commandant Confesses

What testimony is there from the very participants in the executions in the concentration camps? Rudolf Höss, former commandant of the Auschwitz camp complained: ‘Believe me, it wasn’t always a pleasure to see those mountains of corpses and smell the perpetual burning.’ He also expressed “surprised disapproval that Jewish Special Detachments (Sonderkommandos) were willing, in return for a short extension of their own lives, to help with the gassing of members of their own race.” (The Face of the Third Reich, by Joachim C. Fest, page 285) German author Fest adds: “Some of the one-sided perfectionist pride of the expert comes out in Höss’s statement: ‘By the will of the Reichsführer of the SS [Heinrich Himmler], Auschwitz became the greatest human extermination centre of all time,’ or when he points out with the satisfaction of the successful planner that the gas chambers of his own camp had a capacity ten times greater than those of Treblinka.”

In his autobiography Höss wrote: “Unknowingly, I was a cog in the chain of the great extermination machine of the Third Reich.” “The Reichsführer SS [Himmler] sent various high-ranking Party leaders and SS officers to Auschwitz so that they might see for themselves the process of extermination of the Jews. They were all deeply impressed by what they saw.”a

However, they were apparently affected by the difference between the phrase “the final solution of the Jewish question” and its ghastly reality in the gas chambers. When asked how he could stand it, Höss answered: “My invariable answer was that the iron determination with which we must carry out Hitler’s orders could only be obtained by a stifling of all human emotions.”

Thus, Höss, the sadistic puppet, freely admitted that the Holocaust was a reality and that he was one of its perpetrators as camp commander of Auschwitz.

In Values and Violence in Auschwitz, a book first published in Polish, the translator, Catherine Leach, states that 3,200,000 Polish Jews lost their lives because of mass executions, torture, and slave labor in concentration camps. She says: “The holocaust of Europe’s Jews took place on Polish territory.”

Death by Drowning

Death could come in many ways in the camps​—starvation, disease, a bullet in the neck, gas chamber, beatings, hanging, guillotine, and drowning. The drowning was a special refinement.

Writer Terrence Des Pres explains: “The fact is that prisoners were systematically subjected to filth. They were the deliberate target of excremental assault. . . . Prisoners in the Nazi camps were virtually drowning in their own waste, and in fact death by excrement was common. In Buchenwald, for instance, latrines consisted of open pits twenty-five feet [8 m] long, twelve feet [4 m] deep and twelve feet [4 m] wide. . . . These same pits, which were always overflowing, were emptied at night by prisoners working with nothing but small pails.” One eyewitness recounts: “The location was slippery and unlighted. Of the thirty men on this assignment, an average of ten fell into the pit in the course of each night’s work. The others were not allowed to pull the victims out. When work was done and the pit empty, then and then only were they permitted to remove the corpses.”

Much more testimony could be quoted to prove that extermination became a part of the Nazi policy as more and more European countries were occupied. The bibliography on this subject is endless, and the eyewitness testimony, together with the photographic evidence, is appalling. But was the Holocaust only a Jewish experience? When the Nazis invaded Poland, was it only the Jews they wanted to liquidate?

[Footnotes]

[Blurb on page 5]

“The prisoners [transferred to labor camps] would have been spared a great deal of misery if they had been taken straight into the gas chambers at Auschwitz.”​—Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz

[Blurb on page 6]

‘Believe me, it wasn’t always a pleasure to see those mountains of corpses and smell the perpetual burning.’​—Rudolf Höss

[Blurb on page 8]

“More people kept coming, always more, whom we hadn’t the facilities to kill. . . . The gas chambers couldn’t handle the load.”​—Franz Suchomel, SS officer

[Box on page 6]

Payment for Proof

“A $50,000 reward offered for ‘proof’ that the Nazis gassed Jewish victims in concentration camps must be paid to an Auschwitz survivor under the terms of a court settlement, the survivor’s lawyer said today.

“Judge Robert Wenke of [Los Angeles] Superior Court approved the settlement that calls for the Institute for Historical Review to pay Mel Mermelstein, the Auschwitz survivor. . . .

“The institute, which says the Holocaust never happened, must also pay Mr. Mermelstein $100,000 for the pain and suffering caused by the reward offer, the lawyer said. . . .

“‘Mr. Mermelstein’s victory in this case’ [the lawyer, Gloria Allred, said] ‘will now send a clear message to all those throughout the world who attempt to distort history and inflict misery and suffering on Jews that the survivors of the Holocaust will fight back through the legal system to protect themselves and vindicate the truth about their lives.’”​—The New York Times, July 25, 1985.

[Box on page 7]

Sachsenhausen​—“Safe Custody Camp”?

Was Sachsenhausen really an extermination camp? Or was it just a “safe custody camp”?

Answer by Max Liebster, Jewish victim who survived the Holocaust:

“My statement is based on my personal experience and what I have witnessed in this camp. I do not need a classification from an outsider to find out what Sachsenhausen was like. True, the media and the Nazi government claimed it was a Schutzhaftlager, which is a ‘safe custody camp.’ The following experiences speak for themselves:

“In January 1940, as I was brought by the Gestapo (secret state police) from Pforzheim to the prison of Karlsruhe, I was told by the Gestapo that I was on my way to an extermination camp. The Gestapo hurled abuse at me, saying: ‘Du Stinkjude wirst dort verecken, kommst nicht mehr zurück!’ (You stinking Jew. You will die like a beast. You will never return!)

“The mistreatment on our arrival at Sachsenhausen is beyond human comprehension. Jews were sent into a separate camp inside the main camp. They had worse conditions than the others. For instance, the Jews had no sleeping shelves, only straw sacks on the floor. The barracks were so crammed that it was necessary to lie like sardines, with one man’s feet being at the next man’s head. In the morning, dead men were found lying next to the living. There was no medical care for the Jews.

“I heard that my father was three barracks away. I found him lying behind the stack of strawsacks, his legs swollen with water and his hands frozen. After he died, I had to carry his body on my shoulders to the crematorium. There I saw more dead stacked up than they could burn.

“Thousands died in Sachsenhausen because of the inhuman treatment. For many victims it was worse dying in Sachsenhausen than in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.”

[Box on page 8]

“No Trace Must Be Left of Them”

“When the last mass grave was opened, I recognized my whole family. Mom and my sisters. Three sisters with their kids. They were all in there. They’d been in the earth four months, and it was winter.” “The head of the Vilna Gestapo told us: ‘There are ninety thousand people lying there, and absolutely no trace must be left of them.’”​—Testimony of Jewish survivors, Motke Zaïdl and Itzhak Dugin.

“Just as we went by, they were opening the gas-chamber doors, and people fell out like potatoes. . . . Each day one hundred Jews were chosen to drag the corpses to the mass graves. In the evening the Ukrainians drove those Jews into the gas chambers or shot them. Every day! . . . More people kept coming, always more, whom we hadn’t the facilities to kill. . . . The gas chambers couldn’t handle the load.”​—Franz Suchomel, SS officer (Unterscharführer), on his first impressions of the Treblinka extermination camp.

(These quotes are taken from interviews in the documentary film Shoah.)