Questioning the number of victims of the Holocaust
A frequent method of deniers is various manipulation of numbers and, through it, subsequently questioning the number of victims of the Holocaust. These theories were gradually developed. They are primarily based on the claims of Gerald LK Smith, Paul Rassinier, Arthur Butz, Richard Verall, Austin J. Appa or David Irving, but there are many more such pseudo-experts.
Their claims often focus on demographics, purposefully selecting only those that suit them. They refer, for example, to data from the publications The World Almanac and Book of Facts. They draw on war and immediately post-war data, which may erroneously show the increase in the global population.
The fact in this case is that the given publication did not obtain the data directly and drew only from secondary sources that were out of date at the time of the war. As soon as the situation changed, the publisher significantly reduced the numerical values, but the deniers did not take this into account.
As part of questioning the number of victims, part of this spectrum focuses on the data on the memorial board of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp. Originally, the number of four million victims was stated there, after the fall of the Communist Party regime in Poland, a more accurate figure of 1.5 million victims was given. It is this change that serves as “proof” for Holocaust deniers that the data is falsified.
How was it actually? The original data was based on Soviet assumptions of the theoretical capacity of extermination facilities and was not created on the basis of name lists or other archival materials. Subsequently, for the next four decades, these numbers were part of Soviet propaganda and research.
Due to the censorship of the regime at the time, the change for more accurate data was not possible. However, it is important to note that several detailed studies were gradually carried out in countries outside the Eastern Bloc based on analyzes of deportation lists or various archival documents of an administrative nature.
Despite Nazi Germany’s efforts to destroy evidence at the end of the war, a large number of administrative records survived, many of which served as evidence during the Nuremberg Trials. The report of the Nazi statistician Richard Korherr also became an important document.
In 1943, he reported in detail to the architect of the Holocaust, Heinrich Himmler, the number of Jews who lived in Nazi Germany and the satellite or occupied states of Europe. The report detailed the number of Jews in concentration camps and the number of Jews who were deported to the eastern regions.
The research of the organization Yad Vashem – The World Holocaust Remembrance Center (Yad Vashem: The World Holocaust Remembrance Center) also contributed to the resulting number of victims, which during their decades of activity managed to digitize and confirm the names of around five of the six million victims of the Holocaust.
At this point, it is necessary to approach the victims of the Holocaust in a somewhat broader perspective. The Holocaust was not only about murdered Jews and Jewish women. Among the victims are also persons who have already been affected by the process itself, which has been gradually expanding in Europe since the mid-1930s.
Exclusion from society, depriving a selected part of the population of basic human and civil rights, simultaneously with the loss of economic background, affected a numerically larger part of the Jewish population than just the murdered victims. Jews who had to flee from the Holocaust or had to hide for long periods are also among the victims of the Holocaust.
Denying the existence of gas chambers
One of the methods of disproving the existence of the Holocaust as a whole is to question individual facts about its course and consequences. Denial of the existence of gas chambers in concentration and extermination camps can also be attributed to this partial questioning.
The gas chambers were the main mechanism by which the extermination of the Jewish population was carried out, as well as other ethnic groups or politically or socially unreliable people for the Nazi regime. The deniers mainly use two independent documents for this, namely the Leuchter report from 1988 and the Rudolf report from 1993.
Both documents differ in scope and erudition of the authors, but develop similar arguments. Their key claims focus on the low concentration of chemical traces after the use of cyanide compounds and their properties, or on the construction and technical parameters of the gas chambers. With Fred Leuchter’s report, the author’s expertise can be objected to.
Leuchter claimed to have a technical background, but this was disproved in court after his report was published. Furthermore, it is necessary to point out the unprofessional handling of the samples, which he collected in an uncontrolled manner and by moving and handling, he degraded them analytically. Moreover, when analyzing them, he did not choose an appropriate procedure to achieve relevant results.
The second report by Germar Rudolf attempted a more professional analysis. The author, a chemist, was employed at the time at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research. However, Rudolf also omitted many factors that did not fit into his analysis. One of them was the influence of the environment.
Rudolf compared samples from well-preserved chambers used for lice removal and the ruins of gas chambers that the Nazis managed to destroy. His objections were based on the low measured values of the concentration of cyanide compounds, thereby denying the purpose of the extermination chambers.
However, it did not take into account the impact of the environment, which has been exposed to rain and weather conditions for decades. These cyanide compounds are soluble in water and are washed out of the masonry over time.
At the same time, in his analysis, Rudolf neglected the difference between the time and the effect of cyanide compounds on insects and on humans, and based his analysis on the values valid for insects. Humans are more sensitive to these compounds. This also disproved his questioning of the time needed to murder people in the chambers.
The construction-technical reservations of both reports mainly concerned ventilation systems. While Leuchter overlooked them, Rudolf deliberately did not take into account the way they were used. Both documents and their conclusions can be summarized as significantly methodologically insufficient, using a selective selection of facts, false analogies or as ignoring the historical context and the testimonies themselves.
Holocaust deniers often make light of living conditions in concentration and extermination camps, which is how they try to question the Holocaust itself. These narratives are also based on the conclusions of the visit of the International Committee of the Red Cross, which was approved by Nazi Germany.
In 1944, an inspection of the Terezín concentration camp was carried out, which was preceded by an action to beautify or reduce the number of prisoners so that the camp did not appear overcrowded. For this reason, 7,503 Jews were deported to the concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau.
A cultural program was even prepared for the inspection, which was supposed to complement the positive impression. All this was finally reflected in the report of Maurice Rossel. Nazi propaganda also used this situation to create a film in which the treatment of prisoners was shown that did not correspond to reality.
The reality is that after the inspection itself and the making of the film, the regime in Terezín returned to its original state and most of the Jews who acted in the film were murdered. During the war, the Red Cross operated with the then method of discreet interventions and did not decide to adopt a more direct position and more vigorous steps towards helping the victims.
Many propaganda period photographs from several camps also serve to make light of it. These were intended to create a false impression that people “under the protection” of Nazi Germany were treated well. The most famous are the photos of the fire tank in the Auschwitz I facility, which was converted into a swimming pool.
This pool was used for propaganda purposes, when photos were staged of how prisoners have the opportunity to use it. The fact is that this facility was intended only for members of the SS and a select group of privileged non-Jewish prisoners. Photos from the concentration camp in Nováky also served a similar purpose, where it was advertised that Jews there had jobs in local workshops and children had a secure school.
The existence of these photographs is still one of the main arguments of Holocaust deniers who claim that the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp was not an extermination camp and that prisoners were treated in good conditions in the other camps. The fact is that the existence of a swimming pool, schools or workshops in the camps does not refute the fact in which conditions the prisoners had to survive in them, and at the same time it does not refute the fact that most of them were murdered.
Testimonies of survivors
There is little more direct evidence, such as the testimonies of survivors, but also of surrounding witnesses or the perpetrators themselves. Even so, there are people in society who can deny even these testimonies. Even directly in the face of a Holocaust survivor herself, as happened in 2019 in the Bardejov synagogue as part of the Open about extremism project, which was organized by the civic initiative Zabudnute Slovakia.
In the more than 80 years since the end of the war, several internationally important projects and institutions have been established that are dedicated to mapping the memories and testimonies of the Holocaust. These include the aforementioned organization , , , Post Bellum with an online archive and many others.
Today, on the pages of these organizations, it is possible to find thousands of testimonies and direct memories, describing what preceded the Holocaust, what its onset, course and effects were on the lives of the victims and the lives of their family members, who in many cases did not live to see the end of the war.
However, these are just some of the many theories that Holocaust deniers rely on despite the fact that their claims have been repeatedly disproved by evidence and scholarly works. There are still many of those forms and expressions in Slovak society. Sometimes they are straightforward, sometimes sophisticated.
The so-called come into the public space from below, but also from the mouths of political representatives, who would ultimately like to achieve the decriminalization of this crime. It is only up to a healthy civil society not to allow such tendencies and to be able to successfully defend against all forms of Holocaust denial.
