Institute for Historical Review

The Myth of the Six Million -- Appendix 3

That Elusive 'Six Million'

BY AUSTIN J. APP, PH.D.

Our distinguished author, a noted scholar and writer, strikes a blow here for freedom of discussion. Even in our Great (if not always Free) Society, some issues are taboo and never raised. The liberals and pro-Communists have stigmatized all Conservatives and anti-Communists with the Six Million Myth because it prevents serious discussion of every burning issue facing Western Civilization.

An age which prides itself on scientific accuracy has no business substituting fantasy for fact in the matter of the six million. Three cliques have found it to their interest to sabotage honest investigation. First, the Communists want to keep the figure of six million alive to distract from their own mass rapings and murders, such as at Katyn, and from the embarrassing circumstance that many of the Jewish casualties occurred under Red more than Nazi dominion. Secondly, Zionist leaders want to use the figure of six million vindictively as an eternal club for pressuring indemnities out of West Germany and also for wringing financial contributions out of American Jews. Finally, some Washington elements seem to welcome the inflated figure to forestall any investigation as to where some millions of Jews went if they were not exterminated.[1]

AN EXPEDIENT SILENCE

Certain it is that Bonn has been required or found it expedient not to find or publish the facts about the six million. As late as 1959, Reds and Zionists created a furor when German courts professed incompetence to sentence to jail a German who had denounced as an "immense lie" the figure of six million gassed (See Newsweek, "A Vicious Few," Feb. 2, 1959). This very March, 1966, the ADL Bulletin (Anti-Defamation League) nastily attacked a German paper for urging "a study of the number of murdered Jews 'in order that the long-refuted six million figure ... can be banished."'

As if in collaboration with the ADL Bulletin, the Red propaganda sheet for the Soviet Zone, Democratic German Report, March 18, 1966, smeared the same German paper as "neo-Nazi" for featuring the headlines, "The Lie About 6 Million Dead Jews -- How We Are Blackmailed" and "The Dogma of the Six Million." Significantly, however, even this Red rag is forced to concede that the figure of six million is exaggerated. It confesses:

... reputable historians in many countries have been unable to agree upon how many millions of Jews were killed by the Nazis. Eichmann gave the figure of six million; more recent research indicates it may have been nearer five million.

FANTASTIC CHARGE

No scientifically valid proofs were ever adduced for the fantastic charge of six million, repeated and elaborated ad nauseum.[2] The first jolt to this bloated figure came from various independent censuses. The World Almanac in 1947 gave the number of Jews for 1938 as 15,688,259. A year later, Mr. Hanson W. Baldwin (New York Times, Feb. 22, 1948) placed the number of Jews in the world at a minimum of 15,600,000 and a maximum of 18,700,000. According to these figures, the Nazis could not have executed more than a fraction of the six million. Similarly the 1949 Information Please lists the Jews in the world for 1943 as 15,152,098, when the Nazi occupation for a year had been most widely flung. Then in an asterisk and apparently as an afterthought (which looks like deliberate juggling) adds this further data:

The total number of Jews throughout the world at the beginning of 1948 was estimated at approximately 12,000,000. Practically the entire loss was in Europe (about 3,000,000 in Poland alone). It is estimated that 1,000,000 Jews escaped Nazi-dominated Europe.

First of all, this juggling is clearly and at best mere guesswork and certainly not calculated to minimize the casualties. Secondly, even at that, the estimate of 12,000,000 Jews in 1948 would require a deflating of the six million figure by about half !

And that is the minimum deflation which already available facts demand. It is probable that eventually, just as the 1946 Dachau casualty figures of 238,000 have now had to be revised down to only 20,600, so the figure of six million will be happily reducible to only ten percent of six million. But even now facts call for at least a fifty per cent deflation.

According to Chambers Encyclopedia the total number of Jews in 1939 in eventually Nazi-occupied territory was 6,500,000. Many of these fled before the Nazis took over. In Colliers, June 9, 1945, Freiling Foster, referring to the estimated 5,800,000 Jews in Soviet Russia, explains that, "2,200,000 have migrated to the Soviet Union since 1939 to escape the Nazis." This reasonable and realistic figure reduces the Jews Hitler ever could have executed to 4,300,000.

But of these, too, certainly several million escaped. Philip Friedman in the universally acclaimed as authentic, Their Brothers' Keepers (Crown, N.Y., 1957), whose purpose was to keep Nazi crimes alive, admits that:

... more than 2,000,000 remained alive. Those surviving were saved by flight, emigration or evacuation before the arrival of the Germans ... But a least a million Jews survived in the very crucible of the Nazi hell, the occupied areas. (p. 13)

There is ambiguity here as to whether two million survived by flight and an additional million under the Nazis-or whether both categories add up to two million. But in any case, it shows that millions survived and also that the Nazis could not have planned total extermination, for if they had they would not have spared over a million of them. According to Their Brothers' Keepers, 75% or 285,000 of the Jews of France were spared, 90% or 45,000 of Bulgaria's were spared, an even higher percentage was spared in Finland, Italy and Denmark (p. 44), and "Dutch, Belgian and French Jews were convoyed by the thousands to Switzerland or to Spain." (p. 47)

In short, wherever the West has been free to look, even such anti-German reporters as Philip Friedman must concede that the Nazis spared the overwhelming percentage of Jews. Consequently, the only refuge for the six million legend is areas where the Soviets have barred investigation and where they can lie at will, as when at the Nuremberg trials they accused the Germans of the murder of the Polish officers at Katyn! Even so, Friedman's admission reduces the figure of six million by from two to three million at least.

DEVASTATING PROOF

But a more devastating proof of the brazen fantasy of the six million figure is the rising number of Jewish survivors who claim indemnities from West Germany. By March 31, 1956, Germany had settled 400,000 such claims and another 852,812 were pending (See Jewish Aufbau, July 13, 1956). But by June 30, 1965, the survivors claiming indemnities had almost tripled. By that date 3,375,020 were registered with the West German Republic as having suffered under but survived the Nazis to claim indemnities for physical or psychological suffering allegedly incurred between 1939 and 1945.

That means that of the Jews that came under Nazi domination at least some three and a third million are very much alive and enjoying, very probably, more prosperity than most of the people of the world -- for the people of Germany are subsidizing them with what U.S. News and World Report called "A $10-Billion 'Conscience Fund"' (Aug. 10, 1964).

Admittedly the execution for no crime of any one human being, or a thousand, or a million, or six million is a horrible crime. But wanton exaggeration of atrocities for political and blackmailing purposes is a wrong, too, and honesty and accuracy are virtues. Facts available now are enough to prove that the figure of six million is a preposterous exaggeration of at least three million. Furthermore, all indications point to the likelihood that when the Soviets open up

Eastern Europe for the same sort of investigation possible in West Europe, the legend of the six million will shrink some 90 per cent, and of the remaining casualties some will be proven to have died in the Warsaw uprising in combat, some to have been executed justifiably as partisans, and some to have been killed by non-Germans for collaboration with bolsheviks and, alas, also some to have been executed in the heat of war unjustifiably by the Nazis. For these Germany has been penitently straining every fibre to make restitution.

Notes

[1] For example, on August 16, 1963, Ben Gurion stated that although semi-officially the Jewish population of the U.S. is given at 5,600,000, "the total number of Jews in the United States would not be estimated too high at 9,000,000" (See Deutsche Wochenzeitung, Nov. 23, 1963). He estimated another two million for the rest of North America. In his Berlin Diary (Knopf, 1941, p. 292), Wm. L. Shirer reported that in 1940 there was in Germany a "waiting-list of 248,000 names at the American consulate" for emigration to America even though the annual quota was only 27,000. "Ninety-eight per cent were Jews -- or about half the population of Germany." That most of these, and probably similar numbers from other affected countries might have immigrated in violation of quotas appears from Albert Q. Maisel's article, "Our Newest Americans" (Reader's Digest, January, 1957), When Hitler unleashed his persecutions, America saved nearly 300,000 from almost certain extinction by quietly giving them priority under our quota laws. Soon after World War II, by Presidential directive, 90 per cent of all quota visas for central and eastern Europe were issued to the uprooted who dared not return to their homes behind the iron curtain. If, in fact, most of the six million were not exterminated, this gives a clue as to where they might have gone! [2] The only basis for the fantastic figure is an affidavit of November 26, 1945, extracted from a Nazi Group Leader, Dr. William Hoettl, not that he knew, but that "SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann" had told him in August, 1944 in Budapest, that Approximately 4,000,000 Jews had been killed in the various extermination camps while an additional 2,000,000 met death in other ways. Even though Eichmann himself during the trial and even when facing death never corroborated this assertion, and even though it violated all norms of probability, it has eagerly been trumpeted about the world as Gospel truth and anyone questioning it has been smeared as a neo-Nazi or an anti-Semite!

This material first appeared as an article in American Mercury, June quarterly 1966, Number 481, page 9.