Speaking to the Nuremberg
tribunal in his opening address, Justice
Jackson remarked: “What makes this
inquest significant is that these prisoners
represent sinister influences that will
lurk in the world long after their bodies
have returned to dust.”
These influences, in fact,
have regenerated like a poisonous weed.
Anti-Semitism and the euphemistic catchwords
that led to “the Final Solution of
the Jewish Question” have reappeared
hand in hand. A world-wide cult has arisen
claiming that the Holocaust never happened.
A hundred books, booklets, and pamphlets
have been printed alleging that the slaughter
was imaginary or exaggerated, and is but
a Jewish invention.
All of this might be dismissed
as the frustrated thrashing about of a radical,
irrational fringe were it not for the haunting
parallels to the pre-Hitler era, and the
continuing employment of Nazi propaganda
methodology. A leader of the French neo-Nazis,
for example, asserts that those Jews who
died had merely been victims of the wartime
food shortage. The Nazis had, in fact, originally
planned to starve the Jews to death, allocating
186 calories per capita daily for their
sustenance, but had abandoned the scheme
for more direct methods after the ensuing
epidemics had decimated not only the Jews
but threatened to spread to the relatively
well-fed German population.
Similar in nature is the
assertion that Zyklon B gas was employed
only as a disinfectant at Auschwitz. This
had been the case until the fall of 1941,
when an enterprising SS officer had concluded
that if Zyklon B killed lice it could kill
people just as well. Thereafter, the gas
had been used, first to murder thousands
of Soviet prisoners of war, and then hundreds
of thousands of Jews - nearly all of them
women, children, and old people unfit for
“extermination through work.”
Hitler’s dictum that “the magnitude
of a lie always contains a certain factor
of credibility, since the great masses of
the people ... more easily fall victim to
a big lie than to a little one” has
once more come into vogue.
The most effective means
to combat such distortions is to make the
facts accessible, and, with them, expose
the statements for what they are. At Nuremberg,
General Telford Taylor, the prosecutor of
more war criminals than any other man, said:
“We cannot here make history over again.
But we can see that it is written true.”
(Conot, xii-xiii)
This article is presented in that spirit, and
in lasting memory of those who were ruthlessly
destroyed during the Holocaust. It is the result
of the combined effort of many, and contains
data from myriad sources. I would like to acknowledge
the contributions from Danny Keren (
