41845358-Antisemitism

DENYING THE HOLOCAUST
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count for the missing Jews. The majority of the Jews in Lithuania and Ukraine
and many Polish and Romanian Jews, he said, were evacuated to Central Asia
by the Soviet army, and after the war, they secretly made their way across China
and the Pacific Ocean to North and South America, where they reside today.
Butz offers his own solution. Jewish men were conscripted for labor tasks, “for
what was undoubtedly intended by the Germans to be a period of limited duration....
Under such conditions it is reasonable to expect that many of these
lonely wives and husbands would have, during or at the end of the war, established
other relations that seemed more valuable than the previous relationships.
In such cases, then, there would have been a strong motivation not to
reestablish contact with the legal spouse.” 57 Irving claims that after the war
Jews were “whisked into new homes, lives, and identities in the Middle East,
leaving their old, discarded identities behind as ‘missing persons.’” 58
By claiming that not 6 million but fewer—in some instances they say far
fewer—than 1 million Jews perished, deniers aim to relativize the Holocaust
to simply one of many atrocities committed in a brutal conflict, that, for example,
what befell the Jews was no worse than the terror bombing of German
cities by the Allies, a comparison often made by David Irving. For instance,
historians conclude that about 1,100,000 Jews perished at Auschwitz, most of
them in gas chambers. In a speech delivered in 1992 in Toronto, Irving
claimed that over a four-year period, no more than 100,000 died there, 75,000
from epidemics, 25,000 by hanging or shooting. Besides fraudulently minimizing
the number of deaths, Irving considered Auschwitz a lesser crime than
the firebombing of the German town of Pforzheim by the Allies in February
1945: “... twenty-five thousand civilians ... [Richard Evans notes that the
Statistical Office of the City of Pforzheim estimated the number of deaths as
17,600] burned alive in twenty-five minutes! In Auschwitz it was a crime committed
over four years. You don’t get it spelled out to you like this, except by
us, their opponents. When you put it into perspective like that, of course, it diminished
their Holocaust—that word spelled with a capital letter.” 59
It is not unusual for some Jewish survivors to light memorial candles for fifty,
seventy, or even a hundred relatives who perished in the Holocaust. These people
witnessed horrors and endured pain that still baffle belief. It should be comforting
to these survivors to learn that their loved ones did not perish in the Polish
ghettos from planned and gratuitous mistreatment; they were not clubbed to
death in Vilna, gassed at Treblinka, Sobibor, or Auschwitz, or machine-gunned in
Ukraine; they did not die in the brutal death marches from Auschwitz and other
camps to Germany near the end of the war. They are probably living in Israel or
the United States, reluctant to reestablish their old identities!