Archive/File: holocaust/usa/ihr app.003 Last-Modified: 1994/07/04 "In 1946, intensifying his campaign to justify German war behavior, App began to play the 'numbers game,' something all deniers engage in with great fervor. They attempt to demonstrate that it is statistically impossible for six million to have died. Along with their questioning the scientific plausibility of the gas chambers, it is the most critical component of their enterprise. The deniers consciously fix on those aspects of the Holocaust that are the hardest to believe precisely because they demand the greatest leap of the imagination. The use of advanced technology for the purposes of mass murder, and the sheer scope of the endeavor - particularly the number of its victims - help to render the event beyond belief. App, who engaged in this numerical chicanery even before Paul Rassinier, began in quite clumsy fashion. First he tried to disprove the Jewish 'claim' about the Holocaust by demonstrating that most of Germany's Jews had survived the war. In a letter to _Time_ magazine in 1946, he declared that Germany never had a Jewish population greated than seven hundred thousand and that when Germany surrendered 'there still seemed to be about a half million there.'<13> Here App indulged in some of the tactical maneuvers that have come to typify Holocaust denial. First, in his attempt to prove that the numbers were inflated, he more than doubled the actual number of Jewish survivors without offering any proof of how he reached that figure.<14> In addition to exaggerating the number of Jewish survivors in Germany after the war, he also gave them a new identity as _German_ Jews. In fact these survivors were not from Germany but came instead from many occupied countries. Many of them had been in concentration camps in the East and, in the latter months of the war, as the Soviet army advanced, had been tranferred to Germany on brutal death marches that were part of the Nazis' effort to prevent camp inmates from falling into Soviet hands. Many died en route, and those who survived found themselves in Germany at the end of the war. Their numbers were augmented by Jews who immediately on liberation began to head west to avoid falling into Soviet hands. By official Allied policy, all displaced persons (DPs) were to be returned to their homes as rapidly as possible. But a significant number adamantly refused to be repatriated to Poland, the Soviet Union, and other Communist bloc countries and petitioned to be allowed to enter Palestine or the United States. The British were firmly opposed to their entry into Palestine, and the Americans would only allow a very limited number to immigrate into the United States. As a result of the controversy over these DPs, the fact that practically all the Jews then in Germany were not actually German Jews was widely publicized and would have been well known to someone like App, who followed events so closely. In the same letter, App suggested that among the putative Jewish victims of Nazi atrocities were many who had died of 'legitimate' causes and many who were not really dead at all but were living in comfort in the Western Hemisphere. He wrote to _Time_ magazine demanding that it investigate just how many Jews were executed and for what; how many died of abuse in concentration camps and for what; how many were said to have been killed when they simply died of old age. And how many were in one way or another brought into the United States, Mexico and Canada. An AP dispatch ... states that the United States had rescued 3,000,000 refugees. Most of them appear to have been Jews, yet Judge Simon F. [sic] Rifkind recently stated that the Nazis _slew_ 6,000,000 Jews. What are the facts?<15> The facts were quite simple: The United States _had_ rescued many European refugees. But it had not allowed three million refugees, Jewish displaced persons, survivors, or refugees of _any_ ethnic group to immigrate. In fact, App was using a crafty but obvious ploy. The AP dispatch he cited was based on the report of the military governor of the American Zone on the _repatriation_ - not the immigration into America - of the approximately three million DPs who were in the American zones in Germany and Austria at the end of the war. The report and the dispatch clearly indicated that the vast majority of the DPs had been returned to their homes by December 1945. Moreover, nowhere in the governor's report was there any indication that the refugees in question were Jews.<16> Most of the Jews who were allowed into the United States after the war did not begin arriving until the early 1950s." (Lipstadt, 90-92) Lipstadt's End Notes: <13> App, Morgenthau Era letters, p. 66 <14> At the end of 1946 the official American total of Jewish survivors in the western zones of Germany, Austria and Italy was 207,788. The Joint Distribution Committee, which assisted the survivors, estimated that there were 231,500. Many of these were refugees who had spent the war years in Central Asia. Dinnerstein, "America and the Survivors," p. 278. See also Malcolm Proudfoot, "European Refugees: 1939-1952," (Evanston, Ill., 1956) pp. 339-341 <15> App, Morgenthau Era Letters, pp. 66-67. Judge Simon H. Rifkind was the army's advisor on Jewish affairs in Germany in 1945-46. <16> "Repatriation of Displaced Persons, March 1946" (U.S. Zone), "Monthly Report of Military Governor, U.S. Zone, April 20, 1946," cited in Dinnerstein, "America and the Survivors," p. 275 Work cited Lipstadt, Deborah E. Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. New York: The Free Press (A division of Macmillan, Inc.), 1993.
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