The Nizkor Project: Remembering the Holocaust (Shoah)

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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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