Orac attracts a Holocaust denier

Vacation time! While Orac is off in London recharging his circuits and contemplating the linguistic tricks of limericks and jokes or the glory of black holes, he's rerunning some old stuff from his original Blogspot blog. This particular post first appeared on February 2, 2006. Enjoy!

It had to happen sooner or later. I'm only surprised that it's taken so long.

What is it?

Well, finally, Orac has attracted a Holoaust denier in the comments of his last post on David Irving, Holocaust denier extraordinaire (spelling errors not corrected):

First off, no one disputes that David Irving can be a prodigious researcher. The problems are his selective use of data, in which he ignores data that contradicts his conclusions, and his inability to evaluate the sources objectively, not his ability to dig up information out of archives and various other sources.

I can handle most of the fallacies in the above comment save one. So I e-mailed Professor Deborah Lipstadt herself about the claim that Lipstadt's team had produced an estimate of the dead at Auschwitz of 350-500 thousand. Her response? That the above is completely incorrect. As she put it:

We never touched the number of dead.

I had thought as much. One can also try to search the website, Holocaust Denial on Trial to see that this particular denier's claim is without basis. The complete transcripts of the trial are there.

As for his claims about the Auschwitz death toll, this is a long-debunked denier canard known as the Auschwitz Four Million Gambit:

Holocaust deniers would have people believe that the Auschwitz State Museum's death toll of four million was a widely accepted idea, and that any revisions in this number should also lower the total dead from the Holocaust. Deniers often claim that this revision is largely due to the efforts of "revisionist scholars", and then use this as evidence that the stories of mass murder at Auschwitz are a hoax.

Deniers also claim that anyone who dared to question the four million figure was "labeled an Anti-Semite, neo-nazi skinhead (at the very least)." By accusing their opponents of slander, deniers can simultaneously tarnish the reputations of real historians, and also invoke a "conspiracy" thatsuppresses "the truth." Conspiracy theorizing is another common denier approach, and they use it to explain why their "startling facts" have been ignored for so long. Deniers almost always overstate the "Four Million Variant,"as they would like to portray Holocaust historians as a repressive, Jewish dominated cadre that rigidly enforces the "dogma" of four million dead at Auschwitz.

As is often the case, our "revisionist scholars" have things more than a little askew. "The Four Million Variant" is the fallacious notion that a change in the Auschwitz Museum's figure pokes a major hole in mainstream Holocaust history. Taking each aspect of the "Four Million Variant" individually shows just how wrongheaded this notion is:

"The four million figure at Auschwitz was a widely held notion."

This is clearly false. In a quick survey of nineteen historical references (see appendix) only two listed the total Auschwitz dead at four million. One of these, Friedman's "This Was Oswiecim: The Story of a Murder Camp," was published in 1946, well before morereliable estimates were available. Most list figures from 1 to 2.5 million, and they arrived at these figures in a variety of methods .

Some quoted Kommandant Höss's testimony (2.5 million) and others attempted to piece together how many people arrived at Auschwitz, minus any survivors, while still others used available pre- and post war census data. In fact, to find many sources that do list four million dead, one has to find books published behind the iron curtain (see appendix).

Other authors derided the Tribunal's four million figure as an absurd example of Soviet propaganda. For example, Gerald Reitlinger's The Final Solution discussed the source of the State Museum's figure and why he found it ludicrous:

...The Red Army did not arrive [at Auschwitz] till January 26th. They found 2,819 invalids in the three camps, whom they spared no pains to nurse back to health. In due course a Soviet State Commission arrived and on May 12th the world was presented with its findings.

However, using rectified coefficients for the part time employment of the crematorium ovens and for the periods when they stood empty, the technical expert.commission has ascertained that during the time that the Auschwitz camp existed, the German butchers [sic] exterminated in this camp not less than four million citizens of the U.S.S.R., Poland, France, Jugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Hungary, Holland, Belgium, and other countries.'

The world has grown mistrustful of 'rectified coefficients' and the figure of four million has become ridiculous. Unfortunately, Russian arithmetic has blurred the stark and inescapable fact that 800,000 to 900,000 human beings perished in Auschwitz, its gas chambers and its camps. There are probably too many incalculable factors to make a closer estimate of the number of Auschwitz victims possible...

Reitlinger's book was published in 1968, well before the deniers claim the figure fell into disfavor, and twenty years before "revisionist scholars" began challenging the figure.

The bottom line is that the famous estimate of four million killed at Auschwitz was mainly a product of early postwar Soviet propaganda and was never a component of serious historians' estimates of the now commonly accepted total Jewish death toll during the Holocaust of approximately 6 million.

As for this deniers' claim about gas chambers in Dachau, there is an excellent essay at the Holocaust History Project that takes this denier canard on. The short version is that there were indeed gas chambers at Dachau, but it is unclear whether they were ever used on inmates. Even if they were not, it would be completely irrelevant to the massive amounts of evidence that support the historicity of the Holocaust. Dachau was not an extermination camp; it was a concentration camp. Many did die there of overwork, disease, starvation, and execution for trivial infractions against the rules, but Dachau's primary purpose was not extermination--unlike Sobibor, Treblinka, Belzec, and Chelmno, for example, which were primarily extermination camps. Dachau was meant primarily as a concentration camp for political opponents, Jews, and then, during parts of the war, Russian P.O. W.'s.

Finally, the anti-Semitism prevalant in Poland in the prewar period that led to a number of actions against Jews does not excuse or justify the eliminationist anti-Semitism of the Nazi regime that led to the deaths of approximately six million Jews during the Holocaust. For one thing, the Poles did not try to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Similarly, whatever Israeli excesses or brutality in treating Palestinians may have occurred, they are orders of magnitude less than what the Nazis did. Trying to equate the two is a transparent dodge and, when taken to the extreme, is an example of the Hitler Zombie in action. The anti-Semitism of the person making these comments is obvious, particularly his referring to "so-called Jews."

What else would he call them I wonder?

In actuality, I'm a bit disappointed. Here I've been blogging about Holocaust denial for over a year now, and I haven't yet pissed off any Holocaust deniers enough to post long tirades in my comments section until now? I take that as measure that I'm either not as effective as I should be or that I remain completely unknown. Back in the day, they used to come after me hot and heavy on alt.revisionism.

Clearly I'm not doing my job well enough. I vow to do better in the future.