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This article is from the Holocaust FAQ, by Ken McVay kmcvay@nizkor.org with numerous contributions by others.

01 Introduction & Editorial Notes (Holocaust: Auschwitz)

A January, 1993 newspaper article (Foner - see below) presents a
series of lies and distortions regarding events at the Auschwitz
concentration camp as historical fact. The article illustrated an
increasing effort on the part of world-wide neo-Nazi political
organizations to deny that the collective events commonly known as
the Holocaust did occur. Conot addressed the need for a continuing
effort to combat such material in his introduction (Justice at
Nuremberg):

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 (dzk@cs.brown.edu) in particular, and the subscribers to the
Holocaust Research Information List in general. Without their
contributions, this document could not have been written.

The appearance of a quotation mark within a proper name indicates
that the previous letter should be read as an umlaut, although some
quoted material appends a trailing 'e' instead. (I.e. Hoess and
Hoess reference the same name.)

The documents cited in this work which are available from our ftp
server are often noted in the form (get <path>/<filename>).

 

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