{"id":188048,"date":"2019-05-09T14:44:32","date_gmt":"2019-05-09T14:44:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=188048"},"modified":"2019-05-13T06:38:43","modified_gmt":"2019-05-13T06:38:43","slug":"fixing-the-numbers-at-auschwitz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=188048","title":{"rendered":"Fixing the Numbers at Auschwitz"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jewish and Polish scholars conclude that the number of deaths at Auschwitz was just over one million. Nearly a quarter of what was previously claimed.<\/h4>\n

Chicago Tribune \u2013 May 7, 2019<\/h1>\n
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Many revisionists claim that Auschwitz was not a “death camp” but a forced labour camp that was critical to the German war effort<\/p><\/div>\n

Beyond the Death Wall and the prisoners` barracks, past the ruined gas chambers and crematoriums, at the edge of the Auschwitz death camp, is a row of 19 concrete memorials.<\/span><\/p>\n

The memorials are dedicated to the victims of the Nazi killing machine that operated here with such horrific efficiency. But gone now from the memorials are the 19 inscriptions that said in 19 languages that four million people died here.<\/span><\/p>\n

The memorials are blank because they were wrong.<\/span><\/p>\n

Jewish and Polish scholars of the Holocaust now agree that the Auschwitz death toll was less than half the four million cited here for four decades. The actual number was probably between 1.1 million and 1.5 million and at least 90 percent of the victims were Jews.<\/span><\/p>\n

The fiction that more than a million non-Jews died there was a myth created by Poland`s communist leaders.<\/span><\/p>\n

It was only after the fall of the last communist government in 1989 that Polish historians were finally allowed to say what Franciszek Piper, manager of a historical department at Auschwitz, says he had known for five years. Jewish scholars say they knew the truth for at least 10 years.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Revisionists believe that Auschwitz wasn’t a ‘death camp’ but an industrial facility, which employed forced labour, and which was crucial to Nazi war efforts. However, this doesn’t mean that there wasn’t a program to eliminate anyone the Nazis considered undesirable. It just didn’t happen on the scale that has assumed at Auschwitz. The real Holocaust took place in eastern Europe and western Russia where\u00a0 Einsatzgruppen<\/i> systematically slaughtered Jews, homosexuals, left-wing intellectuals, Poland’s cultural elite, Russian partizans and anyone else who did not fit in with the Nazi plan. Click to enlarge<\/p><\/div>\n

But Piper, an ex-communist Pole, and Jewish historians have different explanations of why it took so long for the truth to come out.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sitting in his drab little Auschwitz office, filled with books on the transport of prisoners and the operation of crematoriums, Piper said that years of research were needed to get to the truth and that then, ”the people in charge of publishing” in communist Poland ”didn`t believe” the lower number.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, Jewish Holocaust specialists said they suspected more malevolent motives.<\/span><\/p>\n

”The numbers that we dealt with before were numbers that were politically motivated,” said Miles Lerman, chairman of international relations for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council in Washington.<\/span><\/p>\n

The communists tried to ”de-Judaize” Auschwitz to emphasize that other nationalities, particularly Poles, died at the hands of the Nazis, said Lerman, who is also a member of the International Council of the State Museum of Auschwitz.<\/span><\/p>\n

He said the downward revision was first made at the museum, which is run by the Polish government after it was personally approved by Poland`s first post-communist prime minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki.<\/span><\/p>\n

”We are not looking for enormous numbers,” Lerman said. ”We are looking for historical veracity. The old inscriptions were removed because they presented a politically slanted picture.”<\/span><\/p>\n

The communists tried not only here but also in the former Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe to de-emphasize the suffering of the Jews, said Aaron Breitbart, research director for the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.<\/span><\/p>\n

”The communists looked at the war against Nazism not as a human issue but as one ideology fighting another, so they tended to misappropriate the Holocaust for their own political goals,” said Breitbart.<\/span><\/p>\n

”Poles were incarcerated in Auschwitz, Poles were murdered in Auschwitz, but they died different deaths and they died for different reasons and the numbers were much smaller,” said Lerman.<\/span><\/p>\n

In addition to Jews, Auschwitz`s victims included Gypsies, Soviet prisoners of war, Poles, French, Dutch, Germans and other nationals, as well as political dissidents, homosexuals, criminals, and prostitutes.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Poles and other non-Jews were mostly starved, poisoned or lined up against the infamous Death Wall and shot. The Jews were herded into the gas chambers. The only other people gassed were Gypsies and some Russian POWs.<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the sad truths about Auschwitz, Polish and Jewish historians agree, is that the exact number of victims will never be known. The Nazis destroyed most of the camp records to cover up their crimes.<\/span><\/p>\n

Piper said he used the transport records uncovered by scholars throughout Europe to determine the number of victims. The results of his study were first published by the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem last year.<\/span><\/p>\n

He calculates 1.1 million died-one million Jews, 70,000 to 75,000 Poles, 21,000 Gypsies, 15,000 Soviet POWs and 5,000 from other countries.<\/span><\/p>\n

He estimates two million to three million Poles died during World War II, but the overwhelming majority were not killed in Auschwitz, even though the camp was first opened in 1940 for Polish political prisoners. The camp became the extermination center for Jews in 1942.<\/span><\/p>\n

His study indicates that the Soviets got their original estimates from the testimony of former inmates, camp guards and the camp commander.<\/span><\/p>\n

Israel Gutman, a historian at Hebrew University in Israel and former Auschwitz prisoner, estimates there were 1.5 million victims at Auschwitz, of which 93 percent to 95 percent were Jews and roughly the same number of other victims calculated by Piper.<\/span><\/p>\n

Gutman, vice chairman of the international council on Auschwitz, praised Piper`s work but said he believed that Piper underestimated the number of Polish Jews who were transported to the camp.<\/span><\/p>\n

Piper agrees the number could be greater, perhaps as many as 1.5 million, if some transports were larger than planned and some records were completely lost, but 1.1 million is all he has been able to document.<\/span><\/p>\n

But what does dramatically lowering the number of victims do to the previous estimates of six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust?<\/span><\/p>\n

The downward revision actually strengthens the case that 5.5 million to six million Jews died in the Holocaust, said Breitbart. The earlier estimate of two million or more Jews killed at Auschwitz, added to the numbers who died elsewhere, produced a total of more than seven million.<\/span><\/p>\n

”We have to be careful with numbers,” said Breitbart, ”because it just gives Holocaust-deniers the opportunity to come up with the idea that there was no Holocaust because the numbers were wrong.”<\/span><\/p>\n

Since Polish and Jewish scholars are in rough agreement about the numbers, why are the 19 memorials still blank?<\/span><\/p>\n

”The reason it takes so long is that we want to be sure that the new inscriptions are separated from politics and that they are historically correct,” said Lerman, who is in charge of a task group expected to resolve the issue finally at a meeting here in late May.<\/span><\/p>\n

He said the new inscriptions ”will reflect the truth that this is a place where citizens of various countries occupied by Nazi Germany were incarcerated, tortured and killed, and that approximately 1.5 million perished here and that the overwhelming majority of victims were Jews.”<\/span><\/p>\n

Piper said delays in replacing the inscriptions have been caused by disagreements among the members of the international council. For example, he said, some want a quotation from the Bible, which the atheists on the panel objected to.<\/span><\/p>\n

Gutman said it was not clear at all whether the new inscriptions would contain a number. The total will be presented somewhere else in the museum.<\/span><\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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