The latest effort to combat "Denial", i.e., Holocaust Revisionism. (Part III)
By Wilfried Heink The second study in chapter one is by Dr. Moshe Zimmermann, Prof. for contemporary history and head of the Richard Koebner Minerva Center for German History at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The essay is titled: "How survivors perceive the mass murder by poisonous gas." Before we go into this, the book this article is part of is about new studies on killing with poisonous gas by the Nazis, and the denial by Revisionists of said killings. The first article by Mr. Evans contributed nothing to the issue supposedly under discussion, the title of the second seems to follow that trend. One has to wonder why we need to know how the alleged murder by poisonous gas was perceived by the, ahem, survivors. But let's not judge a book by its cover and see what Mr. Zimmermann has to say. He starts out by informing us that he will concentrate on how Jewish survivors perceived this mass murder, specifically Israelis, even though only a small percentage of actual survivors live in that country. But, so Zimmermann, the whole of Israeli society, starting with the "Survivors of the second generation", consider themselves to be a society of survivors. And in their opinion they represent the whole of Jewish society [...].[1] Comments: The last part makes it clear that "surviving the Holocaust" has turned into a social exercise and has nothing to do with actual numbers. But the part about percentages is interesting, because one needs to ask: A percentage of what? In a Ha'aretz article of December 29, 2005, we read: "As of 2005, of the nearly 400,000 Holocaust survivors residing in Israel, 40% live below the poverty line...". This article has since disappeared, all I have is the printout of a portion of it. Some of it is still available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aftermath_of_the_Holocaust - look under "Survivors welfare in Israel" (footnote 7 refers to the disappeared Ha'aretz article). And this article talks about cancer/colon cancer as a result of starvation - clearly just about actual survivors. Thus, if 400 000 is a small percentage of the total of survivors, how many did "survive"? Why do we have no exact figures when they surely must exist because Germany is paying retribution to each of the survivors? I have seen numbers as high as 4 million [2], but it is said that some of those were double claims. Possibly so, but why the big secret? Fact is, no historian ever concerned himself with the issue of how many survived, and many did survive the war.[3] In this essay, links are provided to works by Messrs. Kulischer and Scheidl, among others, with the latter demonstrating that the numbers we are given - of Jews allegedly murdered by the Germans - are not based on solid research. We also know now that up to 20,000 camps, i.e., detention facilities existed instead of the 5,000 to 7,000 believed to have existed. Mr. Thomas Kues mentions this in his article.[4] So, why is the issue of how many survived seemingly unimportant? It should not be, for only if we know how many Jews were able to flee or make it through the war somehow can we begin to look for those missing. CONTINUE READING |
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