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Re: Studying the Reactionary Mind
Martin Cohen (mcohen@UCLA.EDU)
Mon, 8 Jan 1996 21:07:31 -0700
Anthony Dauer wrote:
>Does it maintain the original body count estimates or reflect the newly
>excepted ones? I've seen a couple of the web pages on this "deny ...
>Auschwitz" there arguements and evidence fit just as well against them.
>While I do not feel that the Holocaust did not happened I am a bit concerned
>about the allegations (and to a small extent proof) of inflated evidence. I
>wonder if there are any sources outside the history purists that support any
>of their finds.
First of all, does it matter if only 4 million Jews died in the Holocaust
instead of 6 million? Six million is the best guess, and a good one. Lots
of people disappeared. If you have looked at the denier's web sites, then
you know that some of the less bold admit to many Jews dying, they just
attribute it to poor conditions in the camps instead of genocide! Amazing.
What is a fact, and what makes the Holocaust clearly genocide is the fact
that between 25% to 30% of the victims were children! Between 1.5 to 2
million Jewish children died at the hands of the Nazis. But eyewitness
accounts, as well as photographic evidence smuggled out of Auschwitz, among
other death camps give clear testimony.
Finally, the words of the Nazis, and their own records are quite clear:
"I mean the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish
people. This is something that is easy to talk about. 'The Jewish people
will be exterminated,' says every member of the party, 'this is clear, this
is in our program: the elimination, the extermination of the Jews: we
will do this.' And then they come to you -- eighty million good Germans --
and each one has his 'decent' Jew. Naturally, all the rest are pigs, but
this particular Jew is first-rate. Not one of those who talk this way has
seen the bodies. To have stuck it out and at the same time, barring
exceptions caused by human weakness, to have remained decent: that is what
has made us tough...
This is a glorious page in our history which never has and never
will be written."
-- Speech by Heinrich Himmler to a meeting of S.S. generals in
Posen on October 4, 1943.
One of my current research projects concerns the history of the Holocaust.
I am studying a little known history of the Jewish resistance to the
Holocaust. This has gotten me elbow deep into the horror of the Nazi plans
to exterminate, first and foremost, the Jewish people, as well as
homosexuals, Gypsies, dissadents and anyone they considered a threat. I am
on the board of advisors for "The Jewish Partisan Project", a documentary
film project on the Jewish partisan of Poland and the USSR.
Understandably, I couldn't let this post go by.
Martin Cohen
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