The Holocaust

The Holocaust most often refers to the murder of six million Jews by Nazi Germany prior to and during World War Two, although the official policy began in 1941 and ran til 1945. It is often expanded in definition to eleven million, including groups such as Romanis, Slavs, Homosexuals and the disabled. The focus on who the Nazis murdered has a considerable political aspect, with the United States focusing on Jewish victims, as they were more plenty and influential in the US than Slavs; the nations of which the US was opposed to in the Cold War. The Soviet Union for its part emphasized the suffering of Soviet citizens by the Nazis, which was greater in scope (an official toll of 20 million was given by the Soviet government, later revised to a total of 26.6 million by the Russian Federation, of which 8,668,400 were military deaths). This manifested in the Holocaust being less emphasized as seperate and written as an intrinsic part of World War II. One author stated that "Very few works by Soviet Jewish writers deal with the Holocaust. People were afraid to write about this, since such works were either not published or caused their authors endless difficulties." This was likely due to the CPSU fearing that Soviet Jews would gravitate in a nationalist direction through unfettered coverage of the Holocaust; that it would engender Zionist sentiments.

Concentration and Death Camps

The Holocaust was a relatively medium-sized part of the over-all problem - the German concentration camp system.

Soviet POWs

Soviet POWs (Prisoners Of War) were, alongside the Jews the main demographic that these camps truly affected as Jews and Slavs were in Nazi eyes, united as a single "Bolshevik threat".

Holocaust Denial

Like many atrocities of the Third Reich, the Holocaust is downplayed and denied by many Neo-Nazis and, for the ignorant, come off as possessing convincing arguments for their Clean Wehrmacht claims. This is often shortened to the modern phrase "Holohoax".

Red Cross Numbers

One denier gambit is the claim that the International Red Cross got to visit all concentration and extermination camps, recorded all those that died there, and their numbers only tally up to a low six figure amount. Apart from Theresienstadt, the Potemkin village of Nazi Germany specifically built for propaganda purposes, the IRC was, in fact, not allowed proper and complete access to concentration camps, nevermind the extermination camps.

Commonly cited is a purported letter from the Bad Arolsen International Tracing Service from 1979, addressed to a certain "Herr", a Mr. That this is a letter in German with English words thrown in should already raise the alarm, but we'll continue anyway: the document lists only registered deaths ("beurkundete Sterbefälle") at some Nazi concentration camps. The vast majority of people who died at the death camps were never registered because they died before this could occur. Another such widely circulated document among the far right is an essay titled "The Jews And The Concentration Camps: A Factual Appraisal By The Red Cross." sometimes you will find it under an even more self-incriminating title "A Factual Appraisal Of The 'Holocaust' By The Red Cross: The Jews And The Concentration Camps: No Evidence Of Genocide". This is not a Red Cross report, but a "report" about a Red Cross report; penned by a denier (probably Richard Harwood, as this article is one of the chapters of the 1974 booklet, "Did Six Million Really Die?"), about the three-volume Report of the International Committee of the Red Cross on its Activities during the Second World War, Geneva, 1948 The latter contains key sections where the IRC explicitly states that the systematic extermination of Jews was Nazi policy, but they are ignored and left out in the aforementioned "report of the report", for an obvious agenda.

Holocaust denying books

There are numerous Holocaust-denying books which say to portray the "truth" of the Holocaust. An example of this sort of book is The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry by Arthur Butz. The book is banned in Canada, and after numerous Jewish groups complained about how the company Amazon was selling anti-semitic books, the Hoax of the Twentieth Century and a few other books were pulled. The Hoax of the Twentieth Century was published in 1975 by a publisher commonly known to publish Holocaust-denial books. An Amazon reviewer (who reviewed in 2014, before it was pulled) said that The Hoax of the Twentieth Century "cogently and meticulously torn to tatters the audacious lie that is the holocaust.". On the book-reviewing website GoodReads (also owned by Amazon) The Hoax of the Twentieth Century has a rating of 3.82 stars. Majority of the reviews are five or four star ratings, saying things such as "Scrupulous and detailed analysis of the evidence.". The book is very popular among anti-semitic groups - Canadian academic Alan T. Davies named it a "new antisemitic classic".