One of the methods Rassinier used to convince his readers that the Holocaust was a fraud was his use of the numbers game. Among the first to engage in this practice, he established a pattern followed by all deniers who try to prove that the death tolls are not valid. Rassinier argued that Jewish historians have fraudulent intentions and manipulate the data accordingly. For Rassinier the proof of this dishonesty is that they each interpret the data in a dramatically different fashion. Consequently their findings cannot be relied on, and they cannot be personally trusted.
In trying to make his case, Rassinier fabricated data, misquoted, and used quotations out of context. He first tried to demonstrate that Arendt and Hilberg were in disagreement about the number of Jews who were killed in Poland. According to Rassinier, in her February 23, 1963, New Yorker article Arendt “coolly inform[ed] us that ‘three million Polish Jews were massacred during the first day of the war.’” He then wrote: “Mr. Raul Hilberg found that ‘about 2,000,000 Polish Jews, …were transported to their deaths in 1942 and 1943.’” Rassinier complained about this apparent contradiction between the findings of these two historians and added: “It would be a good thing to come to an understanding: were there in Poland 3 to 3.3 million Jews during the war, as all statisticians unanimously claim, including those who are Jewish, or were there 5.7 million as Mme. Hannah Arendt is obliged to claim, since here are 5 million exterminated.”{21}
Rassinier simply falsified Arendt’s statement. In addition, he made minor but strategically important changes in Hilberg’s quote and then quoted it out of context in order to make it appear as if there were some contradiction between the two scholars. In The Destruction of the European Jews, Hilberg analyzed the role of the railways in the annihilation process. He observed that the “railway network managed to carry about 2,000,000 Polish Jews to their deaths in 1942 and 1943.” Rassinier ignored the references to the railway network. He makes it appear as if Hilberg is citing the total number of Polish Jews who were annihilated and not just those transported by rail. (Hilberg does not include in this total Jews deported by other means and those who were killed in ghettoes or in areas immediately adjacent to their homes.{22} When those Polish victims are included, Hilberg’s total comes to three million Polish Jews.)
But Rassinier committed an even more egregious falsehood in connection with Arendt’s quote. Arendt did not write that three million Polish Jews were killed in the first day. Discussing German estimates of the number of Jews left in Europe in 1940, Arendt observed that one particular estimate “did not include three million Polish Jews, who, as everybody knew, had been in the process of being massacred even since the first days of the war.”{23} By changing Arendt’s quote to say three million had been killed on the first day, Rassinier manages to make Arendt sound not only in total contradiction to other historians but quite out of touch with reality. Deniers would repeatedly rely on this tactic to try to make the findings of Holocaust historians seem particularly fantastic.
While Rassinier wished to cast doubt on the findings and motives of as many Jewish scholars as possible, he was particularly intent—as we have seen—on destroying Hilberg’s status. Ironically, after attacking Hilberg’s credibility, he used Hilberg’s standing as the premier historian in this field to cast doubt on the finding of other Jewish historians and institutions. In an obvious attempt to throw into question the findings of the World Jewish Congress, he wrote that while the congress “gives the figure of 1,000,000 (dead in the USSR) Mr. Raul Hilberg finds only 420,000.”{24} Once again Rassinier misrepresented Hilberg’s findings. In one of his tables delineating the number of victims according to their countries of origin, Hilberg lists the prewar and postwar populations of the USSR. The difference between the two figures is 420,000. But the two figures represent dramatically different categories, as Hilberg clearly acknowledges at the bottom of the table, where he notes that the first column was based on prewar and the second on postwar boundaries. The postwar boundaries of the USSR were significantly larger than those of the prewar period, and Hilberg’s list reflects this. Since the Baltic republics were independent when the war began they are listed as separate countries in the prewar table. Because they became part of the USSR as a result of an agreement between Germany and the Soviet Union in 1941, in postwar totals Hilberg treats their Jewish victims as part of the toll for the entire USSR. Moreover, Hilberg’s postwar total must also be adjusted because it includes, as again he clearly notes, three hundred thousand refugees, deportees, and survivors from other regions.[2] With these adjustments Hilberg’s total was one million, precisely that of the World Jewish Congress. By ignoring these critical and obvious pieces of information, Rassinier makes it sound as if Hilberg is not only contradicting other historians but himself as well, since elsewhere in the book he cites the total dead in the USSR as approximately one million.{25}
Rassinier devised this alleged contradiction in order to depict these historians as willfully creating farfetched facts and figures. “One would like to invite all of these people—[Arendt, Baron, and Hilberg] and the multitude of others in the same boat—to please get together and agree on their figures before undertaking to explain us to ourselves.”{26} The fact is that while there are differences in totals, there are no fundamental contradictions between the findings of these or any other major historians. Virtually all agree that of the total killed approximately three million were Polish Jews. There is some variation of opinion on the number of Soviet Jews killed. The estimates range between 1 million and 1.3 million. The total death toll is somewhere between five and six million.{27}
Rassinier’s thesis, built on falsified data, is that the discrepancies between these historians invalidate their findings. Rassinier is correct in one regard, however: There are variances in each of their findings. Few agree on precisely the same number. But rather than invalidating their credibility, these discrepancies support it. According to Rassinier, if Hilberg has one toll for the victims and Baron another, it is proof that both are creating fictionalized accounts. Since both use official documents and testimonies to reach their conclusions, the contradictions in their findings supposedly illustrate that neither they nor the documents can be trusted. But in making this argument Rassinier ignores a critically important historical fact. Complete unanimity among historians regarding an event of such magnitude would itself be highly suspicious. A death toll on which all historians unequivocally agreed would raise legitimate suspicions about the independent nature of their historical research. It is precisely these differences that show that these are not “court-appointed” historians but independent researchers, each trying to assemble a myriad of details regarding one of the most brutal and chaotic chapters in recent history.
2
The section on the USSR appears as follows:
| - | ||
|---|---|---|
| USSR | 3,020,000 | 2,600,000 |
| • Estonia | 4,500 | - |
| • Latvia | 95,000 | - |
| • Lithuania | 145,000 | - |
| Totaclass="underline" | 3,264,500 | 2,600,000 |
When the three hundred thousand deportees, refugees, and survivors are deducted from the 2.6 million the total corresponds to a loss of 1 million Jews in the USSR.