The eight assertions were:
1. Emigration, never annihilation, was the Reich’s plan for solving Germany’s Jewish problem. Had Germany intended to annihilate all the Jews, a half million concentration camp inmates would not have survived and managed to come to Israel, where they collect “fancy indemnities from West Germany.”
2. “Absolutely no Jews were gassed in any concentration camps in Germany, and evidence is piling up that none were gassed in Auschwitz.” The Hitler gas chambers never existed. The gassing installations found in Auschwitz were really crematoria for cremating corpses of those who had died from a variety of causes, including the “genocidic” Anglo-American bombing raids.
3. The majority of Jews who disappeared and remain unaccounted for did so in territories under Soviet, not German, control.
4. The majority of Jews who supposedly died while in German hands were, in fact, subversives, partisans, spies, saboteurs, and criminals or victims of unfortunate but internationally legal reprisals.
5. If there existed the slightest likelihood that the Nazis had really murdered six million Jews, “World Jewry” would demand subsidies to conduct research on the topic and Israel would open its archives to historians. They have not done so. Instead they have persecuted and branded as an antisemite anyone who wished to publicize the hoax. This persecution constitutes the most conclusive evidence that the six million figure is a “swindle.”[3]
6. The Jews and the media who exploit this figure have failed to offer even a shred of evidence to prove it. The Jews misquote Eichmann and other Nazis in order to try to substantiate their claims.
7. It is the accusers, not the accused, who must provide the burden of proof to substantiate the six million figure. The Talmudists and Bolsheviks have so browbeaten the Germans that they pay billions and do not dare to demand proof.
8. The fact that Jewish scholars themselves have “ridiculous” discrepancies in their calculations of the number of victims constitutes firm evidence that there is no scientific proof to this accusation.{40}
While all these assertions are easily controverted by evidence and documentation, some are based on such faulty reasoning that their fallaciousness can be exposed without even turning to the evidence. As was the case with Rassinier, App ignored a fundamental flaw in his eighth assertion. If the Holocaust was truly a fraud perpetrated by the Jews, one could legitimately expect a powerful force like “World Jewry” to have seen to it that no discrepancies were allowed to creep into research by Jewish scholars. All their findings should neatly dovetail with and confirm one another. And if the “Talmudists” were crafty enough to recognize that precise conformity might arouse suspicion, they would have ensured that there was only the slightest variation among scholars’ findings.
But this, of course, is not the only inconsistency in App’s arguments. At the same time that he described Israeli archives as playing a pivotal role in the “swindle,” he also used their findings to validate his own. In an attempt to prove that even Israeli institutions have been unable to document the number of dead, App cited a statement by Yad Vashem, the national memorial to the victims in Israel, that it has been able to gather only 2.5 million pages of testimony.[4] App argued that if in the years since the end of the war Yad Vashem had been unable to document even 4 million, it was because there had not been that many. Even the 2.5 million figures they supplied were nothing but a “a lie and a swindle.”{41} But if Yad Vashem was as App depicted it—an Israeli institution at the heart of the hoax—it should have had no difficulty forging the additional documentation needed to fill the quotient of six million.{42}
More recently the Institute for Historical Review published a report from the Jerusalem Post in which the director of Yad Vashem’s archives reported that more than half of its testimonies from Holocaust survivors are “unreliable.” According to Yad Vashem officials, these testimonies have never been used as evidence in Nazi war crimes trials because survivors who wanted to be “part of history” may, in fact, have allowed their imaginations to “run away with them.”{43} For the deniers this was further evidence of a “hoax.” What the Institute for Historical Review could not ask, given its ideological predilections, was the question of why Yad Vashem would acknowledge that some of its archival holdings are incorrect if its objective was to perpetuate the Holocaust “myth.” Why did it not simply replace these testimonies with “correct” ones? Why did it not have its researchers further “falsify” the data? If Jews were able to forge documents sufficient to convict Nazi war criminals within a few months after the war, they should certainly have been able to deposit reliable and historically accurate testimonies in Yad Vashem in the decades since then. This simpilistic and yet deceptive claim is but another example of the deniers’ use of tactics that conveniently either ignore proof of the Holocaust or twist it in a way that substantiates their conspiracy theory.
App’s faulty arguments regarding the scholarly dispute about the number of victims and his use of statements and figures from Yad Vashem to prove his point were not the only occasions when he became ensnared in his own attempts to manipulate the evidence. In The Six Million Swindle he also attacked a journalist who had written that the Nazis wished to kill “as many Jews as possible” before the end of the war. In order to substantiate his charge that this journalist was lying, App cited Himmler’s fall 1944 order prohibiting any further execution of Jews.{44} This evidence, he argued, proved two things: First the Nazis did not wish to kill as many Jews as possible, for if so Himmler would not have halted the killings. Second, he argued, it showed that Himmler, not Hitler, was in charge of Jewish policy.{45} In his attempt to exonerate both the Nazis in general and Hitler in particular by laying the blame for this policy at Himmler’s doorstep, App ignores a basic contradiction in his argument: If there was not a policy to kill the Jews, what then was Himmler ordering stopped?
Here and elsewhere App’s approach to evidence is reminiscent of Rassinier’s arguments regarding eyewitness accounts. It is the standard method by which deniers dismiss evidence which contradicts their conclusions. All affidavits by Nazis admitting the existence of a Final Solution are declared “outright frauds,” and all testimony by Jews regarding mass murder is “in part or whole perjured, often well rewarded and altogether unreliable.”{46} This blanket denial of the validity of any evidence attesting to the Holocaust, including that of eyewitnesses, has become a centerpiece of the deniers’ methodology. Simply put, anything that disagrees with their foregone conclusion is dismissed. Because of the sheer number of affidavits by survivors, perpetrators, and eyewitnesses, unless the deniers categorically dismiss this mass of evidence they cannot perpetrate their own hoax.
3
All these assertions are absolutely false. Israel has opened its archives to all credible scholars and students working in this field.
4
A “page of testimony” at Yad Vashem consists of the name and birthdate of the victim as well as additional biographical information. It is usually filled out by a surviving relative, friend, or neighbor. Obviously many people died and did not leave behind any relatives or neighbors who could perform this task of memorializing their name.