Chambers does in fact cite a figure of 6,500,000, but not as the size of the Jewish population of prewar Europe:
On the continent of Europe apart from Russia, whose western provinces also suffered terribly, only a handful of numerically unimportant communities in neutral countries escaped and of the 6,500,000 Jews who who lived in the Nazi-dominated lands in 1939, barely 1,500,000 remained alive when the war ended six years later.{38}
Chambers specifically excluded from its figure of 6,500,000 the Jewish population in the Soviet Union and those countries that were not dominated by the Nazis in 1939.
Harwood also argued that the majority of German Jews left Germany prior to the outbreak of the war. Consequently they were not within reach of the Nazis and were safe from any form of persecution.{39} They could not therefore be counted among the six million. It is correct that more than 50 percent of German Jews emigrated. Though many went to places that in the mid-1930s seemed perfectly safe—for example, the Netherlands, France, and Belgium, they were eventually caught up in the Nazi maelstrom. Given that six million is cited as the death toll of all European Jewry, the percentage of Jews who emigrated is a meaningless statistic unless one notes their destination.
Whatever sources deniers cannot twist they ignore, particularly when they contradict their most basic contentions. Such was the case with the Chambers Encyclopedia. After citing the population figures, the encyclopedia discussed the “systematic campaign of annihilation in a series of death camps” as a result of which one-third of the Jewish population was killed.{40}
Harwood repeatedly used partial information to distort trustworthy sources. He wrote that the Baseler Nachrichten, a Swiss newspaper, reported in June 1946 that “a maximum of only one and a half million Jews could be numbered as casualties.”{41} Harwood neglected to mention a subsequent article in the same paper that acknowledged that the previous figure was incorrect and that the accurate number of victims was 5,800,000.{42}
He similarly twisted the conclusions reached by Margarete Buber in Under Two Dictators. According to Harwood she proved that the concentration camps were comfortable institutions with sufficient food and facilities to allow inmates to live in relatively acceptable conditions. He identified the author as a German Jewish woman, who was the only Jew in her group of deportees from Russia who was not immediately allowed by the Gestapo to return to Russia.{43} There is nothing in the book to indicate that Buber was Jewish. More significant is the manner in which Harwood misconstrued her description of Ravensbrück. According to Harwood she found it “clean, civilized and well-administered.” When she first arrived in 1940 she ate a meal of “white bread, sausage, leek porridge and dried fruit.”{44} She lived in these comfortable circumstances until 1945, when “she experienced the progressive decline of camp conditions.” In making this claim, Harwood was voicing a familiar argument. According to the deniers the terrible conditions of the camps were caused by the Allied destruction of the German civilian communication, transportation, and supply systems. The Allies, who wrought havoc on Germany’s civilian infrastructure during the latter stages of the war, prevented the Germans from feeding camp inmates. That is why the survivors in the camps were in such an emaciated condition when the camps were opened. Harwood absolved the victimizers and blamed the victors, transforming the Allies into perpetrators responsible for much of the suffering that occured in Germany. More to the purpose, something that could not be denied—the inmates’ skeletal condition—was explained away.
But this version of Buber’s account is totally at variance with what she actually says. Buber explicitly describes conditions that had broken down long before 1945. She made specific reference to executions, starvation, and terrible conditions that existed prior to the Allied raids of 1945. In addition to relating how inmates died as a result of being “beaten, starved, or frozen to death in the punishment cells,” she made specific references to gas chambers and executions. Referring to the crematorium in the camp, she wrote the “SS men were fond of telling us that the only way we should ever leave Ravensbrück would be ‘up the chimney.’”{45} Harwood ignored these references in Buber’s work, transforming a book that explicitly depicted the horror of the camps into one that renders them benign.[3]
Harwood also used selective quotations to turn Colin Cross’s Adolf Hitler inside out. He claimed Cross concluded that moving millions of Jews around Europe and “murdering them in a time of desperate war emergency was useless from any rational point of view.”{46} Harwood implied that Cross, in dismissing the annihilation program as totally irrational, believed it did not exist. Such is not the case; virtually all Holocaust scholars call attention to the fact that the Nazi annihilation of the Jews was irrational. Skilled workers were killed even if their tasks were unfinished. Precious freight cars needed to transport matériel to the front were used to carry Jews to their deaths. The Holocaust must be understood as something inherently lacking in functional reason. Therefore Cross’s description of it as irrational cannot be interpreted as indicative of denial tendencies. As he had with Buber’s book, Harwood ignored an array of passages that attested to Cross’s firm belief that there had been a plan for the annihilation of the Jews: “It was with the attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 that Hitler’s policy switched decisively to mass murder.”{47} Neither was there doubt in Cross’s mind about Hitler’s role in the Final Solution:
Even the most cursory examination of the facts points to the extreme possibility that Hitler was not only aware of the policy but was its active instigator… Moreover, Himmler repeatedly and definitely told his officials according to the minutes of meetings, that the extermination programme was based upon the leader’s orders. Finally there are statements in Hitler’s ‘Testament’ of 1945 in which are recounted the destruction of European Jewry as his achievement.{48}
Moreover, Cross stressed that the Holocaust was a “fundamental” aspect of Hitler’s policy. “The number of men, women and children who were herded into gas chambers and murdered simply for being Jews did run into millions.”{49}
Harwood employed this tactic of trying to make a book say what it does not in an even more systematic fashion in his treatment of the three-volume 1948 report of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on its attempts to assist those interned in camps. Blatantly misrepresenting the information contained in the report, Harwood tried to make it appear to lend credibility to the deniers’ proclamations. He described it as the only survey regarding the Jewish question in Europe during World War II and the conditions of Germany’s concentration camps that was not only “unique in its honesty and objectivity” but strictly politically neutral. According to him it demonstrated that the International Red Cross had found no evidence “whatever” in camps in Axis-occupied Europe of a “deliberate policy to exterminate the Jews.”{50} Harwood contended that in all its sixteen hundred pages the report failed to make any mention of “such a thing as a gas chamber.”[4] Though the ICRC admitted that Jews had suffered rigors and privations, as had many other wartime nationalities, “its complete silence on the subject of planned extermination is ample refutation of the Six Million legend.”{51}
3
Buber’s book contains a variety of historical flaws. I use her work not as a historical source but as an example of how deniers regularly falsify authors’ conclusions.
4
The American publication