Rassinier's Numbers Game (Part 2)

Another distortion by Rassinier concerns the work of Leon Poliakov. Rassinier claimed, falsely, that Poliakov supported the figure of four million for the number of Jews who died at Auschwitz:

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For example: about 4,000,000 Jews met their fate at Auschwitz, the rest in other extermination camps, or in the open at the hands of the Einsatzgruppen, we are told by Leon Poliakov, Olga Wormser, and Henri Michel, among others.

The real figure given by Poliakov was "in the neighborhood of two million", as cited in this link:

In his affidavits, Hoess spoke of two and a half million, 'a figure set officially,' he wrote, under the signature of [Eichmann], in a report to Himmler. This figure has been accepted by several authors, and it appears in the verdict at the trial of the major war criminals. However, there is no reason for accepting without question the statistics attributed to Eichmann, which may err on either side. Adding the number of victims to those deported from different countries gives a lower figure, although we have little data, for example, on the number of Polish Jews sent to Auschwitz. An approximate figure in the neighborhood of two million seems closer to the truth.

Furthermore, as Van Pelt has shown, Poliakov's estimate was not the lowest preferred by serious historians at the time that Rassinier was writing (early-mid-1960's). Hoess's memoirs were available, citing a figure of not more than 1.2 million, Reitlinger had estimated 840,800 (but was uncertain about Poland and the Baltic states) and Hilberg had published a figure of one million Jews. Rassinier had thus constructed Straw Men around the four million specified by the Soviet-controlled Extraordinary Commission, whilst omitting the fact that the Commission had referred to "no less than four million citizens of the USSR., Poland, France, Jugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Hungary, Holland, Belgium, and other countries," but had not specified a figure for Jews. He had then misrepresented the figures given by his Straw Men historians. Rassinier's example would later be emulated by other deniers such as Sanning.

Rassinier's Numbers Game (Part 1)

In Chapter Fourteen of Debunking the Genocide Myth, Rassinier presented misleading Holocaust statistics; a blatant exercise in deception. Here is an example.

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Rassinier was trying to set up a disparity between the figures quoted by Hilberg and those in other sources. Thus for Poland he claimed that:

The clearest example of these differences, it seems to me, is Poland, where Mr. Salo Baron, holder of the chair of Jewish History at Columbia University, found that on the arrival of Russian troops in the country 700,000 Jews were still there (according to his statement of April 24, 1961, at the Eichmann Trial); the World Center of Jewish Documentation at Paris gave the figure of 500,000 (communique to the Figaro litteraire of June 4, 1960), the Institute of Jewish Affairs claimed some 400,000 (Eichmann's Confederates and the Third Reich Hierarchy, p. 59), and Mr. Raul Hilberg found only 50,000 (The Destruction of the European Jews, p. 670).[emphasis mine]

Here is Baron's actual testimony concerning Poland:

According to the figures in our possession, and according to the census conducted by the Central Jewish Committee in Poland on 15 August 1945, only 73,955 Jews remained, of whom 13,000 were Polish soldiers and 5,446 were registered in ten displaced persons' camps in Germany and Austria. In other words, out of 3,000,000, possibly within a slightly larger territory, there remained a very small remnant of those who had survived.[emphasis mine]

CODOH Demographics

In January 1953, Paul Rassinier wrote an article for Der Weg in which he claimed that "the majority (80%) of the Jews in the Ukraine, White Russia, Lithuania and Latvia" were rescued from the Nazis by Soviet evacuation procedures. As Pierre Vidal-Naquet noted here, Rassinier based this claim on a single source - a Soviet newspaper article by David Bergelson - that had no primary corroboration. This single-source claim was repeated by deniers Richard Verrall in 1974 and Walter Sanning in 1983. In April 2003, fifty years after Rassinier's article, CODOH repeated the single-source propaganda claim on this thread. What does the thread tell us about the state of revisionism, and CODOH's intellectual bankruptcy?

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Unlike Sanning, CODOH moderator Jonnie 'Hannover' Hargis makes no attempt to fabricate a pseudo-scientific method based on fraud, deception and manipulation. For Hargis, it is sufficient to state a faith position:

Jews went where Jews are.

Look at Israel.. how many Jews were there before WWII? How many are there now? Jews were literally flooding out of Europe immigrating to Israel, US, Canada, S. America, S. Africa..you name it.

It never occurs to Hargis that the onus is on him to prove this claim with demographic evidence from the countries concerned. He also embarasses his fellow revisionists, Mattogno and Graf, by showing that they - like Rassinier, Verrall and Sanning - are forced to rely on hearsay from journalists rather than proper historical and demographic sources:

Mattogno/Jürgen quoted in their Treblinka book a Jewish journalist Louis Rapoport from his book La guerra di Stalin contro gli Ebrei, Rizzoli, Mailand 1991

This is the best that CODOH can do. Like all its fellow fraudsters in the 'revisionist' school, therefore, CODOH does not have a clue how to study a demographic or historical subject seriously.