Revisionist scholars, on the other hand, have long pondered about the origin of the six million figure, the most famous and thorough research stemming from Prof. Dr. Arthur Butz in his epochal work The Hoax of the Twentieth Century.While analyzing a large amount of New York Times articles on the persecution of Jews in German dominated Europe during World War Two, Butz found several articles which clearly indicate that as early as late 1942/early 1943, Jewish lobbying groups within the United States were already anticipating a total loss of five to six million Jews at war's end. Some of these articles I would like to briefly quote here, taken from Butz' book:
NYT, June 30, 1942, p. 7:
"1,000,000 Jews Slain By Nazis, Report Says"[10]
NYT, September 3, 1942, p. 5:
"A European observer said the Germans planned to exterminate the Jews not only in Europe, but throughout the world. He declared the Nazis had executed 2,000,000 Jews in the past three years."[11]
NYT, December 13, 1942, p. 21:
"[...] 'Authenticated reports point to 2,000,000 Jews who have already been slain by all manner of satanic barbarism, and plans for the total extermination of all Jews upon whom the Nazis can lay their hands. The slaughter of a third of the Jewish population in Hitler's domain[3?2,000,000=6,000,000] and the threatened slaughter of all is a holocaust without parallel.'"[12]
NYT, December 20, 1942, p. 23:
"What is happening to the 5,000,000 Jews of German-held Europe, all of whom face extermination [...].
Early in December 1942 the State Department in Washington gave some figures showing that the number of Jewish victims deported and perished since 1939 in Axis-controlled Europe now reached the appalling figure of 2,000,000 and that 5,000,000 were in danger of extermination."[13]
NYT, March 2, 1943, pp. 1, 4:
"Immediate action by the United Nations to save as many as possible of the five million Jews threatened with extermination [...] was demanded at a mass demonstration [...] in Madison Square Garden last night.
[...Rabbi Hertz said] 'appalling is the fact that those who proclaim the Four Freedoms have so far done very little to secure even the freedom to live for 6,000,000 of their Jewish fellow men by readiness to rescue those who might still escape Nazi torture and butchery. [...]'"[14]
NYT, March 10, 1943, p. 12:
"Forty thousand persons listened and watched [...] last night to two performances of 'We Will Never Die,' a dramatic mass memorial to the 2,000,000 Jews killed in Europe. [...] The narrator said 'There will be no Jews left in Europe for representation when peace comes. The four million left to kill are being killed, according to plan.'"[15]
NYT, April 20, 1943, p. 11:
"London, April 19 (Reuter) - Two million Jews have been wiped out since the Nazis began their march through Europe in 1939 and five million more are in immediate danger of execution. These figures were revealed in the sixth report on conditions in occupied territories issued by the Inter-Allied Information Committee."
Thus, Butz concludes in his book:[16]
"Another point that should be made here [...] is that the six million figure had its origin apparently in the propaganda of 1942-1943."
Butz also shows that the origins of these articles were Jewish-Zionist pressure groups like the World Jewish Congress and the American Jewish Congress. Initially, their claims were not taken seriously in Washington, until Henry Morgenthau of the Treasury department managed to reduce the influence of the State Department on official U.S. politics.[17]
But even Butz' farsighted approach was still a little short. Let me first go back in time six more years. On November 25, 1936, Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization, testified in front of the Peel Commission, which was formed as a reaction of violent clashes between Jews and Arabs in Palestine and which finally decided to divide Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab State. In his speech, Weizmann said:[18]
"It is no exaggeration to say that six million Jews are sentenced to be imprisoned in this part of the world, where they are unwanted, and for whom the countries are divided into those, where they are unwanted, and those, where they are not admitted."
That Weizmann's reference to six million threatened and/or suffering Jews is neither an exception nor by any means the earliest reference to this figure, is now shown by Don Heddesheimer. He has collected a vast amount of material indicating that the propaganda unleashed by Zionist organization during World War Two was not unprecedented. As a matter of fact, it is a mere repetition - or should we say continuation? - of propaganda, which intensified during World War One (!) and reached its first culmination in the 1920s. Already by then, the figures of five or six million Jews threatened by death were widely publicized and were used as a means to an end: namely the uncritical support of Jewish and Zionist political goals.[19]To go one step further, Heddesheimer even found a source from 1900 claiming that six million suffering Jews were a good argument for Zionism (see p. 40).
In this preface, I have quoted several New York Times articles of the years 1942 and 1943, because after having read this book, I would like the reader to come back to these pages and read those articles again. He will then be struck by the similarity of the theme. But he will also notice a difference:
During World War Two, Zionist pressure groups found a very convenient propaganda target in National Socialist Germany, whose extremely anti-Jewish politics invited all sorts of credible sounding accusations.
Before, during, and immediately after World War One, however, the situation was more complex. As Heddesheimer shows, the major target for polemic attacks in the years before World War One was czarist Russia due to its policies toward Jews, which many Zionists considered to be anti-Jewish. After czarist Russia's defeat was apparent in 1916/1917, Zionist propaganda switched its target over to Germany (see pp. 38f. of this book), whose ally, the Ottoman Empire (Turkey), needed to be defeated to 'liberate' Palestine for Zionist plans (and of course in order to secure billions of dollars lent to the British and French). Such propaganda accusations against Germany, however, ceased at war's end, because Germany, in those years, was quite willing and capable of defending itself against such untrue propaganda.
After the end of World War One, when Zionist dreams about Palestine were temporarily disappointed, but new hopes had arisen with the Soviet experiment in Russia, no particular country was initially singled out, even though there was a perfect target: Poland.
Between World War One and World War Two, Poland was a military dictatorship, which implemented a policy of 'ethnic pressure,' i.e., all non-Polish minorities were subjected to discriminations and various degrees of persecution with the intention to 'convince' them to emigrate (quite similar to what Israel does today in Palestine against non-Jews). The Jews in Poland were not exempt from this treatment. As a matter of fact, Polish official as well as unofficial anti-Judaism was so massive that many Polish Jews preferred to live in Germany even during the Third Reich until late 1938 rather than to stay in their native country.
Hence, there was enough justification to massively attack Poland for its rabid anti-Jewish attitude as there were reasons to attack Germany after Adolf Hitler rose to power there and step by step implemented a policy increasingly comparable to that already in effect in Poland.
Although it can be shown that The New York Times accused Poland of anti-Jewish persecution in many articles - whereas this newspaper was basically silent about similar persecution suffered by Germans, Lithuanians, Ruthenians, Ukrainians, and Slovaks residing in Poland -Heddesheimer does not focus on this aspect, because his book is not about the suffering and persecution of Jews in eastern Europe, but about propaganda and fund raising in New York. I therefore want to draw the reader's attention to a few examples of articles in The New York Times addressing anti-Jewish persecution in Poland.
Already by 1919, a report about alleged anti-Jewish pogroms in Poland appeared in the New York Times, but with a very ironic connotation, since the veracity of these reports was doubted:[20]
"It has been pointed out that some of these reports may have originated with German propagandists or may have been exaggerated by them with the obvious purpose of discrediting Poland with the Allies, in the hope that Germany might be the gainer thereby. Germany might have assisted in spreading these stories, may have invented them, although it would be a cruel deception to wring the hearts of great multitudes of people in order to gain such an end [...]"
False claims of Jewish suffering would be cruel, indeed, and it sure is nice to read it from the horse's mouth. It is troubling, however, when such claims are falsely attributed as in this case where the New York Times apparently could not suppress its prejudice to potentially see the 'evil German' behind everything.
In some articles during the 1920s addressing the sufferings of Polish Jewry, these hardships were interestingly depicted as a result of general economic hardship in Poland after World War One rather than as a result of any specific anti-Jewish policies.[21]Others, in particular during the 1930s when Polish policies became more repressive, reported about anti-Jewish persecutions, which triggered the public protest of Dr. Joseph Tenenbaum, the chairman of the American Jewish Congress.[22]This was, however, also accompanied with some dramatic exaggerated claims about the suffering of the Jews:[23]
"The Jewish people all over the world face a war of extinction, Dr. Tenenbaum declared in an address [...]."
This was roughly one year before Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany!
Even though Poland's anti-minority policies in general and anti-Jewish policies in particular, which started right at this country's establishment in 1918/19, made it a perfect target for criticism, this aspect of Polish history is today almost forgotten.
