{"id":50079,"date":"2017-02-06T17:05:29","date_gmt":"2017-02-06T15:05:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=50079"},"modified":"2017-02-04T15:23:57","modified_gmt":"2017-02-04T13:23:57","slug":"06-05-13","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=50079","title":{"rendered":"Remember the 11 million\u2019? Why an inflated victims tally irks Holocaust historians"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>Remember the 11 million\u2019? Why an inflated victims tally irks Holocaust historians<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

RON KAMPEAS<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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An oft-cited statistic of 5 million non-Jewish Holocaust deaths has no basis in fact, experts say, and may be contributing to denial efforts<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\"A
\nA social media post by the IDF Spokesperson\u2019s Unit, marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day, includes a total of Jews and non-Jews killed in the Holocaust that historians say is greatly exaggerated. (Twitter)<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

WASHINGTON (JTA) \u2014 \u201cFive million non-Jews died in the Holocaust.\u201d<\/span><\/strong>
\n It\u2019s a statement that shows up regularly in declarations about the Nazi era. It was implied in a Facebook post by the Israel Defense Forces\u2019 spokesperson\u2019s unit last week marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day. And it was asserted in an article shared by the Trump White House in defense of its controversial Holocaust statement the same day omitting references to the 6 million Jewish victims.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

It is, however, a number without any scholarly basis.<\/span><\/p>\n

Indeed, say those close to the late Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, its progenitor, it is a number that was intended to increase sympathy for Jewish suffering but which now is more often used to obscure it.<\/span><\/p>\n

The White House statement sent waves of dismay through the Jewish community, including among groups that have been supportive of President Donald Trump.<\/span><\/p>\n

By mentioning the \u201cvictims, survivors, [and] heroes of the Holocaust\u201d without mentioning the Jews, said a host of Jewish organizations, the January 27 statement risked playing into the hands of the European right, which includes factions that seek to diminish the centrality of the Jewish genocide to the carnage of World War II.<\/span><\/p>\n

In defending the omission of Jews from the statement, a White House spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, sent CNN a link to a 2015 Huffington Post-UK piece titled \u201cThe Holocaust\u2019s Forgotten Victims: The 5 Million Non-Jewish People Killed By The Nazis.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Sean Spicer, the White House spokesman, on Monday appeared to cite the same source, saying that the Nazis\u2019 victims included Roma, gays, the disabled and priests. He called complaints about the statement \u201cpathetic,\u201d although some of those objections came from two groups that otherwise have been supportive of Trump, the Republican Jewish Coalition and the Zionist Organization of America.<\/span><\/p>\n

recomended by:
\n<\/em><\/span>Leon Rozenbau<\/em><\/span><\/strong>
\n\"\"<\/p>\n

In the wake of the controversy, the world\u2019s two leading Holocaust museums, in Washington and in Jerusalem, issued statements emphasizing the centrality of the annihilation of the Jews to the understanding of the Holocaust; neither mentioned Trump.<\/span><\/p>\n

The \u201c5 million\u201d has driven Holocaust historians to distraction ever since Wiesenthal started to peddle it in the 1970s. Wiesenthal told the Washington Post in 1979, \u201cI have sought with Jewish leaders not to talk about 6 million Jewish dead, but rather about 11 million civilians dead, including 6 million Jews.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Yehuda Bauer, an Israeli Holocaust scholar who chairs the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, said he warned his friend Wiesenthal, who died in 2005, about spreading the false notion that the Holocaust claimed 11 million victims \u2013 6 million Jews and 5 million non-Jews.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"YehudaYehuda Bauer (Thonke\/Ullstein bild via Getty Images\/JTA)<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

I said to him, \u2018Simon, you are telling a lie,\u2019\u201d Bauer recalled in an interview Tuesday. \u201cHe said, \u2018Sometimes you need to do that to get the results for things you think are essential.\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Bauer and other historians who knew Wiesenthal said the Nazi hunter told them that he chose the 5 million number carefully: He wanted a number large enough to attract the attention of non-Jews who might not otherwise care about Jewish suffering, but not larger than the actual number of Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust, 6 million.<\/span><\/p>\n

It caught on: President Jimmy Carter, issuing the executive order that would establish the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, referred to the \u201c11 million victims of the Holocaust.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of Holocaust studies at Emory University in Atlanta, wrote in 2011 how the number continues to dog her efforts to teach about the Holocaust.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI have been to many Yom Hashoah observances \u2014 including those sponsored by synagogues and Jewish communities \u2014 where eleven candles were lit,\u201d she wrote in an article in the Jewish Review of Books in which she lacerated Wiesenthal\u2019s ethical standards. \u201cWhen I tell the organizers that they are engaged in historical revisionism, their reactions range from skepticism to outrage. Strangers have taken me to task in angry letters for focusing \u2018only\u2019 on Jewish deaths and ignoring the five million others. When I explain that this number is simply inaccurate, in fact made up, they become even more convinced of my ethnocentrism and inability to feel the pain of anyone but my own people.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The problem, according to Bauer, who has debunked the number repeatedly in his writings over the decades, is not that non-Jews were not victims; they were. It is that Wiesenthal\u2019s arbitrarily chosen tally of non-Jewish victims diminishes the centrality to the Nazi ideology of systematically wiping any trace of the Jewish people from the planet.<\/span><\/p>\n

In fact, he said, the term \u201cgenocide\u201d could accurately be applied to the 2 million to 3 million Poles murdered and millions more enslaved by the Nazis. But the mass murder of the Poles, Roma and others should not come under the rubric \u201cHolocaust,\u201d a term that Holocaust historians generally dislike because of its religious connotations but nonetheless have accepted as describing only the annihilation that the Nazis hoped to visit on the Jews.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAll Jews of the world had to be annihilated,\u201d Bauer said. \u201cThat was the intent. There was never an idea in Nazi minds to murder all the Russians.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The number 5 million also adheres to no known understanding of the number of non-Jews killed by the Nazis: While as many as 35 million people were killed overall because of Nazi aggression, the number of non-Jews who died in the concentration camps is no more than half a million, Bauer said.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"SimonSimon Wiesenthal in 1995. (photo credit: AP\/Ronald Zak, File)<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

read more: Remember the 11 million\u2019?….<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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twoje uwagi, linki, wlasne artykuly, lub wiadomosci przeslij do: webmaster@reunion68.com<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Remember the 11 million\u2019? Why an inflated victims tally irks Holocaust historians RON KAMPEAS An oft-cited statistic of 5 million non-Jewish Holocaust deaths has no basis in fact, experts say, and may be contributing to denial efforts A social media post by the IDF Spokesperson\u2019s Unit, marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day, includes a total of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50079"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50079"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50079\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50112,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50079\/revisions\/50112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}