The numbers game

I have been fascinated by the comments of 'Bishop' Richard Williamson, reportedly that that historical evidence was "hugely against six million having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler ... I believe there were no gas chambers."

This needs taking apart and analyzing; by not analyzing it, the media are in danger of tacitly supporting vicious prejudice. In fact the only person I know of who has made the allegation that the 'Bishop' contradicts - and perhaps he has a lot to answer for in this respect - is Bob Dylan in his song 'God on Our Side' ('though they murdered 6 million, in the ovens they fried'). But not a single historian claims - or has ever claimed - that ''six million [were] deliberately gassed in gas chambers''. All the evidence is however that many millions of Jews (and others) died as a consequence of Nazi policies, in concentration camps by disease and execution as well as by gassing, and by mass-murders and executions in invaded territories (about 100,000 of them in Babi Yar, not far from where I am presently writing). (It is interesting to note, by the way, that, as Mark Mazower points out at the start of his excellent 'Hitler's Empire' , about six million Germans, military and civilian, died from the war and the two years of turmoil following it, and therefore were also casualties of this murderous regime - perhaps the 'Bishop' would be wiling to agree with this statistic).

It is a standard tactic of holocaust deniers to put up the nonsense 'argument' that 6 million were gassed, which is easily demolished. Then you can allege, as the 'bishop' does, that '200,000 to 300,000 Jews perished in the Nazi concentration camps but none of them in gas chambers'. Now we are dealing with 'only' "200,000-300,000 people" - which apparently mitigates the matter - and the argument has been forced to turn on whether or not there were any gas chambers, i.e on the means of murder, rather than the murders themselves.

Arguing about the numbers and the methods only distracts from understanding of Europe in 1933-45. (Or if we include - as we should - the homicidal Russian regime in our assessments, the period 1920-1945). We have not been helped by 'Holocaust education', which with its dismal concentration on gruesome events and statistics may have indeed impeded understanding of the moral and political background to this appalling story, and helps to characterise Jews in student minds merely as victims of a historic tragedy (who, in turn, according to some pundits, 'should know better' as a consequence when it comes to dealing with Palestinians).

This is what happened in the second quarter of the 20th century; untold millions of people died throughout Europe as a consequence of political totalitarianism. 'Punch and Judy' games such as 'it was only 200,000' are just contemptible in this context; and when they are played by a 'Bishop' they become beneath contempt. But when the media just report them in passing and then move gaily on, they become poisonous.