Auschwitz
So just what constitutes "Holocaust denial"? Surely a claim that most Auschwitz
inmates died from disease and not systematic extermination in gas chambers would be
"denial." But perhaps not. Jewish historian Arno J. Mayer, a Princeton University
professor, wrote in his 1988 study Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?: The 'Final
Solution" in History': ... From 1942 to 1945, certainly at Auschwitz, but probably
overall, more Jews were killed by so-called 'natural' causes than by 'unnatural' ones."
(note 9)
Even estimates of the number of people who died at Auschwitz -- allegedly the main
extermination center -- are no longer clear cut. At the postwar Nuremberg Tribunal,
the Allies charged that the Germans exterminated four million people at Auschwitz.
(note 10) Until 1990, a memorial plaque at Auschwitz read: "Four Million People
Suffered and Died Here at the Hands of the Nazi Murderers Between the Years 1940
and 1945." (note 11) During a 1979 visit to the camp, Pope John Paul II stood before
this memorial and blessed the four million victims.
Is it "Holocaust denial" to dispute these four million deaths? Not today. In July 1990,
the Polish government's Auschwitz State Museum, along with Israel's Yad Vashem
Holocaust center, conceded that the four million figure was a gross exaggeration, and
references to it were accordingly removed from the Auschwitz monument. Israeli and
Polish officials announced a tentative revised toll of 1.1 million Auschwitz dead.
(note 12) In 1993, French Holocaust researcher Jean-Claude Pressac, in a muchdiscussed
book
about
Auschwitz,
estimated
that
altogether
about
775,000
died
there

during
the
war years.
(note
13)

Professor Mayer acknowledges that the question of how many really died in
Auschwitz remains open. In Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? he wrote (p. 366):
... Many questions remain open ... All in all, how many bodies were cremated in
Auschwitz? How many died there all told? What was the national, religious, and
ethnic breakdown in this commonwealth of victims? How many of them were
condemned to die a 'natural' death and how many were deliberately slaughtered? And
what was the proportion of Jews among those murdered in cold blood among these
gassed? We have simply no answers to these questions at this time.
Gas Chambers
What about denying the existence of extermination "gas chambers"? Here too, Mayer
makes a startling statement (on page 362 of his book): "Sources for the study of the
gas chambers are at once rare and unreliable." While Mayer believes that such
chambers did exist at Auschwitz, he points out that
most of what is known is based on the depositions of Nazi officials and executioners
at postwar trials and on the memory of survivors and bystanders. This testimony must