Human Soap?
Is someone a "Holocaust denier" if he says that the Nazis didn't use Jewish fat to
make soap? After examining all the evidence (including an actual bar of soap supplied
by the Soviets), the Nuremberg Tribunal declared in its Judgment that "in some
instances attempts were made to utilize the fat from the bodies of the victims in the
commercial manufacture of soap." (note 3)
In 1990, though, Israel's official "Yad Vashem" Holocaust memorial agency "rewrote
history" by admitting that the soap story was not true. "Historians have concluded that
soap was not made from human fat. When so many people deny the Holocaust ever
happened, why give them something to use against the truth?," said Yad Vashem
official Shmuel Krakowski. (note 4)
Wannsee Conference?
Is someone a "Holocaust denier" if he does not accept that the January 1942
"Wannsee conference" of German bureaucrats was held to set or coordinate a program
of systematic mass murder of Europe's Jews? If so, Israeli Holocaust historian Yehuda
Bauer must be wrong -- and a "Holocaust denier" -- because he recently declared:
"The public still repeats, time after time, the silly story that at Wannsee the
extermination of the Jews was arrived at." In Bauer's opinion, Wannsee was a meeting
but "hardly a conference" and "little of what was said there was executed in detail."
(note 5)
Extermination Policy?
Is someone a "Holocaust denier" if he says that there was no order by Hitler to
exterminate Europe's Jews? There was a time when the answer would have been yes.
Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, for example, wrote in the 1961 edition of his study,
The Destruction of the European Jews, that there were two Hitler orders for the
destruction of Europe's Jews: the first given in the spring of 1941, and the second
shortly thereafter. But Hilberg removed mention of any such order from the revised,
three-volume edition of his book published in 1985. (note 6) As Holocaust historian
Christopher Browning has noted: (note 7)
In the new edition, all references in the text to a Hitler decision or Hitler order for the
"Final Solution" have been systematically excised. Buried at the bottom of a single
footnote stands the solitary reference: "Chronology and circumstances point to a
Hitler decision before the summer ended." In the new edition, decisions were not
made and orders were not given.
A lack of hard evidence for an extermination order by Hitler has contributed to a
controversy that divides Holocaust historians into "intentionalists" and
"functionalists." The former contend that there was a premeditated extermination
policy ordered by Hitler, while the latter hold that Germany's wartime "final solution"
Jewish policy evolved at lower levels in response to circumstances. But the crucial
point here is this: notwithstanding the capture of literally tons of German documents
after the war, no one can point to documentary evidence of a wartime extermination