Holocaust denial called "the most vulgar aspect of anti-Semitism"

A BBC news article said,

Pope Benedict XVI has expressed "full and indisputable solidarity" with Jews, distancing himself from a bishop who denies the Nazis used gas chambers.

Briton Richard Williamson was among four bishops whose excommunications were lifted by the Pope last week.

Bishop Williamson said recently: "I believe there were no gas chambers".

Jewish leaders, marking Holocaust Remembrance Day, reacted angrily to the rehabilitation of the bishop, saying it had harmed Catholic-Jewish dialogue. . . . .

Nobel Peace Prize winner and death camp survivor Elie Wiesel said that the Pope, by lifting the excommunication of the British-born cleric, had given credence to "the most vulgar aspect of anti-Semitism".

. . . . On Tuesday, the Chief Rabbinate of Israel -- the supreme Jewish governing body in the country -- broke off official ties with the Vatican in protest over the Pope's decision.

Haifa Chief Rabbi Shear Yishuv Cohen, chairman of the Rabbinate's commission, told The Jerusalem Post that he expected Bishop Williamson to publicly retract his statements before links could be renewed.

Here the entire Catholic church is being blamed for the holocaust views of just one Catholic bishop. This shows the tremendous pressure that people are under to conform with holocaust dogma.

My own position is that a "systematic" Jewish holocaust was impossible because the Nazis had no objective and reliable ways of identifying Jews and non-Jews.

Deborah Lipstadt's blog has a number of articles about the controversy.

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Two blogs about the holocaust

The two blogs are:

One Person with Proof -- a holocaust-revisionist blog by Bradley Smith, who is associated with CODOH (Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust).

Deborah Lipstadt's blog -- an anti-revisionist blog.

I am adding both blogs to my list of external links in the sidebar of the home page. I already have two holocaust websites in the list -- CODOH and the Institute for Historical Review -- but neither website accepts comments. These two new blogs offer opportunities to comment.

I am a holocaust revisionist. My main argument is that a "systematic" Jewish holocaust was impossible because the Nazis had no objective and reliable ways of identifying Jews and non-Jews. This is an unusual argument -- I have never seen this argument raised directly by anyone else. The argument has been indirectly raised by others, particularly by Edwin Black in his book "IBM and the Holocaust," in which he claimed to have discovered the means by which the Nazis identified all of the Jews of Europe: by means of IBM Hollerith-card machines. My blog has two post-label groups of articles about holocaust revisionism [1] [2] (the reason for the two groups is that the Blogger.com template format that I am using limits me to 20 articles per post label). My blog also has two post-label groups about the Darwin-to-Hitler issue [3] [4]. These post labels are also listed in the sidebar of the home page.

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Long-known Auschwitz drawings falsely called a new discovery

An AOL news article says,

BERLIN (Nov. 10) – The original construction plans believed used for a major expansion of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz in 1941 have been found in a Berlin flat, Germany's Bild newspaper reported on Saturday.

The daily printed three architect's drawings on yellowing paper from the batch of 28 pages of blueprints it obtained. One has an 11.66 meter by 11.20 meter room marked "Gaskammer" (gas chamber) that was part of a "delousing facility" . . . .

The plans, published ahead of the 70th anniversary of the "Kristallnacht" or the Nazi pogrom that was a harbinger of the Holocaust, also include a crematorium and a "L. Keller" -- an abbreviation for "Leichenkeller" or corpse cellar . . . . .

The mass-circulation newspaper quoted Hans-Dieter Kreikamp, head of the federal archives office in Berlin, as saying the blueprints offered "authentic evidence of the systematically planned genocide of European Jews." . . . . .

"These documents reveal that everyone who had even anything remotely to do with the planning and construction of the concentration camp must have know that people were to be gassed to death in assembly-line fashion," Bild wrote.

"The documents refute once and for all claims by those who deny the Holocaust even took place," it added.

However, JTA, a Jewish news agency, says,
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Auschwitz documents touted as a sensational find by a German newspaper have been known to historians for years, an expert told JTA.

Historian Robert Jan van Pelt, an expert on Auschwitz, said he had checked the "so-called ‘new’ material" on the Web site of Bild, a high-circulation daily, and found that "the drawings that are on their site are all old material, perfectly known" and published by himself and others in the 1990s.

"If they are original drawings from which blueprints were made, this would be an interesting story," van Pelt, a professor at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, told JTA in a telephone interview. But, he said, there were "tons of such drawings in 300 boxes at Auschwitz ... copies of the originals." Some were found in the former Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and published by van Pelt and others . . . .

Van Pelt expressed dismay that the Bild’s claim of a new discovery had been picked up by newspapers around the world.

"Everyone is repeating the same nonsense, and the deniers are having great fun because it shows how people are gullible," he told JTA.

. . ."it is completely and utterly incomprehensible" that the director of the national archive would "open his mouth on something so sensitive without having consulted the literature." And when the Bild publishes this "without doing any homework, it puts us back 20 years. It’s as if we didn’t publish these documents already."

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Politically correct persecution of holocaust skeptics goes international

A BBC news article says,

Dr Gerald Toben was arrested by British police under an EU arrest warrant issued by the German authorities.

That warrant accuses him of publishing material online "of an anti-semitic and/or revisionist nature".

Dr Toben has been remanded in custody after his extradition hearing on Friday was adjourned, but will face a bail hearing on Friday 10 October and a full hearing on 17 October.

Dr Toben, an Australian national, was convicted in Germany in 1999 for breaking a German law that prohibits denying or "playing down" the mass murder of the Jews under Hitler. . . . .

. . . . . Human rights campaigner James Panton, of the Manifesto Group, said that Dr Toben should not be extradited, because he had not broken any British laws.

"Extraditing this man - however unpleasant a character he may be - would set a crazy and dangerous precedent," he said . . . .

. . . . .Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party, said that while his party in no way condoned Dr Toben's views, "not only has he not broken any UK laws, but in seeking to arrest him, Germany is claiming censorship rights to the entire internet network."

This view is shared by Australian free-speech campaigners who have accused Germany of trying to "legislate for the entire world" by treating downloadable internet material as a German publication.

Dr Toben, a German-born former schoolteacher, who now lives in Australia, has in the past described the Holocaust as "a lie".

His Australian-based website, the Adelaide Institute, carries the transcript of an interview in which Dr Toben says there is "no proof" that Hitler systematically exterminated the Jews, and that Auschwitz was a "transit camp". . . . .

. . . . "His views would probably qualify him for prosecution under laws against incitement to racial hatred in this country," he told the BBC's Jeremy Vine programme.

How is holocaust denial or revisionism "incitement to racial hatred"? That is a real stretch.

BTW, if Auschwitz was just a transit camp, then how does Toben explain the big sign "Arbeit Macht Frei" at the entrance to the camp? Just a thought.

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Germany continues persecution of holocaust deniers and revisionists

The European Jewish Press reported,

BERLIN (AFP)---Germany on Wednesday banned two regional far-right organizations suspected of denying the Nazis' extermination of six million Jews and launched early-morning raids against their members.

Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said the groups outlawed were the Collegium Humanum and the Association for the Rehabilitation of Those Persecuted for Questioning the Holocaust (VRBHV)".

As long-time readers of this blog may be aware, my personal position is that a "systematic" Jewish holocaust was impossible because the Nazis had no objective and reliable ways of identifying Jews and non-Jews.

This is a freedom of speech issue, not a holocaust issue. Again, here is a contact form for sending protests to the German Embassy.

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Israel urges UNESCO to promote holocaust education

An article in the Jerusalem Post says,

More than 60 years after the Holocaust, the Foreign Ministry is working to keep the Nazi genocide at the forefront of international consciousness.

The ministry submitted a resolution to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization this week calling for the creation of a UNESCO-sponsored curriculum to teach students around the world about the Holocaust and its role in history.

The ministry submitted a resolution to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization this week calling for the creation of a UNESCO-sponsored curriculum to teach students around the world about the Holocaust and its role in history. . . . .

. . . . .In 2005, the UN established International Holocaust Memorial Day on January 27, the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp. In 2006, the international body passed a resolution condemning Holocaust denial.

We need more tolerance of holocaust revisionists, not more teaching of official holocaust history. Holocaust revisionists have been imprisoned and fined.

A "systematic" Jewish holocaust was impossible because the Nazis had no reliable way(s) of identifying Jews and non-Jews. We don't even know exactly what a Jew is. Also, despite claims that the Nazis kept "meticulous" records of the holocaust, there have been wild variations in the official death count for Auschwitz, from one million to four million.

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UC questions holocaust!

The "Plaintiffs' Statement of Uncontroverted Facts and Conclusions of Law in Support of Motion for Summary Judgment" in ACSI v. Stearns says,

UC rejected courses on the holocaust for having only a Jewish viewpoint: "[n]eed to include a different perspective and a broader viewpoint" and "[n]eed to expand the perspectives for this course," and "too slanted towards Holocaust with no other perspective." (pages 18-19 of document, pages 21-22 of pdf file)

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Funny, he doesn't look like a Jew. Who knew?

Professor Eugene Volokh


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Idiot-savant Eugene Volokh, a blogger on the popular Volokh Conspiracy blog, is just one in a long line of well-known people of Jewish descent who I never even imagined had Jewish ancestry. People like him strengthen my argument that a "systematic" holocaust was impossible because the Nazis had no reliable way of identifying Jews. There are blond-and-blue-eyed Jews and black Jews. There are all kinds of Jews.
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Volokh said in a Wall Street Journal article,
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Modest amounts of anti-Semitic speech and unfair criticism of Israel, it seems to me, can strengthen American Jews' self-identity as Jews, and thus indirectly both support the preservation of the American Jewish community as a community, and strengthen support for Israel . . .

. . . If anti-Semitic speech became too common, these community-strengthening effects may be decreased (for instance, if American Jews became afraid to be publicly identified as Jews) or might be swamped by harmful effects (again, such as violence, ostracism, discrimination or fear suffered by individual Jews). But my sense is that at modest levels, the existence of this speech in America is a net positive (not an unalloyed positive, but a net positive) both for Israel and for the American Jewish community. And we are talking these days about such modest levels, if one looks at the big picture of Jewish existence in America today.

So far I have tried to be purely descriptive: I have tried to describe what I think is an existing phenomenon, a phenomenon that is positive for Israel and for the American Jewish community as a community. (I should say that I'm a relatively assimilated Jew who doesn't care as much about the American Jewish community as a community as some do; I'm much more concerned with the welfare of individuals, Jewish or not, than with the welfare of the community. Still, even I see some value, so long as anti-Semitism does exist, in America and elsewhere, in protecting Israel and preserving American Jewish institutions.)

Now, though, let me shift to the prescriptive: I think that this phenomenon ought to further strengthen American Jews' support for free speech, including for free speech by anti-Semites and unfair, bigoted critics of Israel. (I think we should support such free speech even without this phenomenon, but I hope this phenomenon strengthens such support in others.)

Well, Gene, maybe someday your support for free speech will extend to blogs.
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Tenure denied to professor who accused Israel of exploiting Holocaust

An AOL news article described a tenure denial that echoed the denial of tenure to pro-ID Iowa State University professor Guillermo Gonzalez:
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CHICAGO (AP) - A DePaul University professor who has accused some Jews of improperly using the legacy of the Holocaust to get compensation payments has been denied tenure after a drawn-out public fight.

Norman Finkelstein, whose work led to a long-running public feud with a Harvard law professor and lawyer famous for representing O.J. Simpson, said he was disappointed by the faculty panel's 4-3 decision.

"They can deny me tenure, deny me the right to teach," the 53-year-old told the Chicago Sun-Times. "But they will never stop me from saying what I believe."

Finkelstein's most recent book, "Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History," is largely an attack on Alan Dershowitz's "The Case for Israel." In it, Finkelstein argues Israel uses the outcry over perceived anti-Semitism as a weapon to stifle criticism.

Dershowitz, who threatened to sue the book's publisher for libel, has urged DePaul officials to reject Finkelstein's tenure bid . . .

The debate over his tenure raised the ire of many in academic and religious circles, and blogs and petitions that both support and deride him have appeared on the Internet . . .

"In the opinion of those opposing tenure, your unprofessional personal attacks divert the conversation away from consideration of ideas, and polarize and simplify conversations that deserve layered and subtle consideration," school President Dennis Holtschneider wrote in a letter dated June 8.

Finkelstein is not even a holocaust denier or revisionist.

I think that tenure is bad because it is unfair to those who can’t get it, but I feel that it should be administered fairly so long as we have it. So even though I am against tenure in general, I am supporting tenure for Gonzalez and Finkelstein because of the principles “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” and “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade.”

Using tenure for the purpose of enforcing academic conformity rather than tenure’s intended purpose of protecting academic freedom removes all justification for having tenure at all.
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Holocaust is 98% politics and 2% history

A news report from last month says,

Opposing interpretations of history clashed earlier this month in Auschwitz, where Polish curators of a museum at the former death camp refused to let Russia to open its exhibit.

Russia claimed that hundreds of thousands of "Soviet citizens" died in the Holocaust. The Poles vehemently rejected this, saying those victims, mostly Jews, were from territories occupied by the Soviet Union in league with the Nazis between 1939 and 1941.

Sergei Mironov, a senior Russian lawmaker, called the Polish decision "sacrilegious," and its reasoning "stupid."

The 1939-41 German-Russian joint occupation of Eastern Europe occurred before the holocaust and Russia had no policy of participating in the holocaust.

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EU stops short of blanket ban on holocaust denial

A BBC news article reported,

European interior ministers have agreed to make incitement to racism an EU-wide crime, but have stopped short of a blanket ban on Holocaust denial.

The agreement makes it an offence to condone or grossly trivialise crimes of genocide -- but only if the effect is incitement to violence or hatred.

The deal follows six years of talks, and will disappoint Germany, which pushed hard for a Holocaust-denial law.

Berlin has also had to drop a proposal for an EU-wide ban on Nazi symbols.

The European Network Against Racism said most European countries already had laws against incitement to racism, and the "weak text" would leave many national legal codes unchanged.

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Another example of the Jew-identification problem

I have argued that a "systematic" Jewish holocaust was impossible because the Nazis had no reliable way of identifying Jews and non-Jews. Another example of this difficulty of identifying Jews is that a Virginia state legislator did not know that the delegate seated next to him in the legislative chamber is Jewish:

When Englin sat, Hargrove reached over and softly patted Englin on the arm. Then, Hargrove rose to speak and, looking down at his seatmate, said, "I didn't even know you were Jewish, I had no idea of what your religion, (and) I don't care what your religion is."

A related post on this blog is here.

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Germany proposes Europe-wide ban of Holocaust revisionism and Nazi symbols

A news article reported,

Germany intends to introduce a Europe-wide law banning the display of Nazi symbols and making denial of the Holocaust a crime to fulfil its “historical obligation” 62 years after the liberation of Auschwitz.

Brigitte Zypries, the Justice Minister, will today outline plans to punish with up to three years in prison anyone in the European Union who publicly rejects the Nazi slaughter of six million Jews.

. . . . Laws banning the denial of the Holocaust already exist in 10 of the 27 EU states and Latvia and Estonia ban the display of communist symbols.

Enough is enough. The USA should impose economic sanctions on these countries that deny freedom of expression. Private boycotts of products of these countries would also be in order. I was disappointed to see France on the list of European countries that ban holocaust revisionism -- I have bought a lot of French-made bicycle equipment over the years.

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Great news -- Austria releases holocaust denier David Irving

Details are in this AOL news article. Maybe the holocaust conference in Iran had something to do with it -- Austria did not want to appear to have less freedom of speech than Iran.

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Rabbi at holocaust conference is a revisionist

An AOL news article on the holocaust conference in Iran says,

Rabbi Moshe David Weiss, one of six members attending from the group Jews United Against Zionism, told delegates, "We don't want to deny the killing of Jews in World War II, but Zionists have given much higher figures for how many people were killed."

"They have used the Holocaust as a device to justify their oppression," he said. His group rejects the creation of Israel on the grounds that it violates Jewish religious law.

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Rabbis attend holocaust-revisionism conference in Iran

An AOL news article reported that six members of a group called Jews United Against Zionism -- including two rabbis -- are attending the holocaust-revisionism conference in Iran not because they question official holocaust history but because they are opposed to the existence of Israel. The article has a photo showing one of the group's members wearing a badge with the flag of Israel covered by the international circle-and-slash symbol. These people showed great flexibility in setting aside the differences they had with the holocaust deniers and revisionists who are also attending the conference. In contrast, I have been told that some Darwinism doubters are afraid to be associated with me because of my holocaust revisionism.

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Iran invites scholars to holocaust conference

An AOL news article reported,

Iran has invited scholars from 30 countries to attend a conference starting on Monday about the Holocaust . . . . .

"For 60 years talking about the Holocaust was a crime in the West but now there is a serious debate about the Holocaust in the media and also in political and popular meetings," state television quoted [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad as saying.

Unfortunately, questioning official holocaust history is still a crime in several Western countries. David Irving is still in an Austrian prison for his past holocaust revisionism.

I wish that I could go to the conference. I think that I could make a positive contribution because almost no one besides myself has recognized and discussed the major problem of positive identification of Jews and non-Jews in the holocaust. Edwin Black also recognized and discussed this problem but his book on the subject, "IBM and the Holocaust," fell flat on its face -- see here and here.

This is a good time to remind readers about the "Free David Irving" petition. I strongly urge readers to sign -- the right of free expression that you save may be your own.

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More about the "IBM and the Holocaust" fraud

In the introduction to "IBM and the Holocaust," author Edwin Black said that the display of IBM Hollerith machines at the US Holocaust Museum was what inspired him to write the book, which claimed that the machines were used to identify all the Jews of Europe. He wrote, "What made me demand answers to the unasked questions about IBM and the Holocaust? I confronted the reality of IBM's involvement one day in 1993 in Washington at the United States Holocaust Museum." According to an article in the Washington Jewish Week, Sybil Milton, a former senior historian at the museum, said that she recommended the Hollerith exhibit "to convey the unfeeling bureaucracies at work during the Holocaust" (indeed, the slogan "don't fold, bend, spindle, or mutilate" that was printed on IBM Hollerith cards was once a metaphor for unfeeling bureaucracies). But she also said, "We have no proof that the Hollerith was ever used to target individuals for deportation lists. It was a back-up system because it was too broad a system, providing aggregate counts of population groups." Another Washington Jewish Week article quoted her as saying, "We were never out to harass any corporation. The aim here was to tell a story of how people, companies and even foreign companies are made complicit for multiple reasons in a process that would have taken place, perhaps, more slowly, but certainly would have happened in Nazi Germany."

An introduction to an interview of Edwin Black concerning the book said of the controversy over the book,

The range of the controversy can be gleaned from the pages of BusinessWeek alone, which in a March review excoriated the "illogical, overstated, padded, and sloppy" book for fostering "a new myth -- the automated Holocaust," and in an April commentary said the "enlightening" book "should be required reading for every first-year MBA student."

Black said in the interview, "Much of what could do with a computer during the late 20th century could be done with Hollerith machines, but slower." But the Hollerith machines were just not capable of identifying all the Jews of Europe, regardless of how much time was allowed. The machines could just handle comparatively small batches of cards at a time and could not correlate data on the billions of cards scattered across Europe. I found some descriptions of Hollerith machines and their functions -- some of these machines were probably more advanced than those the Nazis had. The "Tabulating Machine," for example, described as the largest and most complex Hollerith machine, was not capable of correlating data on different cards -- it could just read the card data and add them, subtract them, print tabulated reports, etc.. One machine with the ability to correlate data on batches of cards, the "Collator," which could merge and match cards, was described as "the most cursed" of the Hollerith machines: "Card jams were a mechanical nightmare requiring partial disassembly to extract mutilated cards. Read brushes were often ruined." There were other problems with this scheme of Jew identification, like finding the data for the cards and finding the people connected with the cards, but I need not go into those problems here. Anyway, this description of the Hollerith machines is a far cry from what Black described in his book: "Jews could not hide from millions of punch cards thudding through Hollerith machines, comparing names across generations, address changes across regions, family trees and personal data across unending registries." How come IBM did not defend itself by saying that the Hollerith machines were incapable of doing what the book says they did?

Black also said in the interview,

Remember, IBM custom-designed the machines, custom-designed the applications and custom-printed the punch cards. There were no universal punch cards or machine wiring. Programs to identify Jews, Jewish bank accounts, barrels of oil, Luftwaffe flights, welfare payments, train schedules into camps, and even the concentration camp information -- all these had to be tailored for each application.

Wrong. As I noted in a previous post, IBM introduced universal (general-purpose) cards around 1928. The machines had a limited number of functions -- described above -- and did not need and could not have used custom-designing. Some cards intended for special applications had custom printing on them, but this printing was not necessary -- the Hollerith machines read the holes, not the ink.

Nor were the Nazis necessarily dependent on IBM USA for technical assistance and/or parts. IBM USA's German subsidiary Dehomag was very experienced -- Dehomag's founder acquired licenses to all of IBM's patents in 1910 and IBM took over Dehomag in 1922. The Nazis had hundreds or even thousands of the Hollerith machines and broken-down machines could have been cannibalized for parts. For comparison, American cars from the 1950's are still being used in Cuba.

It is obvious that controversy over IBM's role in the holocaust has focused on the IBM USA's business relationships with the Nazis and has largely ignored questions of the Hollerith machines' technological capabilities.

And I am still wondering where Black got those 100 "volunteer" researchers who helped him write the book. This is not the kind of work most people would want to do for a hobby. And then Black gets all the publicity and all the income.

Edwin Black is a charlatan, not a historian.

So far as I know, this book is the only publication that has addressed the question of how the Nazis could have reliably distinguished Jews from non-Jews according to the Nazi definition of the word "Jew" -- and the book fell flat on its face.

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Iran to host conference on holocaust

An AOL news article noted,

TEHRAN, Iran (Sept. 3) - Iran said Sunday it would sponsor a conference to examine the scientific evidence supporting the Holocaust, dismissing it as exaggerated.

The decision came as U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan raised concerns with Iranian officials over an exhibition of cartoons about the Holocaust in Iran's capital, Tehran.

Arabs and Moslems have long complained that they were unfairly being required to pay for the holocaust by giving land to Israel, but until now they have not so openly questioned official holocaust history.

It is interesting that Iran chose to retaliate against the Mohammed cartoons -- published in Denmark -- by having an exhibition of cartoons about the holocaust.

This conference raises the profile of holocaust revisionism but unfortunately not in a favorable way. Similarly, the pope's seminar about the evolution controversy raises the profile of this controversy but not in a way that is completely favorable for criticisms of evolution, as the seminar appears to be biased against evolution -- at least three of the four principal speakers at the seminar are critics of evolution.

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Confusing and inconsistent polls about the holocaust

I have been putting off discussing the holocaust because I did not want my unpopular and heretical views about this subject to be used to make ad hominem attacks on my views about Darwinism. A lot of bigoted people are just incapable of keeping separate issues separate. But I could not forever put off discussing the holocaust.

The Journal of Historical Review, published by the Institute for Historical Review, a holocaust denial & revisionism outfit, reported the following about opinion polls conducted in the early 1990's:

In April 1993, just days before the opening of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, newspapers across the country reported "chilling" and "startling" news: 22 percent of American adults surveyed in a major public opinion poll said they thought it was possible that "the Nazi extermination of the Jews" never took place.
An additional twelve percent of adult respondents in the survey -- sponsored by the American Jewish Committee and conducted by the Roper organization -- said they did not know if it was possible or impossible . . . . . .

As it turned out, however, the "startling" results of the AJC/Roper survey were not accurate. One of the poll's most serious flaws was the confusing wording of question 16, which produced the response that generated the most media comment: "Does it seem possible or does it seem impossible to you that the Nazi extermination of the Jews never happened?" The question's compound structure and double negative wording almost certainly confused many respondents. It is also likely that some of the 992 adults and 506 high school students surveyed may have believed that the Nazis exterminated millions of Jews but nevertheless agreed that it "seems" impossible.

What was confusing about question 16? If it was asked as a yes-or-no question, then it would be impossible to answer, as it is really two different mutually exclusive questions in one. However, if the answer choices were "possible" and "impossible," then there should have been no confusion.

The JHR article continues,

Responding to criticism, the AJC recommissioned the poll, changing only question 16. In the second survey, this question was worded: "Does it seem possible to you that the Nazi extermination of the Jews never happened, or do you feel certain that it happened?" The results of the second, 1994 AJC poll were quite different: Only about one percent of Americans thought it was possible the Holocaust never happened, while eight percent were unsure. ("Poll on Doubt of Holocaust is Corrected," The New York Times, July 8, 1994)

I don't see how the second version of question 16 is different from the first. Asking "do you feel certain that it happened" is equivalent to asking "does it seem impossible to you that the Nazi extermination of the Jews never happened." The great difference between the first and second poll results is really surprising.

The New York Times archives has a page with summaries of articles about these polls and other polls about the holocaust conducted in the early 1990's. However, it costs $4.95 to purchase each of the articles, which is not worth the price to me when there is no guarantee that the articles would answer any of my questions about the polls.

Also, these all-or-nothing polls allowed for no gradation of opinion. For example, I think that a poll about the holocaust should ask something like, "do you think that something like the holocaust happened but that it is possible that official figures on the total number of victims and/or the percentage that were Jews might be exaggerated?" Of course, we have pictures of concentration camp victims and we also have anecdotal reports from survivors, so we know that something really bad happened and therefore most people would be reluctant to say that the holocaust didn't happen or possibly didn't happen.

The JHR article reports the results of some other early 1990's polls on the holocaust. Two of these polls were informal call-in polls and therefore the results are unreliable. The results of an apparently formal 1993 poll were as follows:

In Georgia, nearly 19 percent "aren't sure that the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews occurred," according to a 1993 survey conducted by the University of Georgia Survey Research Center. Answering a separate question, nearly 20 percent think "the number of Jews killed by the Nazis, generally estimated at six million, may be inflated." (Atlanta Journal/Constitution, June 10, 1993, p. A8).

Anyway, these polls -- conducted in the early 1990's -- are as old as the hills. I wonder why we can't have more frequent polling on controversial subjects. There is the same problem with polls of scientists' opinions about evolution -- the most recent reliable such poll that I was able to find is from 2002.

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Here is a quick review of my two previous articles on the holocaust, Holocaust mythologies and The absurd book "IBM and the Holocaust":

(1) Despite claims that official holocaust history is based on "meticulous" Nazi records, there have been wild inconsistencies, which persisted for decades, in the official numbers of deaths at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Official numbers have varied from about 1 million to 4 million. Even today, agreement is not good -- a plaque at Auschwitz gives the figure as 1.5 million but the most accepted figure is 1-1.1 million.

(2) The ability to reliably distinguish between Jews and non-Jews would have been essential to carrying out a "systematic" holocaust of Jews, but the issue of Jew identification has been almost completely ignored. "Jew" is not even a well-defined classification. A big fairly recent book that claimed to answer the question of how the Nazis identified the Jews, "IBM and the Holocaust" by Edwin Black, fell flat on its face, IMO. Even a prominent mainstream holocaust historian, a former senior historian of the research institute at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, said that there was no proof that the IBM Hollerith machines were "ever used to target individuals for deportation lists."

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