Letter to Calgary Gauntlet

Hello Calgary Gauntlet-

Scott Strasser // [email protected]

[email protected]

I am a member of the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust.

I would like to comment on Scott Strasser's article of Feb. 16, 2017 and the quote of Professor Maureen Hiebert claiming that, "Holocaust denial is a form of anti-Semitism, plain and simple.”

I disagree that there is anything hateful or anti-Semitic in questioning, even revising the facts of a historical event(s).

We at CODOH feel that much of history taught today has been influenced by Soviet, British and American wartime propaganda which exaggerated and exploited real tragedies for propaganda purposes. This concerns not just Jews but Slavs, Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses and, in some versions, gays.  Recent scholarly research has often proven us right. The example of Majdanek Camp in Poland epitomizes the matter.

In 1946 evidence admitted to the Nuremberg Tribunal asserted that 1,400,000 people were murdered at Majdanek Camp, at Lublin Poland, and turned into human fertilizer. Revisionists have long disputed this number. On Dec. 23, 2005, we were shown to be correct when the Auschwitz State Museum posted “Majdanek Victims Enumerated. Changes in the history textbooks? Tomasz Kranz, director of the Research Department of the State Museum at Majdanek, asserted that approximately 59,000 Jews and 19,000 people of other ethnic backgrounds, mostly Poles and Byelorussians, died there.”

When the Auschwitz State Museum calls for changes in the textbooks, I do not understand why anyone can be so angry at Revisionists.  We need more discussion and research, not more attempts at silencing other people.

I add that 78,000 deaths is still a horrible tragedy but it is a quantum difference from the Nuremberg figure of 1,400,000 and later lower figures. I think it is important to ask how could the Tribunal have gotten it so wrong?

I also respectfully state to Mr. Jordan Waldman that not believing in the impossible and horrible tales of steam chambers or human fertilizer factories should no more make me anti-Semitic than not believing in the Transubstantiation of Flesh makes me anti-Christian.

Unfortunately, real history was bad enough. Why make things up?

Yours for free speech, honest scholarship, and accurate history.

David Merlin

Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust 

PO Box 20774 

York PA  17402 

[email protected]