A Holocaust Revisionist Response to Pope Francis’s claim that “Holocaust Denial is madness”

According to a June 13, 2014, news report, Pope Francis claimed in an interview to a Spanish newspaper that “Holocaust Denial” is “madness.” This truly is a bizarre statement on the Pope’s part, because with regard to the traditional Holocaust story, the Papacy has a documented track record of piously promoting Holocaust falsehood, while the Holocaust Revisionists have promoted the truth. Hearwith:

At the postwar Nuremberg Tribunal, the Allies charged that the Germans exterminated four million people at Auschwitz. 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.” During a 1979 visit to the camp, Pope John Paul II stood before this memorial and blessed the alleged four million victims.

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 then announced a tentative revised toll of about 1.1 million Auschwitz dead.

Around September of 1989, mainstream Holocaust historians began admitting that the four million figure was a deliberate myth. According to Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer, the Poles wanted to create a “national myth,” so this “required” that a large number of both Poles and Jews lost their lives at Auschwitz. Polish propagandists intentionally exaggerated the figures, and told the world that 1.5 million Poles and 2.5 million Jews were murdered at Auschwitz concentration camp. Dutch-Jewish historian Robert Jan van Pelt noted the four million falsehood was originally established by the Soviets, and then later used by the communist rulers of Poland for their own political goal of laying claim to formerly German territories.

With regard to the politically inspired falsehood that four million people were murdered at Auschwitz, the late Pope John Paul II proposed it should be used as a “religious inspiration.” We let the New York Times pick up the story here about his June of 1979 religious service at the Auschwitz concentration camp: “His voice going hoarse on the sixth day of the visit to his native Poland, the Pope asked that all his listeners commit themselves to the care of human beings and the oppressed, in testimony for the four million—including two and a half million Jews—who died in the camps he could see from the raised altar platform.”

Here we have a clear example of John Paul II lending his immense moral authority to a propaganda lie. How many millions of Christians believed the four million falsehood because the Pope himself lent his moral power to it?

If Pope John Paul II had real moral integrity on this issue, he would have publicly apologized for lending his moral authority to a falsehood and misleading his flock. At the very least, he should have shown moral integrity by publicly admitting that the Auschwitz death toll of four million is a gross exaggeration. But he never did this. Nor has any official of the Catholic Church (such as Pope Francis) ever publicly apologized for the Papal wrong of lending moral credence to the propaganda lie that four million people were murdered at Auschwitz.

Let us look at this from another angle. In Exodus 20:16 it is written: “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” Now, this false claim that the Germans murdered four million people at Auschwitz is in fact an example of various political elites (the Soviets, Polish communists, the Allies) bearing false witness against their German neighbors. Pope John Paul II never publicly apologized for helping these political elites to “bear false witness against their neighbor.” This shows that even the so-called “moral conscience” of the West had questionable moral integrity on this Holocaust issue.

It is fair to say, I believe, that this significant expose and revision concerning the number of alleged deaths at Auschwitz was the result of what was publicly revealed by Holocaust Revisionist Ernst Zündel’s defense team at his world-shaking trials in Toronto, Canada in 1985 and 1988. Ergo, regarding the “four million murdered at Auschwitz” claim, it is the “Holocaust Denier” Ernst Zündel that brought TRUTH to the people and it was the Papacy that helped to promote Holocaust falsehood. In view of this, how dare Pope Francis claim that “Holocaust Denial is madness!”

There is no commandment in the Bible that says: “You shall believe in the Holocaust ideology.” However, there are statements in the New Testament that command the Christian to search for truth. So it is written in Mark 10: 19: “You know the commandments: You shall not bear false witness.” In John 3: 21, we read: “But he who does what is true comes to the light, that it may be clearly seen that his deeds have been wrought in God.” In John 8: 31-32, it is stated: “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” In 1 John 2: 21, this theme of finding truth is again stated: “I write to you, not because you do not know the truth, but because you know it, and know that no lie is of the truth.” Finally, to illustrate the point, let us quote Exodus 20: 16: “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” These statements clearly imply that followers of the Bible’s teachings will search for truth and reject lies.

Herein lies the ultimate lesson of Pope John Paul II’s promotion of the “four-million-murdered-at-Auschwitz” falsehood. A Christian does not find the truth about the alleged Holocaust by blindly accepting what the mass media and various political elites tell him to believe. For if he did, he could end up like Pope John Paul II who accepted and promoted the propaganda falsehood that four million people were murdered at Auschwitz.

In conclusion, the real Christian strives for the truth. He gives the revisionist and traditional view of the Holocaust a fair hearing, and then attempts to determine where the truth really is. The “Holocaust” is an ideological interpretation of history that is propagated worldwide by various power elites. It is to be evaluated with the same set of rational-scientific methods that historians and political scientists apply to other doctrines of this nature.

For those interested in the footnoted sources for this essay, see Paul Grubach’s “Christianity and the Holocaust Ideology: Reflections on the Bishop Williamson Affair,” at http://tinyurl.com/oxtd5ud