Critique of John S. Conway’s Review of Walter Sanning’s “Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry” from “The International History Review,” August 1985

In the annals of anti-Revisionism, one does not often find Establishment academia types appraising Revisionist works directly. However, Dr. A.R. Butz has recently discovered just such an endeavor, involving, indeed, a book to which he wrote the preface: Walter Sanning's The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry. The deed was done by one John S. Conway, of the University of British Columbia, writing for The International History Review, VII, 3, August 1985, pp. 450-51.

After a preamble in which Conway praises Sanning for avoiding sensationalism (i.e., refraining from the assertions that gas chambers never existed or that the Holocaust is mere Zionist propaganda), he launches into a reasonable summary of Sanning's demographic findings. Conway even acknowledges the extensive use of Jewish and Israeli sources in establishing Jewish population shifts into the Soviet Union, revealing that much of European Jewry avoided the German advance and did not reside within its sphere of occupation. However, Conway then deplores that these same documents are not used to establish Nazi crimes. The implied grievance would be that in using Jewish and Israeli documents, one ought to do so in a way which would most plead Jewish and Israeli partisans, else one is not properly reciprocating for services rendered. I here proclaim a minor truth: if one trusts a source in instances, one is not obliged to endorse the entirety; and if one uses a source in instances, one is not obliged to use anything but what is relevant to the purposes at hand. In this regard it was unwittingly apt that Conway chose to preface his complaint with the words “needless to say:” for that is it, exactly. By contrast to Sanning's half measures, Conway is prepared to demote the credibility of Sanning's entire thesis because the latter calls Operation Barbarossa (the 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union) a “preventive aggression.” I shall not argue that pre-Barbarossan Soviet aggression against Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Finland, and Eastern Poland might have established any sort of plausible trend, but instead ask that Mr. Conway take this up with fellow historians Toland, Irving, Diwald, and Franz-Willing, for their reputations are in question here also.

Mr. Conway readily admits that he is not a competent demographer, but is certain that if one were found, he “would expose many of the errors in this work.” I might ask: does Conway specifically know which data are in error and which are not; and if not, how does he “know” that there are “many” errors, or that there are errors at all? Still lacking the demographer's expertise, Conway elaborates his suspicions to include “juggled figures” and “dubious conjectures about demographic trends, fertility patterns, death rates, emigration opportunities, and other equally unverifiable suppositions… ” I am afraid that I am in the same predicament regarding Conway as Conway is regarding Sanning. There is one major difference, however. Whereas Sanning provides various data, tables, and background as the foundation of his conjectures, Conway's suppositions are unverifiable on their face: no evidence, no contrary information, no examples by which to substantiate his accusations, no information whatsoever, other than his own bald assertions. Because of this, such generalizations cannot be investigated or refuted except in a general way. I will say only this: to the degree that Conway uses his claim of “dubiousness” as an inference that Sanning's conjectures are false, he is liable to the fallacy of argumentum ad ignorantiam: the proposition that if a thing cannot be proven (i.e., “unverifiable”), it is necessarily disproved. Both Dr. Butz, in his prefatory remarks to the text, and Sanning, its author, are aware that certain estimates “have no claim on absolute certainty” (p. 11). A similar intellectual honesty, however, might ask to know why Sanning's “unverifiable suppositions” are necessarily dubious, while suppositions based on the same Jewish, Israeli and Allied sources by persons such as Poliakov, Reitlinger, or Dawidowicz do not suffer any such reservation. Whereas Conway is rather undemocratic in this regard, he is otherwise the perfect egalitarian: he implicitly suggests that Sanning's suppositions are equivalently unverifiable, while in actuality they are equal only to the degree that Conway's claims themselves cannot be verified because they remain mere innuendo, without a single example specified.

As with unmentioned Nazi crimes, Conway is similarly distressed that concentration camps such as Auschwitz, Chelmo, Maidanek, and Treblinka are not mentioned. The defense, I suspect (as Faurisson gives for not mentioning Babi Yar or the Sonderkommando), is that it is not a necessary part of the subject. But I give Conway credit in recognizing that it could have been. Sanning might have attempted to determine from concentration camp records the number of Jews interned throughout the German occupied countries. If this is possible, assuming the existence or accuracy of such records, I do not know. Admittedly, it would have been an interesting study to determine the numbers of Jews actually held in such camps versus the numbers which were present at the time of liberation. Still, Conway should be advised that this itself would not necessarily determine the cause of death for those who perished, or that death ought necessarily to be assumed for those who were missing

Conway closes his review of Sanning with a final extended chastisement, which I quote:

This book is in fact no more than a perverse attempt to concoct a contrived analysis of the Jewish 'population changes' during the Second World War, which not only mendaciously exonerates the Nazis, but hypocritically seeks to create a distorted account of the Jewish experience which does without the Holocaust, without Hitler, without history at all.

Conway does not simply say that Sanning may have derived mistaken or faulty conjectures, but that his analysis was a wilful and perverse attempt at concoction. I think Conway was a bit injudicious. He is claiming no less than libel, and may be subject to same.

For Conway, it is obvious that no purpose dealing with the Jewish experience during World War II can be historical if certain features are missing, i.e., concentration camps, “Holocaust,” and Hitler. I must first register dismay that academia counts among its members persons with this low an opinion of the meaning of history. Secondly, it is unfortunate that this is the paltry level of intellect with which Revisionism must sometimes contend. Whereas Conway earlier refers to a misuse of alleged erudition disregarding Sanning's “unverifiable suppositions,” I would have to say that this is certainly in contradistinction to Mr. Conway's disuse of same. For while Conway's complaint seems to focus on the impropriety of Sanning's analysis, i.e., that it “exonerates” Nazis while “distorting” the experience of Jews, he reveals an ignominious and thoroughly unacademic criterion in his critique: not concern with truth for its own sake or the sake of history, but history primarily as a servant to politics and philosophy. Sanning reiterates his book's purpose on page 196:

The purpose of this analysis was not to investigate the content of truth in the “Holocaust” story, but to outline the extent and the direction of the Jewish population movement before during and after World War Two.

This is certainly his right as a demographer, and reasonably so, as it is sharply delineated and restricted to the authors field of expertise. I would instead question that any account which attempts to elaborate Nazi crimes, the daily routine of concentration camps or the life and death of Adolf Hider is within the reasonable scope of the intended analysis. It is not Sanning's demographic study which “distorts” accounts of the Jewish experience, but Conway's demands, which attempt to distort this specific purpose by insisting on a general one. Though Conway has elsewhere expressed appreciation that Sanning does not openly deny the Holocaust, this is not enough: full satisfaction demands Sanning proclaim its existence as a foundation to his study. This is not to say that this should be satisfactory to the purposes of a demographer – or a historian.

Sanning's book has amassed 24 tables, 453 references and footnotes quoting 98 publications and authors (almost entirely Allied, Zionist, and other “sympathetic” sources), with 205 pages of text. Conway has condemned the entirety by simply claiming “errors” (which supposedly will require the services of a demographer to expose), “juggled figures” and “dubious conjectures” (accusations unelaborated and without any example), “contrived analysis” (Conway's reciprocity here is 1.2 pages without reference or bibliography), and that Sanning's account is “without history at all.” To say that there is “no history” if one's purpose is without Hitler or the “Holocaust” is to redefine history in a rather narrow-minded, precarious and utterly Orwellian fashion. Whether this is a politicized definition, or one which is merely foolish, Conway has made of himself a person whose undocumented attacks defy serious treatment. His review of a work which he considers ahistorical is ironically performed in a manner which is anti-historical and non-analytic, an approach which carelessly substitutes dogma for integrity: assumptive, unsubstantive, and by his own accusation, hypocritical.

Appendix

In the interest of fairness we would like to reproduce John S. Conway's review so our readers can judge for themselves.

History, Hitler, and the Holocaust

EBERHARD JÄCKEL. Hitler in History. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1984. Pp. 115; GERALD FLEMING. Hitler and the Final Solution. Berkeley, Cal.: University of California Press, 1984. Pp. 219; MALCOLM C. MACPHERSON. The Blood of His Servants. New York: The New York Times Book Co., Inc., 1984. Pp. 310; ISABELLA LEITNER. Fragments of Isabella: A Memoir of Auschwitz. New York: Crowell Publishers, 1978. Pp. 112; JAMES BENTLEY. Martin Niemöller 1891-1984. New York: Free Press, 1984. Pp. 253; SAUL S. FRIEDMAN. The Oberammergau Passion Play: A Lance Against Civilization. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984. Pp. 270; DAVID S. WYMAN, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941-1945. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Pp. 445; WALTER N. SANNING. The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry. Torrance, Cal: Institute for Historical Review, 1983. Pp. 239.

As Archibald MacLeish once remarked, “We are deluged with facts but we have lost or are losing our human ability to feel them.” He might well have continued: “It is possible to refuse full realization of unprecedented horror because we are unable to face the implications of these facts.” Or as William Shawcross has recently written, “Few people want to believe tales of atrocities; resistance to them is a natural defence mechanism. And the more awful the speculations, the greater the resistance.” Such was the case when the news of the annihilation of Europe's Jews first became known in the 1940s. The rational scepticism of the experts and the innocent incredulity of ordinary citizens could not embrace the rumors and reports seeping out of Nazi-controlled Europe. In subsequent decades, the same factors have widely affected the reception of the “Holocaust” as it is now called, so that witnesses, survivors, and historians alike still have an uphill battle to gain full acceptance for any objective and complete description of the twentieth century's most portentous genocide. As a notorious recent trial in Toronto has shown, there are still some extremists who wish to disbelieve the accumulation of evidence, preferring to convince themselves that the Holocaust story is a deliberate post-war hoax, perpetuated by a world-wide conspiracy of Jews, Freemasons, and Bolsheviks and designed to bring into discredit the otherwise admirable German nation. This defiance of the available contemporary evidence about the Nazi state and its intentions, and of the vast researches of scholars during the past four decades on the extermination of the Jews, must be judged intellectually dishonest and obscene. “It is an appalling lie that the Holocaust did not happen; it is a monstrous truth that it did.”

Finally, a piece of sophisticated Holocaust detail. Walter Sanning, one of the team who writes for the Institute for Historical Review in Torrance, California, avoids the kind of sensationalism exhibited in the recent Toronto trial. He does not assert that the gas chambers never existed, that the Holocaust is mere Zionist propaganda, or that the Nazis were basically respectable citizens. Instead, Sanning claims to have undertaken a detailed examination of the population statistics of eastern Europe, and in particular of the Jewish inhabitants, in order to show that the extermination figures attributed to the Nazis are greatly exaggerated, because there simply were not that many Jews – no more than 3.5 million – in all the areas controlled by the Germans. For example, Sanning claims that emigration and death had already, by 1939, reduced to 2.6 million the 3 million Jews in Poland in 1931, and that thereafter no fewer than 2.1 million Jews were deported by the Soviet Union to Siberia, including such notable figures as Menachem Begin. More escaped through other routes, leaving only 750,000 in German-controlled Poland by 1941. For obvious reasons, the Germans exaggerated the figures in order to justify their policies, while the Soviets have imposed a total silence. Sanning makes the further claim that the large number of Jews in Russian-controlled Poland in 1941 and other populations in the Ukraine, the Baltic countries and western Russia were forcibly deported early in 1941 to work in the relocated industries behind the Urals. Thus, only 720,000 Soviet Jews fell into German hands in 1941-2, mostly older people in any case liable to higher death rates through natural causes. But the vast majority must have survived the war, since the figures of Jews present after 1945 amount to nearly this total. The fate of the Jews deported by the Russians to Siberia was far worse (by implication than those under Nazi control). He quotes extensively from Jewish and Israeli sources to prove how large the Jewish population in the Soviet Union had become by 1950, with a view to establishing that the eastern European Jewry had “dissolved” without any participation by the Germans. Needless to say, neither the same sources nor Nazi wartime documents are quoted about the Nazi crimes. Despite the warm endorsement of Sanning's statistical tabulations by A.R. Butz, Professor of Electrical Engineering, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, the credibility of his thesis is not enhanced by such absurd claims as that the German invasion of the Soviet Union was purely “preventive” in order to forestall a planned Soviet aggression. It will require the services of a competent demographer to expose many of the errors in this work. The potpourri of juggled figures, using dubious conjectures about demographic trends, fertility patterns, death rates, emigration opportunities, or other equally unverifiable suppositions, adds up to a misuse of alleged erudition. Naturally, Auschwitz, Chelmo, Maidanek, or Treblinka are not mentioned. This book is in fact no more than a perverse attempt to concoct a contrived analysis of the Jewish “population changes” during the Second World War, which not only mendaciously exonerates the Nazis, but hypocritically seeks to create a distorted account of the Jewish experience which does without the Holocaust, without Hitler, without history at all.