Jews in Europe, How Many Slain? (1946)

Several of the letters of Austin J. App are to be presented as part of the CODOH Revisionist Library. These are important to the historiography of Holocaust revisionism as they are some of the earliest works to question the formative Holocaust story. These works are being presented for researchers as they are rare documents. They should be understood for the time that they were written. They do not necessarily represent the current state of Holocaust revisionist scholarship and research. –Editor

Incarnate Word College
San Antonio 2, Texas

Time
Rockefeller Center
New York 20, New York

May 22, 1946

Gentlemen:

In your May issue you say that “Before Hitler, Europe's non-Russian Jewry numbered 6,500,000.”

Since you have tremendous facilities for fact-finding which an individual like me does not have, couldn't you be persuaded to make a thorough check of these figures.

They seem to be exaggerated. According to Almanacs there never were more than 15,000,000 Jews in the whole world- there appear to be as many now. Secondly, Wm. Shirer's Berlin Diary states somewhere that Germany never had more than about 700,000 Jews. And when Germany surrendered there still seemed to be about a half million there.

 Time would do a useful service if once and for all it investigated all those figures thoroughly. Just how many Jews were executed and for what; how many died of abuse in concentration camps and for what; how many were said to have been killed when they simply died of old age.

And how many were in one way or another brought into the United States, Mexico, and Canada. An AP dispatch, Bremerhaven, May 11, states that the United States had rescued 3,000,000 refugees. Most of them appear to have been Jews, yet Judge Simon F. Rifkind recently stated that the Nazis slew 6,000,000 Jews. What are the facts?

A just peace depends to a large extent on facts and truth-about friend and enemy. I wish Time would really dig out and present the best available facts now. What we have heard regarding the Jewish population of Europe and its treatment is not substantiated fact.

Sincerely Yours,

Austin J. App, PhD
Incarnate Word College
San Antonio , Texas

P.S.- If you want to print all or any part of this you may. But what I seriously want is a Time study of the facts.

Originally Published in Morgenthau Era Letters: 119 Letters to Newspapers and Newsmakers- Mostly in the Decade from 1941 to 1950, Boniface Press 1966.