The Bankruptcy of Yad Vashem or How to Reach 6,000,000

We know that Yad Vashem is an official Israeli institute responsible for managing the memory of the extermination of Jews by the Germans; it is somewhat equivalent to the Roman Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The weeping press reports that Yad Vashem has just published a database of the victims of the Shoah.[1] As Yad Vashem explains, the three million or so names currently listed are those of “Jews who perished in the Shoah”, the aim being to find, if possible, the names of the six million Jewish dead. In fact, the affair ended in bankruptcy, but it is nonetheless rich in lessons.

Bankruptcy through a Lack of Method and Rigor

What strikes anyone studying the history of the deportation of the Jews is the lack of method and rigor on the part of those responsible for writing it. Faced with a multiplicity of documentary and testimonial sources, any serious historian would sort through them; Yad Vashem, on the other hand, has no interest in doing so, hence the many duplications. However, as we shall see, this is not the only criticism that can be leveled at the bank’s designers. But enough commentary, let’s take some examples.

• Let’s take as our first example the case of Jews deported from France; Yad Vas hem has based its database on Serge Klarsfeld’s memorial;[2] admittedly, most of the Jews listed died in deportation; But Yad Vashem took no account of this and included all the deportees in its database, including the survivors; to cap it all, it even mentions that these deportees returned.
  For example, Simone Veil, Henri Krasucki and Simone Lagrange (Simy Kadosche, who was only a child whom the Germans forgot to gas) are listed as “SURVIVED”; there are also many Jewish survivors whom Klarsfeld declared dead, although Yad Vashem cannot be blamed for this; These include Raphaël Esrail, secretary of an association of deportees, and Marie Reille, a Catholic woman deported by mistake, whom the Germans sent back to France from Auschwitz. We spoke of her during the Papon trial.
  What’s more, as we shall see later, Yad Vashem did not confine itself to referring to the memorial alone, but also retained testimonies, so that many French Jews are counted several times over.
• Let’s take another example, that of 2 children (Michael and Josef Salomonowicz, aged 11 and 6 on arrival at Auschwitz) and their mother; we saw in “The liquidation of the Lodz ghetto”[3] that all three had been deported from Lodz to Auschwitz where, according to the exterminationist vulgate, they were gassed and incinerated; in reality, the reader was convinced that they had been resettled in Danzig and had survived the war. And what does the bank say about them?
  • The mother is mentioned 3 times in different spellings, including once with the word “survived”.
  • The eldest son, Michael, is listed twice under different spellings; he is also declared “survived” once.
  • The youngest son, Josef, is also listed twice; he is also declared “survived” once. In this case, 3 survivors = 7 dead.
• Another double: that of Ester Skora (11) based on 2 lists from the Lodz ghetto; another triple: that of Elchanan Reingold (7) based on 3 lists from the same ghetto.
• The above counts are based on documents that are admittedly poorly used, but (often) irrefutable. Unfortunately, the history of the Shoah is based mainly on eyewitness accounts, i.e. on fragile elements. A large part of the Yad Vashem database is of this type; not only are these testimonies hardly reliable, but as no sorting was obviously carried out, this approach can only lead to multiple duplications. Worse still, sometimes the documentary source is added to the testimonial source. Here are a few examples:
  • The Dutchman Samuel Acathan is counted twice. The first time on the basis of a testimonial and the second time on the basis of the Dutch memorial.[4]
  • This is also the case for Frenchwoman Charlotte Rotsztejn, counted twice (under different names) on the basis of the Klarsfeld memorial and her father’s testimony (1992). Also among Jews in France, Frida Raichman is counted 2 times – once on the basis of the memorial and once with the testimony of a cousin (1994). Still in France, the 51 people (including 44 children) from the Izieu orphanage are counted 2 or 3 times, or even 4 times, as is a certain Hans Ament, counted on the following bases:
    • Klarsfeld’s French memorial;
    • the Austrian DÖW memorial (H. Ament was born in Austria[5]) ;
    • the testimony of his brother (1987), who, although not deported, is nevertheless listed in the American “Survivors” database;
    • the testimony (1999) of a relative of three of the children of Izieu; she too was not deported, but that didn’t stop her from “testifying” about the 50 deported from Izieu.
  • It’s clear here that Holocaust hysteria leads to the loss of all common sense: you didn’t see anything, and indeed you weren’t even born when it happened, but you testify anyway, and this approach is accepted by historians.
  • The Polish Genia Wagman is recorded 3 times on the basis of the testimonies of her son, who testified 2 times (1955 and 1997) and her uncle (1957); she was born and lived all her life in the same place until her death (in 1941 or 1942), and we’re not even sure she was exterminated. A Belgian woman with the same first and last names is listed twice, once on the basis of testimonies from her brother (1978) and once from her granddaughter (1999); we can predict that she will be listed a 3rd time when Yad Vashem encodes her name as belonging to the Jews of Belgium.
  • Another example is the German Helga Wolf, listed 3 times on the basis of a list from the Lodz ghetto and 2 testimonies (from a niece in 1978 and a “researcher” in 1999).
• At that point, we thought a famous deportee like Anne Frank was going to be reprinted a hundred times over. But no! It may well be that, in this particular case, Yad Vashem made an exceptional selection, as Anne is only included twice (on the basis of the Dutch memorial and the testimony of her father’s second wife, but with variations in the first name and date of birth, which must have misled Yad Vashem); his sister Margot, on the other hand, is included 3 times; his mother, Edith Frank, is included 2 times; his father, Otto Frank, although returned from deportation, is included once on the basis of the German memorial.[6] In this case, for Yad Vashem: 1 survivor + 3 dead = 8 dead.
• The question arises: aren’t there dead people in this database who have been declared dead on the basis of the testimony of another dead person? We haven’t found any, but go figure… this database still holds many surprises in store for us.
• We should also point out that the Jews would have us believe that any Jew who died during the war must have been exterminated by the Germans, even if he was in his eighties. Just one example: the database includes Channa Wagman, who was born in 1854 and died in 1942 at the age of 88 in her native Galician village (testimony given by her sister in 1956). This approach increases the number of supposedly exterminated people by several hundred thousand.

In conclusion, we may ask, by how much should we divide the figure of three million names already encoded by Yad Vashem? It’s difficult to say, as imprecision is a well-known feature of the Jewish Civil Registry. Nevertheless, we can take a closer look at a few examples and attempt a cautious extrapolation.

• If, for example, we interrogate the database about Simone Veil, we obtain 38 names of people close to that of the former minister. Of these 38 names, eight are certain to be duplicates, one is that of a survivor (Simone Veil) and another that of a Jew who died in combat in the ranks of the 1st French army; a dozen others are more than doubtful; and we still don’t have all the guarantees for all the others.
  Among the supposedly exterminated is a man almost 90 years old.
• It should also be noted that, in this particular case, there were 16 witnesses; in all, they testified 464 times, including almost 250 times for French, Belgian and Dutch deportees already included in the database from documents; these witnesses included a lady who testified 34 times (including once for the mother of her sister-in-law) and a “researcher” from Lorraine who testified 154 times for people he probably didn’t know. But it gets better: a Czech man testified 166 times.
  It would seem that if we generalize the results of this research on S. Veil, we should divide the 3000000 by 2.
• Let’s take another example and ask the database about Arno Klarsfeld (Serge’s father): the database gives three names, and all three relate to our man. Yad Vashem first took Serge’s testimony in 1974; then it encoded the same Serge in the 1978 memorial; finally, it took the 1992 testimony of a “friend”; this friend also testified 38 times for French deportees, who are therefore also counted at least twice in the database. Things are clear in this case, because all you have to do is divide the 3,000,000 by 3.
• In short, these examples give the impression that we need to divide the 3 million by 2 or even 3.

A Bankruptcy Rich in Lessons

The operation undertaken by Yad Vashem has ended in bankruptcy, from which we can nevertheless draw an initial lesson: the figure of six million Jews exterminated is a myth that anyone can easily convince themselves of. But a closer look at this database is even more rewarding. Thus, in the article on the liquidation of the Lodz ghetto to which we referred above, revisionist researcher Carlo Mattogno gives the names of children who arrived in Auschwitz in August 1944, where they were gassed, according to the official story, but who, in reality, were sent a few days later to the Stutthof-Danzig camp, 600 km north of Auschwitz; among them, as we have already seen, are Michael and Josef Salomonowicz (aged 11 and 6), but they also include:

• Adam Szyper (4, counted twice), Tolla Richer (12) and Christine Wolman (14). Yad Vashem reiterates that they were interned in Lodz, then in the Stutthof camp (it did not see fit to mention Auschwitz!) and finally Theresienstadt, where all three were liberated.
• Kazimierz Lachman (age 7). Yad Vashem counts him as dead on the basis of the testimony of an aunt who stated in 1988 that her nephew had died at Stutthof-Danzig, which is very distressing but confirms what C. Mattogno discovered: the 11,500 unfit people from Lodz were not gassed but were indeed redirected to Stutthof. What we have here from an official Israeli organization is an implicit admission that the gassing of Jews is just another myth.

News from the Yad Vashem Database

We all know that Yad Vashem has undertaken to list the names of the alleged 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust. To the most benevolent, and even to historians, this undertaking can only appear foolhardy, given that the latter already count a million fewer victims.[7]In fact, to date, Yad Vashem has only arrived at 3 million, but by multiplying the number of duplicates. It can thus be estimated that it has multiplied the number of listed victims by 2 to 3. In a last-ditch attempt to break the deadlock, he has just launched a major collection of testimonies from Jews in the former USSR.[8] His reasoning is simple (and misleading at the same time): he claims that over two-thirds of the 6 million dead resided there (i.e. over 4 million), but only a quarter of them are listed in the database (i.e. 110,000); the result is that over 3 million of them have yet to be listed, which would make it possible to (finally) reach the (mythical) figure of 6 million.

However, for R. Hilberg, the world’s most respected Holocaust historian (or at least those who believe in him), there were no more than 2 million victims in the USSR (including the Ukraine, Belarus, annexed Poland, Moldavia and the Baltic States), i.e. half as many as Yad Vashem, leaving only one million names to list. However, this would only bring the total to 4 million. A totally implausible total, moreover, in which we would find (to take just a few examples):

• 2 times Robert Badinter’s father and Simone Veil’s parents,
• 3 times Serge Klarsfeld’s father,
• 5 times the father of Henri Minczelès,
• 3 times the 52,000 Jews in Berlin, etc., not to mention survivors like Henri Krasucki, Henri Bulawko or Madeleine Veil, or all those who died of old age in their beds. It’s all hysterical, but it’s true, it can be very profitable.

Notes