The Holocaust Issue: Three Christian Views

Christian Responsibility to Truth

Herman Otten

While most revisionists appear to be opposed to the construction of the [U.S. government] Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, right next to some of our nations’s most cherished monuments, I say: Let it be built! One day it will serve as a monument to the stupidity of modern man, who can still accept a hoax as a fact. Hopefully it will then serve as a reminder to study all the facts and evidence, and repudiate all hoaxes.

The day is surely coming when all the evidence showing that the Germans never exterminated six million Jews can no longer be suppressed. Truth is not determined by majority vote. I learned this lesson in high school, and since then have repeatedly discovered how the majority of scholars, even within our churches, can be in error. That our presidents, senators and congressmen are all supposed to be convinced that the Germans killed six million Jews, that almost all of our nation’s professors and churchmen are said to maintain that the Holocaust is a fact, doesn’t make it a fact.

There is no dispute over the fact that large numbers of Jews were deported to concentration camps and ghettos, or that many Jews died or were killed during World War II. Revisionist scholars have presented evidence, which “exterminationists” have not been able to refute, showing that there was no German program to exterminate Europe’s Jews, and that the estimate of six million Jewish wartime dead is an irresponsible exaggeration.

The Holocaust – the alleged extermination of some six million Jews (most of them by gassing) – is a hoax and should be recognized as such by Christians and all informed, honest and truthful men everywhere.

Here are the reasons that have impressed me as particularly persuasive in coming to my own conclusion that the Revisionist view of the Holocaust story is the correct one:

Rev. Herman Otten speaking at the 1989 IHR Conference.

• There is no convincing or substantial evidence for the allegation of mass killings in gas chambers in the wartime German camps. Careful investigation – in particular that carried out by American engineer Fred Leuchter – has thoroughly discredited the “gas chamber” extermination claims.
• The most reliable statistics available cannot be reconciled with the legendary “six million” figure. The best evidence indicates that no more than a million, or perhaps a million and a half, European Jews perished from all causes during the war years.
• Neither the major Jewish organizations in the United States, nor the wartime Allied governments, nor the International Red Cross, nor the Vatican acted as if they seriously believed the wartime extermination propaganda.
• Although the German government kept extensive and detailed records of its wartime Jewish policy, not a single document has ever been found which substantiates or even refers to an extermination program or policy. Instead, the voluminous German records confiscated by the Allies at the end of the war clearly show that the German “final solution” program was one of emigration and deportation, not extermination.
• Even prominent Jewish “exterminationist” historians now acknowledge that the stories of gassings and extermination in camps in Germany proper are not true, in spite of the fact that such claims were once seriously made, particularly at the great Nuremberg Trial of 1945–1946.
• The Holocaust story now centers on just six former camps in Poland. The so-called “evidence” presented to prove mass exterminations in these camps is qualitatively no better than the now discredited “evidence” once cited for extermination in the camps in Germany proper.
• Much of the co-called “evidence” presented by “exterminationists” over the years has already been thoroughly discredited. For example, the well-known horrific photographs of piles of corpses taken in camps in western Germany at the end of the war are now acknowledged to be photos of victims of disease and malnutrition who perished as indirect victims of the war in the final weeks and months of the conflict. Also, so-called “confessions” – such as those of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss – have been shown to be untruthful and extracted by torture. Many of the official reports and testimonies presented as “evidence” by the prosecution in the Nuremberg trials have since been shown to be lies.
• The fact that so many Jews “survived” German rule during the war – many of them even in so-called “extermination” centers such as Auschwitz-Birkenau – is enough to show that there was no German program or policy to exterminate the Jews of Europe.

The Holocaust is a hoax. The time has come for Christian scholars and pastors to recognize this, and to stop perpetrating a hoax as the truth. A Christian is not free to believe and promote a lie about any person or nation. True Christian scholars should at least read what the Revisionists write.

Many have said to us: “What difference does it make? The truth of the Holocaust is of no concern to Christians.” Nonsense! A Christian is not free to believe and promote a lie about any person or nation. A Christian is guided by truth and facts, not emotions and majority opinion.

If Christians can accept as historical fact the Holocaust, despite all the powerful evidence that it is a hoax, what does that say about their ability to evaluate evidence? What about their scholarship? Is it any wonder that some Revisionists, who have made a careful study of the Holocaust, question the scholarship of Christians, so many of whom swallow as absolute truth what is clearly a hoax?

I have been told numerous times, even by theologians who claim to be orthodox: “I don’t care whether it was six million or one Jew, even one is too many.” Such an attitude shows contempt for the truth. A Christian is to show true love, and the Apostle Paul tells us that love is “happy with the truth.” (1 Cor. 13:6) The writing of Proverbs tells us: “Speak out for those who can’t speak, for the rights of those who are doomed. Talk up, render fair decisions, and defend the rights of the poor and needy people.” (Proverbs 31:9)

A Christian bases his faith upon facts and absolute truth, not feelings and emotion. A Christian recognizes that only God is all-knowing. A Christian is willing to listen to evidence and evaluate various viewpoints. He doesn’t close his mind to the facts and evidence. He doesn’t start out with the assumption that the Jew is right and the German is wrong, or that the Jew is wrong and the German is right. He looks at the evidence. Those who say they don’t care if it was six million or one are showing a despicable attitude toward truth. They are saying: “We don’t care about the truth.” Such an attitude is sinful and worldly. Is it any wonder that so many then go on to act as it they don’t care about another man’s wife or property? The truthfulness of the Holocaust is a moral issue. Those who maintain that the Germans exterminated some six million Jews, most of them by gassing, are seeing to it that the Christian Church can no longer avoid speaking out. Churches are being pushed, as never before, to have special services commemorating the Holocaust.

A Christian is ready to change his opinion if the evidence shows he is wrong. Numerous times we have invited “exterminationists” to refute the Revisionists.

Some tell us that we have not shown love to the Jews, and that we are being racists and anti-Semitic when we publish articles by Revisionists questioning the Holocaust, and when we insist that Jesus Christ is the only way to heaven.

We have repeatedly emphasized in many editorials that the Bible teaches that there is no special chosen race. All those – regardless of color, race, nationality, sex, wealth, et cetera – who trust in the merits of Jesus Christ alone for their salvation are God’s chosen people and will go to heaven. Those who tell Jews, Muslims, and any other non-Christian that they worship the true God, and can get to heaven without Christ, are not showing true love to the Jews and other non-Christians.

The so-called “fact” of the Holocaust is being used to deport innocent men from this country who, as teenagers, served with the German armed forces. In some cases they have been sent back to certain death in Communist lands. The [US government’s] Office of Special Investigation is using the Holocaust as an excuse to force from the United States even such a reputable person as the scientist Arthur Rudolph.

Israel is using the “fact” of the Holocaust as an excuse to execute John Demjanjuk, an innocent Ukrainian-American. “The Jewish people have a long score to settle with the Ukrainian people” says Dov Ben-Meir, a deputy speaker of Israel’s Knesset [parliament]. According to this top Israeli official, “unaccounted numbers” of Ukrainians “collaborated with the Nazi regime, especially in the annihilation of hundreds of thousands of Jews.”

The “fact” of the Holocaust is being used by some to deny that Christianity is the only true religion, or that Jesus Christ rose from the dead.

Israel is using the “fact” of the Holocaust as an excuse to kill Palestinians in Israel. This slaughter, together with the anti-scriptural notions of the Israel-first Millennialists, almost all of whom believe in the Holocaust, could lead to another bloody war.

The Holocaust is not some innocent hoax, such as children’s fairy tales that entertain and have no evil consequences.

The “chosen people” and “Holocaust” myths make mission work among non-Christians far more difficult. Arabs, who are told that the Bible teaches that their land belongs to the Jews, find it more difficult to believe what the Bible says about Christ.

“Victims Deserve Better”

Joseph Sobran

I haven't been to the new United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, but even a Washington Post reporter was shocked by what he describes its “outrageous” anti-Christian propaganda. The exhibition apparently dates anti-Semitism from the birth of Christ. And of course the implication of the Museum is that mass murder is worse when its victims are Jews.

Some surprisingly critical notes have been struck in the reviews of the Museum. Kay Larson, art critic for New York magazine, objects that “the Germans depicted here … are almost exclusively Nazis…. Most American children who endure the walk-through will think of Germans as Nazi pigs.”

She continues:

The Jews endured the most dementedly calculated and well-documented – but hardly the only – case. To separate the Nazi evil from other evils is understandable but Eurocentric. It trivializes all suffering but its own… It awards special, extra-human stature to the victims. Nothing that occurs inside Israel can be wrong, because Jews were gassed at Auschwitz. And so people set themselves apart from, against, and above others.

She has caught the note of most Holocaust rhetoric: intense self-absorption. This is a human reaction, and it can be excused up to a point. That point comes when those whose rights have been violated begin disregarding others' rights, as when Jewish apologists for Israel feel persecuted by criticism of Israel's brutality toward non-Jews.

Even many pro-Israel Jews feel uneasy about the Museum being in America, on government land, paid for with tax money. The implication of its presence is that all Gentiles, especially Christians, need to be instructed, to have their consciousness raised, even to be made to feel guilty about Jewish suffering. As if we didn't know that murder and persecution are wrong! As if Israel were a moral model for us!

In the same way, the implication of the word “anti-Semitism” is that the chief moral test for anyone is whether he has the correct attitude toward Jews. And again, this is understandable but also very narrow. Murdering Ukrainians is every bit as evil as murdering Jews, after all. But why should we even have to say that?

The wrong lesson is being drawn. You would think that the evil of Hitler was mere anti-Semitism as such, rather than mass murder. But if anti-Semitism were confined to country-club snobbery, even Jews wouldn't mind it too much. The real evil is the use of the state as an instrument of death. Government, perverted from it modest uses, can magnify every crime unimaginably.

That is the real “lesson of the Holocaust,” the lesson our time still refuses to learn. We think it's only the Hitler or Stalin version of the superstate that is wrong. But think how America's conduct in World War II would have appeared to our ancestors. It's hard for us to feel the sheer monstrosity of bombing cities.

I recently heard some interesting testimony on this point. During that war the US government commissioned a series of propaganda films from Frank Capra, which were made under the collective title “Why We Fight.” One of them, “The Battle for China,” describes the barbarity of the “Japs,” also called “Nips,” and mocked them for their “grinning yellow faces.” Among the horrors perpetrated by the Japs was the unprecedented atrocity of bombing cities, killing civilians by the thousands!

Of course Capra and his staff didn't know that the US government was planning to do exactly that to Japanese and German cities. In their innocence, they assumed that only a savage, alien race could have stooped to such barbarism.

But we have supped full with horrors. Evil bores us. Its statistical extremes have long since lost their interest, and there is something ritually formulaic in the demands that we profess belief in, and abhorrence toward, Nazi and Communist abominations. “Holocaust denial” has become the big thought crime, denounced by Christians who are quite tolerant of those who deny the Redemption. No similar opprobrium, by the way, attaches to Gulag denial. After all, nobody who really believes a thing wants to force others to profess belief in it. Sincerity never demands hypocrisy.

Even the word “Holocaust” has come to seem a polemical appropriation of human suffering that verges on the indecent. I remember an old Jewish woman I slightly knew who had a number tattooed on her wrist. That told me all I needed to know about Hitler, and it would be pedantic to wonder whether a regime that was willing to brand Jews like cattle meant to kill them all. But it would have seemed morally crass to call what that woman had been through as a girl “the Holocaust”: It's beginning to sound like a brand name, of special utility to glib hawkers. All the victims of World War II, including Jews, deserve more respect than that.

“Examine All the Evidence”

Louis Vezelis

On April 22, 1993, an ugly, monstrous edifice was dedicated in Washington, DC. It is a grotesque museum dedicated to the victims of evil. The only problem is that the majority of people throughout the world have been conditioned like Pavlovian dogs to react irrationally to pre-determined stimuli. Those who refuse are summarily isolated from the rest of the dehumanized human herd through use of meaningless but emotionally-charged epithets.

It is quite easy to observe which newspapers are subservient to this modern day hoax. The subject is the so-called “Holocaust Museum” built on public land “generously” donated by the US government …

Insulting terminology in an editorial appearing in the left-wing, pro-Zionist, anti-Christian Democrat and Chronicle [newspaper of Rochester, New York] introduces the reader to the most obvious abuse of logic and good taste. But, logic and good taste have systematically been expunged from the American mind during a period of more than thirty years.

Well-informed American citizens demonstrated [in Washington, DC, on April 22] against the historically false accusations constantly made against the German people and other nationalities whose only real crime was resisting the international gangsters who facetiously call their brand of exploitation “Communism.”

The Democrat and Chronicle editorial starts out:

The mindless folks who were waving signs at the opening of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, last week claiming that the Holocaust never happened merely demonstrate why the museum is so important: to preserve the facts, before they disappear in the mists of history.

These “mindless folks” include none other than well-educated professors and professional historians, investigative reporters and, in general, are among the most descent people of a civilized society. It is their right and duty to examine all the evidence, and draw the truthful conclusions concerning what really happened in history.

There is already a strong indication that those who promote the Holocaust story are afraid of the truth. That can only explain the need for ridiculing those who seek only to present the entire matter before an open world forum of unbiased and unprejudiced investigators. Because the preponderance of objective and factual evidence shows the promoters of the Holocaust story to be libelous frauds, sneak tactics and irrational emotionalism must be used.

We are concerned for the truth. Only those who are not of the truth must resort to lies and bloodshed. Facts by themselves do not constitute truth. Truth is in the judgment …

The Hollywood cosmetics exploiting the unfortunate victims of death do not prove anything. For example, to film or photograph dead bodies, and then label them according to one’s political need is a travesty of justice and truth beyond the capability of morally responsible individuals. Facts must be correctly interpreted before they can tell something of truth.

Another example is the famous “Anne Frank Diary” which has been foisted upon the American people at all levels. We all wept at the Hollywood tear-jerker action on the silver screen. Decent people reacted as expected by the unscrupulous falsifiers of fact. It has come to the attention of more and more people that this diary is a fraud. Yes, it has been proven to be fake. Public school facilities are periodically used to foist this fraud upon unsuspecting citizenry to re-enforce the psychological brainwashing.

Anne Frank was not fake: She really did live. But everything else about her life is a melodramatic, money-making operation to overwhelm the world with hatred for a nation … No one says anything comparable about the children brutally murdered by the Soviets when they occupied the Baltic States in 1940, and Germany in 1945.

A French Professor whose love for truth is greater than his love for fame and life, Robert Faurisson, has proven that the alleged “diary” of Anne Frank could not have been written by her …

While the American people are being lulled into very dangerous apathy by being fed psycho-babble, a real holocaust, including child murder, is taking place every day in occupied Palestine …

Could it be that someone is trying to put a guilt complex on the American people so they will not dare raise a loud voice of protest against greater evils?

“Even in a world as degenerate as ours, one can still lead a life worthy of living. It means remaining unbought and true to one's dignity, and never to lift a finger for the unworthy – even at the cost of sacrifice.”
—Joachim Fernau, German writer, in his published collection of letters In dem Hause auf dem Berge (Munich, 1992). quoted in: Nation und Europa (Coburg), June 1993, p. 13.