The Six Million – We Want Proof (1949)

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

Hotel Furstenhof
Wien VII, Austria
July 16, 1949

Time
Rockefeller Center
New York 20, New York

To the Editors:

I want to thank you sincerely for your letter of May 23 in which you cite the testimony of Dr. Wilhelm Hoettl given Nov. 26, 1945, to substantiate Time's statement which I had questioned, that six million Jews were “murdered” by the Hitler regime.

What was especially gratifying to me was that your letter tended to show that the Time editors actually believed that so many Jews were killed and were not, as I had suspected, merely repeating that old charge in order to please the Morgenthauists.

Nevertheless, I beg Time again, as I did a year ago, once and for all to make a thorough investigation of this problem. It is important to establish the facts, because now, every time anyone demands an Atlantic Charter (just) peace for Germany, he is met with the sneer, “What did you do to prevent the murder of six million Jews by Hitler?” Recently when Catholic prelates protested the expulsion of Arabs from Palestine by the Zionists, that was the Zionist answer.

Clearly, a crime is a crime whether committed against one or against six millions. But quantity does matter, too. If Hitler in 1936 had for example totally robbed and ruthlessly expelled the 700,000 Jews in Germany and allowed 20 percent of them to be abused to death on the way, it would have been a horrible crime, but it would not have been as vast a crime as the Czech expulsion of three million Sudetens, sanctioned in the Potsdam agreement, and the estimated abuse to death of 600,000 of these Sudetens. Both fact and numbers are important in discussing atrocities.

When I came to Europe in June I had calculated from the best sources then available to me that about 1,500,000 Jews had lost their lives through the Nazis, some because they were partisans and spies, killed as American did or would have killed persons guilty of similar offenses.

After being here a month, evidences are accumulating that even that estimate is too high. I beg Time again to investigate the matter thoroughly. Surely the fact that even you could quote no better authority than that of a frightened, hysterical “Obersturmbannfuehrer,” testifying four years ago, must make you suspect that if his figures could have been substantiated those who repeat the charge in order to persecute Germans would have long ago have done so.

But in any case, I do sincerely thank you for your detailed and honest letter.

Sincerely Yours,

Austin J. App, PhD

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