REVISIONISM 101 

Wilhelm Höttl and the Elusive 'Six Million'

The Holocaust Issue: Three Christian Views

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 Wilhelm Höttl and the Elusive 'Six Million'

So ingrained has the Six Million figure become in the popular consciousness that while the average American may be quite sure that six million Jews were slaughtered by the Germans in the Second World War -- that is, in what is now called "the Holocaust" -- he has no idea of how many British, Poles, Russians, or even Americans died during that global conflict, or, for that matter, of how many of his fellow countrymen lost their lives in the American Civil War.

This is hardly surprising, considering how relentlessly the Six Million figure is hammered into the public consciousness, not only in newspapers, magazines, motion pictures, and television, but also routinely in our schools, and even by a special taxpayer-funded U.S. federal government agency, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, which runs the imposing U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

The familiar World Book Encyclopedia tells readers, for example: "By the end of 1945, the Nazis had slaughtered more than 6 million Jewish men, women and children -- over two-thirds of the Jews in Europe." [See note] German president Richard von Weizsäcker, in his much cited commemorative speech of May 8, 1985, spoke of "the six million Jews who were murdered in German concentration camps." Anglo-Jewish historian Martin Gilbert, a prolific writer who is also the "official" biographer of Winston Churchill, has referred to "the systematic murder of six million Jews." [See note] The Encyclopaedia Judaica states flatly: "There can be no doubt as to the estimated figure of some six million victims." [See note] An information sheet issued by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council describes the grand Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, as a "living memorial to the six million Jews and millions of other victims of Nazi fanaticism who perished in the Holocaust."

Just what is the basis for this familiar figure?

Even before the end of the Second World War in Europe, that is, before any careful or detailed investigation was possible, the Six Million figure was already in wide circulation. For example, in essays published in late 1944 and early 1945, the prominent Soviet-Jewish writer Ilya Ehrenburg repeatedly told his many readers that "the Germans" had killed six million Jews. In an article published in March 1945, for instance, in the English-language London weekly, Soviet War News, he wrote: "The world now knows that Germany has killed six million Jews." [See note]

Some weeks later, as David Irving has related, this figure was affirmed in New York by representatives of major Jewish organizations: [See note]

In June 1945, just a few weeks after the end of the war in Europe, three Jewish lawyers who represented major Jewish organizations, met in New York with Robert Jackson, who would soon be serving as the chief U.S. prosecutor at the so-called "International Military Tribunal" in Nuremberg. Jackson asked how many Jews had lost their lives in all Nazi-occupied lands. The number, he was told, was six million.

By remarkable coincidence, some twenty-five years earlier the American Jewish community had been warning of a "holocaust" of six million Jews in Europe. In an address published in 1919 in a leading Jewish American paper, the American Hebrew of New York City, under the headline "The Crucifixion of Jews Must Stop!," the former governor of New York state, Martin Glynn, spoke repeatedly of "six million" European Jews who were "dying" and "being whirled toward the grave" in a "threatened holocaust of human life." [See note]

Given all this, it is hardly surprising that someone was found to provide "proof" for the Six Million figure at the most extravagant judicial undertaking in history, the 1945-46 trial in Nuremberg of Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, and other high-ranking Third Reich personalities. The legendary figure was fixed in history at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, where it was cited by chief British prosecutor Sir Hartley Shawcross in his closing address, and by the Allied judges in their final judgment. [See note]

This figure was not the result of any careful investigation, research, or calculation. The only specific evidence presented for it to the Nuremberg Tribunal was the hearsay testimony of former SS officer Wilhelm Höttl (sometimes spelled Hoettl), who said that he recalled it from a remark by Adolf Eichmann, the wartime head of the Jewish affairs section of Himmler's Reich Security Main Office (RSHA). Höttl, who also served with the RSHA during the war, stated in an affidavit dated November 26, 1945, and provided to the U.S. prosecution at Nuremberg, that Eichmann confided to him in August 1944 that some four million Jews had been killed in the "various extermination camps," and another two million had been killed in other ways, mostly in shootings by Einsatzgruppen forces in the course of the military campaign in Russia. [See note]

Eichmann himself, it should be noted, later called the Höttl story "nonsense," vigorously denied ever having made the alleged remark, and speculated that Höttl may have picked up the figure from a radio or newspaper report. [See note]

If it were not for Wilhelm Höttl's role in branding into the world's consciousness the trademark Six Million figure, his place in history would likely be little more than a footnote.

Who was this man, and how reliable is his historic affidavit?

He was born in Vienna in March 1915. In 1938, at the remarkably young age of twenty-three, he received a doctorate in history from the University of Vienna. While still a student there, he joined the National Socialist party and the SS. From 1939 until the end of the war in Europe, Höttl was employed almost without interruption by Germany's central intelligence agency, the RSHA. He was first stationed in Vienna with the "foreign bureau" (Amt Ausland, later Amt VI), and then, from early 1943, in Berlin in the "Southeastern Europe" branch E of Amt VI, with the SS rank of major (Sturmbannführer).

In March 1944 Höttl was assigned to Budapest, where he served as second in command to Himmler's SS representative in Hungary, and as political advisor to Hitler's ambassador there, Edmund Veesenmayer, who reported to Berlin, for example, on the large-scale deportations in 1944 of Jews from Hungary. On May 8, 1945, as German forces were unconditionally surrendering to the Allies, American troops arrested Höttl in Austria, and for several years after that he worked as an intelligence agent for the United States. He died in 1999, not long after the publication of his self-serving memoirs.

In April 2001 the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency made public thousands of pages of long-suppressed documents from its files of major German wartime figures, including the bulging Höttl file. Along with the release of these documents, two U.S. government employees wrote and issued a detailed report about Höttl based on those recently declassified CIA files, which sheds revealing light on his wartime and postwar career. This report, entitled "Analysis of the Name File of Wilhelm Hoettl," was written by two "historical researchers" of the U.S. government's "Interagency Working Group" (IWG), Miriam Kleiman and Robert Skwirot. [See note]

These documents establish that Höttl was a completely unreliable informant who routinely fabricated information to please those who were willing to pay him. In their report, the two U.S. government researchers write:

Hoettl's name file is approximately 600 pages, one of the largest of those released to the public so far. The size of the file owes to Hoettl's postwar career as a peddler of intelligence, good and bad, to anyone who would pay him. Reports link Hoettl to twelve different intelligence services, including the U.S., Yugoslav, Austrian, Israeli, Romanian, Vatican, Swiss, French, West German, Russian, Hungarian and British.

Soon after his arrest by the Americans in May 1945, Höttl began working for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency, and then for the U.S. Army's Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC). As the two U.S. government researchers put it: "Upon his arrest, Hoettl played to the interests of his captors ..." It was during this period, while he was secretly working for American intelligence, that Höttl provided his historic and damning "six million" affidavit for submission by the American prosecution at the Allied-run tribunal at Nuremberg.

Höttl benefited from his readiness to tell those who paid him what they wanted to hear, but this eventually proved his undoing. All the same, it took several years for U.S. intelligence to firmly conclude that it was being had.

In June 1949 one U.S. intelligence official cautioned against using Höttl for any reason, calling him "a man of such low character and poor political record that his use for intelligence activities, regardless of how profitable they may be, is a short-sighted policy by the U.S." In August 1950, CIA messages referred to Höttl as a "notorious fabricator [of] intelligence." A U.S. Army CIC report in early 1952 deemed his information useless, noting that Höttl "is involved in extensive intelligence activities for almost anyone who is willing to purchase his findings." In April 1952 his reports were called "worthless and possibly inflated or fabricated."

Interestingly, numerous U.S. intelligence reports identify connections between Höttl and Simon Wiesenthal, the well-known "Nazi hunter." One U.S. Army CIC document described Wiesenthal as the "Chief Austrian Agent of the Israeli Intelligence Bureau." A U.S. Army CIC report in January 1950 noted that for the last three or four months Wiesenthal had "recruited the services of Wilhelm Höttl," and had hired him to gather information for reports by the "Nazi hunter."

In July 1952, when U.S. Army intelligence finally broke completely with Höttl, a letter on U.S. Army stationery warned:

Dr. Höttl has long been known to this headquarters and other allied military organizations in Austria as a fabricator of intelligence information. His reports normally consist of a fine cobweb of fact, heavily padded with lies, deceit, conjecture and other false types of information. This organization will have absolutely nothing to do with Dr. Höttl or any members of his present entourage. He is persona non grata to the American, French and British elements in Austria.

In their report on his postwar career, U.S. government historical researchers Kleiman and Skwirot conclude:

The voluminous materials in Wilhelm Höttl's personality file ... trace the activities of a notorious intelligence peddler and fabricator, who successfully convinced one intelligence service after another of his value, and then proceeded to lose such support.

Indeed, and as already noted, Höttl "successfully convinced" the American and British prosecutors, and the judges, of the inter-Allied tribunal in Nuremberg, and many others around the world ever since, that German authorities killed six million Jews during the Second World War. And even though U.S. intelligence services and U.S. government researchers have, finally, as it were, discredited him, Höttl's most historically important claim remains widely, and even officially accepted.

The recently released U.S. intelligence documents on Höttl, and the U.S. government report about his postwar career, confirm what some revisionist scholars have contended for years. In his pathbreaking book The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, first published in 1976, Dr. Arthur Butz cited sources that were publicly available even in the 1950s to show that, during the war, Höttl had gotten into trouble more than once with SS authorities. His involvement in a shady Polish land deal led in 1942 to an SS investigation of his activities. An internal SS report characterized him as "dishonest, scheming, fawning,... a real hoaxer," and concluded that he was not fit even for SS membership, let alone a sensitive intelligence service position. [See note] Höttl was, accordingly, demoted. But his luck improved after his friend and fellow Austrian, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, was appointed in 1943 to head the RSHA. It seems that Kaltenbrunner protected him from a second disciplinary action, this one for misappropriation of security service funds.

Regardless of the unreliability of Höttl's infamous affidavit, the more important question remains: How valid is the six million figure?

The most common technique used by Holocaust historians to calculate figures of between five and six million Jewish extermination victims is to compare prewar and postwar estimated Jewish population figures for various European countries and areas, and then assume that the differences between the figures were all killed. This was the method used, for example, by Jacob Lestchinsky to produce a figure of 5,957,000 Jewish Holocaust deaths, in his important 1946 World Jewish Congress report. [See note] It is also the technique used by the late Lucy Dawidowicz, another prominent Jewish Holocaust historian, who estimated a total of 5.9 million Jewish victims. [See note]

However, this method fails to take into account substantial numbers of Jews who emigrated or fled to Allied or neutral countries during the war years. It also ignores the fact that many Jews, particularly in Eastern Europe, did not return to their original homelands at the end of the war, but instead emigrated to Palestine, the United States, and other countries beyond Europe.

It further assumes that all Jewish deaths (or "losses") were due to German or Axis policy. Thus, all Jews in areas under German or Axis control who died during the war years are routinely and misleadingly counted as "victims of the Holocaust," regardless of the cause of death. This includes Jews who died of natural causes, perished in Allied bombings of cities and concentration camps, who died as Allied soldiers, particularly in the Soviet military, or who -- like hundreds of thousands of German civilians -- succumbed to exhaustion, disease, and exposure in the particularly catastrophic final months of the war. Raul Hilberg, probably the most prominent Holocaust historian, acknowledges that a distinction should be made between "Jewish losses" and "Holocaust victims." He notes, for example, that the average age of Jews in Germany at the outbreak of the war was abnormally high anyway. [See note]

It is unlikely that there were ever six million Jews under German control during the war.

The wartime representative of the World Jewish Congress in Switzerland, Gerhard Riegner, confidentially reported to London and Washington in August 1942 that the total number of Jews in the countries occupied or controlled by Germany was three and a half to four million. [See note] This figure presumably referred to Jews in the "Greater" German Reich (including Poland), as well as in France, Holland, Belgium, Slovakia, and the occupied Soviet territories. If one adds the approximately 1.2 million Jews estimated to be living in Hungary and Romania, the total number of Jews that came under direct or indirect German control during the war years could not have been more than 5.2 million.

The unreliable character of the legendary Six Million calculation is also shown in the manipulation of Holocaust statistics in the cases of specific countries. In this regard, it is much more fruitful to examine Jewish losses in western European countries, where much more reliable statistics and other data are available, than to attempt to estimate Jewish losses in such eastern territories as Poland, where reliable data is not available. (In the case of Poland, even the country's borders changed drastically during and just after the war.) An important feature of these manipulations is that even though figures of alleged Jewish wartime losses in individual countries may be inflated and deflated over the years, there is an obvious effort to juggle figures so that the overall total is kept as high as possible.

The Case of Denmark

Consider, for example, the case of Denmark. In 1946 the "Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry" announced in its widely quoted report that, out of a total of 5.7 million European Jews who perished during the war years, 1,500 were Danish Jews. [See note] Raul Hilberg, in his highly regarded, three-volume 1985 study, gave a similar figure of 1,000 Danish Jews "lost" during the war years. [See note]

In fact, fewer than 500 Jews were ever even deported from Denmark. (Most Danish Jews fled to Sweden in 1943.) All of these deportees from Denmark were sent to the ghetto-camp of Theresienstadt (or Terezin) where precisely 51 Danish Jews (mostly elderly) died, all of natural causes. [See note] Thus, even if these 51 are counted as "Holocaust victims," Jewish "losses" for Denmark were exaggerated approximately 30 times by the supposedly authoritative "Anglo-American Committee," and 19 times the true figure by Hilberg.

The Korherr Report

At the beginning of 1943 SS chief Heinrich Himmler ordered his "Inspector for Statistics," Richard Korherr, to prepare a report on the "Final Solution of the European Jewish Question." Relying for the most part on information and figures supplied by the Reich Security Main Office, Korherr wrote a sixteen-page statistical survey that he submitted to Himmler on March 23, 1943. A few weeks later he produced a shorter supplemental version with the same title. [See note]

Even though, as Hilberg has pointed out, much about these reports, including their origin and purpose, "remains obscure," they are nevertheless the most authoritative wartime statistical records available on the fate of Europe's Jews. [See note] These top level, secret German documents contain no mention of an extermination program or mass killings of Jews, a fact that seems hardly possible if such a program had existed. Furthermore, as Jewish historian Gerald Reitlinger noted, they suggest that nothing like six million Jews could have been killed, even assuming the most sinister interpretations of the data. [See note] Korherr, a staunch Catholic, declared after the war that he had not been aware that his reports had any sinister or murderous significance. [See note]

Jewish Restitution Claims

Another important indication that the Six Million figure is not accurate is the large number of Jewish "Holocaust survivors" who have received restitution payments (Wiedergutmachung) from the German government in Bonn and, more recently, in Berlin. Individuals who were "persecuted for political, racial, religious or ideological reasons" by the wartime German regime have been eligible for money from the Bonn and Berlin government under the terms of the Federal Compensation Law (BEG) of 1953 and 1956. This includes Jews who were interned in camps or ghettos, were obliged to wear the star badge, or who lived in hiding. [See note]

As of January 1984, there were 4.39 million successful individual BEG restitution claims. The great majority of these were from Jews. Raul Hilberg has said that "about two thirds" of the allowed claims have been from Jews. [See note] This is a realistic but possibly conservative estimate. Approximately 40 percent of those receiving payments were living in Israel, 20 percent in West Germany, and 40 percent in the United States and other countries. [See note]

The Atlanta Journal and Constitution newspaper reported in 1985 that an estimated 50 percent of Jewish "survivors throughout the world are on West German pensions." [See note] But this estimate is very probably too high. For example, Jews in Poland, the Soviet Union, Hungary, Romania, and Czechoslovakia were not eligible for restitution, at least not at that time. [See note] In the United States, only about 66 percent of the Jewish "Holocaust survivors" in the Atlanta (Georgia) area in 1985 had received German restitution money. [See note]

If one conservatively estimates that two thirds of the 4.39 million individual claims for German restitution have come from Jews, that would mean some 2.9 million Jewish claims. And if half of the Jewish "Holocaust survivors" around the world have not received any restitution (which is probably a low figure), and granted that the number of claimants may be somewhat larger than the number of claims, it would appear that some six million European Jews "survived" the Second World War. (Of course, some European Jews who lived through the war years died before the German BEG restitution law was enacted in 1953.) And given that there were no more than some eight million European Jews under German wartime control, [See note] the number of Jews who died in Europe during the Second World War must be fewer than three million. As we shall see, the actual figure of Jewish wartime dead is substantially lower.

Finally, estimates of "Holocaust survivors" provided in recent years by authoritative Jewish sources cannot be reconciled with the generally accepted "Holocaust" story or the Six Million figure.

Before going further, it is a remarkable fact that, in recent years, the number of "Holocaust survivors" has actually been increasing. This is because -- as Norman Finkelstein stresses in his important book, The Holocaust Industry -- Israel, the World Jewish Congress, and other major Jewish organizations, all of which demand and collect billions in the name of "Holocaust survivors," have an interest in inflating figures both of wartime victims and of postwar survivors.

A report issued in July 1997 -- that is, fifty-three years after the end of the war -- by a committee organized by the Israeli prime minister's office estimated the number of "Holocaust survivors" (admittedly defined rather broadly) at between 834,000 and 960,000. A similarly authoritative report issued in June 2000, that is, fifty-five years after the end of the war in Europe, estimated the number of Jewish "Holocaust" survivors at between 832,000 and 935,000. [See note]These figures, Robert Faurisson has written, suggest that there were slightly more than three million Jewish "survivors" in Europe at the end of the 1939-1945 war. [See note]

Norman Finkelstein, a professor of political science at Hunter College in New York, and author of The Holocaust Industry, has commented that, on the basis of these Israeli or Jewish figures, there would have been eight million Jewish "Holocaust survivors" in Europe at the end of the war in May 1945. Remarking on this, Finkelstein has said: [See note]

There were fewer than eight million Jews in all of Nazi-occupied Europe. In other words, if these numbers are correct, the Holocaust didn't happen. As my mother used to say, if everyone who claims to be a Holocaust survivor actually is one, who did Hitler kill?

How many Jews did die during the Second World War? A year after the end of the war, an apparently impartial Swiss analysis entitled "How high is the number of Jewish victims?" concluded that no more than 1.5 million European Jews could have perished (of all causes) under German rule during the war. It appeared in June 1946 in the respected daily Baseler Nachrichten of neutral Switzerland. [See note] The widely-cited figures of between five and six million Jewish dead, the analysis noted, were not based on official sources, but merely private and semi-official estimates that greatly exaggerated the number of Jews that ever came under German control.

Stephen F. Pinter, a U.S. War Department attorney who was stationed in Germany after the war, published a statement in 1959 in which he condemned what he called "the old propaganda myth that millions of Jews were killed by the National Socialists." He went on to write: [See note]

From what I was able to determine during six postwar years in Germany and Austria, there were a number of Jews killed, but the figure of a million was certainly never reached. I interviewed thousands of Jews, former inmates of concentration camps in Germany and Austria, and consider myself as well qualified as any man on this subject.

Some revisionist historians have reached similar conclusions. Arthur Butz and Robert Faurisson have written that as many as one million European Jews may have died of all causes during the war years (not counting those serving in military forces). [See note] Walter Sanning, a European-American scholar and university lecturer, concluded in his detailed 1983 study that total Jewish losses during the Second World War were "in the neighborhood" of 1.25 million, many of whom died as Red Army soldiers or in Soviet camps and forced evacuations. [See note]

A common rejoinder to expressions of skepticism about the Six Million is rhetorically to ask: "What difference does it make how many were killed? It would be terrible if just one million, or even one thousand, Jews were murdered." To many people, efforts to establish the true numbers seem like insensitive and perhaps irrelevant quibbling. But the skeptics are not the ones who incessantly and insistently go on about Six Million murdered Jews. It is not the revisionists who have made a totem of this legendary figure, or who invoke it as quasi-sacrosanct ritual symbol. In any case, striving for historical exactitude, even about the iconic Six Million, is precisely what historians are supposed to do.

Notes

1. World Book Encyclopedia, 1984 edition, s.v. "Holocaust." vol. 9, pp. 263-264.
2. Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1986), p. 811.
3. Encyclopaedia Judaica, 1971 edition, s.v. "Holocaust."
4. The Ehrenburg essays, published in Soviet War News (London), Dec. 22, 1944, Jan. 4 and March 15, 1945, are reprinted in facsimile in the fifth edition of Joachim Hoffmann's detailed study, Stalins Vernichtungskrieg 1941-1945 (Munich: Herbig, 1999), pp. 390-393 (see also p. 183), and in Hoffmann, Stalin's War of Extermination 1941-1945 (Capshaw, Alabama: TADP, 2001), pp. 189-190, 402-405.
5. David Irving, Nuremberg: The Last Battle (London: Focal Point, 1996), pp. 61-62.
6. The American Hebrew (New York), Oct. 31, 1919, p. 582. Facsimile in The Journal of Historical Review 15, no. 6 (Nov.-Dec. 1995), p. 31. Also cited in Irving, Nuremberg, p. 62.
7. Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal (IMT), vol. 1 (Nuremberg: 1947-1949), pp. 252-253; IMT, vol. 19, p. 434; and IMT, vol. 22, p. 496.
8. Höttl affidavit of Nov. 26, 1945: 2738-PS (USA-296) in IMT, vol. 31, pp. 85-87, and Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression (NC&A), vol. 5 (Washington, DC: 1946-1948), pp. 380-382; 2615-PS in NC&A, vol. 5, pp. 338-339. On the ad hoc and self-serving origins of the Höttl affidavit, see Otto Skorzeny's letter of Dec. 14, 1956, in Gerd Honsik, Freispruch für Hitler? (Gibraltar and Barcelona: 1994), pp. 196-197.
9. R. Aschenauer, ed., Ich, Adolf Eichmann (Leoni [Bavaria]: Druffel, 1980), pp. 460-461, 474; Jochen von Lang, ed., Eichmann Interrogated (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), pp. 117-118. Dieter Wisliceny, another former SS officer, made a statement similar to Höttl's at Nuremberg on Jan. 3, 1946, but spoke of "only" four or five million Jews killed. IMT, vol. 4, p. 371. Eichmann later called Wisliceny's comments "theater," and said that he never had any figures of "exterminated" Jews. See von Lang, ed., Eichmann, pp. 164-165, 94-95, 110-117.
10. The report is posted on the U.S. National Archives web site: http://www.nara.gov/iwg/declass/hoettl.html
11. Arthur Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century (Newport Beach, CA: IHR, 1997), p. 81.
12. Jacob Lestchinsky (Leszczynski), "Balance Sheet of Extermination," 1946 and revised in 1955. Cited in Nora Levin, The Holocaust (New York: Crowell, 1968), p. 718; Leon Poliakov, Harvest of Hate (New York: Holocaust Library, 1979), p. 335 (Revue d'histoire..., Oct. 1956); Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985), p. 1202.
13. Lucy Dawidowicz, A Holocaust Reader (New York: Behrman, 1976), p. 381; Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945 (New York: Bantam [pb. ed.], 1976), p. 544.
14. Hilberg, Destruction, p. 1206.
15. Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret (Boston: Little Brown, 1980; New York: Henry Holt, 1998), p. 77.
16. Levin, Holocaust, p. 715; Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution (London: Sphere Books [pb., 2nd ed.], 1971), p. 546; Wolfgang Scheffler, Judenverfolgung im Dritten Reich (Berlin: Colloquium, 1960), p. 114.
17. Hilberg, Destruction, p. 1048.
18. Leni Yahil, The Rescue of Danish Jewry (Philadelphia: JPS, 1969), p. 318; Dawidowicz, The War, p. 505.
19. Documents NO-5193 through NO-5198. Complete texts in German and English in: Serge Klarsfeld, ed., The Holocaust and the Neo-Nazi Mythomania (New York: B. Klarsfeld Foundation, 1978), pp. 165-211 (appendices). Also published in: John Mendelsohn, ed., The Holocaust: Selected Documents in Eighteen Volumes (New York: Garland, 1982), vol. 12, pp. 210 ff. (The two reports are sometimes together referred to as "the Korherr report.") See also Hilberg, Destruction, pp. 1204-1206; Gerald Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution, p. 136, 138; von Lang, ed., Eichmann, pp. 112-115.
20. Raul Hilberg, "The Statistic," in: François Furet, ed., Unanswered Questions: Nazi Germany and the Genocide of the Jews (New York: Schocken, 1989), p. 158.
21. Reitlinger, Final Solution, pp. 534-535.
22. Gerald Reitlinger, The SS: Alibi of a Nation, 1922-1945 (New York: Viking/Compass [pb.], 1968), pp. 221-223; Hilberg, Destruction, pp. 1205-1206. In a letter to Der Spiegel (Nr. 31, July 25, 1977, p. 12), Korherr specifically stated that the term "special treatment" in a report's first draft did not refer to killing.
23. Focus on "Restitution in Germany," No. 1, May 1985, p. 3. (Information bulletin of the German Information Center, New York City, an agency of the German Federal government); see also: Hilberg, Destruction, pp. 1165, 1166; Mark Weber, "West Germany's Holocaust Payoff," JHR 8, no. 2 (summer 1988), pp. 243-250.
24. Hilberg testimony in Zündel case, Toronto District court, Jan. 18, 1985. Transcript page 1229.
25. Focus on "Restitution in Germany" (German Information Center), May 1985, p. 3.
26. Atlanta Journal and Constitution, Sunday, March 31, 1985, p. 15 A.
27. Hilberg, Destruction, p. 1170; D. Margolick, "Soviet Emigre Lawyer...," New York Times, March 10, 1983, p. B2.
28. Atlanta Journal and Constitution, March 31, 1985, pp. 15 A, 17A.
29. Jacob Lestchinsky, statistician for the American Jewish Congress, estimated that in 1939 there were 8.25 million Jews in the lands that came under German or Axis control. "Balance Sheet of Extermination," in Levin, Holocaust, p. 718. Lucy Dawidowicz estimated that the "pre-Final Solution population" of the lands that came under Axis control was 8.86 million. Dawidowicz, The War, p. 544.
30. Number of Living Holocaust Survivors, July 27, 1997, report of the "Spanic Committee," organized by the Israeli Prime Minister's Office (with estimates slightly revised in May 1998), and the "Ukeles" report, June 28, 2000, commissioned by the "Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany," a semi-official Jewish agency. Both cited in: "Special Master's Proposed Plan of Allocation and Distribution of Settlement Proceeds," (Sept. 2000, also referred to as the "Gribetz Plan"), Volume I, Annex C, "Demographics," pp. C-2, C-8, C-9. Posted on line at the "Official Information Web Site for the Holocaust Victim Assets Litigation Against Swiss Banks and other Swiss Entities": http://www.Swissbankclaims.com/media
31. Robert Faurisson, "Impact and Future of Holocaust Revisionism," JHR 19 (Jan.-Feb. 2000), pp. 9, 28 (n. 24).
32. Interview with Norman Finkelstein, by Viktor Frölke, in Salon.com, "Shoah business," August 30, 2000. Posted on-line at: http://www.salon.com/books/int/2000/08/30/finkelstein/index.html See also: N. Finkelstein, "How the Holocaust Industry Stole the Swiss Monies," June 2001, Postscript to Foreign Translations. Posted on-line: http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/id112.htm
33. "Wie hoch ist die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer?," Baseler Nachrichten (Abend-Blatt), June 13, 1946, p. 2. (This newspaper, founded in 1845, is no longer published.)
34. Pinter letter in the national Catholic weekly, Our Sunday Visitor, June 14, 1959, p. 15.
35. Butz, Hoax, p. 239; Robert Faurisson interview with Storia Illustrata (Italy), August 1979. Authorized translations in: Serge Thion (with Robert Faurisson), Vérité historique ou vérité politique? (Paris: 1980), p. 197, and JHR 2 (winter 1981), p. 348.
36. Walter Sanning, The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry (Newport Beach, CA: IHR, 1983), pp. 198, 196.

About the author

Mark Weber is director of the Institute for Historical Review. This essay is adapted from his address at David Irving's "Real History" conference in Cincinnati, August 31, 2001.

Reproduced gratefully from: Institute for Historical Review web site

         The Holocaust Issue: Three Christian Views

          'Examine All the Evidence'

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?

About the author

Louis Vezelis, O.F.M., is editor of The Seraph, a traditionalist Roman Catholic monthly published by the Franciscan Friars (Order of St. Francis of Assisi) of Rochester, New York. This commentary is from an editorial by Bishop Vezelis in the May 1993 issue of The Seraph.

Reproduced gratefully from: The Journal for Historical Review (http://www.ihr.org)

The Holocaust Issue: Three Christian Views

Christian Responsibility to Truth

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:

• 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 Häss -- 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.

About the author

Herman Otten is a Lutheran pastor and editor-publisher of the weekly Christian News of New Haven, Missouri. This commentary is excerpted from his address at the Ninth IHR Conference. The complete text is published in the Fall 1989 Journal.

Reproduced gratefully from: The Journal for Historical Review (http://www.ihr.org)

Christianity, Truth and Fantasy:
The Holocaust, Historical Revisionism and Christians Today

Paper presented to the Ninth Intemational Revisionist Conference.

The early Christians were champions of the truth, not myth and fantasy. They spoke and wrote on the basis of solid evidence. Peter wrote:

We didn't follow any clever myths when we told you about the power of our Lord Jesus Christ and His coming. No. With our own eyes we saw His majesty. God the Father gave Him honor and glory when from His wonderful glory He said to Him: "This is My son whom I love and with whom I am delighted." We heard that voice speak to Him from heaven when we were with Him on the holy mountain.

And we have a more sure word of prophecy. Please look to it as a light shining in a gloomy place till the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts. Understand this first, that no one can explain any written Word of God as he likes, because it never was the will of a human being that brought us God's Word, but the Holy Spirit moved holy men to say what God told them. [1]

John concludes his Gospel: "This is the disciple who testified about these things and wrote this. And we know what he testifies is true." [2] John begins his first epistle: "It was from the beginning, we heard It, we saw It with our eyes, we looked at It, and our hands touched It -- we're writing about the Word of Life." [3] He concludes this epistle: "We know God's Son came and gave us the understanding to know Him who is real, and we are in Him who is real, in His Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and everlasting life. Children, keep away from idols." [4]

The prophets and apostles who write the Bible presented facts, true history, not pious myths based upon some emotional experiences. They carefully evaluated the evidence Luke begins his Gospel:

Many have undertaken to plan and write a story of what has been done among us, just as we heard it from those who from the first became eyewitnesses and servants of the World. For this reason I too decided to check everything carefully from the beginning and to write it down in the proper order for you, excellent Theophilus, so that you too will be sure what you have heard is true. [5]

Jesus, who said: "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, no one comes to the Father except by Me," [6] emphasized the importance of knowing the truth. He declared: "If you live in My Word, you are really My disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will free you." [7]

Today direct revelation, the very concept of truth, doctrine, and real history which can be known are being rejected right within the established churches. The very thought that God revealed Himself or any truths to man in propositions recorded in Holy Scripture is denied. Many contend that there is no such thing as absolute truth and that no one can say with absolute certainty what really happened. A professor we had for a course in philosophy at the University of Rochester in New York held up his pencil and told our class that if we believed the pencil were a cow or an elephant it would be a cow or elephant for us. Our response was that one may very well call it a cow but it certainly would not produce any milk.

Modern liberalism contends that there is no such thing as divinely revealed, authoritative, final doctrine, doctrina divina. However, the idea of propositional truth and revelation is taught by the Scriptures. The Holy Scriptures contain dogma, doctrine, real history, divinely revealed truth, which can be known.

While the Bible does use the term "truth" at times to mean such things as "loyalty," "faithfulness," etc., the Bible also teaches the idea of propositional truth, revelation, absolute truth, which man can know and express in doctrinal statements.

To the Samaritan woman who said, "I have no husband," our Lord replied that since she had had five husbands and since her present consort was not her husband, her answer was quite correct: "You've told the truth." Obviously Christ means "factual precision." He is not attributing "faithfulness or "loyalty" to the woman. [8]

Of another woman we read in Mark that she came to Christ and "told Him all the truth." Again this can only mean "factual precision." Certainly she is not preaching the Gospel to Christ. She simply narrated the prosaic facts of her case. [9]

Martin Luther and other early Reformers had an intense desire to know and proclaim the truth in all areas. Luther, in his explanation of the Eighth Commandment: "Do not lie concerning your neighbor," noted: "We should fear and love God that we may not deceitfully belie, betray, slander, nor defame our neighbor, but defend him, speak well of him, and put the best construction on everything."

Christians are not free to believe or spread lies and myths about anyone or any people or nation. In short: A Christian promotes truth, not lies and hoaxes.

Revisionism

A Christian is not a revisionist in the sense that he wants to revise real history and distort what actually happened. Rather he is interested in learning and promoting facts, not lies, in every area. He is particularly vitally concerned about the true origins of all religions. Christianity is the only religion which is founded upon actual history. Unlike all other religions, it is founded upon actual events, which really happened in ordinary calendar history, not some kind of History" which is above and beyond real.history (the realm of myth). A Christian is not out to revise true history.

However, a Christian can be a Revisionist if by this is meant that a Christian is interested in revising what many consider to be history. Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace by Harry Elmer Barnes, who was not a Christian, was one of the first books I bought by a Revisionist during my college days in the early fifties. I still have this copy. Barnes noted in Revisionism and the Promotion of Peace" in The Journal of Historical Review (Spring, 1982):

During the last forty years or so, Revisionism has become a fighting term. To so-called Revisionists, it implies an honest search for historical truth and the discrediting of misleading myths that are a barrier to peace and goodwill among nations. In the minds of anti-Revisionists, the term savors of malice, vindictiveness, and an unholy desire to smear the saviors of mankind.

Actually, Revisionism means nothing more or less than the effort to correct the historical facts, a more calm political atmosphere, and a more objective attitude. It has been going on ever since Lorenzo Valla (1407-1457) exposed the forged "Donation of Constantine," which was a cornerstone of the papal claim to secular power, and he later called attention to the unreliable methods of Livy in dealing with early Roman history. Indeed, the Revisionist impulse long antedated Valla, and it has been developing ever since that time. It has been employed in American history long before the term came into rather general use following the first World War.

Revisionism has been more frequently and effectively applied to correcting the historical record relative to wars, because truth is always the first war casualty, the emotional disturbances and distortions in historical writing are greatest in wartime, and both the need and the material for correcting historical myths are most evident in connection with wars.

Growing Up in New York City During World War II

The October, 1988 IHR Newsletter announcing this conference referred to me as a "German-American." My parents came to this country from Germany as teen-agers. However, ancestors on both my mother's and father's side came to Germany from Sweden. I mention this because some have said I am a neo-Nazi, out to defend Germany because of my background. But Mother's mother refused to say "Heil Hitler." She insisted that she had only one Heiland (Savior) and that was Jesus Christ. Some feared she would be imprisoned. My father's father was one of the first Lutherans in Germany to leave the German territorial [state] church and helped form an independent church free from any government control. He vigorously protested against the liberal anti-Christian theology taught in many German universities and schools of higher learning. Perhaps much of the suffering that Germany has had to endure is because it had to such a large extent departed from God's Word.

I was fortunate to have a father, who, although he was an ordinary housepainter in New York City, was interested in world affairs and did considerable reading, including the writings of some Revisionists. Prior to WW II he followed the work of Charles Lindbergh and the America First Committees which sought to keep the U.S. out of war. I can still recall sitting in front of our radio in a Bronx apartment on December 7, 1941 listening to reports of the bombing of Pearl Harbor -- I was eight years old at the time but I remember Dad telling us that this was the beginning of the most devastating war the world had ever known and that President Franklin Roosevelt was not entirely innocent in the affair. "F.D.R.'S WAR PLANS! -- Goal is 10 Million Armed Men; Half to Fight in AEF -- Proposes Land Drive by July 1, 1943 to Smash Nazis" were the headlines of the December 4, 1941 Chicago Tribune, three days before Pearl Harbor. One of the first things we had to do many mornings during WWII was run to a local 'candy' store to buy a copy of the New York Daily News, which at that time was only 2 cents. In the evening Dad would come home from work with other newspapers to keep up with the latest news about the war. When the news came on the radio at supper time, the entire family had to be quiet so we could hear the reports. Dad would often comment, after coming home from a day of painting in the homes of some clergymen and college professors, that a good number of them were rather uninformed about what was really going on in the world. He told us that very few of them recognized that Roosevelt actually planned to get the U.S. into the war.

During our public school years in the Bronx, news and evidence of the war were constantly before us. Apartment houses near our public schools were vacated and thousands of WACS, WAVES and SPARS moved in. They regularly marched around our school and trained in what is probably one of the largest armories in the world, which was right across from our school. A few gold stars replaced blue ones in our church and as we walked to school from time to time we could observe in the windows of apartment houses where a gold star had been placed just the day before where there had been a blue one. Another American had died in the war.

Some of the forty families who lived in our apartment house were Jews who had recently come from Europe and still had relatives there. At times there were only two or three of us in some of our grade school classes who were not Jews. Many of our teachers and friends were Jews. We collected newspapers for the war effort in apartment houses where most of the tenants were Jews. Some had only been in this country for a short time and still had some contact with relatives in Eastern European countries.

Before and after the war our family helped European Jews and other refugees settle in this country. A few of them became Christians. Our congregation in New York, St. Mathew Lutheran Church, often called the oldest Lutheran church in the country, probably included more former Jews than any other Lutheran church in the U.S. At one time our pastor told us that there were about 80.

During the years immediately after the war our family sent hundreds of food packages to the destitute in Europe. Since we had no automobile, we children took many of these packages to the post office in our wagon.

We cannot recall any of the many Jews with whom we came into contact growing up in Manhattan and the Bronx from 1933-52 who acted as if he really believed that millions of fellow Jews were being gassed by the Germans.

Undergraduate Revisionist Studies

I attended Concordia College Institute in Bronxville, New York, which consisted of a four-year prep school and two-year junior college. The school had a high academic standing, and four years of Latin, two years of Greek, and four years of German were required of all students, in addition to the standard courses in English, history. mathematics, and science.

Following my Dad's example, I became an early and enthusiastic Revisionist, which got me into difficulty with some of my teachers at Concordia. During my senior year I gave a talk on Roosevelt, Pearl Harbor, and the forced repatriation of millions of Eastern Europeans back to the Communists. One of the resources I used was The Crime of the Ages, by Ludwig A. Fritsch. The book included a pamphlet with an endorsement from Dr. Walter A. Maier, who at that time was speaker on the "International Lutheran Hour" and a professor at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis.

My history professor, who was an ardent fan of Roosevelt, almost exploded after I completed the speech. I had previously expressed some disagreement with this professor's views of the causes for the war and Roosevelt's parts in the war, but this was the final straw. A few of my classmates were prepared for a confrontation. I was sent to the principal to get "straightened" out. It didn't do much good and only led me to read more books by such Revisionist historians as Charles Tansill, George Morgenstern, Percy Greaves, John T. Flynn, Charles Beard, Admiral Theobald, etc. I was determined to read all I could about WW I and WW II. When I graduated from Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, in 1957 I also received a Master's Degree in history from Washington University. One reason for majoring in history was because I was interested in writing a textbook on American history which would tell the truth about the origins of World War I and II.

Christian Influences for Revisionism

I. Dr. Walter A. Maier

My thesis at Concordia Seminary in 1957 was on the political and economic thought of Dr. Walter A. Maier, who was one of the best known American churchmen during the war years. 32 years ago I wrote:

From Maier's endorsement of The Crime of the Ages it is rather obvious that he accepted the Revisionist interpretation of World War Two. He concluded a letter of thanks to the author with the words, "It certainly tells the truth" The author of this book, Ludwig A. Fritsch, Ph.D., D.D., stated that Roosevelt and his associates led America into war in order to bring this nation out of the depression. He argues that Roosevelt was not able to solve the unemployment situation in spite of social legislation and huge spending. Since Hitler could not be induced to attack the United States, Fritsch maintains that Roosevelt had to engineer war "via the back door." Through various economic pressures Japan was supposed to have been sufficiently antagonized to attack Pearl Harbor. This was claimed to have permitted Roosevelt and his associates to stand before America and demand revenge for the sneak attack. Fritsch, whom Maier endorsed, wrote:

TELL OUR PEOPLE what Oliver Lyttleton, British Minister of Production, told the Chamber of Commerce of America June 20, 1944, as reported by the United Press: "Japan was provoked into attacking the United States at Pearl Harbor. It is a travesty of history ever to say that America was forced into the war." ... TELL OUR PEOPLE, that before God and history, the load of responsibility for the chaotic conditions and the indescribable misery all over the world rests on our conscience; because we played havoc with prehistoric brutality and saved Bolshevism, making it a world menace. Without our intervention there would have been peace and order in Europe and the world long ago. [10]

II. Dr. Alfred Rehwinkel

Most of my professors at Concordia College (Bronxville), Washington University, Columbia University and Concordia Seminary (St. Louis), promoted the generally accepted line about Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt and the cause of both World War One and Two. Almost all of the few who were even aware of the Revisionist position refused to accept it. Dr. Alfred Rehwinkel, one of my advisors at Concordia Seminary, was one of the few who knew what was really going on in the world. Rehwinkel had been associated with Charles Lindbergh and the America First Committee. I often visited him, even after graduating from Concordia Seminary. He was several times a guest speaker at our congregation in New Haven, Missouri. Rehwinkel had been president of Concordia, Edmonton and later St. John's College in Winfield, Kansas, founded in 1893 by J.P. Baden, a distant relative our family. My father, who was one of Rehwinkel's many admirers among the laymen, first became acquainted with him when Dad worked in the wheat fields in Kansas in the 1920's.

Perhaps one reason The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod's Concordia Publishing House has never published an excellent well written biography by Rev. Ronald Stelzer of Rehwinkel known as "Rip," is because of his position on WW II. -This biography notes:

To Rip "The Second World War was the bankruptcy of Western statemanship, and worse than that, it was the bankruptcy of Western morality." It was the impetus behind his 400 page unpublished manuscript entitled War, The Christian's Dilemma. Herein is depicted one side of the story that likely will never appear in the textbooks of American history. Against the backdrop of American and Allied atrocities in World War II, Rip analyzes the ethical problem of war as it is dealt with in the Old and New Testaments, the early Church Fathers, medieval Church history, by the Reformers and those in recent times ...

Amidst the jubilant celebration of his countrymen over the German and Japanese surrender, Rip was profoundly unimpressed with the Allies' accomplishments on the battlefield and at the negotiating table. Fifteen years later an interviewer asked Rip, "Who do you think has had the worst influence on our modern world?" Rip spoke without hesitation, "The answer is very simple. The men who have had the most baneful influence on our whole world today are Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill." (Questionnaire prepared by Dr. William Beck of St. Louis at the request of Dr. O.A. Dorn of Concordia Publishing House.) In my own conversations with Rip he consistently referred to these two, but especially Roosevelt, as "contemptible warmongers, deceivers and fools." On occasion he has described them as "the architects of world chaos" or "the curse of our generation" and their acts as "stupendous stupidities" or "selling us down the river." ...

Rip was a voice crying in the wilderness, a lonely prophet proclaiming God's judgment upon a nation that could see only that it had won a great war. "God's attitude regarding the dignity of human life has not changed. No government has the right to shed man's blood unless for a just cause specifically sanctioned by God Himself." Instead of sharing in the party spirit, Rip posed the rhetorical question, "What does it profit a nation if it conquers the whole world but loses its soul?" When his countrymen cheered as wave after wave of bombers pounded Dresden and Hamburg, Rip echoed the words of the prophet "Woe to the bloody city, all full of lies and booty-no end to the plunder! The crack of whip, and rumble of wheel, galloping horse and pounding Chariot! Horsemen charging, flashing sword and glittering spear, hosts of slain, heaps of corpses, dead bodies without end -- they stumble over the bodies! ... Behold I am against you, says the Lord of Hosts." (Nahum 3:1-5) ...

Rip also perceived a sign of God's judgment in that the American people supported and approved the follies of their leaders. Jeremiah writes "An appalling and horrible thing has happened in the land: the prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests rule at their direction; my people love to have it so." (Jer. 5:31). It was a source of constant amazement to Rip how the Americans and Briffsh still honor Roosevelt and Churchill as great heroes.

But what of Hitler? "Like Nebuchadnessar, when he made himself to be a god, God made him to be a fool; likewise those who worshipped him." It is plain to those who have eyes to see that God is using Russia and the rest of the Communist world as His executioners just as He used Assyria and Babylonia against an apostate Israel and Judah.

III. Professor Kurt Marquart

Not all of the students at Concordia Seminary were unfamiliar with the works of Revisionist scholars and unconcerned about the threat of Communism. One of these students, who was also greatly influenced by by Rehwinkel, was Kurt Marquart, now a professor at Concordia Seminary (Ft. Wayne). Dr. Marquart is considered by many to be one of the leading theologians in all of Christendom. At the same time is well informed about what is going on in the world.

Marquart and I were roommates at Concordia Seminary in 1954-55. His mother and stepfather were born in Russia, and he was born in Estonia, escaping when the Communists took over. Marquart taught Russian during his first year at Concordia Seminary. A good number of his writings on Communism and many other matters have been included in The Christian News Encyclopedia.

Marquart stated in an address first presented at the Australian League of Rights in Brisbane, Australia in 1968:

It is difficult for those who have not directly experienced Communism to comprehend the horror of it all. Allied soldiers, who as a result of the infamous Yalta Agreement, had to force Soviet citizens "liberated" from German captivity at the end of World War II, to return to the Workers' Paradise, reacted with utter bewilderment and incomprehension when most of these people not only refused to go back "home," but resorted to the most desperate measures to avoid this fate. I myself shall never forget the pathetic spectacle I witnessed in 1945, of a two-mile stream of Russians, simple workers and peasants in the main, fleeing into the woods with what few belongings they could carry, to avoid being sent back to the Soviet Union. One of our friends, a Russian engineer, went back to the camp to help rescue some others, and was caught by the British soldiers whose distasteful duty it was to enforce these inhuman mass-deportations. When the men vehemently resisted "repatriation" the British officer in charge asked him if he realized that he could be sent to gaol for five years if he refused to co-operate. Our friend explained that he would gladly go to prison rather than return to the Red hell! He served five years. In other camps, also in the American occupation zone, ever more terrible scenes took place. When the men had been herded like cattle onto trucks, the women would lie down on the road in front of the trucks, and had to be removed at bayonet point. Not infrequently mothers would kill their children, and then slash their own wrists, if there was no other way out. Such unparalleled mass desperation testifies unanswerable to the utter contempt for human life practiced in the name of the brotherhood of man by the most brutal, most cynical, most inhuman regime of modern times, if not of all history. [11]

Some Twentieth Century Hoaxes

The Christian News, true to its function as a Christian Lutheran paper, has, since its founding in 1962, combated a number of false beliefs which I consider to be hoaxes no less than the Holocaust The Christian News has exposed the false notion that all self-professed Christian churches and sects embrace the Christianity of the Gospel, as well as the claim that Christianity is just one of the many valid religious ways to God. We have upheld the inerrancy of God's directly revealed word in the Bible, and have published hundreds of articles by prominent scientists which demonstrate that the theory of evolution is a hoax.

The Christian News has stood firmly against the idea that God has picked any one particular race to be his "chosen people." This is a hoax which is widely accepted by both liberals, with their theory of evolution, and many "conservatives," who maintain that the Bible teaches the Jews are God's chosen race.

There are plenty of sincere but misguided Christians who maintain that when the Bible speaks about the conversion of all Israel this means physical Israel and those who are referred to as Jews today. The Christian News Encyclopedia includes a good number of articles exposing the nature of this hoax. [12]

Even some who might consider themselves "Revisionists" and who reject the anti-scriptural notion that the Jews are God's chosen race are guilty of racism. Here is just one recent example: An article appearing in the December, 1988 Christian Vanguard, newsletter of the New Christian Crusade Church, says:

First let us bear in mind that the Bible is a book about the racial history of the White Race and that Adam, our ancestor, was White and that that line remained pure until Jesus, who was God, came in the flesh. If our God was White, and we are His sons and daughters, then we may fairly say that there is nothing in the Bible for any race other than the White Race, despite the millions that Christian churches have spent overseas to "save" non-Whites. For some strange reason, the ministers who so roundly denounce Adolf Hitler, champion of the White Race, never find time to criticize Moses and the prophets who actually did what Hitler didn't do! Deuteronomy 11:23 tips the hand in which way the Pentateuch will take the White Race: " ... and ye shall possess greater nations and mightier than yourselves." Thusly, we see that under the "Führership" of Moses, Israelite tribal ascendancy was to come at all costs, including some rough treatment of other races. Hitler was falsely accused of having put into practice the racial conceptions handed to Moses by Yahweh Himself. [13]

The Bible knows nothing about any chosen race. The true Christian today worships the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Holy Trinity. Those who are called Jews today reject this God. Paul wrote to the Galatians that Abraham "believed God, and so was counted righteous. You see, then, those who believe are Abraham's real descendants. The Bible foresaw that God would make the nations righteous by faith, and long ago He told Abraham the good news: Through you all nations will be blessed. So those who believe are blessed with Abraham, who believed." [14]

According to Holy Scripture, in God's sight there is no special race, color, nationality, sex, etc. Peter wrote to the Christians of his day: "But you are a chosen people, priests of the King, a holy nation, a people saved to be His own and to tell of the wonderful deeds of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light. Once you were no people, but now you are God's people. Once you had received no mercy, but now you have received mercy." [15]

Peter noted that "God doesn't prefer one person to another. It doesn't matter what people you belong to; if you fear Him and do what's right, he accepts you." [16]

I have repudiated all racism as long as I can remember. As I previously mentioned, I grew up in New York City among members of numerous nationalities and races. Our church had members of all races. One of my Sunday School teachers was Japanese. I had a Chinese for a roomate my first year in Prep School. In grade school most of my schoolmates were Jews. I often worked with my father as a housepainter in Harlem in the homes of blacks. One summer I was the only white person on a 40-man picking crew. The Christian News, ever since it began, has published editorials against racism. I have been invited to speak to large groups where the vast majority were non-whites. Churchmen from various races have spoken in our church. Yet the Anti-Defamation League has labeled The Christian News as a hate sheet, racist and anti- Semitic. [17]

I wrote to the National Director of the Anti-Defamation League on June 25, 1988:

Mr. Abraham Foxman, National Director
Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith
823 United Nations Plaza
New York, N.Y. 10017
Dear Mr. Foxman:

The Christian News has just received in a letter from Mr. Edgar M. Bronfman, President of the World Jewish Congress 501 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10022, a statement from you which says in part: "we educate, persuade, demand when we have to, use the courts, do the research, and make sure the necessary information is published and distributed where it will do some good. ADL responds to the needs of individual victims of prejudice, and fights against bigotry, racism and anti-Semitism." Attached to your statement is a report titled " An ADL Special Report -- HATE GROUPS IN AMERICA -- A Record of Bigotry and Violence."

Your special reports include a section titled "List of Extreme-Right Groups." It says: "The following is a list of extreme-right groups that have operated in the U.S. in recent years. These groups espouse racism and/or anti-Semitism: many have engaged in violence." Under a section title "List of Extreme-Right Publications" is Christian News, New Haven, Missouri -- (no organization)."

Christian News wrote to Mr. Harold Singer, publisher of the Jewish Journal, Brooklyn, New York, on March 8: "An article in the February 19 Jewish Journal lists Christian News as part of the 'Right Wing Hate Press.' Could you please tell us why Christian News is considered part of the 'hate press?' Could you please send us the address of Mr. Abraham H. Foxman, National Director of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith?"

Christian News wrote to you on March 29: "A report in the February 19 Jewish Journal says that the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith lists Christian News as part of the Right Wing Hate Press.' Could you please tell us why Christian News is considered part of the 'hate press?'"

Perhaps you never received this letter. Could you now please answer these questions?

I then posed a series of questions to Mr. Foxman, asking to produce a single citation from The Christian News advocating or defending racial hatred, anti-Semitism, or violence. Then I put to him a series of questions on the factuality of the Holocaust, and on ADL's willingness to engage in a debate on the issue.

The Christian News never received any response from the Anti-Defamation League and, as far as I know, The Christian News is still on the ADL's list of hate and racist publications.

Two hoaxes often promoted by Christians are closely linked. According to one of them, Jesus Christ will establish a kingdom of peace on this earth and reign from Jerusalem for a thousand years. The other hoax represents the contemporary State of Israel as the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy.

Space does not permit me to show how widely Millennialism has infiltrated the fundamentalist, charismatic, evangelical and Reconstructionist movements. Such prominent churchmen as Jerry Falwell, Oral Roberts, Pat Robertson, Dave Hunt, Carl McIntire, Rousas Rushdoony, Gary North, Robert Sumner, Billy Graham, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, Hal Lindsey, and many others are all Millennialists of one sort or another. The State of Israel has welcomed the Israel First Milliennialists, who believe the State of Israel a fulfillment of Biblical prophecy, with open arms.

Millennialists often disagree with one another. Some of the hoaxes the Millennialists promote are rather bizarre. Hal Lindsey, the author of the bestselling Late Great Planet Earth (more than 20 million copies) says, in his A Prophetical Walk Through the Holy Land, that there will be such a terrific battle in Israel, involving hundreds of millions, that blood will flow up to the horses' bridles for 200 miles. Lindsey's book includes a map showing where this wide tide of blood will flow up to the horses' bridles for 200 miles. Lindsey and other Millennialists are quoted at considerable length in the CNE. [18]

Anyone who wants documents showing that the whole of Millennialism is a dangerous, anti-scriptural hoax, should consult The Christian News Encyclopedia. [19]

The Augsburg Confession, one of the confessions of the orthodox Lutheran Church, stated it well when it referred to the Millennialists of the Sixteenth Century as those who were spreading certain "Jewish opinions." The Augsburg Confession says in Article XVII:

Also they teach that at the Consummation of the World Christ will appear for judgment, and will raise up all the dead; he will give to the godly and elect eternal life and everlasting joys, but ungodly men and the devils He will condemn to be tormented without end.

They condemn the Anabaptists, who think that there will be an end to the punishment of the condemned men and devils.

They condemn also others, who are now spreading certain Jewish opinions, that before the resurrection of the dead the godly shall take possession of the kingdom of the world, the ungodly being everywhere suppressed. [20]

The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod in its Brief Statement correctly confesses after listing numerous Bible passages: "According to these clear passages of Scripture we reject the whole of Millennialism, since it not only contradicts Scripture, but also engenders a false conception of the kingdom of Christ, turns the hope of Christians upon earthly goals, (1 Cor. 15:19; Col. 3:2), and leads them to look upon the Bible as an obscure book." [21]

Another widespread delusion among Christians is that today's Jews view the Old Testament in the same way as Christians, and that the Old Testament is the chief Jewish scriptural authority.

Jews today insist that the Talmud is their highest religious authority. They consider it to be far more authoritative than the Old Testament. When I was in Israel last year, various Israeli guides and leaders repeatedly told me that the Talmud was their most authoritative source of religious truth. A new translation of the Talmud is now in the process of publication. The Christian News Encyclopedia includes some 160 pages from the 34-volume Socino edition of the Talmud. [22] Few churchmen have studied the Talmud. Hardly anyone at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, has checked out the edition of the Talmud in the seminary's library. Almost all the pastors and professors we asked about the Talmud say they had not read even a few pages.

Those who have read what Luther wrote about the Talmud should have at least some idea of the gross immorality and lies found in the Talmud. Fifty and more years ago some of the orthodox theologians of The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, such as Lutheran Hour speaker Walter A. Maier, did not hesitate to point out the lies, racism, and immorality in the ralmud. The standard of morality promoted in the Talmud gives Israel the right to take land away from Arabs who have owned it for centuries. Today it seems that even many conservative theologians hesitate to expose the Talmud for "fear of the Jews."

The Talmud reports that the Emporer Hadrian slaughtered some 800,000,000 million Jews at a time when most historians say there were about 2,000,000 Jews in Palestine. Gentiles are said to have fertilized their vineyards for seven years with the blood of Israel without using manure. Sixty-four million Jewish children, according to the Talmud, are supposed to have been slaughtered by the Gentiles in Bethar. Another section of the Talmud says that the Romans killed 4 billion Jews or "as some say" 40 million Jews. The blood of the slain Jews is to have reached the nostrils of the Roman horses and then, like a tidal wave, plunged a distance of one or four miles to the sea, carrying large boulders along with it, and staining the sea a distance of four miles out. The bodies of Jews slain by the Gentiles were used to build a fence around Hadrian's vineyard, which is said to have been eighteen miles square and the blood that was saved from the tidal wave was used to fertilize the vineyards for seven years. [23]

Most Jews today are scarcely familiar with the Old Testament. They reject the real message of the Old Testaments the Messiah, Jesus Christ, and salvation only in Him.

The Roman Catholic church has long maintained that some of its saints have been able to raise people from the dead and that the Virgin Mary appears to some of them. An advertisement of Raised From The Dead, True Stories of 400 Resurrection Miracles by Father Albert J. Hebert, a book which has the imprimatur of Rome, says:

The raising of the dead is a miracle which, astonishing as it is, has been performed hundreds of times since the days of Christ. Our Lord told His Apostles to raise the dead (Matt 10:8), and over the centone of the leading Charismatics of our day, says that he has spoken face to face with a 900-foot Jesus. Roberts and other Charismatics continually claim that God speaks directly to them, particularly when they are in need of money. There are millions who believe this hoax.

Some Charismatics have requested us to publish their reports about Charismatics raising people from the dead. We asked them for the evidence but they never supplied us with any. Kenneth Copeland, a Charismatic who denies the deity of Christ and speaks in tongues, reports in his April, 1987 Voice of Victory that a leading African Charismatic has raised seven people from the dead. [25]

Oral Roberts, one of the leading Charismatics of our day, says that he has spoken face to face with a 900-foot Jesus. Roberts and other Charismatics continually claim that God speaks directly to them, particularly when they are in need of money. There are millions who believe this hoax.

Dr. Percy Collett, who has been widely promoted by Charismatics, including the Full Gospel Businessmen's Fellowship, claims that for almost six days he was literally in heaven. An advertisment promting Collett says: "For 5 earth days he talked with God the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit. Elijah, Elisha, Abraham, Moses, Paul and others. He viewed the mansions of the saints, and toured the buildings NOW under construction." [26]

Dr. Richard E. Eby, who claims that after he died Jesus sent him back to earth to tell people the truth, is now being promoted by charismatics. The Charismatic Full Gospel Business Men's Fellowship says that

In 1972, Dr. Eby fell two stories to his death. His blood had drained out into the ground from his crushed skull. He was instantly in a new body with the Lord. He shares this unique experience in Heaven with Jesus Christ as well as the dramatic return to life in his earthly body. He describes the marvels of life after death, and as a physician he includes a vivid description of his immortal body. Jesus sent him back to earth to tell the truth. Everyone has wondered about life after death -- is it true? Where will I go? Is there really a Heaven? A Hell? This is your opportunity to meet someone who has actually experienced death and restoration, and find the truth for yourself.

Jimmy Swaggart, one of the tongues-speaking and healing Charismatics who has promoted Collett, said:

... you are going to be literally elated, excited and thrilled at what Dr. Collett is going to share. I could talk to His man for 10 years and never scratch the surface -- what he saw, what has happened to him, and the move of the Holy Spirit, within his life ... He has thrilled my soul and I think he's going to thrill yours as well . . [27]

The Christian News has for many years exposed the hoaxes promoted by such leading Charismatic preachers as Oral Roberts, Kathryn Kuhlmann, Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, Kenneth Copeland, Jack Coe, and others. [28]

God speaks to man today through His Word, Holy Scripture, which is powerful and efficacious. [29]

The Charismatics, and visionaries who accept the testimony of those who claim the Virgin Mary spoke to them at Fatima, Medujmorje, and elsewhere have been among those who accepted the Shroud of Turin as the Shroud of Jesus. However, even some conservative and evangelical Christians also believed the Shroud of Turin was the Shroud of Jesus, as we noted in a Christian News editorial titled: "Admit Mistakes -- Even Some Conservatives Believed in Hoaxes -- Recognize the Shroud of Turin is not Shroud of Jesus." [30]

Millions of pilgrims have gone to Turin and many of them claim to have witnessed miracles. Such conservative publications as William Buckley's National Review, Billy James Hargis' Christian Crusade, Human Events, and even such scientific journals as the American Medical News and the Industrial Research Development have published articles and editorials supporting the hoax that the Shroud of Turin is the Shroud of Jesus. Some of our conservative friends took sharp issue with us for maintaining that the Shroud of Jesus was not the Shroud of Turin.

Rev. Jeff Gavin, a Lutheran Church-Missouri minister in Dacatur, Illinois, commented:

I am writing to comment on your article "The Shroud of Turin Is A Hoax," April 12, 1982.

I never considered The Saturday Evening Post to be a theological publication, yet compared to your article and your "scholarship" it appears I must reconsider my evaluation of the Post.

For some years, I have been interested in the Shroud, and must agree with the Post's conclusion "The man of the Shroud suffered, died and was buried the way the Gospels say Jesus was." You neglect to mention that Dr. McCrone was the only dissenting scientist among the STURP team of 40 scientists. The conclusion reached by the others all indicated that the Shroud cannot be proven a hoax. What Dr. McCrone did find on the Shroud was not paint but iron oxide, a substance found in paint but also found in blood.

The amount of physical support for the authenticity of the shroud has filled many books and articles. I suggest you study some of them before you make your own conclusions.

Let me conclude by quoting a Biblical scholar far more knowledgeable than either of us. Dr. David P. Scaer of the Concordia Theological Serninary writes concerning the Shroud of Turin in an article in the C.T.Q. [Concordia Theological Quarterly] Jan. 1979 issue: "The image on the Shroud of Jesus portrayed in the Gospels ... there is therefore no valid theological objection to identification of the Shroud of Turin as the Shroud in which Jesus was buried.

While we have often commended the Concordia Theological Quarterly (formerly The Springfielder) and have urged readers to subscribe (Concordia Theological Quarterly, 6600 North Clinton Street, Fort Wayne, Indiana 46825), we still insisted that the Shroud of Turin was not the Shroud of Jesus. We did not retract our editorials on the shroud being a hoax simply because various scientists and even some orthodox Christian professors concluded that the Shroud of Turin may very well be the Shroud of Jesus. The Shroud of Turin is not the only hoax some orthodox Christians accept as fact. The October 14, 1988, Washington Times reported in a story titled Triple Testing Finds Shroud Medieval Fake:"

Turin, Italy-The Shroud of Turin, revered by many Christians as the burial cloth of Jesus Christ, has been shown by carbon-dating tests to be a fake from the Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic church said yesterday.

But Vatican officials said the mystery of how the blood- stained image of a crucified man has appeared on the yellowing cloth was still unsolved and the shroud would remain an object of veneration for the Church.

Turin Cardinal Anastasio Ballestrero told a news conference that tests by three laboratories -- in England, the United States and Switzerland -- showed with 95 per cent certainty that the cloth dated from sometime between 1260 and 1390.

The results of the carbon-dating tests should again show the folly of accepting as fact all the stories of visions, healings, relics, etc., which Rome, the charismatics, and even some misguided churchmen at times promote. Christians should not accept any hoax as a fact.

Last but certainly not least among the hoaxes exposed in The Christian News is the Holocaust, the alleged slaughter of some six million Jews, most of them by gassing, in a planned attempt at extermination by the German government in the Second World War. Those not familiar with The Christian News may be surprised to learn that we have published hundreds of items supporting the Holocaust theory, and numerous letters defending the case for the Holocaust.

The Revisionist Side

While The Christian News has given those who are convinced that the Germans exterminated six million Jews plenty of space to defend their position. the paper has also published a good number of articles, letters, and reports by Revisionists who question the Holocaust story. Some of these articles, in the sections on the Holocaust, Revisionism, Israel, Jews, Germany, Millennialism, and Germany, have been reprinted in The Christian News Encyclopedia. We have included photographs of various documents pertaining to the Holocaust.

My father was a friend of Dr. Austin App, a Christian Revisionist honored at your conference last year. When Dr. App published his booklets on the Holocaust, he sent us copies and they were reviewed in The Christian News at a time when others hesitated to even mention them. [31] We also published a long statement from a liberal pastor who took issue with Dr. App, and then printed Dr. App's response. [32]

Some of the Revisionists whose writings have appeared in The Christian News are Mark Weber, Arthur Butz, Bradley Smith, Charles Weber, Jim Keegstra, Clarence Lang, Ernst Zündel, Walter Bodenstein, Robert Faurisson, Ratibor Ray M. Jurjevich, Martin A. Larson, William Stäglich, and Ditlieb Felderer. [33] We have repeatedly invited readers who disagree with the Revisionists to send us articles and letters showing where the Revisionists are in error. Many of our readers, some tell us the vast majority, including most of the thousands of clergymen and professors who receive The Christian News, accept as absolute fact that the Germans exterminated approximately 6 million Jews during World War II. We have noted, however, that some, particularly among our younger readers, are seriously questioning the Holocaust.

Last year when The Christian News reviewed Thies Christophersen's The Truth of Auschwitz, The Christian News published this special notice:

If any reader knows of someone who was at Auschwitz who is able to refute Thies Christophersen, or anyone who can show that Christophersen is either lying or sadly mistaken, please contact The Christian News. The Christian News is particularly interested in publishing a statement from someone who actually saw the gas chambers at Auschwitz, where some four million Jews are said to have been gassed by the Germans. [34]

Christophersen was at Auschwitz when the Germans were supposed to be gassing millions of Jews, and states that there were no gas chambers and no mass extermination of Jews in Auschwitz.

Fred Leuchter, one of the leading U.S. experts in the construction of gas chambers, accepted the notion that the Germans exterminated some six million Jews before he made a thorough examination of the matter last year. "The Leuchter Report -- the End of a Myth -- An Engineering Report on the Alleged Gas Chamber at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdenek, Poland" sets out the methodology and findings of the actual sites in Poland where the gassings were alleged to have occurred. Luechter's conclusion, after inspecting the sites and analyzing samples taken from walls and floors for total cyanide content, was unambiguous: the alleged gas chambers could not have been used, then or now, as execution gas chambers. The publisher of the "Leuchter Report" comments (CNE, 2363):

David Irving, the distinguished British historian, has called the "Leuchter Report" a "shattering" document which was instrumental in hardening his belief that the whole of the Holocaust mythology was now open to doubt. It is a document which "Holocaust" historians can ignore only at the peril to their reputations as objective scholars. After the "Leuchter Report," the allegation of genocide perpetrated by the Germans against the Jews, using gas chambers as murder instruments, can no longer be upheld.

When The Christian News published a report on the Leuchter document, The Christian News noted:

Christian News welcomes a critique from anyone who still believes the Germans gassed six minion Jews after he has read the "Leuchter Report." We have made similar offers to those who still believe in the Holocaust after they have read the words of Faurisson, Rassinier, Butz, Stäglich, and Feldereer. We have repeatedly discovered that those who believe the Germans gassed six million Jews have seldom read the writings of the scholars who maintain there were no gas chambers for the extermination of even a few Jews" (The Christian News, July 18, 1988).

Faurisson concludes his "The Problem of the Gas Chambers":

There was not a single "gas chamber" in even one of the German concentration camps; that is the truth. The non- existence of "gas chambers" should be regarded as welcome news; to hide this news in the future would be an injustice. Just as there is no attack upon religion if one portrays "Fatima" as a fraud, the announcement that the "gas chambers" are an historical lie is not an attack upon concentration camp survivors. One is merely doing one's duty by being truthful.

When The Christian News reviewed Wilhelm Stäglich's Auschwitz Myth, we made a similar challenge:

The Christian News now invites a response from anyone who can show that Wilhelm Stäglich's The Auschwitz Myth is in error. We would like to publish a review from anyone who has read the book and still believes that the Germans gassed four million Jews at Auschwitz. [35]

No critic of the writings of such Revisionists as Arthur Butz, Charles Weber, Robert Faurisson, Wilhelm Stäglich, and Thies Christophersen has ever sent us any statement showing where their writings are in error.

The Christian News has insisted upon careful docu mentation and has always been willing to publish the other side in any matter. It is possible for even a careful scholar to use an oft-quoted statement without first checking its authenticity. In the past we have noted that quotations can be spuriously transferred from one writer to another. One of the first quotations we exposed as a phony was one which anti-Communists were quoting at the time. American Communist leader Gus Hall is supposed to have said, at the funeral of Eugene Dennis in 1961, "I dream of the hour when the last congressman is strangled on the guts of the last preacher ..."

Our efforts to acquire any information which would refute the Revisionists have been sincere. We wrote to both Dr. Jacob Preus, former president of The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod and Rev. Richard Neuh