"The Holocaust is a lie"

In an interview conducted by Mehr News Agency On December 19 in Tehran, Fredrick Toben, the director of the Adelaide Institute in Australia, argues that the Holocaust is a myth:

"The Holocaust is a lie because none of its three main pillars on which it rests are factually true or proven.

1. Hitler systematically exterminated European Jewry. There is simply no proof of this claim, it was a transfer of Jews, and together with Zionist collaboration, German Jews arrived in Palestine with their property. Others were moved out of German territory and Auschwitz was a transit camp."

Toben is quite right that there is no evidence that the Nazis ever planned or attempted a systematic extermination of European Jewry, however they unquestionably pursued ethnic cleansing and slave labour programmes; these ultimately led to genocide, and in various camps in Eastern Europe, there is ample evidence of systematic killing towards the end of the war.

"2. The killing was done in huge chemical slaughterhouses -- homicidal gas chambers. This is a technical impossibility because you can work out how long it would take, for example, to kill one million people -- the size of a city like Adelaide -- without anyone finding out about it. The world soon found out President Bush lied about Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction -- that lie didn't last even one year."

Toben is right that scientific tests can be used to question the veracity of the various estimates of concentration camp fatalities, yet they will never provided certainty. In fact, all estimates regarding the number of inmates killed concentration camps are pure conjecture. It is therefore absurd to estimate what percentage of those that died, who might have been been gassed, this is unprovable and unknowable.

"3. Six million Jews were killed -- this number is mythical/religious -- and although at one time the numbers killed at Auschwitz was claimed to be 4 million, then reduced to 1-1.5 million, and now to around 500,000, the six million remains the same. Why?"

Whilst Toben is correct to suggest the figure is mythical/religious, the four million figure for the number that died in Auschwitz, was a Soviet estimate and was not the basis for the six million figure postulated by Raul Hilberg. Moreover, until the mid 90s, when many European countries introduced or updated their Holocaust denial laws, the preponderance of opinion amongst European historians was that the figure of Jews killed during the Second World War was under four million. However with the advent of such laws most historians remain quite on the subject and allow journalists and politicians to talk of estimates, preferring to avoid politically inconvenient conjectures. I would offer that such unsound speculative extrapolations were always best avoided, it makes for poor history. It is reasonable to forward that the six million figure is a myth and not a historical fact. However, one cannot sensibly do so on the premise of a competing myth.