The First Holocaust
Six Million Jews died in the Holocaust – we all “know” that, don’t we?
But how do we know?
And for how long have we known about it?
The following presentation is based on the book “The First Holocaust” by Don Heddesheimer,
which deals with “The Surprising Origin of the Six-Million Figure.”
This book is Volume 6 of the series “Holocaust Handbooks,”
a steadily growing series of groundbreaking research
into the biggest taboo of our modern society.
It was first published in 2003 by Castle Hill Publishers,
and is currently available in its 3rd edition of 2015.
This presentation is divided into three parts.
Part one tries to find an answer to the question,
since when the world has known that six million died in the Holocaust.
Historians usually refer to the Allied postwar tribunals at Nuremberg
as the origin of the claim that six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis during WWII.
Here, we will trace back that symbolic number,
starting with the Nuremberg Trials in 1946,
and going back in time to Hitler’s rise to power in 1933.
In the second part, we make a big leap back in time
to the first time the six million figure was used,
and then we will go through a large amount of media reports
claiming that Jews were suffering in Eastern Europe
prior to, during and after the First World War.
Yes, the First, not the Second!
During the third and final part,
I will give an overview on the appearance of the six-million figure
in the mass media throughout more than a century,
and after summarizing our topic, I will briefly discuss what this all means.
First, let’s see what we are told by the experts
as to why we know that six million died.
When we dig into the matter, the surprising result is that,
for a long time after the Second World War,
expert historians on this topic have stated that we actually don’t really know at all.
For instance, when asked during a trial in Germany in 1979,
German mainstream historian Dr. Martin Broszat,
who at that time was one of the worldwide leading historians in Third Reich studies,
stated that the six million figure was more of a symbolic figure
rather than one that has been substantiated with solid demographic research.
In fact, it took until the early 1990s
for mainstream Holocaust historians to publish a study
that claims to thoroughly investigate the question
of how many Jews fell victim to “the Holocaust.”
Its title translates as “Dimension of Genocide.”
It was written under the aegis of Dr. Wolfgang Benz,
who at that time was a German professor for studies on anti-Semitism, of all things.
The book has never been translated into any other language.
As a matter of fact, this book was thereaction to a 1983 “revisionist” study
that had challenged the accuracy of the six million figure.
The cover image of its current edition is shown here to the right.
In their attempt to refute that evil revisionist study,
Benz and his colleagues got lucky,
because their research confirmed what has always been known.
He wraps it up on page 17 of this book, were he states:
“The bottom line indicates a minimum of 5.29
and a maximum of just over 6 million [Jewish victims of the Holocaust].”
In an attempt to quell any skepticism about this lucky find,
Benz asserts three pages later:
“Of course the purpose of this project also was not
to prove any pre-set figure (‘six million’).”
Such an uncalled-for disclaimer might make skeptical minds suspicious,
but we won’t analyze this any deeper here.
It is usually assumed that the Nuremberg Military Tribunal during 1945 and 1946
was the origin of the claim that six million fell victim to the Holocaust.
And in fact, during that trial two witnesses made claims to that end:
First we have Wilhelm Höttl, shown to the right.
Höttl was a German secret-service agent whose written affidavit was submitted to the court.
It can be found on page 85 following in volume 31 of the published trial transcript.
The affidavit is in German, and its decisive passage says, I translate:
“[Eichmann told me that] In the various extermination camps
some four million Jews have been killed,
while two more million perished in other ways.”
In his 1997 autobiography, the cover of which is shown to the right,
Höttl confirmed to have heard those numbers from Eichmann.
The second Nuremberg witness was Dieter Wisliceny.
He is the fellow I have marked with a red arrow in the picture.
During the war he was a German official working for Adolf Eichmann
at the task of deporting Jews.
He testified in person during the Nuremberg Trial.
His testimony can be found in volume 4 of the IMT documentation,
and the passage of interest here can be found on page 371, where it states:
“He [Adolf Eichmann] said he would leap laughing into the grave
because the feeling that he had 5 million people on his conscience
would be for him a source of extraordinary satisfaction.”
Note that Wisliceny falls one million short of the require six million.
Since Eichmann was on the run after the war,
it has been speculated that he was used as a convenient scape goat
during the Nuremberg trials.
But Eichmann ended up before his own trial some 15 years later,
after he had been kidnapped by Mossad agents from his Argentine refuge in 1961.
Interestingly, when he was asked during that trial
whether the Jews he had deported knew what was awaiting them,
he made some rather astonishing remarks.
That trial was actually taped, and that footage is online on YouTube and elsewhere.
Let’s listen to this interesting passage:
“Die Leute draußen, die haben das lange nicht gewusst.
Ich selber wusste es ja auch nicht, ob diese Transporte zum Beispiel,
wenn sie ins Generalgouvernment fuhren, dann wusste ich,
dass ihnen überhaupt nichts passierte, solange Globocnik nicht gearbeitet hatte.
Fuhren sie nach Auschwitz, so ist es ja klar, dass hier das Gros in die Arbeit überführt wurde.
Auch mich hat man im Unklaren gelassen, wieviel oder wer etwa getötet wird.
Ich habe mich allerdings auch nicht darum gekümmert,
denn es ist nicht mein Aufgabenbereich gewesen.
Es lässt sich nicht leugnen,
dass ich durch die Tatsache meiner befohlenen Reisen nach dem Osten
von den Sachen gewusst habe.”
Now, most of us don’t understand what he says, as it is German.
But there’s a twist to it.
If you listen to that trial footage, you realize that,
whenever there is a language problem between Eichmann and the judge or the prosecutor,
they all switch over to flawless, accent-free German.
Like the defendant, both the chief prosecutor and the presiding judge were Germans.
So this was a trial among Germans,
one of whom had once assisted in the persecution of his fellow countrymen.
Anyway, here is my translation of what Eichmann just said:
Quote, “The people out there did not know that for a long time.
I myself didn’t know either whether these transports…
for instance, if they went into the General Government [occupied Poland],
then I knew that nothing happened [to them] as long as Globocnik was not working [there].
If they went to Auschwitz, it is very clear that the majority was deployed for labor there.
I was kept in the dark as well how many or who would be killed.
But I did not worry about that either,
because that was not my area of responsibilities.
It cannot be denied, though, that I knew about the things
due to the service trips I was ordered to make to the East.”
Interestingly, a little after the scene we’ve just seen,
Eichmann mentions that he has learned about some aspects of the Holocaust
by reading Gerald Reitlinger’s book “The Final Solution,”
which makes me think that his own recollections, and thus his testimony,
might have been polluted by what he’s learned after the war.
But again, we won’t go there, because that would lead us too far astray.
When we look deeper into the matter, however, a slightly different image appears.
When doing research for his book “Nuremberg: The Last Battle,”
controversial British historian David Irving rummaged through many archives
and personal records of people involved in those trials.
He found out that in June 1945, before that trial began,
the man who was organizing it, U.S. Chief Prosecutor Robert Jackson,
met three lawyers representing major influential Jewish organizations.
Jackson wanted to get their input for the upcoming trial.
Regarding Jewish population losses, Jackson asked them straight forward:
“How great were those [Jewish] losses?”
One of those lawyers, Dr. Robinson, responded spontaneously:
“Six million.”
But how could he have known this?
The mystery deepens as we go back in time.
Already in December of 1944, when the Allied armies were about to enter Germany,
the Soviet propagandist Ilya Ehrenburg
wrote in the Soviet’s English language newspaper "Soviet War News," as reproduced here:
“In regions they seized, the Germans killed all the Jews,
from the old folk to infants in arms.
Ask any German prisoner why his fellow countrymen annihilated six million innocent people,
and he will reply quite simply: ‘Why, they were Jews.’”
That’s not the only time this symbolic figure
appeared in that propaganda newspaper published for Anglo-Saxon readers.
It was repeated in the issues of January 4 and March 15, 1945.
We read there:
“The world now knows that Germany has killed six million Jews.”
Those articles were re-discovered by the German historian Dr. Joachim Hoffmann
who has reproduced them in the appendix to his 2001 book “Stalin’s War of Extermination”,
see its front cover here on the right.
Here the same question comes to mind:
How could Ehrenburg know that six million had been killed
before even a single Allied soldier had set foot onto German soil?
In fact, Ehrenburg knew about those six million already much earlier.
English newspapers were announcing in November of 1944
that Ehrenburg was about to publish a book on claimed German atrocities.
Here is a press release by the United Press
as published in the "Youngstown Vindicator" on November 27, 1944,
where we read about, quote,
“the German massacre of approximately six million European Jews.”
And down below we read that somewhat misspelled main editor of that book,
Ilya Ehrenburg.
Now, considering that writing a book takes months,
that six million figure must have been around already well before November 1944.
This book actually didn’t get published in the Soviet Union at that time,
probably because Stalin didn’t want to emphasize the Jews’ role as victims of the Germans.
It appeared only many years after the war.
Here is an edition that can currently be bought on Amazon,
again with Ehrenburg as the main editor.
That the six million figure is indeed older than November 1944
can be gleaned from the next writer,
Rabbi Chaim Weissmandl,
who become known for his efforts to save the Jews of Slovakia
from what he assumed would be certain extermination.
Wikipedia writes about him, quote:
“Largely by bribing diplomats,
Weissmandl was able to smuggle letters or telegrams to people
he hoped would help save the Jews of Europe,
alerting them to the progressive Nazi destruction of European Jewry.
It is known that he managed to send letters to Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt,
and he entrusted a diplomat to deliver a letter to the Vatican for Pope Pius XII.”
One of the most famous letters he wrote is widely quoted here,
for instance by the Jewish Virtual Library.
It stems from May 16, 1944,
and was allegedly written while Weissmandl was hiding in a cave in Poland.
If we scroll further down on their webpage on this letter, we read there, quote,
“why are you, fellow Jews and government ministers in all the free countries,
being silent about this slaughter,
in which some six million Jews have been murdered thus far,
and in which tens of thousands are now being murdered every day?”
Again we should ask: how could this cave dweller know this?
Weissmandl is such a big figure in the struggle to save Jews during the war
that there exists even a dedicated book on him,
here the book’s page on Amazon
One of the first mainstream authors referring to Weissmandl
was the Holocaust Historian Dr. Dawidowicz, shown to the right,
in her 1975 book “The War against the Jews.”
Not even May 1944 is the end of our six million journey through time.
Let’s leap backward a year: May 15, 1943.
The material shown here is taken from an eleven-minute documentary on YouTube named
“How do we know that six million Jews died in the Holocaust?”,
which has some additional interesting material along the same lines
as this present documentary.
You might want to watch it, too.
The first item of interest is an article in the Australian newspaper “The Advertiser”
dated May 15, 1943.
It mentions, quote, “the possibility of the complete wiping out of six million Jews.”
So this article does not claim that six million have already been murdered,
but that there is a chance that this will be done “by the barbarian Hun.”
The next entry is from the “Canadian Jewish Review” from just a day earlier.
Let’s watch this brief video clip as it moves across that paper.
Down here it states, quote:
“Two millions of Jews have already been done to death.
Six millions in mid-Europe are sentenced to die.”
So here as well, they predict that at the end of the war,
six millions might be the total death toll.
Our third quote is from the “Cumberland Evening Times” from Cumberland, Maryland.
It is from March 20, 1943,
and tells the reader what the Nazis were in the process of doing, quote:
“The Nazis set out in the beginning to destroy whole peoples.
They expected to obliterate from the earth not less than 6,000,000 Jews as a beginning.”
My last quote is from the “New York Times” of March 10, 1943,
where we read in a similar fashion
that “2,000,000 Jews” have already been “killed in Europe,”
and further down we read that
“four million left to kill are being killed, according to plan.”
One month earlier still, America’s magazine with the largest amount of readers,
“Reader’s Digest,” has a very interesting article which I want to briefly highlight here
by showing an excerpt from the 9th episode of the excellent 4¼-hour documentary
“One Third of the Holocaust,” which you can find on YouTube.
“We might find the answer in ‘Reader’s Digest,’ of all places.
In February 1943, the usual millions of copies were dropped
in rural, small-town and suburban mail boxes all over the United States.
You get an idea of what the magazine was like by a sampling of the article titles,
such as 'Vivas for Jorge Washington' and ‘Even soda pop goes to war.'
At the time, ‘Reader's Digest’ had the highest circulation of any magazine in the world.
The issue had an article called 'Remember Us!'
It said on page 107 that by the end of the war,
the Jews of Europe would be 'reduced from a minority to a phantom.'
In other words, there would be hardly any left.
The author puts out a number:
six million.
That's quite a prediction considering this is in the middle of war,
and that the main chambers at Auschwitz were still under construction.
In Hilberg's book on page 885, we see that, at the time,
the main chambers at Auschwitz hadn't even be finished being built.
So was the writer an investigative reporter stationed in Europe
with access to good information,
or a high-up government official?
Actually, the writer was a Jewish Hollywood script writer named Ben Hecht.
His internet movie database entry is huge.
This story in ‘Reader's Digest’ brought the Holocaust story
to the heartland of America for the first time."
Going back yet another year, let’s turn to America’s most prestigious newspaper,
the “New York Times.”
On December 13 of that year, this paper published an article
on statements made by several Rabbis throughout New York.
Right in the middle of that article is the section of interest.
It says there, quote:
“Authenticated reports point to two million Jews
who have already been slain by all manner of satanic barbarism,
and plans for the total extermination of all Jews upon whom the Nazis can lay their hands.
The slaughter of a third of the Jewish population in Hitler’s domain
and the threatened slaughter of all is a holocaust without parallel.”
Note the word “holocaust” here.
A week later, the “New York Times” reported that,
in addition to the two million already murdered,
another “five million were in danger of extermination.”
During the war years,
the “New York Times” published a number of rather revealing articles
on this and closely related issues,
which were first analyzed by Dr. Butz
in his 1976 book “The Hoax of the Twentieth Century,”
here shown in its currently available 4th edition of 2015,
which is volume 7 of the “Holocaust Handbooks” series.
Needless to say, that wasn’t the end of it either.
Here is an article from the “Palm Beach Post” of June 25, 1940,
the day France surrendered to the German Wehrmacht.
It is headlined “Doom of European Jews is seen if Hitler wins,”
which is meant to stir up the world against Hitler
in order to prevent peace to be concluded at reasonable terms,
which Germany was offering at that point.
The chairman of the World Jewish Congress Nahum Goldmann is quoted as having said that
“six million Jews in Europe are doomed to destruction”
in case the world makes peace with Hitler.
How could Goldmann know that?
And why would that be so in the first place,
as it was the continuation of the war rather than its early termination
which is said to have triggered the Holocaust.
But again, discussing this would get us off topic, so we won’t go there.
The next item is from January 1939, almost 9 months before the outbreak of the war.
It reports among other things what the Czech politician Masaryk had to say.
Masaryk was a disgruntled Politician who couldn’t stand seeing his country,
the former Czechoslovakia,
falling apart due to constant conflict between its various ethnic groups.
He blamed that conflict on Germany
and was looking for allies in his propaganda efforts against Germany,
here among American Jewish lobby groups.
But that’s not why I bring it up.
If we scroll down on this lengthy article,
we find an interesting passage toward the end where a Rabbi is quoted.
He has his own agenda,
and that is trying to get support for Jewish emigration from Europe.
In that context he said that it would be “impossible to evacuate six million Jews.”
Again, the mystical figure.
A little later, a certain Dr. Chaim Weizmann is mentioned
as being supportive of this migration effort –
here is his liking.
We will encounter him next in our journey back in time.
We are now in 1936.
At that time, the so-called Peel commission, formed by the British government,
was investigating the causes of Arab unrest in Palestine,
which at that time was under British control.
In that context, Jewish leaders were also heard,
some of which advocated the formation of a Jewish autonomous area in Palestine,
or even an independent state.
Here you can see a map that shows how the country that today forms Israel
would have been divided up according to one suggestion being discusses back then.
The 1937 Peel Commission Report concluded as follows:
“Partition offers a possibility of finding a way through [the difficulties],
a possibility of obtaining a final solution of the [Jewish] problem
which does justice to the rights and aspirations of both the Arabs and the Jews
and discharges the obligations undertaken towards them twenty years ago
to the fullest extent that is practicable in the circumstances of the present time.”
Nothing came of it back then, though, as we know today.
However, what is interesting in our present context
is the testimony of one witness who testified in 1936 during the Commission’s hearing:
Dr. Chaim Weizmann.
Here is an article from the London “Times” of November 26, 1936,
which reports about Weizmann’s testimony.
I put a red box around what interest us here and enlarge it.
He spoke of “six million unwanted unfortunates” in Eastern Europe
“who were condemned to be penned up in places where they could not live.
Even those in Western Europe were now threatened.
Second was the world problem created by the presence of these six million people
without a future whose condition was a threat to Europe.
A certificate permitting emigration to Palestine was regarded as a certificate of freedom.”
So here the future first president of the State of Israel lets the cat out of the bag:
Jewish leaders were advocating a Zionist agenda,
and six million suffering Jews were a convenient argument for this.
Again, we won’t discuss here whether Weizmann’s claims are accurate.
We only note that he used the magical figure.
Let’s look into two media reports during the very first years of Hitler’s reign.
The first is from the “newspaper of record,” the “New York Times” of September 8, 1935.
This article is actually mainly about Jews in Poland,
but it features what we are looking for.
I quote:
“the first world conference of the Federation of Polish Jews
[was] being attended by sixty delegates
from eighteen countries representing 6,000,000 Jews.”
Although there is nothing in it about suffering Jews, the next media item sure is.
It is from March 29, 1933, and addresses claimed persecutions of Jews in Germany.
It says that the Joint Distribution Committee
“is now active in relief and reconstruction work in Eastern Europe
where 6,000,000 Jews are involved.
The work there is done through the office in Berlin.”
This brings up a topic which brings us to the second part of this presentation,
because the Joint Distribution Committee mentioned here
has been involved in Jewish relief activities for many years
before Hitler came to power.
Six Million Jews mentioned before Hitler came to power.
At this point we’ll stop our journey back in time and do our journey chronologically.
We start with looking into Jewish lobbying activities prior the First World war,
then we will briefly look into what was going on during that first world conflagration,
after which we will investigate Jewish fundraising campaigns between the World Wars.
Finally we will follow the money to see what was really going on.
We start by going back to the year
when the magical number was mentioned for the first time.
It was in the year 1850 in a book published by a Christian Society
trying to make Jews convert to Christianity.
On page 216 of this book, we find some statistical numbers
on religious affiliations of mankind during that era.
Here it is, enlarged, with the magical number underline,
claiming that among the billion people then living on the planet,
six million were Jews.
The next occurrence we have located stems from the year 1866
in yet another Christian publication,
which repeats the number from 1850 on its page 677.
Probably in lack of any reliable demographic data, that number keeps popping up elsewhere,
for instance in the “New York Times” of September 12, 1869,
where we read under the headline “Sunday Notes,”
with reference to a new Jewish weekly,
that “there are now living about 6,000,000 Israelites,
nearly one half of whom live in Europe.”
This is repeated again in the same newspaper on October 31 of that same year
under the headline “Religious Intelligence.”
Twenty years later, in a “New York Times” article of February 10, 1889,
which actually asked the question “How many Jews are there?,”
that number still hadn’t changed.
This makes me suspect that nobody was actually counting the Jews;
they were just copying that figure from whoever wrote it first,
since it was a round, sexy number.
Before rushing ahead, let’s take a step backward in time.
On March 13, 1881, the Russian Czar Alexander II was assassinated by political radicals.
At the right you can see a portrait of him,
and below a painting showing an artist’s take on the scene
when that assassination actually happened in Petersburg.
Since many political radicals in Russia were Jewish,
pogroms against Jews flared up in Russia lasting for more than a year.
Although the Czar’s government didn’t seem to have contributed to them,
they were accused of not doing enough to put a stop to it.
Here is the cover of a book which tells the grim story of that year.
“The New York Times” reported on those pogroms,
for instance in a long article on January 28, 1882, with the headline
“Russian Jewish Horrors. A Nine-Months Record of Rapine, Murder, and Outrage,”
which summarized the events of the prior nine months.
On April 22, 1882, in an article headlined “Russia and the Jews,”
the same newspaper even used a buzzword in connection with the Russian pogroms:
“annihilation.”
The next Czar, Alexander III, was massively oppose to political reforms
and wanted to turn the clock back,
while the world around him expected Russia to become more liberal.
In particular, he had an ax to grind with the Jews,
as they were the ones pushing most ardently for liberalization.
Hence, in May 1882, Czar Alexander III tightened residential and professional limits
for the Jews in Russia.
Several towns and provinces subsequently expelled their Jews,
erroneously thinking that the Czar had issued a ukase
expelling them from Russia altogether.
As a result, Jews started emigrating from Russia by the thousands.
The “New York Times” was reporting about this ongoing persecution of the Jews in Russia,
peaking in 1891 with numerous articles:
The first one appeared on January 26, where it said:
“Russia’s population of five million to six million Jews”
and elsewhere “about six million persecuted and miserable wretches.”
The Times’s reporting on Jews in Russia culminated in a series of 15 articles
by a certain Herold Frederic stretching from early September to late December 1891;
almost all of them were printed on the front page.
The first was titled “Russia’s War on the Jews,”
while all the other subsequent 14 articles were titled “An Indictment of Russia.”
The second sequel of this series of September 12
gave as the total number of Jews living in Russia again an estimate of 6,000,000.
And now here they come, all 15 of them.
I won’t go into any details,
again because we’re not concerned with the underlying claimed or actual historical events,
but rather with the origin of this magical number.
I only want to highlight here that second sequel,
which at the bottom of the first column says about the number of Jews living in Russia, quote:
“a total of six million is most nearly correct.”
This number was repeated in an NYT article headlined "Russia and Religious Liberty"
on March 15, 1896. Here it is, underlined in red.
During the reign of Czar Alexander the III, Russia wanted to get rid of its Jews,
but no country would accept them.
With no place to go, Jewish lobby groups were looking for a way out.
That was a situation which would repeat itself
some 50 years later in Germany, by the way.
In 1897, Theodor Herzl published his now famous book
“Der Judenstaat” ( The Jewish State),
which gave the Zionist Movement a tremendous boost.
Jewish media and organizations increasingly lobbied
for the emigration of Jews to Palestine and for the resurrection of Israel.
For example, as the “New York Times” reported on June 11, 1900,
during a “Zionists’ Mass Meeting” in New York, Rabbi Stephen Wise said:
“There are 6,000,000 living, bleeding, suffering arguments in favor of Zionism”
Although Russia started implementing serious liberal reforms
with the succession of Czar Nicholas II to the throne in 1894,
Russia wasn’t coming to rest.
On April 19-21, 1903, an anti-Jewish pogrom occurred in the Russian town of Kishinev.
On May 16, “The New York Times” reported about the event,
and way down toward the lower end of this long article we read, quote:
“We charge the Russian Government with responsibility of the Kishineff massacre.
We say it is steeped to the eye in the guilt of this holocaust.”
– yep, there it is. A holocaust!
But that’s not all. Further below we read, quote:
“So long as a ‘civilized’ Government brands five million people
as a perilous pest which must be slowly annihilated,
so long its baser subjects will think themselves justified
in accelerating the process of extermination with knives, axes, and hatches.”
So, annihilation, extermination and a holocaust.
It’s all there.
The article’s only deficit is that it missed the magical figure by a million.
In the same vein “The New York Times” wrote on May 20 of that same year,
again with reference to the Kishinev massacre, quote:
“This barbaric Holocaust…”, end quote.
The spell was broken. A fashionable word had been minted: The Holocaust.
On November 10, 1905, the “New York Times” used the buzz word again.
The background of this was the failed attempt to overthrow the Czar.
During that aborted revolution, political radicals, mostly socialists and communists,
failed to do what they would succeed in doing 12 years later.
As before, this attempted revolution was again fueled
by a disproportionate number of Jewish radicals
and with a lot of Jewish support even from abroad.
“The New York Times” reported this attempted putsch rather favorably.
But when things went bad for the revolutionaries,
retaliatory excesses against Jews were again on the rise,
resulting in this renewed accusation of a “holocaust” by the “New York Times.”
Three days later, on Nov. 13, we read the following in “The New York Times” on page 1:
“Jews” are being “exterminated”
and then on page 4, in an article denouncing the Russian Orthodox Church
for its alleged responsibility in those pogroms,
the “Times” uses the word “holocaust” again with reference to the Kishinev massacre.
It is even claimed that the Russian Church had, quote,
“repeatedly declared that the Jew must be either converted or exterminated.”
Again, we won’t check whether that’s true.
We are only interested in the history of the magical number,
and while we’re at it, if we stumble over similar buzzwords,
I’ll present them here, too.
As we have seen during the previous slide,
as we approach the First World War, things are heating up,
and Jewish lobby groups are pushing for a Jewish homeland.
Here is an article in “The New York Times” from October 20, 1904,
pipe-dreaming about Britain handing over to the Jews some colony in Africa.
“England’s Offer of Land in South Africa,” says the subtitle,
and further below the promised land has shifted to East Africa.
But what we’re after can be found further below,
the reason for Jews trying to find some homeland:
the suppressed “six million Jews in Russia.”
I mentioned before that “The New York Times” was supportive
of the aborted Russian revolution of 1905.
Here is an article from January 29, 1905, proving the point.
It was written in the wake of civil unrest which eventually led to that failed putsch.
A Jewish preacher is quoted saying that, quote,
“a free and a happy Russia, with its six million Jews,
would possibly mean the end of Zionism.”
In other words, if a revolution would liberate Russia,
Jews would get lucky and wouldn’t have to leave Russia.
After the failed 1905 Revolution in Russia,
“The New York Times” published more reports on six million suffering Jews.
Here are some examples:
Reporting about the resignation of a top official of the Russian Orthodox Church,
we read on November 1, 1905, quote:
“From 1890 to 1902 he caused six million Jews to be expelled from Russia.”
Now, if that were so, there wouldn’t have been any Jews left in Russia afterwards,
but be that as it may,
right now we’re only interested in tracking that symbolic figure here.
On March 25, 1906, we read in the newspaper of record that, quote,
“startling reports of the condition and future of Russia’s six million Jews”
indicate that, quote,
“the Russian Government’s studied policy for the ‘solution’ of the Jewish question
is systematic and murderous extermination.”
Does that rhetoric sound familiar?
Almost five years later, in an article from March 13, 1910,
about Jews fleeing from Russia we read in the same newspaper again
that magical number of Jews suffering in Russia.
And again on April 11, 1910 on the sad plight of the Russian Jews,
where, quote, “six million souls” are subject
to “systematic, relentless, quiet grinding down,”
whatever that means.
October 31, 1911: “Christian Churches plea for the Jews,”
and the “New York Times” reports in the middle column of that article
about a resolution passed, where we read that, quote,
“The six million Jews of Russia are singled out for systematic oppression
and for persecution by due process of law.”
My last pre-World War I example from “The New York Times” is from December 10, 1911.
This is a huge full-page article dedicated to the oppressed Jews in Russia.
The right-most column has the buzzwords we are looking for at the very bottom
in the red box shown here, which I magnify.
Now, the “New York Times” sure wasn’t the only media outlet
propagating that six million Jews were being persecuted and exterminated by Russia,
but it was the most prominent and prestigious source to do so.
In a similar vein, one of the most prestigious publication of American Jewry,
the “American Jewish Year Book,”
wrote on page 308 of its edition covering the years 1911-1912, quote,
“The position of our [Jewish] co-religionists in Russia grows increasingly deplorable […].”
and further down, quote:
“Russia has since 1890 adopted a deliberate plan to expel
or exterminate six millions of its people […].”
This frenzy was jacked up to a near-fever pitch, once the Great War had broken out.
Here are some quotes from “The New York Times” published during that conflict:
On December 1914 we read about, quote,
“the plight of more than six million Jews who live within the war zone”.
On January 14, 1915, in support of a fund-raising campaign,
we are told that, quote, “more than six million Jews are in the very heart of the war zone.”
On February 28, 1916, again in connection with an attempt to raise funds,
the “Times” reports that, quote, “Nearly six million Jews are ruined.”
Almost at the end of the war, on October 18, 1918,
in an attempt to get a billion dollars from American donors
in support of whatever was happening in Russia back then
– I think they had a – quote, unquote – successful revolution there for a change –
the "Times" reported in its subtitle that “Six Million Souls Will Need Help”,
without saying what kind of souls they are,
but further down this is then spelled out: “Six Million Jews Need Help.”
In the middle of the First World War,
the American Jewish Committee published a booklet
which played a major role in shaping public opinion in the U.S.
as to the situation of Jews in Russia,
because 25,000 free copies of this booklet were sent to leaders of U.S. society
and molders of public opinion, including President Wilson,
members of the Presidential Cabinet and Congress, and the media.
The language used in this book was subsequently reused extensively by other sources,
such as the "New York Times."
The general theme of this publication was
that Jews in Eastern Europe experienced a unique suffering
which was not experienced by any other group of people.
The booklet claimed that Jews were uniquely denied elementary rights
and that they were victims of government-sponsored persecution.
What interests us here are buzzwords like “six million” and “extermination”:
On page 12 it's claimed
that Russia has a campaign of extermination running against the Jews;
on page 19 it talks about six million Jews living in squalor and misery;
on page 20 it states that there are six million Jews in Russia,
and further below that they live like prison inmates;
on page 29 we have again the six million Russian Jews;
on page 47 it states that the six million Russian Jews ought to loyal to their country
and in a similar vein on page 60;
and finally on page 66,
claiming that nearly half of these six million Jews are now without means of support.
Roughly a year after the end of World War I,
an article appeared in the Jewish periodical “The American Hebrew”
with the headline “The Crucifixion of Jews Must Stop!”
It contains so many buzzwords
that it can rightly be called the pinnacle of pre-World War II Holocaust propaganda.
We read here, quote:
“From across the sea six million men and women call to us for help…”
A little further down, that magical number is repeated.
We read that, quote, “six million human beings are being whirled toward the grave,”
and that, quote, “six million men and women are dying…”
The next paragraph even says, quote, “In this threatened holocaust of human life…”
and in the next column it speaks about, quote, “six million famished men and women.
Six million men and women are dying.”
Finally we read that, quote, “because of this war for democracy,
six million Jewish men and woman are starving across the ocean.”
Never mind that in this so-called “war for democracy,”
the Czarist monarchy fought alongside the British constitutional monarchy
against the constitutional monarchies of Germany and Austria.
Democracy had nothing to do with it.
But again, we’re not concerned with historical facts here
outside of tracking down that symbolic figure, so I’ll leave it at that.
As already mentioned before,
Jewish organizations started raising huge amounts of money
in order to support the Jews in Russia.
If we want to understand what was going on at that time,
we need a brief summary of those events.
Since the communist putsch in late 1918, a brutal civil war was raging in Russia.
The communist “Reds” were opposed by the counter-revolutionary “Whites,”
who were units mostly loyal to the monarchy.
Ethnic Jews, most of whom had been the most ardent enemies
of the Czarist system for decades for understandable reasons,
dominated many of the leading ranks of the “Reds.”
Consequently, anti-Jewish feelings among the “Whites”
and their supporters grew immensely.
The result of this were more anti-Jewish pogroms,
but this time the Jews were willing to fight back.
For example, in an article of September 8, 1919,
the “New York Times” reported on massacres against Jews
committed by anti-Semitic gangs and by the counter-revolutionary units.
According to that article, 127,000 Jews had already been killed in pogroms,
and all six million were threatened to be next.
Further down it calls these pogroms massacres,
and toward the end it states, quote:
“this fact that the population of six million souls in Ukrainia
and in Poland have received notice through action and by word
that they are going to be completely exterminated.”
On December 20, 1922, the “New York Times” reported with pride
how Jews had formed their own militia in the young Soviet Union
to fight against anti-Jewish gangs and counter-revolutionary insurgents
in order to protect, quote,
“the lives and interests of five million of their race living in Russia.”
At that time, when the Soviets had won the civil war,
such a militia army was possible only with the Soviet government’s support
or at least tacit condoning.
There is another, 22-minute-long video on YouTube titled “Six Million Jews 1915-1938”
at the address given here which I can highly recommend.
It shows a number of original newspapers of that time period
and briefly highlights similar buzzwords as we are tracking here.
The disturbing question that this raises is:
were Jewish groups in the U.S. supporting the Communist Revolution?
Fact is that, by 1921,
Jewish pressure groups in the U.S. feared a collapse of communist Russia,
as they expected this to lead to a gargantuan pogrom against the Jews in Russia.
A “New York Times” article of July 20, 1921 gets that point across already in the subtitle,
which states that massacres are threatened,
should the power of the Soviet regime wane.
We read there, quote:
“Russia’s six million Jews are facing extermination by massacre.
As the famine is spreading, the counter-revolutionary movement
is gaining and the Soviet’s control is waning.”
The fundraising campaigns by Jewish lobby groups in the U.S.
were therefore focused not only on helping destitute Jews,
but also on pressuring the U.S. government to intervene.
One might also wonder where the Jews in Russia got the means
to organize and arm an army of 500,000 Jewish soldiers…
Interestingly, this article was copied from the “Chicago Daily Tribune,”
which, however, printed this article on the same date with a misleading headline,
trying to imply that the Jews were fleeing from the communists,
although the article states clearly that they only feared a defeat of the Reds
during that revolutionary war.
Let’s now quickly go through a number of ads and articles
dealing with the fundraising campaigns initiated by Jewish organizations in the U.S.
after World War One with the aim of supporting Jews
and their various projects in Europe and the Soviet Union,
whatever those projects might have been.
My first example is an article in the “New York Times” of November 12, 1919,
which talks about six million starving Jews in Europe,
and about thirty million dollars which have already been spent to help them.
Here is another one from April 21, 1920,
scrolling down, we find, well, this time only five million starving Jews in Europe.
This is an ad published in the “New York Times” on May 1 of that same year.
It’s by the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee,
and they are asking for big dollars to make sure
that six million lives are no longer at stake.
This ad by the JDC is from two days later,
imploring to save the lives of six million Jews by handing over the money.
The previous ad was accompanied by an editorial article
talking about a catastrophe taking place in Russia and neighboring countries
but again missing the mark by a million,
as it talks only about five million starving Jews.
But we’re not picky.
Two days later, yet another ad with the same spiel by the JDC.
And in the same edition, ten pages on, we find this ad, also from the JDC.
Again two days later, they’re at it again,
this time with an article deploring the six million Jewish war sufferers
in Eastern Europe and asking for money.
The campaign lost some of its momentum later that year,
but it was rekindled in 1926, for instance with an ad like this,
published in the “New York Times” on April 21, 1926.
It doesn’t mention six million suffering Jews in that ad,
only that, quote, “millions of Jews,” in fact, quote “a whole people is dying.”
But they actually asks for six million dollars for a change instead.
This one is from late 1926 and talks about five million suffering Jews,
stating that the JDC has so far sent some sixty-two million dollars
to Jewish sufferers in Europe
which were, quote, “distributed among those five million destitute Jews,”
but that more was needed.
Not that all this fundraising helped much,
because after almost fifteen years of more or less uninterrupted fundraising,
six million Jews were still dying in Eastern Europe,
as the “Montreal Gazette” claimed on December 29, 1931.
So the JDC wanted some two and a half million more dollars.
You get the picture.
Let us now focus on what happened with all that money.
Don Heddesheimer spends quite some time tracking down those millions of dollars,
which today would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
This graphic shows how much the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee collected
from its inception in late 1914 until 1934.
That chart was taken from a book published in 1935
by the Jewish billionaire banker Felix Warburg.
All in all, the JDC raised some 77 million dollars throughout those years.
While most of the funds raised in the war and immediate postwar years
were spent mostly on helping people in need,
later years saw a shift toward a larger portion of reconstruction activities.
The Joint Distribution Committee was
– and still is to this day –
a Jewish organization which was represented by some of the most influential
and rich individuals on the planet,
like Louis D. Brandeis, an associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court from 1916 to 1939;
Henry Morgenthau senior, U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during the First World War,
and father of Henry Morgenthau junior,
the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury during the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt;
U.S. banker Jacob H. Schiff,
and Cyrus L. Sulzberger, a leading figure in many U.S. Jewish organizations,
and the already mentioned Felix Warburg.
This image here shows some of these celebrities
as published in the book mentioned on the right.
But that’s not the whole story.
Fact is that tens of millions of these dollars raised
did not just serve emergency relief and reconstruction activities,
as the JDC claimed in the chart just shown.
An article in the “New York Times” of September 7, 1927,
accused members of the JDC of misappropriating millions of these donations
for their own ends.
As much as 40%, it was claimed, may have, quote,
“disappeared in the manipulations by the bankers on the subject of exchange.”
No formal investigation was ever launched, though,
so we don’t know for sure what exactly happened.
Fact is that, in addition to the above-mentioned projects,
those millions of U.S. dollars were also used
to support Jewish-communist agricultural settlements throughout the Soviet Union.
They moreover served, quote, “general improvements,
electrification of villages, irrigation, water supply and other projects”
throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union,
as the JDC itself admitted in a 1939 book
with the title “Twenty Five Years of American Aid to Jews Overseas.
A Record of the Joint Distribution Committee.”
In another JDC book published in 1953, we find this remarkable admission, quote:
“Without the full cooperation of the Russian Government,
these tasks could not have been accomplished.”
In other words, the Soviet Union welcomed this massive influx of U.S. capital,
meant to stabilize the lives of Russian Jews,
since it also helped stabilize this revolutionary regime to no small degree.
As hinted at before, it would also not be surprising to find out
that some of the funds were used to support the Jewish Militias
fighting alongside the Red Army during the revolutionary civil war in the early 1920.
And that’s only regarding funds
that were raised and transferred to the Soviet Union through official channels…
But again, that’s not the focus of this presentation.
In the last part of this presentation,
we will approach our topic in a broader, more general way.
For this purpose I have tapped into three databases which can be accessed online.
First we have the Library of Congress Search Engine of Historic American Newspapers,
which features digitized U.S. newspapers from 1836 to 1922.
I have searched it for the terms “six million Jews,” both written out and as a number.
The first case, I have found 71 results,
and in the second 198.
Curious as I was, I also search the database for
seven, five, four, three, two and one million.
The results are given in parentheses.
So there is no particular preponderance for six million.
However, when looking up the actual newspaper articles,
it turns out that only the entries of seven, six and five million
are predominantly about claims of suffering Jews or Jews in danger of being exterminated,
with a focus on five and six million.
Lower figures are usually about some mundane issue,
like how many Jews live in New York or in the U.S. or some other country, for instance.
Here are three examples of entries I have found using this database,
which meet our criteria.
I will just scroll through them without boring you with even more details.
If you want to read it, just pause this video.
I have done the same kind of search on the “New York Times” database at the address given,
and for editions spanning from 1851 to 1939.
This results in only four entries for “six million Jews” with the number written out,
and sixteen entries with the actual number.
Results for other round-million figures are again listed in parentheses,
where the same observation applies as mentioned before.
Here are three examples of the “New York Times”
writing actually about seven million suffering, starving, dying Jews.
Stop the video to read details, if you wish.
I’ve also searched the database of the “Chicago Tribune,”
but the results there are rather meagre.
After all, the “New York Times” was owned and run by Jews,
whereas the “Chicago Tribune” was not.
This may account for the difference,
but the “Chicago Daily Tribune,” as it was called back then,
was not immune to the six-million propaganda either,
as this example of 1919 shows,
which states that, quote, “more than six million Jews are suffering…”
Now, if you think I have presented a lot of material
published prior to the end of the Second World War
which refers to six million suffering and dying Jews,
think again.
Because there is more, and the most comprehensive list I’ve seen so far,
spanning from the years 1900 to the end of World War Two with currently 278 entries,
can be found on the internet address listed here.
Don’t worry, we won’t get into any of them here.
I’ll just let some of the first entries scroll through to give you an impression.
If you are interested in the entire list,
you can get there also by simply entering the Google shortcut Goo.gl/h8auqj.
Now, if you are trying to convince a skeptic, this list might not do the trick,
because anyone can make up such a list.
In that case you’d have to present not just the source information,
but reproductions of the actual newspaper articles.
And guess what…
That’s been done by a very diligent researcher as well.
It has been published as an eBook with the title “Six Million Open Gates,”
whose cover is shown here.
It can be downloaded free of charge at the address given.
If that’s too much to type, just use the Google shortcut.
This book contains reproductions of 240 media items between 1900 and late 1945.
I’m showing here only the first 21 entries.
The author of this book has gone to great length and huge expenses
to put this work together.
So in case you need to see the actual article to believe it,
just grab an electronic copy of that book.
And make no mistake: this list is still not complete!
Let’s take a more scientific, statistical approach to the matter at hand.
The world’s largest internet search engine Google has posted millions of books online.
This database can be used to find out,
how often a certain term occurs in books associated with a certain date,
usually the date of publication.
Here is a graph showing the result for the term “six million Jews.”
I have also done the same search for the same term
in the second most common media language, which is German.
The results for “6 Millionen Juden” are shown in red.
Now, let’s make an overlay.
The tendency in both languages is similar,
but the peaks are more pronounced in the German,
maybe because there is less data.
Anyway, we see here a first rise of that figure
with ongoing pogroms in Russia under Czar Alexander III
then a steep rise starting just prior to the First World War,
with a peak during the fundraising campaign of the early 1920s,
and another, less pronounced one during the campaign’s second phase
in the mid and late 1920.
Next we have a slight rise during the early years of Nazi Germany,
a further slow rise during the first years of the Second World War,
with an extreme rise after the outbreak of the German-Soviet war in mid-1941.
The curve hits a maximum in the mid and late 1940s
around the Nuremberg Tribunals and its legal and media aftermaths.
Then we have another sharp peak around the 1961 Eichmann trial in Jerusalem,
with a slight decrease in the Anglo-Saxon world,
but a more pronounced one in the German media sphere,
probably because the Germans weren’t quite in tune with the new zeitgeist yet.
The last rise of the curve indicates that “six million” has turned into a household term,
but the later decrease is probably merely due to newer books
being underrepresented in Google’s database due to copyright protection issues.
Let’s summarize what we’ve learned.
The term “six million Jews” could be found in Anglo-Saxon media reports
ever since the world’s Jewish population had reached roughly six million
in the mid-eighteen-hundreds.
The anti-Jewish pogroms and legal measures in Russia
after the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881 made “six million Jews” a buzzword.
Terms like “extermination” and “holocaust” made their first appearance in this context
at the dawn of the 20th century.
During the aborted Communist revolution of 1905,
these words were even used together with an alleged “solution of the Jewish question”
as a policy of “murderous extermination.”
The First World War with its subsequent Russian/Communist Revolution,
which was very popular among many Jews both in Russia and abroad,
resulted in further hardship for the Jews in Russia.
This in turn led to a steep increase in the use of these buzzwords.
Fundraising campaigns in the U.S. for Jews in Eastern Europe
kept those terms in the media during the early and mid-1920s.
The rise of National Socialism in Germany steadily reinvigorated the use of these terms
from the very beginning of the Third Reich.
We conclude, therefore, that we have known since the eighteen-eighties
that “six million Jews” have been threatened more or less continuously
with extermination in a holocaust.
So what? You may ask.
What is that supposed to prove, if anything?
Well, here are some tough questions:
In 1882, was there a “struggle for the annihilation of the Jews”?
In 1903, did the Russian government decide that Jews “must be annihilated,”
so that they underwent a “process of extermination” in “this barbaric holocaust”?
In 1905, was there a “holocaust” in which “Jews must be … exterminated?”
In 1906, was “the Russian Government’s policy”
to solve “the Jewish question” by way of “murderous extermination”?
In 1911, had “Russia … adopted” a “plan to … exterminate six million” Jews?
In 1915, was there a “Russian campaign of extermination” against the Jews?
In 1919, were “six million” Jews “dying… in this threatened holocaust?”
Were “6,000,000 [Jewish] souls… going to be completely exterminated”?
In 1920, was it necessary “to save six million [Jews] from extermination”?
In 1921, were “Russia’s 6,000,000 Jews… facing extermination by massacre”?
In 1926, was the “whole [Jewish] people… dying”?
To ask these questions in such a condensed form means to answer them.
Because what we are dealing with here was exaggeration and hyperbole.
Fact is that prior to the Communist Revolution,
holocaust and extermination claims were exaggerations used to lobby for
facilitation of Jewish immigration to the U.S. and to other countries,
creation of a Jewish national homeland,
and “regime change” in Russia.
Once that “regime change” had been accomplished in Russia at the end of World War One,
holocaust and extermination claims didn’t cease but rather continued.
This time these exaggerations were used
to raise funds meant to assist Jewish communities in Eastern Europe,
to prevent success of the tsarist counter-revolution and thus,
to effectively stabilize the fledgling Communist regime in Russia.
The advent of the Third Reich led to the repetition of some of the patterns:
holocaust and extermination claims were exaggerated
at least until the outbreak of the German-Soviet war,
which was by its very nature a counter-revolutionary war.
These exaggerations were again used to lobby for
facilitation of Jewish immigration to the U.S. and to other countries,
creation of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine,
and finally “regime change” in Germany.
We all know the outcome of that struggle.
Ok, so, Holocaust, extermination, six million Jewish victims,
and a murderous solution to the Jewish question,
all these are recycled terms, so to say.
But what about gas chambers?
They surely must be genuinely linked to the Third Reich, right?
Well, the truth is…
no.
On March 22, 1916, during the worst part of the First World War for Britain,
the traditionally anti-German newspaper “The Daily Telegraph”
published an article with the title “Atrocities in Serbia.”
In its subtitle it mentions 700,000 victims.
Now, all historians, without exception, agree today
that this “news report” was false atrocity propaganda.
But let’s read it. It says, quote:
“According to reliable information"
– yeah, sure –
"the victims of the Austrians and Bulgarians exceeded 700,000.
Whole districts, with towns and villages, have been depopulated by massacres.
Woman, children, and old men were shut up in the churches by the Austrians,
and either stabbed with the bayonet or suffocated by means of asphyxiating gas.
In one church in Belgrade 3,000 women, children, and old men were thus suffocated,” end quote.
Ok, so that was atrocity propaganda,
a lie designed to stir up the war-weary British public
so they would keep up the fight against their German brothers
who were offering peace since 1915.
Compare the previous article with this one, though,
which was again published by the rabidly anti-German “Daily Telegraph,”
this one on June 25, 1942.
Britain was again embroiled in a fratricidal war against their German brethren.
But this time, the 700,000 victims are already announced in the main title,
and the gas chambers have become mobile,
also by moving up from the lower half of the article to the subtitle.
We read here, quote:
“More than 700,000 Polish Jews have been slaughtered by the Germans
in the greatest massacre in the world’s history.”
Now, this time this news report was the whole and unembellished, indubitable truth!
And you better believe it, because doubting this can get you prison terms
of up to 10 years in Austria,
5 years in Germany, Russia and Israel,
three years in Italy, Switzerland, Poland and Hungary,
and lower prison terms in many more countries…
This is actually the only claimed event in the history of mankind
that has ever been protected from critical investigation by penal law!
But again, that’s not the subject of this presentation.
So be that as it may.
Fact is that with Germany’s collapse in 1945,
the nightmarish gas chambers
used to kill most of the six million Jews who fell victim to the Holocaust,
that is to say, the Nazi’s solution to the Jewish question
by means of murderous extermination
– note that any resemblance of the terms used here
with those used during past events is purely coincidental –
these gas chambers were a matter of the past, gone for good.
Done!
Wrong again!
False war propaganda struck again in 1991,
when the world was gearing up to wage a war against Saddam Hitler,
uh, sorry, Saddam Hussein.
During that first U.S.-led war against Iraq,
“The Jewish Press,” had this unobtrusive headline on the front page
of its issue dated February 21, 1991.
I’m not going to analyze it here.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center jumped on that same bandwagon
with the spring 1991 issue of their periodical “Response.”
Here is the title page of that infamous edition, where we read, quote:
“Germans produce Zyklon B in Iraq,” end quote.
They even show a German-made gas chamber
allegedly planned to be used on the Jews of Israel,
should Saddam ever make it there…
Again, everybody agrees today that this was just another case of wartime hysteria,
of false atrocity propaganda.
But it did the trick to whip the world into a war of extermination
against the nation of Iraq,
if I may borrow that term.
Does anyone care what the truth was?
So, at the end of this presentation,
let’s pose that initial question again:
Since when do we know that Six Million Jews died in the Holocaust?
To answer this question, we need to know two things:
First, which Six Million are we talking about?
And second, which holocaust?
Thank you for taking the time to watch this presentation.
We hope you enjoyed it and learned something about the mendacity of our mass media
when it comes to stirring up the world’s nations into waging war
and causing violent civil unrest, revolution and other means
of more or less violent forms of “regime change.”
And if you would like to read the book upon which this presentation is based,
you can find it on Amazon or anywhere else books can be bought.
Or go to www.HolocaustHandbooks.com for more information.