There’s an old Yiddish joke that illustrates the meaning of chutzpah:
A little old lady sold pretzels on a street corner for a dollar each. Every day a young man would leave his office building at lunch time and as he passed the pretzel stand he would leave her $1.00, but never take a pretzel.
This offering went on for more than 3 years. The two of them never spoke. One day as the young man passed the old lady's stand and left his dollar as usual, the pretzel lady spoke to him for the first time in over 3 years. Without blinking an eye she said: "They're $1.25 now."
Those who require a case study can watch Deborah Lipstadt in action.
Lipstadt is a professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University. Her awards, which are legion, result from her historical works that encompass the evolution of antisemitism from the WWII era to the Charlottesville protests. The Biden administration recently rewarded her scholarship by nominating her as Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism. You may recall that the confirmation was delayed, in part, after Lipstadt accused Senator Ron Johnson of “white supremacy/nationalism” for favorably comparing the Jan. 6 rioters to BLM activists (Lipstadt subsequently walked back this allegation). After languishing in congressional purgatory, her nomination eventually passed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and was confirmed by a Senate voice vote.
Lipstadt is best known, however, for her battle with British historian David Irving, who sued her for defamation after her book Denying the Holocaust accused him of being "one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial.” According to Lipstadt, Irving had mangled the historical record to further his conceit that the Nazis never plotted to exterminate Jewish people.
Lipstadt was correct on this point, as Irving’s books and speeches consistently downplay Nazi atrocities. Irving has argued, for instance, that any mass executions occurring under the Nazi regime were authored by rogue Einsatzgruppen whose butchery had somehow escaped Hitler’s notice. Gas chambers were strictly used to delouse clothing. The mounds of dead bodies in concentration camps resulted from the typhoid outbreaks and other epiphenomena that naturally flourish under any impromptu mass incarceration. Irving supported these eccentric notions by selectively surveying the archival records, invoking conspiracy theories to dismiss inconvenient testimony, and judiciously mistranslating the German language as needed (for example, when Heinrich Himmler spoke of “Ausrottung des jüdischen Volkes” in his 1943 speech in Poznan, Poland, he didn’t mean that Jewish people needed to be exterminated; Himmler was only advocating deportation because, you see, the word ausrotten has a secondary meaning of “to uproot”. German is apparently so nuanced that its meaning often eludes native speakers).
Irving also appealed to a forensic examination by Fred Leuchter, who tested the crumbling remains of several homicidal chambers in Auschwitz and concluded that they lacked the chemical residue of Zyklon B, the cyanide compound used to murder inmates. Subsequent analyses, however, have shown trace levels of Zyklon B in the putative gas chambers, although the levels were too low to yield the signature blue stains present in the delousing chambers.
However ill-advised his law suit might have seemed, Irving held a trump card: the trial’s locale. British libel law imposes the burden of proof on the plaintiff, which meant that Lipstadt had to prove that she had not defamed Irving — an imposing task. Lipstadt used the services of historians such as Richard Evans to debunk Irving’s scholarship. Evans and his students compiled a lengthy report that exposed the chicanery behind Dave’s methodology. A juicy excerpt from this report is featured in Evans’s Wikipedia article:
Not one of [Irving's] books, speeches or articles, not one paragraph, not one sentence in any of them, can be taken on trust as an accurate representation of its historical subject. All of them are completely worthless as history, because Irving cannot be trusted anywhere, in any of them, to give a reliable account of what he is talking or writing about. ... if we mean by historian someone who is concerned to discover the truth about the past, and to give as accurate a representation of it as possible, then Irving is not a historian.
Lipstadt prevailed in court. Those who want a detailed account of her struggle can read her autobiographical History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier or watch Denial, a movie based on the trial.
Lipstadt’s decades-long study of the Holocaust has unveiled its multifaceted nature. In The Atlantic, Lipstadt classifies denial as either hardcore or softcore. While hardcore denial simply rejects the historical reality of Nazi-sponsored genocide, softcore denial “does not deny the facts, but it minimizes them, arguing that Jews use the Holocaust to draw attention away from criticism of Israel. Softcore denial also makes all sorts of false comparisons to the Holocaust.” These type of deniers often “de-Judaiz[e]” the Holocaust by focusing too much on Gentile victims.
In fact, Lipstadt argues that Gentiles can’t be considered victims of the Holocaust at all. The great scholar has tried to set the public straight for many years on this issue. In a 2011 review of a Simon Wiesenthal biography, she avers:
In the 1970s, Wiesenthal began to refer to “eleven million victims” of the Holocaust, six million Jews and five million non-Jews, but the latter number had no basis in historical reality. On the one hand, the total number of non-Jewish civilians killed by the Germans in the course of World War II is far higher than five million. On the other hand, the number of non-Jewish civilians killed for racial or ideological reasons does not come close to five million (though it no doubt would have exceeded it if the war had ended in a German victory). Nevertheless, Wiesenthal’s contrived death toll, with its neat almost-symmetry, has become a widely accepted “fact.” Jimmy Carter’s Executive Order, which was the basis for the establishment of the US Holocaust Museum, referred to the “eleven million victims of the Holocaust.” I have been to many Yom Hashoah observances-including those sponsored by synagogues and Jewish communities-where eleven candles were lit. When I tell the organizers that they are engaged in historical revisionism, their reactions range from skepticism to outrage. Strangers have taken me to task in angry letters for focusing “only” on Jewish deaths and ignoring the five million others. When I explain that this number is simply inaccurate, in fact made up, they become even more convinced of my ethnocentrism and inability to feel the pain of anyone but my own people. [my emphasis]
Lipstadt’s Atlantic article clarifies:
There were indeed millions of innocent people whom the Nazis killed in many horrific ways, some in the course of the war and some because the Germans perceived them—however deluded their perception—to pose a threat to their rule. They suffered terribly. But that was not the Holocaust.
I see. And which groups would the Nazis have murdered had they won the war?
Had the Germans won, they probably would have eliminated millions of other peoples, including the Roma, homosexuals, dissidents of any kind, and other “useless eaters.” But it was only the Jews whose destruction could not wait until after the war.
By Deborah’s reckoning, the Nazis only murdered heterosexual White Gentiles when they posed a political threat, had severe disabilities, or were unlucky enough to stray in front of a V-2 rocket. Certainly, the Nazis never considered anyone in this group as a racial inferior unworthy of life. True, the Nazis may have “horribly abuse[d]” gay people and murdered some Roma, but since the Nazi “anti-Roma” policy was “inconsistent” and since the Nazis didn’t seek to murder all gays, logic forces Deborah to exclude these groups as well. And anyone who argues otherwise is, by definition, engaging in soft denial by de-centering Jewish suffering.
But to quote one of Biden’s newly minted ambassador-scholars:
“This is a matter of historical accuracy and not of comparative pain.”
Indeed. Let’s examine the evidence.
An excellent starting point is the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum. Researchers from this institution have combed through wartime documents, government records, and demographic studies to estimate the total number of Holocaust victims. The results follow:
Jews 6 million
Soviet (Gentile) civilians ~ 5.7 million
Soviet prisoners of war ~ 3 million
Non-Jewish Polish civilians ~ 1.8 million
Serb civilians 312,000
People with disabilities up to 250,000
Roma (Gypsies) between 250,000 and 500,000
Jehovah's Witnesses around 1,900
Repeat criminals/ asocials at least 70,000
Political opponents/activists undetermined
Homosexuals hundreds, possibly thousands
The number of Gentile deaths, excluding the Soviet POWs, is roughly eight million. Wiesenthal’s 5 million figure is indeed wrong, but only by understating the true value.
Other estimates exist. The authors of the Holocaust Controversies blog, who debunk claims from deniers of all stripes, derive a more conservative figure by eliminating possible instances of double counting. Although they concede that their estimate “lays no claim to being scientific and is open to any constructive criticism that may lead to improving its accuracy”, it is based on archival records and other scholarly sources. They tally over seven million non-Jewish Deaths:
Soviet Union 5,030,000 to 5,800,000 (including 2.5 ~ 3.3 million Soviet POWs)
Poland 1,000,000
Czechoslovakia 33,000
Yugoslavia 260,000
Romania 51,000
Hungary 28,000
Greece 150,000
Italy 76,000
France 147,000
Belgium 17,000
Netherlands 75,000
Norway 2,000
Denmark 1,000
Austria 16,000
Germany 245,000
Total 7,131,000 to 7,901,000
Excluding the Soviet POWs reduces the death toll to roughly 4.5 million. In summary, the most comprehensive tallies peg the number of Gentile civilian deaths at somewhere between 4.5 and 8 million. So, contra Wiesenthal and Lipstadt, there’s no need to “invent” millions of Gentile deaths because they are already part of the historical record. At that’s by ignoring the death of Soviet POWs, which, as we will see, is a grievous — not to mention categorical — error.
Now, Debbie would retort that these dead people shouldn’t be included in the Holocaust total because the Nazis didn’t murder them over their race or ideology. Let’s revisit an earlier quote:
On the one hand, the total number of non-Jewish civilians killed by the Germans in the course of World War II is far higher than five million. On the other hand, the number of non-Jewish civilians killed for racial or ideological reasons does not come close to five million (though it no doubt would have exceeded it if the war had ended in a German victory).
Debbie is either lying or demonstrating her historical ignorance, as the Nazis most certainly classified Slavic people as racial inferiors, and the number of Slavic victims is certainly close to (and in fact probably exceeds) Wiesenthal’s 5 million number. This racial ideology was codified by the Nazi Lebensraum policy, which was predicated on the need for Germans to clear Eastern Europe of Untermenschen so that Germans could appropriate the available farmland for themselves. This plan called for a combination of deportations, enslavement, and “reunification” of racially salvageable Slavs with their proper German homeland.
Richard Evans’s The Third Reich at War describes the rationale behind this program:
Hitler had announced before the war that he intended to clear the Poles out of Poland and bring in German settlers instead. In effect, Poland was to serve the same function for Germany as Australia had for Britain, or the American West for the USA: it was to be a colony of settlement, in which the supposedly racially inferior indigenous inhabitants would be removed by one means or another to make room for the invading master race.
The most sinister removal scheme involved the “Hunger Plan”, which advocated starving tens of millions of Eastern Europeans to free up available land. The historian Timothy Snyder argues that this plan claimed 2.6 million Soviet POWs alone (with the Nazis shooting an additional half million). Snyder’s book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin expends considerable space documenting the 4.2 million victims of this murderous Lebensraum policy. Overall, Snyder’s estimates that the Nazis were directly responsible for roughly 5 million Gentile deaths in Eastern Europe. This compilation excludes deaths in other regions or from sickness and malnutrition.
Evans provides a snapshot on how the policy impacted Warsaw citizens:
The black market was particularly rampant in the area of food supplies. Food shortages began to occur almost immediately after the invasion, exacerbated by the burning of crops by retreating Polish army units. Conditions were particularly severe in the General Government, which contained Poland’s poorer farming areas. In 1940 the German occupation forces in Klukowski’s district began registering pigs and other livestock on local farms and ordered that they could only be slaughtered for the German army, not for local inhabitants.129 Queues outside food stores became commonplace.130. The Germans began to impose quotas on farmers for delivery of food supplies to them, and punished those who failed to fulfil them.131 Altogether from 1940 to 1944, 60 per cent of Polish meat production was taken off to feed Germans in the Reich, 10 per cent of grain production, and much else besides.132 So bad was the food supply situation that even Frank became alarmed. He managed to secure deliveries of grain from the Reich in the first few months of 1940, but here too, the bulk of the supplies went to feed the German occupiers, with Poles working on key installations like the railways coming second, Ukrainians and ordinary Poles next, and Jews bottom of the list. The rations allotted to Poles in Warsaw were down to 669 calories a day by 1941, in comparison to 2,613 for the Germans (and a mere 184 for the Jews).133 Nobody could live on these quantities. Health deteriorated rapidly, diseases associated with malnutrition spread, death rates soared. Most Poles did their best to provide most of their food intake by other means, and this meant once more the black market.134 [my emphasis]
Evans estimates that the black market supplied more than 80 percent of calories for the average resident.
To be sure, Evans distinguishes Gentile from Jewish victims. In a review of Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands, Evans argues:
By addressing Nazi anti-semitism almost entirely in the context of Hitler’s plans for Eastern Europe, and drawing rhetorical parallels with the mass murders carried out on Stalin’s orders in the same area, Snyder distracts attention from what was unique about the extermination of the Jews. That uniqueness consisted not only in the scale of its ambition, but also in the depth of the hatred and fear that drove it on. There was something peculiarly sadistic in the Nazis’ desire not just to torture, maim and kill the Jews, but also to humiliate them. SS men and not infrequently ordinary soldiers as well set light to the beards of Orthodox Jews in Poland and forced them to perform gymnastic exercises in public until they dropped; they made Jewish girls clean public latrines with their blouses; they performed many other acts of ritual humiliation that they did not force on their Slav prisoners, however badly they treated them in other ways. The Slavs, in the end, were for the Nazis a regional obstacle to be removed; the Jews were a ‘world enemy’ to be ground into the dust.
And boy, did the Nazis remove that regional obstacle!
Despite this qualification, Evans concedes that the Nazis harbored genocidal ambitions towards Slavic people, grumbling that “[W]e know about the events Snyder describes already, despite his repeated assertions that we don’t.” and that “ [My book] The Third Reich at War [provides] thorough coverage of the mass murders and deportations carried out in eastern Poland at Stalin’s behest, as well as a lengthy account of Nazism’s genocidal policies towards the Poles.” In essence, Evans acknowledges that the Nazis killed millions of Gentiles, often for racial reasons.
As to Evans’s claim that Snyder simply revisits well-trodden ground — well, maybe the joint Nazi-Stalinist butchery of Eastern Europe is old hat for historians not named Deborah Lipstadt, but it sure as hell isn’t common knowledge among the America’s moral gatekeepers, who frequently ignore the Nazi’s non-Jewish victims. The Southern Poverty Law Center, for example, consistently defines the Holocaust as “the systematic murder of around 6 million Jewish people in World War II”. The Anti-Defamation League’s statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day “remembers the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis, and the many millions more who perished at their hands.” [my emphases] When Whoopi Goldberg asserted that the Holocaust wasn’t “about race”, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt’s response ignored the Nazi’s racial views of Slavic and Roma people, and Whoopi’s apology similarly glided past Hitler’s non-Jewish racial victims. Even those outlets that referenced the Gentile victims of Nazi racial ideology often quoted the phony Wiesenthal 5 million figure, and didn’t specify who those 5 million victims might actually be. So yah, I think the American public could use a little clarifyin’ on this issue.
In sum:
Debbie claims that the number of Gentiles civilians murdered for racial and ideological reasons by the Nazi regime “does not come close” to Wiesenthal’s 5 million tally, when in fact, it does come close, and perhaps exceeds that figure
Debbie never mentions the mass murder of Soviet POWs
Debbie never discusses the Nazi killing plans targeting Slavic peoples
When discussing the non-Jewish victims, Debbie ignores the White, heterosexual Gentiles who were massacred by Hitler’s murderous regime
The verdict is in: Deborah Lipstadt is a lying liar who prevaricates about her own field’s signature tragedy. She lies by equivocation and by omission. She lies by limited hangout. And now, Biden has raised her platform so she can lie to a larger audience.
In my next newsletter, I will discuss how these lies metastasize through the community, damaging discourse.