Dear Angela Merkel: How much do Raul Hilberg and I owe you?

This just in! Two notable anti-revisionists have agreed to join me to rebut Thomas Dalton. Details here.

[Note: I will be interviewing Thomas Dalton, author of Debating the Holocaust: A New Look at Both Sides this Saturday, April 24th, 5-6 pm Central, on AmericanFreedomRadio (to be archived here for free on-demand listening). I am still looking for a mainstream Holocaust expert to refute him during the second hour. Over the past few months I have invited Deborah Lipstadt, Michael Shermer, John Zimmerman--the three most prominent critics of the "Holocaust deniers" -- as well as many dozens of professors from several of the leading Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Jewish Studies programs. While I have received a few cordial refusals, notably from Shermer and Lipstadt, the vast majority of the academic "experts" have refused to respond...as has anti-revisionist blogger Muehlenkamp. I will be publishing my email to these experts in a later blog. Meanwhile, I am worrying about how to fill the second hour of the show. If you know any Holocaust experts who dare to defend the conventional wisdom, please have them contact me: kbarrett*AT*merr.com. Otherwise I will just have to keep Dalton on for the second hour to respond to callers, many of whom, I hope, will critique his interpretations. Anyway...as a free speech absolutist and a card-carrying non-coward, I am disgusted by the fear that surrounds this topic--not to mention the criminal sanctions. Below is my letter to German Chancellor Angela Merkel offering to turn myself in for beginning to doubt the standard six-million-Jewish-victim figure.]

Dear Andrea Merkel,

I read in the news that your German government has fined Bishop Richard Williamson 10,000 Euros for "partial Holocaust denial." According to reports, the 10,000 Euros fine reflects Williamson's public statement that he believes that "200,000 to 300,000 Jews died in Nazi concentration camps" rather than the widely touted figure of six million.

According to the dw-world.de report, you stated that the pope must "'clarify unambiguously that there can be no denying' that the Nazis killed six million Jews." So I am writing to tell you that as a Muslim and a nonbeliever in both papal infallibility and Zionist historiography, I am not going to endorse the six million figure even if the Pope threatens me with hellfire and damnation. After reading three books on the issue--Lipstadt's Denying the Holocaust, Shermer's Denying History, and Dalton's Debating the Holocaust--I am now prepared to state that I find pre-eminent Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg's estimate of 5.1 million Jewish Holocaust victims a more reasonable estimate.

Since it is against the law in Germany to state ones belief that fewer than six million Jews died in the Holocaust, Hilberg and I are apparently partners in crime. The question is, precisely what penalties should Hilberg and I face? Since Bishop Williamson was fined 10,000 euros for underestimating the six-million-Holocaust by 5.75 million people, that means that underestimating the six-million-Holocaust by roughly one million, as Hilberg and I do, should be penalized by a fine of $1,739.13 Euros. Please let me know where I should go to turn myself in -- the nearest German consulate is in Chicago -- and whether you would like that in the form of cash, check, or credit card. Or should I just send it straight to Israel and bypass the middleman? (Hilberg, fortunately for him, passed away a couple of years ago, and will thus never have to feel the fiscal jackboot of German justice.)

But seriously, Ms. Merkel, you may ask why I side with Hilberg's estimate of 5.1 Holocaust deaths rather than the well-known figure of six million. My answer is that Thomas Dalton, in his book Debating the Holocaust, presents evidence that the figure of six million European Jewish victims threatened with destruction repeatedly occurs long before anyone could possibly have known the real figure. For example, the February 23rd, 1938 New York Times describes six million European Jews as "slowly dying of starvation, all hope gone." Yet at that time the Holocaust, much less its precise body count, was still several years away. A few decades earlier, the May 7, 1920 New York Times cited "Jewish war sufferers in Central and Eastern Europe, where six millions face horrifying conditions of famine, disease and death..." More