Many Jews were able to leave Europe during the war through a variety of paths. Over 100,000 are claimed by Yad Vashem to have crossed Soviet territory to Shanghai, China which had liberal immigration policies. From there almost all of them proceeded to other destinations which included the United States, Canada, and Australia. Fashion designer John Weitz is said to have taken this emigration route through China. Others traveled south from the Soviet Union into Iran and then west to Palestine.

Babi Yar is a ravine in Ukraine where thousands of Jews are said to have been shot by the Nazis and buried in a mass grave.

Eyewitness testimony, even when it is not politically motivated, is the lowest quality of evidence. Memory is a very malleable thing even under normal circumstances. In the highly charged atmosphere of the ideological conflict that destroyed a major part of Europe, the testimony of people who have good reason to hold a grudge should be highly suspect and examined carefully.

The Holocaust story of German extermination of the Jews originated during the war. The charge of gassings of Jews in concentration camps was leveled by the Zionist and Jewish organizations appear around 1942 and were picked up and given lip service by the American and British governments at about the same time. Some Zionists were looking to leverage the British into opening Palestine up to more Jewish immigrants.

Poland passed a law which required Polish Jews living outside the country return to Poland to have their passports stamped. If these stamps were not obtained by a particular date, the passports would become invalid and the bearer would no longer be recognized by Poland as a citizen of that country. Nazi Germany, fearing that it would suddenly have a large population of 'stateless' Jews, forced thousands of Polish Jews living in Nazi Germany back to Poland to obtain the required stamp.

Because the six million number is not based on a census or survey or any other type of documentation, this question cannot be answered in an accounting 'balance sheet' type manner. However, a general explanation is possible. There are several circumstances one has to keep in mind when considering what happened to the Jews of Europe between 1939 and 1948. Before the outbreak of the war, the Jews of Europe were concentrated in the east.

Though that is alleged by those wishing to discredit Hitler and others who wished to shift blame to a dead man. No extermination order has ever been located, and there is no evidence Hitler even knew such a program existed.

a) The forced transfer of populations is something that has happened as long as history has been recorded. In more recent times, the Turks and the Greeks exchanged populations when borders were redrawn at the end of W.W.I. At the end of W.W.II millions of Germans were relocated under horrible conditions. In the United States, Indian tribes were resettled multiple times as the country expanded westward.

The WRB report is supposed to be based on the testimonies of three escaped prisoners from Auschwitz who claimed Jews were being gassed at Auschwitz on a large scale. It has now been largely forgotten, even though it is one of the founding sources for the Auschwitz legend. The reason it has been forgotten is that it is so obviously inaccurate in its descriptions of the gas chambers and the numbers of Jews being killed.

Kurt Gerstein was a low-ranking SS officer with a degree in mining engineering who served as a sanitation officer for the SS during the war. Near the end of the war, he deserted his assignment and surrendered to the French. While a captive of the French, he wrote several reports or confessions having to do with what he claimed to have witnessed with regard to the gassing of Jews at various Nazi concentration camps. He was found hanged in his cell soon thereafter.

The Nazis proclaimed a boycott of German shops owned by Jews in response to an international boycott of German goods declared by international Jewish groups on March 24th, 1933 that was to last more than twelve years.

The Nazi boycott of German Jewish shops lasted one day: April 1st, 1933. It was a Saturday--when religious Jews would not be doing business because of religious obligations.

The six million figure is not based on any body count, records, or census. The number came into use during the war in Zionist propaganda and appears to have symbolic numerological significance. When the digits in six million are summed they add up to six. Six million is six times ten raised to the sixth power. In numerology the number six is considered 'perfect'. Six is the number of days God used to create the earth in the story of creation in the book of Genesis.

The gas chambers are supposed to be the end result of a long chain of events that evolved into a genocide program. They then constitute the physical application of Nazi policy toward the Jews. Whether the policy the exterminate the Jews was the intention from the start, or whether it evolved into it over time because of circumstance, the gas chambers are unambiguous signs the extermination program existed.

The reports left by Gerstein are full of exaggerations and absurdities, but because the source is an SS officer, they are frequently used by Holoscribes as source material in their writings. A reading of the entire text of these confessions can only make one wonder how anyone can seriously quote from them.

Jews were put into concentration and labor camps for a wide variety of reasons. Some were imprisoned because of criminal activities or anti-Nazi political activities. Others, particularly after 1943 and the reversal of Germany's fortunes on the eastern front, were taken from ghettos for the purpose of working in factories and on farms and housed in concentration camps to keep them socially isolated from the surrounding community.

The Jewish question was 'What was to be done with an ethnic minority with no homeland of its own which refuses to assimilate into the dominant German culture?'. It should be noted that this question was being raised by Jews as well as non-Jews. II[...] The primary responsibility for the administrative handling of the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem will rest with the Reich Leader SS and the Chief of the German Police [...] -regardless of geographic boundaries.[..

Many concentration camp inmates were imprisoned not simply for ethnic reasons. They were there because they were common criminals. Some of these people were not honest to begin with and used this opportunity to turn the tables on their former captors. It is a way to take revenge and to distract attention away from their own crimes. B. Many concentration camp inmates were there for political reasons-- particularly communists. They might lie for ideological reasons.

Because of the rapid acquisition of huge amounts of territory which had been depopulated by the retreating communists, the Nazi leadership saw this as an opportunity to expel the Jews. Germany now had control of an area into which to put them until the end of the war. Because of the war, an international boycott of German goods and limits on immigration in Palestine and other areas, Germany had difficulty getting the Jews to emigrate.

Holocaust literature often uses 'selection' as meaning a process in which prisoners were segregated into a group that would be put to work and a group that would be put to death. Of course, the process of sorting prisoners by sex and age before the delousing procedure was a standard and implied nothing sinister since the prisoners had to strip in order to take a shower.

Several German words with the 'Sonder' or 'special' prefix have been designated as code words in the Holocaust lexicon. 'Sonderbehandlung' can mean many different things in German depending on the context. In many documents in the Auschwitz files, the 'Sonder' prefix designated something that had to do with the hygienic regimen that was instituted in the camps after the epidemics of the summer of 1942.

The diary of SS doctor Joseph Kremer makes repeated references to his taking part in 'special actions' while he was assigned to duty at Auschwitz during the Fall of 1942. This was during the worst time of the typhus epidemic at that camp. While his diary does not make clear what he was doing during one of these special actions, it appears his duty was one of giving clinical (i.e. visual) examinations to groups of prisoners being transferred from other camps and sub-camps of Auschwitz (e.g.

Zyklon B was and still is a commercially made fumigant designed to rid man-made structures, such as buildings, ships, silos, etc. of destructive pests including moths, rodents, termites, and--most importantly during World War II--the typhus-bearing body louse. Many of the Nazi concentration camps suffered from typhus epidemics which killed hundreds of thousands of prisoners. Camp staff members also became sick and died from typhus.

From 1942 until the end of the War in 1945, the SS fought epidemics of typhus and other diseases in the concentration camps. One of the largest camps and the one hardest hit by the epidemic was Auschwitz and its satellite camps. An average of about one hundred prisoners out of population of around fifty thousand died there every day. The crematories were built as a sanitary measure to dispose of the bodies of the dead.

Because the fight between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany was a largely ideological one, and the Soviet Union was not a signatory of Geneva Convention agreements on the conduct of war, it was rightly assumed by Hitler that the Soviets would not fight by the rules. The Einsatzgruppen were police units assigned to the pacification of occupied territories in the east.

Israel's 1948 declaration of independence states the reason that state was being founded was the Holocaust had shown there was a need for a Jewish state as a place of refuge for Jews suffering persecution. Without the Holocaust, there is no demonstrated need for a Jewish state. The Israeli government therefore considers any questioning of the Holocaust to be a questioning of Israel's right to exist.

Some groups of Gypsies were put into Nazi concentration camps for several reasons. The German government considered them a security risk, but more importantly the Romany led a wandering lifestyle and did not occupy themselves in what the Nazis considered productive employment. Because they refused to abandon their traditional lifestyle, they were put to work in labor camps.

It is alleged by those who claim to be survivors of Treblinka camp that some 800,000 bodies were first buried in mass graves and that these were later exhumed and burned on iron rails set over wood fires. Treblinka was not equipped with crematories. Aerial photography of the site taken in 1944 shows no indication of mass graves or locations where continuous burning of bodies had taken place.

Testimony is the poorest form of evidence. The human mind is very malleable, and memory can be affected by a wide variety of factors. Very normal people can sincerely remember things that never happened. Add to this the interest of many of the witnesses in getting attention, influencing how they are themselves perceived by those around them, ameliorating their punishment, or exacting vengeance on their enemies. Testimony alone should be used only with extreme caution.

There is very little in the report which can verified as accurate. The bulk of the information in the report is verifiably untrue or inaccurate by a wide margin. Though the report is supposed to be the first detailed account of the extermination of Jews at Auschwitz to reach the West, it is wrong in almost all of its details. Auschwitz camp commander Rudolf Hoess signed two confessions. The first confession was while a captive of the British.