The 11m holocaust deaths background.

[borjastick]

This week on the internet on facebook and the like I have seen a meme and another different account talking about 11m holocaust deaths and it got me thinking about that number.

As far as I am aware that number came from two different and unrelated origins. The first was the Wannsee Conference where they discussed the jewish totals in every country in Europe which amounted to 11m. Of course this was a theoretical figure because Germany had yet to invade a number of those countries on the list such as the UK.

The second and arguably more well known 11m claim was by that wonderfully truthful and upstanding man Simon Wiesenthal who to make sure the jews received massive sympathy for their holocaust realised that the non jews in the world should share the pain but not as much as them jews. So he came up with the idea to say that while the jews lost some 6m in the holocaust non jews lost 5m. This ensured plenty of (fore) skin in the game. It spread the message and the pain.

But I ask this question of those far more educated on the matter than me. Were there other claims from different sources that claimed 11m holocaust deaths?

[Eye of Zyclone]

At the Nuremberg show trial, the British Chief Prosecutor Hartley Shawcross claimed that 12 million Holocaust deaths occurred in Nazi camps.

[Booze]

Q: What happened to the 6 million then?
A: Same thing that happened to the 5 million.

[Archie]

The 11 million was a number that was pushed by Simon Wiesenthal that he made up out of thin air. Even other Jewish scholars like Yehuda Bauer have called him out for this.

In 1979, Wiesenthal told The Washington Post: "I have sought with Jewish leaders not to talk about 6 million Jewish dead [in the Holocaust], but rather about 11 million civilians dead, including 6 million Jews." In a 2017 interview, Yehuda Bauer said that he had told Wiesenthal not to use this figure. "I said to him, 'Simon, you are telling a lie,' ... [Wiesenthal replied] 'Sometimes you need to do that to get the results for things you think are essential.'" According to Bauer and other historians, Wiesenthal chose the figure of 5 million non-Jewish victims because it was just lower than the six million Jews who were murdered, but high enough to attract sympathy from non-Jews. The figure of eleven million Nazi victims became popular and was referred to by President Jimmy Carter in the executive order establishing the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.[139]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Wiesenthal

[Booze]

It's convenient to be able to point to one scapegoat, but I'm not really buying it.
When did they decide to challenge Wiesenthal, how many decades elapsed and how many of them repeated the 11m?
While it suited their purpose 11m was the number.

[Archie]

There has never been any consistency on the numbers of non-Jews that were "exterminated." The early Soviets reports claimed huge numbers while usually not emphasizing Jews. Four million at Auschwitz and 1.5 million at Majdanek - obviously such huge numbers could not all be Jews. That means large numbers of Gentile exterminations. And the American concentration camp footage also did not emphasize Jews (and indeed most of the corpses were not Jews). There seems to have been some impulse early on to make the suffering more universal. Subsequently, however, a lot of "Holocaust" scholarship was entirely Jew-focused, and exterminated Gentiles have been mostly nudged off the stage. But they go back and forth on this. It seems Jews want Jewish suffering front and center, but at times it seems they want to get more buy-in from non-Jews and may occasionally put the spotlight on non-Jewish victims for tactical reasons. This is alternated with guilt-trips about "collaboration" and failure to save the Jews.

More recently, it seems liberal Gentiles might be moving toward a more universalist version. My suspicion is that this is because there is wariness over Israel's ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.

[Booze]

All very true.
So there's no walking away from it, but that's what they imply... they have a scapegoat and it's case closed.

Do you have a link to that The National Education Association's handbook?

[Archie]

It's page 355 of the NEA handbook.

https://defendinged.org/wp-content/uplo ... e_2025.pdf

[Booze]

Thank you

[Wetzelrad]

Looking into this now, the best coverage of the invention of the 11 million trope is probably Peter Novick's The Holocaust in American Life. It's worth reading in full, but just take this passage in particular, from page 216:

Before the late seventies, few in the United States had ever heard the figure "eleven million." Wiesenthal's fame in this country had to do with his exploits as a Nazi hunter, not as an interpreter of the Holocaust. This changed in 1977 when, in return for a subsidy for his program of tracking down war criminals, a California rabbi obtained the use of his name for what became a highly visible Holocaust institution, the Simon Wiesenthal Center[27]. "Eleven million" was part of the baggage that came with the name[28]. Inscribed at the entrance to the center's museum was a tribute to "six million Jews and to five million of other faiths"; center publications came to speak of "The Holocaust - six million Jews and five million non-Jews."[29]

The footnotes look like solid support. Indeed, I can't find any mention of the 11 million trope before 1977, and all of the Jewish historians who dissent from this number attribute its invention to Wiesenthal. There's really no room for doubt that he simply made it up and it stuck, immediately.

In 2011, Deborah Lipstadt wrote a few paragraphs about this controversy. My takeaway is that it is a fight between liberal Jews and ethnocentric Jews, with both sides believing that they are being more truthful.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190402081 ... f-history/

In 2006, Alex Grobman wrote that the 11 million trope is "a particularly egregious historical distortion".
https://jewishmag.com/109mag/holocaustn ... umbers.htm

On the other side, there are tons of mainstream newspaper articles going back decades that all push the 11 million trope. Tons of websites too. To pick out just one, in 2015, anti-Zionist outlet Mint Press News wrote in defense of "the forgotten 5 million". Another figure claimed here is that "up to 1.5 million" Roma Gypsies were exterminated.
https://www.mintpressnews.com/the-forgo ... st/208329/

Karl Radl noted that a book published in 1984 claimed 13 million murders.
https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/remar ... onsense-42

As an example of a history book used in American public schools, I have a copy of Alan Brinkley's American History, 2015 edition. On page 708, Brinkley claimed 10 million just in camps:

As early as 1942, high officials in Washington had incontrovertible evidence that Hitler’s forces were rounding up Jews and others (including non-Jewish Poles, gypsies, homosexuals, and communists) from all over Europe, transporting them to concentration camps in eastern Germany and Poland, and systematically murdering them, often in factory-like gas chambers. (The death toll would ultimately reach 6 million Jews and approximately 4 million others.)

I had never seen this before, but the USHMM has a table breaking down the non-Jewish victims by category. It adds up to 6 million. Therefore USHMM must believe in 12 million total Holocaust deaths, although they never use that number. Also interesting is that, contrary to Mint Press's article above, USHMM claims only 0.25-0.5 million Roma Gypsies were murdered, a denial of at least a million victims.
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/ ... ersecution

Grokipedia cites only that USHMM page to claim that there were "an estimated 5 to 11 million" non-Jews exterminated. Therefore Grok has made up another 5 million. Or it's just a bad citation and it got that number from some other source.
https://grokipedia.com/page/The_Holocau ... ted-groups

[Eye of Zyclone]

(Simon Wiesenthal was the chief agent of the Israeli Intelligence Bureau in Austria.)

[borjastick]

Thanks for the replies which rather shone the spotlight on the wonderful Simon Wiesenthal, a man who knew from the get go that the holocaust was never about truth but about how to lie with authority to gain the result the jews (zionists) wanted. A man who never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

[Booze]

I think a few things need to be looked at. If death from disease and malnutrition are put under the umbrella of "the holocaust" then we do have a non Jew holocaust, those deaths are not exclusive to Jews. There are good reasons from a revisionist standpoint to quantify the number of non Jewish deaths.
I've heard figures of 25m for the number of people who were conscripted for labor, If the number of non-Jew deaths are low then what does it say about the general living conditions in the camps? For example lets arbitrary say out of 20m non-Jews 1m died. Then the question raised is why was the general survival rate 95% among non-Jews?
It gives strong credence to the argument by revisionists that what the public sees in war department films isn't anything close to the conditions of the camps during the war.