Did Six Million Really Die?

Did Six Million Really Die? by Richard Harwood (also known as Richard Verrall)

Did Six Million Really Die? is a Holocaust denial booklet written by British National Front member Richard Verrall, under the name Richard E. Harwood, and published by Ernst Zündel in 1974. The Supreme Court of Canada found that the book "misrepresented the work of historians, misquoted witnesses, fabricated evidence, and cited non-existent authorities."

The book

In the book, Verrall claimed that the Nazi Holocaust was a fabrication. The booklet targeted various war crime trials, the best-known of these being the Nuremberg Trials and the Adolf Eichmann trial, criticizing their legal integrity and the standards of evidence presented, as well as the impartiality and objectivity of the judges.

Verrall also claimed that censuses and population charts showed that the world's Jewish population did not significantly change between 1938 and 1948, and that the total Jewish population in Nazi-controlled Europe never exceeded 2.5 million (it should be noted that the population estimates given by Verrall are contradicted by all reputable sources, including the Nazis' own counts: according to the Wannsee Protocol, there were eleven million Jews in Europe in 1942).

He further argued that, first, the scale of the Holocaust had been fabricated by the Allies

1. to hide their own guilt over such things as the atomic bombs dropped on Japanese cities, the air raids of predominantly civilian towns such as Dresden, and the Allies' own human-rights abuses (particularly Stalin's mass killings in the gulag concentration camps), and that,
2. it was used as a pretext for the establishment of the state of Israel, which he predicates on the commission of atrocities against the Palestinian population.

He proposed that the Holocaust was also used as a tool against the "white race", writing that "thus the accusation of the Six Million is not only used to undermine the principle of nationhood and national pride, but it threatens the survival of the Race itself."

Supreme Court of Canada case

In a 1992 court case in front of the Supreme Court of Canada, the book was examined, and the court concluded that it "misrepresented the work of historians, misquoted witnesses, fabricated evidence, and cited non-existent authorities." From the court decision:

The appellant's allegations of fact in the pamphlet were divided into 85 extracts and rebutted one by one. The trial judge summarized this material at length for the jury but it will suffice here to point only to some of the more egregious examples. The pamphlet alleged that a memorandum from Joseph Goebbels revealed that the Final Solution was never more than a plan to evacuate Jews to Madagascar. It was shown that there was no such memorandum but that the reference was to Goebbels' diary entry of March 7, 1942. This diary extract was adduced and shown to state nothing of the kind. The Crown went on to point out that the entry for March 27, 1942 made clear that the Final Solution was, in fact, genocide: "Not much will remain of the Jews. On the whole, it can be said that about 60 per cent of them will have to be liquidated, whereas only about 40 per cent can be used for forced labor...."

..The pamphlet alleged, purportedly relying on a Red Cross report, that all concentration camps were really humane work camps. Mr. Biedermann, a delegate of the International Committee of the Red Cross, testified that the Red Cross Report pertained exclusively to prisoner of war camps as the Red Cross personnel had not been inside any camps in which civilians were detained. The Crown adduced evidence from Professor Hilberg that while some camps had labour facilities annexed to them, Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor and Chelmno were exclusively "killing factories" and that gas chambers were in operation at Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek. The numbers of Jews slaughtered was verifiable from railway records showing the payments per person made by the Gestapo for transport to the camps. These numbers were compared with those having left the camps or who were found there after liberation.

On and on, the Crown showed that the appellant misrepresented the work of historians, misquoted witnesses, fabricated evidence, and cited non-existent authorities.

However, the Supreme Court of Canada acquitted Zundel, and upheld his right to freedom of speech.

Royalties

Anthony Hancock published Did Six Million Really Die? and made a significant amount of money from doing so, to the point where he was sued for royalties in the High Court in 1982.

International reactions

Many nations such as Germany banned the booklet outright and forbade any copies from any official sales, the first being South Africa.

In 1985 and 1988 Verrall's publisher Ernst Zündel was tried in Canada on charges of "false news." He was found guilty and sentenced to 15 months in prison. On appeal his conviction was overturned by the Canadian Supreme Court's landmark decision R. v. Zündel, when it declared that the law he had been charged under, reporting false news, was unconstitutional.

External links

• Text of Did Six Million Really Die? at the Institute for Historical Review, the leading proponent of Holocaust denial.