Jewish war dead
Sir: Mr Terence Prittie of Britain and Israel (Letters, 17 July) quotes the self-revealing plaudit from the black tyrant-murderer Idi Amin for the notion that 'over six million Jews' were 'burnt ... alive with gas in the soil of Germany'. Mr Prittie adds that UN Secretary-General Dr Waldheim possibly welcomed that despicable effusion, as his fellow-Austrians once 'joined with gusto and glee' in that 'mass-murder of the Jews'. This slur is totally unfounded and indefensible.
Mr Prittie also comments, however, that Amin 'had his facts slightly wrong' ; a considerable understatement. In actual fact, no serious judicial or historiographic enterprise has ever alleged that six or more million Jews were deliberately exterminated by the Nazis, either by burning alive or by gassing, anywhere in Europe, let alone in Germany itself, with or without the enthusiastic cooperation of the Austrian people. To set the record straight, Mr Gerald Reitlinger in his statistical analysis of the Final Solution (1966) conjectured that a maximum figure of 4,575,400 Jews were dead or missing as a result of all causes during the last war. He concludes that more than a third of these disappeared 'not from direct physical violence, but from overwork, disease, hunger and neglect', deaths by gassing forming only a fraction of the total.
Jewish wartime casualties were certainly on a par with those of other peoples, such as the Yugoslays, Crimean Tartars, East Prussians and Gypsies, although there is no documentary evidence of any predetermined plan to wipe out the Jewish people, let alone of any Austrian enthusiasm for such barbarity. Most Jews died from disease (particularly in the camp typhus outbreaks of 1942 and 1945) or starvation, while others were shot in anti-partisan campaigns similar to the Zionist operations at Deir Yasin and elsewhere. Probably prisoners incapable of work were murdered, by injections and gassing, although Mr Prittie and your readers should be informed of the recent comprehensive analysis, by Professor Arthur Butz, of the documentary and engineering evidence relating to the existence of 'gaschambers' at Auschwitz and other camps, which concludes that these allegations are mostly mere propaganda.
.The 'six million' has been turned into a political slogan by a barbarian like Amin who both approves and practises murder. But it is also regrettable that the commitment of Zionists to Israel not only outweighs their concern for historical accuracy but also tempts them to use the. sufferings of the wartime dead as chauvinistic propaganda. Thus, anyone who makes the slightest criticism of Israeli policy can incur the charge of 'antisemitism' which in turn is then equated with mass-murder.
F. P. Yockey Box 76062, Los Angeles, California
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