> Yehuda Bauer, an Israeli Holocaust scholar who chairs the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, said he warned his friend Wiesenthal, who died in 2005, about spreading the false notion that the Holocaust claimed 11 million victims — 6 million Jews and 5 million non-Jews.

> “I said to him, ‘Simon, you are telling a lie,’” Bauer recalled in a Jan. 31 interview. “He said, ‘Sometimes you need to do that to get the results for things you think are essential.’”

Your quote and several other parts of the story focus on the number being "made up" and yet the same person quoted by you also says:

> The problem, according to Bauer, who has debunked the number repeatedly in his writings over the decades, is not that non-Jews were not victims; they were. It is that Wiesenthal’s arbitrarily chosen tally of non-Jewish victims diminishes the centrality to the Nazi ideology of systematically wiping any trace of the Jewish people from the planet.

> In fact, he said, the term “genocide” could accurately be applied to the 2 million to 3 million Poles murdered and millions more enslaved by the Nazis. But the mass murder of the Poles, Roma and others should not come under the rubric “Holocaust,”

So that's up to 3 million Poles, up to half a million Roma, which only requires "others" to make up 1.5 million for the "made up" number to be exactly correct. A quick Google suggests about a quarter of a million disabled people, 20 thousand gay men. So in reality this seems a surprisingly accurate "lie".

What he appears to be mostly concerned about is that the term "Holocaust" be a specific term for the Nazi genocide of Jews, and other terms be used for their genocide of other groups.

If anything, his dramatic quote about telling Simon Wiesenthal he was spreading a lie is a better example of someone using drama to advance their opinion

Did the person allegedly quoted actually think it was lie? Seems amazingly lucky that he got so close to the real figure if he did. It feels like someone saying "sometimes you got to break the law to get things done" because they jaywalked in the middle of the night when out buying some milk. The drama of the comment just doesn't seem plausible at first glance.

> While as many as 35 million people were killed overall because of Nazi aggression, the number of non-Jews who died in the concentration camps is no more than half a million, Bauer said.

... so I can't see a way to reconcile that with the figure for Poles except by considering them overwhelmingly casualties of war, not a policy of extermination.

And so, as far as I can see, the original article is broadly right and your comment is inaccurate.

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/polish-vic...

EDIT: Also, this linked page on this very topic was pretty interesting to me. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/documentin...

Edit: General question, what is it with new accounts created, seemimgly, only for comments like yours? I don't see anything controversial in it that migjt justify a throwaway... Unless of course you are new to HN, in which cade, welcome!

Edit 2: It seems I have day checking links... well, you article quotes Bauer:

>>

“All Jews of the world had to be annihilated,” Bauer said. “That was the intent. There was never an idea in Nazi minds to murder all the Russians.”

With all due respect to Bauer, the Nazis deliberately killed Soviet POWs. And they considered them sub-human of sorts. Also tue, the Nazis basically started WW2 to murder all the jews. As I said, depends if where draw the line of the Holocaust, and whether or not you want to include non-jewish victims caught in the same industrial genocide complex seperately or not. It seems the question is not the number of victims, but rather under which column they are counted. >>

I don't think that's true. It's a stupid point to start a war. Where's the profit for Germany in that?

While it's also true that Nazi Germany explicitly set to murder all Russians. There're numerous official Nazi documents confirming that. Most of the population was determined to be killed directly or by causing hunger (by capturing the only lands suitable for agriculture in the South-West of USSR).

But since the West in general always considered and continue to consider Russians as subhumans, there's no mention of this fact in western books, movies and articles.

No idea what you mean that the Nazis behaviour regarding slaws, not just Russians, isn't talked about in the West. I am in the West, and I defenitely didn't learn about from Russian books. Also, claiming the West sees Russians as sub-human is a strong claim, to put it mildly...

Edit: As a supply chain and logistics guy myself, the logistics of the holocaust seem to be the only historical occurance the Germans got wartime logistics right. Eichmann was a really good supply chain guy, running a tremendously efficient operation from, and beware the following will be incredible cynical now, sourcing (getting jews concentrated in ghettos) with close collaboration of local suppliers (the SS, Gestapo and local authorities ranging from French police to the various collaborators in the east) over transportation (including Eichmann himself working on details like damaged passanger rail cars to keep his prime carrier, the Reichsbahn, happy) to the classification of people arriving in incredibly well run extermination factories in the occupied East. It is that efficiency, applied at murdering innocent people for a deprived ideology, that makes the holocaust stand out from all other genocides in history. And that was the main, if not even the only goal, of the Nazis behind WW2.

[0] https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/bison-books/9780803259799/

The comment you replied to is somehow assuming that all slavs are / were Russians and that the Germans didn't somehow also murder a ton of Ukrainians and Poles, among others.

Tim Snyder's explanation in Bloodlands is at odds with that story. There were very few Jews in Germany at the start of WWII. Initially, the goal was to deport them - somewhere (Madagascar!). The systematic killing of Jews came later, after Germany had invaded Poland (which contained a lot of Jews). The irony is that the Jewish population of Germany increased during the initial part of the war, with Polish Jews being interned in Germany.

To get some better feeling, and insihjt, I can only recommend the original film, German, about the Wannsee Conference based on the actual meeting minutes.

Hitler was driven by his desire to reunify the German peoples and his wanting to enable Germans to become economically self-sufficient and militarily secure. Within Germany, these goals were supported because the Treaty of Versailles, which had ended WWI, put terms on Germany such as paying financial reparations, disarm, give up territory, and give up all its oversears colonies.

After annexing Austria and Czechosloviakia, Germany invaded Poland in 1939. The French and British had guaranteed support should this happen, so they declared war on Germany, which started WWII.

Actually the only mistake the Allies might have made, might have because it is hindsight, is not invading Germany in the West while the Wehrmacht was busy in Poland. History is history so. Seeing the causes of WW2 so, and the motivation of the Nazis, as anything else than what they are ia something I will leave unadressed so.

I believe at this moment in time she is well aware of the claims against her paper. She has not released a rebuttal to the claims, likely because she doesn't have one (otherwise she would have used stronger evidence in her paper). Every day that goes by, she leaves the paper un-adapted and un-retracted, meaning that she knowingly propagates this false narrative. It is likely she has zero intention of retracting her paper unless the journal forces her.

> Politicians do it all the time, but historians in particular should not do it.

Neither should do it, but politicians are somewhat shorter lived.

> Not getting caught in such narratives is ... difficult.

Posing a narrative isn't necessarily negative, as long as it is plausible and supported by evidence. For example, you could read a very good argument for Europe being wrong to go to war with Nazi Germany and have very good arguments being made based on proper evidence. You don't have to agree with it, just respect a difference of opinion.

The paper the article addresses does not fall into this category.

If you don't think that, then you should read her Twitter, at which is pinned to the top her paper with this introductory text: "This paper details how an innovation some historians have called 1 of the top 10 of the industrial revolution was first developed in the late 18C by 76 Black Jamaicans in a foundry just west of Morant Bay, but the central concern of the paper is much more important.. 1/4"

If you read her detractors you will find that absolutely no-one accuses her of "setting out to deceive", what they are saying that her conclusions (while they could be true) are not sufficiently backed up by hard facts. And that she has got some of her facts wrong.

"Setting out to deceive" is a fairly serious accusation to level at a historian, claims that need more proof than pointing to a pinned tweet saying "she still sticks to her story" even though someone on the internet (credibly) found her conclusions to be tenuous.