From: Hal Finney (hal@rain.org)
Date: Fri Dec 27 1996 - 10:33:28 MST
From: Lyle Burkhead <LYBRHED@delphi.com>
> There are two explanations for the disappearance of European Jewry.
> One is that they were killed in gas chambers. This is the conventional
> view, accepted, apparently, by almost all historians. The alternative
> explanation, put forward by the revisionists, is that they were uprooted
> and driven out: some of them were shot and buried in mass graves,
> and many died of disease, starvation, or exposure, but many others,
> perhaps the majority, emigrated or were deported, and they ended up
> in the Soviet Union, America, or Israel.
>
> The two explanations agree on everything else. They differ only on the
> question of gas chambers.
This statement is inconsistent with your previous paragraph. The two
explanations also disagree about whether the missing Jews were killed,
or whether many, "perhaps the majority", survived. This is a far more
significant difference then the method by which they were killed. If the
revisionists agreed that the Jews sent to the camps were all killed,
but insisted that it was by mass shootings rather than gas chambers,
the debate would not have much interest and would probably be confined
to historians.
The real issue is the claim that many or most of the Jews were not
killed at all. This would significantly reduce the moral culpability
of the Nazis, while casting Jewish organizations and sympathizers as
villains, inventing a horrifying story like this without justification.
I believe that is the real agenda of most of the revisionists.
Hal
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