Be aware that the newest tactic employed by anti-Semites is not denying the Holocaust but rather trivializing it. This past year I heard two undemocratic political leaders, one in Iran, the other in Venezuela, employ this clever and offensive tactic.
Holocaust deniers are easy to refute, thanks to a more than abundant body of evidence, not only from survivors and evidence on the ground at the killing sites, but also by a film record and official records carefully kept by the Nazis.
The Holocaust trivializers are different. They do not quibble about numbers. Instead, they say, “Let’s accept that 6 million Jews were killed. Big deal, consider that somewhere between 40 and 50 million people were killed during World War II, most of these civilian men, women and children.”
In late September in New York, Hugo Chavez added to this the murderous conflicts associated with the European settlement of the New World and the decimation of Native Americans.
These and other episodes of mass killings throughout history are undeniably true. But what they ignore and what is also undeniably true, is that no other such orgy of murder was performed by as calculating, rational, industrial, efficient and heartless manner as was that of the 6 million victims of the Jewish Holocaust.
Evidence of this assertion is readily available. Trains carrying Jews to the death camps had priority over even troop movements. Victims were classified and tattooed by number, and their bodies stripped of recyclable resources such as eyeglasses, gold teeth, hair and more.
Evaluations were held to determine the least expensive mode of murder. It was decided that bullets could be saved and the bother of digging graves averted if the Jews were murdered en masse by gas and subsequently burned to ash.
No battle cries were needed; no personal ill will required; no apologies expected; it was the coldest, cruelest, most immoral, least humane mass murder of that magnitude in history.
Accept nothing less than the truth. The Holocaust is different.
Irwin D. Rinder, Ph.D., served as chairman of the sociology department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and then at Macalester, before retiring in 1983. He was awarded the Jewish Scholar of the Year award in the 1960s by the Jewish Community Center.
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