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Inflated Victims Tally Irks Holocaust Historians
(JTA) Ron Kampeas - "Five million non-Jews died in the Holocaust" is a statement regularly asserted, but the number is without any scholarly basis. Those close to the late Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, its progenitor, say the number was intended to increase sympathy for Jewish suffering, but it is now more often used to obscure it. The "5 million" has driven Holocaust historians to distraction ever since Wiesenthal began to speak of it in the 1970s. Yehuda Bauer, an Israeli Holocaust scholar who chairs the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and knew Wiesenthal, said the Nazi hunter told him that he chose the 5 million number carefully: He wanted a number large enough to attract the attention of non-Jews who might not otherwise care about Jewish suffering, but not larger than the actual number of Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust, 6 million. It caught on: President Jimmy Carter, issuing the executive order that would establish the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, referred to the "11 million victims of the Holocaust." Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of Holocaust studies at Emory University in Atlanta, wrote in 2011 that the number of 11 million involved "historical revisionism" and that "this number is simply inaccurate, in fact made up." Bauer says the problem 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, Bauer said, the term "genocide" could accurately be applied to the 2-3 million Poles murdered by the Nazis. But the mass murder of the Poles, Roma and others should not come under the rubric "Holocaust," a term describing the annihilation that the Nazis hoped to visit on the Jews. "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." The number 5 million also adheres to no known understanding of the number of non-Jews killed by the Nazis: While 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.