As the number of Holocaust survivors continues to dwindle, there is a fear that no one will be left to bear witness. Hearing a survivor’s individual testimony and being able to connect personally with them can be an extremely powerful and emotional experience. Without the survivors, there is a concern the Holocaust will become a distant memory. Thanks to the myriad of oral histories, diaries, letters, books, films and poems produced by victims, survivors, perpetrators, historians, theologians, psychologists, and philosophers, as well as postwar trial transcripts, we have an enormous volume of information to document the German attempt to destroy the Jewish people. With all this evidence and corroboration, there are a number of issues that must concern us.

In the Absence of Survivors

In place of survivors, some institutions have or are in the process of installing high-definition holographic interview recordings with voice recognition technology. This allows survivors to recount their experiences and respond to questions from the audience, which enables the visitors “to have a personalized, one-on-one ‘conversation.’” The advantage is being able to see, hear and interact with the survivor as if the person is sitting in the room with them. The problem can occur when questions are asked. Survivors are experts on what happened to them. For the most part, they are not authorities on the Shoah, and should not be expected to be able to answer specific historical questions.

Holocaust Denial

Holocaust denial is an ongoing challenge that Michael Shermer and I documented in our book “Denying History.” The deniers admit there were between 300,000 to one or two million Jews who died as a result of disease, starvation, shootings, hangings and perhaps even some experimental gassing. They claim a very small number died as a result of being overworked. Gas chambers were used only to delouse clothing and blankets, and crematoria were used to dispose of those who perished from these forms of death, particularly disease.

Palestinian Arab Holocaust denial is ubiquitous. In a column by Ramzi Oudeh, Secretary-General of the International Academic Campaign against Israel, in the Feb. 5, 2023 issue of Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, the official Palestinian Authority daily, he said: “Without commenting on the Zionist exaggeration of the [number of] victims of the Holocaust in order to obtain the world’s sympathy and support for the Zionist state ….we do not deny that the Holocaust is a fact…. As Arabs, we do not deny that the Holocaust is a fact. However, as Arabs we are not required to include it in the school curricula, or even in the museums dealing with this human tragedy, as for the last several hundred years dozens of cases of ethnic cleansing have been committed in the world…. It may be that the most prominent incident of genocide is what has happened and is still happening to the Palestinian people at the hands of the Zionists for more than 70 years.”

Number of Jews Murdered

Israel is not involved in the systematic destruction of the Palestinian Arabs, and there is absolutely no proof the state is involved in mass murder. The accusation is just a way to deflect attention from their murderous assaults on Israeli citizens.

With regard to the Holocaust, the number of Jews murdered is not exaggerated. While estimates vary, there is independent corroboration between historians, using different methods and different source materials, that there are at least six million Jews who were murdered by the Germans. The variation adds credibility to the figure of around six million, for it would be more likely that the numbers were “cooked” if they all came out the same.

Significantly, the Nazis themselves estimated that at least six million were murdered. On Nov. 26, 1945, at the first Nuremberg trial, the Nazi physician Dr. Wilhelm Hoettel testified: “In various concentration camps approximately four million Jews had been killed, while about two million were killed in other ways, the majority of these having been killed by the action squads [Einsatzgruppen] of the security police. Himmler had not been satisfied with the report, since in his opinion the number of Jews killed must have been greater than six million.”

German Reparations

As Shermer and I point out, another false denier’s accusation is that the Holocaust is a Zionist conspiracy to exaggerate the suffering of the Jews during World War II in order to finance the establishment of Israel. Israel was created in May 1948 and only began receiving reparations in the 1950s. Reparations were based not on the number of Jews murdered, but on the expense to Israel of absorbing and resettling Jews who fled Germany and areas under German control prior to the war, as well as survivors who immigrated to Israel after the war. If reparations were based on the number of Jews, shouldn’t the Zionists have claimed a greater number of survivors? If the deniers were correct, then wouldn’t the Germans owe Israel far more in reparations, for the significant number that would have gone to Israel.

The Myth of The 11 Million

One common error that is made in describing the Shoah is the term 11 million — six million Jews, five million non-Jews. This historical distortion equates the destruction of the six million Jews of Europe with the others who were murdered. Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal believed that few non-Jews would care about the Holocaust unless five million non-Jews were mentioned. But the term was made up. Millions of civilians and soldiers were killed as a consequence of war. Communists, political and religious leaders were eliminated because they were viewed as a potential threat to the Nazis. Jews were deemed an existential threat to Germany and the world. Not even the Sinti and Roma were singled out for total annihilation, only the Jews. We trivialize the importance of this unprecedented event in modern history, minimize the experiences of all those who suffered and prevent a legitimate understanding of its causes and its universal implications for Western society when we use the phrase 11 million.

Dr. Alex Grobman is the senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society, a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, and on the advisory board of the National Christian Leadership Conference of Israel (NCLCI). He lives in Jerusalem.