On the occasion of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Wasim 'Afifi, a columnist on the Egyptian news portal Elmwatin.com, published an article in which he listed "five reasons that caused the Arab world to reject the veracity of the Holocaust." He stated that the media inflated the dimensions of the Holocaust as part of a conspiracy by Russia, which wanted to blacken Germany's image, and the West, which wanted to establish a state for the Jews in Palestine. Auschwitz, he added, was not a concentration camp but rather a factory for manufacturing pesticides, and the crematoria were meant for burning the bodies of typhus victims. The world's misguided ideas about Auschwitz are a result of propaganda by Russia, which controlled the camp and manufactured fake evidence there after the war. Also according to 'Afifi, calculations prove that the Germans cannot have exterminated six million Jews, nor is it possible that their wealth was confiscated, considering that they now possess "the greatest wealth in the world." He claimed further that no official documents prove that the Nazis had a policy of exterminating the Jews. The German plan, he says, was to create a Jewish homeland in Madagascar, but "technical difficulties" and the need for working hands prompted them to use the Jews as laborers instead.
Afifi's article on the website: "Five Reasons that Caused the Arab World to Reject the Veracity of the Holocaust"
The following are excerpts from the article:[1]
"There are five main reasons why the Arab world is waving the banner of refusal to accept the Holocaust as an historic fact. The most obvious of these is the claim that six million Jews were exterminated. This number is greatly exaggerated; according to European statistics, before World War II the total number of Jews in Europe was 6.5 million. This means that in the Holocaust, nearly all Europe's Jews were killed. This contradicts other numbers from immigration departments in Europe, according to which between 1933 and 1945, 1.5 million Jews emigrated to Britain, Sweden, Spain, Australia, China, India, Palestine, and the U.S. According to German government statistics, by 1939, 400,000 of Germany's 600,000 Jews had emigrated. Likewise, 480,000 Jews emigrated from Austria and Czechoslovakia, as part of the plan to settle Jews in Madagascar, but they ended up in other countries. Their property was not confiscated – otherwise, the Jews would not today have the greatest wealth in the world. Other numbers show that over two million Jews immigrated to the USSR.
"Historians point out that in 1938, there were 16.5 million Jews in the world, and that a decade later, that is, in 1948, there were 18.5 million Jews in the world. Assuming for the sake of argument that six million Jews were annihilated during World War II, it is inconceivable that the remaining 10 million reproduced at such a rate as to become 18 million a decade later. This is contrary to the laws of statistics, and to the human population growth [rate].
"The second reason is the lack of official documentation. There is not [one single] official document noting the details of the Holocaust operations, and most of Heinrich Himmler's statements at the Wannsee Conference, on January 20, 1942, concerned the impracticability, at that stage, of [implementing] the [Nazi] government's policy encouraging Jewish emigration to Madagascar with the aim of turning it into [the Jewish] homeland, due to the circumstances of World War II, and because Germany needed working hands to run its war machine. This is according to the French historian Paul Rassinier,[2] who wrote in his book The Drama of the European Jews that the so-called 'Final Solution' document was in fact a plan for postponing the Jewish settlement operation in Madagascar, which had already been decided upon, until after the war, because of Germany's need for working hands and because of the wait for opening diplomatic channels with other countries for finding a suitable homeland for Europe's Jews.
"The third reason is the media propaganda; the intense media coverage of the detention camps and the death camps is groundless, because these camps were [actually] huge manufacturing units for supporting the war machine. The biggest detention camp, that sparks much controversy – that is, Auschwitz – was first occupied by Soviet forces, who did not allow any neutral party to enter it for 10 years. It is assumed that during these 10 years the USSR changed the features of the camp and that [from the outset] it had no so-called gas chambers into which Jews were sent by the thousands in order to poison them, but that these were small rooms for manufacturing agricultural pesticides... There were some crematoria at these camps, but they were used for burning the bodies of people who died of typhus in the last years of the war, because of the lack of medical services following the collapse of Germany's industry... It makes no sense that Germany would waste so much fuel and energy, that it needed so badly for the war, in order to burn millions of bodies.
"The fourth reason is the forgery of documents: Many of the photos presented to the world, and in the Nuremberg trials, were in fact photos from the German archives themselves [taken] when the Germans tried to show the extent of the starvation and typhus in Germany in last years of the war. The photos presented at the Nuremberg trials [allegedly] showing the mass destruction of the Jews were in fact of the controversial bombings carried out by Allied war planes against Dresden, February 13-15, 1945.
"The fifth and final reason is the spread of the conspiracy theory. There is a sort of conspiracy theory: the media exaggerated the events of the Holocaust. The USSR was party to this, and spread these rumors, in order to expand its hegemony in Europe as a better alternative to Germany, and in order to divert attention from its poor treatment of prisoners at the Soviet forced-labor camps of the notorious Gulag. The West too – which won World War II and did not accept the German idea of establishing a homeland for the Jews in Madagascar but favored the idea of establishing the State of Israel in Palestine as the homeland of the Jews of the world – was also a partner in this conspiracy."
[1] Elmwatin.com, January 27, 2018.
[2] French politician Paul Rassinier (1906-1967) is considered the father of Holocaust denial. In his 1948 book Le Passage de la Ligne, Crossing the Line, and his 1950 book The Holocaust Story and the Lie of Ulysses, he argued that while some atrocities were committed by the Germans, they have been greatly exaggerated, and that the Germans were not the perpetrators of these atrocities – the inmates who ran the camps instigated them. The major focus of his 1964 book The Drama of European Jewry was the denial of the gas chambers in the concentration camps, the denial of the widely accepted figure of 6 million Jews exterminated, and the discounting of the testimony of the perpetrators following the war. Jewishvirtuallibrary.org/a-brief-history-of-holocaust-denial, accessed January 30, 2019.
