by F.J. Foster

Created on: May 30, 2009   Last Updated: September 13, 2010

His name was Fred, and I worked with him some 30 years ago. One evening at work, he mentioned something from his World War II service, a reference to the Holocaust that stuck with me from then on. He described how his unit had liberated one of the death camps. "Outside the camp fence," he said, "there was a large wooden wagon loaded with potatoes. We opened the gate and rolled it inside. They, (the prisoners), picked it clean. They were eating potatoes like apples."

We've all seen the photos and the films of the starving, skeletal victims of Adolf Hitler's Final Solution. Worldwide, archives are awash with documentary evidence. The death camps themselves still stand, with their ovens and their gas chambers intact. Even Lt. Colonel Adolf Eichmann, Nazi Germany's Mr. Efficiency, who so thoroughly carried out Hitler's murderous wishes, proudly reported to his bosses that six million Jews had been slaughtered. Yet today some deny the Holocaust, or at the very least, try to minimize it. But how, with the number in the millions?

Deniers seem willing to try anything, from creative math to outright lies. To date, all have been refuted by credentialed scholars, not to mention their rejection by most rational, ordinary people. But still the deniers try, dipping endlessly into their moth-eaten and nearly barren bag of tricks.

They claim, for example, that no Final Solution plan existed because no document specifically spelling one out ever turned up. But as early as 1920, Hitler was on record saying that Jews must be eliminated.  Notwithstanding a non-existent manual for eliminating all Jews, (the Nazis covered their efforts by using euphemisms rather than stating clearly their real intentions), quotes by Hitler make it clear what his goals were. "The result of this war will be the complete annihilation of the Jews," he stated at one point.  And, on February 24, 1943, he said: "This struggle will not end with the annihilation of Aryan mankind, but with the extermination of the Jewish people in Europe."

What Hitler wanted, Hitler got. So when the Nazis estimated that 11,000,000 Jews lived in Europe, that's how many deaths Hitler sought. For deniers, in another of their tactics, to assert that 6,000,000 is an inflated number, is nonsense. Modern scholars and historians agree on it, as did the Nazis themselves.

Still another part of the denial game rests on claims that Holocaust scholars rely on anecdotal evidence provided by survivors because

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