Chapter 1: What You Know About the Holocaust Is Probably Wrong or Incomplete

First, the disclaimer: I am not a Holocaust scholar and I do not have an undergraduate or graduate degree in Holocaust studies.

What I do have is the experience of living in Munich, Germany (the birthplace of the Nazi party) only 25 years after the end of World War II. On November 9, 1970, I was reading in my U.S. Army quarters (apartment) while my U.S. Army officer husband Mitch worked at the office of the 18th Military Intelligence Battalion of the 66th Military Intelligence Group.

On that day of November 9, 1970, I learned for the first time about Kristallnacht (in Germany more properly called Reichspogromnacht). Suddenly I realized I was reading about this supposedly “spontaneous” attack on Jews on the 32nd anniversary of that date – and I was in Munich!

Being stationed in Munich at that time changed my husband’s and my lives forever, although I’ll share that story later.

What I want to share now is the explanation of this first chapter’s title:

I am a trained journalist (B.A. in Journalism from Michigan State University) who worked as an editor and reporter at the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent weekly newspaper for six years (Summer 1972 to Summer 1978). As editor of Friday Forum – the Exponent’s monthly literary supplement, I published many firsthand accounts written by Holocaust survivors and saviors, did book reviews of Holocaust fiction and nonfiction, and interviewed in-person (no Zoom then) people such as Nazi identifier Beate Klarsfeld and Romanian rescuer Ruth Kluger (not the Austrian Ruth Kluger). During that time I also taught news writing courses and copy editing courses at the Center City extension of Temple University.

In the last few years as I have learned more about the Holocaust – and more importantly, what led up to the Holocaust starting when Germany surrendered in World War I on November 11, 1918 – I have spotted numerous inconsistences, errors, and anomalies in the history.  

And as a journalist trained to REPORT THE FACTS – I have become increasingly interested in the gaps in our knowledge and understanding – gaps that all our sources of information from books to film to social media to podcasts often accidentally or purposely manipulate.

Why is this awareness of the information gaps important?

  1. To be able to counter Holocaust denial
  2. To learn and understand from this history what is going on today that could lead to NEVER AGAIN actually happening again – sooner rather than later
  3. In terms of 2: being active now to try to prevent this happening

Okay, you’re probably thinking “enough of this explanation – could you please give some examples?”

Here are just a couple of ones that will be explored later in the book:

  1. While we all have seen and read over and over again about the selection process as the Jews were viciously herded off the sealed trains upon arrival at Auschwitz – one side to the gas chambers, one side to life for at least that day – there were trains that arrived from which those Jews did not go through selection. (Yes, many of these arrivals were later gassed, such as the Roma and Sinti – Gypsies.) This explanation will come later including who (of the Jews not immediate gassed) got tattoos at Auschwitz and that Auschwitz inmates often said “going to the ovens” when they meant first gassed to death in the gas chambers, then bodies burned in the crematoriums.
  • And staying with Auschwitz, we have all seen over and over again the picture of a group of children being liberated from Auschwitz as if children had a decent chance of surviving selection or the extermination camp itself. (Another fact: Auschwitz under the Nazis was not originally an extermination camp.) Those pictured children were an anomaly – the few survivors of the brutal medical experiments undertaken on children (especially identical twins) by Auschwitz Nazi doctors including the infamous Josef Mengele.

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In Diane Cole’s June 10-11, 2023, Wall Street Journal review of Joseph Berger’s 2023 biography “Elie Wiesel: Confronting the Silence” there is this interesting mention:

“Fair-minded throughout, Mr. Berger doesn’t shy away from reporting on those critics of ‘Night’ who questioned various details that Wiesel include. [… ]The biographer tracks down the historical record to confirm that the atrocities Wiesel describes did indeed occur.”

Why is this mention so significant? And why would anyone doubt Elie Wiesel’s eyewittness accounts?

Because Auschwitz, the “Holocaust by bullets” or any other aspect of the extermination of six million Jewish men, women and children along with millions of others — including Roma and Sinti, homosexuals, political dissidents and Jehovah’s Witnesses –was not monolithic.

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I’ll close this first chapter by repeating the chapter’s title in a longer version:

Everything you think you know about the Holocaust and the events leading up to it are probably wrong, incomplete, or a small subset depending on such factors as the precise location of the victims’ murder and, most importantly, the exact date of the murder (for example, in Poland when divided between the Nazis and the Soviets or later when Poland was totally occupied by the Nazis).

In closing, I hope you’ll keep reading additional chapters. I’ll be sharing little known FACTS along with travelogue accounts of visiting Holocaust museums and memorial sites in Europe and accounts of Jewish and non-Jewish heroes who are often overlooked by mainstream history.

NEXT CHAPTER: Chapter 2: The STAB IN THE BACK German Lie Blaming the Communists and the Jews for Losing WWI