 November 12, 1989
 Auschwitz
Revisionism:
An Israeli
Scholar's Case By PETER STEINFELS AT Auschwitz,
it is inscribed in stone: four million people died
in the Nazi camps. But Yehuda Bauer, left,
one of the foremost historians of the HoIocaust and
a sworn enemy of those who deny its reality, says
that the number of victims was less than half
that. Why is Mr. Bauer, the Director of the Division
of HoIocaust Studies at the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem's Institute of Contemporary Jewry,
insisting that far fewer people, including far
fewer Jews, died at Auschwitz than is commonly
reported? "A historian's
first duty is to tell the truth," Mr. Bauer
said. And in this case the truth is horrible
enough. Exaggerating the number of dead at
Auschwitz, he said, "would only be grist for the
mills of the deniers of the Holocaust." "They can add, you know," he said. The four
million figure, combined with the known deaths
elsewhere, would result in a total number of
Holocaust victims well above the approximate figure
of six million that has long been established by
different methods, including a comparison of
European Jewish population statistics before and
after the war, he said. Although differing estimates of the Auschwitz
death toll were reported during the furor this year
about the location of a Roman Catholic convent at
the concentration camp site, the most frequently
cited figures list 2.5 million Jewish victims and
1.5 million others, most of them presumed to be
Polish. At the end of September, Mr. Bauer
published an article in The Jerusalem Post
calling those figures "patently false." Five years ago, he said, research by the French
Jewish historian Georges Wellers had
established that approximately 1.6 million people
were gassed, executed by other means, tortured to
death or were victims of starvation or disease at
Auschwitz. According to these findings, about 1.35
million were Jews. There were 83,000 Polish
victims, 20,000 Gypsies and 12,000 Soviet prisoners
of war. An additional 150,000 Poles were imprisoned
at Auschwitz, then shipped elsewhere Where many,
al-though not the majority, died. Mr. Bauer, who is in the United States
participating in several scholarly conferences on
the Holocaust, said that his article had "created
quite a rumpus in Israel." He received calls and
letters asking, "Why is this Bauer going around
saying a million fewer Jews died at Auschwitz?" Why indeed do differences between any such
grisly estimates of deaths matter at all? When
answering that question, Mr. Bauer speaks
passionately about the role of the historian and
the temptation to create "myths" that are dangerous
in the long run. In his attack on the familiar Auschwitz
statistics; Mr. Bauer has the agreement of a Hebrew
University colleague, Yisrael Gutman, who is
the editor of a four-volume Encyclopedia of the
holocaust, to be published next year. Mr. Gutman
led the Jewish underground in the Auschwitz
camps. Political
Purposes  Among
Holocaust historians, Mr. Bauer said, the larger
figures "have been dismissed for years, except that
it hasn't reached the public and I think it's about
time that did." Mr. Bauer contends that Polish
Communists and nationalists alike promoted the
larger figures to serve a political purpose casting
both Jewish and Polish losses in such huge numbers
that the distinction between the fates of the two
groups was blurred. Mr. Bauer said he does not play
down the Nazi assault on Poles. He calls it
genocide, which he defines as the "destruction of a
national entity with selective mass murder" of
those who resisted. "The flower of the Polish
intelligentsia was murdered in tho camps, including
Auschwitz," he said. But for the Jews, he said, the
Nazis planned a fate even beyond the destruction of
a nation: "mass annihilation." Genocide and
holocaust "are separate frightfulnesses," Mr Bauer
said, and if the world wants to combat them, it has
to keep in mine the distinction. "You don't treat
cholera and cancer with the same medication, you
differentiate between deadly diseases."
 For
some time, many Jewish organizations have avoided
taking a position on the Auschwitz figures. Elan
Steinberg, left, executive director of the
World Jewish Congress and participant in the
Auschwitz convent controversy, agreed that the
lower figures "were generally accepted by reputable
scholars." Although the inflated statistics blurred
the reality of Auschwitz as "pre-eminently a Jewish
killing ground," he said, sheer repetition led many
Jews to accept the numbers.
Mr. Bauer said, "It's the historian's task to
examine myths " and if necessary to explode them.
He illustrated his point by noting "the perception
of some Israeli politicians, that all the Gentiles
were against us" during the Holocaust, with the
exception only of those "righteous Gentiles"
honored at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial
center in Jerusalem. "Nonsense, just nonsense," Mr.
Bauer said. "The Jews in a number of countries were
saved by the local populations." Mr. Bauer said that it was a similar misuse of
history "to compare every post-Holocaust
anti-Semite to the Nazis." There are Nazi elements
in contemporary anti-Semitism, he said, but
frequently there are significant differences as
well. "Facile analogies are things we have to warn
against," he said. While insisting on precision about Holocaust
death tolls, Mr. Bauer has also warned against
"immersing tears and suffering in oceans of
footnotes" and "coming up with a remote
quasi-scientific approach which would be as inhuman
as that of those who committed the crime or of
those who stood by and watched it
indifferently."  Donate
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