Holocaust Revisionism And its Political Consequences Jürgen Graf, January 2001, in Tehran exile

2. The official version of the holocaust

The world "holocaust" is of Greek origin and means "immolation by fire". It is nowadays almost exclusively used to design the alleged extermination of the Jews by the Germans during the Second World War.

According to the orthodox historians, the National Socialist leadership, having decided to wipe out the Jewish race, set up six extermination camps where [six] million of Jews were gassed. All six killing factories were located in Poland (or in territories which had been Polish before the war and were annexed by Germany in 1939 before returning to Poland in 1945). Four of them (Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor and Chelmno) were pure extermination camps, and only a handful of Jews survived them. At Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibor, the Jews were murdered in gas chambers, at Chelmno in gas vans. The remaining two extermination centres, Auschwitz and Majdanek, served both as killing factories and as labour camps. In these two camps, the Jews unfit for labour were gassed, while those able to work were at least temporarily spared. The bodies of the gassed Jews were burnt, partly in crematoria, partly in the open air, so that no mass graves were found after the war. As all gassing orders were only given orally, no documentary evidence corroborating the existence of homicidal gas chambers has ever been discovered.

The Holocaust historians claim that, in addition to the mass gassings, the Germans shot between one and two million Jews on the Eastern front. According to them, between five and six million Jews perished in the German sphere of influence. More than half of them were murdered in homicidal gas chambers (and, to a much lesser extent, in homicidal gas vans), a large part of them were shot in the occupied Soviet territories, and the remaining ones (some hundreds of thousands) perished from diseases, starvation and bad treatment in labour camps and ghettos.

This is the official version of the holocaust, as it is described in Raul Hilberg's standard work The Destruction of the European Jews. But as we shall see later, the first versions were very different from the story we are told today.