Poland has cut its estimate of the number of people killed by the Nazis in the Auschwitz death camp from 4 million to just over 1 million.A most convenient excuse! In 1989 I organized a write-in campaign to persuade the then-Soviet Leader Gorbachev to release the Auschwitz Death Registers captured in 1945 when the Red Army took over the Auschwitz complex. A few months afterwards this actually happened. Gorbachev released these all-important documents to the Red Cross, which showed in minute detail why people had died in Auschwitz, the cause and time of death, their birth, address etc.
The vast majority of the dead are now accepted to have been Jews, despite claims by the former Polish communist government that as many Poles perished in Hitler's largest concentration camp. . .
The new study could rekindle the controversy over the scale of Hitler's final solution."
Shevach Weiss, a death camp survivor and Labor Party member of the Israeli Parliament, expressed disbelief at the revised estimates, saying: "It sounds shocking and strange." . . .
Shmuel Krakowsky, head of research at Israel's Yad Vashem memorial for Jewish victims of the Holocaust, said the new Polish figures were correct.
"The 4 million figure was let slip by Capt. Rudolf Hoess, the death camp's Nazi commander. Some have bought it, but it was exaggerated." . . .
But the Polish authorities said accurate estimates of the number killed could only be made by studying German documents seized by the Soviet Union. But Moscow has refused to return the archives.
74,000 names of people who had died were listed, of which only approximately 30,000 were Jews, along with an almost equal number of Poles and members of other nationalities.
The incredibly shrinking Holocaust! The "millions" that we have heard about for half a century and that we hear and read about still today all started with the "testimony" beaten out of poor Hoess on that horrible night in defeated Germany.