Source: Bigstock

On that note, I should also point out that the Red Cross list only covers registered deaths. Toward the end of the war, the camp registration process broke down as the camps became overcrowded and the Nazi infrastructure collapsed under the weight of Allied bombings. Auschwitz is included on the Red Cross list (today, Auschwitz is in Poland, but during the war, it sat on territory annexed by Germany), and the Red Cross tally for that camp is low by even the deniers’ standards. Germar Rudolf, arguably the most serious of the deniers, had this to say about the Red Cross death tally in 2003’s Dissecting the Holocaust: “The camps Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka are missing from the table, as are the victims in the ghettos. And finally, one must remember that according to the Death Books approximately 66,000 people died in Auschwitz by late 1943 alone.” The Red Cross gives a total figure of 60,056 for Auschwitz. As Rudolf points out, that figure is too low.

Even the world’s leading denier agrees, the Red Cross report omits the most important camps (which the Red Cross never had access to), and its total for other camps is incomplete.

Some will say, “Why quibble over the numbers?” Well, here’s why. On one side of the debate, we have boobs who claim that there was no program of mass murder, that only a few hundred thousand Jews died, and only from disease and overwork; and on the other side, you have Jewish organizations that seek to censor or imprison anyone who dares to put the number of Jewish dead below the sacred 6 million mark (for the record, I put the total at somewhere between 3 and 3.5 million). With irrational extremists demanding “all or nothing,” of course it’s important to seek the truth, to combat the history falsifiers on both ends.

That explanation I just gave regarding the Red Cross report? I provided a slightly more detailed version of it to Chuck Johnson. I asked him if it altered his opinion regarding the Holocaust death toll. His reply? “Yes, you changed my mind.” See how easy that was? If someone is unaware, you enlighten them with facts and reason. And now, here’s one less person—and a fairly influential person at that—who’ll be spreading the Red Cross report “250,000 deaths” myth. The ADL could have tried things my way, respectfully reasoning with Johnson, but it didn’t, because the ADL has no interest in reason, nor does it have any desire to actually combat Holocaust denial. The ADL would not exist (or profit) without people it can accuse of being Jew-haters. To the ADL, there’s no upside to educating a man like Johnson. The ADL needs anti-Semitism, it needs Holocaust denial. It needs people to defame, people to censor, people to spy on. The ADL without enemies is like a tobacco enema without an asshole; a whole lot of noxious fumes with nowhere to go.

The ADL thrives on people who fall for anti-Jewish myths and memes on social media. It thrives on people who bellow their ill-formed opinions about the Holocaust while stubbornly refusing to confront their biases and question their assumptions.

You want to fight the ADL? Stop doing that.