1.7 million Jews killed at Majdanek, says Lipstadt | Winston Smith Ministry of Truth Archive

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1.7 million Jews killed at Majdanek, says Lipstadt

Deborah Lipstadt overestimated the Jewish death toll at Majdanek by 2,733%*

* Based on the current official death toll of 60,000 6, Hilberg's estimate was 50,000 minimum.

The former German concentration camp Majdanek situated on the outskirts of the Polish city of Lublin has endured a plutonian experience in recent years as its status as a Vernichtungslager (extermination camp) or Todeslager (death camp) has been withdrawn. Tomasz Kranz director of the Research Department of the State Museum at Majdanek wrote that the camp "can not be classified as a death camp in the strictest sense." 1

This has much to do with its decreasing number of homicidal gas chambers; presently standing at two 2, down from the seven the museum claimed to have until the 1980s 3, and its vastly reduced death toll; currently standing at 78,000 4, down from a maximum of "almost 2,000,000." 5

The number of Jews claimed to have been killed at Majdanek currently stands at 60,000 6, a figure significantly smaller than The Black Book's 750,000 7; Lucy Dawidowicz's 1,380,000 8, and is just mere 3.5% of the figure Professor Deborah Lipstadt claimed were killed at the camp: 1,700,000! 9

Lipstadt also supported the 4,000,000 figure for Auschwitz, claiming that a "minimum of 2 million" of the victims "were Jews." 10 Therefore, Professor Deborah Lipstadt can be proved to have claimed that a minimum of 3,700,000—around 62% of the 6,000,000 Jews killed in the Holocaust—were killed at just Auschwitz and Majdanek.

Notes:

1. Tomasz Kranz, Emily Fuggle (English Language Editor), The Extermination of Jews at Majdanek Concentration Camp, Lublin: Państwowe Muzeum na Majdanku, 2010 (revised edition; originally published in English in 2007), p.8.

2. See Jürgen Graf's article on Tomasz Kranz's contribution to the 2011 German study on Nazi gassings; photos of a Majdanek museum pamphlet purchased at the museum in November 2012; photo taken in September 2013 of a museum sign at Majdanek describing the two gas chambers.

3. The seven homicidal gas chambers are described in detail in an earlier publication by the Majdanek Museum: ‎Edward Gryń, Zofia Murawska, Jan Gaczoł (translator), Majdanek Concentration Camp, Lublin: Państwowe Muzeum na Majdanku, 1966, pp. 45-47. The June 30, 1981 judgment of the six-year-long Duesseldorf-Majdanek trial states (s.404) that aside from for three of the homicidal gas chambers in the so-called Bunker of Block 41: "[t]he evidence heard has not yielded wholly conclusive findings ..." regarding the other four ("Die Beweisaufnahme hat hierzu keine völlig zweifelsfreien Erkenntnisse erbracht"). Only the judgment of the trial is accessible to the public so it's not possible to learn how many homicidal gas chambers are claimed in the indictment or were maintained by the prosecution throughout the trial, but contemporary newspaper reports and television programmes about the trial consistently claim that there were seven.

4. Kranz, op. cit., p.75.

5. "[j]ust under two million" is the death toll British agent Paddy Costello of the New Zealand Legation, Moscow, states he was told by the director of the Majdanek museum on his visit to the former camp. Although his full report is undated, part of it became a separate report titled "German 'Extermination Camps' (Vernichtungslager)" dated May 4, 1945. Both reports are found in the UK National Archives: FO 371/50975, pp.20-31, the latter is quoted in full in James McNeish, The Sixth Man: The Extraordinary Life of Paddy Costello. London: Quartet Books, 2008, p.313-318.

6. Tomasz Kranz, "Ewidencja zgonów i śmiertelność więźniów KL Lublin", Zeszyty Majdanka (journal published by the Majdanek museum), Vol. 25, 2005 (pdf version of the article, see p.39); see also Jürgen Graf's article.

7. "The mixed Russo-Polish commission inquiring into Maidanek atrocities estimates fully 1,500,000 people—men, women and children—were exterminated there. It was further estimated that about one-half of the victims of Maidanek were Jews,". Ilya Ehrenburg et al., The Black Book: The Nazi Crime Against the Jewish People, New York: The Jewish Black Book Committee, 1946, p.379.

8. "Auschwitz 2,000,000(Belzec 600,000(Chelmno 340,000(Majdanek 1,380,000( Sobibor 250,000( Treblinka 800,000( Total 5,370,000". Lucy Dawidowicz, The War against the Jews: 1933-1945, NY: Bantam Books, 1991, p.149. According to Jeremy Hicks in First Films of the Holocaust (Uni. of Pittsburgh Press, 2012, p.165) this figure is also stated as being the Majdanek death toll—although the religious affiliations of the 1,380,000 aren't mentioned—in the 1944 film Majdanek: Film Documents of the Monstrously Evil Deeds of the Germans in the Extermination Camp of Majdanek, in the Town of Lublin by Soviet director Irina Setkina, who also made a film about the Germans perpetrating the Katyn massacre.

9. "In the fall of 1944, Allied forces reached Maidanek and found the remains of 1.7 million Jews." "Our national loss of innocence — and of sensitivity," Finger Lake Times (Geneva, NY), Friday, April 22, 1983, p.5 (facsimile). Coincidentally, or not, 1,700,000 if the death toll attributed to Majdanek in a Soviet-Polish report submitted to the main Nuremberg trial, entered into evidence as USSR-93, and was described by chief Soviet prosecutor Roman Rudenko: "This report has already been presented to the Tribunal as Exhibit Number USSR-93 (Document Number USSR-93) and, according to Article 21 of the Charter, constitutes irrefutable evidence."

10. "Of the approximately 4 million people killed at Auschwitz a minimum of 2 million were Jews. All of them were citizens of various European countries, but they were killed as Jews." Deborah Lipstadt, Beyond Belief: The American Press & the Coming of the Holocaust 1933-1945, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1993, p.262.

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