Institute for Historical Review

Holocaust pressure groups shut down Japan's Marco Polo magazine

The Greatest Taboo of Postwar World History: There Were No Nazi 'Gas Chambers'

1. It is an undeniable fact that the Nazi regime engaged in unjust discrimination against Jews and persecuted them in a variety of ways. Also, after Germany plunged into war with the United States, persecution was stepped up against Jews within Germany proper and within the European nations controlled by Germany. All across Europe, a policy of confining Jews in concentration camps was initiated. On this point, the traditional accounts are largely correct.
2. However, neither Hitler nor the Nazi leadership ever planned the "extermination" of Jews. The Nazi leadership's plan was to transfer the Jews from the concentration camps to "Eastern territories" within the Soviet Union after the war. They called this forcible resettlement plan the "final solution" (Endlösung) of the Jewish problem, and intended to implement it after defeating the Soviet Union on the Eastern Front.
3. Concentration camps such as Auschwitz, which were built in Poland by Nazi Germany, were preliminary facilities for implementing the "final solution" of forcibly relocating the Jews after the Soviet Union was defeated and occupied. That is to say, the intention was to use the Jews in Auschwitz and other Polish concentration camps as a wartime labor force and then, after the war, forcibly to transfer the Jews to "Eastern territories" in such places as the Soviet Union. Consequently, "Jewish extermination" was never intended nor attempted by the German government: it would have been inconsistent with the government's plan.
4. However, reverses on the Eastern Front made the "Jewish forcible transfer plan" unworkable. Moreover, in the confusion of the closing days of the war, sanitary conditions in the Jewish concentration camps deteriorated and there were explosive outbreaks of epidemics of diseases like typhus, in which many innocent Jews died.
5. After the war, the Allies, who had photographed the bodies of Jews who had died of disease, claimed that these were the bodies of victims of "gas chambers."