It is obvious that it occured. What is not so obvious is the numbers of people it occured to.
Now I happen to have a boss who is an American German Jew - her mother at about age 6 escaped on a Banana Boat to Central America with her own mom - my boss’ grandmother was kicked out of her family by her father for doing something so stupid as to leave Germany since things weren’t too bad yet. Then he wrote her a letter telling her how proud of her he was since at the time he wrote the letter, it was too late for him and the rest of her family. They were never seen or heard from again.
It absolutely happened, but to how many is what can be legitamently debated. In my school text book in elementary school it was said the numbers were more than 8 million. Now in my daughter’s text book that number has fallen to almost 6 million. Huge difference - although both numbers are terriblely large.
The number is generally between 10 and 13,000,000. The number of 6,000,000 is the closest accurate estimate of the Jewish population that was slaughtered; for most, the Holocaust was a Jewish-only purging.
I distinctly remember going through a college class that started with everyone standing, then sitting down as a particular religion, belief system, physical trait, or physical condition was mentioned. In the camps, those left standing would live (if they kept their health up) and everyone else would be sent to the gas chambers. My class had around 30 college freshmen in it, and I think 2 would have lived.
During the same time frame of WWII more than 20 million Orthodox Christians were martyred…what is really interesting is that we Americans never hear anything about their holocaust. Nothing in our text books about that.
Various exterminations were carried out by the USSR during their span of barbarism from 1917-1990 (although the worst periods were from 1927-39). Orthodoxy survived, but entire groups such as the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church were nearly eliminated in entirety.
Robert Conquest was probably the most important person in bringing the horrors of Soviet life and death to the West, but he was regularly slandered and denied over his lengthy investigative career by leftists in the media and in politics. When he was asked to update “Harvest of Sorrow” for a 25th anniversary re-release, he was asked if he’d like to change the title. His response was “Only if I can change it to ‘I Told You So, You (expletive) Idiots!’”
American soldiers liberated the camps with cameras nearby. If the war had pressed into the USSR as it should have, the Holocaust would have seemed like nothing with those cameras rolling.
Since 1973 to today, there have been more than 50 million children killed in their mothers wombs in the United States alone - and that based only on the States that require documentation on the amount of abortions performed. That’s one holocaust which will probably never hit text books in anyone’s class room.
It is a grotesque indictment on the western world when belief in God’s existence is regarded as “backward” and killing of animals for food is barbaric, but atheism and slaughter of the unborn is regarded as “glorious progress”.
