Representative Press Blog

"The genocidal barbarism of the Nazi forces has been well documented. What hitherto has been little known is the fate of fifteen million German civillians who found themselves at the mercy of Soviet armies and on the wrong side of new postwar borders. All over Eastern Europe, the inhabitants of communities that had been established for many centuries were either expelled or killed. Over two million Germans did not survive."

"One night in April 1945 soldiers burst into our home awakening my family. They grabbed my mother and tore her wedding ring and earrings off. With nothing but the clothes on our backs and a few small bundles under my mother's and grandmother's arms we were driven into the dark. I was petrified as I clung to my grandmother and we joined the large crowd in the middle of the street. The whole town was taken in this manner and herded out of Karlsdorf to the airport just outside the town. We were put into hangers, which were surrounding by a high barbed wire fence. We slept on the bare, cold and damp dirt floor. No heat was provided, so that condensation from the people breathing would rise to the ceiling and in the morning, as it cooled off, it would drip down on us like rain.

Throughout Yugoslavia , all ethnic Germans were put into concentration camps and became prisoners of the state. We lost our citizenship and all our property was confiscated. I, too, at the tender are of four, was considered a political prisoner and a threat to the security of Yugoslavia. From 1945 to 1949, we suffered starvation, beatings, mass murders and slave labor." -Testimony of Survivor Elisabeth Walter

But Deborah Lipstadt insists that this woman did not survive a holocaust!

Deborah Lipstadt insists that the more than 2 million people who died because of the starvation, beatings, mass murders and slave labor did not die in a holocaust. Deborah Lipstadt insists that the more than 2 million people, who were targeted and who died because of what ethnicity they were, did not die in a holocaust.

(For more of the Testimony of Survivor Elisabeth Walter, see p100 of A Terrible Revenge : The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans )

I asked Lipstadt about signing a petition to help bring Shlomo Morel to justice. I mentioned to her that Morel was responsible for the deaths of Germans who died in concentration camps (under the conditions survivors like Ms. Walter have testified to) It was Lipstadt who brought up the question of whether I thought they died in what could be called a holocaust. I said yes. She was making the point that it wasn't a holocaust. In fact, several minutes later, when I was talking to someone about the 2 million ethnic Germans that died after WWII, Lipstadt felt it necessary to interject, "Two million Germans did not die after World War II." I called her a "denier."

There were others who attended her talk at Barnes & Noble who totally denied that Jews had murdered Germans in camps! Note that they didn't dispute how many Germans were murdered at the hands of Jews, they totally denied that it had happened at all!!! The irony and hypocrisy is incredible. What is commonly referred to as "Holocaust Denial" is actually a dispute about specifics of the Holocaust, what we have here is actual denial. A denial that is total and not simply a dispute over specifics, numbers, methods, intent or scope.

There are people who share the blame for keeping so many people in ignorance about the enormous, horrific reality that the German civilians, men, women, children and babies suffered after WWII. Lipstadt is one of them. Lipstadt calls John Sack's book An Eye for an Eye "not a good book." When I said it had been coroberated by 60 minutes, she scoffed at the idea that that should mean something. The woman is in denial. An Eye for an Eye had been fact-checked by 60 Minutes and they found eight eyewitnesses in addition to the eyewitnesses John Sack had found. An Eye for an Eye was fact-checked by three major magazines and a paper whose editor said, "It may be the most accurate story in the history of American journalism." An Eye for an Eye was corroborated by the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune. Historians hired by major newspapers in Germany went to the German Federal Archives and wrote, "The facts are true," "The facts are right," "The facts are iron-bound."