Q: What did one Jew say to the other on the train to Buchenwald?

A: "Hey, at least we're not on the train to Auschwitz!"

It's funny because it's true, right? Just ask Rand Simberg, who in a little japeGallows At Buchenwald-Ohrdruf: Not a casualty from "stress" or "disease" promulgated by University of Tennessee Law Professor and "blogfather" of the right Glenn Reynolds, wrote this:

Buchenwald...while atrocious beyond normal human understanding, was merely a slave labor camp, and not historically abnormal in a time of war.

Let's see: Was Buchenwald a slave labor camp ordinary in the history of war? There were some 238,380 people incarcerated there between 1937 and 1945, of whom SS materials record 33,462 dead. Additionally, according to a former prisoner's calculations, there were 8,483 executions by shooting, 1,100 executions by hanging, and 13,500 deaths on evacuation transports beyond the SS numbers, for a grand total of 56,545 deaths. What could possibly be more historically normal for a time of war than that?

But wait, it gets better. Simberg adds:

The people who died there did so under the stress of work and disease, rather than as a deliberate attempt to wipe them off the planet. Which, of course, says much more about human nature and history than it does about the Nazis.

Did the victims of Buchenwald die of stress and disease rather than "a deliberateBodies At Buchenwald-Ohrdruf Labor Camp: "not historically abnormal in a time of war" attempt to wipe them off the planet"? John Cole points us to the Jewish Virtual Library's entry on Buchenwald, which includes not historically abnormal details such as the secret experiments with poison, chemical burns and incendiary bombs, spotted fever virus, yellow fever, smallpox, typhus, paratyphus A and B, cholera, and diphtheria conducted on prisoners. And what about the prisoners who died under "the stress of work"? Here is how Reinhard Heydrich described the purpose of labor camps, as recorded in the minutes of the Wannsee Conference by Adolf Eichmann:

Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex, will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes. The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as the seed of a new Jewish revival.

In other words, inducing "the stress of work and disease" was a deliberate attempt toCorpses Treated With Lime: not victims of "a deliberate attempt to wipe them off the planet" exterminate the Jews. Simberg is claiming that the Nazi concentration camp system, with the exception of Auschwitz, was not the mechanism of a premeditated plan to murder the Jewish people, and that whatever deaths occurred there were not historical outliers. Those are the fundamental premises of Holocaust denial, endorsed by a popular right-wing blogger and passed along to anyone who might be interested by a tenured law professor at the University of Tennessee.

What on earth could possess anyone who is not eager to be shunned by decent society to say (or in Reynolds' case, disseminate) such things? Why, naturally, it helps to discredit Barack Obama, who recently mentioned in passing that his uncle helped liberate Auschwitz. In fact, Obama's great-uncle helped liberate Buchenwald. The first error generated a gleeful apoplexy on the right because no one ever has or would describe a great-uncle as an "uncle." The second is nefarious because Auschwitz was so awful, and Buchenwald so blah by comparison, that Occam's razor itself, Simberg aptly observes, dictates that Obama substituted "Auschwitz" for "Buchenwald" in a calculated attempt to boost his Jewish vote. Which makes sense only if (a) you buy into Holocaust denialism or (b) you're a deranged hack.

Incidentally, the second Allied officer at Buchenwald was William B. Ravenel III,More Wartime Normality At Buchenwald: So Obama's uncle and McCain's mentor helped stop this; so what, right? who later was hired as an English teacher and football coach at Episcopal High School, and eventually became a mentor and surrogate father to John McCain. In Faith of My Fathers, McCain wrote that "when I came home from Vietnam, Mr. Ravenel was the only person outside of my family whom I wanted to see. I felt he was someone to whom I could explain what had happened to me, and who would understand. That is high tribute to Mr. Ravenel. For I have never met a prisoner of war who felt he could explain the experience to anyone who had not shared it." I spoke recently with Katharine Ravenel, William Ravenel's daughter, who told me that what enabled her father to connect to McCain's experiences as a POW was not any lesson in the classroom or on the football field, but Ravenel's experience liberating Buchenwald and forcing the local townsfolk to see with their own eyes what had happened there (one of the mayors Ravenel led through the camp shot himself).

In other words, Simberg and Reynolds are denigrating the heroism of one of the most important influences on John McCain's life, in addition to their graver indecencies. They were out to score points against Barack Obama, but the gutter they dove into is too polluted with filth to allow for any partisan outflow.

It's good to be reminded that, despite Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's best efforts, not everyone in the Muslim world buys the line that open mindedness about the existence of the Holocaust is the mark of a freethinker and an anti-imperialist.

The organization Jewish Voice for Peace sends us links to two recently published rants against Ahmadinejad's Holocaust revisionism. At MrZine, Mahmoud al-Safadi, a PFLP member recently released from an Israeli prison, says in an open letter to the Iranian president,

Like you and millions of people in the world -- among whom, alas, are innumerable Palestinians and Arabs -- I was also convinced that the Jews exaggerated and lied about the Holocaust.

My long imprisonment [in Israel] provided me with the occasion to read books and articles that our ideology and social norms made inaccessible to us outside the prison. The more I learned, the more I realized that the Holocaust was indeed a historical fact and the more I became aware of the monumental dimension of the crime committed by Nazi Germany against the Jews, other social and national groups, and humanity in general.

Whatever the number of victims -- Jewish and non-Jewish -- the crime is monumental. Any attempt to deny it deprives the denier of his own humanity and sends him immediately to the side of torturers. Whoever denies the fact that this human disaster really took place should not be astonished that others deny the sufferings and persecutions inflicted on his own people by tyrannical leaders or foreign occupiers.

And in an article titled “True Muslims Never Deny the European Holocaust,” Ibrahim Ramey of the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation writes,

[The] world now witnesses yet another wave of historical revisionism and Holocaust denial, this time emerging not from European Anti-Semites, but from none other than the President of Iran. Indeed, this head of state has taken the unprecedented act of hosting an international conference of anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers, and even white racists like former Klan leader David Duke, to gather in Tehran to deny the magnitude, if not the very existence, of this barbaric act.

As a Muslim of African decent in the United States, whose ancestors were victimized by the enormous crime of slavery, I object. And I believe that all Muslims, like other human beings who value compassion and truth, must vigorously object to this gathering as well.

Now if we can just get a few heads-of-state as ruffled as Ramey and al-Safadi, we'll be getting somewhere.