The Holocaust before the Holocaust
or The Story of a Number That Pays Off by
Don Heddesheimer.
Most people believe that six million Jews were exterminated by Nazi Germany during World War II. But how long has the magic number of six million been around? Almost everyone thinks it was established by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. This is wrong: this book shows precisely, based primarily on meticulous and careful research in the American press of the first decades of the 20th century, that the talismanic number was used much earlier: as early as 1919, or even before!
Indeed, during World War I, press campaigns were orchestrated to denounce Imperial Germany and, even more so, Tsarist Russia, in connection with the supposed fate of the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe: they were regularly described as persecuted, starving, and consequently threatened with a "holocaust" and "extermination." Around the same time and throughout the 1920s, numerous fundraising campaigns were launched in Europe and the United States, mobilizing major Jewish organizations to convince Western public opinion of the imminence of a very great peril. In most cases, the funds raised were used to finance and strengthen Zionist and communist initiatives.
Scholarly and well-documented, this book perfectly illustrates how the leaders of a people steeped in numerology and masters of making money grow were able to put these "qualities" at the service of long-term political objectives.
The appendix includes more than 200 newspaper references, from 1900 to 1945, that mention a "holocaust" or the figure of "six million."
256 pp.
Get the book here: https://www.akribeia.fr/histoire-critique/1756-lholocauste-avant-lholocauste.html