The First Holocaust: The Surprising Origin of the Six-Million Figure

Summary

The term “six million Jews” is found in Anglophone media reports ever since the world’s Jewish population had reached roughly six million in the mid-eighteen-hundreds.
The anti-Jewish pogroms and legal measures in Russia after the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881 made “six million Jews” a buzzword. Terms like “extermination” and “holocaust” made their first appearance in this context at the dawn of the 20th century.
During the abortive Communist revolution of 1905, these words were even used together with an alleged “solution of the Jewish question” as a policy of “murderous extermination.”

The First World War with its subsequent Russian/Communist Revolution, which was very popular among many Jews both in Russia and abroad, resulted in further hardship for the Jews in Russia. This in turn led to a steep increase in the use of these buzzwords.
Fundraising campaigns in the U.S. for Jews in Eastern Europe kept those terms in the media during the early and mid-1920s.

The rise of National Socialism in Germany steadily reinvigorated the use of these terms from the very beginning of the Third Reich.

We conclude, therefore, that we have heard since the eighteen-eighties that “six million Jews” have been threatened more or less continuously with extermination in a holocaust.
So what? You may ask. What is that supposed to prove, if anything? Well, here are some tough questions:

– In 1882, was there a “struggle for the annihilation of the Jews”?
– In 1903, did the Russian government decide that Jews “must be annihilated,” so that they underwent a “process of extermination” in “this barbaric holocaust”?
– In 1905, was there a “holocaust” in which “Jews must be … exterminated?”
– In 1906, was “the Russian Government’s policy” to solve “the Jewish question” by way of “murderous extermination”?
– In 1911, had “Russia … adopted” a “plan to … exterminate six million” Jews?
– In 1915, was there a “Russian campaign of extermination” against the Jews?
– In 1919, were “six million” Jews “dying… in this threatened holocaust?” Were “6,000,000 [Jewish] souls… going to be completely exterminated”?
– In 1920, was it necessary “to save six million [Jews] from extermination”?
– In 1921, were “Russia’s 6,000,000 Jews… facing extermination by massacre”?
– In 1926, was the “whole [Jewish] people… dying”?
To ask these questions in such a condensed form means to answer them, because what we are dealing with here was exaggeration and hyperbole.
Fact is that prior to the Communist Revolution, holocaust and extermination claims were exaggerations used to lobby for
– facilitation of Jewish immigration to the U.S. and to other countries,
– creation of a Jewish national homeland,
– and “regime change” in Russia.
Once that “regime change” had been accomplished in Russia at the end of World War One, holocaust and extermination claims didn’t cease but rather continued. This time these exaggerations were used

– to raise funds meant to assist Jewish communities in Eastern Europe,
– to defeat the czarist counter-revolution and thus,
– to effectively stabilize the fledgling Communist regime in Russia.
The advent of the Third Reich led to the repetition of some of these patterns: holocaust and extermination claims were exaggerated at least until the outbreak of the German-Soviet war, which was by its very nature a counter-revolutionary war. These exaggerations were again used to lobby for

– facilitation of Jewish immigration to the U.S. and to other countries,
– creation of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine,
– and finally “regime change” in Germany.
We all know the outcome of that struggle.

At the end of this commentary, let me pose that initial question again:
Since when do we know that Six Million Jews died in the Holocaust?
To answer this question, we need to know two things:

1. Which Six Million are we talking about?
2. Which Holocaust?

Quote from the book The First Holocaust: The Surprising Origin of the Six-Million Figure by
Don Heddesheimer