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Hate and Discrimination

Dave Daubenmire Questions the Extent of the Holocaust

On his "Pass The Salt Live" webcast(link is external) this morning, Religious Right activist Dave Daubenmire showed off an old Bible that he recently purchased at an estate sale and used it to suggest that millions of Jews had not been killed in the Holocaust.

Daubenmire, who(link is external) is(link is external) blatantly(link is external) anti-Semitic(link is external), highlighted a list contained in his copy of the "Pronouncing Edition of the Holy Bible(link is external)"—which was published in 1900 and claimed that there were 7.5 million Jews in the world at the time—and used it to question how six million Jews could have been killed in the Holocaust just a few decades later.

"I'm not going to get into the depth about it because you are going to call me names," Daubenmire said(link is external). "In 1900, there were 7,500,000 in the world. This ain't forged. Folks, 7,500,000 Jews in the world. Can somebody explain to me how six million of them died in Germany? That is all I am going to say. I'll let you figure the rest out."

"Forty years later, six million of them died?" he added. "In Germany? They were all in Germany and died in Germany? Uh oh, I'm making some of you nervous."

The figure of 6 million(link is external) deaths of Jews in the Holocaust does not simply refer to the numbers of German Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis, nor of simply of those who died in Germany; it includes those who died in death camps located in Poland, Ukraine(link is external) and other European countries. Furthermore, the Pew Research Center estimates(link is external) the total population of European Jews in 1939, before the war began, at 9.5 million, based on historical research by Sergio DellaPergola of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.