Dear Barbara Boxer, member of Holocaust Memorial Council and California Senator:
Hopefully we both agree that accurate/non misleading information is as much an obligation for tax payer supported historical museums as it is for publicly traded companies and that the boards of such museums and companies are ultimately responsible for accuracy.
Consider the contrast between the two representations below, the first is from a panel within the United States Holocaust Museum entitled 'Warsaw Ghetto Uprising', the second is from a well respected reference book:
>>... The 700 to 750 ghetto fighters had a few dozen pistols and hand grenades. ... The Polish underground was unprepared to aid the ghetto combatants, who fought the Germans alone.<<
Now per the Holocaust Encyclopedia (Yale 2001) p. 482: "It is well known that the Home Army [the mainstream Polish underground] aided ... providing maps of the ... sewer[s] ... instructions for making Molotov cocktails ... created diversions ... supplied 90 revolvers, 600 grenades ..."
Steven Luckert, curator of the permanent exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Museum, emailed me 7 Jan '02: "I will check the files ... to locate the sources for the information on the number of weapons the ghetto fighters had in their possession." Since I have heard nothing further from Steven Luckert on the subject, presumably nothing credible in the files supports the Museum panel's minimizing, by a factor of roughly four, the weapons available to the Ghetto fighters. (Obviously the Ghetto fighters were hopelessly outgunned, but if the Museum is content to msirepresent one well established number by a factor of four why should I believe the other numbers presented by the Museum ?)
Employees of the Museum have defended the statement "The Polish underground was unprepared to aid the ghetto combatants ..." by stating that the 'aid' referred to is combat aid, i.e. men fighting and not logistics, weapons etc. This was not the predominate understanding of the word within its Museum context in a survey of advance placement high school students. Of the 45 students at Pennsbury High School who read the Warsaw Uprising panel statement 29 believed that the Polish underground provided no aid OF ANY KIND to the Jewish fighters.
(Also please note that per the the Yale publication quoted above "diversions" were "created" by the Polish underground. These diversions were, admittedly, minor; but they were combat aid.)
The same advance placement high school students were also surveyed as to their understanding of the USHM's Soviet Invasion panel, specifically the panel's first sentence statement that "hundreds of thousands (of Soviets) were captured or killed" with an unclear time period reference. (The statement: "Stalin had refused to believe warnings of an impending German attack, and the Soviet army was overwhelmed: hundreds of thousands were captured or killed. Within weeks , German divisions captured ... Latvia, Lithuania , and Estonia. In September the Germans laid siege to Sevastapol ... by late October, the cities of Minsk ... Kiev ... Kharkov had fallen ..." The Museum has claimed the "hundreds of thousands " reference is only to the first month of the German advance.) A significant proportion of forty-five students surveyed believed that the time period referred to was 22 June thru roughly late October 1941, i.e. twenty students, after reading the words on the panel, stated that the number of Soviet captured and killed in the June-October 1941 period was 100,000-500,000. The number of captured and killed Soviets in those four months was about three million.
I have been protesting the misleading/ambiguous wording of the Museum's Soviet Invasion panel for years. After some minor publicity this spring, Steve Luckert stated the panel would be changed. I requested a copy of the proposed new wording, fearing that, rather than accurately conveying Soviet casualties, the new wording would simply eliminate any reference to Soviet human losses. Steve Luckert wrote me 16 April '02: "I will send you the final text as soon as the text panel is revised and on display." I have not heard anything further on the matter from Steven Luckert, and the panel has not been changed.
Half a year should be long enough for the very well funded US Holocaust Museum to revise a panel that misinforms a significant proportion of Museum visitors about the extraordinary Soviet human losses of 1941, losses that were greater than Jewish losses in 1941 and that have been referred to as a holocaust in respectable publications. (Roughly 85% of the two million plus captured of 1941 were dead by the spring of 1942.)
...
The Museum bookshop actively promotes sales of Michael Berenbaum?s The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. (The book is piled high beside the cash registers.) And the book in its title claims a rather close association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Yet the curator of the permanent exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Museum refused to discuss any misrepresentations in the book during my only conversation with him a few years ago. The gentleman stated that any misrepresentations were not a Museum responsibility.
The first two of many misrepresentations in ... the History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (p.1): "[T]he [biblical] Hebrew word OLAH [became in the Greek Septuagint] HOLOKAUSTON. The Hebrew ... signifies a burnt offering ... unto the LORD [my uppercasing of Lord]. The word itself softens and falsifies the event by giving it a religious significance."
Within the Hebrew Bible there is one and only one employment of OLAH referencing a sacrifice/killing of human beings (plural) and that is a sacrifice/ killing of Jewish children in honor of BAAL (the Lord is horrified.) (See Jeremiah 19:5 and/or have a Hebrew speaking researcher check a Hebrew Concordance of the Bible for the word OLAH and its plural OLOT.)
So, ... as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in its first scholarly statement misrepresents both the Hebrew Bible and the meaning of the Greek HOLOKAUSTON.
Immediately following this first 'schorlarly' misrepresentation is another misrepresentation: "The word [holocaust] softens and falsifies the event by giving it a religious significance."
The claim of this last statement is ridiculous or ingenuous. 'H/holocaust' has been in wide use since the 19th century as a synonym for (non-religious) destruction, massacre etc. Few Jews or Protestants alive today have ever encounterd the word in its rare sense of sacrifice unto the Lord. ("Holocaust" is not to be found in Jewish or Protestant translations of the Bible.) And the word, when encountered in its rare 'religious' sense to refer to a 'sacrifice' of human beings to a god, is almost always a reference to a killing to honor an idol or a false god.(1) Five representative examples of H/holocaust employment in the first half of the twentieth century follow my signature.
I am puzzled by the financial and other arrangements the Museum has/ has had with Michael Berenbaum. As I understand the situation ... The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum was written employing Museum material by Michael Berenbaum while he was on salary at the US Holocaust Museum, an institution relying in part on US tax money. The book's large sales are partly a product of the book's title's explicit claim to represent the Museum's prestigious version of Holocaust history and the book's prominent placement within the Museum's heavily visited bookshop. And Michael Berenbaum is the sole beneficiary of the royalty payments from the book, and the Museum takes no responsibility for statements within the book.
Is there something of importance I am missing or misrepresenting in the above paragraph ? ...
And are you bothered in any way that US Holocaust Museum historical representations on non minor matters have, and continue to, mislead significant numbers of the millions of Americans who have visited their taxpayer supported Holocaust Museum and that the Museum appears to be extremely reluctant to correct misleading (and plain untrue) representations ?
Jon Petrie, jon_petrie@yahoo.com
Five examples of employments of "H/holocaust" follow and these are followed by a footnote.
The holocaust of war, the terrors of the Ku-Klux Klan, the lies of carpet-baggers ... left the bewildered serf with no new watchword beyond the old cry for freedom. ( W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Penguin Books, 1989 [first published 1903]). p. 8)
It was after we started with Gatsby toward the house that the gardener saw Wilson's body a little way off in the grass, and the holocaust was complete. (F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby [originally published 1925] Ch. VIII, last paragraph)
As for the Turkish atrocities ... helpless Armenians, men, women, and children together, whole districts blotted out in one administrative holocaust -- these were beyond human redress. (Winston Churchill, The Aftermath, 1929, p. 158)
A dozen Japanese airplanes wheeled and circled ... dropping bombs ... Japanese marines ... pick[ed] off snipers ... the conflagration snapped and crackled. During the holocaust the Shanghai-Nanking Railway station ... burned to the ground. (New York Times, 30 Jan., 1932, p. 2, col 3)
Having invented a new Holocaust/ And been the first with it to win a war,/ How they make haste to cry with fingers crossed/ King's X--no fairs to use it anymore! (Robert Frost, "U. S. 1946 King's X" in Steeple Bush, 1947)
Footnote (1): "H/holocaust" employed in the extremely rare sense of 'religious' sacrifice of human beings:
(a) "[T]wo hundred thousand young men ... the very pick and choice of the world's glorious ones ... And where are they now? ... prematurely aged and decrepit -- or shot or stabbed ... victims devoted upon the altar of the golden calf -- the noblest holocaust that ever wafted its sacrificial incense heavenward." Mark Twain, 1869, writing on the California Gold Rush in Innocents Abroad).
(b) "For him ... God is dead ... the God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob ... has vanished ... in the smoke of a human holocaust exacted by Race, the most voracious of all idols." (Francois Mauriac in the introduction to Elie Wiesel's Night, 1960)
(The above is by far the best circulated explicitly 'religious' employment of "holocaust" within a Holocaust Studies text.)
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Misrepresentations in museums: Soviet prisoner losses of 1941 at
the Imperial War Museum and the US Holocaust Museum
Soviet military losses between 22 June 1941 and the
termination of the German Barbarossa campaign at the gates of Moscow in
December 1941 were by far the highest suffered by any army in any six
month period of recorded history. Exact figures will never be
known but almost certainly total Soviet losses (killed and prisoners)
were over three million. In "normal" warfare prisoners, for the
most part, survive a war return home to familes, sweethearts etc.
The Germans captured well over two million Soviet prisoners in 1941; at
least 80% of these two million plus had been killed by German neglect
and/or murdered by the spring of 1942. (For more details: footnote
1) How this holocaust is misrepresented/ minimized in two major
museums should be of interest to readers of this list.
The Imperial War Museum in London within its lower ground floor
World War II exhibit has a display titled "Prisoners of War."
Within this display the sole reference to the murder by Germans/ death
at German hands/ of roughly three million Soviet POWs 1941-1945 is the
following: "The war of rapid movement ... [resulted in] unprecedented
numbers of ... prisoner[s] ... the situation of Soviet and German
captives on the Eastern front was particularly harsh ..."
Twenty feet or so from this statement a visitor to that museum
can summon up a three minute movie entitled "Barbarossa." ("Barbarossa"
was the German code name for their 1941 campaign to conquer the Soviet
Union.) The narrator of the "Barbarossa" movie, whose voice can
be heard easily by people examining the "Prisoners" display, makes only
two references to Soviet human losses: "the Germans claimed to have
taken a quarter of a million prisoners before they reached Minsk" and
"in and around Kiev 500,000 prisoners were taken." (Quoted wording here
may not be exact but its very close.)
I suggest that most visitors to the Imperial War Museum will
come away from the Barbarossa film and the nearby prisoner display with
the impression that the human death toll resulting from Barbarossa was
under a million.
The Imperial War Museum has an exhibit on two floors in
an area of 1200 square meters documenting both the enslavement/ murder
of Jews in the Nazi era and -- per a statement near the entrance to the
exhibit -- the "how and why" of the murder and enslavement of
"Gypsies ... Poles, Soviet prisoners of war ..."
The only display case within these two floors (and within the
entire War Museum) dealing with the fate of Soviet POWs is
titled "Invasion of the Soviet Union." The main text in the
display refers in its first paragraph to the 22 June 1941
invasion, and mentions the escalation of the German war against the
Jewish 'race' after the invasion commenced. The second paragraph
ends with the statement: "Three million Soviet prisoners were taken in
the first eight months. Jews and suspected Communists among them were
shot immediately; the rest were mostly left to starve or freeze to
death in make shift camps." The concluding paragraph
of the text refers to the shooting of Jews and Communists behind
the front lines.
This "mostly" statement is the sole reference to the death of
roughly two million Gentile, non-Communist Party Soviet POWS who fell
into German hands during Barbarossa within a display case at the
Museum. No figure of global Soviet POW losses is given and the "mostly"
statement is part of a long sentence around the middle of a three
paragraph text.
In the foreground of the display is a Soviet POW jacket with a
Star of David attached to it. The jacket figuratively and
literally obscures a museum visitor's view /appreciation/ of a
photograph placed at the back of the display case which shows an
immense column of Soviet POWs walking thru a Ukrainian rural
landscape. One of the two other photographic images within the
display case shows a Soviet POW wearing a prominent Jewish star.
About half the visuals in the display case bring to mind Jewish POWs and
the fate of Jews in German hands -- but under 3% of dead Soviet POWs
were Jews.
(For a photo of the display and its mainl text go to:
http://www.berkeleyinternet.com/iwm/ )
No 'innocent' visitor will come away from the current "Soviet
Invasion" Imperial War Museum display case with an accurate sense of
the massive Gentile Soviet POW death tolls of 1941 and early 1942. And
given the prisoner display and "Barbarossa" movie within the World War
II exhibit on the museum's lower ground floor badly mislead, it seems
to me that the Imperial War Museum wants its visitors to NOT know of
the huge Soviet POW losses.
A posting of mine on H-War in late February 2002 stated that
the ambiguous wording of the Soviet Invasion panel at the US Holocaust
Museum (Washington, D.C.) leaves many of its readers with the
impression that total Soviet losses from Barbarossa were of the order
of a few hundred thousand. (2) On 8 March 2002 Dr. Megargee of
the US Holocaust Museum wrote: "... I just learned that the
curator of the Permanent Exhibit had already slated that [Soviet] panel
for changes ... My main goal [is] simply to let H-War readers know that
the Museum is not deliberately distorting the past or ignoring
criticism ... It can cost thousands of dollars to replace a single
panel in the exhibit ... the Museum staff have to balance the worth of
the correction carefully against the worth of other things they could
do with the money." (3) The Soviet Invasion panel has not been changed
and the Museum continues to mislead many of its hundred thousand or so
monthly visitors as to the full extent of Soviet losses during
Barbarossa.
Jon Petrie
Footnote (1) Per Gerhard Weinberg -- a well respected military
historian (20 Feb 2002 on H-War): "According to its own ...
accounting, the German army on the Eastern Front had, in the first
seven months of fighting, killed or let die ... two million, one
hundred thousand [prisoners]." Per Ulrich Herbert
(*Fremdarbeiter*, p. 149) 3,350,000 Soviets were captured in 1941 and
in March 1942 only 167,000 of these were both alive and well enough to
have value to the Germans as labor. (Cited by C. Browning, Nazi
Policy ..., p. 72, n. 58 -- I quote Herbert's 3.3 million figure in
part to illustrate the range of semi-reliable figures.)
Footnote (2) The Holocaust Museum's Soviet Invasion panel states
in its first sentence "... hundreds of thousands were captured or
killed." The time period refered to is unclear. (The Museum
has claimed that the reference is only to the first month of the German
advance.) Of 45 advance placement high school students at
Pennsbury High School who read the panel, twenty understood the panel
to be stating that the number of Soviets captured and killed in the
June-October 1941 period was 100,000-500,000.
Footnote (3) The US Holocaust Museum's annual budget is around $50
million so presumably lack of money has not been the constraint holding
up revision of the panel. However, I wrote the US Holocaust
Museum on 9 December '02, "... [I]f the Museum has had second thoughts
about its priorities, and is unwilling to divert moneys from other
expenditures to pay for a new Soviet Invasion panel, I would be willing
to contribute up to $15,000 of the cost of a new invasion panel if such
a panel unequivocally acknowledges the Soviet human losses of
1941." I have not had a response to this offer (13 January
'03).
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