Ia. The Myth of the Six Million

“People are easily fooled. But there are tests for reality. If a thing is burned up, then there will be a residue of ashes and gasses. But if there is not such a residue, and the things appears to be unchanged, then it is not acting as if it were burned up.” — The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny, p. 357

“But if indeed six million Jews were killed (between a third and a half of the Jews in the World, and more Jews than were in the maximum area ever controlled by the Germans) then they should have left a big hole in the total Jewish World Population, but they didn’t.”— Lafferty, Letter, January 24, 1990

One key to interpreting a segment of Lafferty’s fiction is his longstanding Holocaust skepticism and his use of Jewish stereotypes. These help explain certain tropes he employs and the absence of the Jewish Holocaust in The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny. This is distinct issue from one of many developments of the "new-antisemitism"—specifically, the 1980s IHR-denial version Lafferty later bought into—though, as I have written, continuities make strategies of secular quarantine impossible, for reasons that I will return to.

What’s needed is a better grasp of detail, so that is what this post tries to do. Lafferty said that, before reading the Journal of Historical Review, he had read The Myth of the Six Million (1969, Noontide Press—the imprint that later published the Journal). First printed anonymously, the book was most likely written by David Leslie Hoggan.

Something that would have arrested Lafferty’s attention is The Myth of the Six Million’s discussion of Stephen F. Pinter, a former U.S. War Department attorney who served with the occupation forces in Germany and Austria, and its appeal to the Holy See. In a letter to the popular American Catholic weekly Our Sunday Visitor (June 14, 1959), Pinter claimed that there were no gas chambers at Dachau or other German camps and minimized the scale of Jewish deaths.

The anonymous author of The Myth of the Six Million uses this letter to say, “It is small wonder, under such considerations, that the Holy See has steadfastly and consistently refused to join those who charge that Germany practiced a deliberate policy of seeking to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe.” This illustrates how Noontide-style deniers in the new-antisemitism mode made varied rhetorical appeals to Catholicism. Here, a foundational text of modern Holocaust denial quotes from a major Catholic communications organ in the United States, citing a statement from 1959—this being a full decade earlier.

Our Weekly VIsitor 061459.pdf

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Anyone who claims that the mere fact of Lafferty’s Holocaust skepticism marked a radical break from his earlier Catholicism should examine the Dachau letter in Our Sunday Visitor and flip through the issue. In the year Lafferty wrote “The Six Fingers of Time” and “The Polite People of Pudibundia,” rosaries could coexist with discussion of Holocaust denial in a preeminently mainstream organ of American Catholic communication. This is only one part of the picture: also relevant for Lafferty are the development of the post-Conciliar Church’s social teaching, the Church’s relationship to the State of Israel, and Belloc’s separate influence, topics I have written about on this blog.

Did Lafferty read The Myth of the Six Million before February 1976, when he completed The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny? The answer is uncertain, but I’ll be bold: the internal textual evidence—though circumstantial—points in that direction. The case is cumulative. What follows are intertextual correspondences that, for me, tip the balance, ranked from most to least persuasive. They are illustrative rather than exhaustive.

Theme	Apocalypses (R. A. Lafferty, 1977)	The Myth of the Six Million	Why it matters
Reparations framed as suspect “evidence”	“persons are being paid billions of dollars in reparations . . . there is no way to stop money payments once they are started.”	“presenting a reparations invoice… six million… ‘swindlers of the crematoria’… derive billions of marks.”	Both cast reparations as a financial engine that sustains a false narrative.
Affidavits/testimony vs. truth	“more than nine million affidavits…,” yet “People are easily fooled.”	Nuremberg “sample affidavits… one-sided”; “hundreds of affidavits… from former Jewish inmates” used to counter charges.	Each foregrounds “affidavits” (volume of testimony) as unreliable or manipulable.
Forensic/physical pseudo-standard	“If a thing is burned… there will be a residue of ashes and gasses.”	“six million… serried gas ovens… no valid evidence brought forward to support this charge.”	Lafferty’s “ashes/gasses” test mirrors Hoggan’s fixation on cremation/gassing mechanics.
History as “not real” / “legend”	“we come down to… the wars did not happen.”	Jewish sources still “accept the legend that six million… were exterminated.”	Both replace established history with “it didn’t happen”/“legend” framing.
Holocaust referents alongside denial	“the flesh of Gypsies and Jews.”	“under his orders some six million Jews were exterminated… (denied as lacking evidence).”	Hoggan names Jews to dispute extermination.
Number-bookkeeping rhetoric	“the five hundred battles of Armageddon II… were only… army games.”	“3,375,020… registered… to claim indemnities.”	Both use large, precise numbers to imply conventional totals are inflated or misconstrued.

As I wrote, this convinces me. But even if one rejects the argument that specific textual elements of Holocaust denial literature profoundly shape one of Lafferty’s major works, an intractable choice remains: either credit Lafferty’s own claim that he "never did accept" the reality of the Holocaust, or do not. I take him at his word. His love of history and his precision with language amount to a moral and intellectual failure; they explain the absence of the Jewish Holocaust in his work. The Three Armageddons is that is about many interesting things. One of those things is structurally and thematically erasing the Jewish Holocaust.

For Lafferty, "myth" usually does not mean "lie"; in the title The Myth of the Six Million, it does. The table below outlines some of its propagandistic claims.

#	Claim	Quote
1	Core thesis: six million is a deception	“There has never been a more colossal and successful deception, nor one which has been so enormously profitable in every way for its perpetrators, than the Myth that Hitler and his Nazis killed six million Jews.”
2	No conclusive proof, charges called falsification	“There has never been even the slightest conclusive proof for such a campaign of promiscuous slaughter on the part of Germany, and, in the meantime, all reliable evidence continues to suggest with increasing volume and impact that this genocide legend is a deliberate and brazen falsification.”
3	Nazi policy was emigration, with asset transfer	“Although it was the National Socialist policy to encourage the Jews to leave Germany, rather liberal arrangements were made to permit those Jews who migrated to take with them a sizeable portion of their assets… Billions of marks were transferred to Palestine; under the Havarah agreement there were no restrictions whatever.”
4	ICRC reported no extermination policy	“It is important to note in finishing with these detailed and comprehensive ICRC reports that none of the International Red Cross representatives at the camps or elsewhere in Axis-occupied Europe found any evidence whatsoever that a deliberate policy of extermination was being conducted by Germany against the Jews.”
5	ICRC praised conditions at Theresienstadt	“The ICRC had special praise for the liberal conditions which prevailed at Theresienstadt (Terezin) up to the time of their last visits there in April 1945.”
6	No Auschwitz inmate claimed to see gas chamber operation	“It should be pointed out that no Auschwitz inmate has ever personally claimed to have witnessed the actual operation of these so-called ‘gas chambers.’”
7	Rudolf Höss memoirs declared invalid	“It is, hence, impossible to avoid the conclusion that these so-called memoirs of Rudolf Höss have been subjected to an editorial supervision by Communists and others sufficiently extensive to destroy their validity as an historical document.”
8	Wannsee Conference called “mythical” and unsubstantiated	“No one has ever been found to substantiate the alleged information about this conference…”
9	Wannsee numbers deemed absurd	“The absurdity of those figures is obvious.”
10	Logistic and population figures discredit gassing legend	“Hence, both population figures and logistics combine to discredit the legend of six million Jews being gassed in all camps under German control, as well as of about three mil- lion being gassed at Auschwitz.”
11	Einsatzgruppen killings a “legend”	“It has nevertheless become the popular legend that the physical liquidation of the Jews in Europe began with the action of the Einsatzgruppen against their Soviet enemies in 1941.”
12	Eichmann called extermination “absurd”	“Eichmann insisted that the very idea of extermination was absurd.”
13	Ratio of “fraudulent affidavits” vs. denials	“Yet it is a statistical fact that, for every fraudulent affidavit or statement claiming a death camp or a gas chamber, there are at least twenty which deny the very existence of such camps and gas chambers.”
14	No evidence of extermination program or orders	“…there is no evidence that the Germans adopted any program of mass extermination of Jews during the war or that any German National Socialist leader ever gave any order to do so.”
15	Polish Jewry extermination “in part a myth”	“Certainly enough is known to enable any impartial observer to regard the alleged extermination of Polish Jewry as in part a myth …”
16	Kurt Gerstein memoranda inflated figures	“In his personal conversations and answers, Gerstein contended that he knew that no less than forty million concentration camp prisoners has been gassed. In his first signed memorandum on the subject of April 26, 1945, he reduced the number to twenty-five million.”