“I was in Dachau and Belsen. I saw chambers where hundreds of Jews were put to death every day. … I saw the gallows in Belsen where Jews were hanged each Jewish holy day, while the rest were paraded to witness the ghastly punishments of men who had perhaps come a few minutes late to their daily grind. … It is beyond mortal power to bring back to life six million who were burned, asphyxiated and buried alive by the Nazis. But our six million brothers and sisters who went to their deaths have bequeathed us a sacred injunction: to prevent such a disaster overtaking the Jewish peoples in the future and to do so by the Jewish people being an independent people in its own land, capable of resisting any foe or enemy by its own strength.”

— David Ben-Gurion

Letter to an unnamed American friend, as quoted in David Ben-Gurion, in His Own Words (1969) edited by Amram M. Ducovny, p. 57 - 60; similar remarks appeared in an address at Hebrew University (28 November 1945)

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David Ben-Gurion39

Israeli politician, Zionist leader, prime minister of Israel 1886–1973

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“I have just come back from the internment camps of Europe where I looked on the survivors of the Nazi charnel houses. I was in Dachau and Belsen. I saw chambers where hundreds of Jews were throttled every day. They were brought naked, as if to bathe, and the Nazis would peer through peepholes and watch them writhing in their death agonies.”

David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973) Israeli politician, Zionist leader, prime minister of Israel

An address at Hebrew University (28 November 1945), as quoted in Rebirth and Destiny of Israel (1954), p. 151

“Of course, the terrible things I heard from the Nuremberg Trials, about the six million Jews and the people from other races who were killed, were facts that shocked me deeply. But I wasn't able to see the connection with my own past.”

Traudl Junge (1920–2002) secretary to Adolf Hitler

On her emotions on learning she was the same age as a famous martyr of the White Rose anti-Nazi activist group, in Im toten Winkel - Hitlers Sekretärin (2002) [Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary]
Context: Of course, the terrible things I heard from the Nuremberg Trials, about the six million Jews and the people from other races who were killed, were facts that shocked me deeply. But I wasn't able to see the connection with my own past. I was satisfied that I wasn't personally to blame and that I hadn't known about those things. I wasn't aware of the extent. But one day I went past the memorial plaque which had been put up for Sophie Scholl in Franz Josef Strasse, and I saw that she was born the same year as me, and she was executed the same year I started working for Hitler. And at that moment I actually sensed that it was no excuse to be young, and that it would have been possible to find things out.

“No person, not even the most simple one, takes seriously the lie of the six million Jews that were murdered”

Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–1970) second president of Egypt

in the Holocaust
Source: [Satloff, Robert, Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust's Long Reach Into Arab lands, PublicAffairs, 2007, 163, 9781586485108]
Source: [Laqueur, Walter, The Changing Face of Antisemitism: From Ancient Times to the Present Day, Oxford University Press, 2006, 141, 9780195304299]

“On the Lüneberg Heath, it was near where Bergen-Belsen had been, and everything round there smelled of garlic and it was all Jews, because who was buying anything at that time? Only the Jews, and then I said to myself, I, I who was bargaining with Jews over wood and eggs, I was amazed and astounded, and I thought you see - goddammit! They all should have been killed, and there those fellas are, doing deals with me, you know?”

Adolf Eichmann (1906–1962) German Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer

Argentina Audiotapes (1957)

“I interviewed survivors, I went to Poland, saw the cities and spent time with the people and spoke to the Jews who had come back to Poland after the war and talked about why they had come back.”

Steven Spielberg (1946) American film director, screenwriter, producer, video game designer, and studio entrepreneur

The Making of Schindler's List

“If the Jews were killed at Auschwitz or Treblinka or anywhere else…it wasn't a crime because they were Jews, it was a crime because they were innocent Jews who were being killed. It was their innocence that made…it a crime and not their Jewishness that made it a crime.”

David Irving (1938) British writer and Holocaust denier

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgGP_evkvOk

“I have a vision that suddenly all the Jewish people [from around the world] will come to live here… And if there were 10 million Jews here, we wouldn't have to give up on anything.”

Reuven Rivlin (1939) Israeli politician, 10th President of Israel

Times of Israel http://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-endorses-reuven-rivlin-for-president/, 28 May 2014

“I started at the age of six. My elder brother and sister were dabbling a bit, and then I went to my mother and pestered her to teach me as well.”

Viswanathan Anand (1969) Indian chess player

Game of thrones with world chess champion Viswanathan Anand

“Following World War II, the Jews… The Zionists tried to present themselves as oppressed, and to have opportunities in the world. They invented a false claim. They said that Hitler, the Germans, and the Austrians burned six million Jews in crematoria - six million Jews. They tried very hard to convince the world that this issue, this lie, was true, and they succeeded.”

Ali Meshkini (1922–2007) Iranian ayatollah

Ayatollah Meshkini in Friday Sermon at Qom: The Holocaust Is a Lie https://www.kintera.org/site/apps/nlnet/content2.aspx?c=hsJPK0PIJpH&b=689705&ct=3297183 December 2005. <br class="br">2005

“Tell us you lost 6 million. Historians, scholars, scientists, they went to some of the death camps. It wasn't 6 million, it wasn't 5 million, it wasn't 4 million, it wasn't even 3 million. Some of them say we'd be hard-pressed to get 1 1/2 million. Reports on the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis were bloated, exaggerated, probably fabricated.”

Khalid Abdul Muhammad (1948–2001) American activist

Speech in Brooklyn, New York (29 March 1994) quoted in Antisemitism: Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the Present (2002) by Marvin Perry and Frederick Schweitzer

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David Ben-Gurion39

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