Did Six Million Really Die?

Did Six Million Really Die? The Truth at Last is a pamphlet that promotes Holocaust denial and other neo-Nazi sentiments, allegedly written by British National Front (NF) member Richard Verrall under the pseudonym Richard E. Harwood and published in 1974 by neo-Nazi propagandist Ernst Zündel, another Holocaust denier and pamphleteer. The NF denied that Verrall was the author in a 1978 edition of World in Action.
In 1983, Holocaust survivor Sabina Citron began a private prosecution under s.181 of the Canadian Criminal Code against Zündel, charging him with spreading false news. She was subsequently joined in her proceedings against Zündel by the government of Ontario. The Supreme Court concluded in the 1988 trial that "The pamphlet Did Six Million Really Die? does not fit with received views of reality because it is not part of reality."
In the work, Verrall doubts the Holocaust death toll, opposing the historical consensus which says that "no less than six million Jews [were] exterminated" in concentration camps. The booklet targets various war crime trials, the best known of these being the Nuremberg trials and the Adolf Eichmann trial, criticising their legal integrity and the standards of evidence presented, as well as the impartiality and objectivity of the judges.
Verrall also attempts to demonstrate in the book that censuses and population charts show that the European Jewish population figures do not allow for a figure of six million Jews to have been murdered. He argues that the total Jewish population in Nazi-controlled Europe after emigrations and evacuations was "around three million".
He further argues that the scale of the Holocaust had been exaggerated by the Allies:
Verrall's aim is to argue that the history of the 'six million' holocaust is used to discourage any form of nationalism and is a danger to the preservation of the Anglo-Saxon race: "No one could have anything but admiration for the way in which the Jews have sought to preserve their race through so many centuries, and continue to do so today. In this effort they have frankly been assisted by the story of the Six Million, which, almost like a religious myth, has stressed the need for greater Jewish racial solidarity. Unfortunately, it has worked in quite the opposite way for all other peoples, rendering them impotent in the struggle for self-preservation."
In discussing the Gerstein report, the pamphlet states that "Gerstein's sister was congenitally insane and died by euthanasia", effectively admitting the mass murder of civilians by the Nazis in the T4 program.
In writing his booklet, Verrall had used material published in the 1950s and 1960s and most of the inaccuracies of his booklet were errors originally made by Paul Rassinier whose works Verrall had used extensively.
The booklet was examined by the Supreme Court of Canada in 1985 and 1988 in the prosecution of the publisher Zündel under the Criminal Code, section 181, of spreading false news. The 1985 conviction was overturned on appeal, leading to a second prosecution in 1988 which again resulted in a sentence of 15 months.
As part of Zündel's legal defence, Zündel hired Fred A. Leuchter to visit the Auschwitz and Majdanek concentration camps. At the trial, Leuchter was required to defend his report in his capacity as expert witness; however, he was dismissed because during the proceedings it became apparent that he had neither the qualifications nor experience to act as such. The 1988 trial judge concluded that the booklet "misrepresented the work of historians, misquoted witnesses, fabricated evidence, and cited non-existent authorities."
The Supreme Court did find that in the previous lower court trial, the jury were improperly instructed:
However, in reviewing the proceedings of the lower court trial, the Supreme Court were convinced that the facts in the pamphlet were indeed false:
Ultimately the Supreme Court concluded:
Although in the end he was not required to do so, the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper offered to give evidence, stating that "behind a simulated objectivity of expression, it is in fact an irresponsible and tendentious publication which avoids material evidence and presents selected half-truths and distortions for the sole purpose of sowing anti-Semitic propaganda".
Anthony Hancock re-published Did Six Million Really Die? and made a significant amount of money from doing so, to the point where he was sued for royalties in the Canadian High Court in 1982.
In 1975, South African authors Arthur Suzman and Denis Diamond published a book confronting the claims made by Verrall titled Six Million Did Die (Johannesburg). A second edition of the book was published in 1978. The first half of the book seeks to disprove claims made by Verrall and the second to provide further evidence of the Holocaust.
In the 1978 official bulletin, entitled "False Propaganda", the ICRC denounced Holocaust denial and confirmed that the agency "Never published—or even compiled—statistics of this kind which are being falsely attributed to it" and stated that its mission was "to help war victims, not to count them". Verrall also misused ICRC statistics to conclude that the number of people who died in Nazi prisons and camps from 1939 to 1945 was "300,000, not all of whom were Jews", but this was only in reference to "Germans and German Jews" and not nationals of other countries, later (and more complete) counts of the dead concord with estimates given by the International Tracing Service and other Holocaust researchers.
In 1985 and 1988, Verrall's publisher Ernst Zündel was tried in Canada on charges of "false news". He was found guilty and sentenced to 15 months in prison. On appeal his conviction was overturned by the Canadian Supreme Court's landmark decision R v Zundel, when it declared that the law under which he had been charged, reporting false news, was unconstitutional.
Did Six Million Really Die? was banned in Germany and South Africa.
In 2017, Amazon.com removed the book along with other Holocaust-denying books from its US and UK sites.