Here’s one that’ll get the anti-Semites screeching their heads off.
Holocaust denial is a pillar of modern anti-Semitism, be it from the groyper right or the Muslim Israel haters. These hateful loons gibber the sort of pseudo-‘scholarship’ that would do a flat earther proud, pretending to ‘mathematically prove’ that the Nazis and their allies couldn’t possibly have killed six million Jews.
Well, as High Priestess of anti-Semitic dumbassity Candace Owens, would say, we’ve got the receipts.
Five million of the more than six million Jews killed in the Holocaust have now been identified, and with the further help of artificial intelligence (AI), even more names could be recovered, Israeli researchers said on Monday.
Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, said the milestone marks seven decades of work and is at the heart of its mission to recover the identities of those murdered by the Nazis during World War Two.
That’s an astonishing achievement on its own. Almost on a par with identifying the remains of every soldier in the Verdun ossuary. What the pseudo-detective Holocaust deniers either deliberately ignore, or, more likely, are just too stupid to comprehend, is that not all Jews were killed in the camps. Much of the killing in the East (i.e., Russia) were done by roving bands of Einsatzgruppen and local militias, who simply rounded up a town’s Jews and marched them to a field to shoot and bury them in mass graves. The extermination camps came somewhat later than the invasions of Poland and Russia, with the first order to build Belzec extermination being given by Heinrich Himmler in October 1941 (three months before the infamous Wannsee Conference).
As Germany began obviously losing the war, the Nazis directed a great deal of effort and manpower to concealing those mass graves as best they could. In the final months of the war, they also systematically destroyed much of their meticulous records.
But even the painstaking work to rescue the names of the murdered innocents from the mists of history inevitably meets its limits.
Some one million Jewish victims are still unknown “and many will likely remain so forever,” Yad Vashem said. But with tools such as AI and machine learning, it believes it could recover another 250,000 names by analysing hundreds of millions of documents that have been too extensive to research manually.
With the number of Holocaust survivors shrinking and the world soon to be without first-hand witnesses, Yad Vashem chairman Dani Dayan said reaching the five million milestone was a reminder of an unfinished obligation.
“Behind each name is a life that mattered – a child who never grew up, a parent who never came home, a voice that was silenced forever,” Dayan said. “It is our moral duty to ensure that every victim is remembered so that no one will be left behind in the darkness of anonymity.”
The process is being sped up by the use of powerful new software that can crunch the mountains of data far faster than humans.
In May 2024, Yad Vashem had said it had developed its own AI-powered software to comb through piles of records to try to identify hundreds of thousands of Jewish people killed in the Holocaust whose names are missing from official memorials.
At the time, it had tracked down information on 4.9 million individuals by reading through statements and documents, checking film footage, cemeteries and other records.
The names of Holocaust victims, as well as personal files that tell about the lives of many of them, are compiled in an online Yad Vashem database in six languages.
This database, it noted, has helped countless families reunite with lost relatives and families to commemorate loved ones, particularly as most victims were left without graves.
“The Nazis aimed not only to murder them, but to erase their existence. And by identifying five million names, we are restoring their human identities and ensuring that their memory endures,” said Alexander Avram, director of Yad Vashem’s Hall of Names, who heads the central database of victims’ names.
So, sorry, Holocaust deniers: they’re ‘bringing the receipts’. You can’t hide your ignorant hate behind dodgy ‘scholarship’ forever.
