While the Nazis did not restrict their machinery of mass-slaughter to the murder of Jews, the often-cited statistic that there were five-million “others” killed alongside six-million Jews has no basis in historical fact. This myth, which has circulated since the 1970s, has refused to die, despite the efforts of numerous historians. Ron Kampeas writes:

The problem, according to Yehuda Bauer, [the dean of Israeli historians of the Shoah], who has debunked the number repeatedly in his writings over the decades, is not that non-Jews were not victims; they were. It is that [this] arbitrarily chosen tally of non-Jewish victims diminishes the centrality to the Nazi ideology of systematically wiping any trace of the Jewish people from the planet.

In fact, in Bauer’s opinion, the term “genocide” could accurately be applied to [Polish victims of] the Nazis. But the mass murder of the Poles, Roma, and others should not come under the rubric “Holocaust.” . . . “All Jews of the world had to be annihilated,” Bauer said. “That was the intent. There was never an idea in Nazi minds to murder all Russians.”

The number five million adheres to no known understanding of the number of non-Jews killed by the Nazis. While as many as 35 million people were killed overall because of Nazi aggression, the number of non-Jews who died in the concentration camps is no more than half a million. Using the eleven-million figure often leads to muddled history. [An article in the] Huffington Post-UK, for instance, lists as a separate class “twins,” as if Josef Mengele, the murderous doctor at Auschwitz, sought out twins of any heritage for his experiments. In fact, they were chosen only from among the Jews and Roma arriving at the camp.

Robert Satloff has some harsh words for the U.S. government in this regard, words I take especially seriously because Satloff is someone inclined to political moderation. Why, he asks, have American diplomats failed to achieve anything in their endless rounds of talks in Doha and Cairo? Because

there is simply not enough pressure on Hamas to change course, accept a deal, and release the remaining October 7 hostages, stuck in nightmarish captivity. . . . In this environment, why should Hamas change course?

Publicly, the U.S. should bite the bullet and urge Israel to complete the main battle operations in Gaza—i.e., the Rafah operation—as swiftly and efficiently as possible. We should be assertively assisting with the humanitarian side of this.

Satloff had more to say about the hostages, especially the five American ones, in a speech he gave recently:

I am ashamed—ashamed of how we have allowed the story of the hostages to get lost in the noise of the war that followed their capture; ashamed of how we have permitted their release to be a bargaining chip in some larger political negotiation; ashamed of how we have failed to give them the respect and dignity and our wholehearted demand for Red Cross access and care and medicine that is our normal, usual demand for hostages.

If they were taken by Boko Haram, everyone would know their name. If they were taken by the Taliban, everyone would tie a yellow ribbon around a tree for them. If they were taken by Islamic State, kids would learn about them in school.

It is repugnant to see their freedom as just one item on the bargaining table with Hamas, as though they were chattel. These are Americans—and they deserve to be backed by the full faith and credit of the United States.