So Hard to Rethink the Holocaust

Even though this is exactly what Josh Marshall should do when finding out his wife's great grandfather died of typhus at Auschwitz, not directly at the hands of the Nazis. He's shocked there is a death certificate for the man, which of course makes no sense if there was mass extermination of  Jews by the Nazis.

The details are stark and simple. The death of Chaim Breslauer on the afternoon of October 5th, 1942. The cause of death is listed as Altersschwäche, which roughly translates as ‘decrepitude’.

But there’s another notable detail. The document is signed by Johann Kremer, a doctor at Auschwitz (from August to November 1942), who later gained a minor infamy for the very frank diary he kept of his time there. Kremer was tried and sentenced to death after the war but his sentence was communted to life imprisonment. He was released from prison in 1958 and died in 1965.

I believe there is some controversy about Kremer's diary. I'll have to look this up later.