On a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, comedian Ari Shaffir joined Joe Rogan for a conversation that eventually turned to a troubling online trend: the growing number of people attempting to minimize how many Jewish people were k*lled during the Holocaust.
The topic came up after Rogan suggested inviting Shaffir’s father, a Holocaust survivor, onto the podcast. Shaffir explained that his father is nearing 90 and had been in the camps as a young child, possibly released around age 12. His grandfather, he added, had been liberated from a d* ath camp.
Shaffir noted that Shaffir’s father “would love it because he works at the Holocaust memorial as a docent or something,” he said.
He went on to describe seeing his father speak to inner-city students in Kansas City. “When they hear him talk, it’s just this moment you realize like, oh, this isn’t a story, this is his life,” he said.
From there, Rogan shifted the discussion toward the current online climate. “It’s a weird time now where people are enjoying questioning the numbers of people that d*ed in the Holocaust,” he said.
Rogan acknowledged that there are nuances often cited in these debates, referencing photographs taken after the liberation of the camps. “There are some photos of like Auschwitz and a lot of these others that they took after the camps were liberated and they had people go there and they took photos of them, like pretending that these people were at the camps and they weren’t. They were done after the fact,” he said.
However, he was clear that such details do not justify attempts to downplay the scale of the atrocity. “But there’s also tons…”
Shaffir agreed and said, “It’s like what are you hoping for? It was only 1 million? So that’s okay somehow? You want to justify it in your head?”
Rogan pushed back on the fixation with exact figures, emphasizing: “It’s clearly there was a lot of people. I don’t know what the number is, but if it was 6 million or if it was 1 million or 3 million, it’s like, to catch people like, no, no, you guys said it was six, like,,.”
Shaffir stated, “It’s also like it’s 30s and 40s so I don’t know, we’re guessing. We don’t have the wherewithal. And you ask somebody in the Holocaust, they go, I was only in my one camp. I can’t tell you what was going on in Bergen-Belsen,” he said.
Rogan then described the online debate as a stalemate between two entrenched camps. “There’s people that are like equally sure that it was 6 million and then there’s people that are equally sure that it was like 300,000 or 600,000 or whatever they think it was. And it’s like this weird argument back and forth,” he said.
Shaffir concluded by pointing to what he sees as the most straightforward way to understand the scale of the tragedy. “You have to see how many Jews were in Europe before and after, and those would be more,” he said, suggesting that population records provide the clearest counter to claims that the numbers were fabricated or exaggerated..
