Officials at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in Poland have criticized Fox News host Greg Gutfeld for saying on air that Jewish people survived Nazi concentration camps by being “useful.”
“While it is true that some Jews may have used their skills or usefulness to increase their chances of survival during the Holocaust, it is essential to contextualize this statement properly and understand that it does not represent the complex history of the genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany,” the Auschwitz Memorial said in a six-paragraph post early Tuesday on the social media service X, formerly known as Twitter.
“While it is accurate to acknowledge that some Jews may have survived temporarily due to their perceived usefulness, it is crucial to remember that the Holocaust was a systematic genocide with the ultimate aim of exterminating the entire Jewish population,” the memorial said in part. “It would be more appropriate to say that some Jews survived the Holocaust because they were considered temporarily useful, and the circumstances of the Nazi regime’s collapse prevented their murder.”
“We should avoid such oversimplifications in talking about this complex tragic story,” the memorial added.
Gutfeld made the comments Monday on “The Five,” a popular political talk show. The panelists were discussing new educational standards in Florida that would teach public school students that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit,” according to the text of a 216-page document the Florida Education Department posted this month.
Jessica Tarlov, a panelist on “The Five” who is Jewish, said she was “uncomfortable” with the implication that some Black people benefited from slavery and asked whether one could make a similar argument about Jews who were imprisoned at concentration camps during World War II, when Adolf Hitler’s genocidal regime murdered about 6 million Jews and also targeted Romany people, homosexuals and political dissidents.
In response, Gutfeld said: “Did you ever make [read] ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’? Vik Frankl talks about how you had to survive in a concentration camp by having skills. You had to be useful. Utility. Utility kept you alive.”
Gutfeld was referring to Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor who developed logotherapy, a school of psychotherapy premised on the idea that human beings are motivated to find meaning in their lives. Frankl wrote “Man’s Search for Meaning,” a 1946 autobiography that chronicles his experiences in four Nazi concentration camps and how those ordeals shaped his psychological worldview.
“Viktor Frankl’s observation about the specific situation in Auschwitz, which at some point became a camp that connected the functions of a concentration camp and extermination center and where deported Jews went through the selection process, highlights how some Jews became registered prisoners and might have used their skills to gain favor or prolong their lives in that particular setting. Yet, it never gave them complete protection,” the Auschwitz Memorial wrote in its post on X.
The memorial said, “We must not overlook the larger picture of the Holocaust.”
“Nazi Germany’s ultimate goal was to exterminate all the people it considered Jews (Nazis created their racial definition of a Jewish person). Millions of Jews were brutally murdered in execution sites, mainly across the east of occupied Europe, with entire communities wiped out regardless of their usefulness or contributions to society,” the memorial said. “While some of the ghettos seemed to have the goal of being productive and Jews were used as slave labor there, being ‘useful’ did not guarantee safety, as the Nazis eventually decided to liquidate them, leading to the murder of those considered valuable as well.”
Fox News did not immediately respond to an email Tuesday morning requesting comment on the Auschwitz Memorial’s post.
In a statement, White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in part: "What Fox News allowed to be said on their air yesterday — and has so far failed to condemn — is an obscenity.
"In defending a horrid, dangerous, extreme lie that insults the memory of the millions of Americans who suffered from the evil of enslavement, a Fox News host told another horrid, dangerous and extreme lie that insults the memory of the millions of people who suffered from the evils of the Holocaust," Bates said. "Let’s get something straight that the American people understand full well and that is not complicated: there was nothing good about slavery; there was nothing good about the Holocaust. Full stop."
The Auschwitz Memorial posted its statement above a clip of the Fox News segment originally uploaded by Juliet Jeske, a research associate at the Tow-Knight Center for News Integrity at the City University of New York’s graduate school of journalism. Jeske regularly posts clips from the network under the X handle “Decoding Fox News.”
Florida’s approach to teaching public school students about slavery is part of new African American history standards that were approved last week and condemned by many education advocates. The Florida Education Association, a statewide teachers’ union representing roughly 150,000 teachers, said the new standards are “a disservice to Florida’s students” and “a big step backward for a state that has required teaching African American history since 1994.”
Gutfeld, a fixture of the Fox News lineup for more than 15 years, hosts the late-night comedy talk show “Gutfeld!” and appears daily on “The Five.” He is known for his provocative on-air rhetoric, which The New York Times, in a profile published in June, described as “insult conservatism” and “merry trolling.” He joined the conservative news network in 2007.
