Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory
Deborah E. Lipstadt
Language: English
Pages: 363
ISBN: 0141985518
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The denial of the Holocaust has no more credibility than the assertion that the earth is flat. Yet there are those who insist that the death of six million Jews in Nazi concentration camps is nothing but a hoax perpetrated by a powerful Zionist conspiracy. Sixty years ago, such notions were the province of pseudohistorians who argued that Hitler never meant to kill the Jews, and that only a few hundred thousand died in the camps from disease; they also argued that the Allied bombings of Dresden and other cities were worse than any Nazi offense, and that the Germans were the "true victims" of World War II.
For years, those who made such claims were dismissed as harmless cranks operating on the lunatic fringe. But as time goes on, they have begun to gain a hearing in respectable arenas, and now, in the first full-scale history of Holocaust denial, Deborah Lipstadt shows how--despite tens of thousands of living witnesses and vast amounts of documentary evidence--this irrational idea not only has continued to gain adherents but has become an international movement, with organized chapters, "independent" research centers, and official publications that promote a "revisionist" view of recent history.
Lipstadt shows how Holocaust denial thrives in the current atmosphere of value-relativism, and argues that this chilling attack on the factual record not only threatens Jews but undermines the very tenets of objective scholarship that support our faith in historical knowledge. Thus the movement has an unsuspected power to dramatically alter the way that truth and meaning are transmitted from one generation to another.
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was relative and nothing was fixed, it created an atmosphere of permissiveness toward questioning the meaning of historical events and made it hard for its proponents to assert that there was anything “off limits” for this skeptical approach. The legacy of this kind of thinking was evident when students had to confront the issue. Far too many of them found it impossible to recognize Holocaust denial as a movement with no scholarly, intellectual, or rational validity. A sentiment had been
Carto and the IHR. 2* Various Jewish organizations with which Mermelstein consulted, including the ADL and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, suggested that he ignore the IHR’s challenge because participating would only give the deniers the attention they craved. He decided to proceed nonetheless. 3* In 1990 Mermelstein’s story was made into a television movie starring Leonard Nimoy. 4* Among the mailings distributed by his so-called Jewish Information Society is a grossly distorted sexually
Holocaust was the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews. It is telling that many of those who gave the wrong answer thought that the United States had committed the Holocaust against the Japanese with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Birmingham, Alabama, News, Aug. 12, 1990). 2* The same kind of rehabilitation is evident in France among the highest reaches of the political and judicial establishment. President François Mitterrand recently had a wreath placed on the grave of the Vichy
Tiso’s regime constitutes the legal and moral precedent for a sovereign Slovakia. Neither Tudjman nor the Tiso protesters are engaged in overt denial. However, their efforts to diminish the magnitude of the deeds and roles of the central players are critically important aspects of Holocaust denial.20 There is a psychological dimension to the deniers’ and minimizers’ objectives: The general public tends to accord victims of genocide a certain moral authority. If you devictimize a people you strip
their possessions through an increasingly onerous emigration tax. By January 1939 they had been totally excised from the German economy. On occasion Reich leaders simply took groups of Jews and placed them outside Germany’s borders, forcing their neighbors to have to accommodate a large group of destitute immigrants. The best known of these incidents took place on the Polish border at the end of October 1938 on the eve of Kristallnacht, the anti-Jewish Nazi pogrom of November 1938 during which
