41845358-Antisemitism

DENYING THE HOLOCAUST
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Holocaust deniers may have had some marginal success in reaching people
who were not already infected with the antisemitic virus, but they have
made no inroads with historians or governments. No scholarly conference invites
them; no national or international committee investigating the plundering
of Jewish wealth and property during the war requests their advice.
Interfaith groups dedicated both to understanding the historical roots of
Christian anti-Judaism and to teaching tolerance regard the deniers as abhorrent
hatemongers. Educational groups in several countries preparing Holocaust
curriculums for students shun them, and several countries, including
Germany, Belgium, Italy, Sweden, Australia, and New Zealand, have made it
illegal to propagate the insidious myth of Holocaust denial.
THE MYTH
It is not our purpose here to refute in a systematic way what Holocaust deniers
say. There exists a massive and rapidly growing literature on the Holocaust;
very able historians from many lands and of various persuasions, utilizing an
array of sources, particularly the official records of the Third Reich and increasingly
of eastern European lands, have described the systematic murder of
European Jewry. Nowhere in their writings do they refer to Holocaust deniers,
except perhaps as an aside to express their disdain for them. No historian—except
those with neo-Nazi leanings and affiliations—endorses the
so-called revisionist position. Here we want only to examine some views advanced
and procedures employed by the deniers. (For more detailed critiques
of the deniers, the reader is referred to the works of Deborah Lipstadt and
Pierre Vidal-Naquet.) The denialist position can be reduced to several elemental
points.
1. The Third Reich had no policy of extermination. German records from the
war and statements by German officials that point to mass murder have been
wrongly interpreted or are forgeries. The testimony and confessions of Nazis in
the various trials held between 1945 and 1963 are not trustworthy—they were
obtained through torture, threats, or the hope of a lighter sentence.
In the deniers’ eyes, the Nuremberg trials, conducted immediately after the
war for leading Nazis implicated in war crimes were simply the revenge of the
victors. They offer this reason for dismissing as untrustworthy and fraudulent
the enormous amount of documents assembled by the prosecution. Germans
who confessed to war crimes, say the deniers, were really innocent; they told