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HOLOCAUST,
DENIAL OF THE: Claims that the mass extermination of the Jews by the
Nazis never happened; that the number of Jewish losses has been
greatly exaggerated; that the Holocaust was not systematic nor a
result of an official policy; or simply that the Holocaust
never took place. Clearly absurd claims of this kind have been made
by Nazis, neo-Nazis, pseudo-historians called �revisionists� and
the uneducated and uninformed who do not want to or cannot believe
that such a huge atrocity could actually have occurred.
Holocaust
denial was attempted even before World War II ended, despite the
obvious evidence at hand, The Nazis who attempted to carry out the
�Final Solution��the extermination of European Jewry�used
euphemistic language like the terms �Final Solution� and
�special treatment� rather than gassing, annihilation,
and killing, in order to conceal their murderous activities from the
world. During the last two years of the war, Sonderkommando units,
put to work in a secret program called Aktion 1005, were
charged with digging up mass graves and
burning the corpses. Again, the Nazis� purpose was to hide all
evidence of their activities.
In
the present day, more than 50 years later, there are still some
people who either completely reject the notion that the Holocaust
happened or say that the Holocaust was not as widespread as it
actually was. �Revisionist historians� and other pseudo-scholars
are active in much of the world. In 1978 a revisionist group in
California established the Institute for Historical Review. The
group, which claims to be scholarly, publishes the Journal of
Historical Review and holds international conferences.
Revisionists
often say that the Holocaust did not affect as many people as it
really did. A Frenchman named Paul Rassinier, one of the original
founders of the revisionist school, stated that only 500,000 to one
million Jews died during World War II, mostly due to bad physical
conditions and gradually�not systematically at the hands of the
Nazis. Rassinier also claimed to have found the millions of Jews who
disappeared from Europe, He maintains that the large number of North
African Jews who moved to Israel both before
and after it became a state were not always native North Africans.
Rather, they were Jews who had fled Europe before and during the war.
Arthur
R. Butz, an American revisionist, alleges that a mere 350,000 Jews
were missing. He even goes as far as saying that some of them are
not really missing, but rather just fell out of contact with their
families, while only about 200,000 were executed by the Germans
during the war. Butz also claims that many Jews were not killed, but
rather immigrated to the United States illegally, changed their
identities, and were absorbed into American life without leaving a
trace of their former selves. Furthermore he
maintains that the number �six million� was created out of thin
air by the Zionists.
Revisionists
claim that the Holocaust diaries, testimonies, and photographs are
not credible and are full of lies. Some deniers say that the Nazis
could not have physically cremated so many people so quickly, nor
could Zyklon B gas have feasibly been used on a regular basis in one
place. With the advent of the Internet, Holocaust deniers have used
this medium to spread their messages of hate, Many websites,
established by them or by related groups such as white supremacists,
offer their skewed version of events.
Important
steps have been taken to combat this misinformation. In some
countries Holocaust denial has been made illegal and those who
perpetuate it are punished. Many Holocaust museums have been
established, and Holocaust education has been instituted in many
schools�in order to ensure that, despite the efforts of deniers,
it will never happen again.
(From:
Robert Rozett and Shmuel Spector (eds.), The Encyclopedia of the
Holocaust, New York: Facts on File, 2000)
Bibliography:
Evans,
Richard J., Lying about Hitler.
New York: Basic Books, 2001
Guttenplan,
D.D., The Holocaust on Trial. Boston: Atlantic Monthly, 2000
Lipstadt,
Deborah E., Denying the
Holocaust, The Growing Assault On Truth and Memory, New York:
The Free Press, 1993
Shermer,
Michael, and Alex Grobman, Denying History: Who Says the
Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000 |
