Holocaust Deniers - Essay Example

Additionally, Holocaust denial is not based on factual evidence, but rather is “based on falsification and defamation, which seeks to appear in a respectable, academic guise. Deniers like to call themselves 'Revisionists,' an ambiguous term that needs to be substituted by Holocaust deniers, which… more adequate[ly]… reflects their ideology”.

Holocaust deniers usually make claims about facts that precipitated and included the happenings of events that took place in Nazi concentration camps from 1939-1945 during World War II in Hitler’s Germany. Claims range from the fact that Hitler never ordered a plan for a “Final Solution” to the ‘Jewish Problem’, to the idea that an order was never carried out for the Jews’ methodical extermination.

However, there are plenty of pieces of evidence which document the actual occurrence of the Holocaust and its atrocities. The Holocaust is one of the most widely- and well-documented massacres in history.

Writers such as Kenneth Stern, Ephraim Kaye, and Deborah Lipstadt have written books to counteract the claims of Holocaust deniers.

“The father of Holocaust denial was Paul Rassinier (1906-1967), a…deportee to the Dora concentration camp…[who] returned from Dora with…[a vision that]…the victims of the war were the Germans; the ones to blame were the Jews who were responsible for the world conflict”.

This leads us to the question that naturally follows, which is, What are Holocaust denial and the arguments that it proposes? Holocaust denial, by definition, is “a propaganda movement active in the United States, Canada and Western Europe which seeks to deny the reality of the Nazi regime's systematic mass murder of 6 million Jews in Europe during World War II”.

The Institute for Historical Review is the main organization which supports revisionism, which denies the Holocaust ever happened. The IHR, founded by William Carto, holds annual conferences which are forums for revisionist ‘historians’ to foment and spread their propaganda.

These people are not historians at all. They usually seek to undermine legitimate historical research and writing by propagating their writings.

The IHR is “a pseudo-academic enterprise…[for people with] no [history credentials, including Ph.D.’s]…Revilo P. Oliver and Robert Faurisson[,] writers…David Irving… Bradley Smith, and career anti-Semites…Mark Weber and Ernst Zündel…—convene to develop new outlets for their anti-Jewish, anti-Israel and, for some, pro[-]Nazi beliefs".

Most notably, recently, those who deny the Holocaust have decided to use empirical evidence to prove their point that the Holocaust could not have happened. The “Leuchter and Rudolf Reports purported to demonstrate that there was not enough cyanide residue in the Auschwitz gas chambers to be consistent with mass gassing. Friedrich Paul Berg, in…The Diesel Gas Chambers:  Myth Within a Myth, claims to show that it would be improbable…to use diesel engine exhaust to kill people…”. Each paper cites “experiments, laboratory analyses, chemical compositions, etc.[,] just like any other objective scientific paper”.

However, these findings are false. The only logical conclusion one can come to is that the deniers of the Holocaust know the truth. To deconstruct the truth, they have to know the truth well. This includes knowing facts about gas chambers, cyanide, and other methods that were used to exterminate the Jewish people as well as other undesirable groups within Nazi Germany.

According to revisionist Mark Weber, "The Holocaust is a religion. Its underpinnings in the realm of historical fact are non-existent—no Hitler order, no plan, no budget, no gas chambers, no autopsies of gassed victims, no bones, no ashes, no skulls, no nothing...".

Why do revisionists think they can get away with this version of history?  Underlying their claims of rebuttal against historical fact is a deep-seated hatred of the Jewish people, combined with an interest in seeing National Socialism revived again—whether it be in the form of Nazism or not.

Additionally, what can be done to counteract the historical revisionism of the Holocaust? It is imperative that in classrooms across the country and one’s place of residence, the truth of the Holocaust and its evidence be honoured and defended when challenged. This could include recounting: evidence presented at the Nuremberg Trials; personal stories of Holocaust survivors; and history of the Holocaust as presented to the public in Holocaust museums, and literature such as Ely Wiesel’s Night. 

Here it has been examined what Holocaust denial is, what the arguments of Holocaust deniers are, and why this denial occurs and how it can be counteracted.

One of the actions that can be taken to ensure that this kind of historical revisionism does not take place in one’s community includes keeping everyone well-informed, not only of Holocaust history but about history in general. This includes WWII history.