Denying the Holocaust : The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory

by Lipstadt, Deborah E. (Author)

• ISBN13: 9780452272743
• ISBN10: 0452272742
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1994-07-01
• Publisher: Plume

Summary

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. Forty 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 over the past decade 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. One sign of the movement's disturbing resonance is the rise of such figures as the Holocaust denier David Duke to national prominence. Holocaust deniers have also begun to make common cause with radical Afrocentrists such as Leonard Jeffries of New York's City University, who retails racist myths about the Jews; and a recent campaign of ads in college newspapers calling for "open debate" on "so-called facts" about the Holocaust suggests a bold new bid for mainstream intellectual legitimacy. 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.

Table of Contents

Preface to the Paperback Edition	xi
Preface	xix
Canaries in the Mine: Holocaust Denial and the Limited Power of Reason	1	(30)
The Antecedents: History, Conspiracy, and Fantasy	31	(18)
In the Shadow of World War II: Denial's Initial Steps	49	(16)
The First Stirrings of Denial in America	65	(20)
The World of Immoral Equivalencies	85	(18)
Austin J. App
A Tool of the Radical Right	103	(20)
Denial
Entering the Mainstream: The Case of Arthur Butz	123	(14)
The Institute for Historical Review	137	(20)
The Gas Chamber Controversy	157	(26)
The Battle for the Campus	183	(26)
Watching on the Rhine: The Future Course of Holocaust-Denial	209	(14)
Appendix: Twisting the Truth: Zyklon-B, the Gas Chambers, and the Diary of Anne Frank	223	(14)
Notes	237	(35)
nIdex	272