Holocaust denial or Holocaust revisionism

“The Holocaust” is the term which has been and is applied to the mass extermination of Jews and members of other groups the Nazi German (National Socialist) regime considered ‘undesirables’ such as homosexuals, Roma, communists, the mentally impaired, etc. – especially as occurred in Europe during Second World War.

An holocaust can be seen as a concerted and committed attempt, and the allocation and directing of resources to accomplish, the intentional or functional destruction of a people based upon features such as race, religion, ethnicity, etc.

Holocaust denial or Holocaust revisionism refers to intellectual attacks made concerning the accuracy of aspects of the historical case for the Holocaust which has been documented and centres on three main points:

Asking questions about and carefully and rationally re-assessing historical events, especially in the light of new (good quality) information, plays an integral role in the study of the past and can be useful and enlightening. Holocaust revisionists like to portray their efforts as an instance of such scholarly inquiry and frequently appeal to “free speech” as a shield with which to club opponents, but such denial is really an attempt to distort, transform, and re-write history to legitimize an ideological outlook or to deflate or mute criticisms of favoured beliefs – and sometimes may involve darker motives – it is misleading and deceptive and has rightly been described as pseudo-history. It should be noted that if deniers uncover errors or inconsistencies with the evidence which are subsequently independently verified these should quite correctly be placed upon the historical record – any correction of small errors or modest improvements in the precision of describing of an individual historical episode does not equate to demonstrating that the Holocaust did not happen.

Amongst other tacks taken by deniers is the use of quotations out of context and appealing selectively to sources of evidence such as Nuremberg trial testimony. For example, citing Third Reich participant Albert Speers’ testimony at Nuremberg that he did not know of the official arrangements of the extermination, while ignoring Speers’ numerous other statements in which he elaborated on his awareness and understanding of both Hitler’s and the regime’s deep commitment to and declarations about purging the Reich of the “Jewish problem” and of the regime’s activities in pursuing the matter, including particular actions perpetrated by Speer himself: his confiscation of over 23, 000 apartments from Jews in Berlin or the allocation and supervision of resources for the construction of concentration camps such as Mauthausen. “I still see my guilt as residing chiefly in the approval of the persecution of the Jews and the murder of millions of them”.

The “Final Solution” refers to Nazi policy on ridding Nazi-occupied Europe of all Jews and took personnel and methods from earlier, suspended, so-called euthanasia research by Nazi doctors in which many thousands of people with mental or physical infirmities were murdered through gassing. In the concentrations camps spawned by the Final Solution cyanide gas produced from Zyklon-B, the commercial name of a pesticide based on hydrocyanic acid, became the extermination tool of choice.

It has been pointed out establishing that the Holocaust took place does not rest upon a single piece of evidence or episode as the Holocaust is not a single event, it is many events happening in many different places, and through analyzing all of this information converges upon a striking conclusion: that many millions of Jews were systematically killed in what is one of the greatest mass murders in human history.

Who is making the running in holocaust denial or holocaust revisionism? The Institute for Historical Review, together with its Journal for Historical Review (JHR), plays a key role in the holocaust revisionism movement. Those connected with it include IHR Director Tom Marcellus, JHR Editor Mark Weber, author and biographer David Irving, pro-Nazi publisher Ernst Zuendel, Adelaide Institute founder Dr Fredrick Toben and, curiously, Jewish revisionist David Cole.

Components of evidence coming together to show the reality of the Holocaust are:

nWritten documents:           comprising of many, many thousands of letters, memoranda, speeches, articles, orders, blueprints, bills, memoirs, and confessions, etc.;

nPhotographs:                     News and magazine photography and cinematography, German and Allied military photographs and films (e.g., aerial), civilian photographs and secret photos shot by prisoners;

nPhysical evidence:             Artifacts from Nazi concentration, work, and death camps;

nEye-witness testimony:     Accounts of Holocaust survivors, local populations (e.g., nearby townspeople), Sonderkommandos, SS guards, commandants, and influential and higher level Nazis, etc.;

nDemographics:                   All those people – millions – who were visible in various ways in Europe (especially Germany) pre-War, for example, in municipal and tax records, who when searched for after the war were missing.

We remember those whose lives were taken by Hitler's Third Reich and those who have lost family members...

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