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Explore the beliefs, tactics, and arguments of Holocaust deniers such as David Irving, Ernst Zundel, and Willis Carto. Discover their denial of gas chambers, mistrust of survivor testimonies, and attempts to falsify historical evidence.
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Holocaust Deniers “Truth exists. Only falsehood has to be invented.”—Georges Braque
David Irving • British Journalist and historian • Defines himself as a “modern fascist” • Keeps a portrait of Adolf Hitler over his desk • He claims that Hitler had no knowledge of the Final Solution or the Holocaust • In 1992, Irving said publicly that “there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz.” He was tried, convicted and fined in a court in Germany where Holocaust denial is a crime.
David Irving • "I don't see any reason to be tasteful about Auschwitz. It's baloney, it's a legend. Once we admit the fact that it was a brutal slave labour camp and large numbers of people did die, as large numbers of innocent people died elsewhere in the war, why believe the rest of the baloney?" Irving said. He added, "I say quite tastelessly, in fact, that more women died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz."
David Irving vs Deborah Lipstadt • David Irving brought a libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt, the author of DENYING THE HOLOCAUST: THE GROWING ASSAULT ON TRUTH AND MEMORY because she attacked him as “one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial. • Mr. Irving was denied his suit because, according to the judge, he “deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence.” • Irving insisted that Nazi evidence should be accepted and believed while the testimony of Holocaust survivors should be dismissed as worthless.
Ernst Zundel • Born in Germany but immigrated to Canada where he became a Neo-Nazi and established a publishing house, Samisdat, which publishes inflammatory books and pamphlets • Published a 32 page pamphlet called Did Six Million Really Die? He was put in jail for nine months in Canada for printing lies. • He is active in distributing a pamphlet soliciting support for a worldwide campaign to ban Steven Speilberg’s Schindler’s List.
Willis Carto • Founded the Institute for Historical Research, based in California • Formed a publishing company, Noontide Press, which published The Myth of the Six Million, a 119 page book seeking to disprove eyewitness testimony of Holocaust survivors
What do they believe?“They steal a page from Hitler’s book Mein Kampf, in which the Nazi dictator declared that the bigger and more outrageous the lie, the more likely it is to be believed by most people. The deniers’ big lie is that the Holocaust never happened.” (Gottfried 26)
The denier gambit is a variant on the falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus (false in one thing, false in all things) formulation which claims that if any one fact about the Holocaust can be proven to be wrong, then all the reported facts are wrong and there was no Holocaust.
1. Nazi War Criminal Confessions are false • They believe that any statements made by Nazi War criminals before or during their trials were the result of torture by Jews disguised in British uniforms. • The allegation is that the Jews secretly infiltrated the postwar German government in order to condemn the German people in the eyes of the world. • They believe that after the war, Jews rounded up all the camp survivors and told them what to say to prove that the Nazis had use poison gas to exterminate the Jews.
2. There were no gas chambers. • They believe that all the pictures of piled up dead bodies that had been gassed were faked. • They believe that there is no evidence of holes in the ceilings of the gas chambers at Auschwitz, so the stories aren’t true. No holes, no Holocaust. (refuted by an engineering report from Keren, Mazal, and McCarthy http://www.holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/holes-report/holes.shtml) • They contend that the Nazis could not have disposed of so much ash from so many bodies killed by gas (The ashes of thousands of people can fit onto a fair-sized truck. The Nazis scattered ash over fields, buried it, and dumped it in rivers)
2. There were no gas chambers. • They contend that the technology to release the Hydrocyanic acid (HCN) in Zyklon B would not have been available in the 1940s (The US had been using Zyklon B in their gas chambers since the 1920s). • They contend that the gas is highly explosive and would have been too dangerous to use near furnaces (The concentration necessary for the gas to explode would have been 200 times the amount used in the gas chambers). • They contend that it would have taken 20 hours before a chamber could be safely entered, and not the five to ten minutes described in survivor accounts (The Nazis installed powerful ventilators to get the gas out of the room).
Fact about Holocaust Deniers in America: In 1979, the IHR offered to pay $50,000 to any person who could prove that the Nazis operated gas chambers to exterminate Jews during World War II. When the media didn’t respond, they sent letters to prominent Holocaust survivors to accept the challenge. One survivor, Mel Mermelstein, took the challenge and provided numerous documents, testimonies, and scientific evidence. He sued them for the $50,000 and actually won $90,000 ($40,000 for pain and suffering).
3. There was no mass conspiracy to kill the Jews • They contend that the Jews were actually prisoners of war, and that is why they were in concentration camps. • They contend that Jewish slave labor was too valuable to kill them off through mass shootings and gas chambers. They say that there is no record of anyone dieing in a gas chamber (the Nazis only kept records of those who were selected to live).
4. Anne Frank’s Diary is a fake. • They contend that if she was in hiding, they never would have used a vacuum cleaner (but Anne writes that they only used the vacuum cleaner when the warehouse was empty) • They contend that when Anne wrote about her romantic feelings for Peter, that indicated that she was a sex fiend and they attacked the book as child pornography. They contend that all Jews are obsessed with sex. • They contend that the diary was written in ballpoint ink and paper that wasn’t available at the time. After three different CSI labs in three different countries studied the diary, they all concluded the same thing: it was authentic.
5. Only 300,000-500,000 Jews died during this time in history. • They contend that there were never six million Jews who died, but that they simply couldn’t find all of the Jews after the war because they moved to other countries, like the US, and New York City in particular. • They contend that the Jews exaggerated the numbers so that the world would feel sorry for them and give them their own country, Israel.
“False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.”-Plato
