Denying History Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? Book

I read this book on the heels of assisting with a Holocaust remembrance program at my library. Before the program I'd gotten geared up for what I'd say to someone trying to hijack the program for the purpose of Holocaust denial. ("Please, we are here to remember something that happened. If you want to remember something that didn't happen, you need to reserve the room for your own program some other time.") After the program (which didn't attract any deniers) I was perusing the book exhibit put together for the program, and this book was on display.

While it does an excellent job of explaining Holocaust denial and, along the way, of presenting evidence to answer the deniers, the best part of the book is what it says about how to think about not only history, but science. Science proceeds by establishing a hypothetical framework and seeing how well it explains the facts. History works the same way, but in the case of history the "facts" are the multifarious pieces of documentary, testimonial, and statistical evidence. Science (and history) must also have an impersonal, nonideological truth as the object and require an open and public examination of competing ideas.

Where Holocaust deniers have demanded a single "smoking gun" as necessary to establish the Holocaust--an intact gas chamber whose purpose was to kill humans--Shermer, a well-known professional skeptic, summarizes the "convergence of evidence" that establishes the historicity of the Holocaust: testimonials of survivors, both Jew and Nazi; documentary evidence from within the Reich; ideological utterances of Nazi leaders; multiple, independent demographic studies; photographic evidence; and the records of ghettos, labor camps, and extermination squads. The denier gas chamber demand--already weakened by the fact that the Nazis intentionally destroyed them in advance of the arrival of the Russians--is completely washed away by a tidal wave of converging evidence confirming the reality of the Holocaust.

An excellent single-volume explanation and refutation of Holocaust Denial, the book's broader perspectives on science and history also make it worth reading for those dealing with such fringe ideologies as Creationism and any type of ethnocentric history.