Reviews for Denying the Holocaust

The average rating for Denying the Holocaust based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-01-24 00:00:00 Isabelle Langer Update Just seen the film of the trial of the book (Denial) and it was pretty good. A word of explanation for anyone who doesn’t know – Deborah Lipstadt's excellent book trashes the Hitler-loving anti-Semitic David Irving. It was published in 1993, and in 1996 Irving sued Penguin Books and the author for libel. It was a huge case and this is the film of the events surrounding the court proceedings, all of which is fascinating. There is a problem with making such a film though – it bites off way more than any film could chew, so Holocaust denial is simplified into three or four bullet points which looks a lot like terrible dumbing-down, but I don’t see that could be avoided. Most of the issues dealt with in the real trial don’t get a look in but if you make this movie that is going to happen. The main issue centred on whether Irving had deliberately falsified information in his books in order to deny that gassings of Jews happened at Auschwitz. And, of course, he had. Such a strange thing to do – why would you bother? Suppose, just for a moment, that he was correct, and Auschwitz was only a concentration camp and never an extermination facility – would he have then denied the existence of Sobibor, Treblinka and Belzec, the extermination-only camps? Would he have denied the work of the Einsatzgruppen in Eastern Europe and Russia? Picking away at the gassings at Auschwitz seems useless and pointless, but that is what the slimebag did. Anyway, I do recommend the film but I’m not sure what anyone who didn’t know the subject of Holocaust denial reasonably well would make of it. *** From The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi. In this brilliant passage, Primo Levi anticipates the success of Holocaust denial. Somewhere in a concentration camp in 1943 a Nazi addresses a Jew: However this war may end, we have won the war against you. None of you will be left to bear witness, but even if someone were to survive, the world would not believe him. There will be perhaps suspicions, discussions, research by historians, but there will be no certainties, because we will destroy the evidence together with you. And even if some proof should remain and some of you survive, people will say that the events you describe are too monstrous to be believed – they will say they are the exaggerations of Allied propaganda and will believe us, who will deny everything, and not you. Deborah Lipstadt nails the insidiousness of holocaust denial really well in her introduction. She recounts walking off a TV show which was discussing holocaust denial because they had a Nation of Islam guy on the show who was explicitly denying the holocaust. DL told them she couldn't appear with a denier. But we wanted people to hear a balance of views, the TV producer said. You should present your side of the story and he should be allowed to present his side. In the days when Donald Trump's press secretary refers to such things as "alternative facts" it's worth saying that a fact is a fact. Holocaust denial uses two main types of argument - in the first type, fanboys of Hitler say that whilst the Holocaust may have happened Hitler himself never ordered it - in fact wasn't aware of it. It was all the work of Heydrich and Himmler, those two over-enthusiastic idealists. The second type of argument says that all these deaths, these mountains of corpses we see in the atrocity photos, were caused by epidemics which raged through the camps in the months before liberation. There was no deliberate extermination. No, all the camps were work camps, whose regimes were admittedly harsh, but no harsher than those in the Soviet gulag. The deniers then accuse anyone denying their denial of Zionism, siding with the Jews against the Palestinians; and this insidious strand of argument has been unfortunately successful in some quarters of the European Left which has seen - for example - the usual leftist protesters against the latest Western invasion of a Muslim country making common cause with Islamist groups who are explicit Holocaust deniers. What a tangled web it all is. Lipstadt's book was written before 9/11 and therefore takes little notice of jihadi Holocaust denial - her book is mostly a pageant of far-right American screwballs, the political tin foil hat brigade. They're deeply unpleasant but they aren't the ones spreading the poison into current generations. Still, it's a very interesting read and recommended for those who enjoy a creepy political freak show.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-08-16 00:00:00 Alexander Elenskiy Denying the Holocaust is a thorough exploration of the rise and development Holocaust denial. Lipstadt's book examines the evolution of Holocaust denial from its immediate post-war origins to the rise of a modern denial "movement", along with an examination of the most famous and influential deniers and their claims. This is a fascinating story, which begins with early instances of Holocaust denial as espoused by historians such as Harry Elmer Barnes and Austin J. App, to the development of entire organizations devoted to denying the Holocaust, such as the U.S. based Institute for Historical Review, considered by many to be the mecca for Holocaust deniers world-wide. The Institute even has its own publishing house, the Noontide Press, which publishes books and pamphlets denying the Holocaust along with classic antisemitic texts such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Holocaust deniers agree on a number of points - Nazi Germany did not systematically exterminate Jews during World War 2 and there was no mass murder in extermination camps and gas chambers, and the number of Jews killed during the War is significantly lower than the accepted figures - but Holocaust denial is rarely an isolated phenomenon; rather, deniers engage in it as a part of apologia for Nazi Germany in general and Adolf Hitler in particular. Common claims include Germany being provoked into war by Britain, France and sometimes America, invasions of countries as a necessity to protect their persecuted German minorities, or even being forced to react militarily against aggressive and threatening Poland; in this world, everyone is out to destroy Germany, with Hitler acting as a statesman devoted to protect his country, resorting to conflict only after all of his patient diplomatic efforts at maintaining peace have failed. Although Holocaust denial is central to Nazi apologetics, it is rarely the only part of it - I believe that it would prove very difficult to find a person who would deny that a Nazi genocide of Jews has taken place, but at the same time acknowledge antisemitism, totalitarianism, hegemonic imperialism and war crimes of Nazi Germany. Holocaust deniers and Nazi apologists either ignore historical evidence which does not fit their already made conclusions, or twist it to conform to their view of the world. Such is the case of David Irving, a British author of many books on World War II, once celebrated for his talent of unearthing new historical documents, now notorious and reduced to speaking at far-right gatherings and private lectures. Although Lipstadt is heavily critical of Irving's practices and names him "the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial", her book is by no means focused on him or his work - he is just one of the many figures which she correctly associated with denying the Holocaust. Nonetheless, Irving sued Lipstadt for libel in 2000 - and in English law the burden of proof is on the defendant, which meant that Lipstadt had to prove that Irving is a Holocaust denier and an apologist for Hitler who has manipulated evidence to suit his needs. Irving lost the case spectacularly - British historian, Richard J. Evans, examined his published work thoroughly, and found that Irving has knowingly manipulated and distorted real documents and used forgeries as sources, concluding that none of his writing or lectures can be trusted as an accurate description of historical events, and that Irving himself could not be trusted as a historian. The Irving Trial is the most famous case of a Holocaust denier - even more so because it was Irving who sued and had all the possibilities of proving the truth of the "truth" about the Holocaust in a court of law, but ended up being exposed as a fraud and racist. Although the subject is interesting and Lipstadt does a good job at presenting it, there are elements in the book which are troubling and spoil it. First of all, there is not a word in it about the non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust - Soviet POWs, Ethnic Poles, Belorussians, Ukrainians, and others - communists, homosexuals, and the disabled. Are they not part of the same tragedy which befell the Jews, and not worthy of the same attention and commemoration? How much of Holocaust studies focuses on these victims? Hitler's famous speech at his Obersalzberg residence, delivered on the 22nd of August 1939, is the one where he openly calls for ruthless extermination of an entire people - physical destruction of men, women and children, without mercy and compassion, using the Armenian genocide as an example. This speech is often used as proof of Hitler's familiarity with genocide, and his intention to carry one out during the war. But how many people know that this speech calls for genocide not of Jews, but of Poles? At another point Lipstadt dismisses comparisons of Nazism with Stalinism; she states that Stalin's campaign of terror was "arbitrary", whereas Hitler's was targeted at "a particular group", and goes on to say that while Hitler's Germany targeted every single Jew, "no citizen of the Soviet Union assumed that deportation and death were inevitable consequences of his or her ethnic origins". This is simply not true, as in the Soviet Union entire nationalities were deported precisely because of their ethnicity. In 1937, all ethnic Koreans were deported from the Russian Far East to unpopulated areas of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The official reason for this mass deportation was to prevent Japanese espionage in the Soviet Union (at the time Korea was under Japanese rule). In 1917, the Soviet Union began what would be known as "Decossackization" - a process aimed to eliminate the Kuban and Don Cossacks as distinctive ethnic group, as they were perceived to be collectively hostile to the new regime. This is the first example of the Soviet Union targeting an entire population of people with the full intent of ultimately exterminating it - and it happened long before Hitler, or even Stalin, came to power. During the Great Purge, the Soviet NKVD carried out a series of what would be known as the National Operations, where the Soviet government explicitly targeted entire populations purely on ethnic grounds. Deportation of Koreans was one of them, but another one which has to be mentioned is the Polish Operation. Conducted between 1937 and 1938, it targeted ethnic Poles living in the Soviet Union, and accused them of sabotage and spying for the Polish government. Their social class did not matter; they were targeted and killed because they were Polish. Although official orders called for arrest of Polish "spies", it was openly acknowledged by the NKVD as an order to exterminate all Poles and even those who were perceived to be Polish. The operation was carried out as such without any judicial trial whatsoever - to fill in large arrest quotas, the NKVD resorted to the crudest of methods: one example was to use phone books to find and lock up people with Polish names. Men were summarily shot, and their wives and mothers were deported to labor camps in Kazakhstan and Siberia. Their children were taken by state orphanages to be brought up as Soviet citizens, deliberately severing any connection to their Polish origins. All possessions of the accused were confiscated, purposefully leaving nothing for their parents and in-laws, which ultimately left them to perish as well. Stalin openly encouraged the NKVD to keep digging and "cleaning out this Polish filth". It is estimated by official Soviet records that more than 139,000 people have been sentenced, out of whom approximately 111,000 were executed, five times more than in the Katyn massacre. Is this "arbitrary terror"? It also has to be noted that while Jews were persecuted in Germany after Adolf Hitler's rise to power - beginning with boycott of Jewish businesses to ultimately stripping them from their legal rights - Nazi Germany began the mass killing of Jews after invading Poland and subsequently the Soviet Union, with the long decision process regarding the Final Solution culminating at the infamous conference in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee in 1942. In comparison, Stalin undertook his Great Terror in peacetime, with entire populations being targeted specifically on ethnic and national grounds, leaving the British historian Timothy Snyder to conclude that "it was Stalin, not Hitler, who initiated the first ethnic killing campaigns in interwar Europe". While I do not want to suggest that ms. Lipstadt does not have compassion and empathy for other victims of other genocides, her sharp dismissal of them is crude and ill-considered; a historian should truly know better. Acknowledging and remembering these victims does not take anything away from the enormity of Jewish suffering; glossing them over or completely disregarding them strips them of their dignity, memory and historical importance. Last, but not least - the book was first published in 1993, and to the best of my knowledge has not been revised since. It does not cover the development of antisemitism and Holocaust denial outside Europe and North America - a 2014 study by the Anti-Defamation League found that the majority of Holocaust deniers live in the Middle East and North Africa, with antisemitic attitudes being most prevalent in that region. Also, because of its publication date, Denying the Holocaust completely omits the role that the internet plays in Holocaust denial - the rise and development of internet communities such as Stormfront, which gather Holocaust deniers and white supremacists from all over the world. Video and audio materials focused on denying the Holocaust are easier to spread than ever, and so is denial itself (anyone who has ever watched a YouTube video focused on Germany in World War 2 will understand it immediately after reading the comments). Although the book does much well, there is also much to improve and add to it - though unfortunately I don't know if it'll ever see a new edition.