Denying the Holocaust; The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory

A timely analysis of the antisemitism and prejudice that fuels Holocaust deniers, written by the inspirational author behind the major motion picture Denial, starring Rachel Weisz.

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.

Such notions used to be 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 now, in the first full-scale history of Holocaust denial, Deborah Lipstadt shows how—despite 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. 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.

Deborah E. Lipstadt is Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University. She is the author of History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving (a National Jewish Book Award winner); Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory; and Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933–1945. She lives in Atlanta.