Legitimate "revisionism" does not question the actuality of historical events. Revisionism looks at their causes and consequences. There is no debate among historians about the actuality of the Holocaust or that Nazi Germany systematically killed millions of Jews.
Major Assertions Of Holocaust Denial Propagandists
1) The Holocaust did not occur because there was no single "master plan" for Jewish annihilation.
2) There were no gas chambers used for mass murder at Auschwitz and other camps.
3) Holocaust scholars rely on the testimony of survivors because there is no objective documentation proving the Nazi genocide.
4) There was no net loss of Jewish lives between 1941 and 1945.
5) The Nuremberg Trials were a "farce of justice" staged by the victors in the war.
Factual Responses To Holocaust Denial
1) That there was no single document outlining a "master plan" does not mean there was no plan. The "Final Solution" was the culmination of the development and implementation of Nazi Jewish policy, overseen and directed by the highest tier of Nazi leadership including Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, Adolf Eichmann, Hermann Goering and Adolf Hitler himself. As early as September 16, 1919, Hitler wrote that the "final goal, however, must steadfastly remain the removal of Jews altogether." On February 24, 1943, Hitler stated: "This struggle will not end with annihilation of Aryan mankind, but with the extermination of the Jewish people of Europe."
2) Death camp gas chambers were the primary means of execution used against the Jews during the Holocaust. Well before the fall of 1941, when the Nazis issued a directive implementing large-scale gas chambers, procedures facilitating mass murder, including the utilization of smaller gas chambers, were already in place.
3) The Germans themselves left no shortage of documentation and testimony to the events, and no serious scholar has relied solely on survivor testimony as the conclusive word on Holocaust history. The history of the Holocaust has been compiled largely from German documents -- written by Nazi policymakers such as Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, Hans Frank, Rudolf Hess and Adolf Eichmann -- captured by the allied armies.
4) The widely cited "six million" figure of Jewish Holocaust victims is derived from the initial Nuremberg trial estimate of 5.7 million deaths, subsequent census counts, statistical analyses, and other demographic studies of European Jewry. Newly released information from Soviet archives suggests that the death count should be revised upward by perhaps 250,000 additional Jewish victims.
5) The process of bringing Nazi war criminals to justice was a lengthy and complicated effort involving the differing legal traditions of the United States, England, France and the Soviet Union. The trials did not result in either "rubber stamp" guilty verdicts or identical sentences. In fact, by 1951, 77 of the 142 criminals convicted at Nuremberg had been released from prison.
Holocaust Denial On College Campuses
