Taking an in-depth look at those who say the Holocaust never happened, this text explores the motivations behind such claims. While most commentators have dismissed the Holocaust deniers as antisemitic neo-Nazi thugs who do not deserve a response, historians Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman have immersed themselves in the minds and culture of these Holocaust "revisionists". They have conducted personal interviews with the deniers, read their literature, monitored their Web sites, attended their conferences, engaged them in debate, and even travelled around Europe to conduct research at the Nazi extermination camps. Uncovering a complex social movement, the authors go in deep not only to try and understand the motives of the Holocaust deniers, but also to refute their points one by one. In the process, they show how we can be certain that the Holocaust happened and, for that matter, how we can confirm any historical event.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Arthur Hertzberg Introduction. Who Speaks For The Past? History and Pseudohistory PART I. FREE SPEECH AND HISTORY 1. Giving the Devil His Due The Free Speech Issue 2. The Noble Dream How We Know Anything in History Happened PART II. INSIDE THE DENIAL MOVEMENT 3. Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened? An Inside Look at the Personalities and Organizations 4. Why They Say the Holocaust Never Happened The Ideological Agenda 5. How Deniers Distort History Flaws, Fallacies, and Failings in the Deniersi Arguments PART III. ARGUMENTS AND REFUTATIONS 6. The Crooked Timber of Auschwitz How Concentration Camps Became Death Camps 7. "For God's Sake--Terrible." The Scope and Scale of the Holocaust 8. The Evil of Banality The Protocols of National Socialism PART IV. TRUTH AND HISTORY 9. The Rape of History In Search of a True and Meaningful Past
Author Biography
Michael Shermer is the founder and publisher of Skeptic magazine, Director of the Skeptics Society, Adjunct Professor of the History of Science at Occidental College, and host of the Skeptics Lecture Series at Caltech. He is also the host of a national TV show called Exploring the Unknown (Fox Network) and the author of Why People Believe Weird Things (1997), and How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science (1999). Alex Grobman is the founding editor in chief of the Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual, as well as the editor of In Defense of the Survivors: The Letters and Documents of Oscar A. Mintzer, AJDC Legal Advisor, Germany, 1945-46 (1999) and coeditor, with Rabbi Daniel Landes and Sybil Milton, of Genocide: Critical Issues of the Holocaust (1983).
