Holocaust Deniers Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Holocaust Deniers - Essay Example Deniers like to call themselves 'Revisionists,' an ambiguous term that needs to be substituted by Holocaust deniers, which more adequate[ly] reflects their ideology."2 Holocaust deniers usually make claims about actual facts that precipitated and included the happenings of events that took place in Nazi concentration camps from 1939-1945 during World War II in Hitler's Germany. Claims range from the fact that Hitler never ordered a plan for a "Final Solution" to the 'Jewish Problem,' to the idea that an order was never carried out for the Jews' methodical extermination. However, there are plenty of pieces of evidence which document the actual occurrence of the Holocaust and its atrocities. In fact, the Holocaust is one of the most widely- and well-documented massacres in history. "The father of Holocaust denial was Paul Rassinier (1906-1967), adeportee to the Dora concentration camp[who] returned from Dora with[a vision that]the victims of the war were the Germans; the ones to blame were the Jews who were responsible for the world conflict."3 This leads us to the question that naturally follows, which is, What is Holocaust denial and the arguments that it proposes Holocaust denial, by definition, is "a propaganda movement active in the United States, Canada and Western Europe which seeks to deny the reality of the Nazi regime's systematic mass murder of 6 million Jews in Europe during World War II."4 The Institute for Historical Review is the main organization which supports revisionism, which denies the Holocaust ever happened. The IHR, founded by William Carto, holds annual conferences which are forums for revisionist 'historians' to foment and spread their propaganda. These people are not historians at all. In fact, they usually seek to undermine legitimate historical research and writing through propagating their own writings. The IHR is "a pseudo-academic enterprise[for people with] no [history credentials, including Ph.D.'s]Revilo P. Oliver and Robert Faurisson[,] writersDavid Irvingand Bradley Smith, and career anti-SemitesMark Weber and Ernst Zndel-convene to develop new outlets for their anti-Jewish, anti-Israel and, for some, pro[-]Nazi beliefs."5 Most notably, recently, those who deny the Holocaust have decided to use empirical evidence in order to prove their point that the Holocaust could not have happened. The "Leuchter and Rudolf Reports purported to demonstrate that there was not enough cyanide residue in the Auschwitz gas chambers to be consistent with mass gassing. Friedrich Paul Berg, inThe Diesel Gas Chambers: Myth Within a Myth, claims to show that it would be improbableto use diesel engine exhaust to kill people"6 Each paper cites "experiments, laboratory analyses,