Denying History:
Who Says The Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?

Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman

Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. ISBN: 0-520-23469-3. Pages: xviii, 312, bibliography, index.

Review © 2004 Branislav L. Slantchev

This is a disturbing book. Not because of its contents, but because it demonstrates the need to write it. Since I spend most of my time in the somewhat rarefied atmosphere of the academe, I very seldom come into contact with people who deny that the Holocaust ever happened. I have always dismissed these people as crackpots, bigots, and racists (which they are) but never realized that someone can seriously challenge the formidable mountain of evidence for the systematic extermination of the European Jews by the Nazis. I picked up this book mostly because I was curious to see what sort of ludicrous arguments one could advance to deny the Holocaust. In this respect, I found what I expected. But I also found out the startling extent to which deniers have managed to legitimize their agenda.

The book is a devastating expose of the denier movement and a methodical demolition of their claims with respect to the three major aspects of the Holocaust they deny: the use of gas chambers for mass murder, the extermination of about 6 million Jews, and the premeditated, planned, and highly organized machinery of implementing the Final Solution. The book comprises four parts.

The authors begin by discussing the legitimacy of Holocaust denial 'research', and then look at the standard of historical evidence. That is, how one can ever know that something actually happened in the past. By far the strongest line of reasoning is the 'convergence of evidence' whereby bits and pieces of knowledge, small facts from various documents and seemingly unrelated areas, all converge to provide one possible explanation for an event. The authors take up this theme in part IV, where they demonstrate the fallacies of several denial movements quite similar to the Holocaust denial one. It bears repeating that the tactic of denial is always the same: pick one statement, then find evidence that contradicts it (either real or imagined), then conclude that the entire explanation is incorrect. Any reasonable person should immediately see that this line of reasoning is utterly false, but the authors are right to insist on drawing our attention to the method for it is often easy to lose the forest for the trees.

In part II, the authors tackle to identity of the deniers and their motives. I would have preferred this to be the last part of the book, mostly for psychological reasons. While it is quite valid to examine one's background and possible motives for advancing an argument, one does not want to fall into the associational trap. Irwing may be a neo-Nazi racist but that does not diminish the strength of his arguments. (Or he may not be, and that would not increase that strength either.) The point is that placing this part before the contra-arguments makes it appear as if Shermer and Grobman are trying to smear the deniers.

The meat of the book is in part III, where the authors dedicate one chapter to each of the three main claims of the deniers. They demonstrate convincingly that while the extermination camps may not have been planned as such from the outset, they evolved together with Nazi planning of the Final Solution. They also provide numerous evidence that thousands of people were gassed at particular camps, and in the process refute the absurd claims of the deniers that most victims of the concentration camps died of "normal" causes like privation. The authors then turn to analyzing the number of Jews murdered by the Germans. They discuss various sources for the 6 million figure, including Nazi documents, demographic studies, and records of Einsatzgruppen. Finally, they tackle the claim that nobody ever ordered the systematic murder of the Jews, that it was a sort of spontaneous, if unfortunate, zeal by isolated locals in the heat of war. By showing why there could not have been an explicit order signed by Hitler, and then going over statements and documents by Nazi leaders, the authors build a persuasive case. After reading this, one would be as sure that the Nazi government planned to murder the Jews as one is sure that the Hutu government planned to murder the Tutsis or that the Serbian government planned to murder the Bosnians.

To those who scream that we have seen too much of the Holocaust (e.g. the often despicable arguments advanced by Finkelstein), this book is proof that we don't see nearly enough; that within a span of mere fifty years, we have begun to forget the past, to distort it, to deny it... which means that we shall eventually be condemned to relive it. To those who object to the seemingly exclusive focus on Jewish suffering, one should say that what begins with the Jews never ends with the Jews; the Nazis began by murdering the Jews, but then extended the killing to Gypsies, Slavs, and just about any 'undesirable' they could imagine. The way Jews are treated is a signal akin to the canary in the mines: if it dies, we are not far behind.

I hate to say that everyone should read this book because ideally I want to believe that nobody needs to. But reality is different, and so my advice would be to most certainly read this excellent work.

April 4, 2004