In this first full-scale history of Holocaust denial, Lipstadt shows how, despite tens of thousands of living
witnesses and vast amounts of documentary evidence, this irrational idea has not only continued to gain adherents
but has become an internationally organized movement.
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. Forty years ago, such notions were 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 over the past decade they have begun to gain a hearing
in respectable arenas, and now, in the first full-scale history of Holocaust denial, Deborah Lipstadt shows how
- despite tens of thousands of 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. One
sign of the movement's disturbing resonance is the rise of such figures as the Holocaust denier David Duke to national
prominence. Holocaust deniers have also begun to make common cause with radical Afrocentrists such as Leonard Jeffries
of New York's City University, who retails racist myths about the Jews; and a recent campaign of ads in college
newspapers calling for "open debate" on "so-called facts" about the Holocaust suggests a bold
new bid for mainstream intellectual legitimacy. 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.