Did Six Million Really Die

The American government, which had had records of successful intervention on behalf of persecuted Jews in Morocco, Russia, and Romania, as well as on behalf of Armenians in Turkey, failed to act during the Nazi era to save Jews or alleviate their plight. It refused to change the immigration restrictions for refugees from Germany, nor did it protest against the Nazi anti-Jewish policies, not even against the deportation of German Jews in 1940-41. It failed to do anything to prevent the murder of six million Jews, even after it received reliable information on Nazi mass murders of Jews. The passive stance of the U.S. government was seconded by the anti-refugee sentiments of many lower rank officials and of the American populace. The reluctance of the U.S. government to act on behalf of the Jews of Europe was noted by the Nazis and used in their propaganda. Dwells on the successful activities of the War Refugee Board, established in 1944. Paradoxically, the WRB activities, as well as other rescue initiatives, were sometimes obstructed by U.S. diplomats abroad. Concludes that the WRB represented a small gesture of atonement by a nation which, during 1933-44, showed apathy toward the victims. Contrasts the inaction of the United States with the active stance of one man - Raoul Wallenberg - who actually rescued thousands of Hungarian Jews.

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. Sixty 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 as time goes on, 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. 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. Thus the movement has an unsuspected power to dramatically alter the way that truth and meaning are transmitted from one generation to another.