Holocaust Denial and Deniers


Ben S. Austin

Holocaust denial may seem, on first sight, to be preposterous. How, you may ask, can anyone deny the most extensively documented period in world history? An equally fascinating question, and far more significant in terms of its implications is WHY would anyone want to deny the Holocaust? What motivations could lie behind such a stance? What is to be gained through denial?

The second question may have several different answers, all of which reveal more about the deniers than about the Holocaust or any of the Holocaust documents.

Yet a third question of importance is: How shall we respond to Holocaust denial and deniers? Should they be ignored altogether? Should we simply do a better job teaching about the Holocaust and increasing the number of avenues through which the Holocaust is taught? Would the cause of truth and humanity be served through open confrontation or would debate and dialogue merely provide an apparent legitimacy to their insidious claims?

These, and other questions, are addressed in the pages that follow. Please follow the highlighted links below for information on several crucial issues:

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The Nizkor Project

I wish to express my deepest gratitude to Kenneth McVay and his army of dedicated volunteers for their vigilant fight against Holocaust denial. Readers are encouraged to examine the documents on file by clicking on The Nizkor Project. This website houses the largest collection of anti-denial materials available anywhere.

Annie Alpert, an associate of the Nizkor Project explains the purpose of the vast undertaking:

What is Nizkor?

Nizkor is a Hebrew word that means "We will remember."

The Nizkor Foundation was founded by a dedicated cadre of researchers and scholars for the purpose of fighting hatred, anti-Semitism and bigotry on the internet. We maintain a huge educational database of information related to the Holocaust which we offer as ammunition in the battle against Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism. The Nizkor database, located at http://www.nizkor. org/ on the World Wide Web, has become theInternet's largest collection of Holocaust-related material. Encompassing thousands of documents, mostly typed by hand from books, the project is designed to provide point-by-point refutation to statements of neo-Nazis and anti-Semites on the Web.

Our objectives are:

To monitor the falsehoods, half-truths, and misinformation distributed via the Internet and other media by individuals and organizations that are fascist (including Nazi or neo-Nazi), racist, antisemitic, and/or that dishonestly and/or flagrantly reject established historical fact about the Nazi Holocaust.

To refute or otherwise reply to those falsehoods, half-truths, and misinformation, with the aim of ensuring that they and their proponents remain firmly in the margin.

To encourage, assist, and engage in such refutation by sponsoring and organizing collaborative research and writing efforts of both amateurs and experts around the world, including but not limited to historians, war-crimes prosecutors, lawyers, and witnesses, and/or to distribute such refutation.

To encourage a critical and skeptical awareness of history, science, and the acquisition of human knowledge generally, so as to foster a frame of mind which recognizes such falsehoods, half-truths, and misinformation for what they are.

To seek, solicit, and archive, for worldwide electronic access free of charge, material that deals with the phenomenon and history of hate, especially the Nazi Holocaust, material that documents and exposes such hate, and nonviolent methods and tools for combating such hate.

To attempt to buttress democratic institutions against the campaign of destruction and disinformation being waged by hatemongers in electronic forums, principally on the Internet.

To provide teachers, from grade schools through universities, with curricula to bolster democratic, multicultural, and multiracial institutions.

To speak to or otherwise educate students, teachers, fraternal organizations, church groups, police forces, and any other interested groups, about the propaganda campaigns of racist and antidemocratic individuals and organizations conducted through computer networks, and about which nonviolent methods and tools are effective and ineffective in combating them. (Letter to H-Holocaust Discussion Group, January 15, 1997)

-- Nizkor (USA) - An Electronic Holocaust Educational Resource
Nizkor Web: http://www.nizkor.org/
European mirror: http://www1.de.nizkor.org/~nizkor/ **************************************************************************

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