In a London courtroom, British writer David Irving is suing Deborah Lipstadt, author of "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory," for calling him a Holocaust denier.
"I do not deny the Holocaust," he said. "I merely redefine it." Irving's "redefinition" includes that there was no killing of Jews in gas chambers and that Adolf Hitler did not order, and perhaps for a time did not know of, the "Jewish problem's" Final Solution--the Nazi name for the Holocaust.
How could this happen?
After all, documentation of the Holocaust is vast. The killers have never denied the crime. The Germans kept meticulous records, and massive documentation exists in the archives of many countries. Aerial surveillance, photographic evidence, intelligence intercepts and even the archeological remains of the sites reinforce the documents.
They all tell the story of the evolution of Nazi genocide, from the infamous Nuremberg laws to the introduction of segregation, economic confiscation and apartheid, to the mobile killing units that killed bullet by bullet, person by person, and ultimately to the gas chambers at death camps such as Auschwitz and Treblinka--assembly-line death factories.
Throughout the years, survivors of the Holocaust have bore witness in memoirs, audio and video testimony and at trials. The Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation has videotaped more than 50,000 survivors in 33 languages in 57 countries. These eyewitnesses reiterate the story of the Holocaust, testimony by testimony. The perpetrators, too, have told their stories in diaries and letters, memoirs and trial testimony.
Yet how, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, can the Holocaust be denied? A series of techniques are employed:
* If there is any conflict in testimony, the entire testimony is negated, not just the issue in dispute. So, for instance, if there are discrepancies between survivors' accounts, or minor factual errors, all testimony is discarded as worthless. To deniers, perpetrator testimony is equally worthless, the fruits of coercion.
* If historians dispute information, then all positions in the debate are equally credible. Raul Hilberg, the dean of Holocaust historians, has conservatively estimated the Jewish dead at 5.1 million. The eminent German historian, Wolfgang Benz, has argued that 6.1 million Jews were killed. If two such eminent historians can be at odds, then a figure of less than 1 million Jewish dead can also be put forward as credible.
