Check out the recently relaunched CODOH forum:

At times, there are nuances that arise from history that create equivocation in analyzing how, why, and when certain historic events have occurred. There are no nuances to be discerned regarding the Holocaust. It is a historic fact.

—Judge Joseph A. Greenaway Jr., opinion in Ali v. Woodbridge Township School District (2020)

To say something is self-evident is to say that it is to be accepted without proof or explanation. The mainstream position on the Holocaust is that it is effectively self-evident. While we do hear frequent mention of the “overwhelming� proof for the Holocaust, those foolhardy enough to request specifics will soon discover that such inquiries are not very welcome, to put it mildly.

This hysterical insistence that everything is completely settled is a classic instance of the lady doth protest too much. These nervous assurances should enhance rather than deter our curiosity. Even a cursory investigation confirms that the establishment is, at the very least, guilty of dramatically overstating their case. They claim a level of certainty normally reserved for religion or the hard sciences, a preposterous position that is refuted even by their own literature, as we shall see.

Early Holocaust Scholarship

There is a proclivity to insist that there were 6 million killed because that’s what was said in 1945. People don’t want to let go.

—Raul Hilberg, 1990

The first comprehensive history in English of what we now call “the Holocaustâ€� was Gerald Reitlinger’s The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939-1945, published in 1953. Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews appeared a few years later in 1961 and would go on to become a standard text. Although “the Holocaustâ€� enjoys considerable support among elite academic institutions today, we can’t help but notice that this was not at all the case early on. Reitlinger’s book was published by Vallentine Mitchell, a British press specializing in Judaica. Hilberg’s book was published by the obscure press Quadrangle and only after considerable difficulty. Neither of these men were trained academic historians. Hilberg was an academic at the University of Vermont, but his field was political science. It is also conspicuous that both of these major early authors settled on death tallies noticeably lower than the traditional six million figure. Hilberg’s figure of 5.1 million is a little too low for comfort today. Even more surprising is Reitlinger’s estimated Jewish death toll of 4,194,200 to 4,591,200 victims, numbers that would likely elicit shrieks of Holocaust denial if published today.

Reitlinger’s work in particular is to be credited with showing a degree of critical spirit, albeit to an inadequate extent. It seems Reitlinger was rather less constrained in some respects than later historians, presumably because he was an author of Jewish heritage writing well before the modern “Holocaust” era. Reitlinger often remarked on difficulties or seeming contradictions that most other Holocaust writers might pass over in silence so as not to encourage doubts. He felt that the body counts in many of the German documents were unrealistic and exaggerated. He thought the Soviet death toll of 4 million at Auschwitz was “ridiculous.” His own estimate for Auschwitz was 840,800, somewhat lower than current mainstream estimates. He similarly rejected the 1.5 million supposedly killed at Majdanek, stating that it “was not a death factory on Auschwitz lines” (although he failed to deal with the implications of that concession). Unlike Hilberg, Reitlinger noticed the anachronisms in the confessions of Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz, and made some effort, albeit unsuccessfully, to account for them. He also showed some caution with the alleged deathbed confession of Franz Ziereis, the commandant of Mauthausen, opining that it was “not very reliable.â€� He shared some documents that seemingly undermine the extermination narrative, such as Himmler’s order in December of 1942 to reduce the death rates in the concentration camps, including Auschwitz, by all means necessary. When describing testimonies of the mass shootings, Reitlinger noted and endeavored to explain the surprising passivity of the victims.

The state of mind of the victims, who meekly stripped, shovelled a layer of sand over the twitching bodies of their kinsfolk, and then lay patiently, naked in a temperature below zero, to await a shot in the neck, was nothing but the normal resignation of the condemned.

Similarly, of the shooting of a huge number of Jews in only two days at Babi Yar near Kiev, Reitlinger with some understatement pointed out the logistical difficulties, noting that “it must have taken some ingenuity to keep 33,771 people crouching in the road for two days on end, particularly as the small-arms salvos must have been almost within earshot.�

In his statistical appendix, Reitlinger discounted the usual “estimates which are based solely on alleged pre-war and post-war population returns, the latter being reached by deducting from the former the figure it is desired to prove.â€� And he explained at some length the difficulties in arriving at figures for Eastern Europe “where figures have been adduced that have no relationship with the facts as known.â€� And he noted the wide discrepancies in the various estimates for the number of Jews in Russia, “none of which [were] realisticâ€� in his opinion, given that significant numbers of Polish Jews were known to have escaped into the Soviet Union.

Reitlinger’s rejection of the six million figure alarmed the Frenchman Leon Poliakov, another early but less nuanced Holocaust author. In a 1956 article, Poliakov rebutted Reitlinger by simply declaring that “the estimated data available are sufficiently abundant and reliable for us to be able to accept, as the most probable number, the ‘classic’ total of 6 million.â€� In the same article, Poliakov stated that the number of Jews killed at Auschwitz could be put “conservativelyâ€�(!) at two million, about double the current mainstream estimate. Poliakov based this on the confessions of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess who “admitted” to killing 2.5 million people which Poliakov took completely at face value. Reitlinger for his part had never taken Hoess’s numbers seriously and attributed the excessive figure to a “curious inverted megalomania.”

Ultimately, Poliakov got his wish as the lower figures of Reitlinger were completely ignored, as were Hilberg’s, in favor of the “classic� six million, a figure which has never quite been dislodged, despite its demonstrable deficiencies. Over time Holocaust scholars seemingly became more orthodox on this point compared to Reitlinger and Hilberg. We see this clearly in the work of Lucy Dawidowicz in the 1970s. Dawidowicz held a chair at Yeshiva University in the then emerging field of “Holocaust Studies,� despite starting but never completing two master’s programs. (Again we see that the vaunted academic prestige of the Holocaust side is a later phenomenon). In Dawidowicz’s 1975 bestseller The War Against the Jews she estimated that 5,933,900 Jews died in the Holocaust, a figure conveniently close to the desired number, seemingly modified ever so slightly to give the impression of statistical precision.

Later Holocaust Scholarship

In the meantime the war against the Soviet Union has made it possible to use other territory for the final solution. The Fuehrer has accordingly decided that the Jews shall not be sent to Madagascar, but to the East. Madagascar therefore need no longer be considered for the final solution.
—Franz Rademacher, memo, 10 Feb 1942 (NG-5770)

Over time, Holocaust scholarship progressed from what was more or less a Jewish special interest into a more professionalized field. While the ultimate conclusions have remained more constrained than ever on the headline Holocaust claims, there have been some rather radical fixes to the details of the story.

In the Nuremberg judgment, it was accepted that the “final solutionâ€� or extermination of the Jews began around the time of Operation Barbarossa in the summer of 1941. Most early Holocaust historians understood Goering’s order to Heydrich of July 31, 1941 regarding the “final solution” to be a plan for mass murder. Reitlinger, Hilberg, and Dawidowicz all interpreted this document along these lines, with Reitlinger remarking that the order came “surprisingly late.â€� Hitler’s January 1939 speech which contained a “prophecyâ€� regarding the “annihilationâ€� of the Jews, although not interpreted literally in 1939, was commonly cited after the war as proof of Hitler’s genocidal intentions. The Russian invasion, the desire for Lebensraum for the master race, all this was seen as part of an intrinsically genocidal Nazi ideology.

This traditional understanding of the final solution as a top-down, deliberate plan has the benefit of being straightforward and intuitive. But there was a fly in the ointment: The German documents categorically refute this. It is clear from the German documents from 1940 through much of 1941 that there was no plan at that time to execute all the Jews en masse. This was apparent even at Nuremberg, although it was not adequately appreciated at the time. At the Wilhelmstrasse trial (NMT Case XI), the prosecution compiled a bundle of key German documents related to Jewish policy (NG-2586). This bundle included, among others, Goering’s decree to Heydrich, the minutes of the famous Wannsee Conference, and an August 1942 memo by Martin Luther which provided a thorough summary of Jewish policy in the Reich up until that point. One is hard pressed to find within this considerable documentation any indication of an extermination program, and quite a few parts seemingly contradict that thesis such as the plan to resettle the Jews in Madagascar. The traditional explanation is to say that the Germans were careful to never speak of the real policy explicitly and all references to deporting Jews “to the East� and the like were euphemistic. Judge Leon Powers offered an interesting dissenting opinion that in many ways anticipated the later difficulties of Holocaust historians.

It is incorrect also, it seems to me, to assume that every reference to the “Final Solution” of the Jewish Question means extermination. The fact is that when the first campaigns against the Jews were inaugurated, the term, “Final Solution” came into use. Generally in the early stages, the final solution meant forced emigration. During one period it meant deporting the Jews to Madagascar. As a result of the Wannsee Conference, it meant deporting them to labor camps in the East. It never meant extermination, except to a few of the initiated.

The evidence shows that the program of extermination was handled with the greatest of secrecy. Hitler orally instructed and directed Himmler to start this action; Himmler carefully selected and pledged to secrecy the men who were to work with him and to carry out these exterminations; places were selected which were isolated, and were camouflaged by being identified with labor camps nearby, and the program was carried on with the deliberate purpose and design of preventing the German people, and all others not connected with the enterprise, from knowing what was going on. The evidence by those who were on the inside of this terrible extermination program strongly tends to show that not over 100 people in all were informed about the matter. (NMT Green Series, Vol XIV, pg. 909-910)

By the 1970s, these contradictions had prompted some historians, particularly in West Germany, to suggest alternative “functionalistâ€� theories that were not so obviously in conflict with the documentary record. These controversies were likely heightened by David Irving’s thesis in his 1977 book Hitler’s War that the Holocaust must have happened behind Hitler’s back.

So how did these later scholars explain such anomalies as the Madagascar plan? Or the earlier Nisko plan to set up a reservation for Jews near Lublin? The functionalists realized that these and other difficulties could not be brushed off as smokescreens or merely as transitional stages in a long-planned extermination program, as assumed by Dawidowicz and others. The functionalist theories deal with these difficulties primarily by shifting to a later timeline for the extermination decision, some time between September and December of 1941, depending on who you ask. Additionally, the functionalists posit a less organized and more improvised extermination program.

The functionalist theories manage to avoid certain difficulties, but the resulting story of a gradual, improvised Holocaust is frankly a bit weird and is miles away from what most of the general public believes. Under the functionalist theory, the Goering order to Heydrich is too early to be an extermination order, which in turn would mean the phrase “final solution” is not inherently murderous (as Judge Powers had precociously observed). Similarly, it becomes difficult to insist on a literal interpretation of the exterminationist language in Hitler’s “prophecy” of January 1939, as this was well before the extermination decision is said to have been made. Moreover, the fact that Hitler supposedly threatened to do the Holocaust in a public speech that was reported by the international press does not fit with the idea that the program was so secret that it could only be discussed in careful code language even in internal documents.

The Revisionists

The great French revisionist Robert Faurisson once remarked that it was curious how mainstream scholars would in select instances allow their critical spirit to be awakened only to then inexplicably allow that critical spirit to “collapse into lethargy” the moment Auschwitz or some other sacred axiom was threatened. Revisionists are distinguished by a willingness to let the critical spirit run free without arbitrary limitations.

The pioneer of Holocaust revisionism is widely agreed to be the Frenchman Paul Rassinier, a leftist who was himself a political prisoner at the Buchenwald and Dora concentration camps. Rassinier would provoke considerable controversy with his early postwar writings which challenged the common image of the concentration camps. Rassinier found that much of the sensational concentration camp literature of the time did not square at all with his experiences, and he sought to provide a much-needed corrective. Rassinier’s interest in the topic did not abate through the 1950s and into the 1960s. Over time he moved beyond his personal experience to more general research, eventually concluding that the notorious Nazi gas chambers and the six million were largely mythical.

Even prior to Rassinier, there was a strain of skepticism or “proto-revisionism” that was evident even during the war itself. As early as 1942, it was being claimed that the Jews were being exterminated, not only in the now famous gas chambers but also in steam chambers, electrocution chambers, and other creative methods of execution. The bodies of the victims were said to have been used for soap production. These atrocity reports appeared in the newspapers but usually as minor stories with high page numbers. Some publications such as the Christian Century were openly dismissive of the stories and various commentators noticed similarities with the soap factories and bayoneted babies and other discredited horror stories of the previous war. Behind the scenes, many officials within the US State Department were also skeptical. Much of this skepticism abated soon after the war with the concentration camp liberations and the Nuremberg trials, though there were a few proto-revisionists in the early post-war period such the journalist Douglas Reed, along with the aforementioned Rassinier.

It was some time before the revisionist thesis was developed with rigor. If forced to choose a start date for modern revisionism, 1976, the year of publication of Arthur Butz’s book The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, would be a reasonable choice. Butz was an electrical engineering professor at Northwestern University who began writing the book in his spare time in the early 1970s. After reading Hilberg, Butz became convinced that the extermination story was a “pernicious hoaxâ€� and that mainstream scholars were acquiescing in “a monstrous lie” which he “felt an inescapable obligation and an intellectual imperativeâ€� to expose. Butz examined in detail the evidence from the war crimes trials and the works of Reitlinger and Hilberg. The book was head and shoulders above any prior revisionist effort and served as a foundation for subsequent revisionist research which advanced rapidly in the 1980s.

The traditional Holocaust scholarship is heavily reliant on testimonies and generally does not consider physical evidence whatsoever. Revisionists examine the key testimonies and see what they actually say. What this reveals is that the traditional scholarship has carefully assembled a story using very questionable and often contradictory testimonies, harmonizing the stories often without any explanation or justification and with the most contradictory and embarrassing parts quietly omitted. This problem of the testimonies is best appreciated simply by reading some of these primary sources.

On 25th December, 1943, I was sick with typhus and was picked out at a selection made by Doctors Mengele and Tauber along with about 350 other women. I was made to undress and taken by lorry to a gas chamber. There were seven gas chambers at Auschwitz. This particular one was underground and the lorry was able to run down the slope and straight into the chamber. Here we were tipped unceremoniously on the floor. The room was about 12 yards square and small lights on the wall dimly illuminated it. When the room was full a hissing sound was heard coming from the centre point on the floor and gas came into the room. After what seemed about ten minutes some of the victims began to fite [bite?] their hands and foam at the mouth and blood issued from their ears, eyes and mouth and their faces went blue. I suffered from all these symptoms, together with a tight feeling at the throat. I was half conscious when my number was called out by Dr. Mengele and I was led from the chamber. I attribute my escape to the fact that the daughter of a friend of mine who was an Aryan and a Doctor at Auschwitz had seen me being transported to the chamber and had told her mother who immediately appealed to Dr. Mengele. Apparently he realised that as a political prisoner I was of more value alive than dead and I was released. (Regina Bialok, May 1945, testimony at the Belsen Trial)

There are some problems with this. The cellars said to be used for gassings were not accessible by lorry in the way described. The gas is not supposed to have come from the floor but rather to have been dropped in the form of pellets from holes in the ceiling. Nor is it plausible that the victim was pulled out of a densely packed gas chamber in the middle of the gassing, by Dr. Mengele no less. Victims of gassing with hydrogen cyanide would not have blood coming out of their ears, eyes, and mouth. This silly testimony is no isolated example. One could fill volumes with this nonsense. Nor is it the case that the most important testimonies are of vastly superior quality. As revisionists have shown over the years, many of the “star” witnesses relied upon in the traditional histories such Rudolf Hoess, Kurt Gerstein, Dr. Miklos Nyiszli, Rudolf Vrba, and Yankel Wiernik are similarly problematic.

Revisionists fact-check these stories, including for scientific plausibility, the exact sort of analysis that has been deliberately avoided by the mainstream. Those who look further into revisionism will learn all sorts of interesting science such as the carbon monoxide content of diesel exhaust, the evaporation curve for Zyklon B, and how hydrogen cyanide reacts with iron. The details of these arguments are too much to cover here but below are a couple of major points.

The Gas Chambers: For a gas chamber to be used for mass gassings, there are certain technical requirements. At the most basic, there must be a way of introducing the gas into the chamber and ventilating the room afterwards. Gassing multiple unrestrained prisoners presents additional challenges such as having to reinforce all doors and windows. The facilities that are claimed to have been “gas chambersâ€� for mass execution are very unlikely to have functioned as claimed for technical reasons. Moreover, the rooms in question often had obvious mundane functions. Shower rooms, morgues, fumigation chambers, laundry facilities, etc. Are we to believe the Germans had such a diversity of haphazard “gas chamber” designs? Or is it more likely that the Allies misrepresented mundane facilities as something more sinister for purposes of propaganda?

The Bodies: Given that the claim is that six million were killed, with a majority of these occurring at precisely known locations, it is reasonable to ask if there are mass graves at these camps to corroborate this mass slaughter. It may be surprising to the layperson to learn that the official story is that the Germans burned almost all of the bodies. It is claimed that around 1.5 million bodies were initially buried at just three camps at Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor, and that the Germans later dug up all of these bodies and burned them with wood in open air. This would be thousands of bodies per day disposed of in this way. Revisionists argue that it is not realistic for the Germans to have burned so many bodies in the manner described, nor is there any evidence that these camps were receiving the staggering amounts of wood that this would have required. Likewise for Auschwitz, we argue that the claim that thousands were cremated per day in the ovens is not even remotely realistic.

The Holocaust establishment generally refuses to consider these points and considers them taboo. In 1979, the revisionist Robert Faurisson caused a stir in France when he questioned the gas chambers in the pages of Le Monde. An angry response to Faurisson signed by 34 individuals perfectly captures the mainstream attitude.

It is not necessary to wonder how, technically, such mass murder was possible. It was technically possible because it took place. That is the compulsory point of departure for all historical inquiry on this subject. It is fitting for us to simply repeat this truth; there is not and cannot be any debate on the existence of the gas chambers.

Defenders of the Faith (the Anti-Revisionists)

As revisionism gained steam in the 1980s, the “we’re not going to dignify that with a response” approach proved increasingly impractical. The Holocaust establishment found itself between a rock and a hard place. How could they engage the revisionists without exposing more people to revisionist arguments? How could they rebut revisionist arguments without undermining their claims of infallibility? And what if they were to lose the debate or be forced to make major concessions? At the same time, how could they allow the revisionist arguments to remain unanswered? Wouldn’t people assume that there were no answers? These conflicting impulses led to a mixed strategy response. For the most part, the mainstream continued to ignore revisionists aside from frequent but vague denunciations, and in many countries they began lobbying for revisionism to be banned. At the same time, however, some responses were produced, usually by unofficial or semi-official parties attempting to fill the void.

The first researcher to make a serious attempt to defend the Holocaust claims on a more technical basis was the French pharmacist Jean-Claude Pressac. Pressac, by his own account, was a former revisionist who had found his way back to belief in the 1980s after his many research trips to Auschwitz. He somehow convinced the Klarsfeld Foundation in Paris to publish his research, a decision the Klarsfelds perhaps came to regret. The result was a large 1989 volume, Auschwitz: Technique and operation of the gas chambers, with over 500 oversized pages, full of reproductions of previously unknown documents from the Auschwitz archives, many of them blueprints and other technical documents. Although the book was supposed to be the ultimate refutation of Faurisson and the revisionists, the book was barely distributed with only around a thousand copies printed. Today, the book is so rare that physical copies sell for over $1,000, though fortunately digitized versions are available online.

Revisionists were generally pleased with the wealth of new information Pressac made available, and they noted that the book contained many surprising concessions. Pressac’s assessement of the Holocaust literature was blunt and unflattering, as he called out the “complete bankruptcy of the traditional historyâ€� which was “based for the most part on testimonies, assembled according to the mood of the moment, truncated to fit an arbitrary truth and sprinkled with a few German documents of uneven value and without any connection with one another.â€� Pressac would echo these sentiments in a later interview (not published until 2000) where he described the “pitiful level of science in concentration camp studies, based exclusively these days on the ‘sacrosanct’ testimonies.â€� Conversely, in the same interview, he commended Arthur Butz for the “scientific knowledge and spiritâ€� that he brought to the topic “which the traditional historians do not have,” and he had similarly favorable comments about Italian revisionist Carlo Mattogno.

Pressac did not claim to have found any smoking gun document proving gassing. The core of his case was a collection of 39 “criminal traces,â€� such as orders for “gas-tight” doors. Pressac argued that these were each suggestive of criminal intent and when taken together established the reality of the gas chambers. It must be admitted that revisionists have not always had entirely convincing or consistent explanations for each one of these Pressac documents (interpreting construction documents years after the fact and without full context can be a challenge), but generally revisionists have argued that these “criminal tracesâ€� are ambiguous and could apply to fumigation chambers, gas shelters, and other purposes.

As Pressac’s approach was in many ways more revisionist than orthodox, we can see why Carlo Mattogno has described Pressac’s work as “crypto-revisionist,â€� and why Germar Rudolf has gone so far as to suggest he was a double agent. Pressac’s more scientific approach also predictably sparked objections from traditionalists. Claude Lanzmann, the director of Shoah, condemned Pressac’s work (specifically his 1993 follow-up book) because he felt it “legitimates the arguments of revisionists, who become the point of reference for future debate.” Lanzmann also reaffirmed his preference for survivor testimony over documents and physical evidence: “I prefer the tears of the barber from Treblinka in ‘Shoah’ to a Pressac document on gas detectors.”

Lanzmann’s view would more or less win out. Already in 1990, just a year after Pressac’s first book, France passed the Gayssot Act, a law targeted specifically at Faurisson, which made Holocaust denial illegal in that country. Overt censorship soon became the preferred way to handle the revisionists as such laws spread through most of Europe.

We see from the example of Pressac that any sort of serious engagement with revisionists is not really desired, and to the extent it has occurred it is always immediately obvious that the historicity of the Holocaust is not as sound as is claimed. In America, one of the foremost anti-revisionists has been Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic magazine, who took up the Holocaust controversy in the mid-1990s, seemingly to boost interest in his magazine. Initially the politician-like Shermer was somewhat friendly with revisionists and at one point had managed to be on reasonably cordial terms with people from both sides. In 1994, Shermer had agreed to appear on the Phil Donahue show opposite David Cole, a young Jewish Holocaust revisionist. Cole had visited Auschwitz and several other camps and had compiled a lengthy list of technical problems with the gas chambers. Shermer attempted to get assistance with these questions from several top scholars in the Holocaust field and privately admitted to Cole that none of them had a clue how the gas chambers actually worked, nor it seemed had they ever even thought about it. This would just be the word of David Cole except that there are recordings of Shermer’s conversations with another anonymous revisionist which confirm Cole’s account.

Shermer: I think the whole gas chamber story is probably, in terms of physical evidence, the weakest link in the whole story. To me, it doesn’t matter whether the gas chamber story is completely true or not. It could be, maybe it could be modified for all I know. But to me it doesn’t change the overall Holocaust at all because millions still died. Whether it was six million or five or four or three or two or one, it’s still, I would still consider it a Holocaust.

Anon Revisionist: Part of David Cole’s speech was concerning some interviews you’ve done with Hilberg and other people. [Hilberg and Berenbaum]

Shermer: They were both remarkably ignorant of the details of Cole’s questions. But again, what Berenbaum said was, “But look, I’ve just never gone there in search of problems. I didn’t look at that door handle, you know, wondering, gosh, how could they lock people in here with the door handle like this?” He says “Next time I go, I’ll look.” Therein lies what’s going on. There’s not a “cover up” by the Holocaust …

Anon Revisionist: People just haven’t felt the need or just haven’t been able to get in there and look.

Shermer: This is called the problem of paradigm shifts, you see. Until someone says, hey, that’s anomalous data that’s not explained by the current paradigm and they push it, then nothing’s going to happen. So it could be maybe the revisionists are right, however, just nobody’s asked the question.

In private, we see that Shermer confirms exactly what Pressac said and exactly what revisionists have always said, which is that the traditional scholarship has mostly taken everything for granted and ignored physical evidence completely.

Shermer published a book in 2000 that is still one of the most common anti-revisionist books available. More recently however the anti-revisionist scene has shifted to the internet. The most notable of these sites has been the Holocaust Controversies blog. This blogspot site is hardly a “Holocaust Industryâ€� operation. Rather, it appears to be a volunteer effort, an attempt to fill the gaps left by the mainstream’s refusal to debate. The Holocaust Controversies approach, instead of ignoring revisionism, goes to the opposite extreme and offers a glut of material, often arcane and generally poorly organized, all presented with a thick layer of bluster, all in order to create the impression that revisionism has been satisfactorily dealt with. Their sole attempt to produce something like a book is a 500+ page pdf “white paper.â€� This text does not present the case for the Holocaust for the general reader but is rather a reply to multiple more advanced revisionist texts. Revisionists then responded with their own massive 1,400 page rebuttal. This exchange of well over 2,000 pages will be beyond the patience of most to bother with. If the Holocaust is really the “best documented genocide in historyâ€� as Deborah Lipstadt says and there is absolute proof for it, as we are assured, should it not be possible to present the proof a bit more concisely? The failure to do this is seemingly by design as a concise presentation of the best evidence could be easily be read and evaluated. The tactic being employed seems to be to draw the reader into a morass of detail, to present a series of haystacks with the implication that the desired needles are lurking somewhere within. Such exhaustive efforts unwittingly disprove the mainstream’s assertion that there is nothing to debate.

Conclusion

The mainstream position that the historicity of the Holocaust is an absolute truth that cannot be debated is intellectually disgusting and violates every ideal of free inquiry and scientific method. Their own literature refutes their claim of absolute certainty, particularly the works of Reitlinger and Pressac. One could expound at length on free speech and justify allowing Holocaust revisionism on purely those grounds. But the best reason to allow Holocaust revisionism is even simpler: It is correct.

Those who would like to participate on the cutting edge of the Holocaust debate are invited to join us at the new CODOH forum.