Holocaust Deniers? There Can Be No Opposing Views! 

Texas Educators: Do Not Become Holocaust Deniers. Michael Streich

 

Ever since the enormity of the Holocaust became a fact after the closing days of World War II, countless books, memoirs, and pictures have decisively documented the most horrendous act of genocide in the twentieth-century. Holocaust survivors have told their stories, the disbelieving can wander the concentration camps throughout Europe – preserved to remind future generations, and hundreds of films have been produced. Yet supposedly responsible individual still, on occasion, deny the Holocaust.

 

The Problem with Holocaust Deniers

 

Anti-Semitism can be traced back in the Western tradition for centuries. The historical record is very clear on the treatment of Jews in Christian Europe. Holocaust deniers not only subvert the historical record, but they encourage continued Anti-Semitism. Far from rational, they ignore the empirical evidence, both written and physical. In the recent case of the rehabilitation of conservative Bishop Richard Williamson by Pope Benedict, the prelate publicly denied the existence of gas chambers used to exterminate millions of Jews.

 

It has been well documented that even during World War II, following the Nazi decision to implement the “Final Solution” at the 1942 Wannsee Conference, that western democracies knew what the Nazis were doing. American newspapers had carried stories of Jewish persecution since the early 1930s following Hitler’s rise to power. Even as the war was ending, heroic men like Raoul Wallenberg publicized the extent of the Holocaust to the rest of the world.

 

Given the mass of evidence that supports the realities of events, denying the Holocaust must stem from other motivations. For Allied leaders during the war, defeating the Nazis militarily was the top priority even when asked to bomb the concentration camp buildings used as gas chambers. Additionally, Anti-Semitism was ripe – and had been even before the outbreak of war, in Europe and the United States.

 

Toward a Greater Emphasis on Education

 

As Deborah Lipstadt writes, “the denial of the Holocaust has no more credibility than the assertion that the earthy is flat.” The Holocaust must remain an integral part of educational efforts from the elementary grades through the college years. The vast evidence, although implicating many non-Germans, rests on the singular truth that Nazi Germany with the willing assistance of its citizens perpetrated the crime known as The Holocaust. Events such as the recent fiasco over Herman Rosenblat’s Angel at the Fence in no way affects existing facts that prove the Holocaust.

 

The blue print for Holocaust can be seen in Hitler’s Mein Kampf and in the early propaganda of the rising Nazi Party in Germany. After 1933, a systematic effort, through laws and social policies, further presaged the event. Ultimately, the Final Solution put into practice what the Nazis had been saying for many years. Robert Abzug quotes Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, when shown evidence of the Warsaw Ghetto and the exterminations at Belzec, as saying, “I know that what you have to say is true, but I don’t believe it.”

 

The truth of the Holocaust can be demonstrated by all of the following:

 

Concentration camps like Dachau and Auschwitz still standing

First hand accounts from eye witnesses and survivors

Books, diaries, and memoirs

Pictures and video footage (such as at Babii Yar)

Holocaust museums and memorial exhibitions

The admission of the German people

 

Sources:

 

Robert H. Abzug, America Views the Holocaust: A Brief Documentary History (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999).

Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (The Free Press, 1993)

 

The author’s personal visits to several camps, talks with survivors, and talks with Germans living at the time.