Holocaust Deniers and Revisionists

“There Were No Gas Chambers”

This allegation can often be traced to the writings of Arthur Butz, a Northwestern University engineering professor. His work, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, is based largely on the fact that Butz could not find the name of one prisoner on the list of Auschwitz prisoners—that of Vrba Rosenberg, who wrote an eyewitness account called I Cannot Forgive that was published in 1946. As it turns out, Vrba was an adopted name and the author was listed in the Auschwitz rolls under his original name, Walter Rosenberg.

“The Concentration Camps Were Not so Bad”

Ernst Zundel, a denier in Toronto, Canada, has testified at trials that many camps had all “the luxuries of a country club,” with dance halls, orchestras, recreational facilities, sauna baths, and other amenities. True, there were showers for inmates, and there was an orchestra that played in the morning when prisoners went to work and again in the afternoon when they returned. But these were simply ruses to help camouflage the fact that the “work” in these camps was meant to lead eventually to the deaths of the prisoners.

“Hitler Was a ‘Man of Peace’”

According to proponents of this view, the Allied air raids on Dresden and the German postwar population transfer from territory ceded to Poland to the West were more brutal than the punishment that was “allegedly” imposed on the Jews in the gas chambers. Harry Elmer Barnes, a prominent historian during the 1930s and 1940s, and people such as Austin App, Robert Faurisson, and David Irving share this opinion. Irving, in fact, devoted an entire book to the bombing [Page 641]of Dresden. These deniers typically overlook the massive German bombing of Rotterdam, Warsaw, Coventry, and London.

...