2
The second illustration comes from a feature article by writer John Sack entitled "Daniel
in the Deniers Den," in Esquire magazine, February 2001. He is describing his experiences at an
"international conference" of the Institute for Historical Review at a hotel in Orange County,
California. There he dined with a man from Alabama, Dr. Robert Countess, a Presbyterian
minister and scholar of classical Greek and Hebrew who was a self-proclaimed evangelical. He
had taught briefly at Covenant College in Tennessee and is a member in good standing of the
Evangelical Theological Society. The man was wearing a shirt that read: NO HOLES? NO
HOLOCAUST! This referred to a claim by the foremost "historian" of the Holocaust denial
movement, David Irving, that the roofs of the infamous gas chambers at Auschwitz
concentration camp did not have any holes through which the cyanide pellets could have been
dropped to kill the people in them, and therefore the Holocaust was a myth. A few years earlier,
Countess had declared in a letter to the editor in the Seventh-day Adventist church religious
freedom magazine Liberty that "current scholarly research" on the Nazi era revealed "the
extreme exaggerations" of Jewish deaths. The number of Jews "not accounted for during the war
period was at most between 300,000 and 1.5 million."
The third illustration is an article by Herman Otten in his magazine Christian News, dated
May 7, 1990. The outspoken Lutheran fundamentalist proclaimed: "The time has come for
Christians to stop believing and promoting one of the biggest lies and slanders of the Twentieth
Century." That was the idea that the Germans exterminated six million Jews during World War
II and planned to kill all Jews in Europe. He said he was challenging "one of the most sacred
doctrines in the world," the "Holocaust religion." Promoting this "hoax" as truth was lying and
was a violation of the Commandment not to bear false witness.
These illustrations reveal in stark tones the problem we are up against. The American
military leader wanted to insure that people would never come to consider the horrors of the
German concentration camps as propaganda myths, while the two evangelical writers, an
educator and a journalist, were already downplaying and belittling what the Nazis had done.
Historical Controversies
To be sure, there are indeed controversies surrounding the Holocaust, that occurrence in
history, in which approximately six million Jews were killed, in an intentional, systematic, and
bureaucratically administered fashion by the Nazis and their collaborators, using a number of