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regarded as Holocausts? If so, does that relativize and trivialize the Jewish Holocaust? Is the
term even further trivialized by the anti-abortion movement in the U.S. (the holocaust visited on
the unborn) and by African-Americans who label slavery as "our holocaust"? If it is relativized
in any way, does it lose its braking force on the age-old tradition of anti-Semitism that has so
plagued the world?
One ongoing controversy is that which rages between the functionalists and
intentionalists. Did the Holocaust result from Hitler's intention to kill all Jews and was
supported from the outset of his rule by the deep-seated anti-Semitism among the German
people? Or did it evolve in a step-by-step manner over time, logically from the anti-Semitism of
National Socialism and through the enthusiasm of Hitler's accomplices, especially Goering,
Goebbels, Heydrich, Himmler, Bormann, et al., who carried out what they felt were the
Fuehrer's wishes, and thus the Nazi regime implemented the policies of destruction in an
unplanned and even haphazard fashion? This long-standing debate was given a new impetus by
the unabashed intentionalist Daniel J. Goldhagen in Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary
Germans and the Holocaust (1996) and challenged in the symposium edited by Franklin H.
Littell, Hyping the Holocaust: Scholars Answer Goldhagen (1997), and Norman G. Finkelstein
and Ruth Bettina Birn, A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth (1998).
However, in all of these controversies, absolutely none of the protagonists deny that the
Holocaust actually occurred. Historians poring through the mountains of documents from World
War II are refining some details about the Holocaust, such as reducing the total number of
victims of the gassings, but at the same time they are revising upward the number of deaths
resulting from the SS killing squads that operated on the Eastern Front. But no responsible
historian of World War II denies that the Holocaust is a myth or that it never happened.
What Is Holocaust "Revision" or Rather "Denial"?
The so-called "Holocaust revisionists" are really "Holocaust deniers," since they reject its
three key components that were mentioned above: 1) the killing of the six million; 2) the use of
gas chambers; and 3) Nazi intentionality. To illustrate this point, Bradley Smith, self-appointed
head of the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust, made the statement in 1992:
"Revisionists deny that the German State had a policy to exterminate the Jewish people (or