8
Bradley Smith, a bookseller from California, mentioned earlier, gained notoriety for
placing ads in college newspapers calling for "open debate" on the Holocaust and he howled
about "censorship" when the ads were rejected. He tagged on to the political correctness debate
and said that the Holocaust story had been "put off limits by America's thought police." He
claimed this went against everything for which the university stood--free inquiry, open debate,
confronting intellectual taboos. There are many other names that should be mentioned--the
Canadian deniers James Keegstra, Malcolm Ross, and especially Ernst Zündel; the French
figures, Paul Rassiner and Robert Faurisson; Louisiana politician David Duke; the self-
proclaimed atheist Jew David Cole who worked with the IHR (and may have recently recanted
his denier views), the British far rightist Richard Verrall (who wrote under the pseudonym of
Richard Harwood), and a variety of Germans, including Ditleib Felderer and Udo Walendy,. But
enough with the names--this list could go on indefinitely.
The Deniers' Arguments
Space precludes the possibility of going through the arguments of the deniers and
systematically refuting them, and besides numerous writers on Holocaust denial have already
done this. It is, however, useful to point out the nature of denial argumentation. These people
utilize a number of approaches to negate the clear facts of this incredible tragedy. One is to
explain the deaths of Jews in the camps as the result of wartime exigencies--Allied bombings,
spread of disease, overcrowding, and overworked prison labor. As for the gas chambers and
crematoria, they were for delousing the clothing of inmates and disposing of those who had died
naturally, and the latter were many because of the difficult wartime conditions and unanticipated
overcrowding of the camps. True, many Jews did perish in the camps but their mortality rate
was in proportion to that of the other peoples housed there. After the war most Jews went to
Israel or the United States, and that explains why there were so few of them left in Europe. The
deniers peck away at inconsistencies in eyewitness accounts to discredit them, and exploit errors
made by scholars and historians to suggest that all their conclusions are wrong. They twist the
debates among scholars regarding specific interpretive questions of the Holocaust (mentioned
above) to call into question the entire veracity of the Holocaust. In every case, they use facts
selectively in their arguments and ignore any information that might be contradictory.
Another approach is that of moral equivalency. Some deniers maintain that what Nazis
did to Jews was no different than what other nations did to their enemies. The United States