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dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities and placed Japanese-Americans in concentration
camps. The British systematically destroyed German cities through their area bombing
campaigns. Deniers also refuse to accept eyewitness accounts and label these as falsehoods. If
the account came from a Nazi figure, they say the testimony was extracted by torture or the
person made it up in an attempt to escape punishment. Some even suggest that Jews and others
were placed in concentration camps to protect them from public anger or to enable their
rehabilitation.
Serious historians know that the thousands of pieces of evidence gathered from the
thousands of events that occurred in thousands of places throughout continental Europe during
the period 1933 to 1945 provide us with a complete and irrefutable picture of what happened.
(Shermer and Grobman, Denying History, p. 256) We do not need one single source, one
"smoking gun," [i.e., a direct, written order from Hitler] to prove that the Holocaust happened.
The composite of the evidence is simply overwhelming. As a result, holocaust denial is a cruel
mockery of history.
It would be enlightening to reflect on what would result if one used the same
methodology to assess the Bible. Such people would quickly relegate Scripture to the status of
another ancient document reflecting the power and class interests of its writers and one that was
full of errors and inconsistencies. This surely could not be the unique, inerrant, and authoritative
World of God. Or how would they treat the resurrection of Christ? Obviously the evidence is
contradictory, the eyewitnesses are biased, and such a miracle could not possibly have happened
in the real world.
Why Holocaust "revisionism" is not an acceptable option for Christian scholars
I would argue that Holocaust "revisionism" or "denial" is completely off-limits for us as
Christian scholars, and in fact it is quite dangerous in even the most general sense.
1) It leads people to be confused as to what had really happened, and it spreads doubt in
the public mind. A few years ago (1992) the American Jewish Committee commissioned a
survey by the Roper Organization. Of those polled 22 percent agreed with the statement "it
seems possible that the Nazi extermination of the Jews never happened" and 12 percent said they
"didn't know." The worst figures were found I the 18 to 29 age group (24% agreed and 17%
didn't know)) and those who were not high school graduates (20% agreed and 27% didn't