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right Richard Harwood's Did Six Million Really Die?Holocaust denial is the claim that the mainstream historical version of the Holocaust is either highly exaggerated or completely falsified.
1 Holocaust denial and Holocaust revisionism
Holocaust deniers prefer to be called Holocaust revisionists. Many people contend that the latter term is misleading. Historical revisionism is the reexamination of accepted history, with an eye towards updating it with newly discovered, more accurate, and/or less biased information. Broadly, it is the approach that history as it has been traditionally told may not be entirely accurate and should be revised accordingly. Historical revisionism in this sense is a well-accepted and mainstream part of history studies. It may be applied to the Holocaust as well, as new facts emerge and change our understanding of its events.
Holocaust deniers maintain that they apply proper revisionist principles to Holocaust history, and therefore the term Holocaust revisionism is appropriate for their point of view. However, their critics disagree and prefer the term Holocaust denial. Gordon McFee writes in his essay "Why Revisionism isn't" that:
- "Revisionists" depart from the conclusion that the Holocaust did not occur and work backwards through the facts to adapt them to that preordained conclusion. Put another way, they reverse the proper methodology [...], thus turning the proper historical method of investigation and analysis on its head." [1]
In general, the term Holocaust denial fits the description at the beginning of this article, while Holocaust revisionism ranges from holocaust denial through the belief that only minor corrections are required to Holocaust history. However, because the latter term has become associated with Holocaust deniers, mainstream historians today generally avoid using it to describe themselves. Thus Holocaust revisionism has come to be understood as revisionist history, rather than historical revisionism.
2 Beliefs of Holocaust deniers and revisionists
Holocaust deniers and revisionists make all or most of the following claims:
- There was no specific order by Adolf Hitler or other top Nazi officials to exterminate the Jews.
- Nazis did not use gas chambers to mass murder Jews.
- The figure of six million Jewish deaths is an irresponsible exaggeration, and that many Jews that actually emigrated to Russia, Britain, Israel and the United States are included in the number.
- Film footage shown after World War II was all specially manufactured as propaganda against the Nazis by the Allied forces. For example, one film, shown to Germans after the war, of supposed Holocaust victims were in fact German civillians being treated after allied bombing.
- Claims of what the Nazis supposedly did to the Jews were all intended to facilitate the Allies in their intention to enable the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
- Although crimes were committed, they were not centrally orchestrated and thus the Nazi leadership bore no responsibility for the implementation of such a policy.
- Historical proof for the Holocaust is falsified or deliberately misinterpreted.
- There is an AmericanThe United States of America also referred to as the United States U. America ¹ or the States is a federal republic in central North America, stretching from the Atlantic in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west. It shares land borders with Canada in, BritishThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a state in Western Europe, usually known simply as the United Kingdom the UK Britain or less accurately as Great Britain . The UK was formed by a series of Acts of Union which united the formerly or Jewish conspiracyFor the movie, see Conspiracy Theory (movie # A conspiracy theory is a theory that defies common historical or current understanding of events, under the claim that those events are the result of manipulations by one or more secretive powers or conspiraci to make Jews look like victims and to demonize Germans. Also, it was in the Soviet's interest to propagate wild stories about Germany in order to frighten related nations into accepting communist rule (Poland, Czechoslovakia, etc.).
- The overwhelming number of biased academics and historians are too afraid to actually admit that the Holocaust was a fictionThree Graces, here in a painting by Sandro Botticelli, were the goddesses of charm, beauty, nature, human creativity and fertility in Greek mythology. Fiction is the term used to describe works of the imagination. This is in contrast to non-fiction, which; they know they will lose their jobs if they speak up.
Most Holocaust deniers also stress that, contrary to popular belief:
- they do not deny that Jews were persecutedPersecution is persistent mistreatment of an individual or group by another group. The most common forms are religious persecution and ethnic persecution. The terms have some overlap, as religion is an aspect of culture that can be a barrier. The most com under the Third Reich;
- they do not deny that Jews were deprived of civil rights;
- they do not deny that Jews were deported;
- they do not deny the existence of Jewish ghettos;
- they do not deny the existence of concentration camps;
- they do not deny the existence of crematoriums in concentration camps;
- they do not deny that Jews died for a great number of reasons, although they claim there were no mass murders;
- they do not deny that other minorities were also persecuted such as gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, and political dissenters;
- and finally, they do not deny that all of the above mentioned things were unjust.
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