Deborah E. Lipstadt

The denial of the Holocaust has no more credibility than the assertion that the earth is flat. Yet there are those who insist that the death of six million Jews and other persecuted people in Nazi concentration camps is nothing but a hoax perpetuated by a powerful Zionist conspiracy. In this first full-scale history of Holocaust denial, Deborah Lipstadt shows how – despite tens of thousands of living witnesses and vast amounts of documentary evidence – this irrational idea has not only continued to gain adherents but has become an internationally organized movement. Lipstadt argues that this chilling attack on the factual record not only threatens Jews but could dramatically alter the way that truth and meaning are transmitted from one generation to another.

The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory

Denying the Holocaust

Jeni Enjaian

I really wanted to like this book and, at first, I did. I even highlighted a few lines for the first time in a Kindle book. I found tremendous resonance, again at first, with Lipstadt's description of the denial techniques used to deny the Holocaust and the things said about the Armenian Genocide. Many of the techniques mimic each other to a great degree.

As the book continued, however, I noticed Lipstadt's understandable bias against the deniers. That being said, as a historian, such blatant bias serves as an irritant and a significant detractor against her historicity. Lipstadt filled each subsequent chapter with increasingly biased language interspersed amongst authentic historiography of the events in which deniers perpetrated egregious historical acts. I held out hope that Lipstadt would be able to reign in her biased language in favor of authentic historiography of this tragic event.

In the final chapter, however, Lipstadt proceeded to place the Holocaust on a pedestal above all other genocidal tragedies, claiming that only in the Holocaust did one group seek to totally annihilate another. Here she twice referenced the Armenian Genocide. At first, I became excited, as I usually do when historians mention the Genocide, an infrequently discussed historic tragedy. Then I exclaimed in disgust at the book. In her second reference to the Genocide, Lipstadt dismissed the Armenian Genocide from comparison to the Holocaust because the Genocide was an eviction and displacement movement, exactly one of the tactics used by deniers that Lipstadt criticized heavily in many of the earlier chapters.

I do not deny the abominable tragedy of the Holocaust, far from it. However, I do wholeheartedly disagree with Lipstadt's elevation of the Holocaust above all other malicious acts of humankind. These events cannot and should not be compared. They should, however, face intense scholarly, historiographic scrutiny and be taught to the entire world.

Denying the Holocaust The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory

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