‘We must establish incredible events by credible evidence’: Holocaust Denial and Historical Truth.
Location
Janet Ayers Academic Center, JAAC 4094
Presentation Type
Presentation
Start Date
17-9-2018 2:00 PM
Description
The title of my presentation is borrowed from one of America’s forgotten giants, Robert H. Jackson, attorney general under Franklin Roosevelt and appointed by him to the Supreme Court. Justice Jackson was the chief U.S. prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal that tried twenty-four Nazis for crimes against humanity, including the extermination of millions of Jews. Even then there were voices, albeit muted, who claimed that the Jewish Holocaust was a grotesque fiction contrived by the victorious Allies. Today Holocaust deniers negate the facts of the Nazi genocide of European Jewry. These “negationists” or “revisionists” assert that there was no policy or intention to eliminate the Jews; that far fewer than six million perished; that deaths in the camps were the result of disease or starvation; and that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz. Recently deniers have minimized or relativized the events of the Holocaust in an insidious campaign to gain public acceptance for their side of the “Holocaust debate.” I will examine the varieties of evidence historians have used to demonstrate the Holocaust occurred and the arguments they have deployed to answer the claims of deniers.
Recommended Citation
Bisson, Douglas, "‘We must establish incredible events by credible evidence’: Holocaust Denial and Historical Truth." (2018). Humanities Symposium. 15.
https://repository.belmont.edu/humanities_symposium/2018/2018/15
‘We must establish incredible events by credible evidence’: Holocaust Denial and Historical Truth.
Janet Ayers Academic Center, JAAC 4094
The title of my presentation is borrowed from one of America’s forgotten giants, Robert H. Jackson, attorney general under Franklin Roosevelt and appointed by him to the Supreme Court. Justice Jackson was the chief U.S. prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal that tried twenty-four Nazis for crimes against humanity, including the extermination of millions of Jews. Even then there were voices, albeit muted, who claimed that the Jewish Holocaust was a grotesque fiction contrived by the victorious Allies. Today Holocaust deniers negate the facts of the Nazi genocide of European Jewry. These “negationists” or “revisionists” assert that there was no policy or intention to eliminate the Jews; that far fewer than six million perished; that deaths in the camps were the result of disease or starvation; and that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz. Recently deniers have minimized or relativized the events of the Holocaust in an insidious campaign to gain public acceptance for their side of the “Holocaust debate.” I will examine the varieties of evidence historians have used to demonstrate the Holocaust occurred and the arguments they have deployed to answer the claims of deniers.
Comments
Convocation Credit: Society and the Arts and Sciences