Abstract
For two millennia scurrilous myths about Jews abounded in Christian lands. We have seen how the medieval Christian myth of the Jew as Satan’s agent conspiring to destroy Christendom helped spawn the modern nationalist myth of a Jewish cabal plotting to rule the planet. This myth and others about Jews, including their racial inferiority, were widely believed by many people and unashamedly propagated by members of the cultural elite— all this in a scientific age that had experienced the critical spirit of the Enlightenment. The Nazis employed these myths to justify their war against the Jews: They were cleansing Europe of parasitical subhumans who threatened the fatherland. The zeal and brutality displayed by both the SS and ordinary Germans involved in the extermination process attest to the immense impact these myths had on people’s thinking.
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Notes
Quoted in Marc Caplan, Liberty Lobby: Hate Central (New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1995), 10.
Quoted in Deborah E. Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (New York: Free Press, 1993), 64.
Quoted in Kenneth B. Stern, Holocaust Denial (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1993), 33.
Quoted in Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), xiii. The quotation is from the foreword by Jeffrey Méhlman who translated the essays.
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Quoted in Marc Caplan, Hitler’s Apologists (New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1993), 27.
Quoted in Gill Seidel, The Holocaust Denial: Antisemitism, Racism and the New Right (Leeds, UK: Beyond the Pale Collective, 1986), 117–18.
Quoted in Richard Evans, Lying about Hitler: History, Holocaust and the David Irving Trial (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 45.
Quoted in Marc Caplan, Holocaust Denial: A Pocket Guide (New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1997), 21. See also Caplan, Hitler’s Apologists, 22.
Quoted in Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler (New York: Random House, 1998), 222.
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Arno Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The “Final Solution” in History (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 362; Mayer’s distinction between “normal” or “natural” deaths and murder by shooting, gassing, starvation, and so on, 365, is exploited by deniers in the same way; Mayer’s shortcomings as a historian of the Holocaust have been pointed out by specialists like Richard Breitman and Saul Friedländer.
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Quoted in Leni Yahil, The Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 269.
Helmut Krausnick et al., Anatomy of the SS State (London: Collins, 1968), 64.
Excerpted in Raul Hilberg, ed., Documents of Destruction (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1971), 56–57.
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Quoted in Franciszek Piper, “Gas Chambers and Crematoria,” Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, ed. Yìsrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 163.
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Quoted in Joseph Borkin, The Crime and Punishment of I. G. Farben (New York: Free Press, 1978), 143.
Jean-Claude Pressac, “The Deficiencies and Inconsistencies of ‘The Leuchter Report,’” Truth Prevails, ed. Shelley Shapiro (New York: Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, 1990), 36–37; italics in the original.
Quoted in Martin E. Lee, The Beast Reawakens (New York: Little, Brown, 1997), 225.
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© 2002 Marvin Perry and Frederick M. Schweitzer
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Perry, M., Schweitzer, F.M. (2002). Denying the Holocaust. In: Antisemitism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-38512-6_6
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