The Holocaust In Perspective

The Holocaust in Perspective

The goal of history as define during the nineteenth century by Leopold von Ranke is to describe history “how it really was” . This, by obvious understanding means that the job of the historian is to present history as accurate as possible, leaving behind, any doubts about the event of which he is writing about.

As in everything and more particularly in history there are two sides of the story; the Holocaust (according to some people) could not be the exception. These groups are trying to start a debate based on that the Holocaust did not took place, they are trying to pass their theories as the other side of the story when obviously most literate, intelligent people know that it did happen; and it is one of the most documented events throughout history.

Throughout history various anti-Semitism groups had been very verbal and open about their hate against the European Jews. They saw them as the killers of Christ and “deliberate disbelievers” , but up to this point many believed that the only salvation for those Jews was conversion. Any of those groups took that hate farther away. “Anti-Semitism before World War I was more a war of words and a way to define one’s own national identity (“we are the opposite of everything that the Jews are”) than a program for radical action.” After World War I the spread of anti-Semitism was intensifying all throughout Europe, especially when people started to link the spread of Communism to them; after some groups of Jewish intellectuals and politicians participated in the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.

Adolf Hitler had made attacks against the Jews since the beginning of his career in the Nazi Party of Germany. When the Nazi Party came to power, they stated form the beginning that they were acting against the Jews. They started to fire them from government jobs, they wrote discriminatory laws against them, and physical violence; “all designed to make them despair and make them leave the country” . One of the most famous laws designed against the Jews were the Nuremberg Laws, which made the Jews second-class citizens and prohibited the Jews of having any kind of relationship with the “Aryans”. At first these laws were not as hard as they seemed since the Germans did not wanted to push too hard on the Jews because they were a big economic influence and they were still recovering from the Great Depression. Jews at this point were slowly starting to be sent to the concentration camps but only if they had been active on a anti-Nazi political parties. Hitler came with the solution to start cleaning his country from undesirable people when the war has given him enough cover. At this moment he only wanted a pure race, so he did not only attack Jews, he also focused his hate on other ethnics groups like: Africans, homosexuals, Catholic and Protestants.

Some historians had raised questions about to what extent the Holocaust was the consequence of Hitler’s hate against the Jews, based on this, two major school of thoughts had come to debate the Final solution. The intentionalists “had stressed what they view as the FÐ"јhrer’s unswerving intention to slaughter the Jews.” The functionalists had challenged the other group; they had not found a “convincing evidence of a Hitlerian master plan to exterminate the Jews, they see instead a series of decentralized anti-Jewish measures, functionally related to one another, that culminated in genocide.”

While these groups only differ on their points of view on why did the Holocaust happened there are other groups that completely deny the whole event. They are creating a whole new theory known as the “revisionist theory”, they are looking for ways to prove that the holocaust did not happened. The revisionists are a group of anti-Semitism people that is turning their attention to those little things about the Holocaust that are not very clear, or do not have the proper documentation; as stated by Lipstadt on her book Denying the Holocaust:

“Half-truths and story segments, which conveniently avoid critical information, leave the listener with a distorted impression of what really happened. The abundance of documents and testimonies that confirm the Holocaust are dismissed as contrived, coerced, or forgeries and falsehoods.”

It is not a different perspective what they are trying to state is just a way to “elevate their anti-Semitic ideology.” Sadly enough they are achieving their purposes on making people believe that there might be a possibility that the Holocaust did no happened. Students at the college levels are starting to incorporate denials views when they ask questions such as: “How do we really that there were gas chambers?”, “Are we going to hear the German side?”, or “What proof do we have that the survivors are telling the truth?” Well either they are telling the truth, or all them (millions) got together one day and decided to make a story of how their family members were killed, or how they suffered all that time. Seriously, how could people think that the most documented event in history is just pure imagination of the survivors?

Things get worst when the deniers get access to highly respected circle and they start to spread their views, and people, as naÐ"Їve as the can be, believe them just because he is a “legislator”. Like the case of David Duke a “neo-Nazi, a former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and a Holocaust denier, that was elected to the Louisiana state legislature in the late 1980’s.” The deniers look forward to pull off their goals by winning recognition as a “legitimate scholarly cadre and by planting seeds of doubt in the younger generation.” This can only be achieved if people start to question the past and even worst, the future. But, what are the main sources that these Holocaust deniers represent the so called “revisionist theories”?

First the deniers start by identifying themselves as descendants from a group of important American historians that were very unhappy by the United States involvement in World War I. They argued that the reasons for the United States to go into war were just “silly propaganda” that they were lied to on who was responsible for war. Then they also argued that Germany did everything under their control to prevent themselves to go into war; they did no have the least