Holocaust Revisionism And its Political Consequences Jürgen Graf, January 2001, in Tehran exile

3. The revisionist thesis

Nobody denies the persecution of the Jews during World War Two. This persecution was very real and very brutal. However, a small but increasingly influential group of scholars, who call themselves "revisionists" - their opponents prefer to call them "holocaust deniers" - claim that the Germans never planned to exterminate the Jewish people, that the killing factories, homicidal gas chambers and gas vans did not exist and that the figure of five to six million Jewish victims is an irresponsible exaggeration. Revisionists do not deny that many Jews were shot by the Germans in the occupied Soviet territories, but consider the figures pandered by the orthodox historians (one to two million shot Jews) to be heavily inflated.

For the revisionists, the Jewish tragedy during World War Two is not fundamentally different from the tragedies many other nations have suffered in wartimes. The persecution of ethnic and religious minorities, concentration camps and forced labour, the shooting of civilians - all these things have occurred many times throughout history. Thus, for the revisionists, what happened to the Jews was by no means a historically unique event as the official historians claim.

In order to ascertain who is right, the orthodox historians or the revisionists, one must resolve the crucial question of the gas chambers. (When referring to "gas chambers", I always mean homicidal ones, not the delousing chambers which were found in all concentrations camps and were often called "gas chambers" in German wartime documents.) If the homicidal gas chambers did not exist, there was no holocaust, because there was no murder weapon, and the six million figure has to be drastically reduced, as the several million gassed Jew were non-existing people.

Of course, the revisionists cannot prove that no Jews were gassed. It is usually very difficult to prove that a certain event did not take place. For example, none of us could prove that he has never committed a murder. But if somebody charges us with murder, he must produce hard evidence to substantiate his accusation, otherwise he will be despised as a foul-mouthed slanderer. - While the revisionists cannot prove that no Jews were gassed during the Second World War, they are able to prove that the alleged mass slaughter in gas chambers as described by eye-witnesses cannot possible have taken place because it was technically impossible. They can also demonstrate that it would have been quite impossible to dispose of millions of human bodies in the so-called extermination camps.

Even if the defenders of the holocaust story were able to produce a document proving that some Jews were gassed in World War Two, this would not invalidate the revisionist thesis, as one or two isolated cases would probably have been the work of a few criminal individuals. However, it should be stressed that not even one case of homicidal gassing by the Germans during World War Two has ever been proved by a document and that not a single body of a gassed prisoner was found by the allied troops who liberated the German concentrations camps in 1944 and 1945. This is candidly admitted by the orthodox holocaust historians.