Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?

MICHAEL SHERMER AND ALEX GROBMAN, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Pp. 312. $27.50.

Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman perform three valuable services for their readers in this fine work. They describe in detail the prominent individuals in the Holocaust denial movement and their arguments. They also expose the flaws in these arguments by summarizing particular facets of the Final Solution. And, last but not least, the authors lead their readers through a primer on History, which they distinguish from pseudohistory "whose purpose is the denial of the past for present political or ideological reasons" (238).

Denying History is organized into four parts (nine chapters with an introduction and an epilogue). In Part One "Free Speech and History," the authors emphasize how historians and others know the Holocaust is an irrefutable historic event through the convergence of evidence. Shermer and Grobman support one of the core principles of Western culture that "truth will always win out when the evidence is made available for all to see" (17). They also note that the deniers...