Early Holocaust Historiography
Leon Poliakov, Bréviaire de la haine: Le IIIe Reich et les Juifs (1951)
Published in 1951 by Calmann-Lévy (a popular French publisher)
Had difficulty getting it published. French-Jewish Philosopher Raymond Aron convinced Calmann-Lévy to publish it.
Wikipedia says it was “little noted at the time.”
English translation appeared only in 1956. English Title: “Harvest of Hate, the Third Reich and the Jews”
Co-founder of Le Centre de documentation juive contemporaine (CDJC) in 1943
He was a Jewish activist, he held no academic position, and he wrote almost exclusively on Jews and anti-Semitism
Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution (1953)
Published in 1953 by Vallentine-Mitchell, a publisher specializing in Jewish-related topics
The first full history on the topic in English.
Studied art at the Slade and the Westminster School of Art in London
Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of European Jews (1961)
Published in 1961 by Quadrangle Books, a small publisher
“...no major publishing house expressed interest in his groundbreaking study, and he only managed to find any publisher due to a private benefactor who agreed to defray indirectly some of the costs.”
Worked with War Documentation Project, worked extensively with Nuremberg documents
PhD in public law and government from Columbia.
Professor at the University of Vermont in the Political Science department
-His advisor Franz Neumann discouraged him from the topic, “this will be your funeral.”
Nora Levin, The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry, 1933-1945 (1968)
Published in 1968 by T.Y. Crowell Company, a popular American press
M.L.S degree (Library Science) from Drexel
Professor of History at Gratz College in Philadelphia, a small Jewish school
-Reitlinger gave it a very negative review in the NYT. He accuses her of plagiarizing other books without adequate citations. Even more favorable reviews concede that it adds little in terms of scholarship and is merely a recapitulation of previously published work. Levin is pretty clearly a lightweight.
Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945 (1975)
-Published in 1975 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, a popular American press
-Started a Columbia Master’s program in literature but did not finish. Later enrolled in a Columbia Master’s program in Jewish history but did not finish.
-Researcher for the American Jewish Committee, 1946-1969
-Associate Professor at Yeshiva University, a Jewish school, eventually became a full professor and held a chair in interdisciplinary Holocaust studies.
-Received grants from Gustave Wurzweiler Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation
-Mixed reception of the book. It “received many enthusiastic reviews from newspaper critics but in numerous instances professional historians were less positive in their assessment of her work.”
-Hilberg was dismissive of her, saying she was relying "largely on secondary sources and conveying nothing whatever that could be called new,"
-Albert Lindemann criticized her quite strongly for her lack of objectivity in his book Esau's Tears.
https://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=13566&p=98993#p98993
-Worked as a Jewish activist at the AJC for over 20 years. She did not complete a postgraduate degree, but did have an academic position, although it was at a Jewish school in "Holocaust Studies."
Summary
Maybe it's just me, but in terms of credentials this group is decidedly underwhelming. ALL five are Jewish, and at least two could be described as Jewish activists. There are three who held academic positions, two at Jewish schools, none at what I would call elite schools. And there's only one doctorate among them. Hilberg is easily the best credentialed of the group, but even here we can't help but notice that his field was political science rather than history. None of these books were published by an academic publisher. I am simply judging them here by their own criteria. I'm in no way a credentialist snob and I think people from many backgrounds could potentially write very good history but this is supposed to be one of the big points in favor of the establishment Holocaust narrative. Yet it seems clear it started as a niche Jewish topic and the elite academic dominance was not achieved until some decades after the war.
Mainstream Historiography
We turn now to what was being published by mainstream historians and academics. Dawidowicz wrote a book in 1981 about this very topic called The Holocaust and The Historians. Notably this book was published by Harvard University Press, a significant and telling promotion in terms of academic prestige. In it Dawidowicz complains about how the Holocaust had been essentially neglected in standard historical works.
Consider this entry (not in the Dawidowicz book) in an early postwar reference work, written by a Jewish author no less, that sounds downright revisionist.
Encyclopaedia Britannica (1947; reprinted in 1952 and 1956 editions), “Jews” by Jacob Rader Marcus, American-Jewish Historian [Quoted by Kues in his history of revisionism series]
In order to effect a solution of the Jewish problem in line with their theories, the Nazis carried out a series of expulsions and deportations of Jews, mostly of original east European stock, from nearly all European states. Men frequently separated from their wives, and others from children, were sent by the thousands to Poland and western Russia. There they were put into concentration camps, or huge reservations, or sent into the swamps, or out on the roads, into labour gangs. Large numbers perished under the inhuman conditions under which they labored. While every other large Jewish center was being embroiled in war, American Jewry was gradually assuming a position of leadership in world Jewry.
And here's one from a later work (from Dawidowicz). This 1972 book is over 1200 pages. It does talk about what we call "the Holocaust" although it dedicates a mere three sentences to the topic. Such cursory treatment would be unthinkable in something published today.
-Columbia History of the World (1972), Co-Editor Peter Gay (Jewish).
“The impact of the Nazis’ dreadful racial fantasies further exacerbated the situation. Some six million Jews and countless other innocents had been exterminated. The horrors of the concentration camps and the gas chambers left memories that it would take a long time to erase.”
Dawidowicz also goes through some of the work of the noted British historians A.J.P Taylor, Hugh Trevor-Roper, and Alan Bullock, and she notes that talk about persecution of Jews only very minimally in their works on WWII and the Third Reich. In a similar vein, Faurisson liked to point out that the voluminous memoirs of Churchill, Eisenhower, and de Gaulle have virtually no mention of what we call the Holocaust.
Here is how Arthur Butz interpreted the situation (as of the mid 70s):
In books and articles on subjects that are other than, but touch on, the “holocaust,” professional historians invariably give some sort of endorsement to the lie, but the extent, to which contrary hints are found in their writings, is considerable. No professional historian had published a book arguing and presenting evidence either for or against the reality of the exterminations. The motivations are obvious. No established historian had been willing to damage his reputation by writing a scholarly-sounding work supporting the extermination allegations, solemnly referencing documents and testimonies produced at illegal trials held under hysterical conditions and seriously setting forth, without apology, obvious idiotic nonsense such as the alleged dual role of the Zyklon. At least, no inducement to produce such a work seems to have come along. On the other hand, the pressure of intellectual conformity (to put it mildly) in academia has evidently terrorized historians into silence in the opposite regard. This being the case, it is both justified and expected that works such as the present one be produced by engineers and whatever.
https://www.unz.com/book/arthur_r_butz__the-hoax-of-the-twentieth-century/#p_75_1
By the 1980s the situation had begun to change. Soon "The Holocaust" was large and in charge and the pay became good enough that we began to see even Gentile scholars like Christopher Browning willing to debase themselves by devoting their careers to Holocaust research.
One interesting case from the 1990s however is that of Joel Hayward, a New Zealander who sometime around 1993 wrote a master's thesis on Holocaust revisionism for which he received an A+. The Jews found out about it around 1999 at which point they attempted unsuccessfully to have his degree revoked. How interesting though that this graduate student who was by most accounts philo-Semitic began looking into the topic and found the revisionist arguments persuasive, although he would disavow the thesis later on once he found himself under vigorous attack. And also how interesting that his own professors in the history department judged his work to be of excellent quality at the time it was submitted.
The Credentials of the Revisionists
Most of the challenges have accordingly come from outside the historical profession. Unz expresses it well.
In exploring the history of Holocaust Denial, I have noticed this same sort of recurrent pattern, most typically involving individuals rather than institutions. Someone highly-regarded and fully mainstream decides to investigate the controversial topic, and soon comes to conclusions that sharply deviate from the official truth of the last two generations. For various reasons, those views become public, and he is immediately demonized by the Jewish-dominated media as a horrible extremist, perhaps mentally-deranged, while being relentlessly hounded by a ravenous pack of fanatic Jewish-activists. This usually brings about the destruction of his career.
https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-holocaust-denial/#p_1_143:1-93
Paul Rassinier, Frenchman, Nazi political prisoner, concentration camp survivor
Wilhelm Staeglich, German Judge, stationed near Auschwitz during the war and visited the camp several times
Robert Faurisson, Frenchman, professor of literature at Lyon
Arthur Butz, American, bachelor's at MIT, PhD from Minnesota, professor of electrical engineering at Northwestern
Fritz Berg, German-American, engineering degree from Columbia, worked as mechanical engineer
Fred Leuchter, American, degree in history, worked as a consultant on execution equipment, recommended to Zundel by a prison warden.
Walter Lüftl, Austrian, civil engineer, President of the Federal Chamber of Engineers
Germar Rudolf, German, working toward PhD in chemisty, left Germany for legal problems related to revisionism
Just like Unz says, we see people from a variety of backgrounds looking into the matter and reaching conclusions completely at odds with the standard story.
