A New Blog About a Very Heavy Subject

In January 1942, there were an estimated 11 million Jews in Europe. By the end of the war in Europe, six million Jews were dead, victims of a Nazi program of systematic annihilation. The Nazi leaders called the program the "Final Solution." The survivors called it the Holocaust. There were an additional estimated four million Slavs, gypsies and others of what the Nazi considered subhumans, who were dead as well.

In the first few years after the entry of the United States into the Second World War, the first information about the Holocaust made its way out of Nazi Occupied Europe. The reaction in the Allied nations was one of disbelief. In his book War and Remembrance, Herman Wouk called it "the universal will not to believe." The stores coming out of eastern Europe were too fantastic to be believed by those who did not want to believe. In the last few months of the war, the Allies learned to their horror that the stories were true as the concentration camps were liberated.

Today most people accept that the Holocaust happened, but now it seems that there is a "universal will" not to be troubled by the details. I believe this desire to be spared the horrors of the "Final Solution" plays into the hands of those few who would deny that the Holocaust happened. Unburdened by the details, many might be swayed by the arguments that there isn't any real evidence of the Nazi mass murder of Jews and other undesirables.

Recent events have suggested to some that many people are forgetting the Holocaust. Perhaps there are others who question the relevance of the Holocaust. This forgetting is the reason for this blog.

In 2020, the British historian Richard J. Evans published a book about conspiracy theories surrounding Nazi Germany. "Conspiracy theories often tend to cluster around violent and unexpected political events," wrote Evans. "A sudden death of a head of state, an assassination of a government minister, a bomb attack on a building or a crowd -- these and similar, seemingly random occurrences demand explanation. For many, the idea that they could be the product of chance, or accident, or the deranged mind of a single disturbed individual, seems too simple to be plausible. Whatever the evidence seems to suggest, the authorship of such major outrages must surely have been collective, the planning long-term and meticulous."

Evans then referred to two more recent events which are surrounded by conspiracy theories. "The killing of US President John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963 and the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York in 2001 are perhaps the two major vortices into which conspiracy theorists have been sucked in our own time, spewing out ever more elaborate hypotheses and pseudo-explanations as they re-emerge. Argument continues to rage, as the proponents of rival theories construct evidential edifices of such staggering detail and complexity that they are frequently almost impossible for the lay-person to navigate."

It should not be surprising to learn that the history of the Third Reich is also surrounded by conspiracy theories and "alternative facts", with Adolf Hitler lying at the center. "The most potent moral figure in Western culture," noted Alex Ryrie, "is Adolf Hitler. It is as monstrous to praise him as it would once have been to disparage Jesus. He has become the fixed reference point by which we define evil. . . . Nazism, almost alone in our relativistic culture, is an absolute standard: a point where argument ends, because whether it is good or evil is not up for debate. . . . Nazism has crossed the barrier separating historical events from timeless truths."

Even so, as Evans wrote, "There are some who, in spite of everything that is known about the Nazi leader, retain a strong admiration for him, and such people are more than likely to support conspiracy theories, including Holocaust denial."

To be clear, Evans has written several in-depth, hard-hitting histories of the Third Reich and is clearly not sympathetic to the Nazis or to Nazi ideology. His definition of Holocaust denial may still be useful, however: "believing that the 'truth' about the Holocaust -- that it did not happen -- had been systematically suppressed by the world's academics and journalists since the 1940s, as the result of a global conspiracy of Jewish elites."

Again, to be clear, this belief is nonsense, but it does us no good to refuse to acknowledge that Holocaust deniers exist or to fail to understand what they believe. It is partly because Holocaust deniers exist they I feel compelled to study and write about the Holocaust. Recent events have only made this effort more compelling, thus blog is born.