The most dramatic rebuttal to these theories came in September, when Jean-Claude Pressac’s “The Crematoriums of Auschwitz: The Machinery of Mass Murder” was published in Paris. Pressac, a pharmacist and amateur historian, has been linked with Holocaust deniers, but he told NEWSWEEK he had never questioned the fact of the Holocaust–merely the methods the Nazis used. “I had questions,” he says. “It’s normal.” Using newly available documents taken by the Soviets from Auschwitz, Pressac explains with chilling objectivity the floor plans and ventilation systems of the gas chambers and reproduces order forms for furnaces. Holocaust experts have hailed his work as definitive.
Holocaust deniers dismiss Pressac’s book; they also discount a newly found speech by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels about the “murderous fate” awaiting Berlin’s Jews. Deborah Lipstadt, author of “Denying the Holocaust,” is appalled by the willingness of some students and the media to see Holocaust denial as simply “the other side”; she refuses to grant deniers the status of “In this relativistic time we live in, Holocaust denial is turned into an opinion, and everyone’s opinion is of equal validity,” she says. “That’s like asking whether slavery happened.” But more pernicious than cranks proselytizing the ignorant is simple indifference. When the last survivors cease to bear living witness, will enough people still care to insist that what happened happened? Silence is the ultimate denial.
