What Is Holocaust “Revision” or Rather “Denial”?
The so-called “Holocaust revisionists” are really “Holocaust deniers,” since they reject the three key components that were mentioned above: 1) the killing of the six million; 2) the use of gas chambers; and 3) direct, systematic actions by Nazis to carry out the process. An illustration of this point is the comment by Bradley Smith, the self-appointed head of the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust, made in 1992: “Revisionists deny that the German State had a policy to exterminate the Jewish people (or anyone else) by putting them to death in gas chambers or by killing them through abuse or neglect.” (Shermer and Grobman, Denying History, p. xv) Genuine historical revisionists are people who work with primary documents and sources and through these reexamine and reinterpret some historical event. They revise our understanding of the occurrence on the basis of new sources and new insights applied to existing sources. They refine the detailed knowledge we have about an event, but
