Hist 33D, L 16: Holocaust Denial
by Professor H. Marcuse, UCSB, Nov. 18, 2003

Is history made of facts, or perceptions?
If the latter, are all perceptions equally valid?

Lili Schiff, b. l1932Nina Morecki, b. 1920Nina Morecki, b. 1920; Lili Schiff, b. 1932
(follow-up on their visit last Thursday)

Power/Action grid: Where do we situate these survivors and the people in their stories?

Power/Action Behavior table

Announcements

Korczak (1990)Jakob the Liar (1999)Jacob the Liar (1974)Anne Frank, 2000 ABC docudramaFilm choice tonight

Holocaust Denial: History

Legacies of Dachau: passage quoted by deniersDenial in action: My book quoted on alt.revisionism, May 2002

Note that he [Marcuse] says that the gas chamber at Dachau was used for "trial gassings" although a sign in the gas chamber says it was never used for gassing. The interesting thing, however, is that he thinks that the inmates were evacuated from the camps as part of a cover-up. He mentions that the inmates at Natzweiler were brought to Dachau as part of this "cover-up of the atrocities" but he doesn't mention that the Nazis completely forgot to destroy the gas chamber there, which is still being shown to tourists as a bona-fide gas chamber that was used to kill Jews.

He says that the mass graves were dug up in order to eliminate the evidence of atrocities, but the mass graveyard at Dachau is still there. The Nazis forgot to dig up the bodies there and burn them, and they also neglected to destroy the evidence of the gas chamber at Dachau, although they had two years to accomplish this before the Americans arrived.

Considering that the Nazis began a "campaign to eradicate the physical evidence of its atrocities" in 1943, they didn't get much done before the Americans arrived. They left gas chambers intact at Dachau, Natzweiler, and Mauthausen. They also left gas chambers for the Russians to find at Sachsenhausen and Majdanek. In fact, there was only one gas chamber that they managed to destroy in the Old Reich - the one at Ravensbrück, the women's camp. Today, no one even knows the exact location of the gas chamber that was destroyed there.

Quoting out of context:

From the scan of the pages in my book, Legacies of Dachau, from which the quotation was taken: It begins at the end of chapter 1, and continues with the beginning of chapter 2. It ends right before I address the (rhetorical) questions the denier poses.

Main Reasons for Denial

Denial and EIEIO


prepared for web by H. Marcuse, Dec. 13, 2003, images added 12/14/03
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