pelling in itself, particularly for its curious and paradoxical nature: it has an ostensibly preposterous thesis that is coupled with an obvious appeal to otherwise sound and inquisitive minds.
Holocaust denial theory rests upon as few as three and as many as five pillars of skepticism. As Michael Shermer writes in "Why People Believe Weird Things," Holocaust deniers claim that 1.) "There was no Nazi policy to exterminate European Jewry," 2.) "The main causes of death were disease and starvation, caused primarily by Allied destruction of German supply lines and resources," and 3.) 6 million Jews were not killed during Hitler's reign, rather "Between 300,000 and 2 million Jews died or were killed in ghettos and camps" (Shermer 189). Other sources, such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), add to Shermer's list that some Holocaust deniers also claim that there was no net loss of Jewish lives during World War II and that the Nuremberg trials were a farce and were "staged for the benefit of the Jews" (www.adl.org). Each of these five pillars can be discredited in turn. First, however, it is prudent to explore each of them as defensible positions, and identify some of their proponents.
The first premise, that the Holocaust could not have existed simply because there is no single Nazi document that expresses a "master plan" for Jewish annihilation, attributes to Adolph Hitler a metaphorical "Final Solution" that did not include genocide. On this view, the Final Solution to the famed "Jewish question" was deportation out of Nazi Germany (Shermer 189). Because Hitler did not envisage a Third Reich that was comprised of anything other than the Aryan race, so the Jews needed to be expelledùnot liquidatedùfrom Germany and her territories. Some Holocaust denial propagandists have gone so far as to suggest that Hitler in fact expressly ordered that the Jews not be liquidated, citing a cable from his bunker instructing "Jewish transpo...