LECTURE ON THE HOLOCAUST DENIERS GIVEN BY DR. MICHAEL SHERMER by Edvard A. Hemmingsen In my youth I lived in a small town in Norway. Most of the residents knew, or knew about, each other. In this population were several Jewish families. They were arrested and shipped off to unknown places by the Germans upon occupation of Norway in 1940. None were ever to return. At the end of the war it became clear why. From direct evidence found in the concentration camps and in the mass graves, from the stories of the survivors and others, from the testimonies at the postwar trials, from the mountains of circumstantial evidence including the wide scale, systematic arrest and disappearance of Jewish people from Germany and the occupied territories, the horror of the holocaust emerged. It never occurred to me that the existence of this horror would ever be questioned by anyone. However, this may be happening today. Dr. Michael Shermer, a Historian of Science, an Adjunct Professor at Occidental College in Los Angeles, a leading authority on Holocaust denial, and the Editor-in-Chief and publisher of Skeptic Magazine, presented a lecture on "The Holocaust Deniers" at the SDARI meeting on September 29, 1996. Because he has carried out extensive research in this area, and has interviewed many leading deniers, Dr. Shermer could provide at least a limited inside viewpoint on why these people make their preposterous claim that the holocaust (with about six million people murdered) did not happen, but rather that a few hundred thousand people were badly treated, even killed, as often happens in wartime. This claim ignores the overwhelming evidence, indeed the facts, that point directly to the holocaust. The holocaust deniers ground their belief, in essence, on the fact that no official German document that orders the extermination of the Jews has been found, and that there are some discrepancies in the estimates made of the actual numbers of people murdered. By focusing on minor inconsistencies or trivial errors in the mainstream historical literature, they attempt to discredit and dismiss the larger issue that is based on strong evidence and facts. The deniers assert that the holocaust as defined by mainstream historians today is political propaganda put out by the Allies. Dr. Shermer gave many examples of material available to historians and others that refutes many claims of the holocaust deniers. He emphasized that the holocaust was not one event, put into motion by written orders from Hitler, but rather a series of events separated in pace and time and occurring over several years that escalated in ferocity as the Nazi high command sought "the final solution" to the Jewish question. Therefore, it is impossible to approach the catastrophe we call the holocaust as a single, provable event. One group of holocaust deniers is organized as the Institute for Historical Review with headquarters in Newport Beach. The Institute's official publication has the appearance of a respectable publication with the title The Journal of Historical Review. In answering a question from the audience, Dr. Shermer gave his opinion that each holocaust denier has a different reason for his belief. Some appear to like the fascist power structure, others may be motivated by antisemitism, still others view this as a cause by which they can obtain attention or money, and some may wish to rewrite history to further the political goals of their own group. They are small in number but vocal and well organized. It is a chilling thought that in a few decades, when essentially all who lived through the holocaust period are gone, the pseudo-historians and their crackpot associates may be even more successful in distorting the truth about these tragic mass murders.