SOURCE: "'Revisionism': The Roques Affair," in Midstream, Vol. XXXIII, No. 4, April, 1987, pp. 11-13.

In the following essay, Weinberg studies the writings of French Holocaust deniers.

The pseudo-historians who have engaged in activities to exculpate the Nazis of their horrendous crimes, who have argued that the gas chambers never existed, have attempted to prove that all the evidence is false, and that all testimony can be challenged. There have also been those, the more esthetically oriented, who have expunged much of what had been earlier characterized as abominable. Some have absolved Nazism of responsibility by portraying the executioners as a small, isolated group of perverts; others have shown them as beings held in the grip of hidden, occult forces.

The French "school" of falsifiers of Holocaust history has shown particular predilection for pseudo-literary interpretation. What better way to blur historical information than through "interpretation"—"a rationalization that normalizes, smoothes...