Deceit & Misrepresentation The Mayer Gambit
Research: Holocaust Research Mailing List
The Mayer Gambit is often employed when deniers find themselves
confronted with testimony which supports historical facts surrounding
the Holocaust. One reason is because Mayer himself is Jewish - a Jew
who questions the Holocaust surely cannot be called an antisemite, and
so people will be more likely to accept Mayer's word. An equally large
reason, though, is because they are hoping that most folks haven't read
Mayer's book, and will not be able to check the honesty of their
reference to it.
Greg Raven
provided an example during an exchange with Dr. Keren, on April 26,
1994, when he offered:
Second, these citations are from testimony, and as such present many
of the problems one would normally expect with testimony under similar
conditions. As Professor Arno Mayer has written, "Most of what is
known [on homicidal gassings] is based on the depositions of Nazi
officials and executioners at postwar trials and on the memory of
survivors and bystanders. This testimony must be screened carefully,
since it can be influenced by subjective factors of great
complexity."
[1]
Raven has also posted a pamphlet published by the
IHR:
So just what constitutes "Holocaust denial"? Surely a
claim that most Auschwitz inmates died from disease and not systematic
extermination in gas chambers would be "denial." But perhaps
not. Jewish historian Arno J. Mayer, a Princeton University professor,
wrote in his 1988 study Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?: The
"Final Solution" in History: "... From 1942 to 1945,
certainly at Auschwitz, but probably overall, more Jews were killed by
so-called 'natural' causes than by 'unnatural' ones."
[2]
In his review of
Deborah Lipstadt's recent book on Holocaust
denial, O'Keefe provides another example of the gambit when he
writes:
... And, despite the fact that she makes use of the English
translation of Pierre Vidal-Naquet's Assassins of Memory, she
omits all reference to world-class Jewish historian Arno Mayer's
Why Did the Heavens Not Darken, with its two crushing
observations: "Sources for the study of the gas chambers are at
once rare and unreliable" and "There is no denying the many
contradictions, ambiguities, and errors in the existing
sources."[3]
Mark Weber also employs one of these snippets in his
JHR review of
Vidal-Naquet's "Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust:"
Another early retort to Faurisson was an article in Le Monde,
fittingly headlined "An Abundance of Evidence," that claimed
that proofs of execution gas chambers are plentiful. As Mehlman
notes, even leading Holocaust historians must now admit that
there is no such "abundance" -- merely tortured interpretations
of documentary evidence.
Even once widely quoted "testimonies"
of "survivors" and famed postwar "confessions" of German
officials are being abandoned. As Mehlman goes on to inform the
reader, even Princeton University professor Arno Mayer (himself
Jewish) in his 1989 book, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?: The
"Final Solution" in History, acknowledged that "Sources for the
study of the gas chambers are at once rare and unreliable," and
that more Jews perished at
Auschwitz as victims of disease than
were put to death -- a view at odds with the "official"
Auschwitz extermination story.
[4]
The deniers would like the reader to confuse "sources for the gas
chambers" - that is, the testimony for their existence, which is
plentiful - with "sources for their study" - i.e., the design and
construction plans and the discussions and orders involved in their
adoption, which are indeed hard to come by. The deniers make much
of the fact that there is no written order. However, there is
testimony from Rudolph Höss that he received some orders
verbally, and the Nazis destroyed much of the evidence of their crimes.
(For example, the
Auschwitz crematoria containing gas chambers - except
for the first one, whose gas chamber had been converted to an air-raid
shelter - were dynamited.) As Mayer himself tells us:
To date there is no certainty about who gave the order, and
when, to install the gas chambers used for the murder of Jews at
Auschwitz. As no written command has been located, there is a
strong presumption that the order was issued and received
orally. [5]
Mayer, quite clearly, does not question the existence of the gas
chambers, nor that they were employed for extermination. His words
were taken out of context.
During his review of the
ADL's "Hitler's Apologists: The
Anti-Semitic Propaganda of Holocaust Revisionism," O'Keefe
once again recruits Mayer to his cause:
Once the
ADL's smear apparatus has been turned on and has
sputtered to life, it takes on a demonic existence of its own,
like some odd carnival amusement, ultimately repellent whatever
its attraction. Amid stomach-turning odors, to the manic
burbling of a cranky calliope, the centrifugal pump that is
Hitler's Apologists whirls faster and faster, spewing filth
and falsehood about Revisionists, great and small, into the
faces of the American public.
Fred Leuchter! David McCalden!
Jack Wikoff!
Hans Schmidt!
Ernst Zundel!
Pat Buchanan! Arno
Mayer!
Keegstra!
Faurisson! Roques! Le Pen! The Germans!
Faster and faster! Eastern Europe! Lithuania! The Muslims!
Saddam Hussein! The Intifada!
And on and on it spins and stinks, this latest
ADL hatchet job,
shooting half-truths and lies, irrelevancies and mistakes, to
the point where it becomes idle to track down and refute them
one by one. A production like this is of a piece -- either one
great truth or one great lie. The big lie of _Hitler's
Apologists_ -- that all revisionists are simply Nazis -- is
wearing ever thinner. Thus the insane energy of the liars and
sneaks who basted it together. [6]
- thus apparently including Arno Mayer, a professor of European
history at Princeton, within the ranks of those the
ADL labels
"the revisonists!"
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The Techniques of Holocaust Denial
Writer: Mike Stein