Archive/File: orgs/american/codoh/mayer.arno arno.book
Last-Modified: 1994/02/15

From: "sheldon sheps" 
Message-ID: <199215.1206.9547@dosgate>
Date: 15 Apr 92 23:14:11 EST
Organization: Canada Remote Systems

       What did Arno J. Mayer actually say about Auchwitz and the
       Holocaust, or...

       history as a movie advertisement

   There's a story told about a movie publicist who looked at a
   dozen terrible movie review and proceeded to use them in a
   newspaper ad.  Where the reviewer had said "great if you
   want to catch 40 winks"  he put "great" in 40 pt type.  Where
   the reviewer wrote "fastpaced if you're dead", he put "fastpaced".

   This is what the revisionists have done with Arno Mayer's
   excellent book "Why did the heaven's not darken?".  And more
   importantly it shows the academic bankruptcy of their view.

     Valerie Lippert (not a revisionist supporter, quotes from the
     ad that ran at Northwestern University

VL> >     Arno J. Mayer, chaired professor of European history at
VL> Princeton >University, has written in his _Why the Heavens Did Not
VL> Darken_, that >at Auschwitz more people died of "natural causes"
VL> than were killed. >Mayer is a Jew and himself a refugee from the
VL> Nazi regime.

   at page 364 of the 1990 paperback version:

 "Besides, from 1942 to 1945, certainly at Auschwitz, but probably
 overall, more Jews were killed by so-called "natural causes than by
 "unnatural" ones.

   Let's now try the WHOLE paragraph...
   at page 364:

 "There is a distinction between dying from "natural" or "normal"
 causes and being killed by shooting,hanging,phenol injection or
 gassing.  But quite apart from the vital importance of not allowing
 this distinction to be used to extenuate and normalize the mass
 murder at Auschwitz, it should not be pressed too far.  The Nazi
 leaders decided to transport frail and sick Jews and Gypsies to
 Aushwitz in full awareness of the perils they would face, and they
 continued to do so once there was no ignoring and denying the deadly
 conditions there, including the endemic danger of epidemics.  Besides
 from 1942 to 1945, certainly at Auschwitz, but probably overall,
 more Jews were killed by so-called "natural" causes than by
 "unnatural" causes.

    and let's try p.451
 "On the contrary, the skeptics, who are outright negationists, mock
 the Jewish victims with their one-sided sympathetic understanding
 for the executioners.  They are ill-disguised anti-semites and
 merchants of prejudice, and this morally reprehensible posture
 disqualifies them from membership in the republic of free letters
 and scholarship".

   I do recommend Arno's book...it is somewhat controversial as it
   does not believe that the physical destruction of Jews was
   an initial goal of Nazism...but that does not mean that Arno
   supports the revisionists.

  sheldon.sheps@canrem.com
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