Dissecting the Holocaust : The Growing Critique of "Truth" and "Memory" (Holocaust Handbooks)

* A prominent architectural engineer in Vienna...
* A French professor specializing in textual criticism...
* A chemist from Germany’s Max Planck Institute...
* An American expert on Diesel emissions...
* A Canadian geologist trained in interpreting aerial photography...
* A German architect, an Italian engineer and historian poring over thousands of wartime documents...

These men, and the other researchers featured in Dissecting the Holocaust, are applying hands-on, on-site investigative techniques to a key concept of twentieth century history, the belief that Adolf Hitler and his Nazi henchmen exterminated millions of Jews during World War II. These bold pioneers prefer doubt to dogma, and the practical methods of the detective, the archeologist, or the scientist to armchair theories and societal certitudes.

Today, challenging the Holocaust, whether in whole or in part, has been made punishable by law in many Western democracies. Yet a growing body of evidence, accumulated by the investigators featured in this work and by other researchers, raises increasingly troubling questions about the standard version of Hitler's alleged attempt to exterminate the Jews. As the Holocaust becomes an ever bigger taboo, as the questions from earnest dissenters grow more insistent, Western society stands at a crossroads. Does a decent regard for Hitler's Jewish victims, however many they were, justify suppressing open inquiry and stifling free expression?

In Germany, where all copies of the original edition of this book were ordered seized and destroyed, and in the other European nations in which revision of the Holocaust is also a crime, the great Western traditions of intellectual liberty, freedom of research, and civic courage continue to be given lip service. Where is the government minister, or the university chancellor, who would dare to deny that, throughout our history, those lonely few who have risked reputation, freedom, even their lives, not simply to oppose, but to put right the entrenched errors of academy, church, and state, have been the heroes and benefactors of all mankind?

Dissecting the Holocaust, therefore, is more than an adventurous, innovative challenge to our understanding of a vital historical issue. It is a book that exposes and confronts a contemporary malignancy of Western society to ask: What sort of truth is it that crushes the freedom to seek the truth?

Dissecting the Holocaust applies state-of-the-art scientific technique and classic methods of detection to investigate the alleged murder of millions of Jews by Germans during World War II. Among the questions raised and considered by the authors, each a specialist in a historical, scientific, technological, or legal discipline: How reliable are the claims of the eyewitnesses or the confessions of the alleged perpetrators? What do population statistics reveal about the probable number of Jewish casualties under Nazi rule? How strong is the evidence for murder in gas vans? Do photographs that seem to show Nazi crimes actually document them? What do wartime Allied aerial photographs of the camps reveal about the alleged massacres? Why are Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald no longer classed as extermination camps, even by Holocaust true believers? What do the long-suppressed Auschwitz camp records, recently unearthed in the Moscow state archives, disclose about murder by gas at the most notorious death camp? Did the technology to gas millions, then incinerate their corpses with scarcely a trace, exist during World War II? Did German soldiers shoot hundreds of thousands of innocents behind the Russian front? Most important of all, dare one doubt what society has declared to be self-evident?