66 Questions and Answers about the Holocaust

The Nizkor Project: Remembering the Holocaust (Shoah)

66 Questions & Answers About the Holocaust
Nizkor's response to the Institute for Historical Review & Ernst Zündel


The Pamphlet

The Institute for Historical Review, or IHR, publishes many small pamphlets designed to misinform people about the Holocaust. One of the most-persistent has been a pamphlet called "66 Questions And Answers About the Holocaust," or simply "66 Q&A."

This pamphlet neatly summarizes many of the most common arguments used by Holocaust-deniers. Refuting these 66 claims strikes directly at the core of Holocaust-denial.

Readers of the Usenet newsgroup alt.revisionism will notice claims and arguments below which may seem familiar. This is because this material, and its derivatives, have been presented and discussed on Usenet many times before. These web pages contain more in-depth replies than previous postings, however, and the links to other information put the technology of the web to good use.

The pamphlet itself has been put up on the world-wide web by at least two separate Holocaust-deniers: Greg Raven, head of the IHR, and Ernst Zündel, described by Canada's Security Intelligence Review Committee as "a Holocaust denier and prolific publisher of hate literature," and the sponsor and promoter of a "1991 neo-Nazi conference in Germany." Both the IHR's and Zündel's publishing houses distribute the Q&A in print form.

What follows is a point-by-point refutation of its half-truths and untruths. The full text of the original pamphlet is included, with the IHR's questions and answers reproduced unaltered, but if you would like to see their material for yourself, you may examine Greg Raven's copy on the IHR web site, or Ernst Zündel's copy on his web site.

Note that the wording of the questions and "answers" may vary slightly from what we've presented here. The pamphlet has undergone some revisions over the years, and it appears that both Raven's and Zündel's web sites are presenting what we call the "revised" version, as opposed to the "original."

Zündel's publishing house, Samisdat, has distributed an earlier version as recently as November 1995, which we will occasionally refer to as the "Samisdat" version for lack of a better name. We are currently only in possession of the first page of this, and it skips quite a few questions, so we don't know how much we're missing. We are also not sure exactly when it was written, but its answer to question 22 refers to a united Germany, which places it in the 1990s. Updates will come as we learn more, of course.

In any case, the various revisions that have been made have rarely made the pamphlet any more truthful. This is not surprising, because the aim of the pamphlet is not to educate but to mislead. Where the revisions are noteworthy, we will comment upon them.

If our treatment seems tedious, consider yourself lucky: in 1983, the IHR published 120 Questions and Answers About the Holocaust. We have obtained a copy, but for now resign ourselves to critiquing the much-abridged, extensively sanitized version. Remember as you're reading this that there were 54 other questions and answers that were not good enough to make the final cut!

Finally, for another good antidote to the "66 Q&A," we suggest two documents put out by the Simon Wiesenthal Center on their web site: their "Responses to Revisionist Arguments," and their "36 Q&A" (which are unrelated except for the similarity in format).


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