First of all the Nazis blamed the Jews for all of the world's problems, while the Native Americans were "in the way" of the colonizing Europeans.
Stannard's point does not remain. It is false. Why are you so hung up on the Hitch? You flatter him with all the attention. (are you or have you ever been a member of the ISO?) Here he is writing in the LA Times *this* year.
http://www.calendarlive.com/top/1,1419,L-LATimes-Books-X!ArticleD etail-33710,00.html
Sunday, May 20, 2001 The Strange Case of David Irving review of THE HOLOCAUST ON TRIAL By D.D. Guttenplan; W.W. Norton: 328 pp., $24.95 By CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
When the first news of the Nazi camps was published in 1945, there were those who thought the facts might be exaggerated either by Allied war propaganda or by the human tendency to relish "atrocity stories." In his column in the London magazine Tribune, George Orwell wrote that though this might be so, the speculation was not exactly occurring in a vacuum. If you remember what the Nazis did to the Jews before the war, he said, it isn't that difficult to imagine what they might do to them during one.
In one sense, the argument over "Holocaust denial" ends right there. The National Socialist Party seized power in 1933, proclaiming as its theoretical and organizing principle the proposition that the Jews were responsible for all the world's ills, from capitalist profiteering to subversive Bolshevism. By means of oppressive legislation, they began to make all of Germany Judenrein, or "Jew-free." Jewish businesses were first boycotted and then confiscated. Jewish places of worship were first vandalized and then closed. Wherever Nazi power could be extended--to the Rhineland, to Austria and to Sudeten Czechoslovakia--this pattern of cruelty and bigotry was repeated. (And, noticed by few, the state killing of the mentally and physically "unfit," whether Jewish or "Aryan," was tentatively inaugurated.) After the war broke out, Hitler was able to install puppet governments or occupation regimes in numerous countries, each of which was compelled to pass its own version of the anti-Semitic "Nuremberg Laws." Most ominous of all--and this in plain sight and on camera, and in full view of the neighbors--Jewish populations as distant as Salonika were rounded up and put on trains, to be deported to the eastern provinces of conquered Poland.
None of this is, even in the remotest sense of the word, "deniable." Nor is the fact that, once the war was over, surviving Jews found that they had very few family members left. The argument only begins here, and it takes two forms. First, what exactly happened to the missing ones? Second, why did it occur? The first argument is chiefly forensic and concerns numbers and methods: the physical engineering of shooting, gassing, burial and cremation. The second argument is a debate among historians and is known as the "intentionalist versus functionalist" dispute. The "intentionalists" say that Hitler and his gang were determined from the start to extirpate all Jews and that everything from 1933 to 1945 is a vindication of certain passages in "Mein Kampf." The "functionalists" point out (correctly) that the Nazis actually killed almost no Jews until after 1941 and that the Endlosung, or "Final Solution," was a semi-secret plan evolved after Germany began to lose the war on the Eastern front. On this continuum, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, with his view that Germans had a cultural gene of anti-Semitism, is an extreme "intentionalist"; Yehudah Bauer, of the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem, is a moderate "functionalist."
Differences of opinion between these two schools, and discrepancies in the evidence, have recently permitted the emergence of something that is more of a phenomenon than a "school," by which I mean the movement of "Holocaust denial" or (because it consists of two contrasting tendencies) "Holocaust revisionism." This movement contains some Nazi revivalists in Germany and elsewhere, some crackpots and conspiracy theorists and one practicing historian, an Englishman named David Irving. Among revisionist forces there is even more confusion; they either argue that nothing much happened at all and that the whole thing is a fabrication or they maintain that the unforgettable piles of corpses were the result of epidemics, to be blamed on the disruption of food and medical supplies by Allied bombing. (It will be seen at once that this latter faction has no good explanation for why the Jews of Europe were packed into remote camps in the first place.)
The toxicity of the argument is increased by four other factors. First, there are those who maintain that the German people have been blamed enough and that endless suggestions of collective guilt--accompanied by incessant demands for compensation--are an insult and possibly a provocation. Second, there are those who resent the exploitation of the Holocaust, or Shoah, by extreme Israeli nationalists. Third, there is a collective awareness that neither the international community nor organized Jewry did much to help the victims when it could have made a difference. Finally, in many countries, including Germany and France, it is actually a crime to dispute the established version of events, which means that the "revisionist" movement now has its free-speech martyrs. While in the United States, protected as it is by the 1st Amendment, the Holocaust has become a secular religion, with state support in the form of a national museum. Accusations of ill will or bad faith are often made against anyone with reservations about the elevation of this project into something combining a cult, an entertainment resource and an industry, each claiming to represent the unvoiced dead. Indeed, I myself feel constrained to state here that my mother's family is of German and Polish Jewish provenance and that on my wife's side we have not just an Auschwitz "survivor" in our lineage but a man--David Szmulewski--who was one of the leaders of the communist resistance in the camps as well as one of those who smuggled evidence out of it and later testified against the war criminals in court. I look forward to a time when I won't feel any need to mention this.
I was raised in two other traditions as well, however. The first was to believe, with the late Karl Popper, that a case has not been refuted until it has been stated at its strongest. The second was to take it for granted that historians have prejudices. To manifest the first point, then, let us summarize the best case that the revisionists can make. Would it surprise you to know that:
1) there were no gas chambers or extermination camps on German soil, in other words, at Belsen or Dachau or Buchenwald;
2) there were no Jews made into soap;
3) the "confession" of Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz, was extracted by force and contains his claim to have killed more Jews than was "humanly" possible?
These are, however, the now-undisputed findings of all historians and experts on the subject. And if they are sound, then it means that much "eyewitness" testimony is wrong. It necessarily changes our attitude toward the everyday complicity of average Germans. It also means that much of the evidence presented and accepted at Nuremburg was spurious. Of course, we knew some of this already--the Nazis were charged by Soviet and Allied judges with the massacres at Katyn in Poland, which had obviously been ordered by Stalin and are now admitted to have been. And every now and then, a bogus Holocaust merchant makes an appearance. The most recent was the fantasist "Binjamin Wilkomirski," whose book, "Fragments," was a whole-cloth fabrication by someone who had spent the entire war in Switzerland. This did not prevent him from receiving several awards and the warm endorsement of Goldhagen. Earlier, a high Israeli court found the evidence of witnesses useless, ruling that John Demjanjuk had not been at Treblinka in the mythical shape of "Ivan the Terrible."
The confrontation between Irving and the consensus was therefore long overdue. He forced the confrontation himself, by putting his own work on trial in attempting to sue the work of another. But it was high time to have this out in public, in the relatively objective context of an English courtroom. And so to my second observation, about bias and historians.
History, especially as written by historians in the English tradition, is a literary and idiosyncratic form. Men such as Gibbon and Macaulay and Marx were essayists and polemicists in the grand manner, and when I was at school, one was simply not supposed to be prissy about the fact. We knew that Macaulay wrote to vindicate the Whig school, just as we knew of the prejudices of Carlyle (though there were limits: Nobody ever let us read his "Occasional Discourse on the N-word Question," a robustly obscene defense of slavery). Handing me a copy of "What Is History?" by E.H. Carr, my Tory headmaster loftily told me that it was required reading in spite of its "rather obvious Marxist bias." The master of my Oxford college was Christopher Hill, the great chronicler of Cromwell and Milton and Winstanley and the Puritan Revolution. Preeminent in his field, Hill had been a member of the Communist Party and could still be slightly embarrassed by mention of his early book, "Lenin and the Russian Revolution," in which the name of Leon Trotsky was conspicuous by its absence. Moving closer to our own time, we had Sir Arthur Bryant, whose concept of history as a pageant culminated in extreme royalism and a strong sympathy for Franco and Mussolini and Hitler. Then there was A.J.P. Taylor, one of the most invigorating lecturers of all time, who believed that the Nazis had more or less been tricked into the war. And how can one forget Hugh Trevor-Roper, author of the definitive narrative of Hitler's final days, who had close connections to British intelligence, who might be overheard making faintly anti-Jewish remarks and later pronounced the forged Hitler diaries genuine? These were men who had been witnesses and participants as well as archivists and chroniclers. Their accounts were essential reading; the allowance for prejudice and inflection was part of the fun of one's bookkeeping.
This of course doesn't license absolute promiscuity. Eric Hobsbawm, a member of the Communist Party (much later than Hill), may have advertised his allegiances but retained the respect of most critics because he had a strong sense of objectivity in his historical work. In other words, no dirty tricks were to be allowed.
However, what I mean to say for now is that when I first became aware of Irving, I did not feel it necessary to react like a virgin who is suddenly confronted by a man in a filthy raincoat. [end clip. there's much more]