Altered Pasts by Evans Richard J.; Ben-Israel Hedva;

Author:Evans, Richard J.; Ben-Israel, Hedva;
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Brandeis University Press

The problem was, of course, as critics pointed out, that the authors’ endnotes became vague or were missing altogether when it came to supporting crucial claims and allowing readers to check them. In addition, the mass of genuine evidence for the bodies outside the bunker being Hitler’s and Eva Braun’s—including Hitler’s teeth, verified against his dental records—was passed over or sweepingly dismissed, along with the numerous eyewitness accounts by members of his entourage gathered immediately after the war by Hugh Trevor-Roper and published in his book The Last Days of Hitler (London, 1947). Finally, the authors had failed altogether to follow up their belief that Hitler and Eva Braun had been survived by two daughters living in Argentina. Once again, the theory depended on the postulate of a vast conspiracy to suppress the truth, extending over many decades and involving hundreds if not thousands of professional historians, eyewitnesses, archives, officials, investigators, journalists and many more. It did not say much for the authors’ opinion of the historical profession that they dismissed its established research as the product either of deliberate deception or of a woeful failure to inquire properly after the truth.

Spurious historical investigations of this kind are closely related in methodological terms to the politically motivated phenomenon of Holocaust denial, in which considerable forensic ingenuity is devoted to attempting to prove that six million Jews were not killed by the Nazis during the Second World War, that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz, that Hitler did not have a plan or program to kill the Jews, and that the evidence that historians have put together to demonstrate that these things actually did happen has been concocted by a Jewish-led conspiracy after the war. If writers like Thomas, or Williams and Dunstan, are relatively innocent of political motivation in their intent, the same certainly cannot be said of the Holocaust deniers, who are generally driven by antisemitic, racist, neo-Nazi, or Islamist extremist ideology, and use their research—often decked out with all the panoply of footnoted scholarship and conducted in serious-sounding centers with names like “The Institute of Historical Review”—to try and persuade people that there is a vast and sinister Jewish conspiracy controlling the mass media, the historical profession, governments, universities, and political parties, forcing them all to suppress the truth and ruling the world in its own interests.39

This kind of conspiracy theory, often based on claims that established knowledge is “official” knowledge and therefore to be mistrusted, could be found in an even more extreme form, if that can be believed, in works such as M. Robert K. Teske, Jr.’s The Omega Files: The Military-Industrial/Nazi/Alien Connection and the Infiltration of America by the Fourth Reich (New York, 2012). The book’s publicity blurb stated:

What you are about to read is controversial, and may be offensive to some audiences. Reader discretion is advised. (NOTE: In the usage of the word “Alien” feel free to substitute it with “Demonic,” “Fallen Angel,” “Supernatural” or “Occult” as any of those words would aptly apply within the contents of this manuscript.

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