Here is a convergence of evidence that proves the Holocaust happened:
What follows from this quote is, well, the convergence of the types of evidence which the book will use to disprove those who suggest the Holocaust did not happen. Among the various types of evidence making up this convergence are written documents, testimony from people who were actually there, photographs and films and, not least, the very camps used to carry out this abomination still being there. Not as they were when used, of course, but nevertheless. “Convergence of evidence” is the key phrase of the book and it will recur more than twenty times. One can deny opinion and not look foolish, but when one denies a convergence of facts, foolish is the best they can hope to look.
“The way you hold beliefs is more important than what you hold. If somebody’s been a rigid Communist, he becomes a rigid anti-Communist—the rigidity being constant.”
Daniel Bell is a sociologist who attempts to explain why Holocaust deniers retain a stubborn desire to believe what they believe even in the face of overwhelming factual evidence to the contrary. This quote is clearly not specific to them, but is instead a way of attempting to explain any large group of like-minded people who cling to a mythic concept of reality that normal people cannot wrap their head around. Whether the belief is specific to denying the Holocaust, political ideology or even the incomprehensibility of the cult of personality which attaches an almost god-like persona to, say, a confessed serial sexual predator, the psychology remains the same.
“What makes Hitler a phenomenon unlike any other in history is that his goals included absolutely no civilizing ideas…as he conquered territory and extended his control, rejected all idealistic trimmings, deeming them unnecessary to disguise his claim to power.”
Fest is the author of the book upon which the infamous German film Downfall—which details the final days of Hitler in his bunker—is based. The book and the film portray a Fuhrer who is leagues away from the hero that some Holocaust deniers forward or even from the relatively banally evil person described by the slightly less insane. The point that Fest makes here, excerpted from his book, is that to deny the Holocaust is to deny the full scale of malevolence of the man at the top. And to do that is, quote simply, to deny the single greatest reality of the twentieth century. And, of course, to deny that is to ignore the possibility that it could happen again.
