Editing Holocaust denial (section)

===Mayer controversy===
In 1988, the American historian [[Arno J. Mayer]] published a book entitled ''Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?'', which did not explicitly deny the Holocaust, but according to [[Lucy Dawidowicz]] lent support to Holocaust denial by stating that most people who died at [[Auschwitz concentration camp|Auschwitz]] were the victims of "natural causes" such as disease, not gassing.<ref>Dawidowicz, Lucy ''What Is The Use of Jewish History?'', New York: Schocken Books, 1992 pages 129–130</ref> Dawidowicz argued that Mayer's statements about Auschwitz were "a breathtaking assertion".<ref>Dawidowicz, Lucy ''What Is The Use of Jewish History?'', New York: Schocken Books, 1992 page 130</ref> Holocaust historian [[Robert Jan van Pelt]] has written that Mayer's book is as close as a mainstream historian has ever come to supporting Holocaust denial.<ref name="Pelt pages 47-48">Pelt, Robert Jan van ''The Case for Auschwitz'', Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002 pages 47–48</ref> Holocaust deniers such as [[David Irving]] have often cited Mayer's book as one reason for embracing Holocaust denial.{{R|Pelt pages 47-48}} Though Mayer has been often condemned for his statement about the reasons for the Auschwitz death toll, his book does not deny the use of gas chambers at Auschwitz, as Holocaust deniers often claim.<ref>{{cite news |last=Stein |first=Michael |title=The Mayer Gambit |newspaper=Nizkor Project |date=October 2, 2008 |url=http://www.nizkor.org/features/techniques-of-denial/mayer-01.html |access-date=June 4, 2009 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090502170033/http://www.nizkor.org/features/techniques-of-denial/mayer-01.html |archive-date=May 2, 2009 |url-status=dead}}</ref>

Some mainstream Holocaust historians have labeled Mayer a denier. The Israeli historian [[Yehuda Bauer]] wrote that Mayer "popularizes the nonsense that the Nazis saw in Marxism and Bolshevism their main enemy, and the Jews unfortunately got caught up in this; when he links the destruction of the Jews to the ups and downs of German warfare in the Soviet Union, in a book that is so cocksure of itself that it does not need a proper scientific apparatus, he is really engaging in a much more subtle form of Holocaust denial".<ref>Bauer, Yehuda "A Past That Will Not Away" pages 12–22 from ''The Holocaust and History'' edited by Michael Berenbaum and Abrahm Peck, Bloomington: [[Indiana University Press]], 1998 page 15.</ref>

Defenders of Mayer argue that his statement that "Sources for the study of the gas chambers are at once rare and unreliable" has been taken out of context, particularly by Holocaust deniers.<ref>Shermer, Michael & Grobman, Alex ''Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?'', Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002 page 126.</ref> [[Michael Shermer]] and [[Alex Grobman]] observe that the paragraph from which the statement is taken asserts that the SS destroyed the majority of the documentation relating to the operation of the gas chambers in the death camps, which is why Mayer feels that sources for the operation of the gas chambers are "rare" and "unreliable".<ref>Shermer, Michael & Grobman, Alex ''Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?'', Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002 pages 126–127.</ref>