In your article about Gerhard Lauck, “From a distance, Nebraska Nazi agitates at will” (Jan. 9), writer Rogers Worthington perhaps unwittingly implies that historical revision of the traditional Holocaust story is a neo-Nazi phenomenon.
Holocaust revisionism springs not from Nazis (neo- or otherwise) but from historians. Revisionism is a fundamental and unending part of writing history; as new information becomes available about events in the past, we are better able to determine not only what happened, but why it happened and what it means.
With the passage of time, ideologies and political considerations are stripped away, making it easier to put events into their proper context. The Holocaust story, being one part of the history of the Third Reich and World War II, is no more immune to revisionism than the fall of the Roman Empire or America’s “police action” in Vietnam.
The fact that some neo-Nazis may or may not have an interest in Holocaust revisionism neither aids nor hinders the revisionist process. Neither does it add to or subtract from the revisionist position.
