Most historical scholars agree that the Holocaust was a mass genocide of Jewish people, gypsies, and ‘undesirables’ whose victims numbered around 11 million people in the early 1940s.  The event took place at the time of World War II and was perpetrated by the state of Nazi Germany. Many victims of this genocide were removed from their homes and killed in concentration camps or on death marches.

This event is one of the most studied genocides in modern history, and it is studied closely by many scholars. With this amount of study comes a significant amount of dissent. This can be seen clearly in the sites examined below.

Amateur Websites on History

Historical websites on the Holocaust as written by amateurs are interesting. Many of them claim expertise, though this claim is not accurate.  This expertise is what many students depend upon when researching topics such as the Holocaust on the Internet.  Even websites that have self taught students do not hold as high of an accreditation as a scholarly source, because the information is not from a professional.

The above page is essentially an advertisement for the book “Six Million Crucifixions”, which is written by amateur history buff Gabriel Wilensky.  Because Wilensky is not an expert on the topic of the Holocaust through collegiate study, his book and page are considered amateur.  It provides a brief history of the Holocaust, but overall is not a dependable source. His facts are generally correct, but they lack the sophistication of a serious Holocaust scholar, and the lack of sources characterizes the site as amateur.

 

 

“Ducksters” is a website created for school children to quickly and painlessly give a description of the Holocaust.  The site covers a broad topic of historical events for all different sorts of events.  Because the information is so brief and broad, it’s not a source that can be considered scholarly.  It’s on par with a Wikipedia page; the accreditation of the authors are not assured. The historical ‘facts’ listed are generally considered to be correct, however, like many of these other sites, they lack the type of sophisticated arguments or analysis that are characteristic of expert research. This combined with their lack of citations characterize the site as amateur.