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DENYING THE HOLOCAUST The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. By Deborah E. Lipstadt. 278 pp. New York: The Free Press. $22.95. ASSASSINS OF MEMORY Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust. By Pierre Vidal-Naquet. Translated by Jeffrey Mehlman. 205 pp. New York: Columbia University Press. $27.50.

IT was Deborah E. Lipstadt's alarm about the increasing influence of those who claim that the Holocaust never happened that helped provoke her to write "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory." Yet even she may have underestimated the full extent of that influence. "The impact of Holocaust denial on high school and college students," she notes, "cannot be precisely assessed. At the moment it is probably quite limited." In April 1993, shortly after Ms. Lipstadt completed her book, a poll by the Roper Organization found that 20 percent of United States high school students and 22 percent of adults think it seems "possible" that the Holocaust never happened.

It is conceivable, of course, that some Americans would doubt the historical reality of the Holocaust even if the Holocaust deniers had never issued their tracts. There is, after all, a certain level of skepticism, endemic in any society, about even the most settled of historical truths -- including, probably, World War II or the past existence of slavery in this country. But it seems unlikely that as many as a fifth of all Americans would have doubts that the Holocaust ever happened were it not for the strenuous efforts during the last half-century, and especially during the last 15 years, of the Holocaust deniers, who have grown ever more successful in having their arguments presented -- and heard with receptivity and respect -- in high school classrooms, on college campuses and on television talk shows.

Clearly, Ms. Lipstadt's important and impassioned work, as well as Pierre Vidal-Naquet's penetrating "Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust," could not have come at a better time. The two books are apt accompaniments to the recent opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, which tells the story of the destruction of Europe's Jews by Nazi Germany with immense power, compelling immediacy and a stunning fidelity to the truth.

Not surprisingly, attempts were made to interrupt the museum's dedication on April 22 by Holocaust deniers, who demonstrated against the museum's "Jewish lies" and handed out pamphlets. Although those deniers would have had no interest in reading either of these books, it is good to know they are now available to people of good will who do not know what to say, or what to think, when they are told -- by demonstrators, in advertisements, in classrooms or on television -- that the Holocaust never happened.

The two books cover some of the same ground but are quite different in tone, focus and organization. Both analyze the arguments of the Holocaust deniers and demolish them thoroughly and effectively. But Ms. Lipstadt, who teaches religious studies at Emory University, has written a book that, unlike Mr. Vidal-Naquet's, provides a comprehensive account of Holocaust denial, particularly from an American perspective and particularly for the reader with little prior knowledge of the subject. It rigorously traces the movement's roots and development both in this country and abroad, describes the ways the deniers have managed to focus attention on their arguments in both educational institutions and the news media, and explores the susceptibility of Americans, as well as others, to their arguments.

MR. VIDAL-NAQUET'S book, superbly translated by Jeffrey Mehlman, consists of a series of elegant essays, most of which the author -- a distinguished historian of the ancient world at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris -- published in France during the 1980's. It is, naturally, more concerned than Ms. Lipstadt's book with Holocaust denial in France, and occasionally assumes that the reader is acquainted with French intellectual currents. Though no less outraged than Ms. Lipstadt by the Holocaust deniers, Mr. Vidal-Naquet -- a Jew whose parents were deported from France during the German occupation and whose mother died in Auschwitz -- is a subtle writer whose passion about the subject is expressed by means of a gracefully piercing irony. His reader, though dragged through the mire of intellectual dishonesty that characterizes the writings of Holocaust deniers, is nevertheless elevated by the energy and nobility of Mr. Vidal-Naquet's intellectual and moral power and achieves, in the end, a deep appreciation of the absolute centrality of truth to the twin tasks of writing history and preserving memory.

It is important to say, though dismaying to have to say it, that for any legitimate historian, as well as for any reasonable person weighing the evidence, the Holocaust -- the planned and systematic extermination by the Germans, during World War II, of approximately six million European Jews -- is, quite simply, a fact.

The mountain of irrefutable evidence for this historical fact is available in the immense body of careful scholarship by numerous historians, some of which is summarized by Ms. Lipstadt and Mr. Vidal-Naquet. This evidence includes, for example, speeches and orders by the highest Nazi leaders: for instance, Heinrich Himmler's secret speech in Posen (the German name for Poznan, Poland) to SS leaders on Oct. 4, 1943 -- by which date most of the Holocaust's victims, probably close to five million, had already been killed -- in which he talked about the Nazi program for the "extermination of the Jewish people," stressed his conviction that "we have the moral right, the duty to our people, to destroy this people which wanted to destroy us" and boasted that the extermination program was "a glorious page in our history and one that has never been written and can never be written." A recording of this speech can be heard at the National Archives in Washington; by recording it, and by using clear language about the exterminations, Himmler violated his own orders to use euphemisms, camouflage and indirection in discussing the German program to murder the Jews.

The evidence for the Holocaust also includes an enormous number of documents about the killings. It includes, for example, the testimonies or diaries of SS officers, Nazi officials, among them the commandant of Auschwitz, and ordinary German soldiers involved in the killing operations. It includes the detailed reports by the chiefs of the mobile killing squads, the Einsatzgruppen, which executed over a million Jews behind the lines of the German Army as it advanced into Soviet territory. It includes the accounts by Jews who had been forced to drag corpses out of the gas chambers and burn them. It includes the detailed paperwork that documented the building of gas chambers designed to kill many hundreds of people at a time.

The evidence includes, moreover, meticulous German records, such as the precise counts of Jews, often broken down into the numbers of men, women and children, and even broken down further into the number of boys and girls, who were transported to Auschwitz on particular days from particular places in Europe; some of these people -- the strongest -- were tattooed with numbers and were allowed to work in the camp for as long as they might survive its brutal conditions on starvation rations, while most of those arriving at Auschwitz -- particularly the elderly, the ill, mothers and children -- were immediately sent for gassing.

The surviving records of Auschwitz transports and killings are considerable, despite the energetic efforts by retreating Germans to destroy all incriminating evidence before the camp's liberation. The weight of the evidence that the Holocaust took place, from materials related to Auschwitz as well as from an immense number of other sources, has been so overwhelming, so abundant and so widely available as to make the Holocaust, quite simply, an inherent, obvious and established fact of 20th-century reality. Having to cite that evidence now to prove that the Holocaust occurred is in some ways no less absurd than having to cite evidence to prove that the 1940's occurred. One finds oneself doing it, though not without distaste, because, in dealing with Holocaust denial, one has entered the innermost arena of the absurd.

During their nearly five decades of activity, as both Ms. Lipstadt and Mr. Vidal-Naquet note, the deniers have attacked this evidence not by disproving it but through outright lies, nonexistent documents, misquotations, pseudotechnical "investigations," flagrant illogic, the reinterpretation of clear evidence of gassings so as to make it seem to be referring to something else, like deaths from typhus, and the simple refusal to accept any testimony from any source, whether Jewish or Nazi, that contradicts the deniers' position that the Holocaust never happened.

The central arguments of the Holocaust deniers are outlined by both authors. The deniers have insisted that the Germans never planned to kill Europe's Jews; that gas chambers were never used for such a purpose; that the number of Jews who died during World War II was only a small fraction of the approximately six million generally accepted as having been killed, perhaps as few as 200,000; that those Jews who died did so as a result of disease, privations caused by Allied actions or retaliation by Germans for their anti-German activities; and that the entire Holocaust was a hoax perpetrated by Jews and by Israel in order to extort money from a vanquished but honorable Germany. The true villains of the Holocaust, the deniers have stressed, were not the Germans but the Jews.

Both Ms. Lipstadt and Mr. Vidal-Naquet refuse to lend credibility to the arguments of the deniers -- or, as Mr. Vidal-Naquet and many others refer to them, "revisionists" -- by accepting their invitations to debate them. As Mr. Vidal-Naquet puts it: "One can and should enter into a discourse concerning the 'revisionists'; one can analyze their texts as one might the anatomy of a lie; one can and should analyze their specific place in the configuration of ideologies, raise the question of why and in what manner they surfaced. But one should not enter into debate with the 'revisionists.' It is of no concern to me whether the 'revisionists' are neo-Nazi or extreme left wing in their politics: whether they are characterized psychologically as perfidious, perverse, paranoid or quite simply idiotic. I have nothing to reply to them and will not do so. Such is the price to be paid for intellectual coherence." Debating a group whose arguments are absurd and built on falsehoods would be to elevate those arguments into a historical school -- an idea that, Mr. Vidal-Naquet says, has something obscene about it. Rather than debate these deniers, Mr. Vidal-Naquet proceeds "as one might with a sophist, that is, with a man who seems like a speaker of truths, and whose arguments must be dismantled piece by piece in order to demonstrate their fallaciousness."

Who are these Holocaust deniers and what, exactly, have they sought to achieve? Both Ms. Lipstadt and Mr. Vidal-Naquet illuminate, with skill and clarity, not only the peculiarly disturbing world of the Holocaust deniers but also the methods they have used to distort history, the motives that have driven them to do so and the vulnerabilities in our educational systems, our culture and ourselves that have made so many in our society ready to listen to them.

THE first American efforts made after World War II to revise that war's history attempted, as Ms. Lipstadt shows, to mitigate German intentions and actions. Although these efforts were not aimed at denying the Holocaust, they created a framework of arguments that deniers would subsequently use in pursuing their own ends. These arguments were put forward, in large measure, by people who had been isolationists before America's entry into the war. Some were sympathetic not only to Germany but also to Hitler, and they argued that the Germans had done nothing against civilians, including the Jews, that had not been matched in magnitude by the actions of the Allies, such as the bombing of Dresden or the transfers after the war of Germans from parts of Poland and Czechoslovakia. In addition, some historians, journalists, members of Congress and public figures, like Charles Lindbergh, bitterly criticized Allied war crimes trials and denazification programs.

It was in France that Holocaust denial started in earnest. In 1947, Maurice Bardeche, a self-proclaimed fascist, was the first to maintain that the gas chambers that were said to have been used to exterminate Jews had been used, instead, only to disinfect clothing; that the evidence, including photos, documents and testimonies regarding the annihilations of Jews, had been falsified; and that whatever sufferings the Jews had experienced had been deserved, since they had been enemies of the German state.

But Bardeche's influence was sullied by his avowed fascism. It took the writings of Paul Rassinier to provide the Holocaust deniers with a more respectable source of argumentation. A former Communist member of the French Resistance, Rassinier had been interned in the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany. In 1948 he began to publish books in which he attacked the testimonies of survivors. Over the next two decades, as his anti-Semitism grew more strident, he claimed that the genocide was itself a myth; that the notion that the Germans had used gas chambers in the extermination camps (where he was never interned) was an invention of Zionists; that the Germans who had admitted to mass killings during their postwar trials had lied in the hope that by their admissions they would save their lives; and that many of the Jews who were said to have been killed -- more than a million of them -- had survived secretly in Central Asia, had managed to cross China and the Pacific, and had settled in the United States. Rassinier added that both the Zionists who spread the Holocaust myth and the historians, like Raul Hilberg, who wrote scholarly works promoting it, had one dominating motive: to turn Germany into a "cash cow" for Israel. Moreover, he maintained, the Jews used their control of the media and their financial and political power to spread their falsehoods.

Rassinier's arguments were influential not only in Europe but also in the United States. Some people on both sides of the Atlantic who sought to rehabilitate the image of Germany -- if not, openly, of fascism and anti-Semitism -- began to try to erase the Holocaust from history. The attempt by the American historian Harry Elmer Barnes, for one, to revise the commonly held view that Germany had started World War II was, as Ms. Lipstadt demonstrates very convincingly, an extension of the campaign that he had initiated two decades earlier to revise the commonly held view that Germany had started World War I. Eventually, Barnes moved from justifying Germany's prewar behavior during the 1930's to dismissing or distorting the evidence of German genocidal behavior during the war itself.

But it was left to another American, Austin J. App, a professor of English at the University of Scranton and La Salle College, to argue, in his 1973 pamphlet "The Six Million Swindle: Blackmailing the German People for Hard Marks with Fabricated Corpses," the central theses that would become the core of the deniers' arguments. Mr. App, a tireless defender of German policies even during the war, devoted much of his life in the subsequent three decades to challenging the idea that a genocide against the Jews ever took place. The Nazis, he insisted, never had a plan for exterminating the Jews: had the efficient Germans wanted to do so, he explained, no Jew would have survived the effort. Gas chambers were never used to kill Jews. Those Jews who died while in German hands were, in the main, killed justifiably and legally on the grounds that they were subversives, partisans or spies. Many of the Jews who were supposedly killed by the Germans were, in fact, killed as a result of Allied actions, such as bombings, or while they were in lands occupied by the Soviets. And the Germans have paid reparations to the Jews not because they were guilty of genocide but because they have been intimidated by "Talmudists" who seek to receive money for phony corpses. Mr. App dismissed all postwar testimonies by Nazis who admitted that they had participated in the mass killings of Jews as "outright frauds."

PROBABLY the most influential of American Holocaust deniers has been Arthur R. Butz, a professor of electrical engineering at Northwestern University. Mr. Butz's 1977 book, "The Hoax of the Twentieth Century," attracted widespread interest in part because, unlike most prior books and pamphlets denying the Holocaust, his featured many of the trappings of a scholarly work, including notes and acknowledgments. He argued that the documents said to prove that the Holocaust took place had been fabricated and that those pieces of evidence that might not be fabrications, such as Hitler's and Himmler's references to the extermination of the Jews, simply meant something other than what they obviously meant.

In the late 1970's, Holocaust revisionism was given active institutional form by the creation in Los Angeles of the Institute for Historical Review. In the most famous incident in which it was involved, recounted by Ms. Lipstadt in detail, the institute, seeking publicity, offered in 1979 to give a $50,000 reward to anyone who could prove that Jews had been gassed at Auschwitz. In response, an Auschwitz survivor, Mel Mermelstein, whose mother and sister had been gassed at that camp, and whose father and brother had been killed at an Auschwitz subcamp, sent the organization a declaration of his experiences in Auschwitz as well as the names of other eyewitnesses and scientific experts. Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi hunter, also responded to the institute's offer but withdrew when it rejected his proposal that a judge of the California Supreme Court preside over the case; Mr. Wiesenthal said that he would not accept a finding on the evidence he would present if that finding was made by persons chosen by the institute. Mr. Mermelstein, for his part, sued the institute for the reward. The Los Angeles County Superior Court ordered the institute to pay him the $50,000, as well as $40,000 for pain and suffering, and ordered it, in addition, to send a letter of apology to Mr. Mermelstein for the emotional distress caused him and all other Auschwitz survivors. It appears, however, that the institute has seen the Mermelstein case as having given Holocaust denial valuable publicity.

As the Mermelstein case illustrates, many of the deniers' efforts in recent years have been aimed at convincing people that gas chambers were not used by the Germans to kill Jews. Robert Faurisson, a French professor of literature, probably has developed this claim more actively than anyone else, and it was to his activities that Mr. Vidal-Naquet devoted much of his book. In the United States, this claim received particular attention during the Canadian trials, in 1984 and 1988, of Ernst Zundel, a German citizen who had Canadian immigrant status and who had disseminated neo-Nazi and Holocaust-denial materials. Although Mr. Faurisson testified as a witness in the first of Mr. Zundel's trials, more interesting was the testimony, in the second, of Fred A. Leuchter, who presented himself as an engineer who was expert in the construction and installation of execution apparatus.

Before that trial, Mr. Leuchter -- having concluded, following conversations with Mr. Faurisson, that it was impossible for the Germans to have used gassings to kill Jews -- traveled to Auschwitz and Majdanek, at Mr. Zundel's expense, to investigate the matter. In his findings -- issued by Mr. Zundel's publishing house as "The Leuchter Report: An Engineering Report on the Alleged Execution Gas Chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek, Poland" -- Mr. Leuchter argued that, based on his expert knowledge and investigations, there had never been homicidal gassings at those sites. Although, as Ms. Lipstadt notes, Holocaust deniers celebrated Mr. Leuchter's findings as a "historical event," the judge found his methodology "preposterous" and his expertise in several areas in which he testified nonexistent; indeed, he was not even an engineer. Moreover, the state of Massachusetts charged him with illegally practicing engineering, in response to which he agreed to stop presenting himself as a member of that profession.

What has motivated the work of the Holocaust deniers? The more industrious of them, after all, have spent decades toiling in archives looking for minor inconsistencies in the testimonies of survivors or others that they can then use to "prove" that the entire event never took place. They have written pamphlet after pamphlet, and book after book, in the attempt to convince the world that something that so obviously happened never happened. Why have they worked so hard to prove that all those Jews were never killed? It is not because they could not bear the thought of dead Jews. As Mr. Vidal-Naquet writes about Mr. Faurisson, "One revives the dead in order the better to strike the living" -- that is, in order to hurt the Jews who are still alive.

THE primary motivation for most deniers is anti-Semitism, and for them the Holocaust is an infuriatingly inconvenient fact of history. After all, the Holocaust has generally been recognized as one of the most terrible crimes that ever took place, and surely the very emblem of evil in the modern age. If that crime was a direct result of anti-Semitism taken to its logical end, then anti-Semitism itself, even when expressed in private conversation, is inevitably discredited among most people. What better way to rehabilitate anti-Semitism, make anti-Semitic arguments seem once again respectable in civilized discourse and even make it acceptable for governments to pursue anti-Semitic policies than by convincing the world that the great crime for which anti-Semitism was blamed simply never happened -- indeed, that it was nothing more than a frame-up invented by the Jews, and propagated by them through their control of the media? What better way, in short, to make the world safe again for anti-Semitism than by denying the Holocaust?

Remarkably, despite the existence of overwhelming evidence that the Holocaust really happened, and the repeated discrediting of the Holocaust deniers, they have managed to have their case presented in a variety of forums. To some extent, this success has been a product of an age that promotes the idea that every issue must have two sides, and that each side should be accorded equal respect in the marketplace of discussion. This approach to ideas is fostered by a number of current assumptions, increasingly popular in academia, regarding the indeterminacy of truth, as well as by the modern phenomenon of television talk shows and the journalistic ethos that no news story is complete unless all views about it are aired, including the most absurd and discredited. This ethos is captured crisply in Ms. Lipstadt's account of her refusal to participate in a debate with a Holocaust denier on a nationally televised show. "In one last attempt to get me to change my mind," Ms. Lipstadt recalls, the show's producer "asked me a question: 'I certainly don't agree with them, but don't you think our viewers should hear the other side?' "

But the success of the Holocaust deniers is also the product of an age in which the freedom to express views is confused with an obligation to facilitate their expression. During the last two years, Holocaust deniers have managed to get advertisements promoting their views published in numerous college newspapers in this country on the ground, sometimes voiced by university officials, that to stop them from doing so would be to muzzle free speech. As Ms. Lipstadt observes, the same universities that have insisted on the right of Holocaust deniers to publish their ads have established policies that would block the publication of ads likely to cause pain to racial minorities or women, not considering the pain that Holocaust denial causes to persons who have survived the Holocaust or who have lost loved ones in it.

Finally, the deniers' success is also, paradoxically but very profoundly, the result of our need for good news. I realized, as I was reading these books, and as I was immersing myself in the arguments of the deniers, that I was, at some level of fantasy, hoping that the deniers were right -- hoping that those millions of Jews had not been killed, that they were alive secretly in the United States or elsewhere. It would have made me happy to believe that the deep vein of sadness in my life caused by the knowledge that so many in my family had been gassed or shot, and that six million other Jews had been similarly murdered, was merely the product of a bad dream.

In a moment of reverie, and in the yearning to escape despair, one seizes on such a fantasy. But the devastating truth about the Holocaust is that it was a fact, not a dream. And the devastating truth about the Holocaust deniers is that they will go on using whatever falsehoods they can muster, and taking advantage of whatever vulnerabilities in an audience they can find, to argue, with skill and evil intent, that the Holocaust never happened. By being vigilant to these arguments we can all fight this second murder of the Jews -- fight it, and weep not only for the victims' mortality but also for the fragility, and mortality, of memory.