Arno J. Mayer
Arno J. Mayer (born 19 June 1926) is a Jewish Marxist historian.
Mayer's family fled to the United States before the German invasion of Luxembourg in 1940. In 1944, he was drafted into the United States Army and served as an intelligence officer.
As a historian, arguing from a Marxist viewpoint, he has claimed that the WWI and WWII period ultimately resulted from a class struggle, claiming that the aristocracy in all of the European countries held far too much power, and it was their efforts to keep power that led to World War I, the rise of fascism, World War II, and the Holocaust.
Some of his views have been considered somewhat politically incorrect, such as supposedly focusing too heavily on National Socialist anti-Communism at the expense of a more politically correct focus on anti-Semitism. Also, controversy arouse from a book where some parts of the general public first learned of the Holocaust functionalist view.
Not a Holocaust revisionist, some of his statements on the Holocaust have regardless caused controversy, such as "Sources for the study of the gas chambers are at once rare and unreliable … there is no denying the many contradictions, ambiguities, and errors in the existing sources."
