Arno Mayer's book opens with "A Personal Preface" telling of his own hair-raising escape from Luxembourg and occupied France, and of the fate of his grandfather, who refused to leave Luxembourg and died in Theresienstadt. Such personal bona fides didn't prevent the Anti-Defamation League from including Mayer in its 1993 "Hitler's Apologists: The Anti-Semitic Propaganda of Holocaust Revisionism", where his work is cited as an example of "legitimate historical scholarship which relativizes the genocide of the Jews." Mayer's crime is to "have argued, with no apparent anti-Semitic motivation"—- note how the absence of evidence itself becomes incriminating—- "that though millions of Jews were killed during WWII, there was actually no premeditated policy for this destruction."