Denying the Holocaust

by Deborah E. Lipstadt

  Denial arguments have been voiced not only by politicians in the United States but by those in other countries as well. Extremist nationalist groups in those Central and Eastern Europe countries with a tradition of populist antisemitism have a particular attraction to Holocaust denial. Many of the precursors of these movements collaborated with the Nazis. Holocaust denial offers them a means of both wiping out that historical black mark—if there was no Holocaust then cooperating with the Nazis becomes less inexcusable—and rehabilitating those who were punished by Communists for collaborating. Since the fall of communism, deniers in North America and Western Europe have worked with like-minded groups in Eastern European countries to establish “mini” Institutes for Historical Review (referring to the California-based pseudo-academic institution that is the bastion of denial activities and publications). Their objective is to attract people, particularly intellectuals, who are seeking an extremist nationalism cleansed of taints of Nazism.17 Former Communist bloc countries are particularly susceptible to this strain of pseudo-history because postwar generations have learned virtually nothing about the specifically Jewish nature of Nazi atrocities. The Communists, engaging in their own form of revisionism, taught that it was the fascists (not Germans) who killed Communists (not Jews). The specifically Jewish facet of the tragedy was excised.

  While no politician has based his or her entire campaign on Holocaust denial, a number have used it when it was in their interest to do so. Croatian president Franjo Tudjman wrote of the “biased testimonies and exaggerated data” used to estimate the number of Holocaust victims. And in his book Wastelands—Historical Truth, he always places the word Holocaust in quotation marks.18 Tudjman has good historical reasons for doing so: Croatia was an ardent Nazi ally, and the vast majority of Croatian Jews and non-Jews were murdered by their fellow Croatians, not by Germans.19 Tudjman obviously believes that one of the ways for his country to win public sympathy is to diminish the importance of the Holocaust.

  It is likely that as Eastern Europe is increasingly beset by nationalist and internal rivalries, ethnic and political groups that collaborated in the annihilation of the Jews will fall back on Tudjman’s strategy of minimization. In Slovakia crowds of protesters at political gatherings have chanted antisemitic and anti-Czech slogans and waved portraits of Nazi war criminal Josef Tiso, who was directly involved in the deportation of Slovakian Jews to Auschwitz. In an effort to whitewash Tiso’s antisemitism during World War II and to resurrect him as a national hero, his speeches have been broadcast at these rallies. For Slovakian separatists Tiso’s regime constitutes the legal and moral precedent for a sovereign Slovakia. Neither Tudjman nor the Tiso protesters are engaged in overt denial. However, their efforts to diminish the magnitude of the deeds and roles of the central players are critically important aspects of Holocaust denial.20 There is a psychological dimension to the deniers’ and minimizers’ objectives: The general public tends to accord victims of genocide a certain moral authority. If you devictimize a people you strip them of their moral authority, and if you can in turn claim to be a victim, as the Poles and the Austrians often try to do, that moral authority is conferred on or restored to you.

  Holocaust denial, which has well-established roots in Western and Central Europe, has in recent years manifested itself throughout the world. The following brief survey demonstrates the breadth of the deniers’ activities, many of which shall be explored in greater depth in the chapters that follow.

  In 1992 a Belgian publisher of neo-Nazi material distributed thousands of pamphlets purporting to offer scientific proof that the gas chambers were a hoax. In 1988 in Britain over thirty thousand copies of Holocaust News, a newsletter which maintains that the Holocaust was a myth, were sent to Jewish communities in London, Glasgow, Newcastle, Birmingham, Cardiff, Norwich, and Leicester as well as to lawyers, schools, and members of Parliament throughout the country. (According to the Sunday Times, Holocaust News is published by the overtly racist British National party—which is composed of those who find the extremist National Front too mild. It campaigns for the repatriation of Jews and non-whites.)21

  In recent years Holocaust denial in England has undergone a disturbing new development. David Irving, the writer of popular historical works attempting to show that Britain made a tactical error in going to war against Germany and that the Allies and the Nazis were equally at fault for the war and its atrocities, has joined the ranks of the deniers, arguing that the gas chambers were a “propaganda exercise.”22 Irving, long considered a guru by the far right, does not limit his activities to England. He has been particularly active in Germany, where he has regularly participated in the annual meetings of the extremist German political party Deutsche Volks Union.23 In addition, he has frequently appeared at extremist-sponsored rallies, meetings, and beer hall gatherings. Irving’s self-described mission in Germany is to point “promising young men” throughout the country in the “right direction.” (Irving believes women were built for a “certain task, which is producing us [men],” and that they should be “subservient to men.”24 Apparently, therefore, he has no interest in pointing young women in the right direction.3*) Ironically, young Germans who are dedicated German nationalists find Irving and other non-German deniers particularly credible because they are not themselves Germans.25

  In France, Holocaust denial activities have centered around Robert Faurisson, a former professor of literature at the University of Lyons-2 whose work is often reprinted verbatim, both with and without attribution, by deniers worldwide. According to Faurisson the “so-called gassings” of Jews were a “gigantic politico-financial swindle whose beneficiaries are the state of Israel and international Zionism.” Its chief victims were the German people and the Palestinians.26 Faurisson’s area of specialization is the rather unique field of the “criticism of texts and documents, investigation of meaning and counter-meaning, of the true and the false.”27 There is a definite irony in his choice of field because Faurisson, whose methodologies have been adopted by virtually all other deniers, regularly creates facts where none exist and dismisses as false any information inconsistent with his preconceived conclusions. He asserts, for example, that the German army was given “Draconian orders” not to participate in “excesses” against civilians including the Jews; consequently, the massive killings of Jews could not have happened. In making this argument Faurisson simply ignores the activities of the Einsatzgruppen, the units responsible for killing vast numbers of Jews. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, one of Faurisson’s prime adversaries in France and someone who has studied him closely, observed that Faurisson is particularly adept at finding “an answer for everything” when encountering information that contradicts his claims. Faurisson interprets the Nazi decree which mandated that Jews wear a yellow star on pain of death as a measure to ensure the safety of German soldiers, because Jews, he argues, engaged in espionage, terrorism, black market operations, and arms trafficking. German soldiers needed a means to protect themselves against this formidable enemy. He even had an explanation as to why Jewish children were required to start wearing the star at age six: They too were engaged in “all sorts of illicit or resistance activities against the Germans” against which the soldiers had to be protected. Documents containing information that Faurisson cannot explain away or reinterpret, he falsifies. Regarding the brutal German destruction of the Warsaw ghetto, Faurisson wrote that in April 1943, “suddenly, right behind the front,” the Jews started an insurrection. The ghetto revolt, for which the Jews built seven hundred bunkers, was proof of the quite serious threat the Jews posed to German military security. Although it is true that the Jews started an insurrection, it was not right behind the front but hundreds of miles from it. Faurisson’s source for the information regarding the insurrection and the bunkers was a speech delivered in Posen in October 1943 by the Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler. But even Himmler was more honest than Faurisson: He described the uprisings as taking place in Warsaw and in “territories in the rear.”2
8

  Faurisson has not worked alone in France. In June 1985 the University of Nantes awarded a doctoral degree to a Faurisson protégé, Henri Roques, for a dissertation accusing Kurt Gerstein, one of those who transmitted the news of the gas chambers to the Allies, of being a “master magician” who created an illusion that the world accepted as fact.29 Implicitly denying the existence of the gas chambers, Roques tried to prove that Gerstein’s reports were so laden with inconsistencies that he could not possibly have witnessed gassings at Belzec, as he maintained. There exist a variety of official documents and testimonies attesting to Gerstein’s presence at these gassings. Roques, adhering to his mentor’s pattern of ignoring any document that contradicts his preexisting conclusions, simply excluded this material from his dissertation.30 (After a public uproar Roques’ doctoral degree was revoked by the French minister of higher education in 1986.31)

  Though Faurisson and most of his admirers are on the political right, they and their activities have been abetted by an extreme left-wing revolutionary group, La Vieille Taupe (The Old Mole).32 Originally a bookstore, it has become a publishing house that shelters an informal coterie of revolutionary types. Under the direction of its proprietor, Pierre Guillaume, it has distributed periodicals, cassettes, comic books, journals, and broadsheets all attesting to the Holocaust hoax. Guillaume is France’s leading publisher of neo-Nazi material. Twenty-four hours after the Klaus Barbie trial began in France, the first issue of Annals of Historical Revisionism, a journal edited by Guillaume and containing articles by Faurisson, was distributed for sale to Paris bookstores and kiosks.33

  Suggestions of Holocaust denial have come from French political figures as well. The leader of the far right National Front, Jean Marie Le Pen, declared in 1987 that the gas chambers were a mere “detail” of World War II. In a radio interview he asserted that he had never seen any gas chambers and that historians had doubts about their existence. “Are you trying to tell me [the existence of gas chambers] is a revealed truth that everyone has to believe?” Le Pen asked rhetorically. “There are historians who are debating such questions.”34 Le Pen, who has complained that there are too many Jews in the French media, is considered the leader of Europe’s extreme right. A charismatic speaker, he has exploited French fears about the immigration of Arabs from North Africa and has espoused the kind of right-wing antisemitism associated with the Dreyfus affair. Popular support for Le Pen in France has been as high as 17 percent. In the 1988 presidential election he received 14.4 percent of the popular vote, coming in fourth overall.35

  Shades of Holocaust denial were evident at the Klaus Barbie trial when defense attorneys, attempting to diminish the significance of the Holocaust, argued that forcing people into gas chambers was no different from killing people in a war, and that it was no more of a crime to murder millions of Jews because they were Jews than it was to fight against Algerians, Vietnamese, Africans, or Palestinians who were attempting to free themselves from foreign rule.36 These slight-of-hand attempts at moral equivalence constitute a basic tactic of those who hover on the periphery of Holocaust denial. (See chapter 11 for an analysis of Holocaust relativism in Germany.)

  In 1978 Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, Vichy France’s commissioner of Jewish affairs and the person responsible for coordinating the deportation of Vichy Jews to death camps, told the French weekly L’Express that the Nazi genocide was a typical Jewish hoax. “There was no genocide—you must get that out of your head.” Expressing the standard denier’s explanation for this hoax, he charged that the Jews’ aim was to “make Jerusalem the capital of the world.” The rather ambiguous headline of the article, which ran without any editorial comments, was “Only Lice Were Gassed in Auschwitz.”37 Leon Degrelle, the leader of the World War II fascist movement in Belgium and a Nazi collaborator, called on the European right to accept neo-Nazis as honorable allies. He also wrote an “Open Letter to the Pope about Auschwitz,” informing the Polish-born cleric, who had witnessed the war at close range, that there were no gas chambers or mass annihilation in Hitler’s Third Reich and that Jews who had been killed were actually murdered by American and British bombings.38

  But one does not have to be a committed neo-Nazi to be receptive to deniers’ arguments. In Paris, in an interview with the leftist monthly Le Globe, Claude Autant-Lara, one of France’s most acclaimed film directors and at the time a member of the European parliament, described the Holocaust as a legend “stuffed” with lies and claimed that France was in the hands of a left-wing cabal dominated by Jewish internationalists and cosmopolitans.39

  In Austria, where the Kurt Waldheim affair uncovered hidden antisemitism, Holocaust denial has been centered around a number of neo-Nazi publications including the newspaper Sieg, which states that the number of Jews who died under Nazi rule was less than two hundred thousand.40 The publisher, Walter Ochensberger, has been repeatedly convicted by Austrian courts for the crime of “incitement.” During lecture tours in various countries including the United States, he has preached the doctrine of denial.41 The publisher of another neo-Nazi denial magazine, Halt, was indicted for Holocaust denial activities.42 In addition to Seig and Halt, denial publications targeted at schoolchildren have appeared in Austria.43 Since the late 1980s the American Ku Klux Klan has established groups in both Germany and Austria. These groups have added Holocaust denial to their traditional racist extremism.44

  In certain parts of Europe, Holocaust denial has found its way into the general population. In the fall of 1992 a public opinion poll in Italy, where a wide array of denial publications have appeared, revealed that close to 10 percent of the Italian population believe the Holocaust never happened.45

  Denial arguments have permeated the work of those who would not describe themselves as deniers. An English play entitled Perdition charged that Zionist leaders both during and after the war were a separate class of rich capitalists who betrayed the Jewish masses to the Nazis. The playwright described the Holocaust as a “cozy set of family secrets, skeletons in closets.” In a key passage, the leading character charges that Jews who died in Auschwitz “were murdered, not just by the force of German arms but by calculated treachery of their own Jewish leaders.”46 Though the play did not deny the Holocaust, the result was the same: The perpetrators were absolved and the victims held responsible.

  But it has not only been Europe that has witnessed this phenomenon. Since 1965, Holocaust denial material has been available throughout Latin America. In Brazil, much of it has been released by a publishing house specializing in Portuguese-language antisemitic materials. This publisher recently claimed that within four years of publication, one of its denial books had appeared in twenty-eight editions and was read by two hundred thousand people. (Though the figures may be highly inflated, the publisher did boost sales by offering bookstore owners extremely generous terms, allowing them to keep half the cover price as opposed to the usual 30 percent, and giving them 120 days to pay, a major benefit in a country with a 40 percent monthly inflation rate. Obviously, profit was not the publisher’s primary motive.47) Holocaust deniers have also been active in Argentina, Mexico, Chile, and Peru.

  In Australia and New Zealand, Holocaust denial has adopted a particularly deceptive guise. The Australian League of Rights, camouflaging its intentions behind a facade of defending civil liberties, is in fact an ardently antisemitic organization. Its bookstore sells an array of traditional antisemitic works, including denial tracts, and its leader, John Bennett, has called the Holocaust a “gigantic lie” designed to foster support for Israel. Under him the League of Rights has brought prominent deniers and neo-Nazis to Australia, including Fred Leuchter, the self-described “engineer” and gas chamber expert who claims to have conducted scientific tests at Auschwitz and Majdanek proving that the gas chambers there could not have functioned as homicidal killing units. (For an analysis of Leuchter’s report see chapter 9 and the Appendix). The league’s meetings have been addressed by an assortment of Holocaust deniers, includ
ing hard core Nazis and representatives of the California-based Institute for Historical Review. When Leuchter was in Australia, he was interviewed on the radio and given other significant media coverage. The league, which uses conspiracy theories to attract economically vulnerable members of the working class, informed unemployed timber workers that their jobs had been lost because Jewish bankers had taken over their forests and lands.48 The Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission describes the league as the most “influential and effective as well as the best-organized and most substantially financed racist organization in Australia.”49

  New Zealand has its own League of Rights whose activities approximate those of its Australian counterpart. Because these leagues do not have the same offensive public image that some of the more blatantly antisemitic and neo-Nazi groups do, they have been more successful at winning popular support. By projecting an image of being committed to the defense of free speech, these pseudo-human rights organizations have attracted followers who would normally shun neo-Nazi and overtly antisemitic organizations and activities. The manner in which they obfuscate and camouflage their agenda is the tactic Holocaust deniers will increasingly adopt in the future. It is part of the movement’s strategy to infiltrate the mainstream.