In order to maintain their facade as a group whose only objective is the pursuit of truth, the deniers have filled their publications with articles that ostensibly have nothing to do with World War II but are designed to demonstrate that theirs is a global effort to attack and revise historical falsehoods. Articles on the Civil War, World War I, and Pearl Harbor are included in their journals as a means of illustrating how establishment historians, with ulterior political motives, have repeatedly put forward distorted views of history. The deniers aim to undermine readers’ faith in “orthodox” historians’ commitment to transmitting the truth. They argue that this tactic of distortion by “court historians” for political means reached its zenith in the Holocaust “myth.”
What claims do the deniers make? The Holocaust—the attempt to annihilate the Jewish people—never happened. Typical of the deniers’ attempt to obfuscate is their claim that they do not deny that there was a Holocaust, only that there was a plan or an attempt to annihilate the Jewish people.75 They have distorted and deconstructed the definition of the term Holocaust. But this and all the ancillary claims that accompany it are embedded in a series of other arguments. They begin with a relatively innocuous supposition: War is evil. Assigning blame to one side is ultimately a meaningless enterprise. Since the central crime of which the Nazis are accused never happened, there really is no difference in this war, as in any other, between victor and vanquished.76 Still, they assert, if guilt is to be assigned, it is not the Germans who were guilty of aggression and atrocities during the war. The real crimes against civilization were committed by the Americans, Russians, Britons, and French against the Germans. The atrocities inflicted on the Germans by the Allies were—in the words of Harry Elmer Barnes, a once-prominent historian and one of the seminal figures in the history of North American Holocaust denial—“more brutal and painful than the alleged exterminations in the gas chambers.”77 Once we recognize that the Allies were the aggressors, we must turn to the Germans and, in the words of Austin App, a professor of English literature who became one of the major “theoreticians” of Holocaust denial, implore them “to forgive us the awful atrocities our policy caused to be inflicted upon them.”78
For some deniers Hitler was a man of peace, pushed into war by the aggressive Allies.79 According to them, the Germans suffered the bombing of Dresden, wartime starvation, invasions, postwar population transfers from areas of Germany incorporated into post-war Poland, victors’ vengeance at Nuremberg, and brutal mistreatment by Soviet and Allied occupiers. Portrayed as a criminal nation that had committed outrageous atrocities, Germany became and remains a victim of the world’s emotional and scholarly aggression.
But it is showing the Holocaust to have been a myth that is the deniers’ real agenda. They contend that the ultimate injustice is the false accusation that Germans committed the most henious crime in human history. The postwar venom toward Germany has been so extreme that Germans have found it impossible to defend themselves. Consequently, rather than fight this ignominious accusation, they decided to acknowledge their complicity. This seeming contradiction—namely that the perpetrators admit they committed a crime while those who were not present exonerate them—presents a potential problem for the deniers. How can a group that did not witness what happened claim that the perpetrators are innocent while the perpetrators acknowledge their guilt? The deniers explain this problem away by arguing that in the aftermath of World War II the Germans faced a strategic conflict. In order to be readmitted to the “family of nations,” they had to confess their wrongdoing, even though they knew that these charges were false. They were in the same situation as a defendant who has been falsely convicted of committing horrendous crimes. He knows he will be more likely to receive a lenient sentence if he admits his guilt, shows contrition, and makes amends. So too the innocent Germans admitted their guilt and made (and continue to make) financial amends.
The defendants at the war crimes trials adopted a similar strategy. They admitted that the Holocaust happened but tried to vindicate themselves by claiming they were not personally guilty. Arthur Butz, a professor of electrical engineering at Northwestern University, is the denier who has most fully developed this theory of what I call incrimination to avoid self-incrimination. (For a fuller treatment of this see chapter 7.)
Deniers acknowledge that some Jews were incarcerated in places such as Auschwitz, but, they maintain, as they did at the trial of a Holocaust denier in Canada, it was equipped with “all the luxuries of a country club,” including a swimming pool, dance hall, and recreational facilities.80 Some Jews may have died, they said, but this was the natural consequence of wartime deprivations.6*
The central assertion for the deniers is that Jews are not victims but victimizers. They “stole” billions in reparations, destroyed Germany’s good name by spreading the “myth” of the Holocaust, and won international sympathy because of what they claimed had been done to them. In the paramount miscarriage of injustice, they used the world’s sympathy to “displace” another people so that the state of Israel could be established.81 This contention relating to the establishment of Israel is a linchpin of their argument. It constitutes a motive for the creation of the Holocaust “legend” by the Jews. Once the deniers add this to the equation, the essential elements of their argument are in place.
Some have a distinct political objective: If there was no Holocaust, what is so wrong with national socialism? It is the Holocaust that gives fascism a bad name. Extremist groups know that every time they extol the virtues of national socialism they must contend with the question: If it was so benign, how was the Holocaust possible? Before fascism can be resurrected, this blot must be removed. At first they attempted to justify it; now they deny it. This is the means by which those who still advocate the principles of fascism attempt to reintroduce it as a viable political system (see chapter 6). For many falsifiers this, not antisemitism, is their primary agenda. It is certainly a central theme for the European deniers on the emerging far right.
When one first encounters them it is easy to wonder who could or would take them seriously. Given the preponderance of evidence from victims, bystanders, and perpetrators, and given the fact that the deniers’ arguments lie so far beyond the pale of scholarly argument, it appears to be ludicrous to devote much, if any, mental energy to them. They are a group motivated by a strange conglomeration of conspiracy theories, delusions, and neo-Nazi tendencies. The natural inclination of many rational people, including historians and social scientists, is to dismiss them as an irrelevant fringe group. Some have equated them with the flat-earth theorists, worthy at best of bemused attention but not of serious analysis or concern. They regard Holocaust denial as quirky and malicious but do not believe it poses a clear and present danger.
There are a number of compelling reasons not to dismiss the deniers and their beliefs so lightly. First, their methodology has changed in the past decade. Initially Holocaust denial was an enterprise engaged in by a small group of political extremists. Their arguments tended to appear in poorly printed pamphlets and in right-wing newspapers such as the Spotlight, Thunderbolt, or the Ku Klux Klan’s Crusader. In recent years, however, their productivity has increased, their style has changed, and, consequently, their impact has been enhanced. They disguise their political and ideological agendas.82 Their subterfuge enhances the danger they pose. Their publications, including the Journal of Historical Review—the leading denial journal—mimic legitimate scholarly works, generating confusion among those who (like the Yale history student) do not immediately recognize the Journal’s intention. Their books and journals have been given an academic format, and they have worked hard to find ways to insinuate themselves into the arena of historical deliberation. One of the primary loci of their activities is the college campus, where they have tried to stimulate a debate on the existence of the Holocaust. It is here that they may find their most fertile field, as is evident from the success they have had in placing advertisements t
hat deny the Holocaust in college newspapers (see chapter 10). They have also begun to make active use of computer bulletin boards, where they post their familiar arguments. Certain computer networks have been flooded with their materials. Their objective is to plant seeds of doubt that will bear fruit in coming years, when there are no more survivors or eyewitnesses alive to attest to the truth.
There is an obvious danger in assuming that because Holocaust denial is so outlandish it can be ignored. The deniers’ worldview is no more bizarre than that enshrined in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a report purporting to be the text of a secret plan to establish Jewish world supremacy.83 The deniers draw inspiration from the Protocols, which has enjoyed a sustained and vibrant life despite the fact it has long been proved a forgery.
Many years ago the prominent German historian Theodor Mommsen warned that it would be a mistake to believe that reason alone was enough to keep people from believing such falsehoods. If this were the case, he said, then racism, antisemitism, and other forms of prejudice would find no home. To expect rational dialogue to constitute the sole barriers against the attempts to deny the Nazi annihilation of European Jewry would be to ignore one of the ultimate lessons of the event itself: Reasoned dialogue has a limited ability to withstand an assault by the mythic power of falsehood, especially when that falsehood is rooted in an age-old social and cultural phenomenon. There was no rational basis to the Nazi atrocities. There was, however, the mythic appeal of antisemitism. Hitler and the Nazis understood this. Mythical thinking and the force of the irrational have a strange and compelling allure for the educated and uneducated alike. Intellectuals in Nazi Germany were not immune from irrational, mystical thinking. So, too, among the deniers.
The vast majority of intellectuals in the Western world have not fallen prey to these falsehoods. But some have succumbed in another fashion, supporting Holocaust denial in the name of free speech, free inquiry, or intellectual freedom. An absolutist commitment to the liberal idea of dialogue may cause its proponents to fail to recognize that there is a significant difference between reasoned dialogue and anti-intellectual pseudoscientific arguments. They have failed to make the critical distinction between a conclusion, however outrageous it may be, that has been reached through reasonable inquiry and the use of standards of evidence, on the one hand, and ideological extremism that rejects anything that contradicts its preset conclusions, on the other. Thomas Jefferson long ago argued that in a setting committed to the pursuit of truth all ideas and opinions must be tolerated. But he added a caveat that is particularly applicable to this investigation: Reason must be left free to combat error.84 One of the ways of combating errors is by making the distinctions between scholarship and myth. In the case of Holocaust denial, we are dealing with people who consciously confuse these categories. As a result reason becomes hostage to a particularly odious ideology.
Reasoned dialogue, particularly as it applies to the understanding of history, is rooted in the notion that there exists a historical reality that—though it may be subjected by the historian to a multiplicity of interpretations—is ultimately found and not made.85 The historian does not create, the historian uncovers. The validity of a historical interpretation is determined by how well it accounts for the facts. Though the historian’s role is to act as a neutral observer trying to follow the facts, there is increasing recognition that the historian brings to this enterprise his or her own values and biases. Consequently there is no such thing as value-free history. However, even the historian with a particular bias is dramatically different from the proponents of these pseudoreasoned ideologies. The latter freely shape or create information to buttress their convictions and reject as implausible any evidence that counters them. They use the language of scientific inquiry, but theirs is a purely ideological enterprise.
This absolutist commitment to free inquiry and the power of irrational mythical thinking at least partially explain how the deniers have managed to find defenders among various establishment figures and institutions. Even the supposed protectors of Western liberal ideals of reasoned dialogue can fall prey to the absolutist notion that all arguments are equally legitimate arenas of debate. By arguing that the deniers’ views, however ugly, must be given a fair hearing, they take a positive Western value to an extremist end. They fail to recognize that the deniers’ contentions are a composite of claims founded on racism, extremism, and virulent antisemitism. The issue is not interpretation: The challenge presented by the deniers is whether disinformation should be granted the same status and intellectual privileges as real history.
I reiterate that I am not advocating the muzzling of the deniers. They have the right to free speech, however abhorrent. However, they are using that right not as a shield, as it was intended by the Constitution, but as a sword. There is a qualitative difference between barring someone’s right to speech and providing him or her with a platform from which to deliver a message. Quick to exploit this situation, the deniers have engaged in a calculated manipulation of two principles dear to Americans: free speech and the search for historical truth.
In the pages that follow I shall examine both the modus operandi of Holocaust denial and the impact it has had on contemporary culture. I undertake this task with some hesitation, since readers might wonder how marginal the deniers can be if historians do not simply dismiss them. Does scholars’ attention suggest that they are not merely falsifiers? Does research on them give them the publicity they crave?7* Indeed, deniers are quick to pounce joyfully on any discussion of their work as evidence of the serious consideration their views are receiving. In 1981 President Reagan, speaking at the official commemoration of the Days of Remembrance of the Holocaust, related how “horrified” he was to learn that there were people who claimed that the Holocaust was an invention. In its newsletter the Institute for Historical Review, the leading disseminator of Holocaust denial material, cited the president’s comments to demonstrate Holocaust denial’s “vibrancy” and “just how far Revisionism has come since our founding”86—a response reminiscent of the witticism: I don’t care what they say about me as long as they say something.
The deniers understand how to gain respectability for outrageous and absolutely false ideas. The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins has described how this process operates in the academic arena. Professor X publishes a theory despite the fact that reams of documented information contradict his conclusions. In the “highest moral tones” he expresses his disregard for all evidence that sheds doubt on his findings. He engages in ad hominem attacks on those who have authored the critical works in this field and on the people silly enough to believe them. The scholars who have come under attack by this professor are provoked to respond. Before long he has become “the controversial Prof. X” and his theory is discussed seriously by nonprofessionals, that is, journalists. He soon becomes a familiar figure on television and radio, where he “explains” his ideas to interviewers who cannot challenge him or demonstrate the fallaciousness of his argument.87
While we not have yet descended to the point at which respectful reviews of denial literature appear in Time, Newsweek, or The New Yorker, virtually all else has evolved as Sahlins described. Normal and accepted standards of scholarship, including the proper use of evidence, are discarded. What remains, in the word of this eminent anthropologist, is a “scandal.”
The danger that my research might inadvertently give the deniers a certain stature is not my only cause for trepidation. Another more serious problem is inherent in the process of refuting the deniers. It is possible, as the French historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet has observed, that in the course of answering the deniers an “exterminationist” school will be created in opposition to the “revisionist” one.88 Such was the case when radio and television producers wondered why I wouldn’t talk to the “other side.” Deniers have, in fact, already taken to calling those who do research on the Holocaust “exterminationists.”
Despite these dangers I have undertaken thi
s work for a number of reasons. First, denial of an individual’s or a group’s persecution, degradation, and suffering is the ultimate cruelty—on some level worse than the persecution itself. Those who have not experienced the Holocaust or the sting of antisemitism may find it difficult to understand the vulnerability it endangers in the victim. So, too, those who have never experienced racism cannot fully grasp the pain and anger it causes. This book is, in part, an attempt to convey the pain the deniers inflict. In writing it I have often found myself angry with them despite the facts that they live in a strange mental wonderland and that neither they nor the nonsense they spread are worthy of my anger. Although we do not take their conclusions seriously, contradictory as it may sound, we must make their method the subject of study. We must do so not because of the inherent value of their ideas but because of the fragility of reason and society’s susceptibility to such farfetched notions. Many powerful movements have been founded by people living in similar irrational wonderlands, national socialism foremost among them.
I have also delved into this distasteful topic because of my conviction that only when society—particularly that portion of society committed to intellectual inquiry—comprehends the full import of this group’s intentions will there be any hope that history will not be reshaped to fit a variety of pernicious motives. Time need not be wasted in answering each and every one of the deniers’ contentions. It would be a never-ending effort to respond to arguments posed by those who falsify findings, quote out of context, and dismiss reams of testimony because it counters their arguments. It is the speciousness of their arguments, not the arguments themselves, that demands a response. The way they confuse and distort is what I wish to demonstrate; above all, it is essential to expose the illusion of reasoned inquiry that conceals their extremist views.
Denying the Holocaust Page 4