The notions that the Third Reich was too efficient for any Jews to have escaped, and that it could have killed them all if it wanted to, became standard components of deniers’ arguments.22 The fallacious logic of App’s argument was obvious, however. Nazi Germany was a relatively efficient society, but this efficiency was not unlimited nor was every goal the regime set for itself realized: Nazi Germany lost the war. Neither was it realized with regard to the Jews: Denmark and Bulgaria saved their Jews. And many Jews fought in partisan units, and thousands were held in concentration camps throughout the war.
But there is something even more disturbing about App’s argument than its sublime illogic and cruelty. The horrific implications of his claim become evident when we locate the assumptions of his argument. Scholars often focus on the scientific and technological aspects of the horror and on its unimagined and unimaginable scale. These, as we have seen, are the things that strain credibility and so require the largest leap of faith. But, as the theologian Richard Rubenstein has observed, the greatest horror of Nazi Germany was its breaching of a moral barrier of social organization. It was this inhuman social organization that enabled the Nazis to realize their goal of annihilating masses of Jews with such technologically advanced instruments.23 Thus, because they made the latter possible the bureaucratic achievements of the Nazis were more frightening than the technological ones.
Max Weber, writing long before the evolution of Nazism, understood the potential power of bureaucracy in social organization. According to Weber bureaucracy is valued the more it is absolutely dehumanized. The more successfully it eliminated emotions from its official business the more “perfect” it became. The absolute bureaucratic organization demanded optimum precision, unity, unambiguity, knowledge of the files, and strict subordination.24 Weber also understood that bureaucracies rarely, if ever, achieve this level of efficiency although that is their aim. The Nazis were keenly aware of the critical role the bureaucratic mechanism could play in allowing them to realize their plans. They knew that just as Weber taught, they had to demand complete “dehumanization” from their system if they were to realize their goals. They may not have achieved an ideally operating bureaucratic system but not for lack of trying. Consequently some Jews may have survived. Ironically, then, in App’s attempt to defend Nazi Germany from the standpoint of its bureaucratic efficiency, he pinpointed its essential horror.
By 1973 App’s fully evolved Holocaust denial was laid out in his pamphlet, The Six Million Swindle: Blackmailing the German People for Hard Marks with Fabricated Corpses. His use of the term swindle in the title is another of his not so subtle attempts to link his Holocaust hoax arguments to traditional antisemitic imagery. In the pamphlet App explained that the Holocaust hoax was a plot jointly inspired and nurtured by Communists and Jews. In the late 1950s he had argued that the “utterly unsubstantiated” claims of six million dead worked only to benefit the Reds.25 According to App the Soviets had a very good motive for participating in this hoax: They wished to hide the grim fact that more Jews had come to “grief” in Stalin-controlled territory than in Nazi-occupied lands. Whatever atrocities had occurred were committed by the Soviets themselves, not the Nazis. The Holocaust hoax conveniently allowed them to shift the blame onto the Germans.
But the Soviets were not in this alone. App charged that “Talmudic” leaders were well aware of the “horrid truth” that the atrocity charges had been fabricated and the Germans innocent. But if the Jews knew this why did (and do) they go along with it? What was (and is) their motive for blaming Germany if they know the USSR was really responsible? App offered a simple and, for those inclined toward antisemitism, completely logical answer. These Jews knew the truth but did not publicize it for a practical reason: The Bolsheviks could not be successfully blackmailed for reparations for “either real or fabricated corpses.”26 As long as money was their ultimate objective, blaming the USSR served no purpose. Germany, on the other hand, had both the financial ability and the political inclination to pay in order to remove the stain from its reputation. In an article in American Mercury entitled “The Elusive Six Million,” App elaborated on this point and accused Zionists, of wanting to “use the figure of six million vindictively as an eternal club for pressuring indemnities out of West Germany and for wringing financial contributions out of American Jews.”27 The Zionists—who were, according to App, identical with the Bolsheviks in terms of their propensity for evil—thus emerge as the main force behind the Holocaust myth.1* In The Six Million Swindle, written shortly after the Yom Kippur War, App left no doubt as to the Jews’ rationale. “The Talmudists have from the beginning used the six million swindle to blackmail West Germany into ‘atoning’ with the twenty billion dollars of indemnities to Israel.”28 (App exaggerated wildly. The actual sum Germany paid to Israel was $110 million. Far larger sums were paid to individuals.29) Moreover, he claimed, Israel and its supporters continued to use the “fradulent six million casualty” to achieve their political and military objectives.
It was “secret unacknowlege[sic] guilt” that caused the United States to side with Israel in the Arab-Israeli War of 1973. Here too is another basic flaw in App’s reasoning. According to him the U.S. government played a pivotal role in fostering the notion of the hoax. Why would the government be motivated to act by unacknowledged guilt when it knew the charges were a hoax? For App all claims of Israel’s importance to American security were nothing but “hogwash and hypocrisy.” For him Israel was a “millstone about America’s neck and we and Germany are its feedtrough.”30 Israel manipulated public opinion in America and Germany by exploiting the myth of the Holocaust denial. In 1974 App returned to this theme, tying together its essential elements. He argued that at least five hundred thousand of the Jews who were supposedly gassed in German concentration camps were actually in Israel, where they received “huge” reparations from Germany. Other putative victims were really in New York, where they had helped precipitate the 1973 energy crisis by “blackmailing” Nixon into rushing several billion dollars’ worth of weaponry to Israel so it could “clobber” the Arabs. The “Talmudists” had a secret ally in their efforts to manipulate foreign policy: the media. Jews used “their media,” which for App included, among others, the New York Times, Washington Post, and Newsweek, to cry themselves “hoarse” because the Arabs refused to sell oil to the West.31 App was not the first to link Jewish control of the media to the Holocaust hoax—Rassinier had done so previously—but App made it a central element of his argument. He repeatedly returned to the theme of Jewish domination of the media.32 It was through their domination of the press that Jews had been able not only to perpetrate this hoax but subsequently to control the foreign and domestic policies of nations around the world. This theme of Jewish control of the media was a traditional component of modern antisemitism. At the core of antisemitism from the far-right end of the political spectrum was the image of the Jews as a permanent source of unrest and revolutionary zeal in society.33 According to these antisemites the media was one of the primary tools Jews used to foster that unrest. They ignored the paradox inherent in this accusation. If Jews controlled the media why did it treat Nazi Germany’s persecution of the Jews in such a lackadaisical fashion during the 1930s and 1940s.
Though App identified the main force behind the Holocaust hoax as the “Talmudists and Bolsheviks,” he believed there was another participant in the spread of this slander. At the end of the war, when the Americans and British “invaded” Germany, they saw the results of their indiscriminate bombing. The Allies knew, App wrote, that they had been responsible for more destruction than any “vandals of history except the Bolsheviks.” Recognizing that their people would not understand or condone the “unnecessary barbarism,” Allied leaders needed something that would save them from the condemnation that was sure to come. It was then, according to App, that they discovered that their only “salvation” was to “manufacture” and “harp on a mountain of atrocities,” particularly tho
se against the Jews. Harping on Jews as victims was particularly efficacious for the Allied leaders because, App explained, Jews controlled the media and the media would play a critically important role in disseminating the hoax. And their plan worked. They exaggerated real and phony Third Reich atrocities to such monstrous proportions that Allied crimes were totally ignored. They then took matters a step further by instilling such a guilt complex in Germany that the Germans felt compelled to pay unprecedented sums of reparations to Jews and Israel.34
But even when he linked the Holocaust hoax to the Allies’ need for a camouflage in which to hide their own outrages, App did not absolve the “Talmudist leaders.” In fact, he maintained that the Jews were ultimately responsible for Allied actions and actually controlled Allied policy. This leap enabled him to argue that Soviet and American atrocities against the German people were the result of Jewish influence. App focused on the two people he considered responsible for these atrocities. Not surprisingly, both of them were Jews. American Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau and Ilya Ehrenburg, a member of the Soviet Antifascist Committee, were to blame for the Soviet soldiers’ rape of German women and plunder of German property. App argued, without offering a shred of proof, that Ehrenburg personally urged Soviet soldiers to commit rape, against the German people. (Ehrenburg did call for vengeance but not for rape.) This vindicative Jewish Communist supposedly gave the most “beastly directive in history: Rape the German women as booty!” Similarly, App blamed virtually every American action against the Germans on Henry Morgenthau. It is true that Morgenthau, after learning of the horrors of the German annihilation of the Jews, proposed that in the postwar period Germany be converted into a country that was primarily agricultural and pastoral in character.35 As we have seen, the plan was never seriously considered and was subsequently completely abandoned by President Truman. But App claimed that the plan had been put into effect, at least in part. He contended that Morgenthau not only bribed Churchill to stiffen the treatment of German prisoners of war but also inspired the Allies to starve and “abuse-unto-death” several million of these prisoners. This was obviously a Jewish plot, App argued, because “Christians at their worst are not as barbarous as Communists and Jews at their average.”36 Thus, when the Jews saw that the Allies were going to deal leniently with the Germans in the postwar period, they went into action. According to App the American army was planning to allow the German prisoners to be repatriated as soon as possible after the war. But this did not happen despite the fact that it was what the army leadership and “our Christian citizens” wanted. App had a simple explanation as to how the “tribalists” were able to prevent it. They kept “screeching the lie that the Germans ‘gassed’ 6,000,000 of them. It was the Jews who kept screaming for abusing German prisoners of war, for keeping them from home, for slave-laboring them. . . . This is the voice of the Talmudists, the barbarians of the Morgenthau Plan!”37
As his rhetoric about the Jewish role in directing Allied policy escalated, the two became fused in his mind. No longer did he even speak of the Jews’ ability to direct Allied policy. For App, Allied tactics and the Jews’ objectives became one: Allied policy, at its worst, was Jewish policy. This is most evident at the end of A Straight Look at the Third Reich. Immediately after discussing Allied atrocities, without any indication that the subject of his diatribe had changed, App wrote:
Not finding the Nazis guilty of real war crimes at all commensurate with the monstrous ones of the victors, they resorted to the only alternative open to hypocrites and liars namely to fabricate a mass atrocity. This they did with the legend of the six million Jews “gassed.” . . . This is a fabrication and swindle.38
Allied policymakers and Jewish leaders had become one and the same to App. He then fell back on the same approach that Harry Elmer Barnes had utilized, accusing those behind the hoax of “smear terroriz[ing]” and branding as an antisemite anyone who tried to investigate this myth in a scholarly fashion.39
It was not by chance that App relied on the New Testament phrase “hypocrites and liars” to describe Jews. In fact it served two purposes for him: It was a means of drawing on antisemitic imagery that would resonate with many non-Jews. Moreover, for him the Jews of the twentieth century who perpetrated this hoax were essentially the same as the New Testament Jews who were depicted as crucifiers of Jesus. In the forward to the 1975 edition of his collected letters, App noted that just as his letters failed to ease Germany’s fate and prevent the atrocity stories from gaining currency, so too Jesus of Nazareth was unable to prevent his crucifixion. But that did not mean that either Jesus’ or App’s struggle was wrong. Both these martyrs were defeated by the same adversaries. App implied that the ancestors of the “World War Talmudists” had crucified Jesus, and now their descendants thwarted those who wished to tell the truth.2*
By the end of The Six Million Swindle App had fully formulated his Holocaust denial, offering readers what he described as eight “incontrovertible assertions” that demonstrate the fallaciousness of the figure of six million, which the media kept repeating “ad nauseam without any evidence.” These basic assertions—which were eventually adopted by the Institute for Historical Review as well as other revisionist groups as the fundamental tenets of Holocaust denial—fall into three distinct categories. First they absolve the Nazis by arguing that they never had any plan for annihilating Jews and that the means supposedly used for annihilation were technologically impossible. They only wanted Jews to emigrate, and if any Jews did die it was the USSR that was ultimately responsible. Second, they legitimate the killing of those Jews who died by contending that they were killed for justifiable reasons. Third, they blame the perpetuation of this hoax on Israel and Jewish leaders and scholars, all of whom have material and political interests in its dissemination.
The eight assertions were:
1. Emigration, never annihilation, was the Reich’s plan for solving Germany’s Jewish problem. Had Germany intended to annihilate all the Jews, a half million concentration camp inmates would not have survived and managed to come to Israel, where they collect “fancy indemnities from West Germany.”
2. “Absolutely no Jews were gassed in any concentration camps in Germany, and evidence is piling up that none were gassed in Auschwitz.” The Hitler gas chambers never existed. The gassing installations found in Auschwitz were really crematoria for cremating corpses of those who had died from a variety of causes, including the “genocidic” Anglo-American bombing raids.
3. The majority of Jews who disappeared and remain unaccounted for did so in territories under Soviet, not German, control.
4. The majority of Jews who supposedly died while in German hands were, in fact, subversives, partisans, spies, saboteurs, and criminals or victims of unfortunate but internationally legal reprisals.
5. If there existed the slightest likelihood that the Nazis had really murdered six million Jews, “World Jewry” would demand subsidies to conduct research on the topic and Israel would open its archives to historians. They have not done so. Instead they have persecuted and branded as an antisemite anyone who wished to publicize the hoax. This persecution constitutes the most conclusive evidence that the six million figure is a “swindle.”3*
6. The Jews and the media who exploit this figure have failed to offer even a shred of evidence to prove it. The Jews misquote Eichmann and other Nazis in order to try to substantiate their claims.
7. It is the accusers, not the accused, who must provide the burden of proof to substantiate the six million figure. The Talmudists and Bolsheviks have so browbeaten the Germans that they pay billions and do not dare to demand proof.
8. The fact that Jewish scholars themselves have “ridiculous” discrepancies in their calculations of the number of victims constitutes firm evidence that there is no scientific proof to this accusation.40
While all these assertions are easily controverted by evidence and documentation, some are based on such faulty reasoning that their fallaci
ousness can be exposed without even turning to the evidence. As was the case with Rassinier, App ignored a fundamental flaw in his eighth assertion. If the Holocaust was truly a fraud perpetrated by the Jews, one could legitimately expect a powerful force like “World Jewry” to have seen to it that no discrepancies were allowed to creep into research by Jewish scholars. All their findings should neatly dovetail with and confirm one another. And if the “Talmudists” were crafty enough to recognize that precise conformity might arouse suspicion, they would have ensured that there was only the slightest variation among scholars’ findings.
But this, of course, is not the only inconsistency in App’s arguments. At the same time that he described Israeli archives as playing a pivotal role in the “swindle,” he also used their findings to validate his own. In an attempt to prove that even Israeli institutions have been unable to document the number of dead, App cited a statement by Yad Vashem, the national memorial to the victims in Israel, that it has been able to gather only 2.5 million pages of testimony.4* App argued that if in the years since the end of the war Yad Vashem had been unable to document even 4 million, it was because there had not been that many. Even the 2.5 million figures they supplied were nothing but a “a lie and a swindle.”41 But if Yad Vashem was as App depicted it—an Israeli institution at the heart of the hoax—it should have had no difficulty forging the additional documentation needed to fill the quotient of six million.42
More recently the Institute for Historical Review published a report from the Jerusalem Post in which the director of Yad Vashem’s archives reported that more than half of its testimonies from Holocaust survivors are “unreliable.” According to Yad Vashem officials, these testimonies have never been used as evidence in Nazi war crimes trials because survivors who wanted to be “part of history” may, in fact, have allowed their imaginations to “run away with them.”43 For the deniers this was further evidence of a “hoax.” What the Institute for Historical Review could not ask, given its ideological predilections, was the question of why Yad Vashem would acknowledge that some of its archival holdings are incorrect if its objective was to perpetuate the Holocaust “myth.” Why did it not simply replace these testimonies with “correct” ones? Why did it not have its researchers further “falsify” the data? If Jews were able to forge documents sufficient to convict Nazi war criminals within a few months after the war, they should certainly have been able to deposit reliable and historically accurate testimonies in Yad Vashem in the decades since then. This simpilistic and yet deceptive claim is but another example of the deniers’ use of tactics that conveniently either ignore proof of the Holocaust or twist it in a way that substantiates their conspiracy theory.
Denying the Holocaust Page 13