Based on these and a multitude of other statements by Nazi leaders, including Hitler’s own January 1939 promise to exterminate the Jews and his wartime repetition of that promise, there is no doubt that while emigration was employed to rid Germany of its Jewish population during the 1930s, once Poland came under Nazi control and portions of the Soviet Union, with its large Jewish populations, were targeted to be conquered, annihilation became German policy.
Antisemitism was such a fundamental aspect of national socialism that even the most creative denier cannot claim it did not exist. Thus what they cannot deny or distort, they rationalize. We have already seen this in the attempts to portray German Jews as spies and partisans who deserved whatever the Nazis meted out. Harwood widened that scope. He interpreted Nazi antisemitism as Germany’s legitimate response to attacks on it by “international Jewry.” He argued that Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann’s statement in 1939, on the outbreak of the war, that the Jews would stand by Great Britain and fight on the side of the democracies, constituted the Jews’ declaration of war on Nazi Germany and transformed them into a threat to Germany’s security.29 Actually Weizmann never mentioned Great Britain in his statement but spoke of the democracies in general. Harwood added the reference to Great Britain. Harwood insisted that under the tenets of international law Hitler had the right to declare Jews enemy agents intent on prosecuting a war against the Reich. They could therefore be legitimately subjected to a policy of internment.
Harwood ignored the fact that Nazi antisemitic policies antedated Weizmann’s pronouncement by almost seven years. Weizmann’s statement was a response to those policies, not the reverse. Since 1933 Germany had excluded Jews from most professions and subjected them to economic boycotts, incarceration, physical violence, and horrendous degradation. This process was followed by the disenfranchisement of German Jews under the 1935 Nuremberg laws and the destruction and brutality of Kristallnacht in 1938. Weizmann was speaking as a leader of a stateless people who were in no position to wage a war of any kind against an independent, well-armed nation.30 He was, after all, a citizen of Great Britain and Palestine was a British-mandated territory. A declaration of loyalty to the democracies in their war against Germany was the least—and, on some level, the most—he could do.
This ploy to cast Nazi antisemitism as a legitimate response to a threat to Germany’s security could be dismissed were it not for the way it has been adopted by prominent historians. The German historian Ernst Nolte, whose books on fascism have become historical classics, espoused the same argument regarding Weizmann’s statement in his attempt to lessen Nazi responsibility for the outrages of World War II. Nolte was the historian most prominently associated in the 1980s with what has become known in Germany as the Historikerstreit, an effort by some historians, particularly those with conservative political tendencies, to normalize and relativize the history of the Nazi period by arguing that many Nazi policies, including persecution of the Jews, were defensive reactions to foreign threats and were no different from what other countries have done in the past. Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s invitation to President Ronald Reagan to join him in a wreath-laying ceremony at Bitburg was a political manifestation of this historical tendency to try to normalize the German past, particularly its National Socialist past. By asking the American president to accompany him to a German military cemetery that included fallen SS soldiers in an act of reconciliation, Kohl was attempting to lessen the historical blot on German nationalism and patriotism. He was not trying to rewrite or deny the past but to cast it in a different light.31 One of the dangers of Holocaust denial is that it so stretches the parameters of the argument regarding Germany’s wartime behavior that it renders Nolte’s kind of relativism increasingly respectable. (For a fuller discussion of the relationship between relativism and denial see chapter 11.)
Echoing Harwood, Nolte contended that Weizmann’s official declaration at the outbreak of hostilities gave Hitler good reason “to be convinced of his enemies’ determination to annihilate him much earlier than when the first information about Auschwitz came to the knowledge of the world.”32 What power the Jews had to effect Hitler’s annihilation Nolte did not specify. When Nolte was criticized on this point in light of prewar Nazi persecution of Jews, he said that he was only quoting David Irving, the right-wing writer of historical works. How quoting Irving justified using such a historically invalid point remains unexplained, unless one wishes to see it as a reflection of Nolte’s personal predilections.33 As we shall see in subsequent chapters, Irving, who had frequently proposed extremely controversial theories about the Holocaust, including the claim that Hitler had no knowledge of it, has become a Holocaust denier.
These works demonstrate how deniers misstate, misquote, falsify statistics, and falsely attribute conclusions to reliable sources. They rely on books that directly contradict their arguments, quoting in a manner that completely distorts the authors’ objectives. Deniers count on the fact that the vast majority of readers will not have access to the documentation or make the effort to determine how they have falsified or misconstrued information.
Harwood attempted to prove that it was statistically impossible for six million Jews to have perished at the hands of the Nazis. The most cursory examination of his sources reveals his spurious methodology. He cited Chambers Encyclopedia, which according to Harwood concluded that the total Jewish population of prewar Europe was 6,500,000. “This would mean that almost the entire number were exterminated.” How then, Harwood asks, was it possible for so many Jews to emigrate to other countries or to receive reparations if almost all had been annihilated?34
Chambers does in fact cite a figure of 6,500,000, but not as the size of the Jewish population of prewar Europe:
On the continent of Europe apart from Russia, whose western provinces also suffered terribly, only a handful of numerically unimportant communities in neutral countries escaped and of the 6,500,000 Jews who who lived in the Nazi-dominated lands in 1939, barely 1,500,000 remained alive when the war ended six years later.35
Chambers specifically excluded from its figure of 6,500,000 the Jewish population in the Soviet Union and those countries that were not dominated by the Nazis in 1939.
Harwood also argued that the majority of German Jews left Germany prior to the outbreak of the war. Consequently they were not within reach of the Nazis and were safe from any form of persecution.36 They could not therefore be counted among the six million. It is correct that more than 50 percent of German Jews emigrated. Though many went to places that in the mid-1930s seemed perfectly safe—for example, the Netherlands, France, and Belgium, they were eventually caught up in the Nazi maelstrom. Given that six million is cited as the death toll of all European Jewry, the percentage of Jews who emigrated is a meaningless statistic unless one notes their destination.
Whatever sources deniers cannot twist they ignore, particularly when they contradict their most basic contentions. Such was the case with the Chambers Encyclopedia. After citing the population figures, the encyclopedia discussed the “systematic campaign of annihilation in a series of death camps” as a result of which one-third of the Jewish population was killed.37
Harwood repeatedly used partial information to distort trustworthy sources. He wrote that the Baseler Nachrichten, a Swiss newspaper, reported in June 1946 that “a maximum of only one and a half million Jews could be numbered as casualties.”38 Harwood neglected to mention a subsequent article in the same paper that acknowledged that the previous figure was incorrect and that the accurate number of victims was 5,800,000.39
He similarly twisted the conclusions reached by Margarete Buber in Under Two Dictators. According to Harwood she proved that the concentration camps were comfortable institutions with sufficient food and facilities to allow inmates to live in relatively acceptable conditions. He identified the author as a German Jewish woman, who was the only Jew in her group of deportees from Russia who was not immediately allowed by the Gestapo to return to Russia.
40 There is nothing in the book to indicate that Buber was Jewish. More significant is the manner in which Harwood misconstrued her description of Ravensbrück. According to Harwood she found it “clean, civilized and well-administered.” When she first arrived in 1940 she ate a meal of “white bread, sausage, leek porridge and dried fruit.”41 She lived in these comfortable circumstances until 1945, when “she experienced the progressive decline of camp conditions.” In making this claim, Harwood was voicing a familiar argument. According to the deniers the terrible conditions of the camps were caused by the Allied destruction of the German civilian communication, transportation, and supply systems. The Allies, who wrought havoc on Germany’s civilian infrastructure during the latter stages of the war, prevented the Germans from feeding camp inmates. That is why the survivors in the camps were in such an emaciated condition when the camps were opened. Harwood absolved the victimizers and blamed the victors, transforming the Allies into perpetrators responsible for much of the suffering that occured in Germany. More to the purpose, something that could not be denied—the inmates’ skeletal condition—was explained away.
But this version of Buber’s account is totally at variance with what she actually says. Buber explicitly describes conditions that had broken down long before 1945. She made specific reference to executions, starvation, and terrible conditions that existed prior to the Allied raids of 1945. In addition to relating how inmates died as a result of being “beaten, starved, or frozen to death in the punishment cells,” she made specific references to gas chambers and executions. Referring to the crematorium in the camp, she wrote the “SS men were fond of telling us that the only way we should ever leave Ravensbrück would be ‘up the chimney.’ ”42 Harwood ignored these references in Buber’s work, transforming a book that explicitly depicted the horror of the camps into one that renders them benign.3*
Harwood also used selective quotations to turn Colin Cross’s Adolf Hitler inside out. He claimed Cross concluded that moving millions of Jews around Europe and “murdering them in a time of desperate war emergency was useless from any rational point of view.”43 Harwood implied that Cross, in dismissing the annihilation program as totally irrational, believed it did not exist. Such is not the case; virtually all Holocaust scholars call attention to the fact that the Nazi annihilation of the Jews was irrational. Skilled workers were killed even if their tasks were unfinished. Precious freight cars needed to transport matériel to the front were used to carry Jews to their deaths. The Holocaust must be understood as something inherently lacking in functional reason. Therefore Cross’s description of it as irrational cannot be interpreted as indicative of denial tendencies. As he had with Buber’s book, Harwood ignored an array of passages that attested to Cross’s firm belief that there had been a plan for the annihilation of the Jews: “It was with the attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 that Hitler’s policy switched decisively to mass murder.”44 Neither was there doubt in Cross’s mind about Hitler’s role in the Final Solution:
Even the most cursory examination of the facts points to the extreme possibility that Hitler was not only aware of the policy but was its active instigator . . . Moreover, Himmler repeatedly and definitely told his officials according to the minutes of meetings, that the extermination programme was based upon the leader’s orders. Finally there are statements in Hitler’s ‘Testament’ of 1945 in which are recounted the destruction of European Jewry as his achievement.45
Moreover, Cross stressed that the Holocaust was a “fundamental” aspect of Hitler’s policy. “The number of men, women and children who were herded into gas chambers and murdered simply for being Jews did run into millions.”46
Harwood employed this tactic of trying to make a book say what it does not in an even more systematic fashion in his treatment of the three-volume 1948 report of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on its attempts to assist those interned in camps. Blatantly misrepresenting the information contained in the report, Harwood tried to make it appear to lend credibility to the deniers’ proclamations. He described it as the only survey regarding the Jewish question in Europe during World War II and the conditions of Germany’s concentration camps that was not only “unique in its honesty and objectivity” but strictly politically neutral. According to him it demonstrated that the International Red Cross had found no evidence “whatever” in camps in Axis-occupied Europe of a “deliberate policy to exterminate the Jews.”47 Harwood contended that in all its sixteen hundred pages the report failed to make any mention of “such a thing as a gas chamber.”4* Though the ICRC admitted that Jews had suffered rigors and privations, as had many other wartime nationalities, “its complete silence on the subject of planned extermination is ample refutation of the Six Million legend.”48
Harwood could make this claim only by ignoring key sections of the ICRC report. The Red Cross was absolutely specific about the Jews’ fate. It made reference to the Nazi attempt to annihilate them, observing that under Nazi rule Jews had been transformed into “outcasts condemned by rigid racial legislation to suffer tyranny, persecution and systematic extermination.”49 The ICRC, which was empowered to exercise supervision over other prisoners and POWs, admitted it could not do this for the Jews. “No kind of protection shielded them; being neither POW nor civilian internees, they formed a separate category without the benefit of any Convention.” Most important, the ICRC specifically delineated how systematic annihilation was carried out: “They were penned into concentration camps and ghettos, recruited for forced labour, subjected to grave brutalities and sent to death camps without anyone being allowed to intervene in those matters.”50 These were not the ICRC’s only references to death camps or systematic annihilation. Among the other references were the following:
During the period in September 1940, when the “Iron Guard” [Romania] supported by the Gestapo and the German SS had seized power, the Jews had been subjected to persecution and deportation to death camps.51
In Germany and her satellite countries, the lot of the civilians belonging to this group was by far the worst. Subjected as they were to a discriminatory regime, which aimed more or less openly at their extermination, they were unable to procure the necessities of life.52
Harwood contended that the report made “nonsense” of the allegation that there were “gas chambers cunningly disguised as shower facilities.” He substantiated this assertion by quoting a passage from the report that depicted how ICRC officials inspected baths and showers in the camps. When they found problems they acted swiftly “to have fixtures made less primitive and to have them repaired or enlarged.”53 This, Harwood argued, demonstrated conclusively that showers functioned as showers, however primitive, and not as killing apparatus. The problem with Harwood’s choice of this citation, which he quoted correctly, is that the passage had nothing to do with German concentration camps: It referred to Allied camps for civilian internees in Egypt.54
Harwood repeatedly asserted that from August 1942 the ICRC was allowed to visit and distribute food parcels to major concentration camps in Germany, and that from February 1943 this privilege was extended to all other camps and prisons.55 Harwood claimed that this information was to be found on page 78 of the report’s third volume. The page did refer to “major concentration camps” in Germany but indicated that they included only Dachau and Oranienburg. The concession that was extended in 1943 included all other camps and prisons in Germany.56 This meant that numerous camps outside Germany were not included. Moreover, the Red Cross acknowledged that it was limited to giving parcels only to deported aliens for whom it had addresses, and that many inmates, among them the vast majority of Jews, were not allowed to receive food parcels at all.
In yet another attempt to misrepresent the ICRC’s findings, Harwood contended that the relief organization had documented the fact that a significant proportion of European Jews had not been interned in camps “but remained, subject to certain restrictions, as part of the free civilian population.” This, he dec
lared, conflicted directly with Jewish claims that the “extermination programme” was conducted with great “thoroughness.” In this instance Harwood neglected to quote the opening paragraph of the chapter on which he based these assertions. It completely contradicted his claims regarding the Jews’ fate:
No other section of the population endured such humiliation, privation and suffering. Deprived of all treaty protection, persecuted in accordance with National Socialist doctrine and threatened with extermination, the Jews were . . . generally deported in the most inhuman manner, shut up in concentration camps, subjected to forced labour or put to death.57
Harwood’s misuse of the ICRC report is a reflection of how deniers, fairly certain that few people will be able to check the original material, twist information and findings. Rather than misquote, as with other sources, Harwood simply omits those numerous sections of the report which contradict his claims.
Harwood even used other sources to try to misrepresent the ICRC’s findings. He claimed that a Swiss paper, Die Tat, had surveyed all World War II casualties and concluded, based on ICRC statistics, that the number of victims of political, racial, or religious persecution who died in prisons and concentration camps between 1939 and 1945 amounted to “300,000, not all of whom were Jews.” Harwood argued that this figure was the most accurate assessment of the number of victims.58 The Swiss paper did cite the 300,000 figure, but only in reference to “Germans and German Jews,” not nationals of other countries.59 It did not conduct a survey of all World War II casualities and made no reference to Red Cross figures.
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