Denying the Holocaust

by Deborah E. Lipstadt

  The ICRC, inundated with correspondence about these assertions, has repeatedly attempted to refute the deniers’ claims. In 1978 the official ICRC Bulletin protested that the rescue agency “has never published or even compiled statistics” of the kind that were being attributed to it. The work of the ICRC was to “help war victims not to count them.” Even if it had wished to count victims, it could not have done so because its representatives were permitted to enter only a few concentration camps and “only in the final days of the war.”60 This was not the first time the ICRC tried to refute Harwood’s charges. In 1975, after Harwood’s pamphlet appeared in England and increasing numbers of right-wing groups began to reiterate the claims about the record of the humanitarian organization, the central office of the ICRC wrote to the Board of Deputies of British Jews in London regarding Harwood’s citations: “The figures cited by the author of the booklet are based upon statistics falsely attributed to us, evidently for the purpose of giving them credibility, despite the fact that we never publish information of this kind.”61

  Despite the various attempts by the ICRC to set the historical record straight, the deniers have continued to rely on this disinformation. In 1985 at the trial of Ernst Zundel, a German immigrant who was accused by the Canadian government of publishing and distributing Holocaust denial materials, including Did Six Million Really Die?, these false claims regarding the ICRC were introduced by the defense as a means of demonstrating that the relief agency thought the Holocaust was a myth.62

  In a fashion that has become typical of all deniers, Harwood relied on traditional antisemitic stereotypes to make his case. He asserted that Germany’s persecution of the Jews was the major reason the Allies went to war.63 This claim was intended to buttress the antisemitic stereotype of the power of the Jews to compel the Allies to accede to their wishes. Harwood conveniently ignored the fact that Germany began the war by attacking Poland on September 1, 1939. The United States, which was well aware of the extent of the suffering of the Jews, did not enter the war in Europe until after Pearl Harbor, when Germany declared war on the United States. All the Allies had carefully tracked Germany’s treatment of the Jews since 1933. They had not declared war on Nazi Germany after the Nuremberg laws, Kristallnacht, or any of the numerous indignities meted out to the Jews in the prewar period. The United States, which knew of the massacres of Jews on the Russian front in 1941, did not act to help. Clearly, had it been mistreatment of the Jews that prompted the Allies to act, they should have gone to war long before they did.

  Harwood also misconstrued the Nuremberg trials. He claimed that the court accepted three-hundred-thousand “written affidavits” containing charges against those accused of war crimes. Harwood insisted that the large number of affidavits was indicative of the extent of the hoax. At the Zundel trial Raul Hilberg, who was called as an expert witness, estimated that in the aggregate approximately forty-thousand documents had been submitted by the prosecution. Included in these were copies of German correspondence and Third Reich documentation. Notwithstanding the fact that the assertions regarding three-hundred-thousand affidavits has no basis in truth, it has become a standard part of Holocaust denial. Harwood’s most outlandish assertion regarding the trial was that defense lawyers at Nuremberg were prevented from cross-examining prosecution witnesses.64 The most cursory examination of the records of the Nuremberg trials indicates that attorneys had the opportunity to conduct cross-examinations.

  Harwood also attempted to convince readers that the Diary of Anne Frank was a fraud. In a section entitled “Best-Seller a Hoax,” he asserted that the Diary was part of the “fabrication of a propaganda legend.”65 Harwood was not the first to try to cast doubt on the authenticity of the Diary. He was building on attacks on the Diary’s credibility that had begun as early as 1957. (For a more complete discussion of the deniers’ campaign against the Diary see appendix.) This theme would be more fully developed by French denier Robert Faurisson and would be at least partially responsible for the 1989 decision of the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation to issue a critical edition of the Diary firmly verifying its authenticity.66

  Given the vast array of misstatements, misquotes, and outright falsifications in Harwood’s pamphlet, questions regarding its impact remain. Until the publication of The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, by Arthur Butz of Northwestern University, it remained the most frequently cited work on Holocaust denial. Because it is shorter and more cheaply reproduced than Butz’s, it remains in circulation today. It is, of course, impossible to assess the precise degree to which it has entered mainstream literature. But on at least one occasion its arguments were cited virtually verbatim in a major British publication—not as examples of distortions and fallacious findings by a right-wing extremist, but as legitimate historical research.

  In 1974 a lengthy two-part review of Joachim Fest’s biography of Hitler appeared in the English magazine books and bookmen.5* The review was written by Colin Wilson, a well-known British novelist and critic, who periodically reviewed books for the magazine. At the end of the second part of his review of Fest’s book, the reviewer added what he himself described as “a curious—but highly relevant—postscript.”67 Wilson related that a number of years earlier he had received an advertisement from a Dublin publisher for The Myth of the Six Million. “Curious” about this, he sent off for it, only to discover that the publisher had sold out. While he was writing the Fest review he received the pamphlet by Richard Harwood of the University of London. Wilson summarized Harwood’s argument:

  What Harwood says, briefly, is that Hitler had no reason to murder Jews when he needed them for forced labour. He goes on to point out that the total number of Jews in Europe before the war was six and a half millions [sic], and that one and a half million emigrated abroad. Harwood cites figures from international organizations—all quoted—to demonstrate that there were not more than three million Jews in Nazi Germany.68

  Wilson was impressed by Harwood’s denial of the existence of extermination camps and accepted as fact his allegation that most of the memoirs about the camps were “journalistic forgeries, churned out like pornography for an audience that revels in horrors.” He also believed Harwood accurately cited figures from international organizations such as the ICRC. Wilson acknowledged that when he checked Raul Hilberg’s “gigantic, half-million word” book and the fifty-plus other books he had in his library on the topic he found it hard to believe that the Holocaust was “all an invention.” He conceded that there was plenty of evidence to prove that the Third Reich detested Jews and that Hitler would have “thought nothing of exterminating” them. Nonetheless, after reading Harwood’s volume he found it pertinent to ask whether the Nazis had really exterminated six million Jews or whether claims that they had were just another “emotional historical distortion.” Finally, in his most provocative musing thus far—others would follow—he wondered, if the Final Solution had indeed been a hoax, “would it not be better to be prepared to face the whole truth, no matter how unpleasant?”69 Wilson left no doubt that Harwood had convinced him of the unpleasant truth: The Holocaust was a myth.

  As was to be expected, Wilson’s ruminations launched an avalanche of letters to the magazine, including two from Harwood. Many of the letters cited evidence contradicting Harwood’s conclusions. In the face of such information Wilson became even more passionate in his defense of Harwood’s views. In response to this barrage of letters he offered a strange prediction that, it could be argued, reflected his own personal biases: “Some time over the next ten years or so, an Israeli historian is going to write a book called The Myth of the Six Million. It will cause a tremendous scandal; he will be violently attacked—and will become a rich man. And no one will be able to accuse him of being anti-Jewish.”70 Wilson was trying to bolster his case by relying on the same argument made by both Barnes and App: Jews accuse those who question the existence of the Holocaust of being antisemites in order to silence them.

  Regardi
ng the books he had collected on the topic, he wrote, “I would like to know how many of my fifty books on the death camps are forgeries.”71 His willingness tacitly to accept Harwood’s contention that the books were forgeries or “communist propaganda,” and to ignore the possibility that Harwood might be the forger, is particularly telling. In response to still more letters, he described Harwood’s tone as “reasonable and logical” and “devoid of hysteria or emotional antisemitism.” He explained that Harwood made sense to him because he quoted figures and listed his sources and his tone was “generally rather pedantic.” This evaluation by Wilson is further evidence of why the new pseudo-academic style adopted by deniers in recent years is so dangerous. Their packaging, which mimics legitimate scholarly research, confuses consumers. Readers are more susceptible to being influenced by an academic style than by poorly printed extremist and racist publications.72

  In response to attacks for espousing Harwood’s views, Wilson protested almost reflexively that he was not anti-Nazi or anti-Jewish but “deeply pro ‘objectivity.’ ” Such protestations are reminiscent of deniers’ claims that they are only interested in the truth and harbor no sympathies toward Nazis or antipathies toward Jews.73

  The controversy continued until June 1975. Eventually even the editors of books and bookmen felt compelled to respond to readers who criticized the magazine for assigning Harwood’s work for review. The editors assured readers that the pamphlet was “never sent to Colin Wilson for review by b&b nor has it ever been the subject of a review in b&b.”74 Wilson had included it on his own. The penultimate letter the editors published on this controversy was from Harwood himself. In it he reiterated his false claims regarding the Chambers Encyclopedia’s estimates of the prewar Jewish population of Europe. It was followed by a letter that can be interpreted as the magazine’s final editorial comment on the entire matter. The letter writer wondered if the deniers could explain: “What happened to my German Jewish parents, grandparents and cousins, since I find it hard to attribute their deaths, attested to by the International Red Cross, either to Nazi benevolence or Russian propaganda.”75

  In the face of this query there was only silence.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Entering the Mainstream

  The Case of Arthur Butz

  In 1977 a previously unknown professor of electrical engineering at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, initiated a concerted effort to win Holocaust denial scholarly and historical legitimacy. Arthur R. Butz, author of The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, garnered considerable attention, and his book was the subject of news stories in some of the nation’s major papers. Butz’s position as a professor at one of the more prestigious universities in the country enhanced the sense of controversy. It was hard for the public to reconcile Holocaust denial with the pursuit of truth to which universities and their faculty are supposedly dedicated. But there was another draw as well: Taking a different tack than his predecessors, Butz not only revealed a more subtle, sophisticated and, ultimately, devious approach to this material, but he also significantly changed the nature of Holocaust denial.

  Relatively little is known of Butz.1 Born in the mid-1940s in New York of German and Italian ancestry, he graduated from MIT and received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. What distinguishes Butz from virtually all the deniers who preceded him was the veneer of scholarship and the impression of seriousness and objectivity he is able to convey. Tenured at Northwestern University since 1974, he is well versed in academic etiquette. His book’s format indicated that he understood the structure and nuances of scholarly debate and would use them to his advantage. In contrast to many of the previous publications, particularly the poorly printed pamphlets that had typified much of denial writing, Butz’s book contained the requisite myriad notes and large bibliography that were the hallmarks of scholarly works, quoting many of the prominent historians who worked in this field and thanking a number of legitimate research centers and archives. At first glance there were few reasons to question the book’s true import or intent but readers who were aware of the identity of the publishers would have had little trouble discerning either. In England the book was brought out by the Historical Review Press, which had published Richard Harwood’s Did Six Million Really Die?. In the United States the book was released by Noontide Press.2

  But it was not just the form of Butz’s publication that distinguished it from its predecessors. His putative willingness to confront a host of issues most deniers had previously ignored gave the book a different tone—one that was clearly designed to disarm innocent readers and enhance Butz’s aura of scholarly objectivity. He criticized contemporary deniers, describing The Myth of the Six Million, the American denial publication on which Richard Harwood based much of his work, as full of “errors of fact.”3 Nor did he try to whitewash German wartime behavior. Of equal importance in establishing his scholarly veneer was his willingness to concede that as many as a million Jews may have actually died at the hands of the Nazis. Moreover, he acknowledged that the Einsatzgruppen may have actually murdered civilians and that Jews were singled out for special persecution by the Germans and suffered in concentration camps.

  In contrast to Barnes, App, Rassinier, and others, Butz did not justify the German persecution of the Jews by claiming that Jews were disloyal, untrustworthy, or intent on causing Germany’s downfall. He gave the impression of being a serious scholar who was critical of Nazi antisemitism.4 Closer examination revealed that he harbored precisely the same attitudes and used the same methodology that had characterized all Holocaust denial literature up to this point. The packaging had changed but the contents remained the same. Anything that disagreed with Butz’s foregone conclusion and the thesis of his book—that the story of Jewish extermination in World War II was a propaganda hoax and that the Jews of Europe had not been exterminated5—was dismissed as “obvious lies,” “ludicrous,” “breathtakingly absurd,” “absolutely insane,” “fishy,” “obviously spurious,” and “nonsense.”6 “Survivor” literature—the term is always placed in quotes—is dismissed as full of “endless raving about extermination.” Despite his attempt to project a scholarly aura, however, Butz allows his rhetoric to fall into a very different category: American diplomats engaged in “hysterical yapping about the six million,”7 and stories of “gas chambers” were “wartime propaganda fantasies,” “garbage,” and “tall tales.”8

  Evincing the same sympathies as previous generations of deniers, Butz declared that the greatest tragedy was that the Germans and Austrians had been the real victims.9 He also showed the same antipathies as those who had preceded him. Describing Jews as among “the most powerful groups on earth,” he argued that they possessed formidable powers to manipulate governments, control war crimes trials, govern the media, and determine other nations’ foreign policy, all in the name of perpetrating the hoax of the twentieth century.10 According to Butz, Jews invented this hoax in order to further “Zionist ends.”11 Thus one could extrapolate from Butz’s argument that whatever antisemitism the Nazis displayed was well justified. This demonology, common to virtually every denier, is an affirmation of Nazi ideology. The Nazis depicted Aryans as the “master race”—strong and invincible. Jews, in contrast, were not human. Despite their superiority Aryans were considered highly vulnerable to Jewish conspiracies. The Jews’ ability to create the hoax had proven the Nazi thesis correct: They were a threat to the world.

  In the book and in subsequent articles published in the Journal of Historical Review, Butz acknowledged the validity of a number of the criticisms commonly directed at deniers, including that their ranks numbered no historians with any scholarly academic standing. Bemoaning this, Butz attributed it to the fact that respected scholars had been frightened away from questioning something as “established as the Great Pyramid.” It was because of the “default” by professional historians that nonhistorians such as himself were left with the responsibility for exposing the “idiotic nonsense” of the
Holocaust.12

  In order to mainstream Holocaust denial and attain for it scholarly respectability, Butz also had to acknowledge that denial books, articles, and journals are published by neo-Nazi, extremist, and racist groups, side by side with intensely nationalist or white-supremacist racial diatribes. Attempting to deflect this criticism, Butz agreed that in an optimal situation deniers’ work would appear in scholarly journals, but the normal channels of scholarly research had been blocked to those who would reveal the “truth.” In the interest of exposing the hoax, those who worked in this field had no option but to turn to these ideological publications. When he depicted the deniers as martyrs willing to risk their reputations by appearing in these publications because they had no other option, he ignored the intensive, symbiotic relationship—far more than a marriage of inconvenience—that existed between these groups.

  Since the publication of the book, Butz, who has assiduously tried to maintain his image as a disinterested scholar, has been associated with a variety of extremist and neo-Nazi groups. His books are promoted and distributed by the Ku Klux Klan and other neo-Nazi organizations. When his book first appeared it was serialized in the neo-Nazi German weekly Deutsche National Zeitung. In 1985 he presented his hoax ideas at the Savior’s Day meeting of Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam.13

  Despite its veneer of impartial scholarship, Butz’s book is replete with the same expressions of traditional antisemitism, philo-Germanism and conspiracy theory as the Holocaust denial pamphlets printed by the most scurrilous neo-Nazi groups. This is particularly evident when he turns to the hoax itself and the “culprits” responsible for it. Although Jews were the instigators, they engineered this effort with the assistance of other forces. Together they formed a vast conspiratorial network that, despite the broad assortment of groups involved, managed to keep its existence a secret. According to Butz all these vastly different forces were coordinated by Zionists, who nurtured the legend until it achieved the stature of an international, historical hoax.14 A complex and convoluted process that involved multitudinous forces, it remained undetected, amazingly, until a professor of electrical engineering conducted his own brand of historical research.