Denying the Holocaust

by Deborah E. Lipstadt

  Among the publications under Carto’s direct control was the American Mercury.5* Though the journal had begun its descent into antisemitica under its previous owners, under Carto’s tutelage, which began in 1966, the pace of that descent quickened. By the time of the creation of the IHR in 1978 the American Mercury, which had been under the Carto aegis for thirteen years, was considered one of the leading antisemitic publications in the United States.53 It functioned as a cheerleader for Holocaust deniers. An editorial in the American Mercury lauded the IHR because it would function as an antidote to “the Anti-Defamation League’s campaign to prod public discussion of the ‘Holocaust.’ ”54

  But American Mercury was not the only publication in the Carto orbit to disseminate these views. The Liberty Lobby’s newsletter, Liberty Letter, echoed the same themes. It praised Imperium as a major work of philosophy and ranted about the “aggressive minority” that tightly controlled the so-called free press. This “alien-minded and America-last group,” was the “ruthless Zionist pressure machine.” The Liberty Letter claimed to have uncovered thousands of undercover “Zionist ‘fixers,’ lobbyists and Leftists” prowling the corridors of Congress and converging on the White House.55

  In 1975 the lobby’s Liberty Letter, whose circulation was more than one-hundred thousand, was subsumed by the Spotlight, a tabloid newspaper that regularly featured articles on Bible analysis and the putative efforts of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission to dominate the nation. It offered its readers tips on avoiding taxes and fighting the IRS. The paper attacked Martin Luther King, Jr., as a Communist and praised members of the Ku Klux Klan. It has memorialized Gordon Kahl, the leader of the right-wing-extremist group Posse Comitatus, who killed three federal marshals and wounded a number of others before he was killed in 1983 in a shootout with federal agents.

  These publications find conspiracies everywhere. In 1976, shortly before the presidential election, the paper charged that Jimmy Carter was directly linked with the international cocaine trade.56 (The Federal Election Commission fined the Liberty Lobby for publishing this unsubstantiated story so close to the election.) In 1979 Spotlight’s lead article described how a global elite planned to topple world governments. The paper claimed that its reporter had attended an international conference in Austria at which such plans were discussed. In truth, no one from the Spotlight attended this legitimate conference, and the reporter who wrote the story admitted to falsifying it.57

  But the main focus of Spotlight’s attention has been exposing what it calls the “Jew-Zionist” international bankers’ conspiracy designed to cause pain and suffering for dedicated, honest, and hardworking Americans. Though the tabloid finds conspiracies in many places, generally they are linked to Israel and its supporters’ successful efforts to control Congress and dictate American policy.58 During the 1979 gas shortage the paper informed readers that as a result of a secret deal between President Carter and Prime Minister Begin “your gas [was going] to Israel.”59 According to Spotlight, these Zionists do not work alone; cliques of bankers, Red Chinese, and American politicians, including Sen. Jesse Helms and the late Congressman Larry McDonald, were all part of the pro-Israel conspiracy against the United States.60

  Since a major aspect of that conspiracy was the Holocaust hoax, Holocaust denial has also become a regular staple of Spotlight. The paper, which has identified Carto as the force behind the IHR, has devoted entire issues to Holocaust denial.61 The paper has frequently reported on the IHR’s annual meetings and on their retrieval of history from the “memory hole.”62 A fifteen-page supplement in the December 24, 1979, issue was completely dedicated to denial articles. Reiterating familiar denial themes, Spotlight has claimed that the bodies at Auschwitz were cremated as a hygienic measure to control typhoid, that the so-called gas chambers were actually life-saving delousing showers, that the Diary of Anne Frank was a propaganda hoax, that the six-million number was used to entice the United Nations to support the creation of the “illegal state of Israel,” and that professional Zionist “survivors” planned to extort five million dollars from America. It also touted the IHR’s contest. The front page of the “Holocaust Supplement” carried the following headlines:

  WERE SIX MILLION JEWS EXTERMINATED?

  FAMOUS “GAS CHAMBER VICTIMS” LIVING WELL

  NEED $50,000? FIND A HOLOCAUST VICTIM

  TORTURE USED TO MAKE GERMANS “CONFESS”

  CHASING THE “WAR CRIMINALS” FOR PROFIT”.63

  IN 1981 a two-page article bore the following headline:

  GATHERING OF “LIBERATORS” MAY EXPOSE ALLIED WAR ATROCITIES; BELIEVERS IN THE “HOLOCAUST” HAVE INVITED THE “LIBERATORS” OF THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS TO GATHER FOR A CONVENTION. BUT TO SHOW UP WOULD BE TANTAMOUNT TO ADMITTING HAVING MURDERED INNOCENT GERMAN GUARDS.64

  The nature of Spotlight’s readership can be gauged to some degree by the contents of its classified advertising section. There are ads for poetry, laetrile prescriptions, dating services for patriotic Christians, and devices for dramatically increasing a car’s gasoline mileage (these devices have supposedly been kept off the market in a conspiracy against the American consumer). In addition, its classified section regularly offers Nazi paraphernalia, gun silencer parts, bullet-proof vests, clandestine mail drops, and instructions for manufacturing false identification.65

  The Noontide Press has also participated in spreading the message espoused by Yockey, Carto, the Liberty Lobby, and the IHR. Among the books listed in the 1992 Noontide Press catalog was Yockey’s Imperium. The catalog described Yockey as a brilliant young American who “saw through the Holocaust propaganda as early as 1948.” Also offered for sale were the standard works on Holocaust denial, many of which were published by Noontide, among them the Journal of Historical Review, Butz’s The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, and Harwood’s Six Million Lost and Found. The catalog also featured the antisemitic standards—Henry Ford’s The International Jew and The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Included as well was a listing of books on “Race and Culture,” many of them described by the catalog as focusing on the inherent dangers of racial integration. The Testing of Negro Intelligence, by Travis Osborne and Frank C. J. McGurk, was described as a searching evaluation of black performance on intelligence tests from 1966 to 1980 whose findings “give little comfort to egalitarians.” Race and Reason: A Yankee View, by Carleton Putnam, was touted as the “intelligent reader’s guide to the pitfalls of Black-White integration from the White standpoint.” The sequel, Race and Reality, demonstrated how “egalitarians” have used botched science and faulty scholarship to obscure “biological facts about racial differences.”66 Noontide not only offered these racist publications in its catalog, but it also tried to win subscribers for a tabloid newspaper, the White Student. According to Noontide the paper was designed to help students on campus “fight back.” It was an antidote to being brainwashed by Marxist teachers and debilitated “by the rigors of survival in our integrated schools.”67

  In their espousal of antisemitism, racism, and extremism, these publications are no different from a variety of similar offerings worldwide. In fact, the articles in all of them are mind-numbingly similar. However, what is particularly disturbing about this group of publications is their interlocking network and growing source of funds.68 In 1989 the director of the IHR protested that neither he nor any other member of the staff could offer advice as to the merits of other “patriotic movements” or right-wing groups. The IHR, he claimed, “pleads agnosticism” concerning the goals or methods of any group whose objective was not the “revision of history.”69 This was an attempt by the IHR to maintain its facade as an independent research entity dedicated to the exposure of historical falsehoods. Despite its pronouncement, the connection between the Institute for Historical Review, the American Mercury, and Noontide Press had already been officially established. In 1980 Carto’s wife, Elisabeth, acting on behalf of the Legion for the Survival of Freedom, filed an app
lication in Torrance, California, for a business license for the IHR. The institute, according to the papers filed, was to operate as the Noontide Press/Institute for Historical Review. The mailing address listed on the application for the IHR was identical with those of the American Mercury and Noontide Press. Some of the members of the management of the American Mercury were also officers of the Noontide Press/Institute for Historical Review. Former staffers, including David McCalden, have testified under oath that Carto had “ultimate authority” over all decisions made by the IHR.70

  The courts have also found the IHR, Noontide Press, Spotlight, the Liberty Lobby, and Willis Carto intimately connected. In 1988 the United States Court of Appeals rejected the attempt of the IHR, Noontide Press, and the Legion for Survival of Freedom to present themselves as unrelated entities. Justice Robert Bork, in his decision dismissing Carto’s attempt to sue the Wall Street Journal for labeling him an antisemite, stated that Carto had “specifically designed the Liberty Lobby/Legion/Noontide/IHR network so as to divorce Liberty Lobby’s name from those of its less reputable affiliates.”71 One of the main tactics the Carto network uses to keep critics at bay has been the lawsuit. It has filed numerous lawsuits throughout the United States charging defamation. The Court of Appeals noted that Carto and his nexus of organizations have consistently used the libel complaint as a “weapon to harass.”72

  The IHR’s early loss in the Mermelstein case did not stop it from proceeding with its objectives of spreading denial, antisemitism, and racism. One of the ways it has tried to give credence to its claim that it is a research institute with a broad historical agenda is by publishing articles in the Journal of Historical Review on topics that have no connection with World War II or the Final Solution. David McCalden, in a letter sent to students on various campuses, argued that history had long been orchestrated by those who were “willing to parrot . . . just what the establishment wants them to,” and that the IHR was dedicated to ending this.73 The spring 1982 edition of the Journal of Historical Review contained an article by Harry Elmer Barnes entitled “Revisionism and the Promotion of Peace,” in which Barnes argued that revisionism was dedicated to the “honest search for historical truth and the discrediting of misleading myths that are a barrier to peace and goodwill among nations.” Revisionists, as Barnes described them, were engaged in an effort to correct the historical record through the collection of more complete historical facts in “a more calm political atmosphere and [with] a more objective attitude.”74

  The Journal enumerated a series of instances other than the Holocaust in which the historical record had also been manipulated. In need of a “revisionist” analysis were the American Revolution (the policies of the British had not been that harsh), the War of 1812 (Madison was not pushed into war but made the decision based on his own convictions), the German invasion of Belgium in World War I (the British would have done the same thing if Germany had not done it first), and Theodore Roosevelt’s role in the Spanish-American war (he ordered an attack on the Spanish fleet as part of his American imperialist and expansionist philosophy).75 As was often the case with revisionist arguments, the issues raised had a kernel of truth to them. But the deniers proceeded not only to distort that kernel but ascribed to it a conspiratorial nature—premeditated distortions introduced for political ends. By offering alternative conclusions in each of these cases the Journal apparently believed it could lull its readers into accepting that revisions were also needed in relation to the Holocaust.

  This was the objective of an article on Civil War prisoner-of-war camps. The author, Mark Weber, claimed that false reports about Union prisoners’ suffering in Southern camps prompted the North to order similar abuse for prisoners in its “concentration camps.” Weber’s reliance on Sonderbehandlung (special treatment), the euphemistic term the Nazis used for what was to happen to the Jews once they were taken to the death camps in the East, was designed to make a link in the reader’s mind with the Holocaust. Exaggerations about conditions in the South multiplied with the passage of time, as former prisoners wrote books they claimed documented their experiences. Henry Wirz, the commander of Andersonville, the most notorious camp in the South, was executed by the United States because the inmates imagined him “the cruel and inhuman author of all their sufferings.” Weber described a proposal that Andersonville be maintained as a permanent reminder of the war as “shades of Dachau” and maintained (correctly) that many prisoners on both sides had died but prisoners had not been deliberately killed. It was “bad management,” particularly in the South, which caused such extensive death and misery. In the main, Weber’s article followed fairly well-established historical grounds; only his conclusion revealed his true agenda. He drew a direct parallel between the Civil War and World War II—in both wars the victors “hysterically distorted” the conditions in the camps and branded the defeated adversary as “intrinsically evil.” In Weber’s view: “All the suffering and death in the camps of the side that lost the war was ascribed to a deliberate policy on the part of an inherently atrocious power. The victorious powers demanded ‘unconditional surrender’ and arrested the defeated government leaders as ‘criminals.’ ”76

  There was one major difference, Weber insisted: “The Civil War rendition of ‘Sonderbehandlung’ never achieved the sinister notoriety of its Second World War counterpart.” Nonetheless, Weber continued, in both wars the political system of the vanquished was considered to be not “merely different but morally depraved,” and the ethics of the side that lost the war were judged “in terms of [the losers] readiness to atone for past sins and embrace the social system of the conquerors.”77 This argument harked back to a basic tenet of Holocaust denial: War is evil; no side can claim the moral upper hand, and defeated parties are regularly accused by the victors of having committed terrible misdeeds. Weber’s immoral equivalency in terms of treatment of the defeated enemy was part of the deniers’ effort to cast the “myth of the Holocaust” as part of a long-established pattern of the distortion of history for political ends.

  According to the deniers the Holocaust is not the only deceptive legacy of World War II. Another issue of prime importance to them is the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Continuing the battle that had been begun by the revisionists after World War II ended, an entire issue of the Journal of Historical Review was devoted to this topic.78 Its explicit objective was to portray Roosevelt as having known that the attack was imminent and having allowed it to take place unhindered so that America would be forced to enter the war.

  The deniers’ obsession with Pearl Harbor has a dual objective: to demonstrate Roosevelt’s and, by association, the American government’s duplicity. It is also designed to dispel the Allied and “court historians’ ” claim that World War II was a moral as opposed to a power struggle. The revisionists believe that if they can demonstrate that this war was at its heart a conflagration like all others, they can argue that any unique accusations of guilt or special war crimes trials are invalid. In this case the revisionists established a straw man in order to knock him down. The United States entered the war because it was attacked by Japan. Japan’s ally, Germany, then declared war on the United States. But proving that the Allies were motivated by the age-old quest for “power and advantage” is far subtler and less distasteful than creating an immoral equivalence of the gulag versus the death camps or Auschwitz versus the bombing of Dresden.79

  Despite its attempts to portray itself as a respectable organization, the Institute for Historical Review and its subsidiary publications and associated organizations are in essence nothing but part of a larger effort to further goals remarkably similar to those articulated by national socialism. Just as Holocaust denial must be regarded as not just an attack on a portion of history that is of particular importance to Jews but as a threat to all of history and to reasoned discourse, so too the IHR must not be seen as an entity whose only interest is attacking the historicity of the Holocaust. The tradition to which it is heir and the
activities of those who are part of its amorphous orbit indicate that it poses a far greater danger.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Gas Chamber Controversy

  In 1984 the Canadian government charged Ernst Zundel, a forty-six-year-old German citizen who had immigrant status in Canada, with stimulating antisemitism through the publication and distribution of material he knew to be false.1* The case against Zundel, who was the country’s most prolific distributor of Holocaust denial and neo-Nazi publications, resulted in two trials, numerous appeals, and extensive media coverage. The Crown Counsel charged that Zundel instigated social and racial intolerance through the publication of two works, “The West, War and Islam,” which argued that there existed a Zionist-banker-Communist-Freemason-sponsored conspiracy to control the world, and Richard Harwood’s Did Six Million Really Die?

  Though much of the material he distributed was written by other neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers, and right-wing extremists, Zundel himself contributed two books to this melange. The Hitler We Loved and Why, which was published by White Power Publications in West Virginia, portrayed Hitler as a saintly man, a messianic figure whose white supremist ideology had brought salvation to Germany. It concluded with the proclamation that Hitler’s spirit “soars beyond the shores of the White Man’s home in Europe. Where we are, he is with us. WE LOVE YOU, ADOLF HITLER!”1 His book, UFOs: Nazi Secret Weapons?, argued that UFOs were Hitler’s secret weapon and are actually still in use at bases in the Antarctic beneath the earth’s surface. In addition Zundel wrote and distributed scores of fliers and pamphlets praising Nazism, advocating fascism, and denying the Holocaust.

  Zundel created a publishing house, Samisdat Publications, to reprint and distribute the usual array of antisemitic, racist, and Holocaust denial material. It also sold tapes of Hitler’s speeches, copies of Nazi-sponsored films, and cassettes of music from the Third Reich, including a selection of Hitler’s “favorites” and storm trooper songs and marches. Zundel did not just wait for customers to order his wares. He sent Canadian members of Parliament a steady stream of Holocaust denial publications. Nor did his reach end at Canada’s border. Thousands of Americans received his publications, as did U.S. radio and television stations. (He claims his American mailing list numbers above 29,000.) But it was West Germany that was his main target. In December 1980 government officials informed the Bundestag that during the preceding two years two hundred shipments of neo-Nazi extremist books, periodicals, symbols, films, records, and cassettes had been shipped to the country by Samisdat Publishers in Toronto. In 1981, during a German crackdown on neo-Nazis, West German police discovered in the hundreds of homes they raided weapons, ammunition, and explosives as well as thousands of copies of Zundel-produced material. The German Ministry of the Interior identified Zundel as one of the country’s most important suppliers of radical right and neo-Nazi propaganda material. Zundel has also sent his publications to Australia, the Middle East, and a variety of other countries. (He claims to have subscribers in more than forty-five countries.)