Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time

by Michael Shermer

  Calling the publisher's decision "hara kiri," the March/April 1995 issue of the Journal of Historical Review claimed that "Jewish-Zionist groups responded to the article with characteristic speed and ruthlessness" and that "the publisher capitulated to an international Jewish-Zionist boycott and pressure campaign." Author Nishioka said, "Marco Polo was crushed by Jewish organizations using advertising [pressure], and Bungei obliged. They crushed room for debate." The Journal of Historical Review said the incident was "a great defeat for the cause of free speech and free inquiry" and concluded:

  American newspapers and magazines repeatedly assert that the Japanese hold "stereotyped" views about "the Jews," and frequently disparage them for thinking that Jews wield enormous power around the world, severely punishing anyone who defies their interests. The murder/suicide of Marco Polo magazine is unlikely to disabuse many Japanese of such "stereotyped" views. As in the United States, Japanese are expected to engage in a kind of Orwellian "doublethink," simultaneously taking to heart the harsh lesson of Marco Polo's demise, while regarding those who forced the execution as feeble victims, (pp. 2-6)

  From the deniers' perspective, Jewish organizations did exactly what deniers have been accusing them of doing all along—wielding economic power and controlling the media. Simon Wiesenthal Center senior researcher Aaron Breitbart chose not to dignify their viewpoint with a serious rebuttal, responding only, "If it is not true, they have nothing to worry about. If it is true, they'd better be nice to us."

  2. On May 7, 1995, fifty years to the day after the allies defeated Nazi Germany, the Toronto headquarters of Ernst Ziindel, the noted neo-Nazi publisher and Holocaust denier, were set on fire, causing an estimated $400,000 in damage. Ziindel was away on a speaking tour but swore that the attack, not the first, would not deter his efforts: "I have been beaten, bombed, spat at. . . but Ernst Ziindel will not be run out of town. My work is legal and legitimate, and enjoys constitutional protection under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms." Ziindel should know, as he defended these rights in two trials in 1985 and 1988, in which he was charged with "spreading false news" about the Holocaust. In 1992, Canada's Supreme Court acquitted Ziindel on the grounds that the law under which Ziindel had been charged was unconstitutional.

  Claiming credit for the arson attack, according to the Toronto Sun, was "a shadowy offshoot of the Jewish Defense League" called the "Jewish Armed Resistance Movement." The group contacted the Toronto Sun, whose investigations revealed a connection "to yet another offshoot of the Jewish Defense League, Kahane Chai, an ultra-right Zionist group." Meir Halevi, leader of the Toronto Jewish Defense League, denied any connection with the attack, although a few days later, on May 12, Halevi and three companions, including Irv Rubin, leader of the Jewish Defense League in Los Angeles, tried to break into Ziindel's home. Staff members photographed the would-be intruders and called the police, who, with Ziindel in the car, chased them down and apprehended them. They were released, however, without being charged.

  The point is this. Like the Loftus-Demjanjuk story, I heard about these events through the deniers themselves, who take such incidents and use them to prove their point about what "the Jews" are capable of doing. The Institute for Historical Review capitalized on the Marco Polo incident by citing it in a fund-raising letter asking for donations to support the fight against the so-called Jewish-Zionist conspiracy. Ziindel plays to the hilt that it was "the Jews" who did this to him as he solicits funds to help him reconstruct his office.

  My position regarding the freedom of speech of anyone on any subject is that while the government should never, under any conditions, limit the speech of anyone anytime, private organizations should also have the freedom to restrict the speech of anyone anytime within their own institution. Holocaust deniers should have the freedom to publish their own journals and books, and to try to have their views aired in other publications (e.g., college newspaper advertisements). But colleges, since they own their own newspapers, should have the freedom to restrict the deniers access to their readers.

  Should they exercise this freedom? This is a question of strategy. Do you ignore what you know to be a false claim and hope it goes away, or do you stand it up and refute it for all to see? I believe that once a claim is in the public consciousness (as Holocaust denial undeniably is), it should be properly analyzed.

  From a broader perspective there are, I believe, reasonable arguments for why we should not cover up, hide, suppress, or, worst of all, use the State to squelch someone else's belief system, no matter how wacky, unfounded, or venomous it may seem. Why?

  • They might be completely right, and we would have just squashed the truth.

  • They might be partially right, and we do not want to miss a part of the truth.

  • They might be completely wrong, but by examining their wrong claims, we will discover and confirm the truth; we will also discover how thinking can go wrong, and thus improve our thinking skills.

  • In science, it is not possible to know the absolute truth about anything, so we must always be on the alert for where we have gone wrong and where others have gone right.

  • Being tolerant when you are in the majority means you have a greater chance of being tolerated when you are in the minority.

  Once a mechanism for censorship of ideas is established, it can then work against you if and when the tables are turned. Let us pretend for a moment that the majority denies evolution and the Holocaust and that creationists and Holocaust deniers are in the positions of power. If a mechanism for censorship exists, then you, the believer in evolution and the Holocaust, may now be censored. The human mind, no matter what ideas it generates, must never be quashed. When evolutionists were in the minority in Tennessee in 1925, and politically powerful fundamentalists were successfully passing antievolution legislation making it a crime to teach evolution in public schools, Clarence Darrow made this brilliant observation in his closing remarks in the Scopes trial:

  If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and next year you can make it a crime to teach it in the church. At the next session you can ban books and the newspapers. Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy, indeed feeding, always feeding and gloating for more. Today it's the public school teachers, tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After awhile, your honor, it is the setting of man against man, creed against creed, until the flying banners and beating drums are marching backwards to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the man who dared to bring any intelligence, and enlightenment, and culture to the human mind, (in Gould 1983a, p. 278)

  13

  Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened, and Why Do They Say It?

  An Overview of a Movement

  The SS guards took pleasure in telling us that we had no chance of coming out alive, a point they emphasized with particular relish by insisting that after the war the rest of the world would not believe what happened; there would be rumors, speculation, but no clear evidence, and people would conclude that evil on such a scale was just not possible.

  —Terrence des Pres, The Survivor, 1976

  When historians ask, "How can anyone deny the Holocaust?" and deniers respond, "We are not denying the Holocaust," it becomes obvious that the two groups are defining the Holocaust in different ways. What deniers are explicitly denying are three points found in most definitions of the Holocaust:

  1. There was intentionality of genocide based primarily on race.

  2. A highly technical, well-organized extermination program using gas chambers and crematoria was implemented.

  3. An estimated five to six million Jews were killed.

  Deniers do not deny that antisemitism was rampant in Nazi Germany or that Hitler and many of the Nazi leaders hated Jews. Nor do they deny that Jews were deported, that the prop
erty of Jews was confiscated, or that Jews were rounded up and forced into concentration camps where, in general, they were very harshly treated and made the victims of overcrowding, disease, and forced labor. Specifically, as outlined in "The Holocaust Controversy: The Case for Open Debate" advertisements that Bradley Smith places in college newspapers, as well as in various other sources (Cole 1994; Irving 1994; Weber 1993 a, 1994a, 1994b; Ziindel 1994), the deniers are saying:

  1. There was no Nazi policy to exterminate European Jewry. The Final Solution to the "Jewish question" was deportation out of the Reich. Because of early successes in the war, the Reich was confronted with more Jews than it could deport. Because of later failures in the war, the Nazis confined Jews in ghettos and, finally, camps.

  2. The main causes of death were disease and starvation, caused primarily by Allied destruction of German supply lines and resources at the end of the war. There were shootings and hangings (and maybe even some experimental gassings), and the Germans did overwork Jews in forced labor for the war effort, but all this accounts for a very small percentage of the dead. Gas chambers were used only for delousing clothing and blankets, and the crematoria were used only to dispose of the bodies of people who had died from disease, starvation, overwork, shooting, or hanging.

  3. Between 300,000 and two million Jews died or were killed in ghettos and camps, rather than five to six million.

  In the next chapter, I will address these claims in detail, but I wish to give brief answers here.

  1. In any historical event, functional outcomes rarely match original intentions, which are always difficult to prove anyway, so historians should focus on contingent outcomes more than intentions. The functional process of carrying out the Final Solution evolved over time, driven by such contingencies as increasing political power, growing confidence in getting away with a variety of persecutions, the unfolding of the war (especially against Russia), the inefficiency of transporting Jews out of the Reich, and the infeasibility of eliminating Jews by disease, exhaustion, overwork, random killings, and mass shootings. The outcome was millions of Jewish dead, whether extermination of European Jewry was explicitly and officially ordered or just tacitly approved.

  2. Physical and documentary evidence corroborate that the gas chambers and crematoria were mechanisms of extermination. Regardless of the mechanism used for murder, however, murder is murder. Gas chambers and crematoria are not required for mass murder, as we have seen recently in Rwanda and Bosnia. In occupied Soviet territories, for example, the Nazis killed about 1.5 million Jews by means other than gassing.

  3. Five to six million killed is a general but well-substantiated estimate. The figures are derived by collating the number of Jews reported living in Europe, transported to camps, liberated from camps, killed in Einsatzgruppen actions, and alive after the war. It is simply a matter of population demographics.

  One of the things I commonly hear when I tell people about Holocaust deniers is that they must be raving racists or nutty fools on the lunatic fringe. Just who would say the Holocaust never happened? I wanted to find out, so I met with some of them to allow them to present their claims in their own words. In general, I found these deniers relatively pleasant. They were willing to talk about the movement and its members quite openly, and they generously provided a large sampling of their published literature.

  After World War II, revisionism began in Germany with opposition to the Nuremberg trials, typically seen as "victor's trials" that were hardly fair and objective. Revisionism of the Holocaust itself took off in the 1960s and 1970s with Franz Scheidl's 1967 Geschichte der Verfemung Deutschlands (In Defense of the German Race), Emil Aretz's 1970 Hexeneinmakins einer Liige (The Six Million Lie), Thies Christophersen's 1973 Die Auschwitz-Liige (The Auschwitz Lie), Richard Harwood's 1973 Did Six Million Really Die?, Austin App's 1973 The Six Million Swindle, Paul Rassinier's 1978 Debunking the Genocide Myth, and the bible of the movement, Arthur Butz's 1976 The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. It is in these volumes that the three pillars of Holocaust denial—no intentional genocide by race, gas chambers and crematoria not used for mass murder, many fewer than six million Jews killed—were crafted.

  Except for Butz's book, which stays in circulation despite being disorganized beyond repair, these works have all given way to the Journal of Historical Review (JHR), the voice of the Institute for Historical Review (IHR). The institute's journal, along with its annual conference, has become the hub of the movement, which is populated by a handful of eccentric personalities including IHR director and JHR editor Mark Weber, author and biographer David Irving, gadfly Robert Faurisson, pro-Nazi publisher Ernst Ziindel, and video producer David Cole. (See figure 17.)

  Institute for Historical Review

  In 1978, IHR was founded and organized primarily by Willis Carto, who also published Right and American Mercury (considered by some to have strong antisemitic themes) and now runs Noontide Press, publisher of controversial books including those denying the Holocaust. Carto also runs Liberty Lobby, which is classified by some as an ultra-right-wing organization. In 1980, IHR's promise to pay $50,000 for proof that Jews were gassed at Auschwitz made headlines. When Mel Mermelstein met this challenge, headlines and later a television movie detailed his collection of the award and an additional $40,000 for "personal suffering." IHR's first director, William McCalden (a.k.a. Lewis Brandon, Sandra Ross, David Berg, Julius Finkelstein, and David Stanford), was fired in 1981 due to conflicts with Carto and was succeeded by Tom Marcellus, a field staff member for the Church of Scientology who had been an editor for one of the church's publications. When Marcellus left IHR in 1995, JHR's editor, Mark Weber, took over as its director.

  Since the 1984 fire-bombing that destroyed its office, IHR is understandably cautious about revealing its location to outsiders. Situated in an industrial area of Irvine, California, the office has no sign and its glass door, entirely covered with one-way mirror coating, is dead-bolted at all times; one must be identified and admitted by the secretary working in a small office in front. Inside, there are several offices for the various staff members and a voluminous library. Not surprisingly, World War II and the Holocaust are the prime foci of its resources. In addition, IHR has a warehouse filled with back issues of JHR, pamphlets, and other promotional materials, as well as books and videotapes, all part of a catalogue business that, together with subscriptions, accounts for about 80 percent of revenues, according to Weber. The other 20 percent comes from tax-free donations (IHR is a registered nonprofit organization). Whatever funds the institute was receiving through Carto dried up after the 1993 falling out with (and subsequent filing of lawsuits against) the founder of IHR.

  Before the break with Carto, IHR leaned heavily on the "Edison money," a total of about $15 million willed by Thomas Edison's granddaughter, Jean Farrel Edison. According to David Irving (1994), about $10 million of that money apparently was lost by Carto "in lawsuits by other members of the family in Switzerland" and the remaining $5 million was made available to Carto's Legion for the Survival of Freedom. "From that point on it vanishes into uncertainty. Certain sums of money have turned up. A lot of it is in a Swiss bank at present."

  When the institute's board of directors voted to sever all ties with him, Carto apparently did not take it lying down. According to IHR, among many other things, Carto has "stormed IHR's offices with hired goons" and put out "the fantastic lie that the Zionist ADL [Anti-Defamation League] has been running IHR since last September" (Marcellus 1994). On December 31, 1993, IHR won a judgment against Carto. They are now suing him for damages incurred during his raid on the IHR office, which destroyed equipment and ended in fisticuffs, as well as for other moneys that, Weber claims, went "to Liberty Lobby and other Carto controlled enterprises. Probably the money has been frittered away by Carto but we are trying to track this down" (1994b).

  In February 1994, Director Tom Marcellus sent a mass mailing to IHR members with "AN URGENT APPEAL FROM IHR" because it had "been forced to conf
ront a threat to the editorial and financial integrity. . . that in the past several months has drained, and continues to drain, literally tens of thousands of dollars from our operations." Without help from its members, Marcellus wrote, "IHR may not survive." Carto was accused of becoming "increasingly erratic," both in personal matters and in business, and of involving "the corporation in three costly copyright violations." Most interesting, and in keeping with deniers' current attempts to disassociate themselves from earlier antisemitic connections and present themselves as objective historical scholars, the mailing condemned Carto for changing "the direction of IHR and its journal from serious, nonpartisan revisionist scholarship, reporting, and commentary to one of ranting, racialist-populist pamphleteering" (Marcellus 1994).

  David Cole believes that the post-Carto "IHR is going to have to depend a lot more on journal and book sales" and thus on their right-wing, antisemitic backers:

  In order to keep the IHR in the black they have had to cater to the far right. I think if you were to look at their book sales you would see that some of the more complex, really solid historiographical works probably don't sell as well as Henry Ford's International Jew or the Protocols of Zion, or some of the other things they sell. If they had to rely on the sales of Holocaust revisionist works alone they'd be screwed. They have to cater to the money. There are a lot of elderly people with money saved or with social security checks, who want to spend the last years of their life fighting the Jews. Bradley [Smith] can get checks for $5,000, $7,000, $3,000. These people are very, very wealthy, and completely anonymous. There is a lot of money to be made by getting a really good ideological mailing list and the IHR has one that caters mainly to people of the far right. (1994)