A MATTER OF ANTISEMITISM, NOT HISTORY

Dear Professor Lipstadt:

Thank you for that sobering and thought-provoking series of letters. I’d like to move our conversation in a slightly different direction. I know that fighting Holocaust denial has long been a central focus of your professional life and that you have persistently confronted deniers and their historical distortions.

Please don’t think I’m minimizing your accomplishments in this area, but aren’t deniers the equivalent of flat-earth theorists who are peddling an utterly bogus and thoroughly discredited version of history? Why should we take them seriously and give their perverted and unquestionably false view of history the dignity of a response? How much of an impact do they really have?

Yours,

Abigail

Dear Abigail and Joe:

Abigail, you’re not the first person to ask me this question. Sometimes I ask it of myself. When I first began researching and writing on this topic, colleagues would frequently tell me I was wasting my time. “These people are dolts,” they would insist. “Forget about them.” In truth, I thought the same thing when I first heard of Holocaust deniers. I, too, dismissed them as not worthy of serious analysis. Then I looked more closely, and I changed my mind.

Denial flies in the face of basic logic. The Holocaust has the dubious distinction of being the best documented genocide in the world. For deniers to be right, all survivors would have to be wrong.1 Who else would have to be wrong? The bystanders, those non-Jews who lived in the cities, towns, and villages in eastern and western Europe and watched as their Jewish neighbors were being marched away, to be put on trains to concentration camps or to be shot in the woods and left to die in ditches.2 The scores of historians who have studied and written about the Holocaust over the past seventy years would either have to be part of this massive conspiracy or have been completely duped.

But, above all, the perpetrators themselves—those who actually admitted their guilt—would have to be wrong. Survivors say, “This was done to me.” Perpetrators say, “I did it.”3 In criminal cases, the perpetrator’s admission of guilt has more clout than the victim’s accusation. How can deniers explain that in not one war-crimes trial since the end of World War II has a perpetrator of any nationality denied that these events occurred? They may have said, “I was forced to kill,” but not one asserted that the killing did not happen. Finally, why has Germany shouldered the enormous moral and financial responsibility for the crimes committed in the Holocaust, if it did not happen?4 Of course, according to the deniers, the answer to this question is quite simple: German officials were forced into a false admission of guilt by “the Jews,” who threatened to prevent Germany’s reentry into the family of nations. But this, too, makes little sense. German leaders had to know that admitting to a genocide of such proportions would impose upon the nation a horrific legacy that would become an integral part of its national identity. Why would a country take on such a historical burden if it were innocent? Moreover, seventy years after the end of the war, with Germany now a global political and economic leader, it could have proclaimed that “it’s not true; the Jews made us say this back in 1945.” Instead, the German government created a massive memorial in Berlin to the murdered Jews.

There is yet another bit of illogic on which deniers depend. They demand to be shown the one specific piece of evidence that would prove to them there was a Holocaust: Hitler’s written order authorizing the murder of all of Europe’s Jews. In all likelihood, Hitler realized the folly of affixing his signature to such an order, which, had it become public, many might not have accepted. More important, historians are not troubled by the absence of such a document. They never rest their conclusions on one document, particularly in this instance, when the Third Reich left a vast cache of evidence attesting to a government-directed program whose goal was the annihilation of the Jewish people. Deniers, of course, will insist that “the Jews” have forged these documents. But if that were the case, why didn’t the Jews also forge the all-important document from Hitler himself?

The list of illogical arguments goes on. Deniers contend that had the Third Reich, a regime they describe as the epitome of efficiency and power, wished to murder all the Jews, it would have ensured that no witnesses remained alive to testify about the death camps. Therefore, the fact that there were survivors alive at the war’s end constitutes proof that there was no genocide and that the survivors’ testimonies are lies. One need not be familiar with any documentary evidence to recognize the fallacious nature of this argument. The Third Reich was also intent on winning the war, which it did not do. Therefore, the assumption that the Third Reich succeeded at all it set out to do is false. Anything based on that premise is equally false.

Struck by the complete lack of logic in any of their claims, I initially dismissed the Holocaust deniers and their theories out of hand. Then two respected historians suggested that I take a closer, more systematic look. They wondered how deniers—given the implausibility of their arguments—had been able to attract any adherents at all. Though still skeptical, I took up their challenge and thought this would be, at most, a two-year project before I moved on to other matters. I was wrong.

It soon became apparent to me that deniers were a new type of neo-Nazi. Unlike previous generations of neo-Nazis—people who celebrated Hitler’s birthday, sported SS-like uniforms, and hung swastikas at meetings where they would give the Sieg Heil salute—this group eschewed all that.5 They were wolves in sheep’s clothing. They didn’t bother with the physical trappings of Nazism—salutes, songs, and banners—but proclaimed themselves “revisionists”—serious scholars who simply wished to revise “mistakes” in the historical record, to which end they established an impressive-sounding organization—the Institute for Historical Review—and created a benign-sounding publication—the Journal for Historical Review.6 Nothing in these names suggested the revisionists’ real agenda. They held conferences that, at first blush, seemed to be the most mundane academic confabs. But a close inspection of their publications and conference programs revealed the same extremism, adulation of the Third Reich, antisemitism, and racism as the swastika-waving neo-Nazis. This was extremism posing as rational discourse.

Abigail, in your letter you compliment me for consistently confronting deniers. While I have spent time exposing their lies and inconsistencies, I have not entered into debate with them. They will tell you that I am afraid to. The truth is that they are liars, and one cannot debate a liar. It is akin to trying to nail a blob of jelly to the wall. Generally speaking, people differentiate between facts and opinions—you can have your own opinions, but not your own facts. But in the case of deniers, there are facts, opinions, and lies. In 2000, when I was on trial in London for libel, having been sued by David Irving—then one of the world’s leading Holocaust deniers—for having called him a denier, my defense team and I tracked all of his “proofs” back to their sources and found that embedded in the claims he made about the Holocaust were falsifications, inventions, distortions, changes of dates, or some other form of untruth. Once these lies were exposed, his arguments collapsed.

Among the leading purveyors of Holocaust denial arguments are far-right, neo-Nazi, and white power groups. Their adulation of Nazi ideology, “Aryan” superiority, and, above all, Adolf Hitler make them perfect candidates for denial. They are masters of inconsistency. They argue that murdering the Jews would have been entirely justified but that it never happened. I suppose you could call this the “no, but” argument: “No, it didn’t happen. But it should have.”

It should be obvious that Holocaust denial is, quite plainly, a form of antisemitism. It’s not about history. It’s about attacking, discrediting, and demonizing Jews. The claims of the deniers—that the Jews planted evidence, got German prisoners of war to admit to crimes they did not commit, and forced Germany to shoulder a tremendous financial and moral burden when the war ended—are predicated on the notion of the mythical power of the Jews, which, they firmly believe, was extensive enough to realize this vast conspiracy. Unconcerned about how their actions would affect millions of people and with only their own political and financial benefit in mind, the Jews created the myth of the Holocaust in order to obtain a state of their own and extract vast amounts of money from Germany. Then, according to this so-called “theory,” they proceeded to displace another people from their land in order to gain sovereignty for themselves. These assertions rely on classic antisemitic tropes, the same ones found throughout two thousand years of antisemitic accusations. Just as the Jews persuaded the Roman Empire, then the rulers of Palestine and much of the rest of the world, to do their bidding and crucify Jesus, so, too, they persuaded the Allies to create evidence of a genocide for their own financial and political gain.

Now back to your question: Should we be worried about these people? To be honest, while I don’t think they are an imminent threat, I do believe that there is room for concern. Deniers have learned to use social media to their advantage. On Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2017, a survivor was interviewed on a BBC radio program. The producers were “shocked” by the “staggering” number of “brazen” Holocaust denial and antisemitic phone calls and social media posts they received. Though they had previously broadcast programs on the Holocaust and had received some antisemitic and denial comments, this response, one producer told me, was “unprecedented . . . unlike anything we have seen before.” They were so deeply unsettled that they invited me to appear on a subsequent program that addressed Holocaust denial.7 But denial is not something engaged in only by the Far Right. In many segments of the Muslim community, including among European Muslims, there is also an inclination to deny this historical reality. There are schools in Europe where teachers find it difficult to teach about the Holocaust because the students insist that it never happened, and the material the teachers present is dismissed by the students as false.8 As has become evident in recent years, there are those on the far left who also engage in denial. During a BBC interview in September 2017 on leftist antisemitism within Britain’s Labour Party, Ken Loach was asked to comment on a session at the party’s annual conference where a participant called for a “yes or no” discussion of the Holocaust. Loach’s rather ambiguous response: “I think history is for us all to discuss, wouldn’t you?”9

Ultimately, it’s hard to gauge whether deniers have increased in number or are just good at using social media to make themselves seem more numerous than they actually are. While either alternative is disturbing, the deniers clearly feel more emboldened than ever before.

Deniers are not the equivalents of flat-earth theorists, nor are they just plain loonies. Theirs is not a cognitive error that can be rectified by showing them documentation or evidence. They are, pure and simple, antisemites, and their agenda is to reinforce and spread the very antisemitism that produced the Holocaust. They can’t be completely discounted.

Yours,

DEL