DE-JUDAIZING THE HOLOCAUST

Dear Professor Lipstadt:

I’ve noticed that in recent times some eastern European governments (i.e., former Soviet bloc countries) have been attempting to refashion their World War II history. But this seems to be more about politics than history. Is this considered denial? It also appears to come with some latent antisemitism. Is this accurate, or am I beginning to see Jew-hatred in too many places?

Thanks,

Abigail

Dear Deborah:

I’ve also been following the events in eastern Europe with some trepidation. I worry not just about the rewriting of history but also about the attack on democracy that seems to come with it. And I’ve watched with concern the concurrent proliferation of antisemitic sentiment. Is this simply a coincidence or are we, once again, looking at an interlocking directorate of sorts: trampling on historical accuracy, feeding the antisemitic beast, and attacking democracy and its institutions?

Yours,

Joe

Dear Abigail and Joe:

You are both quite right. In eastern Europe today we are witnessing soft-core denial on a national level. What is taking place in a number of former Soviet bloc countries—particularly those governed by parties with strong nationalist orientations—is serious. These countries are currently engaged in blatant and conscious efforts to rewrite their histories. They may not be motivated by antisemitism, but that is one of the end products of what they are doing.

Strongly anti-Communist, these governments are often the ideological and political heirs of the nationalist groups that collaborated with the Nazis during the war against the hated Soviet Communists. Thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, their hatred of it and of communism persists. And who was behind the Communists? The Jews, of course. Some of these countries have even gone so far as to designate soldiers who collaborated with the Nazis and, in some instances, participated in the murder of Jews, as national heroes. At the same time, these governments have labeled as traitors those who fought with the Soviet-backed anti-Nazi partisan groups, which included many Jews. In Lithuania in the early 1990s, one of the first acts of the post-Communist government was the exoneration of Lithuanian nationalists who participated in the Holocaust. In 2004, after Lithuania had already qualified for membership in the EU and NATO, the government began to prosecute Jewish partisans as pro-Soviet collaborators who “paved the way for postwar Soviet ‘genocide.’ ”1 An academic paper posted on the website of the Lithuanian governmental body responsible for investigating war crimes questioned whether the Holocaust even constituted genocide. This paper argued that “although an impressive percentage of the Jews were killed by the Nazis, their ethnic group survived” and subsequently thrived. In contrast, the paper pointed out that the Lithuanian intelligentsia that was exterminated under Stalin has never been replaced.2

In Poland, the newly elected far-right nationalist Law and Justice party (PiS) has attempted to rewrite Poland’s World War II historical record. Any person or institution that casts aspersions on Poland’s wartime record of battling the Nazis is attacked. Museum curators who have tried to present an accurate portrait of Poland’s behavior during the war have been fired.3 Exhibits at various government-sponsored museums have been reconfigured to stress Polish battlefield heroics and erase any evidence of complicity with the Germans.4 The situation escalated in the winter of 2018 when, after extended deliberation, both houses of the Polish parliament adopted legislation that made it a crime to publicly claim that the Polish nation bears any responsibility for crimes committed by the Third Reich during the Holocaust. It was signed into law by the president of Poland in February 2018. Norman Davies, a professor and historian specializing in Polish history, described the law’s effort to paint Poles purely as victims as “a part of the present government’s attempt to rewrite history. It’s one of the pillars of every authoritarian or totalitarian regime, that they want to reorder the past to their own fantasies.”5 There were certainly Poles who helped Jews during the war. (More than sixty-seven hundred of them have been recognized as Righteous Among the Nations by the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem.) But there were also Poles—probably many more—who betrayed Jews. And there were Poles who murdered Jews on their own, without any instigation by the Germans.6

Even though, after an international outcry, the Poles changed the punishment from criminal to civil punishment, this law does more than just fly in the face of historical accuracy and scholarly freedom. It constitutes an attempt to obscure Poland’s long history of antisemitism, one that persisted even after World War II. A recently declassified 1946 State Department report assessed the situation of surviving Jews in postwar Poland. It described Jews “fleeing” Poland in “panic” because of the attacks on them, some of which were facilitated by Polish police. The report took particular note of the fact that Jews—whom the Germans had tried to annihilate—would now rather live in Germany than in Poland. Polish Jews were experiencing, the report contended, the continuation of prewar Polish nationalist antisemitism.7

With the 2018 law, PiS intended to satisfy its rural and nationalist electoral base and to demonstrate to them “that Poland has risen from its knees and won’t be humiliated.”8 While this may have been the intent, the law did something else as well: It helped dredge up antisemitic sentiment. Suddenly, antisemitism seemed to be everywhere: throughout social media, on television, and in the press that supported the government. The PiS-controlled media contended that outside forces—“Jews in particular—want to prevent Poland from telling the truth about its own history.”9

Responding to strong international criticism, Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki justified the law by arguing that “there were Polish perpetrators, as there were Jewish perpetrators, as there were Ukrainian; not only German perpetrators.” While there were Jews who served on the ghetto police forces or as members of the Judenräte, the ghetto councils established by the Germans, their actions could in no way be equated with the genocidal activities of the Nazis and their collaborators—which included many Poles. Jews who agreed to serve as ghetto police or in leadership positions in the ghettos generally did so to save themselves and their families from certain death. Poles who collaborated with the Nazis did so, by and large, for either antisemitic or financial reasons.10

Regrettably, the Trump administration missed an opportunity to confront the Polish government about this new law. When President Trump visited Warsaw in July 2017, the law was under discussion but had not yet been enacted into law. He gave a vigorously nationalistic speech at Warsaw’s war memorial, calling for protection of borders and urging Poles to join Americans in fighting forces, “whether they come from inside or out,” that threaten the shared “values . . . of culture, faith and tradition.”11 Many in Poland saw this as a clear expression of support for PiS’s nationalistic tendencies. The Polish government was delighted with Trump’s speech, and he neither publicly nor privately said anything about the then pending legislation. Then he became the first American president to visit Poland since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 and not make a stop at the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial, the site of the first armed uprising against the Germans anywhere in Europe during World War II. Though the Republican Jewish Coalition tried to blame this on time constraints, Poland’s Jewish community was not mollified and expressed its “deep regret” at this “break with that laudable tradition.”

In Hungary there has been a consistent effort by the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to diminish, if not deny, the role of Hungarians in the murder of the Jews during the war. As Germany’s wartime ally, the Hungarian government persecuted its Jews severely but resisted German attempts to deport them. In March 1944, upon discovering that the Hungarian government was considering armistice negotiations with Britain and the United States, the German army invaded Hungary and established a puppet government. Most Hungarian government officials remained in place and enthusiastically carried out German orders. That spelled the end for Hungarian Jews. Adolf Eichmann, who was in charge of deporting Hungary’s Jews to death camps, had only a few hundred SS officers under his command, hardly enough to destroy the substantial Hungarian Jewish community. But he was energetically assisted by Hungarian police, militia, railway officials, and private citizens. With their help, over the course of approximately seven weeks, Eichmann organized the deportation of more than half a million Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where more than four hundred thousand were murdered.

In an effort to strengthen Hungarian nationalism and erase an inconvenient history of collaboration and complicity, Orbán depicts Hungary as a victim, not a perpetrator, of war crimes during World War II.12 Any attempt to challenge this view and insist that Hungary own up to its past crimes is interpreted by the government and its supporters as an attempt to blacken the country’s good name and reputation.

Western Europe is not immune to this type of historical reconfiguration. On April 9, 2017, Marine Le Pen, president of the National Front (a far-right political party in France) and a member of France’s National Assembly, contended that France bore no responsibility for the notorious Vél d’Hiv roundup of more than thirteen thousand Jews (including approximately four thousand children) in July 1942. Jews were held at a stadium near the Eiffel Tower in Paris for five days in searing heat and horrific conditions—little food, water, or facilities—until they were deported to death camps and murdered.13 This roundup was planned by the Gestapo and members of France’s collaborationist government, conducted by French police, and supervised by French officials. But for decades after the war the French government steadfastly denied any complicity in the affair. That changed in July 1995 when then president Jacques Chirac unequivocally declared, “France, the homeland of the Enlightenment and of the rights of man, a land of welcome and asylum—France, on that day, committed the irreparable. Breaking its word, it handed those who were under its protection over to their executioners.” Every subsequent French president and leading politician has reaffirmed that statement. But in 2017 Le Pen attacked France’s willingness to own up to its blemished historical record. She condemned the teaching of the July 1942 roundup in French schools. “I want them to be proud to be French again,” she stated. And in July 2017, Jean-Luc Melenchon, a left-wing member of the National Assembly, echoed Le Pen’s comments, declaring it “totally unacceptable” to say that “France, as a people, as a nation, is responsible for this crime [of the deportation of the Jews].”14

But this kind of historical obfuscation does not come only from those at the more extreme ends of the political spectrum. Le Livre des Commemorations Nationales (Book of National Commemorations) is an annual publication by the French government to recall notable events and people and, in the words of the French minister of culture, to bring French citizens “great pleasure and beautiful emotions.” In the 2018 edition, notice was made of the 150th anniversary of the birth of Charles Maurras. Maurras, an author, politician, poet, and critic, was also the editor of the antisemitic and antidemocratic newspaper L’Action Française, and wrote many vitriolic articles about Jews. A supporter of Vichy during World War II, he described French collaboration with the Nazis as a “divine surprise.” After the war, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for his collaboration with the Nazis and for “betraying French resistance workers to the Nazis.”15 As a result of the public outcry against Maurras’s inclusion in the Book of National Commemorations, all copies were recalled and the book was reprinted without his entry. Many wondered how a man whose principal claim to fame was his opposition to the French Revolution, his antisemitism, and his pro-Nazism had merited inclusion in the first place.

We will in the future continue to witness instances of soft-core denial. On some level, this is much harder to fight than the hard-core deniers, but fight it we must. You’re right, Joe, about the connections among the rewriting of history, attacks on democracy, and expressions of antisemitism. As I’ve said before, these things never happen in isolation. And what starts with attacks on Jews rarely ends there.

Yours,

DEL