Chapter One
1* Buchanan’s statements were made as part of his defense of John Demjanjuk, a retired Cleveland auto worker accused of being Ivan the Terrible, notorious camp guard and a mass murderer at Treblinka. It is not Buchanan’s defense of Demjanjuk with which I take issue—it is his use of denial arguments to do so. Buchanan has consistently opposed any prosecution of Nazi war criminals.
2* It is ironic that Duke’s efforts to win the Republican presidential nomination were overshadowed by Buchanan, who had earlier advocated that the Republicans stop feeling guilty about their “exploitation” of the Willie Horton issue and instead take a “hard look at Duke’s portfolio of winning issues” (New Republic, October 15, 1990, p. 19).
3* His solution to unemployment would be to declare the employment of a female a “criminal offense.”
4* It is ironic that this internationally known professor should have become such a defender of Faurisson’s right to speak when he would have denied those same rights to proponents of America’s involvement in Vietnam. In American Power and the New Mandarins he wrote, “By accepting the presumption of legitimacy of debate on certain issues, one has already lost one’s humanity.” Though written long before the Faurisson affair, his comments constitute the most accurate assessment of his own behavior.
5* Chomsky’s behavior can be contrasted with that of thirty-four of France’s leading historians who, in response to Faurisson’s efforts, issued a declaration protesting his attempt to deny the Holocaust. The declaration read in part: “Everyone is free to interpret a phenomenon like the Hitlerite genocide according to his own philosophy. Everyone is free to compare it with other enterprises of murder committed earlier, at the same time, later. Everyone is free to offer such or such kind of explanations; everyone is free, to the limit, to imagine or to dream that these monstrous deeds did not take place. Unfortunately, they did take place and no one can deny their existence without committing an outrage on the truth. It is not necessary to ask how technically such mass murder was possible. It was technically possible, seeing that it took place. That is the required point of departure of every historical inquiry on this subject. This truth it behooves us to remember in simple terms: there is not and there cannot be a debate about the existence of the gas chambers.” The full text of the declaration appeared in Le Monde, February 21, 1979.
6* In an apparent emulation of the deniers, a small group of Americans, led by a woman in California, Lillian Baker, has made the same claims about the World War II Japanese concentration camps in the United States. Manzanar, the infamous concentration camp for Japanese Americans, contained only “voluntary visitors.” They were treated royally, given every amenity, and had “all they could eat at our government’s expense.” Like the Jews, Baker and her group claim, the contemporary Japanese Americans who foster this hoax have a rationale for doing so—to divert attention from their community’s complicity with Japan during the war (Los Angeles Times, August 28 and December 6, 1991).
7* Robert Lifton expressed similar ambivalences about the potential impact of his research on doctors who participated in the Nazi killing system. He feared that his explanation would sound as if he were condoning or rationalizing their actions (Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide [New York, 1986], pp. xi-xii).
Chapter Two
1* Lindbergh’s best-known and most controversial statement during this period was made in September 1941 at an America First rally in Des Moines, Iowa. In a speech entitled “Who Are the War Agitators?” he told eight thousand people that the “three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt Administration. . . . If any one of these groups—the British, the Jewish, or the Administration—stops agitating for war . . . [there would] be little danger of our involvement.”
2* In 1977, denier James Martin described Morgenthau’s plan as an example of running postwar Germany “according to the Old Testament instead of the New.” He claimed the plan had been implemented and resulted in the German population transfers, which he called the “most barbarous event of the history of Europe. . . . It is rare that one ever sees an animal forced to endure under such degraded and forlorn circumstances.” Martin, a member of the Journal of Historical Review’s editorial board, is listed as a contributor to the 1970 Encyclopedia Britannica. James J. Martin, The Saga of Hog Island and Other Essays in Inconvenient History (Colorado Springs, 1977), p. 193.
Chapter Three
1* The Einsatzgruppen were the special mobile killing units that conducted the massacres of Soviet Jewry immediately after the Germans declared war on the USSR.
2* The section on the USSR appears as follows:
Prewar Jewish Population, |
|
Postwar Jewish Population, |
||
USSR |
|
3,020,000 |
|
2,600,000 |
|
Estonia |
4,500 |
|
|
|
Latvia |
95,000 |
|
|
|
Lithuania |
145,000 |
|
|
|
Total: |
3,264,500 |
|
2,600,000 |
Note: The postwar USSR total includes 300,000 deportees, refugees, and survivors from other territories.
When the three hundred thousand deportees, refugees, and survivors are deducted from the 2.6 million the total corresponds to a loss of 1 million Jews in the USSR.
3* Author’s note: Hitler changed the date of his original speech threatening the Jews with annihilation from January 30, 1939, to September 1, 1939.
Chapter Four
1* American Jewish organizations have traditionally opposed such a question because they believe it would violate the constitutional guarantee of the separation of church and state.
2* The editor of the Journal of Historical Review was clearly distressed by the ambiguity of this statement, which could be interpreted to suggest that Barnes believed that there might have actually been “gas ovens” in Auschwitz. When the Journal reprinted the article in 1980 the editor added a footnote to Barnes’s comment about the gas ovens: “Of course Barnes is confused here by the difference between a ‘gas chamber’ and a ‘gas oven.’ Shortly after writing this article, he came to reject the entire holocaust myth, not just part of it.”
3* This is what they have done in relation to the charge that Nazis used Jewish cadavers for the production of soap. When scholars of the Holocaust corrected this notion, the deniers were quick to charge they did so in order to avoid being exposed as willful liars. (See chapter 10.)
4* The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was a favorite target of the revisionists. In a confidential report written in 1944 John Flynn cited the ADL as one of the groups responsible for a program to silence isolationists and “destroy the[ir] reputations” by intimidating them and anyone who might be influenced by them. In 1947 the Chicago Tribune ran a series of five articles by Flynn making these allegations (Wayne S. Cole, Roosevelt and the Isolationists, 1932–1945 [Lincoln, Nebr.]).
5* Villard admonished Barnes about making these claims: “I do not think for a moment that you need lay this to the Jews. [Vansittart] is a hard, aggressive fighter as his books have shown and when he chose Nizer as his counsel he picked the man who got a $100,000 verdict against Victor Ridder, which the judge cut to $50,000. Englishmen are very sensitive about libels. . . . I don’t believe he needed the slightest prodding from anybody.”
6* Students at Harvard and Columbia have told me that they had no idea he was writing in this fashion when they were using his books.
Chapter Five
1* This argument was used by the deniers until the Soviets adopted a sharp anti-Zionist policy. It then became difficult to claim the existence of a Zionist-Soviet plot, and the deniers stopped repeating this argument.
2* This was not the only time App relied on biblical themes to depict Jews. In 1948 he called for the reeducation of Jews “away from their eye for an eyeism.” (App, Morgenthau Era Letters, p. 73.)
3* All these assertions are absolutely false. Israel has opened its archives to all credible scholars and students working in this field.
4* A “page of testimony” at Yad Vashem consists of the name and birthdate of the victim as well as additional biographical information. It is usually filled out by a surviving relative, friend, or neighbor. Obviously many people died and did not leave behind any relatives or neighbors who could perform this task of memorializing their name.
Chapter Six
1* For example, both the American and the British authors describe Eichmann’s assistant as “a nervous wreck and addicted to uncontrollable fits of sobbing for hours” (pp. 46, 11). In addition, Dr. M. Nyiszli, the author of Doctor at Auschwitz, is described in the American and the British versions as “apparently a mythical and invented figure” (pp. 118, 20). Nyiszli was a Jewish doctor who worked under the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele as a pathologist. His role is well established in documents and testimonies. There are numerous other examples of “shared” citations and paraphrasing. See, for example, the section on the International Committee of the Red Cross, “Letters of thanks which came pouring in from Jewish internees.” (pp. 99, 25). Compare also p. 98 with p. 24 and p. 101 with p. 25.
2* Scholars debate at what point in 1941 the Nazis decided to murder all the Jews in their sphere of influence. The prospect of having many millions of Jews, including those in the Soviet Union, under their rule when they overran that country led them to conclude that murder was the only “efficient” means of dealing with the Jewish “problem.” Intentionalists argue that the Nazis intended from the outset to eventually murder the Jews and that there was a high degree of consistency and orderly sequence in the Final Solution. Functionalists believe that there was no blueprint for the murder of the Jews but that the annihilation program was initially a means for the Nazis to emerge from a blind alley into which they had maneuvered themselves. Functionalists argue that in its first stages the murder program was improvised, and it proceeded in a haphazard fashion.
I do not intend to enter the debate between the intentionalists and the functionalists. Both groups essentially agree that the war and especially the invasion of the Soviet Union made the annihilation process possible—irrespective of when and how the idea originated. Until 1939 the Nazis tried to get rid of the Jews by pressuring them into emigration. After that time they forcibly extruded them. For an excellent summary of this entire debate see Michael R. Marrus, The Holocaust in History, (New York, 1989 [pbk.]), pp. 34–48.
3* Buber’s book contains a variety of historical flaws. I use her work not as a historical source but as an example of how deniers regularly falsify authors’ conclusions.
4* The American publication The Myth of the Six Million made the same claim about the ICRC report (p. 101).
5* Joachim C. Fest, Hitler (London, 1974).
Chapter Seven
1* The St. Louis was the German ship that was turned away from Cuba in May 1939 because the Cuban government had invalidated the landing certificates of the refugees on board. When the ship tried to land in Miami government officials denied permission.
2* In 1916 the Germans began to lose World War I. The National Socialists attributed this loss to a “stab in the back” administered by the Jews.
3* The most significant was its unprecedented nature.
Chapter Eight
1* In the spring of 1981 he left the IHR because of differences with the organization’s controlling power, Willis Carto. He spent most of the rest of his life until his death in 1991 engaged in a bitter and vitriolic fight with Carto and the IHR.
2* Various Jewish organizations with which Mermelstein consulted, including the ADL and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, suggested that he ignore the IHR’s challenge because participating would only give the deniers the attention they craved. He decided to proceed nonetheless.
3* In 1990 Mermelstein’s story was made into a television movie starring Leonard Nimoy.
4* Among the mailings distributed by his so-called Jewish Information Society is a grossly distorted sexually explicit cartoon depicting male and female elderly Jew. Both have large hooked noses. The woman, whose breasts droop down to her knees, has stubble on her chin and is smoking a cigarette. The man’s penis, which is erect, is supported by a splint, and his scrotum droops to his knees. The caption reads, “In spite of his feeble condition, Dr. Mengele was able to rejuvenate him and he is now proudly showing off his fine restoration to his beautiful, most anticipating, and sensuous looking sweetheart.”
5* In 1979 Carto turned control of the American Mercury over to Ned Touchstone, who had been on the Board of Policy of the Liberty Lobby at the same time as he served as editor of the journal published by the White Citizens Councils.
Chapter Nine
1* In bringing charges against Zundel the Canadian government joined what had begun as a private complaint. Sabrina Citron, a survivor of the Holocaust and a citizen of Canada, initiated the action against Zundel. Most Canadian Jewish organizations did not support her decision.
2* The jury found him guilty of spreading false information about the Holocaust but acquitted him on charges connected with “The West, War, and Islam.”
3* The London edition was entitled Auschwitz: The End of the Line: The Leuchter Report—The First Forensic Examination of Auschwitz. It contained a foreword by Irving.
4* Zundel was found guilty a second time and sentenced to nine months in jail. In 1992 the law under which Zundel had been charged was declared unconstitutional by the Canadian Supreme Court.
5* They showed him documentation regarding the design and fabrication of sophisticated ventilation systems that had been installed in the gas chambers. What purpose, they asked, would such a system have served in a morgue or crematorium?
6* He did the same thing with Otto Frank, Anne Frank’s father (see Appendix).
7* In the segment Leuchter took the film crew on a tour of the North Carolina chamber. The impression given viewers was that he had worked on this facility when, in fact, he had not. Prime Time Live (ABC-TV), May 10, 1990.
8* The Russian archives granted Irving permission to copy two microfiche plates, each of which held about forty-five pages of the diaries. Irving immediately violated his agreement, took many plates, transported them abroad, and had them copied without archival permission. There is serious concern in archival circles that he may have significantly damaged the plates when he did so, rendering them of limited use to subsequent researchers.
Irving believes Jews are “very foolish not to abandon the gas chamber theory while they still have time.” He “foresees [a] new wave of antisemitism” due to Jews’ exploitation of the Holocaust “myth.” C. C. Aronsfeld, “Holocaust ‘Revisionists’ Are Busy in Britain,” Midstream, Jan. 1993, p. 29.
Chapter Ten
1* Among the papers that accepted it, either as an ad or an op-ed column, were the University of Arizona, Cornell, Duke, the University of Georgia, Howard, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Louisiana State, the University of Michigan, the University of Montana, Northwestern, Ohio State, Rutgers, Vanderbilt, Washington University, and the University of Washington.
Among those colleges rejecting the ad were Berkeley, Brown, the University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of Chicago, Dartmouth, Emory, Georgetown, Harvard, the University of Minnesota, the University of North Carolina, the University of Pennsylvania, Purdue, Rice, the University of Southern California, the University of Tennessee, the University of Texas (Austin), UCLA, the University of Virginia, the University of Wisconsin (Madison), and Yale.
2* The memorial stone at Auschwitz lists the number of victims of the camp as 4 million. Research now indicates that the number of people who died in the Auschwitz/Birkenau gas chambers was between 1.5 and 2 million, of whom 85 to 90 percent were Jews.
3* The papers discussed in this chapter function as private newspapers. The courts have broadly defined their editorial discretion to accept or reject ads. In situations of “state action,” where a state university administration controls the newspaper’s content, the courts may prohibit content-based rejection of the ads. Discretion of Student Editors to Accept or Reject Holocaust Revisionist Advertisements (ADL Legal Affairs Dept., Feb. 1992).
4* In 1931, in Near v. Minnesota, the Supreme Court struck down a state attempt to gag a paper’s freedom to publish “malicious, scandalous or defamatory” material. Fred W. Friendly, Minnesota Rag (New York, 1981).
5* The Tufts Daily was the only paper that decided to run portions of the ad. Its editors voiced the opinion that it was necessary to run the ad so that readers could “fully comprehend” the deniers’ arguments and then make “informed judgments” and engage in “active dialogue” about “complex issues.” They reached that conclusion despite their conviction that Smith’s views had little if any “legitimacy” and were filled with “hateful sentiments and ideas that defile the memories” of the millions killed in World War II. To have rejected it would have “unilaterally censored” the campus community from the issue. Tufts joined other campuses in falling prey to the light-of-day argument: In search of a principled stand, they gave Smith exactly the exposure he sought.
6* At the meeting one of the editors of the paper, an African American, stood up and said that while he could not personally know what it felt like to lose so many of one’s coreligionists in the Holocaust, he “knew” the pain of slavery. He would fight anyone’s attempt to deny that. Consequently he felt obligated to fight this attempt at denial.
He also turned to Murphy and said that he understood that one of Murphy’s objections was that it was infantilizing to prevent the students from deciding on the contents of the ad themselves. He wondered if it was not equally infantilizing to tell an entire editorial board to publish something whose publication it uniformly opposed.
7* The deniers have cited these contentions, which have been subjected to serious historical and methodological critiques, to support their claims that whatever atrocities the Nazis committed, those committed by the Allies were worse.
8* The full text of the resolution read “As we approach the fiftieth anniversary of the downfall of the Nazi regime in 1995, the American Historical Association calls attention to the need to initiate plans now to encourage study of the significance of the Holocaust. To that end the association will make available the names of experts on the history of the event.” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 8, 1992.
Chapter Eleven
1* Countries such as the United States, where the degree of ignorance about historical matters is legendary, are particularly susceptible to this kind of rewriting of history. In 1990 only 45 percent of Alabama high school seniors knew that the Holocaust was the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews. It is telling that many of those who gave the wrong answer thought that the United States had committed the Holocaust against the Japanese with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Birmingham, Alabama, News, Aug. 12, 1990).
2* The same kind of rehabilitation is evident in France among the highest reaches of the political and judicial establishment. President François Mitterrand recently had a wreath placed on the grave of the Vichy leader, Marshal Philippe Pétain, who collaborated with Nazi Germany and was directly responsible for the deportation of thousands of Jews. Pétain, who in World War I was commander in chief of the French forces, was convicted of treason by a French court in 1945. Mitterrand insisted in a radio interview that present-day France should not be held responsible for the crimes of the Vichy regime. While the contemporary French government does not bear “guilt” for Vichy’s actions, honoring one of the perpetrators with a presidential wreath sends a revisionist message to the population at large. It revises the historical perception of France’s role in the Holocaust. It can, and already has, become part of a historical whitewash.
Another form of French historical revisionism has been the refusal of French courts to try Vichy war criminals for their actions. The courts have thrown out these indictments, though the Supreme Court recently reinstated one of them. Thus far no citizen of France has been tried for crimes against humanity (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Nov. 23, Dec. 2, 1992).
3* This tactic was evident in the 1992 attempt of the Cincinnati Ku Klux Klan to erect a cross on city property during the Christmas season. They claimed it was part of their campaign to remind Cincinnatians of the religious significance of the holiday. It was a way for the Klan to present itself as more than just a racist organization.
4* It will prove particularly true for those beset by what my colleague David Blumenthal has termed “alterphobia”—the fear of the other. The other may be homosexuals, women, foreigners, Jews, people of color, or all of the above.
5* Having written this book in the shadow of the “industry” that produces these shows, I recognize that of all my calls for action, this one has the least possibility of realization.
6* Charges may again be brought against Zundel on the basis of his having incited hatred against Jews.
Appendix
1* Because the dimensions of the “doors” were thirty by forty centimeters, Pressac hypothesizes that they were probably shutters rather than doors.
2* The traditional notation of who had actually done the drawing and who had signed off on it is chilling in both its ordinariness and extraordinariness. The drawing was completed by prisoner 63003 (whose name remains unknown) on March 23, 1944. We know that it was reviewed by a civilian worker named Techmann and approved the next day by SS Lieutenant Werner Jothan.
3* The Secret Annex was the name Anne gave to the family’s hiding place.
4* Even after the diary was published to wide acclaim in Europe, American publishers were wary. Ten rejected it before Doubleday published it in 1951. It was an immediate success.
5* In fact, in 1973 he wrote a book, The Obsession, about the entire episode.