Preparatory Document

Preparatory document Please notice that we recommend that you read the first ten pages of the first three documents, the last document is optional. • International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, Recognizing and Countering Holocaust Distortion: Recommendations for Policy and Decision Makers (Berlin: International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, 2021), read esp. pp. 14-24 • Deborah Lipstadt, "Holocaust Denial: An Antisemitic Fantasy," Modern Judaism 40:1 (2020): 71-86 • Keith Kahn Harris, "Denialism: What Drives People to Reject the Truth," The Guardian, 3 August 2018, as at https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/aug/03/denialism-what-drives- people-to-reject-the-truth (attached as pdf) • Optional reading: Giorgio Resta and Vincenzo Zeno-Zencovich, "Judicial 'Truth' and Historical 'Truth': The Case of the Ardeatine Caves Massacre," Law and History Review 31:4 (2013): 843- 886 Holocaust Denial: An Antisemitic Fantasy Deborah Lipstadt Modern Judaism, Volume 40, Number 1, February 2020, pp. 71-86 (Article) Published by Oxford University Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/750387 [ Access provided at 15 Feb 2021 12:42 GMT from U S Holocaust Memorial Museum ] Deborah Lipstadt HOLOCAUST DENIAL: AN ANTISEMITIC FANTASY* *** When I first began working on the topic of Holocaust deniers, colleagues would frequently tell me I was wasting my time. “These people are dolts. They are the equivalent of flat-earth theorists,” they would insist. “Forget about them.” In truth, I thought the same thing. In fact, when I first heard of Holocaust deniers, I laughed and dismissed them as not worthy of serious analysis. Then I looked more closely and I changed my mind. Denial flies in the face of not just reams of documents, but of basic logic. The Holocaust has the dubious distinction of being the best documented genocide in the world. For deniers to be right, who would have to be wrong? • The survivors would have to be wrong.1 • The bystanders, the non-Jews who lived in the countries on the eastern front and saw their Jewish neighbors being marched to the outskirts of their towns, where they were shot and left in ditches.2 • The people who lived in towns near the death camps and watched the trains go into the camps filled with people and emerge empty.3 • The scores of historians who have studied and written about the Holocaust over the past sixty years would either have to be part of this massive conspiracy or have been completely duped. • But, above all, the perpetrators themselves—those who actu- ally admitted their guilt—would have to be wrong. Survivors say, “this was done to me.” Perpetrators say, “I did it.”4 This, of course, is no small thing, for in criminal cases, the perpetrator’s *Portions of this paper are drawn from my book Antisemitism Here and Now (New York, 2019). doi:10.1093/mj/kjz019 ß The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] 72 Deborah Lipstadt 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,” or “I had no choice,” but not one asserted that it did not happen. Yet deniers, who have no direct connection to the killing fields, claim they know better. There are other illogical inconsistencies to deniers’ arguments. Why has Germany shouldered the enormous moral and financial re- sponsibility for the crimes committed in the Holocaust, if it did not happen?5 Of course, according to the deniers, the answer to this ques- tion is quite simple: In 1945, German officials were forced into a false admission of guilt by “the Jews,” who, with the complicity of the Allies, threatened to prevent Germany’s reentry into the “family of nations” if it did not falsely admit to this crime. But this too makes little sense. German leaders had to know that to admit to this terrible crime would impose upon the nation a horrific legacy, one that would become an integral part of its national identity. Why would a county take on such a vast historical burden, if it was innocent? Moreover, sixty years after the end of the war, with Germany now a political and economic leader of the “family of nations,” it could have proclaimed that, “it’s not true; the Jews made us say this back in 1945.” It could have marshaled the puta- tive “evidence” demonstrating that it had been forced into admitting to this crime. 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 con- vince 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 while the war was being fought. More importantly, historians are not troubled by the absence of such a document. They never rest their conclusions on one document, partic- ularly 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 Holocaust Denial 73 the fallacious nature of this argument. Simply put: The Third Reich was also intent on winning the war, which it did not do. Therefore, the assumption that the Third Reich succeeded in 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—Yehuda Bauer and Yisrael Gutman— suggested 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 chal- lenge and thought this would be, at most, a two-year project before I moved on to other matters. I was wrong. It was not deniers’ arguments that intrigued me. They remained illogical and evidence free. It was their modus operandi. It soon became apparent to me that deniers were a new type of neo-Nazi and white supremacist. Unlike previous generations of neo-Nazis—people who openly 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.6 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.7 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 closer inspection of their publications or 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. 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, of Adolf Hitler make them perfect candidates for denial. They are masters of inconsistency. They argue that murdering the Jews was 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.” FACTS, OPINIONS, AND ... LIES Many people have complimented me for consistently confronting deniers and for being willing to stand up to them. While I appreciate the 74 Deborah Lipstadt accolades, they are, in fact, not fully deserved. It is true that I have spent time studying their lies and inconsistencies. However, I have not en- tered into debate with them. I refuse to do so for a simple reason: they are liars and one cannot debate a liar. I will debate someone who holds a diametrically opposed position on a matter about which I am quite passionate. But, I cannot debate a person who has a record of lying and falsifying history. It is akin to trying to nail a blob of jelly to the wall. I learned something from this as well. 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 deniers, for having called him a denier, we had two choices for a legal strategy.

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