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Download Chapter (PDF) Robert Solomon Wistrich Introduction: Lying about the Holocaust Holocaust denial is a postwar phenomenon at whose core lies the rejection of the historical fact that six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis during World War II. Alongside explicit repudiation of the Holocaust, denial includes the minimiza- tion, banalization, and relativization of the relevant facts and events, so as to cast doubt on the uniqueness or authenticity of what happened during the Shoah.¹ These softer variants of Holocaust denial are designed to gain public accep- tance for its viewpoint as the “other side” of a legitimate debate. According to the hardline deniers or “revisionists” (as they misleadingly describe themselves), the extermination of the Jews never actually took place: the German authorities never planned to kill the Jews of Europe, and they never built or operated any death camps in which Jews were gassed. Most revisionist accounts rarely put Jewish losses between 1939 and 1945 above 300,000 persons, and these deaths are usually blamed on wartime deprivations, hardship, and disease. According to the deniers, the Nazi concept of a “Final Solution” always meant only the emigration of the Jews, not their annihilation. The Jews “missing” from Europe after 1945 are assumed to have resurfaced in the United States (as illegal immigrants), in Israel, or elsewhere. The massive documentation on the Holo- caust—including official papers of the Third Reich, statements by Nazi criminals, eyewitness accounts by Jewish survivors, diaries, memoirs, and the mountains of evidence from court trials—are invariably dismissed by deniers as unreliable and fantastic or as an outright lie.² For the deniers, no testimony by Jews is acceptable, because it was the Jews who invented the Holocaust “myth” in the first place, to serve their own financial and political ends. In the same way, all the volumes of 1 For earlier overviews of the subject, see Gill Seidel, The Holocaust Denial (Leeds 1986); Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Assassins of Memory. Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust (New York 1992); and Deborah E. Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (Toronto 1993). A more recent study is Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? (Berkeley, Calif. 2002). On French Holocaust denial, see Florent Brayard, Comment l’idée vint à M. Rassinier, Naissance du révisionnisme (Paris 1996); Nadine Fresco, Fabrication d’un antisémite (Paris 1999); and Valérie Igounet, Histoire du négationnisme en France (Paris 2000). 2 For typical examples of this literature, see Paul Rassinier, Le drame des Juifs Européens (Paris 1964); Thies Christopherson, Die Auschwitz Lüge (Mohrkirch 1973); Richard Harwood [pseud. of Richard Verrall], Did Six Million Really Die? The Truth at Last (Ladbroke 1974); and Arthur Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century (Torrance, Calif. 1976). The last two works were published by the Historical Review Press in the United Kingdom. DOI 10.1515/9783110288216.1, ©2017 Robert Solomon Wistrich, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. 2 Robert Solomon Wistrich documentation assembled by the Allies at the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal in 1946 are rejected: they are seen as part of a vengeful act of injustice by the victors, who stand accused by the deniers of having mistreated the Germans.³ According to the godfather of American “revisionist” historians, Harry Elmer Barnes, what Germans suffered at Allied hands—bombing of civilians in German cities, starvation, invasion, and the mass expulsions of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe after 1945—was far “more brutal and painful than the alleged exterminations in the gas chambers.”⁴ As for postwar Nazi testimony, the deniers allege that German defendants had no choice after 1945 but to confess guilt to false charges in the hope of receiving clemency. Confessions such as those of the Auschwitz commandant, Rudolf Höss, are routinely regarded by Holocaust deniers as having been extracted through the use of torture and humiliation. The mendacious propaganda of the Holocaust deniers relies on a number of standard techniques. They like to focus relentlessly on any discrepancies in the testimonies of witnesses, contradictions in documents or disagreements among scholars, in order to undermine the credibility of what they call the Holocaust “story.” They make much play of the fact that no explicit order from Hitler for a mass murder of the Jews has been found; that the Wannsee Conference of January 1942 did not refer to gassings in the present or future; or that Allied aerial recon- naissance of Auschwitz did not indicate gas chambers or crematoria with con- stantly burning chimneys. The deniers also cynically exploit the ambiguity of Nazi euphemisms like Sonderbehandlung (special treatment) for the gassing of Jews to suggest that this term actually mean “privileged” treatment. They provide similarly fake interpretations for the forced “evacuation” of Jews to the East.⁵ The “revisionists” usually explain away the large number of crematoria in the death camps by claiming that these were a means of dealing rapidly with 3 See Maurice Bardèche, Nuremberg ou la Terre promise (Paris 1948); Paul Rassinier, Le Mensonge d’Ulysse (Paris 1950); Richard Harwood [pseud. of Richard Verrall], Nuremberg and Other War Crimes (Ladbroke 1978); Austin J. App, The Holocaust Put in Historical Perspective,” Journal of Historical Review (henceforth HJR) (Spring 1980). 4 Harry Elmer Barnes, Blasting the Historical Blackout (Torrance, Calif.: Liberty Bell Publications, 1976) and idem, Barnes against the Blackout: Essays against Interventionism (Torrance, Calif. 1991), both published by the Institute for Historical Review. On the American “revisionist” school, see Lucy. S. Dawidowicz, “Lies about the Holocaust,” Commentary 70, no. 6 (Dec. 1980): 31–37; it also appears in idem, What is the Use of Jewish History? (New York 1992), 84–100. 5 See ADL, “‘Holocaust Revisionism’: A Denial of History,” Facts 26, no. 2 (June 1980); and Roger Eatwell, “The Holocaust Denial: A Study in Propaganda Technique,” in Neo-Fascism in Europe, edited by Luciano Chales et al. (London 1991), 120–43; see also Danny Ben-Moshe, “Holocaust Denial in Australia” in this volume. Introduction: Lying about the Holocaust 3 the growing number of victims of typhus and other epidemics toward the end of the war. At the same time, they like to suggest that most photographs of the Holocaust showing the liberation of the camps are nothing but fakes or else have been presented in a distorted way to exaggerate German barbarity. In any case, the Allies themselves were to blame. Through their ruthless bombing, they had created the total breakdown in the supply of food and medicine that produced the epidemics and the emaciated victims, whose condition so shocked the eyes of a disbelieving world in 1945. Moreover, by juggling world Jewish population figures before and after World War II, the deniers generally maintain that Jewish losses in the camps remained in the hundreds of thousands rather than in the millions.⁶ All these arguments and many other lies can be found in The Six Million Swindle: Blackmailing the German People for Hard Marks with Fabricated Corpses (1973) by Austin J. App, formerly a professor of English at La Salle College in Philadelphia. App, whose antisemitism was quite explicit, blamed Communists as well as Israel and world Jewry for inventing the myth of the gas chambers to divert attention from their own crimes. Holocaust “revisionists” have for some time focused special attention on the gas chambers. The French revisionist and literary critic, Robert Faurisson, extrap- olating from American gas chamber executions of single prisoners and evidence about the commercial use of Zyklon B as a disinfectant, deduced to his own sat- isfaction that mass gassings were impossible in Auschwitz.⁷ This assertion was then “tested” by Fred Leuchter, an unlicensed American engineer financed by the revisionists, who took forensic samples in Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek and could find no significant traces of hydrocyanic acid (the toxin in Zyklon B).⁸ Leuchter’s evidence was dismissed at the 1988 trial in Toronto of Ernst Zündel, a German-Canadian neo-Nazi and “revisionist.” Leuchter’s complete lack of exper- tise and credibility was summarily exposed.⁹ This did not stop the British his- 6 For examples of “revisionist” juggling with figures, see Harwood, Did Six Million Really Die?, 6–7; and the English language compilation of Rassinier’s work, Debunking the Genocide Myth (Torrance, Calif. 1978). For an analysis, see Georges Wellers, La Solution Finale et la Mythomanie Néo-Nazie: L’existence des Chambres à Gaz, Le Nombre des Victimes (Paris 1979); also Wolfgang Benz, ed. Dimension des Völkermords. Die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus (Munich 1991). 7 Vidal-Naquet, Assassins of Memory, 61–62. 8 For information about Leuchter, see ADL, Hitler’s Apologists: The Anti-Semitic Propaganda of Holocaust “Revisionism.” (New York 1993), 8–10; Michael Schmidt, The New Reich. Penetrating the Secrets of Today’s Neo-Nazi Networks (London 1993), 198–99. 9 Shermer and Grobman, Denying History, 45–46, 64–67, 129–30; see also Alain Goldschläger, “The Trials of Ernst Zündel” in this volume. 4 Robert Solomon Wistrich torian and Holocaust denier, David Irving, from publishing the Leuchter Report in 1989, declaring that it was “the end of the line” for the Auschwitz “myth.”¹⁰ Leuchter’s claims would be decisively refuted by Jean-Claude Pressac in his Aus- chwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers (1990), but this has not prevented his lies from taking on a life of their own in “revisionist” circles. Among present-day Holocaust deniers, apart from Irving, there are very few historians. As far back as 1977, in his best-selling Hitler’s War, Irving groundlessly asserted that the mass murder of Jews had been carried on behind Hitler’s back.
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