Holocaust Denial Holocaust Denial The Politics of Perfidy Edited by Robert Solomon Wistrich Co-published by The Hebrew University Magnes Press (Jerusalem) and De Gruyter (Berlin/Boston) for the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism DE GRUYTER MAGNES An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libra- ries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high quality books Open Access. More information about the initiative can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org We would like to acknowledge the support of the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah in Paris which made possible the publication of this volume. Editorial Manager: Alifa Saadya An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libra- ries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high quality books Open Access. More information about the initiative can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org ISBN 978-3-11-021808-4 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-021809-1 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-021806-2 ISSN 0179-0986 e-ISSN 0179-3256 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License, as of February 23, 2017. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/. ISBNLibrary 978-3-11-028814-8 of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data e-ISBNA CIP catalog 978-3-11-028821-9 record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek LibraryDie Deutsche of Congress Nationalbibliothek Cataloging-in-Publication verzeichnet diese Data Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliogra- ISBN 978-3-11-021808-4 Afie; CIP detaillierte catalog record bibliografische for this book Daten has sindbeen im applied Internet for über at the Library of Congress. http://dnb.dnb.dee-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-021809-1 abrufbar. e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-021806-2 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek ISSN 0179-0986 The© 2016 Deutsche Walter Nationalbibliothek de Gruyter GmbH, listsBerlin/Boston this publication in the Deutsche e-ISSN 0179-3256 Nationalbibliografie;Druck und Bindung: Duck & Co., detailed bibliographic Ortsname data are available in the Internet http://dnb.dnb.de♾ Gedruckt auf säurefreiem abrufbar. Papier Printed in Germany © 2012 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License, &www.degruyter.com Hebrew University Magnes Press, Jerusalem as of February 23, 2017. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/. Typesetting: Michael Peschke, Berlin Printing: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data U Gedruckt auf säurefreiem Papier A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Printed in Germany Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek www.degruyter.com Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliogra- fie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.dnb.de abrufbar. © 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Druck und Bindung: Duck & Co., Ortsname ♾ Gedruckt auf säurefreiem Papier Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com Table of Contents Robert Solomon Wistrich Introduction: Lying about the Holocaust 1 Michael Shafir Denying the Shoah in Post-Communist Eastern Europe 27 Joanna Michlic The Jedwabne Debate: Reshaping Polish National Mythology 67 Simon Epstein Roger Garaudy, Abbé Pierre and the French Negationists 85 Alain Goldschläger The Trials of Ernst Zündel 109 Milton Shain and Margo Bastos Muslim Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism in Postwar South Africa 137 Danny Ben-Moshe Holocaust Denial “Down Under” 157 Rotem Kowner The Strange Case of Japanese “Revisionism” 181 Mark Weitzman Globalization, Conspiracy Theory, and the Shoah 195 Jeffrey Herf Broadcasting Antisemitism to the Middle East: Nazi Propaganda during the Holocaust 213 Matthias Küntzel Judeophobia and the Denial of the Holocaust in Iran 235 vi Table of Contents Robert Solomon Wistrich Negationism, Antisemitism, and Anti-Zionism 257 Notes on Contributors 269 Index 271 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. 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],