HOLOCAUST DENIAL’S ASSAULT ON MEMORY: PRECURSOR TO TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY GENOCIDE? by Dr. Harold Brackman and Aaron Breitbart edited and Preface by Rabbi Abraham Cooper A SIMON WIESENTHAL CENTER REPORT www.wiesenthal.com 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS 1 Preface 2 Why Holocaust Denial’s Assault on Memory Must Not be Allowed to Stand 3 The Challenge of Holocaust Denial 7 The Roots of Holocaust Denial: Europe and North America 7 New States of Denial: The Arab and Muslim World 10 Denial on the Internet 14 Denial as Global Common Denominator 16 Conclusion: Why It Matters 18 Appendix A: Answering The Deniers’ 13 Big Lies 19 Appendix B: A Who’s Who of Deniers 27 Appendix C: Examples Of Denial 42 Appendix D: Documents About Auschwitz 73 Appendix E: Open Letter on Iranian Holocaust Denial Conference 80 Bibliography 83 Online Resources 85 2 Preface This monograph—Holocaust Denial’s Assault on Memory—was initially inspired by the campaign of Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to deny history’s most documented crime: Nazi Germany’s genocidal “Final Solution” against Europe’s Jews that left 6 million dead, included a generation of children. Indeed, the Simon Wiesenthal Center is translating this work into Arabic, Farsi, and, hopefully, Indonesian and Urdu. We dare not allow the bigots to be the sole source of information about the Holocaust for young people in the Arab and Muslim worlds. But upon further reflection, the onslaught of attractive websites, books, and “journals” demonizing the victims and whitewashing the crimes of the perpetrators reflects a much broader worldwide campaign against Truth that must be confronted and defeated. What’s at stake? The philosopher, George Santayana once warned, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But in the twenty-first century, we are confronted with a much bigger nightmare: Not forgetfulness but denial. And if lapses of memory lead to tragedy—deconstructing memory could lead to genocide or Armageddon. I join the authors of this report in thanking Mark Weitzman, the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Director, Task Force against Hate, and Chief Representative to the United Nations, for his input to the project. Rabbi Abraham Cooper Associate Dean Simon Wiesenthal Center Los Angeles, Ca. USA Yom Hashoah/Holocaust Memorial Day April, 2007 3 WHY HOLOCAUST DENIAL’S ASSAULT ON MEMORY MUST NOT BE ALLOWED TO STAND The Assault on Memory: What’s At Stake? “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” ———George Orwell, 1984 “‘The event is unthinkable; therefore it did not occur’. So say the metaphysicians of history when they talk about the extermination of the Jews in the gas chambers. And miraculously they are not exactly preaching in the desert, for here and there a few people lend and ear and welcome their ‘revelations’.” ———Alain Finkielkraut, The Future of a Negation (1998) “The World Holocaust Foundation’s mandate is to question the historical reality of the ‘Final Solution’ [and] ‘challenge the nations of Europe to hand over the proof of the organized massacre of Jews in Europe during World War II’.” ——— Mohammad Ali Ramin, head of Iran’s World Holocaust Foundation, Tehran, 2007 “people will say the events you describe are too monstrous to believe” “Even if someone were to survive, the world will not believe him. There will be perhaps suspicions, discussions, research by historians, but there will be no certainties, because we will destroy the evidence together with you. And even if some proof should remain and some of you survive, people will say the events you describe are too monstrous to be believed: they will say that they are exaggerations of Allied propaganda and will believe us, who will deny everything, and not you. We will be the ones to dictate the history . .” ———Auschwitz Guard taunting Inmate Primo Levi “The Holocaust is a Myth. Zionists are the true manifestation of Satan.” ———Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “To those who deny the Holocaust ever happened I would like them to personally explain to me what happened to my 6 year-old brother, who was murdered in Auschwitz, to my 33 year old mother, my 36 year-old father and to the one and a half million children who did not survive the Holocaust!” ———Sally Wasserman, who survived Auschwitz as an 8 year-old orphan, challenging Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s “Witness to the Truth” Two-Nation Videoconference, December, 2006 4 The Danger of Denial: “Holocaust Denial is like a slow invasion of termites. As long as there are survivors, the danger is mitigated. They can stand up and say ‘I am not lying about the Holocaust: where are my parents and brothers?’ I don’t believe Holocaust denial is a clear and present danger; it’s a clear and future danger. When there won’t be anyone around to say, ‘This is my story, this is what happened to me’, it will become easier to deny.” ———Historian Deborah Lipstadt “The Holocaust Deniers are not a bunch of social misfits, but part of an increasingly sophisticated and interconnected international movement whose ‘assault on truth and memory’ is the ‘cutting edge’ of antisemitism old and new, with all the attendant harm that such racist incitement connotes. For the danger of this international hate movement does not lie only in its assaultive speech denying the Holocaust . rather, it resides first in the imputation of this ‘hoax’ to the Jews . .; and second, it resides, in its whitewashing of the worst crimes and criminals in history. In effect, the Holocaust Denial Movement can be seen as an international criminal conspiracy. .” ———Former Canadian Justice Minister Irwin Cotler (MP) “Today, the most vicious ideas about Jews are primarily voiced not by the downtrodden and disenfranchised fringe elements of society but by its most successful, educated and ‘progressive’ members. This is true in the Islamic world, and it is even truer in the West. One is less likely to find anti-Semites today in beer halls and trailer parks than on college campuses and among opinion makers in the media elite.” ———Journalist Gabriel Schoenfeld The Truth About the Nazi Holocaust from Key Perpetrators: “I said in court that what happened with the Jews, which the government of the German Reich brought about during the last Great War, was the most enormous crime in the history of mankind. And I witnessed the gruesome working of the machinery of death; gear meshed with gear, like a clockwork. It was the biggest and most enormous dance of death of all time.” ——— SS Obersturmbannführer and “Final Solution” architect Adolf Eichmann, on trial in Israel in 1961. “The ‘final solution’ of the Jewish question meant the complete extermination of all Jews in Europe. I was ordered to establish extermination facilities at Auschwitz in June 1941. At that time there were already in the General Government three other extermination camps. These camps were under the Einsatzkommando of the Security Police and SD. I visited Treblinka to find out how they carried out their exterminations. The Camp Commandant at Treblinka told me that he had liquidated 80,000 in the course of one-half year. He was principally concerned with liquidating all the Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto. He used monoxide gas and I did not think his method was very efficient. So when I set up the extermination building at Auschwitz I, I used Zyklon B, which was crystallized Prussic Acid we dropped into the death chamber from a small opening. It 5 took from 3 to 15 minutes to kill the people in the death chamber depending upon climatic conditions. We knew when the people were dead because their screaming stopped. We usually waited about one-half hour before we opened the doors and removed the bodies. After the bodies were removed our special commandos took off the rings and extracted the gold from the teeth of the corpses. Another improvement we made over Treblinka was that we built our gas chambers to accommodate 2,000 people at one time, whereas at Treblinka their 10 gas chambers only accommodated 200 people each. The way we selected our victims was as follows: we had two SS doctors on duty at Auschwitz to examine the incoming transport of prisoners. The prisoners would be marched by one of the doctors who would make spot decisions as they walked by. Those who were fit for work were sent into the Camp. Others were sent immediately to the extermination plants. Children of tender years were invariably exterminated since by reason of their youth they were unable to work. Still another improvement we made over Treblinka was that at Treblinka the victims almost always knew that they were to be exterminated and at Auschwitz we endeavoured to fool the victims into thinking that they were to go through a delousing process. Of course, frequently they realized our true intentions and we sometimes had riots and difficulties due to that fact. Very frequently women would hide their children under the clothes but of course when we found them we would send the children in to be exterminated. We were required to carry out these exterminations in secrecy but of course the foul and nauseating stench from the continuous burning of bodies permeated the entire area and all of the people living in the surrounding communities knew that exterminations were going on at Auschwitz.” ———Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Höss, Affidavit at Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, April 15, 1946 Anatomy of a Lie—One Denier’s Deceptions: “David Irving had gone on the claim that on 1 December 1941, ‘Himmler telephoned SS General Oswald Pohl, overall chief of the concentration camp system, with the order: ‘Jews are to stay where they are’.