Allied behavior in the immediate aftermath of the war was not without fault. There had been insufficient planning for this period, and there were many shortcomings in Allied policies. The de-Nazification program was applied unequally, and inequities in punishment resulted from it. But the critics ignored the circumstances that had produced this situation. Furthermore there was no starvation program in Germany, and the rations Germans received far surpassed anything concentration camp inmates were ever given by the Nazis. The vigor of the isolationists’ attacks on the de-Nazification program did not abate even when it became clear that Washington wished to change, if not totally abandon it.
(The degree to which Germans could be singled out for having committed atrocities was a matter of debate from the moment the war ended. The concentration camps had barely been liberated when some critics and commentators began to argue that the reports, official photographs, and films of the camps were being released in order to implant in American minds a feeling of vengeance. James Agee, writing in the Nation of May 19, 1945, attacked the Signal Corps films of concentration camp victims even though he had not seen them. He did not believe it “necessary” to show them: “Such propaganda”—even if true—was designed to make Americans equate all Germans with the few who had perpetrated these crimes.62 Milton Mayer, in an article in the Progressive, went a step further than Agee. He not only argued against vengeance but questioned whether the films and reports could really be true. “There are, to be sure, fantastic discrepancies in the reports.”63 Despite overwhelming evidence, doubts persisted.64)
Respected Americans voiced concern about a spirit of vengeance. They sometimes did so by casting doubt on the veracity of the stories and by defending the perpetrators. Robert Maynard Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, a vigorous isolationist who had been an advisor to America First, wrote in 1945 that “the wildest atrocity stories” could not change the “simple truth” that “no men are beasts.” (The implicit message in Hutchins’s juxtaposition of the terms “wild atrocity story” with “simple truth” may have been unintended, but it must have had an impact on his readers.) An article in the Progressive by William B. Hesseltine, a historian at the University of Wisconsin, compared the false atrocity stories that had been circulated in the aftermath of the Civil War with those that emerged from Germany after the end of hostilities there.65
Years later, in an example of how deniers pervert historical arguments, a virtually identical argument was made by Austin App:
The top U.S. media, possibly because they are dominated by Jews . . . have no tradition of fairness to anyone they hate. . . . They have also in wartime subverted much of the public to a frenzy of prejudice. Even in our Civil War, where Americans fought against Americans, Americans of the North were told and came to believe that Choctaw County stunk with dead bodies of murdered slaves and that Southern belles had worn necklaces strung of Yankee eyeballs! . . . If Yankees could believe that Southern girls wore necklaces of Yankee eyeballs, would they not even more readily believe that Germans made lampshades out of the skins of prisoners, or that they boiled Jews into soap?66
Two decades later this argument would be reiterated in an essay in the Holocaust revisionist publication the Journal of Historical Review.67 (See chapter 9 for a discussion of the Civil War analogy.) By finding what they deemed to be historical parallels, deniers hoped to demonstrate that the Holocaust was not the only time the public had been tricked by historical orthodoxies.
During the early years after the war, Germans also tried to minimize Nazi wrongdoings and place the blame elsewhere. Some German neo-Nazis maintained that German crimes were not as immense as the Allies had charged.68 Others sought to clear Hitler of any responsibility. In 1952 the Institute for German Post-War History was organized in Tübingen by Dr. Herbert Grabert, who had known connections to extreme-right-wing and neo-Nazi groups. Grabert denounced those who claimed that Hitler had any ambitions to dominate the world,69 despite the fact that in order to do so he had to ignore the clear statements to the contrary in Mein Kampf (see chapter 5). In 1960 the Committee for the Restoration of Historical Truth—which argued that World War II had been caused by the Versailles treaty, that Britain had long sought a war against Germany, and that Roosevelt had helped push Britain into the war—was founded in Hanover. The committee’s organizers denounced the Jews as a “cancerous growth” on the body politic. When dealing with such an adversary, “human considerations do not enter.”70 In 1962 Nation Europa, Germany’s foremost neo-Nazi paper, claimed there was no “evidence that Hitler knew of the mad doings of a small clique of criminals.” And in 1963 the Deutsche Hochschullehrer-Zeitung (German high school teachers newspaper) argued that the Holocaust had been a legitimate “retaliatory action” against Jews, in response to Jewish “business methods” and the murder by Jewish Bolsheviks of German patriots.71
By 1950 the foundation had been laid for those who would not simply seek to relativize or mitigate Germany’s actions—the arguments they needed to buttress their charges of a Holocaust “hoax” had been made, some voiced by legitimate historians and others expressed by extremist politicians and journalists. Virtually all the revisionists’ charges were adopted by the deniers, including Germany’s lack of culpability, chicanery by both Presidents Wilson and Roosevelt, suppression of the truth after both wars, and use of propaganda—falsified atrocity stories in particular—to whip up public support. These arguments would become crucial elements in the deniers’ attempt to prove that the Holocaust “hoax” is not a unique phenomenon but a link in a chain of tradition whose hallmarks were chicanery, conspiracy, and deception. The French writer Nadine Fresco noted in her analysis of Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, “One cannot establish a science whose only ethic is suspicion.”72 Yet that is what the more extreme World War II revisionists were attempting to do.
Nonetheless, there was one thing these defenders of Nazi Germany and critics of American involvement and postwar Allied policy never suggested: namely that the atrocities in question had not happened. Irrespective of which side of the ocean they were on, they stopped short of this denial. They may have claimed that they were not as bad as had been reported. They may have argued that the Soviets or the Allies had committed similar acts or that Hitler knew nothing about them. They may have also ignored the moral implications of such behavior in order to argue that Allied and Axis behavior were virtually equal. But they did not deny that they were factual. Accusations to that effect were not long in coming, however, gaining currency within a few years after the war.
CHAPTER THREE
In the Shadow of World War II
Denial’s Initial Steps
The end of World War II meant the defeat of Adolf Hitler’s dream of a Third Reich. Most rational people assumed it also meant the end of fascism as an ideology. As long as fascism could be linked with Nazism, and Nazism, in turn, could be linked with the horrors of the Final Solution, then both would remain thoroughly discredited. There were those, however, who were not willing to abandon these political systems. They knew that the only means of trying to revive them would be to separate them from the Holocaust and the multitude of atrocities that accompanied it. Nowhere would this effort be more evident in the immediate aftermath of the war than in France, where Holocaust denial found some of its earliest proponents.
Within a few years after the liberation of Europe the effort to minimize the scope and intensity of the Nazi atrocities was overtaken by claims that the death of six million Jews was not only greatly exaggerated but a fabrication. Though the earliest deniers did not become part of a larger group, their tactics and arguments have since become integral elements of contemporary Holocaust denial. They made little, if any efforts, to disguise their antisemitism.
In 1947 Maurice Bardèche, a prominent French fascist, began a concerted attack on Allied war propaganda. He also engaged in a vigorous defense of the Nazis. In his first book, Letter to François Mauriac, Bardèche strongly defended the po
litics of collaboration. In his second, Nuremberg or the Promised Land, he contended that at least a portion of the evidence regarding the concentration camps had been falsified and that the deaths that had occurred there were primarily the result of war-related privations, including starvation and illness. Bardèche claimed that since the end of the war the world had been “duped by history.”1 According to Bardèche, Nazi documents that spoke of the “final solution of the Jewish problem” were really referring to the proposed transfer of Jews to ghettos in the east.
His fundamental argument was not only that the Nazis were not guilty of atrocities, but that the true culprits were the Jews themselves. Jews, both those who died and those who survived, deserved no sympathy because they had helped to instigate the war by supporting the Treaty of Versailles. He argued that it was morally wrong to hold German soldiers or officers of any rank culpable for following orders. Nazi Germany had to defeat the Communists in order to survive. A strong state with a strong and loyal army were absolute necessities for it to do so. The Nuremberg trials were both morally and legally wrong because they punished Germany for having done what was needed in order to defeat Stalin. For Bardèche the Allies’ bombing policy constituted a war crime.
While some of these notions, particularly those regarding the Versailles treaty and the Allied bombing policy, were being articulated by others, including isolationists in the United States, Bardèche was the first to contend that the pictorial and documentary evidence of the murder process in the camps had actually been falsified. He was also the first to argue that the gas chambers were used for disinfection—not annihilation.
Bardèche’s dubious credentials—he remained a committed fascist all his life—made him a controversial figure in denial circles. Despite his contentions that the Holocaust was a myth and that the Nazis were wrongly implicated, Bardèche has never been openly embraced by contemporary deniers. That has not kept them from adopting his ideas. Though they use his arguments, they rarely mention him by name because of his political views, about which he was always quite explicit. Indeed, he began his book What Is Fascism? with the unequivocal declaration: “I am a fascist writer.”
In Bardèche’s second book he laid out his objectives, which remain, almost verbatim, the credo of contemporary deniers: “I am not defending Germany. I am defending the truth. . . . I know a lie has been put about, I know a systematic distortion of facts exists. . . . We have been living with a falsification: it captures the imagination.”2 Today deniers protest that they are neither for Germany nor against Jews. They are not out to defend Hitler or castigate the Allies. They are interested only in revising history so that it will convey the truth. But such claims notwithstanding, examination of their methods and arguments reveals that since Bardèche’s work, truth has been the antithesis of their enterprise.
The next assault on the history of the war also emanated from France. In 1948 Paul Rassinier, a former Communist and a Socialist who had been interned in the concentration camps of Buchenwald and Dora, published Le Passage de la Ligne (Crossing the line). This was the first in a series of books he would write during the next two decades intended to show that survivors’ claims about the behavior of the Nazis, particularly in relation to the atrocities, could not be trusted. Rassinier, who became a member of the Communist party in 1922 when he was sixteen, left the Communists in the mid-1980s and joined the Socialists. When the war broke out he became part of the resistance. Eventually he was captured and sent to Buchenwald. On liberation in 1945, he returned to France and was elected a Socialist member of the National Assembly, where he served for a year. Shortly thereafter he began a prolific publishing career, the bulk of which was devoted to vindicating the Nazis by proving that the atrocity accusations against them were inflated and unfair. Given his earlier role in the French resistance, his arguments have the flavor of the utterances of a repentant sinner.
His books are a mixture of blatant falsehoods, half-truths, quotations out of context, and attacks on the “Zionist establishment.” In 1977 Rassinier’s major books concerning the Holocaust were reissued in one volume, Debunking the Genocide Myth, by the Noontide Press, which publishes neo-Nazi material and is connected with the California-based headquarters of the contemporary deniers, the Institute for Historical Review. The first part of this composite volume is made up of his first two works, Crossing the Line and The Lie of Ulysses, in which he focused on the concentration camps and the behavior of both inmates and Nazis administrators. He set out two propositions: Survivors exaggerate what happened to them, and it was not the SS that was responsible for the terrors of the camps but the inmates to whom they entrusted the running of the camps. He dismissed as gossip the testimony of survivors who claimed they had witnessed atrocities and denigrated the credibility of their assertions regarding the number of Jews who had been killed. “Concerning figures the ‘witnesses’ have said and written the most improbable things. Concerning the implementation of the means of killing, also.”3 He described concentration camp literature as “a collection of contradictory pieces of ill-natured gossip.”4
Rassinier initially limited his argument regarding the killing process to denying that there was a policy of annihilation. People may have been killed, he declared, but those who conducted such “exterminations” were acting on their own and not in the name of “a state order in the name of a political doctrine.”5 Rassinier sought to absolve the National Socialist leadership from responsibility for the gas chambers, claiming there appeared to have been no official Nazi policy of gas exterminations. Though Rassinier would eventually deny the existence of gas chambers altogether, in these early works he stopped short of doing so and posited that there probably had been exterminations by gas, but not as many as had been claimed. At this time even the most extreme neo-Nazi groups were not denying that gas chambers had been used to murder Jews. Instead of denying Nazi atrocities, however, they defended them—one of the major distinctions between the earliest deniers and more recent ones. Bardèche, Rassinier, Barnes, App, and others among the first generation of deniers differ from those who followed them. The first group sought to vindicate the Nazis by justifying their antisemitism. While they argued that the atrocities were exaggerated or even falsified, they also contended that whatever was done to the Jews had been deserved because the Jews were Germany’s enemy. Distorting the truth, they blamed Jews for Germany’s financial and political plight and made the wildly exaggerated claim that Jews had been the prime beneficiaries of the chaos of Weimar. Jews were disloyal citizens, likely to be subversives and spies.
Only in the 1970s, when they finally began to recognize the futility of trying to justify Nazi antisemitism, did deniers change their methods. They saw that, from a tactical perspective, the proof of Nazi antisemitism was so clear that trying to deny or justify it undermined their efforts to appear credible. As deniers became more sophisticated in the subtleties of spreading their argument, they began to “concede” that the Nazis were antisemitic. They even claimed to deplore antisemitism, all the while engaging in it themselves. They acknowledged that some Jews may have died as a result of Nazi mistreatment but continued to argue that there was no Holocaust.
In Crossing the Line Rassinier chose an interesting tactic to express his most radical contentions regarding the inmates and their experiences. Instead of arguing in his own voice, he quoted a fellow inmate, whom he described as a Czech, a lawyer who had been the assistant mayor of Prague before the war.6 It is not clear whether this Czech really existed or whether Rassinier created him as a foil for his own controversial notions. What is clear is that the Czech voiced ideas that became part of Rassinier’s litany of claims regarding the Holocaust. Rassinier may have put this argument in the Czech’s voice for a practical reason. In the early 1950s, when he was arguing that the Nazi leadership bore little, if any, responsibility for atrocities, war wounds were still quite fresh. This was particularly so in France, which had been occupied by the Nazis. Rassinier may have been reluctant
to express his views about the innocence of the Nazi leadership, the inmates’ culpability in their own suffering, and the trustworthiness, or lack thereof, of survivors’ testimony. Such views would have been particularly odious in the 1950s.
In truth, whether this Czech existed or was a literary creation is immaterial, since Rassinier not only articulated no reservations about his views but in fact acknowledged that he was convinced that this Czech was right. Even when Rassinier challenged the Czech’s views, in the end he always conceded that his friend’s ideas vanquished his own.
In these early works Rassinier set out to do three things: First he had to demolish the credibility of his fellow prisoners’ testimony. As long as one could trust what they said, any attempt to absolve the Nazis would be futile. But given the sympathy toward the inmates that existed particularly during the years immediately after the war, he could not ascribe to them diabolical or even devious motives. Instead he explained their supposed behavior in psychological terms:
Human beings need to exaggerate the bad as well as the good and the ugly as well as the beautiful. Everyone hopes and wants to come out of this business with the halo of a saint, a hero, or a martyr and each one embroiders his own Odyssey without realizing that the reality is quite enough in itself.7
Had Rassinier or his Czech argued that some concentration camp inmates were wont to exaggerate certain aspects of the treatment they endured, few would have questioned their conclusions. For a variety of reasons, some inmates did and still do embellish their experiences. Others sometimes adopt the experiences of fellow survivors as their own. Historians of the Holocaust recognize this and do not build a historical case on the oral history of an individual survivor, engaging instead in what anthropologists call triangulation, matching a survivor’s testimony with other forms of proof, including documents and additional historical data. But Rassinier blatantly dismissed all survivors’ testimony. Nor did he stop there in his attack on the survivors. He not only cast doubt on the testimony of victims but he exonerated the perpetrators—the Nazi leadership in general and the SS in particular. According to Rassinier, the “SS never meddled with the camp life.” If there were any excesses in the camps it was the responsibility of the inmates. Outrages in the camps were always made “still worse” by the prisoners.8
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