Denying the Holocaust

by Deborah E. Lipstadt

  Despite having “discovered” the ones who are responsible for generating this myth, Rassinier still faced, as do all deniers, a fundamental obstacle—one he could not manipulate as easily as he had the misinformation regarding the reparations. Hitler and those around him had explicitly stated many times the Nazi intention to destroy the Jews. Hitler’s best-known diatribe in this regard was made on January 30, 1939:

  Today I want to be a prophet once more: If international finance Jewry inside and outside of Europe should succeed once more in plunging nations into another world war, the consequence will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.28

  This was not his only public threat to annihilate the Jews. In September 1942, six months after the gas chambers began to operate, he recalled his speech of 1939 and reiterated his predictions about the Jews’ fate. This time he was even more specific about the outcome:

  In my Reichstag speech of September 1, 1939,3* I have spoken of two things: first, that now that the war has been forced upon us, no array of weapons and no passage of time will bring us to defeat, and second, that if Jewry should plot another world war in order to exterminate the Aryan peoples in Europe, it would not be the Aryan peoples which would be exterminated but Jewry. . . .

  At one time, the Jews of Germany laughed about my prophecies. I do not know whether they are still laughing or whether they have already lost all desire to laugh. But right now I can only repeat: they will stop laughing everywhere and I shall be right also in that prophecy.29

  Rassinier had to explain away such statements—which had to be interpreted as meaning something other than what they clearly say—in order to maintain that genocide was a myth. Rassinier dismissed the 1939 statement as irrelevant hyperbole, typical of the “kind of defiance that was hurled by the ancient heroes” and consequently of “little significance.”30 Here too—as in the case of the total number of victims—Rassinier positioned himself on both sides of the argument. He repeatedly demanded explicit proof specifically indicating that it was the Nazis’ objective to murder the Jews. The absence of such proof, he argued, invalidated all conclusions regarding mass murder. But when a document or statement explicitly indicating an intention to annihilate was cited as proof, Rassinier dismissed it as euphemistic, hyperbolic, or irrelevant. These tactics were later adopted by deniers in their treatment of historical documents that, they argued, proved that the genocide of the Jews was not a myth. (If the documents are specific they are dismissed as euphemistic. If they are euphemistic they are interpreted at face value.)

  Rassinier used a slightly different approach for the 1942 speech. Rather than simply dismissing this as hyperbole, Rassinier contended that the fact that this threat against European Jewry was not cited at the Nuremberg war crimes trials proved that it was not considered to be serious evidence. Had the Allies considered it a serious document, they would have introduced it as evidence. But Rassinier failed to note that Hitler was not on trial at Nuremberg and that, consequently many of his statements and speeches, including those with specific antisemitic themes, were not cited. Moreover, it is both ironic and revealing that Rassinier, who had such contempt for all that went on at Nuremberg, should have used the trial as a standard for determining what does and does not constitute serious evidence.

  Rassinier’s attempt to explain how the Holocaust hoax has been perpetrated and spread worldwide is even more clumsy, and it revealed the true objective of his Holocaust denial. His explanation relied on traditional antisemitic imagery in order to explain the Jews’ intentions. It can be briefly summarized:

  The Jews have been able to dupe the world by relying on their mythic powers and conspiratorial abilities. As they have so often done in the past, world Jewry has once again employed its inordinate powers to harness the world’s financial resources, media and political interests for their own purposes.

  In isolating the source of this huge conspiracy against Germany, Rassinier rooted it in the actions of one Polish Jew.

  After some fifteen years of historical research, I have come to the following conclusion: it was in 1943 that National Socialist Germany was accused for the first time of the systematic mass extermination of the Jews in the gas chambers. The author of this first, horrible and infamous accusation was a Polish Jew, . . . Rafael Lemkin.31

  Lemkin, who in 1944 introduced both the word and concept of genocide into international law, served as counsel to Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson when Jackson was the United States chief counsel for the prosecution at the Nuremberg trials.32 Rassinier was wrong about this, as he was on so many other things. Nazi Germany was first accused of mass murder of Jews in 1942, not 1943. Lemkin had nothing to do with this accusation. Rassinier attributed Lemkin’s success in making such an accusation take hold and stick to the fact that he was supposedly aided and abetted in his efforts by falsified documents and an amenable world press, which took its marching orders from Jews:

  With the release of this information by a Polish Jew and the “discovery” during the Nuremberg trials of documents detailing the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz, in the world press, the gas chambers mythology began its dance to every tune and diabolical rhythm; that unrestrained saraband full of missteps has not stopped since.33

  The media were one of the primary instruments the Jews used to spread this calumny. Here again Rassinier relied on traditional antisemitic imagery. The media had to help Jews because they were dominated by them. Consequently the media “publicize[d], with remarkable consistency,” the thesis that six million Jews had been victims of the Nazis.34

  According to Rassinier the real culprits behind Lemkin, the historians, Jewish institutions, and all others who participated in the hoax were the “Zionists,” who used their remarkable powers to prevent the truth from emerging, including thwarting a census of world Jewry from being taken so that they could subject the Holocaust death toll “to all kinds of manipulation.”35 (His source for this claim was the American Mercury, which from 1952 until its demise in the 1970s was a publication whose most distinguishing feature was its antisemitism.)36 Their ultimate objective was financial: Once they had rendered Germany a “cash cow” for Israel and its supporters, they could turn to their larger and more monstrous objective: control of world finances. Rassinier, who had already relied on an almost unbroken chain of traditional antisemitic images—Jews’ nefarious use of their inordinate international political powers, control of the press, and financial chicanery—now slipped into a purely antisemitic diatribe in his description of what would happen when the Jews consolidated their power:

  Today speaking metaphorically, the aim [of the Zionists] is the gold of Fort Knox. If the plan should succeed—and all that is needed is for the American branch of international Zionism to get its hand on Wall Street—the Israeli home-port of the Diaspora would become . . . the command post of all the world’s industry. “You will earn bread by the sweat of your brow,” the Eternal One said to Adam and to Eve, “You will give birth in pain,” as he chased the couple from the earthly Paradise he had created for them. . . . The women of Israel would, to be sure, continue to bear their children in pain, but their men would earn their bread and that of their children by the sweat of other’s [sic] brows. Then at the very least, it could be said that the designation “Chosen People,” which the Jews claim for themselves, would assume it [sic] full significance.37

  Ultimately it was arguments such as these that conclusively demonstrated that Rassinier’s Holocaust denial was no more than a guise for the expression of a classic form of antisemitism. Though Rassinier’s work may be “distinguished” by its Holocaust denial, it is in fact no different from the myriad of antisemitic tirades that have been published over the centuries. His invective about Jewish power and influence and his conviction that Jews have the most sinister intentions qualify him for the company of a host of antisemites.

  His are the observations of a man whose wo
rk is cited by all subsequent deniers as the formative influence in their thinking. Rassinier’s and Bardèche’s contributions to the evolution of Holocaust denial in France would eventually be magnified by the work of their protégé Robert Faurisson, a former professor at the University of Lyons, who today is one of the leading Holocaust deniers. But shades of French fascism and Holocaust denial would also be found in the political arena, as exemplified by the policies and statements of Jean-Marie Le Pen and his political party, the National Front. They constitute Bardèche’s and Rassinier’s most important legacies and demonstrate that both fascism and Holocaust denial have found a sympathetic environment in contemporary France.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The First Stirrings of Denial in America

  Holocaust denial found a receptive welcome in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s—particularly among individuals known to have strong connections with antisemitic publications and extremist groups. Their Holocaust denial was preceded by their antisemitism.1 Until the beginning of the 1970s Holocaust denial in the United States was primarily the province of these fringe, extremist, and racist groups, though they found unexpected support in a number of seemingly respectable circles.

  The earliest deniers in the United States were extremely receptive to Paul Rassinier’s arguments that the Holocaust had been created by Jewish leaders in order to control the world’s finances and increase support for Israel. Like Rassinier they tried to demonstrate that it was statistically impossible for millions of Jews to have died. Their arguments were unsophisticated, crude, and often lacking in any attempt to prove their point. In 1952 W. D. Herrstrom, an American antisemite, declared in Bible News Flashes that there were five million illegal aliens in the United States, most of whom were Jews. These were the Jews who were supposed to have died in the Holocaust. “No use looking in Shickelgruber’s [Hitler’s] ovens for them. Walk down the streets of any American city. There they are.”2 In 1959 James Madole, who published the racist National Renaissance Bulletin, wrote: “Although the World Almanac attests to the fact that fewer than 600,000 Jews ever lived in Germany the Jews persisted in their monstrous lie that Nazi Germany had cremated six million of their co-racials.”3 Madole’s chicanery is easily exposed. While it is true that Germany’s Jewish population was less than six hundred thousand in 1933, most of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust were not German Jews. Benjamin H. Freedman, who provided the financial support for the antisemitic publication Common Sense, argued in 1959 that there were many million more Jews in the United States than Jews were willing to admit. These were the six million “allegedly put to death in furnaces and in gas chambers between 1939 and 1945.”4 Offering an argument that would be echoed in the 1970s by a number of Holocaust deniers, including Arthur Butz of Northwestern University, Freedman contended that the American Jewish community was opposed to a question about religious affiliation on the census because it would reveal that the Jews who had “allegedly” died were actually in the United States.1*

  The well-known American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell called the Holocaust “a monstrous and profitable fraud.” He echoed Freedman’s notion that the six million “later died happily and richly in the Bronx, New York.” In June 1959, in an article entitled “Into the Valley of Death Rode the Six Million. Or Did They?” American antisemite Gerald L. K. Smith’s Cross and the Flag informed its readers that the six million Jews were in the United States.5

  Such blatant attempts to confuse readers were typical of deniers’ behavior during the first two decades after the war. Ultimately most of these people had little impact because they could so easily be dismissed as extremists and right-wingers. Nonetheless their arguments eventually worked their way into the mainstream of Holocaust denial. In subsequent years their statistical claims would become if not more sophisticated then certainly more complicated.6 Flagrant falsehoods would be entwined in complex arguments, confusing those who did not know the facts.

  Not all the early deniers had overt associations with extremist groups. Consequently they were able to make some of their accusations in more mainstream publications. In the June 14, 1959, issue of the widely circulated Catholic weekly Our Sunday Visitor a letter writer claimed: “I was able to determine during six post-war years in Germany and Austria, there were a number of Jews killed, but the figure of a million was certainly never reached.”7 Newspaper editors who received denial material from Boniface Press, the publishing outlet run by App, turned to the Anti-Defamation League to ask for clarification. One editor requested documentation demonstrating that Jews had really died.8

  Harry Elmer Barnes was the most direct link between the two generations of American revisionists and the Holocaust deniers.9 Some of his numerous books and articles, particularly those on Western civilization, were used as required texts through the 1960s at prestigious American universities, including Harvard and Columbia. Barnes also lectured widely at other universities throughout the United States, his arguments about needless American participation in World War I winning the admiration of many people in the United States and abroad, including the publisher of the Nation, Oswald Garrison Villard; the Socialist leader Norman Thomas; the journalist H. L. Mencken; and the historian Charles Beard. At one time he served as bibliographic editor of Foreign Affairs.10

  But from the outset Barnes’s career was not without controversy. During World War I he had been an ardent advocate of the Allied cause. The material he submitted to the National Board for Historical Service, the principal vehicle for dissemination of pro-Allied propaganda by historians, was deemed “too violent to be acceptable,” and those involved in the effort described him as “one of the most violent sort of shoot-them-at-sunrise Chauvinists.”11 But his views changed dramatically after the war. With the zeal of a convert, he moved to the isolationist, pro-German end of the political spectrum and stayed there for the rest of his life. Much of his work relied on polemics and flamboyant tactics. He so savaged advocates of the “orthodox” view of the war that even those who agreed with him recoiled from his reliance on ad hominem attacks.12 When he publicly accused Bernadotte Schmitt, a prominent and well-respected historian at the University of Chicago, of adjusting his historical conclusions in order to advance his academic career, he evoked the ire of numerous academics, including revisionists. According to Barnes, Schmitt concluded that Germany was responsible for precipitating the war in order to obtain his prestigious university post. This kind of attack typified Barnes’s subsequent attacks on those who disagreed with him. He was convinced that his beliefs constituted objective truth; consequently anyone who took a different view was neither objective nor honest.

  Barnes’s work won a broad popular audience in the United States and abroad. In 1926 he visited Germany to deliver a series of lectures that argued that Germany was not guilty for World War I. Barnes waxed euphoric about his reception there, which he described as a “fairy tale.” He was particularly impressed by the “great interest and energy” shown by Weimar scholars and officials in “seeking to clear Germany of the dishonor and fraud of the war-guilt clause of the Treaty of Versailles.”13 While in Europe he even met with the exiled kaiser, Wilhelm II, a considerable honor for a relatively young scholar. According to Barnes the kaiser “was happy to know that I did not blame him for starting the war in 1914.” But, Barnes recalled, they were not in complete accord: “He disagreed with my view that Russia and France were chiefly responsible. He held that the villains of 1914 were the international Jews and Free Masons, who, he alleged, desired to destroy national states and the Christian religion.”14 Barnes did not fully agree with the kaiser on this point, preferring to point at England and France as the primary perpetrators.

  During the interwar years Barnes used his World War I revisionism to propound the isolationist cause. Even before World War II had ended he was challenging the official version of its history. He was part of a small group of isolationists who tried to resurrect the movement’s reputation and to sully Roosevelt’
s. They were funded by prewar isolationists, including Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford. Barnes repeated his World War I arguments and attacked politicians, journalists, and historians who failed to acknowledge Allied responsibility for the war. He assaulted Roosevelt’s policies and defended Hitler’s, contending that virtually all Hitler’s political and military moves, including the invasion of Czechoslovakia, were necessary to “rectify” the injustices of the Versailles treaty.15 But it was not just the Versailles treaty that was at fault; the real problem was the Allies’ fundamental failure to understand Hitler himself. In a 1950 letter to fellow revisionist Charles Tansill, Barnes described Hitler’s demands in 1939 as the “most reasonable of all,” and in his articles and essays he continuously sought to exonerate Hitler.16 Barnes did not perceive Hitler as a megalomanic leader who was defeated because he was intent on controlling Europe. It was not the German führer’s ferocity but his humanity that caused his military demise. According to Barnes Hitler’s downfall resulted from his “unwillingness to use his full military power” against innocent English civilians.17 Contrary to the prevailing consensus, Hitler did not “precipitously launch” an aggressive attack on Poland. In fact, Barnes argued, Hitler made a greater effort to avoid war in 1939 than the kaiser had in 1914. Barnes not only vindicated Hitler but held the British “almost solely responsible” for the outbreak of war on both the Eastern and Western fronts. Hitler did not wantonly stick “a dagger in the back of France” in June 1940 but was “forced” into war by British “acts of economic strangulation.”18

  In 1952 in a letter to Harvard historian William Langer, who had authored a two-volume defense of America’s prewar policies, Barnes wrote that he considered Roosevelt’s foreign policy “the greatest public crime in human history.”19 Barnes pursued this argument throughout his career, arguing in 1958 that Roosevelt “lied the United States into war,” and, had he not been able “to incite the Japanese” to attack Pearl Harbor, the tragedies of the war and the even “greater calamities” that resulted from it could well have been avoided.20 (Barnes had made precisely the same arguments about Wilson and World War I.) Barnes not only believed Hitler “reasonable” and Britain, France, and the United States responsible for the war, he also argued that a pervasive historical “blackout” silenced anyone who might question the notion of German guilt. The blackout was the keystone of a plan to prevent the truth about World War II from emerging. Barnes’s initial assault on this “conspiracy” was contained in a lengthy pamphlet, The Struggle Against Historical Blackout, which appeared in 1947 and which had gone through nine printings by 1952. According to Barnes Western liberals allowed their hatred of Hitler and Mussolini to blind them to France’s aggressiveness, Britain’s duplicity, and Roosevelt’s deception. “Court historians” kept the truth from emerging by quashing any information that might tarnish Roosevelt’s image and silencing critics who questioned American “intervention” in World War II. Scholars suspected of revisionist views were denied access to public documents. Publishers who wished to issue books or periodicals dealing with the topic were intimidated. Material that embodied revisionist facts or arguments was ignored or obscured. Revisionist authors were smeared.21 This was not simply a case of obtuseness; this was willful deceit. The “court historians” were not just blind or unaware of the facts; they lied, ignored contradictory information, and created new truths. In subsequent years Holocaust deniers would claim that they faced precisely the same situation.22 According to Barnes, politicians’, diplomats’, and historians’ vindictiveness toward Germany was completely out of proportion to reality, and they knew it. Consequently they needed a rationale to justify their enmity. Thus they accused Germany of starting the war and of unparalleled atrocities.