App’s faulty arguments regarding the scholarly dispute about the number of victims and his use of statements and figures from Yad Vashem to prove his point were not the only occasions when he became ensnared in his own attempts to manipulate the evidence. In The Six Million Swindle he also attacked a journalist who had written that the Nazis wished to kill “as many Jews as possible” before the end of the war. In order to substantiate his charge that this journalist was lying, App cited Himmler’s fall 1944 order prohibiting any further execution of Jews.44 This evidence, he argued, proved two things: First the Nazis did not wish to kill as many Jews as possible, for if so Himmler would not have halted the killings. Second, he argued, it showed that Himmler, not Hitler, was in charge of Jewish policy.45 In his attempt to exonerate both the Nazis in general and Hitler in particular by laying the blame for this policy at Himmler’s doorstep, App ignores a basic contradiction in his argument: If there was not a policy to kill the Jews, what then was Himmler ordering stopped?
Here and elsewhere App’s approach to evidence is reminiscent of Rassinier’s arguments regarding eyewitness accounts. It is the standard method by which deniers dismiss evidence which contradicts their conclusions. All affidavits by Nazis admitting the existence of a Final Solution are declared “outright frauds,” and all testimony by Jews regarding mass murder is “in part or whole perjured, often well rewarded and altogether unreliable.”46 This blanket denial of the validity of any evidence attesting to the Holocaust, including that of eyewitnesses, has become a centerpiece of the deniers’ methodology. Simply put, anything that disagrees with their foregone conclusion is dismissed. Because of the sheer number of affidavits by survivors, perpetrators, and eyewitnesses, unless the deniers categorically dismiss this mass of evidence they cannot perpetrate their own hoax.
Ultimately App’s arguments are a composite of faulty assertions, manipulation of data, and above all, outright antisemitism. He has done more than just draw on preexisting antisemitic imagery. He has made a significant contribution to contemporary anti-Jewish propaganda in the United States and abroad. His distillation of Holocaust denial into these eight assertions, each of which plays on an antisemitic theme, has proven extremely useful to individuals and groups which not only deny the Holocaust but wish to portray the Jews as able to control American foreign policy for their own diabolical ends. It has also proved extremely efficacious for those who would delegitimize the existence of Israel.
Together App, Barnes, Rassinier, Bardèche, and Hoggan constitute the most significant figures in the evolution of the denial hoax. Those who followed them discarded some of their more blatant and vulgar arguments, learning how to render them in a slightly more oblique fashion. But with the fundamental text established, virtually all the rest would be commentary.
CHAPTER SIX
Denial: A Tool of the Radical Right
In the late 1960s and 1970s, neofascist organizations and political parties in Western Europe, especially in England, grew in number and strength. These groups—which vehemently opposed the presence in their countries of blacks, Asians, Arabs, Jews, and all non-Caucasian immigrants—were responsible for launching a series of violent attacks on immigrants, minority groups, and Jewish institutions. In England the neofascist National Front built its political agenda on opposition to the immigration of Africans and East Asians from Commonwealth countries. By 1977 it was polling close to a quarter of a million votes in national elections.
These groups, whose ideology embraced racism, ethnocentrism, and nationalism, faced a dilemma. Since World War II, Nazism in general and the Holocaust in particular had given fascism a bad name. Those who continued to argue after the war that Hitler was a hero and national socialism a viable political system, as these groups tended to do, were looked upon with revulsion. Consequently Holocaust denial became an important element in the fabric of their ideology. If the public could be convinced that the Holocaust was a myth, then the revival of national socialism could be a feasible option.
This effort to deny the Holocaust was materially assisted by the publication in 1974 of a twenty-eight-page booklet, Did Six Million Really Die? The Truth at Last, by Richard Harwood. Sent to all members of Parliament, a broad spectrum of journalists and academics, leading members of the Jewish community, and a wide array of public figures, for close to ten years it was the preeminent British work on Holocaust denial.1 Within less than a decade, more than a million copies had been distributed in more than forty countries.2 Because at first glance it seemed to be a sober scholarly effort, many outside the circle of deniers were confused by the claims it made. Deniers continually cite it as an authoritative source.
Given the pamphlet’s wide distribution, there was significant public curiosity about the identity of both the author and publisher. Richard E. Harwood was described as a writer who specialized in the political and diplomatic aspects of World War II and who was “at present with the University of London.” It did not take the British press long to discover that this was false. The University of London told the Sunday Times that Harwood was neither a staff member nor a student and was totally unknown to it; it returned all mail to Harwood marked “Addressee Unknown.”3 In fact Richard Harwood was a pseudonym for Richard Verrall, the editor of Spearhead, the publication of the British right-wing neofascist organization the National Front. Did Six Million Really Die? is identical in format, layout, and printing with Spearhead.4 Neither the National Front nor Verrall denied that he was the editor of the pamphlet.5 In 1979, in a letter to the New Statesman, Verrall, who had a degree in history from the University of London, responding to articles on the Holocaust, reiterated the pamphlet’s basic arguments and defended its conclusions against attacks that had appeared in the British press. He did so despite the fact that most of his conclusions had already been shown to be false.6 He made no attempt to challenge the assertion that he was the author, even though the article in the New Statesman specifically identified him as such. His letter to the magazine was described by the editors as one of “numerous mock-scholarly letters” it regularly received from Verrall and his cohorts.
In addition to concealing the author’s true identity, the publishers also attempted to camouflage their identity. Though the booklet listed the address of its publisher, Historical Review Press, the address was that of a vacant building whose landlord, the British press discovered, was Robin Beauclair, a farmer with established connections to the National Front and various other organizations all of which were dedicated to defending “racial purity.”7 Asked by the press about the publication, he declared the Holocaust part of a network of “Jewish propaganda” and revealed his own deep-rooted antisemitism. “Don’t you know that we live under Jewish domination? The entire mass media is Jewish controlled. It is time that we as British people dictated our own destiny.”8
Not an original creation, this work was largely based on a small American book, The Myth of the Six Million, published in 1969 by Noontide Press, a subsidiary of the antisemitic Liberty Lobby. The American publication contained both an unsigned publisher’s foreword and an introduction by an E. L. Anderson, identified as a contributing editor to American Mercury, which by that time had become unabashedly antisemitic. The anonymous publisher was apparently Willis Carto, founder of the Liberty Lobby, Noontide Press, and the Institute for Historical Review. Carto had, as we shall see in a subsequent chapter, long-standing ties to a mélange of extremist right-wing political groups in the United States. (According to Carto’s former associates, E. L. Anderson was a pseudonym of his.9) The Myth of the Six Million also contained an appendix consisting of five articles that had originally appeared in the Carto-controlled American Mercury in 1967–68. They included App’s “The Elusive ‘Six Million,’ ” Barnes’s “Zionist Fraud,” Teressa Hendry’s “Was Anne Frank’s Diary a Hoax?”, “The Jews That Aren’t,” by Leo Heiman, “Paul Rassinier: Historical Revisionist,” by Herbert C. Roseman, and a review of Rassinier’s book by Harry Elmer Barnes.
The American publication was apparently written by David Hoggan, the Harvard Ph.D. whose work had influenced Harry Elmer Barnes. In 1969 he sued Noontide Press for damages, claiming authorship of The Myth of the Six Million.10 (The book’s introduction described the author as a college professor who had written this booklet in 1960 but had been unable to obtain a publisher daring enough to take the risks involved. It claimed that he could not reveal his identity because he wanted “one day [to] retire on a well-earned pension.”11)
Both these publications consistently mixed truth with fiction, accurate with fabricated quotes, and outright lies with partially correct information. The manner in which the British work liberally paraphrased the American publication indicates that in many instances Harwood may not have gone back to the original sources but simply repeated what the Americans had already said.1* The Americans, in turn, had done their own borrowing from other deniers. This liberal borrowing was not something out of the ordinary for deniers, who make it a practice to draw on other deniers not only for their sources but for verification. They have long engaged in what has been described as an “incestuous merry-go-round [of] cross-fertilizing and compounding [of] falsehood.”12 The basic arguments cited in both works are based on material gleaned from Rassinier, though in certain instances they go even further in their extremism.13
These publications constitute vivid examples of the relationship between Holocaust denial, racist nationalism, and antisemitism. Harwood complained that the “big lie” of the Holocaust stymied the growth of nationalism, and that whenever Britain or any other European nation attempted to preserve its “national integrity,” it was immediately branded as neo-Nazi.14 Preservation of a nation’s national integrity had a specific meaning for both publications. The Holocaust myth threatened the “survival of the Race itself.” Harwood echoed the familiar extremist charge that the Anglo-Saxon world faced the gravest danger in its history: the presence of “alien races” in its midst. Linking Holocaust denial and the defense of the “race,” he argued that unless something was done to halt the immigration and assimilation of non-Caucasians, Anglo-Saxons were certain to experience not only “biological alteration” but the “destruction” of their European culture and racial heritage.15
This argument—a standard element in National Front ideology—blamed Jews for engineering the racial and national degeneration of England as well as Europe as a whole. Shortly after the publication of Harwood’s pamphlet, a National Front leader accused Jews of pouring “billions” into promoting “race mixing” in order to weaken nationalist identity throughout the world, thereby enhancing the possibility of their own world domination.16 According to Harwood, Jews have used the Holocaust myth to preserve their heritage and, at the same time, render other peoples “impotent” in their attempts at self-preservation.17 In his view, Jews, who have relied on their formidable powers of manipulation, have reaped personal and communal gains at a substantial cost to the well-being and security of other nations. (There was no doubt, of course, that the nations Harwood was referring to were white ones.) Harwood complained that any time a person dared to speak of the race problem, he or she was branded a racist, a code word for Nazi, and that Nazi was, of course, synonymous with a perpetrator of the Holocaust.18
The introduction to the American book made the same connection, arguing that the Holocaust myth made it impossible for America to deal with its “overwhelming race problem.” The Holocaust had caused Nazism to fall into disrepute, consequently the problems that emanated from “Negro-White contact” in the same society could not be addressed for what they really were: biological and political. Anyone who dared to do so was accused of advocating “racism, the very hallmark of the Nazi!”19 Since the 1960s and the increased immigration of non-Caucasians into Europe, particularly to Britain and France, the extreme right in each of these countries has articulated this strange mélange of arguments that knit together racism, the revival of fascism, and Holocaust denial. In North America they have been espoused by an array of right-wing extremist groups. Given the connection between these two ideologies, it is logical to expect the Holocaust “hoax” to remain a fixed component of the litany of arguments posed by these extremist fringes of society.
In order to rehabilitate the reputation of National Socialism, these two publications tried to prove that the Nazis’ intention was emigration, not annihilation. First they argued that the Final Solution was nothing but a plan to evacuate all Jews from the Reich. Then they tried to give this evacuation plan historical legitimacy by linking it with the name of the founder of the modern Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl. They claimed that the Nazis were simply trying to realize Herzl’s original goal of transferring all the Jews to Madagascar. In fact Herzl never addressed the issue of Madagascar. At one point he briefly considered Uganda as an alternative to the land of Israel but dropped the idea when it met with furious opposition from other Zionists.
This is not the only way Harwood used revised history to transform the Nazis into supporters of immigration. Attempting to prove that the Nazis were primarily interested in a benign population transfer, he wrote that a main plank of the National Socialist party platform before 1933 was Jewish emigration to Madagascar. In fact emigration of the Jews was never included by the Nazis in their party platform prior to 1933, let alone used as a main plank.20 The Madagascar Plan was never mentioned as a possibility until the late 1930s. The Nazi slogan was Juda Verrecke, “perish Judah,” not “emigrate Judah.” The full meaning of Juda Verrecke is lost in English translation. It is akin to perishing like a “lice-ridden cur.”21 Nazi leaders, among them Josef Goebbels, Julius Streicher, and Hans Frank, frequently described Jews as vermin in need of extermination. In 1929 Goebbels wrote: “Certainly the Jew is a human being. But then the flea is a living thing too—only not a pleasant one. Since the flea is not a pleasant thing, we are not obliged to keep it and let it prosper . . . but our duty is rather to exterminate it. Likewise with the Jews.”22 In an article in the Völkischer Beobachter in 1921 Hitler described the Jews as “lice and bugs sucking the German people’s blood out of its veins.”23
The claim that the Nazis were interested in Jewish emigration exemplifies how deniers draw falsehoods from truth. Emigration was indeed employed by the Nazis in the thirties as a means of ridding the Reich of Jews. From 1933 until 1939 the Nazis vigorously pushed the Jews to emigrate, and more than three-hundred-thousand, or approximately 50 percent of the German Jewish population, did so. While deniers use this data to portray the Nazis as benignly engaged in a population transfer, the Nazis’ true intentions during the 1930s were to brutally destroy the German Jewish community and simultaneously sow seeds of antisemitism abroad. During the prewar period this was their means of creating a Germany that was Judenrein. The chaos of the war allowed them or, some would argue, forced them to move from emigration to annihilation.2* But even emigration—when employed by the Nazis as a solution to the Reich’s Jewish “problem”—had diabolical intentions. A Foreign Office memorandum of January 25, 1939, delineated the more cynical aspects of the emigration plan: “The poorer and therefore more burdensome the immigrant Jews to the country absorbing them, the stronger the country will react and the more favorable will the effect be in the interest of German propaganda.”24 As the Nazis exported penniless and desperate Jews, they also exported antisemitism. This was, in part, the reason why they stripped Jews of their possessions through an increasingly onerous emigration tax. By January 1939 they had been totally excised from the German economy. On occasion Reich leaders simply took groups of Jews and placed them outside Germany’s borders, forcing their neighbors to have to accommodate a large group of destitute immigrants. The best known of these incidents took place on the Polish border at the end of October 1938 on the eve of Kristallnacht, the anti-Jewish Nazi pogrom of November 1938 during which hundreds of synagogues were destroyed and twenty-six-thousand Jews were put into concentration camps.
The emigration myth—the idea that the Na
zis stuck to their original aim of getting rid of Jews by emigration—is easily refuted by Nazi documents, newspapers, and journals themselves, which are replete with statements by high-ranking officials and party leaders, attesting to their ultimate objective. The Nazi leader, Dr. Robert Ley, articulated these intentions in 1942 when he said that it was not enough to “isolate the Jewish enemy of mankind. The Jews have got to be exterminated.”25 In his testimony at Nuremberg, Victor Brack, who was in charge of the gassing of fifty-thousand mentally deficient and chronically ill Germans and Jews under the euthanasia program from 1939 to 1941, acknowledged that by March 1941, it was no secret among higher party circles that the “Jews were to be exterminated.”26 In a May 1943 article in the Berlin weekly Das Reich, Goebbels announced: “No prophetic utterance by the Fuhrer is being fulfilled with so gaunt an assurance and inescapable force as that another world war would cause the extinction of the Jewish race.”27 In October 1943 Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, told high-ranking officers in Posen that “we had a moral duty towards our people, the duty to exterminate this people [the Jews].”28
Denying the Holocaust Page 14
