Denying the Holocaust
Page 21
But Zundel is not just a prolific disseminator of extremist, denial, and neo-Nazi publications. A showman who is extremely adept at winning media attention—he has been dubbed by Manuel Prutschi the P. T. Barnum of Holocaust denial2—Zundel has honed his public antics over many years. When NBC’s Holocaust was screened in Canada in April 1978 he created an organization, “Concerned Parents of German Descent,” to protest the screenings. He declared the West German government to be the “West German Occupation Regime.” In September 1981 he placed an ad in the classified section of the Toronto Star wishing a “Happy New Year to all our Jewish Friends,” signed by himself and Samisdat Publishers.3 He has written rabbis and synagogues throughout Canada offering to lecture on topics of common interest to Germans and Jews. When the Canadian Jewish Congress advertised for a director of its Holocaust Documentation Bank Project, Zundel applied for the job. (His application arrived after the official deadline.) He created a German Jewish Historical Commission and announced that it would organize symposia on topics of Jewish interest.
His publicity stunts received the most attention at his trial. Each day he appeared at the courthouse wearing a bullet-proof vest and a hard hat bearing the words “Freedom of Speech.” (His followers sported similar headgear.) On the day of his sentencing he arrived at court in a Rent-A-Wreck vehicle, emerging with a blackened face to demonstrate that “whites could not receive justice in Canada,” hefted an eleven-foot cross labeled “Freedom of Speech” on his shoulders, and carried it up the steps to the courthouse door.4
Born in Germany in 1939, Zundel’s childhood memories were of “hunger, cold, sickness,” and life under occupation. He came to Canada in 1958 to learn to be a photo retoucher. While in Canada he was greatly influenced by the country’s leading antisemite and neo-Nazi, Adrien Arcand, who introduced him to a group of ardent antisemites including Paul Rassinier. Zundel recalled that Arcand “made a German out of me.” Zundel built a professional reputation as an accomplished photo retoucher. Most of his clients, which included Canada’s leading magazines, did not know that he was one of the country’s most active distributors of neo-Nazi material. One customer who inadvertently came into his shop discovered a huge swastika on the wall surrounded by pictures of Hitler and other Nazis.5
During his trial the prosecution stressed Zundel’s ardent devotion to Hitler, allegiance to the Nazis, advocacy of revolution in the Federal Republic of Germany, and his belief that the white race’s position in the world had deteriorated because of the success of an international Zionist conspiracy. Israel was a “terrorist state,” which was “financially and morally bankrupt,” and Zionists controlled the “moguls” in Bonn.6
Found guilty in 1985 and sentenced to fifteen months in prison, Zundel was given a temporary reprieve when the ruling was overturned on appeal because of procedural errors.2* The second trial, which began in 1988, was memorable because it served to set off the deniers’ most important salvo—fired by a newcomer to the movement who was guided into Holocaust denial by Zundel’s team of advisers—in their assault on the truth since the publication of Arthur Butz’s book. Zundel’s lawyer, Douglas Christie, the main legal defender of Holocaust deniers, antisemites, Nazi war criminals, and neo-Nazis in Canada, came to Zundel’s attention when he defended Jim Keegstra, a schoolteacher in Red Deer, Alberta. Keegstra, who denied the Holocaust, taught his students that a group of Jews called the “Illuminati” was behind all the revolutions and debts in the world since the 1700s and that Judaism was an evil religion. He believed it his Christian duty to fight the evil conspiracy controlled by Jews (John D. Rockefeller was declared to be a Jew) through their money system.7 The worst Jews were Talmudic Jews, though such “atheistical” Jews as Leon Trotsky were also a danger.8 Zionism was a Jewish fraud, and the Holocaust was a hoax.9 (The most disturbing aspect of the Keegstra case was that he taught this array of material for fourteen years before anyone complained.)
Christie’s tactics during the first Zundel trial were the subject of great controversy. He tried to have all potential jurors who were Jewish or who had Jewish friends or relatives screened out. Treating Holocaust survivors in a brutal fashion, calling one a liar and insisting that another give him the full names of at least twenty family members who had been killed in the camps,10 he exhibited what Ontario Lawyers Weekly described as “sheer nastiness.” In the midst of cross-examining Raul Hilberg, Christie asked him if he recognized a certain historical tract and then declared, “I thought you might—you’re a historian of sorts.”11 He managed to structure his defense so that it seemed to some observers that the Holocaust, not Zundel, was on trial.12 For Christie the chief issue in the trial was the Zionist “power” to curtail freedom of speech. He declared the belief that the Nazis killed six million Jews during the Holocaust to be the result of brainwashing, and told the jury that they were being prevented from asking questions about the Holocaust.13
In addition, Robert Faurisson came to Canada to advise Zundel and his lawyers. One of the world’s leading deniers, he was a proponent of the notion that it was technically and physically impossible for the gas chambers at Auschwitz to have functioned as extermination facilities. Faurisson argued that compared to American execution chambers the German facilities were too small and primitive to have been killing chambers.14 Faurisson, who testified as an expert witness for the defense during the first trial, was asked by the Crown to explain the missing six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Faurisson acknowledged that he did not know what happened to them but urged surviving Jews to give him the names of family members they had lost so he could try to locate them.15
At the second trial Christie and Faurisson were joined by David Irving, who flew to Toronto in January 1988 to assist in the preparation of Zundel’s second defense and to testify on his behalf. Scholars have described Irving as a “Hitler partisan wearing blinkers” and have accused him of distorting evidence and manipulating documents to serve his own purposes.16 He is best known for his thesis that Hitler did not know about the Final Solution, an idea that scholars have dismissed.17 The prominent British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper depicted Irving as a man who “seizes on a small and dubious particle of ‘evidence,’ ” using it to dismiss far-more-substantial evidence that may not support his thesis. His work has been described as “closer to theology or mythology than to history,” and he has been accused of skewing documents and misrepresenting data in order to reach historically untenable conclusions, particularly those that exonerate Hitler.18 An ardent admirer of the Nazi leader, Irving placed a self-portrait of Hitler over his desk, described his visit to Hitler’s mountaintop retreat as a spiritual experience,19 and declared that Hitler repeatedly reached out to help the Jews.20 In 1981 Irving, a self-described “moderate fascist,” established his own right-wing political party, founded on his belief that he was meant to be a future leader of Britain.21 He is an ultranationalist who believes that Britain has been on a steady path of decline accelerated by its misguided decision to launch a war against Nazi Germany. He has advocated that Rudolf Hess should have received the Nobel Peace prize for his efforts to try to stop war between Britain and Germany.22 On some level Irving seems to conceive of himself as carrying on Hitler’s legacy. In an interview with the Daily Telegraph in June 1992, he related that his one mistake in life was getting married: “Marriage is a detour.” This was, Irving observed, something Hitler understood. Irving related that Hitler’s naval adjutant once told him how Hitler decided he could not marry because Germany “was his bride.” Irving asked when the German leader had informed the naval adjutant of this decision. When told the date was March 24, 1938, Irving responded, “Herr Admiral, at that moment I was being born.”23
Irving had long equated the actions of Hitler and Allied leaders, an equivalence that was made easier by his claims that the Final Solution took place without Hitler’s knowledge. Prior to participating in Zundel’s trial, Irving had appeared at IHR conferences—at one he declared Hitler the “biggest fr
iend the Jews had in the Third Reich”—but he had never denied the annihilation of the Jews.24 That changed in 1988 as a result of the events in Toronto.
Both Irving and Faurisson advocated inviting an American prison warden who had performed gas executions to testify in Zundel’s defense, arguing that this would be the best tactic for proving that the gas chambers were a fraud and too primitive to operate safely. They solicited help from Bill Armontrout, warden of the Missouri State Penitentiary, who agreed to testify and suggested they also contact Fred A. Leuchter, an “engineer” residing in Boston who specialized in constructing and installing execution apparatus. Irving and Faurisson immediately flew off to meet Leuchter. Irving, who had long hovered at the edge of Holocaust denial, believed that Leuchter’s testimony could provide the documentation he needed to prove the Holocaust a myth.25 According to Faurisson, when he first met Leuchter, the Bostonian accepted the “standard notion of the ‘Holocaust.’ ”26 After spending two days with him, Faurisson declared that Leuchter was convinced that it was chemically and physically impossible for the Germans to have conducted gassings.27 Having agreed to serve as an expert witness for the defense, Leuchter then went to Toronto to meet with Zundel and Christie and to examine the materials they had gathered for the trial.
Within a few days Leuchter left for a week in Poland. Accompanied by his wife, a cinematographer supplied by Zundel, a draftsman, and an interpreter, the group toured Auschwitz/Birkenau and Majdanek. In light of the fact that Zundel paid Leuchter approximately $35,000 to make the trip,28 one cannot help but wonder what would have been the reaction if Leuchter had returned to confirm the existence of gas chambers. However, Leuchter’s leanings were revealed by his observation that although Zundel and Faurisson could not accompany the group, they were ex-officio members of the team, whose spirit was with them “every step of the way.”29
The group spent three days in Auschwitz/Birkenau and one in Majdanek surreptitiously and illegally collecting bricks and cement fragments—Leuchter called them “forensic samples”—from a number of buildings, including those associated with the killing process. On returning to Massachusetts, Leuchter had the samples chemically analyzed. (He told the laboratory that the samples had to do with a workmen’s compensation case.) He summarized his findings in The Leuchter Report: An Engineering Report on the Alleged Execution Gas Chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Majdanek, Poland, which was published by Zundel’s Samisdat Publications and David Irving’s publishing house, Focal Point Publications in London.3* In it he concluded that there had never been homicidal gassings at any of these sites. Leuchter claimed that his findings were based on his “expert knowledge” of the design criteria for gas chamber operation, and his visual inspections of both the remains of the chambers and of “original drawings and blueprints of some of the facilities.” The latter, he asserted, had been given to him by officials of the Auschwitz museum.30
According to Leuchter the design and fabrication of these facilities made it impossible for them to have served as execution chambers.31 Moreover, Leuchter argued, given the size and usage rate of the alleged facilities at Auschwitz and Majdanek, it would have required sixty-eight years to execute the “alleged number of six millions of persons.”32 (This typifies the deniers’ methods of obfuscation: No one had claimed that the gas chambers at Auschwitz or Majdanek were used to kill six million people. Millions of people died at the hands of the Einsatzgruppen and at other death camps.)
Deniers consider Leuchters testimony at the trial a “historical event.” It marked, Faurisson claimed expansively, the end of the “myth of the gas chambers.”33 Emotions were intense as Leuchter tore away the “veil of the great swindle.” Faurisson described his own feelings as a mixture of “relief and melancholy: relief because a thesis that I had defended for so many years was at last fully confirmed, and melancholy because I had fathered the idea in the first place.”34 The record reveals that something quite different occurred. If any veil was lifted it was that of Leuchter’s expertise. On the stand Leuchter was shown to have little technical training to equip him to reach his conclusions. The judge derided aspects of his methodology as “gross speculation” and dismissed his opinion as being of no greater value than that of an ordinary tourist.35
Perhaps Faurisson’s relief was also rooted in the fact that he knew that despite the revelations about Leuchter’s lack of credentials and his fallacious scientific and historical methodology, the Leuchter Report would have a life of its own, as has been the case with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which has repeatedly been demonstrated to be a forgery. In fact, when it was originally published in France in the midnineteenth century, Jews did not appear in the book at all. Only at the beginning of this century was it rewritten with Jews as the primary culprits. This easily documented information has not stopped the Protocols from being accepted by people in different parts of the world as a factual rendition of “international Jewry’s” nefarious goal to rule the world. So, too, Faurisson may have recognized that Leuchter’s so-called scientific report would make Holocaust denial plausible despite its having been shown to be rooted in spurious scientific principles.
With the jury out of the room, the court began to determine Leuchter’s qualifications as an expert witness. When the Crown Counsel questioned him about his training in math, chemistry, physics, and toxicology, he acknowledged that his only training in chemistry was “basic . . . on the college level.” The only physics he had studied likewise consisted of two courses taken when he was studying for a bachelor of arts (not sciences) degree at Boston University. Admitting that he was not a toxicologist and had no degree in engineering, he rather cavalierly dismissed the need for it.36 To this the judge responded sharply:
THE COURT: How do you function as an engineer if you don’t have an engineering degree?
THE WITNESS: Well, I would question, Your Honour, what an engineering degree is. I have a Bachelor of Arts degree and I have the required background training both on the college level and in the field to perform my function as an engineer.
THE COURT: Who determines that? You?37
Throughout the trial Judge Ronald Thomas made it clear that he was appalled by Leuchter’s lack of training as an engineer as well as his deprecation of the need for such training. The judge was particularly taken aback by Leuchter’s repeated assertions that anyone who went to college had “the necessary math and science” to be an electrical engineer and to conduct the tests he conducted at Auschwitz.38 The judge ruled that Leuchter could not serve as an expert witness on the construction and functioning of the gas chambers. The judge’s findings as to Leuchters suitability to comment on questions of engineering was unequivocal:
THE COURT: I’m not going to have him get into the question of what’s in a brick, what’s in iron, what is in—he has no expertise in this area. He is an engineer because he has made himself an engineer in a very limited area.39
Unknown to the court, Leuchter, who admitted under oath that he had only a bachelor of arts degree, was not being entirely candid regarding his education. Implying that an engineering degree had been unavailable to him, he told the court that when he was a student at Boston University, the school did not offer a degree in engineering. In fact it did, three different kinds.40 Later in the trial, when the jury returned to the room, Zundel’s lawyer and Leuchter obfuscated the paucity of his training:
Q. And you are, I understand, a graduate of Boston University, with a B.A. in a field that entitles you to function as an engineer. Is that right?
A. Yes, sir.41
That field was history.
Leuchter was also less than candid about his methodology. He repeatedly asserted that he obtained the “bulk” of his research material on the camps—including maps, floor plans and “original blueprints” for the crematoria—from the official archives at Auschwitz/Birkenau and Majdanek. He testified that these drawings and blueprints played a far more important role in shaping his conclusions than the samples he
collected at the camp.42 After the trial Kazimierz Smolen, the director of the Auschwitz museum, unequivocally denied that Leuchter had received any plans or blueprints from the museum.43 He may have procured tourist materials sold in the official souvenir kiosks in the camps. (It may have been the same material thousands of visitors, myself included, have bought during visits to these sites.)
Irrespective of who gave him the materials, he acknowledged that he “didn’t see any necessity” to reveal to camp officials that he was asking questions in order to gather material for a scientific report or legal action.44 Anyone who had visited a heavily frequented tourist site, which—for better or for worse—Auschwitz/Birkenau has become, knows that the caliber of the answers one receives from officials varies markedly. If they believe that they are speaking to someone who has a professional expertise pertaining to the site they tend to be more precise. Nor, for that matter, did he see any necessity to ask permission to violate the Polish law against defacing national monuments and memorials.45