However the matter is ultimately resolved, the Sunday Times has rescued Irving’s reputation from the ignominy to which it had been consigned by the House of Commons. In the interest of a journalistic scoop, this British paper was willing to throw its task as a gatekeeper of the truth and of journalistic ethics to the winds. By resuscitating Irving’s reputation, it also gave new life to the Leuchter Report.
Leuchter has also had his reputation resurrected by a recent book and documentary film about America’s capital punishment industry. The Execution Protocol, by Stephen Trombley, examines the steps between the imposition of the death sentence and the actual execution.112 A major focus of both Trombley’s book and film is Fred Leuchter. Trombley draws a sympathetic portrait of Leuchter, depicting him as a slightly bizarre and unconventional, myopic craftsman and entrepreneur who filled a need in the execution industry in a creative fashion. Trombley does address Leuchter’s denial activities but represents them as simply another aspect of this iconoclastic man. In contrast to his portrayal of Leuchter, he presents the ADL, Shapiro, Klarsfeld, and others who protested Leuchter’s denial activities as unfairly harassing this committed craftsman who may harbor some bizarre notions but, in truth, only wants to make killing more humane.
As a result of Trombley’s book and film Leuchter has once again been invited to appear on various talk shows as an expert on gas chambers. He has been interviewed on German, French, and British television. Most of these segments fail to mention his association with the Holocaust deniers. A similar attitude is evident in the media reviews of David Irving’s books: Most rarely address his neofascist or denial connections.113
Irving is one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial. Familiar with historical evidence, he bends it until it conforms with his ideological leanings and political agenda. A man who is convinced that Britain’s great decline was accelerated by its decision to go to war with Germany, he is most facile at taking accurate information and shaping it to confirm his conclusions. A review of his recent book, Churchill’s War, which appeared in New York Review of Books, accurately analyzed his practice of applying a double standard to evidence. He demands “absolute documentary proof’ when it comes to proving the Germans guilty, but he relies on highly circumstantial evidence to condemn the Allies.114 This is an accurate description not only of Irving’s tactics, but of those of deniers in general.
The impact of Leuchter’s work is difficult to assess. Rationally one would like to assume that, since Leuchter has been exposed as a man without the qualifications necessary to perform this analysis, and since his work has been demonstrated to be scientifically and methodologically fallacious, the destiny of the Leuchter Report would be the dustbin of history. But the Holocaust and, to only a slightly lesser degree, Holocaust denial itself remind us that the irrational has a fatal attraction even to people of goodwill. It can overwhelm masses of evidence and persuade people to regard the most outrageous and untenable notions as fact. This is easier to accomplish when the public does not have the historical and technical knowledge necessary to refute these irrational and inherently fantastic claims. Ultimately the deniers’ ability to keep repeating Leuchters conclusions even though they have been discredited is another indication that truth is far more fragile than fiction and that reason alone cannot protect it.
CHAPTER TEN
The Battle for the Campus
This is not a public stagecoach that has to take everyone who buys a ticket.
—Benjamin Franklin1
In the early 1990s American college campuses became loci of intensive activity by a small group of Holocaust deniers. Relying on creative tactics and assisted by a fuzzy kind of reasoning often evident in academic circles, the deniers achieved millions of dollars of free publicity and significantly furthered their cause. Their strategy was profoundly simple. Bradley Smith, a Californian who has been involved in a variety of Holocaust denial activities since the early 1980s, attempted to place a full-page ad claiming that the Holocaust was a hoax in college newspapers throughout the United States. The ad was published by papers at some of the more prestigious institutions of higher learning in the United States.
Entitled “The Holocaust Story: How Much Is False? The Case for Open Debate,” the ad provoked a fierce debate on many of the campuses approached by Smith. His strategy was quite straightforward: He generally called a paper’s advertising department to ascertain the charge for publication of a full-page ad and then submitted camera-ready copy and a certified check in the proper amount. On occasion he inquired in advance whether a paper would be willing to run this particular ad.1* Even when he was rejected, the attempt to place the ad won him significant media attention.2 Campus newspapers began to use his name in headlines without identifying him, assuming readers would know who he was. Articles, letters, and op-ed pieces defended Holocaust denial’s right to make its “views” known. But not all the results were necessarily what Smith would have wanted. On some campuses there was a backlash against him and Holocaust denial. Courses on the Holocaust that had languished on the back burner for an extended period materialized in the next semester’s offerings. Campus administrators admitted that the ad constituted the final push necessary to move these courses from the planning stage to the schedule books.3 Professors from a wide variety of disciplines included discussion of the Holocaust in their courses. Movies, speakers, photographic exhibits, and other presentations relating to the Holocaust were brought to campus. Students participated in rallies, teach-ins, and protests.
This response prompted some observers to argue that the controversy had a positive impact. Students had become increasingly aware not only of the Holocaust but of the contemporary attempt to subvert history and spread antisemitism. While this may be a relatively accurate analysis of the immediate outcome of Smith’s endeavor, there is another more sobering and pessimistic aspect to the matter. Analysis of the students’, faculty’s, and administration’s responses reveals both a susceptibility to the worst form of historical revisionism and a failure to fully understand the implications of Holocaust denial, even among those who vigorously condemned it.
This was not Smith’s first use of college newspapers to spread Holocaust denial. For a number of years Smith, along with other deniers, had been placing small ads containing the phone number and address of the Committee on Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH), an organization Smith had created with fellow denier Mark Weber in 1987. According to the ADL, CODOH was initially funded by the late William Curry, a Nebraska businessman known for his antisemitic activities. In 1986, he first attempted to place an ad denying the Holocaust in a campus newspaper. He sent one thousand dollars to the Daily Nebraskan for a full-page ad claiming the Holocaust was a hoax.4 The paper rejected the ad. Shortly thereafter Curry died, and Smith continued his work.
Smith claims that he has no connection to any other denial group and his only association is with CODOH. He has had a long-standing association with the IHR, serving as a contributing editor of its newsletter since June 1985. At the time he was placing the ads he still maintained a relationship with it.5 In 1986 he launched the IHR radio project, writing a regular column on the project for the IHR’s newsletter, in which he touted his success in getting Holocaust denial onto the radio. Under the auspices of the IHR he planned to tour colleges and universities to speak about “Holocaust fraud and falsehood.”6 Smith’s objective was not to “plant seeds” for coming generations but to “take revisionist scholarship directly into our universities NOW!” In a letter to his followers he announced that the IHR had guaranteed to pay a portion of both his “start-up costs” and his “on-going expenses.”7
Before becoming involved with the IHR’s radio project, Smith published Prima Facie, which he dedicated to “monitoring Holocaust Cultism, Censorship and Suppression of Free Inquiry.” In it he attacked Mel Mermelstein, who had successfully challenged the IHR’s demand for “proof” that the Holocaust happened. Smith’s description of Mermelstein
—as a “yokel” who had sued the institute because it refused to believe that “a hank of hair and a jar full of ashes proves” that Jews were “exterminated” in gas chambers—typified the tone of the newsletter. Mermelstein had developed a “tongue so twisted he could drill his own teeth.”8
Articles from Prima Facie have been reprinted in Spearhead, the publication of the right-wing extremist British National party. One such article referred to a wire service report of how a Gestapo officer watched with a smile as his German shepherd dog killed an elderly Jew in Poland in 1942. Smith’s use of sarcasm in his attempt to cast doubt on the story was a hallmark of his style.
Let’s say the dog was an 80-pounder—hell let’s say it was a 100-pounder! Now let’s say the elderly Jew was frail and small, perhaps only a 100-pounder himself. Hell, let’s say he was an 80-pounder! I do want to be fair about this. So one question to get straight about the German dog and the elderly Jew is this: How much of the one could the other really eat?9
Smith’s accomplice was Mark Weber, co-director of CODOH,10 one of the more active spokesmen for Holocaust denial, and a former member of the National Alliance, a pro-white organization. Spotlight described Weber as the “shining star” of defense witnesses at the Zundel trial.11 At the trial and in denial publications Weber has argued that the Jews who died were the “unfortunate victims” not of an extermination program but of “disease and malnutrition brought on by the complete collapse of Germany in the final months of the war.” Repeating a denial argument that had first been voiced by Austin App, Weber contended that if the extermination program had actually existed, the Jews found alive by the Allied forces at the war’s end “would have long since been killed.”12
Born in 1951, he was educated in a Jesuit high school in Portland, Oregon. In an interview in November 1989 with the University of Nebraska Sower he expressed his concern about the future of the white “race” in the United States and about the future of the country. Weber contended that the country was heading in one of two possible directions. Either it would become “a sort of Mexicanized, Puerto Ricanized country,” a result of the failure of “white Americans” to reproduce themselves, or it would break up because of long-standing racial problems. He rejected the possibility of a unified American heritage or culture based on a multiplicity of races and groups. He did not think it desirable or feasible for “black Americans to be assimilated into white society.” He seemed to yearn for a time when the United States was defined as a “white country” and nonwhites were “second-class citizens.” This gave the country a “mooring, an anchor.” He bemoaned the fact that “today we don’t even have that.”13 As the newspaper controversy became more public and Weber became more publicly involved in denial activities, his ideas on race were increasingly left unarticulated.
One of the first papers approached by CODOH, which for all intents and purposes consisted of Smith and Weber, was Pennsylvania State University’s Daily Collegian. After running the small ad that contained CODOH’s number for a few weeks it dropped it in response to campus criticism. Smith immediately sent a series of letters to local newspapers accusing the Daily Collegian of trying to “suppress and even censor radical scholarship.”14 It may have been the “Sturm und Drang” he created with this small ad that persuaded him to expand his efforts.
Shortly after his failed attempt at Penn State he experienced the same problem with the Stanford Daily, which had been running a similar ad for a period of seven weeks. The editor cancelled it due to student protests. Smith, implying that Hillel, the Jewish student organization, controlled the Daily’s coverage of other issues, including American politics in the Middle East, urged the editor to take a stand for “free inquiry and open debate” by running the ad.15 He told Hillel students that it was in Jews’ best interests to know the truth about the Holocaust.16
In his publication Revisionist Letters, Smith tried to differentiate between antisemites who used Holocaust denial to attack Jews and his putative objective of uncovering the truth. He asserted that his editorial policy objective was to encourage “exposés of bigotry and antisemitism” in Holocaust “revisionism.” An article in the magazine argued that the participation of “Nazi apologists” in Holocaust denial circles precluded the participation of other supporters, particularly the radical left.17 The author, Laird Wilcox, wondered how “revisionists” could argue that their speech was suppressed when there was a “substantial element in [their] own ranks that doesn’t believe in it [free speech], except for themselves.”18 Smith reiterated this idea in a column in his local newspaper, admitting that although the “search for truth” about the Holocaust was not antisemitic, there were “bigots” in the movement who were “self-avowedly anti-Jewish and who used revisionist scholarship as an attack on Jews.”19 Smith seemed to be aware that any linkage of his efforts with extremist and racist groups would be a liability, particularly on campus.
His effort to distance himself from these overtly antisemitic groups was reflective of a shift by deniers to sever their overt ties to an array of neo-Nazi and extremist groups. Leonard Zeskind, the research director of the Center for Democratic Renewal in Kansas City, Missouri, and a respected specialist on extremism in America, categorized Smith’s efforts as reflective of a general shift among “white supremacists” and extremists away from the political margins into the mainstream by avoiding any overt association with swastika-bedecked or white-sheeted fascist groups. David Duke’s re-creation of his past during the presidential campaign was an example of this strategy,20 which confuses many people who can easily identify the objectives of the Klan, White Aryan Nation, and Posse Comitatus but who find it more difficult to recognize extremism when it is cloaked in a seemingly rational and familiar garb.
The ad Smith began to circulate in the spring of 1991 contained the deniers’ familiar litany of claims. It declared the gas chambers a fraud, photographs doctored, eyewitness reports “ludicrously unreliable,” the Nuremberg trials a sham, and camp internees well fed until Allied bombings destroyed the German infrastructure in the most “barbarous form of warfare in Europe since the Mongol invasions,” preventing food from being delivered and causing the inmates to starve. According to Smith the notion of a Nazi attempt to destroy the Jews was the product of Allied efforts to produce “anti-German hate propaganda.” Today that same propaganda was used by powerful forces to “scape-goat old enemies,” “seek vengeance rather than reconciliation,” and pursue a “not-so-secret political agenda.”21
He repeated the familiar protest that his sole objective was to uncover the truth through an open debate on the Holocaust—debate that had been suppressed by a powerful but secret group on campus as part of their larger political agenda. “Let’s ask these people—what makes such behavior a social good? Who benefits?”
The ad contended that denial was forcing “mainline Holocaust historians” to admit the “more blatant examples” of Holocaust falsehoods. It was the deniers who had forced them to revise the “orthodox” Holocaust story. They had had to admit that the number of Jews killed at Auschwitz was far smaller than originally claimed, and had been made to confess that the Nazis did not use Jewish cadavers for the production of soap. It is correct that in recent years newly revealed documentation has allowed scholars to assess more precisely the number of Jews thought to have been murdered at Auschwitz.22, 2* It is also accurate that scholars have long written that despite wartime rumors to the contrary, the Nazis apparently did not use Jewish cadavers for soap. There has been a wide array of other “revelations” by Holocaust historians, all part of the attempt to uncover the full details of one of the most horrifying acts of human destruction. Smith suggested to his readers that scholars and others who work in this field, all of whom vigorously repudiate Holocaust denial, have been compelled to admit the truth of deniers’ claims: “We are told that it is ‘anti-Jewish’ to question orthodox assertions about German criminality. Yet we find that it is Jews themselves like Mayer, Bauer, Hier, Hilberg, Lipst
adt and others who beginning [sic] to challenge the establishment Holocaust story.”23 This notion—that deniers have exposed the truth and mainline historians are scrambling to admit it—remains a linchpin of the deniers’ strategy. It has two objectives: to make it appear that Jewish scholars are responding to the pressure of the deniers’ findings and to create the impression that Holocaust deniers’ “questions” are themselves part of a continuum of respectable scholarship. If establishment scholars, particularly those who are Jews, can question previously accepted truths, why is it wrong when Bradley Smith does the same?
Though much of the ad consisted of familiar rhetoric, Smith added a new twist that had a particular resonance on American college campuses. Since the 1980s the concept of “political correctness” has been a source of academic conflict. Conservative political groups have accused the “liberal establishment” of labeling certain topics politically incorrect and therefore ineligible for inclusion in the curriculum. Smith framed his well-worn denial arguments within this rhetoric, arguing that Holocaust revisionism could not be addressed on campus because “America’s thought police” had declared it out of bounds. “The politically correct line on the Holocaust story is, simply, it happened. You don’t debate ‘it.’ ” Unlike all other topics students were free to explore, the Holocaust story was off limits. The consequences, he charged, were antithetical to everything for which the university stood. “Ideology replaces free inquiry, intimidation represses open debate, and . . . the ideals of the university itself are exchanged for intellectual taboos.”24 While most students who had to decide whether the ad should be published did not overtly succumb to CODOH’s use of the political correctness argument, many prove prone to it, sometimes less than consciously—a susceptibility evident in their justifications for running the ad. Among the first universities to accept the ad were Northwestern, the University of Michigan, Duke, Cornell, Ohio State, and Washington University.25, 3*
Denying the Holocaust Page 24
