Another attempt to force professional historians to treat Holocaust denial as a legitimate enterprise began in 1990, when members of various university history departments began to receive letters soliciting support for “Holocaust revisionism.” That same year the American Historical Association’s (AHA) annual meeting was disrupted by pickets calling for recognition of a book charging Gen. Dwight Eisenhower with consciously causing the death of a million German POWs at the end of the war.7* The AHA issued a statement noting that 1995 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the defeat of Nazism and calling on scholars to “initiate plans now to encourage study of the significance of the Holocaust.”116
The AHA statement referred to the Holocaust but did not explicitly say that the Holocaust was a fact of history. According to the then-president of the AHA, William Leuchtenburg, it did not want to “get into the business of certifying what is and is not history.”8* Moreover, he believed that for a group of historians to say there had been a Holocaust was tantamount to “an organization of astronomers saying there is a moon.”117 The press, he believed, would simply ignore such a statement. In December 1991 the AHA unanimously adopted a statement deploring the “attempts to deny the fact of the Holocaust” and noting that “no serious historian questions that the Holocaust took place.”118 Leuchtenburg opposed allowing deniers a table at the convention because the AHA was a professional organization and they were not professionals. It would be the equivalent of the AMA allowing quacks to hawk miracle cures at its meetings.
The OAH was also a target of the deniers. In November 1991 the OAH’s executive committee agreed to allow its newsletter to publish a call by the IHR’s Journal of Historical Review for “revisionist” papers. This action was taken after David Thelen, the editor of the OAH’s scholarly journal, the Journal of American History, refused to list articles by deniers because it was the responsibility of an academic publication to “make judgments on the quality of scholarship.”119 He felt it was harder to refuse them space in the association’s newsletter because it contained both scholarly and nonscholarly information. Joyce Appleby, OAH president, protested the executive committee’s decision to accept the announcement in the OAH Newsletter. “This is not a question of respecting different points of view but rather of recognizing a group which repudiates the very values which bring us together,” Appleby wrote. It was the responsibility of a professional organization to make “professional judgments” and, Appleby asserted, “these people are not professionals and to allow them to advertise is to legitimate them.”120
Mary Frances Berry, a former president of the OAH and a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania, disagreed with Appleby. She compared the debate within the OAH to campus codes against “hate speech,” to which she objected. Her primary concern was “guaranteeing civil liberties for everyone.” She argued that since the OAH did not have a general policy regarding advertisements it would accept or reject, it was obligated to accept everything it received.121 The next issue of the OAH Newsletter contained a series of letters regarding the decision to include the ad and Appleby’s dissent. A group of prominent historians, including Thelen and Berry, wrote in support of the inclusion of denial announcements.122 They argued that however “abhorrent” the goals of the Journal of Historical Review, the constitutional principle of free speech as well as the OAH’s commitments to freedom of expression and the search for historical truth demanded that the ad be printed. In an apparent attempt to “balance” their support of the ad, they suggested a variety of strategies for dealing with the future efforts by the Journal of Historical Review and other deniers to place ads in OAH publications. One idea was that the OAH “pressure” the deniers’ journal to abide by international standards of scholarship, including that experts in appropriate fields evaluate articles submitted to the journal. Given the way they handle documents and data, it is clear that deniers have no interest in scholarship or reason. Most are antisemites and bigots. Engaging them in reasoned discussion would be the same as engaging a wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in a balanced and reasoned discussion of African Americans’ place in society. But on some level Carl Degler was right: Their motive are irrelevant. Some may truly believe the Holocaust a hoax—just as hundreds of antisemites believed the Protocols genuine. This does not give the contents of their pronouncements any more validity or intellectual standing. No matter how sincerely one believes it, two plus two will never equal five. Among the historians’ other suggestions was that a “truth-in-advertising” group be created to unmask the misleading claims in denial notices and announcements and that this group insist that their exposure be published along with the deniers’ claims. But such a suggestion would imply that a debate was being conducted by mainline historians and “revisionists.”123 The historians’ ideas, offered in the name of an attempt to resolve a situation that confounds many academics, played directly into the deniers’ hands. Given the response of such eminent teachers of history, it is not surprising that the Daily Northwestern, Northwestern University’s student newspaper, writing in support of inviting Arthur Butz to debate his “unorthodox view” of the Holocaust, declared that “even outrageous and repugnant theories sometimes deserve a forum.”124 Students emulated exactly what these professors had done. They had elevated what the Harvard Crimson had properly characterized as “utter bullshit” to the level of a theory deserving of a forum. After the IHR’s announcement appeared, the executive board voted to establsih a policy henceforth to exclude such advertisements and announcements from the newsletter. There was significant debate within the OAH’s leadership on this matter, and the decision to exclude denial ads in the future passed by one vote.125
Writing in support of Appleby, the Los Angeles Times provided an interesting slant to the argument. It pointed out that the First Amendment guaranteed freedom of association as well as freedom of speech. As a result the OAH had the right to “exclude fake historians from its ranks.”126 It was probably the most appropriate and possibly the most creative citation of the First Amendment during this entire debate.
The responses to Holocaust denial by both students and faculty graphically demonstrate the susceptibility of an educated and privileged segment of the American population to the kind of reasoning that creates a hospitable climate for the rewriting of history. There were a variety of failures here. All of them are sobering indicators of the ability of Holocaust denial to gain legitimacy. There was a failure to understand the true implications of the First Amendment. There was also a failure by student editors to recognize that their high-minded claims about censorship were duplicitous, given their papers’ policies of rejecting a broad range of ads and articles. In fact, campus policies are often more restrictive than those of the commercial press.
There was a failure to look at the deniers’ own history and to understand what they represented. The observation of the Ohio State Lantern rings hauntingly in my ears: “It is repulsive to think that the quality, or total lack thereof, of any idea or opinion has any bearing on whether it should be heard.”127 It is a response likely to make professors nationwide cringe. But, as we have seen, professors also showed their confusion on this matter.
Most disturbing was the contention voiced by students, faculty members, and university presidents that however ugly, the ad constituted an idea, opinion, or viewpoint—part of the broad range of scholarly ideas. However much they disassociated themselves from the content of the ad, the minute they categorized it as a “view,” they advanced the cause of Holocaust denial. That students failed to grasp that the ad contravened all canons of evidence and scholarship was distressing. But those at the helm sometimes also failed to grasp that the ad was not advocating a radical moral position but a patent untruth. Writing in the Cornell Daily Sun, President Frank Rhodes couched the discussion in terms of freedom of the press, arguing, “Free and open debate on a wide range of ideas, however outrageous or offensive some of them may be, lies at the heart of a university community.” Rhodes was positin
g that Holocaust denial should be considered an idea worthy of inclusion in the arena of open debate.128
This assault on the ivory tower of academe illustrated how Holocaust denial can permeate that segment of the population that should be most immune to it. It was naive to believe that the “light of day” can dispel lies, especially when they play on familiar stereotypes. Victims of racism, sexism, antisemitism, and a host of other prejudices know of light’s limited ability to discredit falsehood. Light is barely an antidote when people are unable, as was often the case in this investigation, to differentiate between reasoned arguments and blatant falsehoods. Most sobering was the failure of many of these student leaders and opinion makers to recognize Holocaust denial for what it was. This was particularly evident among those who argued that the ad contained ideas, however odious, worth of discussion. This failure suggests that correctly cast and properly camouflaged, Holocaust denial has a good chance of finding a foothold among coming generations.
This chapter ends where it began. Given the fact that even the papers that printed the ad dismissed Smith’s claims in the most derogatory of terms—absurd, irrational, racist, and a commercial for hatred—one might argue that the entire affair had a positive outcome. Rarely did the ad appear without an editorial or article castigating Holocaust denial. Students were alerted to a clear and present danger that can easily take root in their midst. Courses on the Holocaust increased in number. One could argue that all this is proof that CODOH’s attempt to make Holocaust denial credible backfired.
My assessment is far more pessimistic. It is probably the one issue about which I find myself in agreement with Bradley Smith. Many students read both the ad and the editorials condemning it. Some, including those who read neither but knew of the issue, may have walked away from the controversy convinced that there are two sides to this debate: the “revisionists” and the “establishment historians.” They may know that there is tremendous controversy about the former. They may not be convinced that the two sides have of equal validity. They may even know that the deniers keep questionable company. But nonetheless they assume there is an “other side.” That is the most frightening aspect of this entire matter.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Watching on the Rhine
The Future Course of Holocaust Denial
Although the instances of outright denial explored in this book are a cause for concern, the deniers may have an impact on truth and memory in another, less tangible but potentially more insidious way. Extremists of any kind pull the center of a debate to a more radical position. They can create—and, in the case of the Holocaust, have already created—a situation whereby added latitude may be given to ideas that would once have been summarily dismissed as historically fallacious.
The recent “historians’ debate” in Germany, in which conservative German historians attempted to restructure German history, offers evidence of this phenomenon. Though these historians are not deniers, they helped to create a gray area where their highly questionable interpretations of history became enmeshed with the pseudohistory of the deniers; and they do indeed share some of the same objectives. Intent on rewriting the annals of Germany’s recent past, both groups wish to lift the burden of guilt they claim has been imposed on Germans. Both believe that the Allies should bear a greater share of responsibility for the wrongs committed during the war. Both argue that the Holocaust has been unjustifiably singled out as a unique atrocity.
This debate was foreshadowed in the late 1970s by the publication of Hellmut Diwald’s History of the Germans. Diwald, a prominent German historian, believed that since 1945 Germany’s past had been “devalued, destroyed and taken away” from the German people. He sought to rectify this by demonstrating how Germans themselves had been victimized: His book devoted significant space to the expulsion of the German population from Eastern Europe at the end of World War II, but only two pages to Nazi crimes against humanity, including the Holocaust.1 Although Diwald’s book was vigorously criticized by German historians of all political persuasions—one called it “confused and stupid”—it was a harbinger of things to come. (Not surprisingly, the deniers were quick to adopt Diwald’s work as an extension of their own. In a letter to the New Statesman, Richard Verrall, editor of the extremist Spearhead and the author of Did Six Million Really Die?, grouped Diwald’s research with that of Butz and Faurisson, arguing that together they were all “carrying on the work initiated by Rassinier.”2 Diwald had unwittingly given the deniers the scholarly respectability they so craved. His successors in the debate would inadvertently do the same.)
Germany’s intensive rewriting of its past from a politico-historical perspective continued in earnest in the mid-1980s, when Chancellor Kohl, initiating what would become the Bitburg debacle, invited President Reagan to participate in a wreath-laying ceremony at a German military cemetery, in a “spirit of reconciliation.” Reagan agreed and, with a remark that can be described as thoughtless at best, informed the press that he would not go to a concentration camp because the Germans “have a guilt feeling that’s been imposed on them and I just think it’s unnecessary.” In many ways Reagan was an innocent pawn in a debate whose nuances he may not fully have grasped.3 Kohl’s invitation to the American president, issued in the wake of Germany’s exclusion from the fortieth anniversary commemoration of the Allied landing at Normandy, was designed to blur Germany’s historical image as the aggressor. Conservative politicians and journalists had already begun to urge Germans, in the words of Bavarian Minister-President Franz Josef Strauss, to get off their knees and once again learn to “walk tall.”4 (The juxtaposition of this image with that of the late former Chancellor Willy Brandt falling to his knees at the Warsaw Ghetto monument is telling.)
Kohl, Strauss, and other politicians on the right were joined in this struggle by a group of historians. In 1986 Andreas Hillgruber, an internationally respected specialist in German diplomatic, military, and political history, published Two Kinds of Downfall: The Shattering of the German Reich and the End of European Jewry. It consisted of two essays, one on the postwar Soviet expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe, and the other on the genocide of the Jews.5 According to Hillgruber these two catastrophes “belong[ed] together.” He argued that the Allies, who had long intended to cripple Germany so that it could never again subjugate Europe, emasculated Germany by usurping its territories for Poland and installing the Russian army as an occupying force. By claiming that they emanated from the same policies of population transfer and extermination, Hillgruber essentially equated Allied treatment of Germany and the Nazi genocide.6 He responded to historians who had criticized the Wehrmacht’s decisions to continue fighting the Soviets well after their colleagues in Berlin had attempted to end the war by assassinating Hitler. This, Hillgruber asserted, was an honorable decision even though it greatly prolonged the horrors of the death camps.7 It was basically an act of self-defense, preventing the Russian forces from laying waste Germany and its people. Other historians in this struggle would take a far more extreme stand than Hillgruber, but his insistence that the reader see the latter stages of the war from the perspective of the German soldier, and his grouping together of these two different “downfalls,” opened the door to much of the apologia and distortion that followed.8
The conservative historian Michael Stürmer, Chancellor Kohl’s historical adviser, believed that the Germans’ “obsession with their guilt” had deleteriously affected their national pride.9 Contending that too much emphasis had been placed on the Third Reich, Stärmer, who advised Kohl on the Bitburg affair, called for a rewriting of history that would help Germans develop a greater sense of nationalism.
The most prominent member of this effort was Ernst Nolte, the German historian renowned for his study of fascism.10 Along with Hillgruber and other conservative historians, he compared the Holocaust to a variety of twentieth-century outrages, including the Armenian massacres that began in 1915, Stalin’s gulags, U.S. policies in Vietnam, the Sovi
et occupation of Afghanistan, and the Pol Pot atrocities in the former Kampuchea. According to them the Holocaust was simply one among many evils. Therefore it was historically and morally incorrect to single out the Germans for doing precisely what had been done by an array of other nations. Joachim Fest, the editor in chief of the prestigious Germany daily, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, published a detailed defense of Nolte, illustrated with a photo of a mound of skulls of Pol Pot’s victims.11 As Oxford historian Peter Pulzer observed, the message was clear: Germans may have sinned but they did so “in good company.”12 Fest had already engaged in his own form of revisionism when he directed a documentary film, Hitler: A Career. Intended to show the fascination that Hitler had aroused among most Germans, the film relied on clips from Nazi propaganda films, synchronizing them with such stereo sound effects as clicking bootheels and exploding bombs. The commentator argued from Hitler’s perspective. Nazi suppression of human rights, oppression, and war crimes were ignored. (Since these had not been filmed by the Nazis, the filmmakers treated them as nonexistent.) The film presents Nazi-produced propaganda as an authentic documentation of the period, showing Hitler as he wanted to be seen.13
The historians’ attempt to create such immoral equivalencies ignored the dramatic differences between these events and the Holocaust. The brutal Armenian tragedy, which the perpetrators still refuse to acknowledge adequately, was conducted within the context of a ruthless Turkish policy of expulsion and resettlement. It was terrible and caused horrendous suffering but it was not part of a process of total annihilation of an entire people. The Khmer Rouge’s massacre of a million of their fellow Cambodians, to which the Western world turned a blind eye, was carried out, as Richard Evans observes, as a means of subduing and eliminating those whom Pol Pot imagined had collaborated with the Americans during the previous hostilities. The ruthless policy was conducted as part of a brutalizing war that had destroyed much of Cambodia’s moral, social, and physical infrastructure. This is not intended in any way as a justification of what happened in Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge’s treatment of their countrymen was barbaric. But what they did was quite different from the Nazis’ annihilation of the Jews, which was “a gratuitous act carried out by a prosperous, advanced, industrial nation at the height of its power.”14
Denying the Holocaust Page 27
