Denying the Holocaust

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Denying the Holocaust Page 31

by Deborah E. Lipstadt


  9. From a letter signed by David Duke accompanying the Crusader, February 1980, as cited in David Duke: In His Own Words (New York, n.d.).

  10. Interview with David Duke conducted by Hustler magazine, reprinted in the National Association for the Advancement of White People News, Aug. 1982.

  11. Jason Berry, “Duke’s Disguise,” New York Times, Oct. 16, 1991. See also Letters to the Editor, New York Times, Oct. 19, 1991.

  12. Jason Berry, “The Hazards of Duke,” Washington Post, May 14, 1989. He also tried to appear as if he had modulated his views on other topics. No longer did he speak of sterilizing welfare mothers; now it was “birth control incentives” (Los Angeles Times, June 10, 1990). See also Lawrence N. Powell, “Read my Liposuction: The Makeover of David Duke,” New Republic, Oct. 15, 1990.

  13. Jacob Weisberg, “The Heresies of Pat Buchanan,” New Republic, Oct. 22, 1990, pp. 26–27.

  14. Ibid., p. 26.

  15. Report of the Anti-Defamation League on Pat Buchanan, Los Angeles Jewish Journal, Sept. 28, 1991.

  16. New York Times, Feb. 14, 1992.

  17. David Warshofsky (pseud.), interview with author, December 1992. “Warshofsky” is a regular participant in the Institute’s meetings and is in constant communication with various deniers both in the United States and in Europe.

  18. Robert D. Kaplan, “Croatianism: The Latest Balkan Ugliness,” New Republic, Nov. 25, 1991, p. 16.

  19. “Croatia,” Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (New York, 1990), Israel Gutman, ed., p. 326.

  20. Some of the key Slovakian separatists have engaged in actual denial. Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Mar. 17, 1992.

  21. Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Nov. 6, 1992; The Times, Mar. 6, 1988.

  22. Daily Telegraph, July 10, 1992.

  23. Sunday Telegraph, Jan. 12, 1992.

  24. Daily Telegraph, July 10, 1992.

  25. Independent on Sunday, May 10, 1992.

  26. Frederick Brown, “French Amnesia,” Harpers, Dec. 1981, p. 70.

  27. Nadine Fresco, “The Denial of the Dead: On the Faurisson Affair,” Dissent, Fall 1981, p. 467.

  28. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust (New York, 1993), pp. 40–41; Serge Thion, ed., Vérité historique or vérité politique? (Paris, 1980), pp. 187, 190, 211.

  29. Vidal-Naquet, Assassins of Memory, p. 115.

  30. Ibid.

  31. Guardian, July 3, 1986; Le Monde, July 4, 1986.

  32. New Statesman, Apr. 10, 1981, p. 4.

  33. Annales d’Histoire Revisionniste, vol. 1, Spring 1987; Judith Miller, One by One by One: Facing the Holocaust (New York, 1990), p. 134.

  34. Miller, One by One by One, p. 137; Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Oct. 23, 1987.

  35. Time, May 28, 1990; U.S. News & World Report, May 28, 1990, p. 42; Los Angeles Times, May 29, 1990, pp. HI, H7. In the following parliamentary election Le Pen’s party was routed but this resulted from a change in the voting system and not a loss of support. Miller, One by One by One, p. 138.

  36. Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Oct. 23, 1987; Alain Finkielkraut, Remembering in Vain: The Klaus Barbie Trial and Crimes Against Humanity (New York, 1989), pp. 35–44.

  37. L’Express, Oct. 28-Nov. 4, 1978; Gill Seidel, The Holocaust Denial (Leeds, England, 1986).

  38. New Statesman, Sept. 7, 1979, p. 332.

  39. The Times, May 11, 1990; Jewish Week, Sept. 15, 1989.

  40. Dokumentationszentrum, 1988 Annual Report, Vienna, Austria.

  41. Austrian News, Embassy of Austria, Press and Information Dept., Washington, Oct., 1989.

  42. Spotlight, June 1, 1992.

  43. In 1991, the Gallup organization conducted a poll of Austrian attitudes toward Jews commissioned by the American Jewish Committee. Fifty-three percent of the people surveyed thought it was time to “put the memory of the Holocaust behind us” and 39 percent believed that “Jews have caused much harm in the course of history.” An almost identical proportion believed that Jews had “too much influence” over world affairs; close to 20 percent wanted them out of the country. These statistics indicate a country “ripe” for an antisemitic ideology such as Holocaust denial. Fritz Karmasin, Austrian Attitudes Towards Jews, Israel and the Holocaust (New York, 1992).

  44. Jewish Telegraph Agency, Aug. 18, 1992, p. 4; Nov. 11, 1992.

  45. Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Nov. 2, 4, 1992.

  46. Arab News, May 8, 1988.

  47. New York Times, Dec. 10, 1989.

  48. New Statesman, Sept. 7, 1979; Searchlight, Nov. 1988, p. 15.

  49. Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Dec. 22, 1992. Outside of the League, some Australians have been able to voice Holocaust denial charges with impunity. Dr. Anice Morsey, a prominent member of the Australian Arab community, has accused Zionists of fabricating the story of the Holocaust. She maintained that the Jews who were killed were fifth columnists or spies. Morsey asserted that Israel was the financial beneficiary of this hoax and Germany the victim. Morsey’s views did not seem to have hampered her career. Subsequent to making that statement she was appointed ethnic affairs commissioner by the Victorian government. An Nahar, Nov. 8, 1982, quoted in Jeremy Jones, “Holocaust Revisionism in Australia,” in Without Prejudice (Australian Institute of Jewish Affairs), Dec. 4, 1991, p. 53. Kenneth Stern’s forthcoming Holocaust Denial contains a useful survey of recent Holocaust denial activities throughout the world (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1993), chap. 2.

  50. New York Times, Mar. 12, 1987; Jennifer Golub, Japanese Attitudes Toward Jews (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1992), p. 6.

  51. The Weekend Australian, Aug. 19–20, 1989; New York Times, Dec. 25, 1988; Time, Oct. 7, 1991.

  52. Yehuda Bauer, “ ‘Revisionism’—The Repudiation of the Holocaust and Its Historical Significance,” in The Historiography of the Holocaust Period, Yisrael Gutman and Gideon Grief, eds. (Jerusalem, 1988), p. 702.

  53. Los Angeles Times, Dec. 18, 1990.

  54. Near East Report, Apr. 16, 1990, p. 72.

  55. Interview with Robert Faurisson, Vichy, France, June 1989.

  56. Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Nov. 26, 1992.

  57. Esquire, Feb. 1983.

  58. The Progressive, Apr. 1986, p. 4.

  59. Peter Hayes, “A Historian Confronts Denial,” in The Netherlands and Nazi Genocide, G. Jan Colijn and Marcia S. Littell, eds. (Lewiston, 1992), p. 522.

  60. Safet M. Sarich to Winnetka educators, May 1991.

  61. New York Times, Jan. 1, 1981.

  62. Gitta Sereny, “The Judgment of History,” New Statesman, July 17, 1981, p. 16; Noam Chomsky, “The Commissars of Literature,” New Statesman, Aug. 14, 1981, p. 13.

  63. Noam Chomsky, “Chomsky: Freedom of Expression? Absolutely,” Village Voice, July 1–7, 1981, p. 12. See also Noam Chomsky, “The Faurisson Affair: His Right to Say It,” Nation, Feb. 28, 1991, p. 231. Gitta Sereny, “Let History Judge,” New Statesman, Sept. 11, 1981, p. 12.

  64. Alfred Kazin, “Americans Right, Left and Indifferent: Responses to the Holocaust,” Dimensions, vol. 4, no. 1 (1988), p. 12.

  65. He was particularly distressed by the University of Lyons’s decision not to let Faurisson teach because it could not guarantee his safety.

  66. Statement by President H. Keith H. Brodie, Duke University, Nov. 6, 1991.

  67. Fish argued that he was not in the business of “recovering” texts but “in the business of making texts and of teaching others to make them.” He found this a liberating approach because it relieved him of “the obligation to be right . . . and demands only that I be interesting.” Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988), p. 544.

  68. Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis, 1978), cited in Novick, That Noble Dream, p. 539.

  69. Richard Rorty, “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism,” Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis, 1982), p. 166. See also Novick, That Noble Dream, p. 540.

  70.
Hilary Putnam, Truth and History (Cambridge, 1981), p. 54.

  71. Time, Aug. 26, 1991, p. 19.

  72. Newsweek, Sept. 18, 1991, p. 47.

  73. Charles Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust and German National Identity (Cambridge, 1988), p. 64.

  74. Novick, That Noble Dream, pp. 448ff.

  75. Mark Lane, letter to the editor, Los Angeles Daily Journal, Nov. 13, 1991.

  76. Conversations with Robert Faurisson, Vichy, France, June 1989.

  77. Harry Elmer Barnes, “Revisionism: A Key to Peace,” Rampart Journal (Spring 1966), p. 3.

  78. Austin J. App, History’s Most Terrifying Peace, p. 106, cited in “Prevent World War III,” n.d., p. 7.

  79. Harry Elmer Barnes, Revisionism and Brainwashing: A Survey of the War-Guilt Question in Germany After Two World Wars (n.p., 1962), p. 33 (hereafter referred to as Brainwashing).

  80. Canadian papers covering the trial regularly carried headlines such as: “Nazi Camp had Pool, Ballroom” (Toronto Sun, Feb. 13, 1985); “Prisoners at Auschwitz dined, danced to band, Zundel Witness Testifies” (Toronto Star, Feb. 13, 1985).

  81. Conversations with Robert Faurisson, Vichy, France, June 1989.

  82. Maier, The Unmasterable Past, p. 64.

  83. Colin Holmes, “Historical Revisionism in Britain, The Politics of History,” in Trends in Historical Revisionism: History as a Political Device (London, 1985), p. 8.

  84. Dumas Malone, The Sage of Monticello, pp. 417–418.

  85. Novick, That Noble Dream, p. 2.

  86. Institute for Historical Review, Newsletter (Apr. 1987), p. 1.

  87. New York Review of Books, Mar. 22, 1979, p. 47. See also Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Assassins of Memory, pp. 3–7.

  88. Democracy, vol. 1–2 (Apr. 1981), pp. 73ff.

  89. Justus D. Doenecke, “Harry Elmer Barnes: Prophet of a Usable Past,” History Teacher (Feb. 1975), p. 273.

  90. Geoffrey Hartman, “Blindness and Insight,” New Republic, Mar. 7, 1988, pp. 26–31.

  91. Donald Cameron Watt, “The Political Misuse of History,” in Trends in Historical Revisionism: History as a Political Device (London, 1985), P. l1.

  Chapter 2. The Antecedents

  1. Sidney B. Fay, “New Light on the Origins of the World War,” American Historical Review, vol. 25 (1920), pp. 616–39; vol. 26, (1920), pp. 37–53; vol. 26 (1921), pp. 225–54.

  2. Sidney B. Fay, The Origins of the World War, vol. 2 (New York, 1966), pp. 552–54.

  3. Novick, That Noble Dream, pp. 210ff.

  4. Ibid., p. 212.

  5. Charles Beard, “Heroes and Villains of the World War,” Current History, vol. 24 (1926), p. 733.

  6. Fay, Origins of the World War, vol. 1, p. 8.

  7. Harry Elmer Barnes, The Genesis of the World War: An Introduction to the Problem of War Guilt (New York, 1929), p. 641.

  8. For analysis of the evidence placed before the Commission on Responsibility for the War at the Paris Peace Conference and the conclusions based on it see A. von Wegerer, “Die Widerlegung der Versailles Kriegsschuldthese” (Refutation of the Versailles war guilt theory), in Die Kriegsschuldfrage (The war guilt question), vol. 6 (Jan. 1928), pp. 1–77; see also his article and the replies to it in Current History (Aug. 1928), pp. 810–28, cited in Fay, Origins of the World War, vol. 2, p. 549.

  9. Barnes, Genesis, pp. 641–42.

  10. Ibid., p. 647.

  11. For a discussion of British propaganda, see C. Hartley Grattan, Why We Fought (1929), and Walter Millis, Road to War (1935), cited in John E. Wiltz, From Isolationism to War, 1931–1941 (New York, 1968), p. 8.

  12. Wiltz, From Isolationism to War, p. 7.

  13. Charles A. Beard, President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War (New Haven, 1948), p. 5.

  14. Barnes, Genesis, p. 648.

  15. Fay, Origins of the World War, p. 558.

  16. Wiltz, From Isolationism to War, p. 17.

  17. Wayne S. Cole, Roosevelt and the Isolationists, 1932–1945 (Lincoln, Nebr., 1983), p. 6.

  18. For background on the isolationists-revisionists and a sympathetic portrayal of their efforts, see Justus D. Doenecke, Not to the Swift: The Old Isolationists in the Cold War Era (London, 1982); see also Wayne S. Cole, Charles A. Lindbergh and the Battle Against American Intervention in World War II (New York, 1974), pp. 379–81.

  19. Tom Connally, My Name Is Tom Connally (New York, 1954), pp. 211–14, cited in Cole, Roosevelt and the Isolationists, p. 161.

  20. Cordell Hull, Memoirs of Cordell Hull, vol. 1 (New York, 1948), p. 404.

  21. Cole, Roosevelt and the Isolationists, p. 161; Dexter Perkins, The New Age of Franklin Roosevelt, cited in Wiltz, From Isolationism to War, p. 50.

  22. Wiltz, From Isolationism to War, p. 7.

  23. Johnson to Hiram W. Johnson, Jr., Feb. 11, 19, 1939, Johnson to Frank P. Doherty, Feb. 11, 1939; Johnson Papers, cited in Cole, Roosevelt and the Isolationists, pp. 308, 607.

  24. Edward S. Shapiro, “Antisemitism Mississippi Style,” Antisemitism in American History, ed. David Gerber (Urbana/Chicago, 1986), pp. 129–47. Rankin also opposed the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act because “Japs” would flood America in the postwar period (Doenecke, Not to the Swift, p. 21).

  25. Congressional Record, 77th Congress, 1st sess., 1941, 87:6565; Cole, pp. 475–76.

  26. Cole, Roosevelt and the Isolationists, p. 465. On antisemitism in America First see James C. Schneider, Should America Go to War? The Debate over Foreign Policy in Chicago, 1939–1941 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1989), p. 210.

  27. Charles Beard, “We’re Blundering Into War,” American Mercury, (Apr. 1939), pp. 388–90.

  28. The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem (Hawthorne, Calif., n.d.). For an analysis of antisemitic conspiracy theories in the United States see Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, The Politics of Unreason: Right-Wing Extremism in America, 1790–1977, 2d ed. (Chicago, 1978), chaps. 4, 5, and 6. For the impact of the belief in the Protocols see Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide (New York, 1966), pp. 156–64. For a compelling overview of the role of conspiracy theories in America see George Johnson, Architects of Fear: Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia in American Politics (Boston, 1983). For a discussion of Henry Ford see ibid., pp. 111–14. For information on contemporary uses of the Protocols see Patterns of Prejudice, Nov./Dec. 1977.

  29. Lipset and Raab, Politics of Unreason, p. 135.

  30. Johnson, Architects of Fear, pp. 78–80.

  31. Henri Zukier, “The Conspiratorial Imperative: Medieval Jewry in Western Europe,” Changing Conceptions of Conspiracy, Carl F. Graumann and Serge Moscovici, eds. (New York, 1987), pp. 93–101.

  32. Chicago Tribune, editorial, Nov. 9, 1945. John T. Flynn, The Roosevelt Myth (New York, 1948). Other books that made similar arguments included William Henry Chamberlin, America’s Second Crusade (Chicago, 1950), and Frederic R. Sanborn, Design for War (New York, 1951).

  33. Beard, President Roosevelt, p. 577.

  34. Time, June 16, 1947, p. 29, quoted in Doenecke, Not to the Swift, p. 101.

  35. Charles C. Tansill, Back Door to War: The Roosevelt Foreign Policy, 1933–1941 (Chicago, 1952), p. 9.

  36. Tansill, Back Door to War, p. 510.

  37. For Tansill’s views on Hitler see Charles C. Tansill to Harry Elmer Barnes, November 10, 1950, Barnes Papers, Univ. of Wyoming. For background on Tansill’s conservative and segregationist views see Doenecke, Not to the Swift, pp. 101–2, 112.

  38. Tansill, Back Door to War, pp. 554–55.

  39. Austin App, A Straight Look at the Third Reich: Hitler and National Socialism, How Right? How Wrong? (Tacoma Park, Md., 1974), p. 40.

  40. William Henry Chamberlin, “Shifting American Alignments,” Human Events (May 22, 1946).

  41. Freda Utley, The High Cost of Vengeance (Chicago, 1949), p. 14.

  42. George Morgenstern, Pearl Harbor: The Story of the Secret War (New York, 1947), pp. 4, 7, 283, cited in Doenecke, Not to the Swift, p. 97.

  43. W
illiam Neumann to H. E. Barnes, Jan. 30, 1946, Barnes Papers, cited in Doenecke, Not to the Swift, p. 141.

  44. Frederick Libby, Peace Action, vol. 9 (July 1945), pp. 3–4.

  45. Leonard Dinnerstein, America and the Survivors of the Holocaust (New York, 1982), pp. 162–83.

  46. Doenecke, Not to the Swift, p. 133.

  47. Ibid., p. 145.

  48. In a far milder and more rational defense of the German people, Philip La Follette, former governor of Wisconsin, described the German people as the first victims of Nazi brutalities.

  49. Congressional Record, Mar. 29, 1946, p. 2801, and Apr. 18, 1946, p. 3962.

  50. Extreme concern about the conditions of the German population did not always ipso facto indicate a lack of concern about what Jews had experienced. Langer was one of the outspoken supporters in the Senate of the activist Jewish leader Peter Bergson, who called for a strong American rescue program for European Jewry. In 1943 on the floor of the Senate, Langer had publicly criticized the Bermuda Conference as a ploy sponsored by the British and American governments to give the illusion that plans for rescue were under serious consideration. He warned that “2,000,000 Jews in Europe have been killed off already and another 5,000,000 Jews are awaiting the same fate unless they are saved immediately. Every day, every hour, every minute that passes thousands of them are being exterminated.” Langer’s positions both during the war and after it are attributable in great measure to his opposition to the Democrats’ foreign policy (David Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941–1945 (New York, 1984), p. 143.

  51. Doenecke, Not to the Swift, p. 215.

  52. Utley, High Cost of Vengeance, p. 14 (italics added).

  53. Ibid., pp. 14, 15.

  54. She included in these crimes “the obliteration bombing; the mass expropriation and expulsion from their homes of twelve million Germans on account of their race; the starving of the Germans during the first years of the occupation; the use of prisoners as slave laborers; the Russian concentration camps, and the looting perpetrated by Americans as well as Russians” (Utley, High Cost of Vengeance, p. 183).

  55. “Slaveholders Always Defend Slavery,” Chicago Tribune, December 10, 1946.

  56. Karl Brandt, “Germany Is Our Problem,” pamphlet (Hinsdale, Ill., 1946).

 

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