Denying the Holocaust
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57. Chicago Tribune, July 26, 1945; Charles A. Beard to Oswald Garrison Villard, November 8, 1946, Villard Papers, cited in Doenecke, Not to the Swift, pp. 140, 141, 149 n. 43.
58. “The Nazi Trials,” editorial, Chicago Tribune, July 24, 1945.
59. Congressional Record, 82nd Cong., 2nd Sess., Mar. 11, 1952, pp. 2106, 2110, cited in Shapiro, “Antisemitism Mississippi Style,” p. 136.
60. Frank C. Waldrop, McCormick of Chicago (Englewood, N.J., 1966), p. 263. For additional background information on the foreign policy of the Chicago Tribune in the interwar period see Jerome Edwards, The Foreign Policy of Colonel McCormick’s Tribune, 1921–1941 (Reno, 1971).
61. New York Daily News, October 6, 1945.
62. Nation, May 19, 1945, p. 579.
63. Progressive, May 14, 1945, cited in Robert Abzug, Inside the Vicious Heart (New York, 1985), pp. 136–37.
64. General doubts about the reports of mass murder and other atrocities committed by the Germans had persisted as late as the liberation of the camps. In April 1945 the BBC had chosen not to broadcast its own reporter’s account of the liberation of Buchenwald because it feared the public would not believe him. It waited a number of days until it received Edward R. Murrow’s account. Because Murrow was held in such high esteem by the British, the BBC was convinced that his description of the horrors perpetrated by the Germans would be more likely to be accepted as accurate. Even Murrow worried that his report would be dismissed as exaggerated, and in his famous broadcast he asked his listeners, “I pray you to believe what I have said.”
65. William Hesseltine, “Atrocities Then and Now,” Progressive, May 9, 1945, p. 4.
66. App, A Striaght Look, p. 5.
67. Mark Weber, “Civil War Concentration Camps,” Journal of Historical Review (Summer 1981), pp. 144, 150–52.
68. C. C. Aronsfeld, The Text of the Holocaust (Marblehead, Mass., 1985), p. 52.
69. Ibid., p. 55. Grabert published David Hoggan’s The Forced War, which would play a seminal role in the evolution of Holocaust denial in the United States and Germany.
70. Welt der Arbeit, May 26, 1961, cited in Aronsfeld, Text of the Holocaust, p. 56.
71. Deutsche Hochschullehrer-Zeitung (Tübingen), no. 4 (1963), quoted in Aronsfeld, Text of the Holocaust, p. 56.
72. Nadine Fresco, “The Denial of the Dead: On the Faurisson Affair,” Dissent (Fall 1981), pp. 473–74.
Chapter 3. In the Shadow of World War II
1. Maurice Bardèche, Nuremberg ou la Terre Promise (Paris, 1948) cited in Gill Seidel, The Holocaust Denial: Antisemitism, Racism and the New Right (Leeds, England, 1986), p. 95.
2. Ian Barnes, “Revisionism and the Right,” A Contemporary Affairs Briefing of the Centre for Contemporary Studies (reprinted in the Glasgow Jewish Echo, Jan. 8, 1982, p. 6).
3. Pierre Hofstetter, Introduction to Paul Rassinier, Debunking the Genocide Myth: A Study of the Nazi Concentration Camps and the Alleged Extermination of European Jewry (Torrance, Calif., 1978), p. x. (hereafter cited as Debunking).
4. Ibid., p. x.
5. Ibid., p. 164.
6. Ibid., p. 35.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., p. 37.
9. Ibid., p. 36.
10. Ibid., p. 185.
11. Ibid., pp. 53, 55.
12. Ibid., p. 216.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., pp. 218–19.
15. Ibid., p. 219.
16. Ibid., p. 214.
17. Paul Rassinier, The Real Eichmann Trial, or The Incorrigible Victors (Silver Spring, Md., n.d.), p. 47.
18. Debunking, p. 214.
19. Ibid.
20. Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Israel, Documents Relating to the Agreement Between the Government of Israel and the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany (Jerusalem: 1953), pp. 9–91. On March 14, 1951, Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett declared in a statement to the Knesset that “the demand for reparation has been calculated according to the burden that the people in Israel and Jewish organizations throughout the world have taken upon themselves in financing the rehabilitation and the absorption of a half a million survivors of the Holocaust who have settled or will settle in Israel.” Nana Sagi, German Reparations: A History of the Negotiations (Jerusalem, 1980), p. 55.
21. Debunking, p. 219.
22. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York, 1967), p. 311; Debunking, p. 219.
23. Hannah Arendt, “A Reporter at Large: Eichmann in Jerusalem—II,” The New Yorker, Feb. 23, 1963, p. 66.
24. Debunking, p. 220.
25. Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, p. 670.
26. Debunking, p. 219.
27. Archival collections in the former USSR, which had previously been unavailable to historians, were recently opened for inspection. It is likely that the information they contain may result in a change in the estimate of the number of victims.
28. Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, p. 257.
29. Ibid., p. 266.
30. Debunking, p. 224.
31. Ibid., p. 288.
32. “Raphael Lemkin,” Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (New York, 1990), p. 860.
33. Debunking, p. 289.
34. Ibid., p. 309.
35. Ibid., p. 306.
36. The American Mercury was founded and edited for many years by H. L. Mencken. Under Mencken it was recognized as one of the literary lights of the American scene, publishing the works of Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, Carl Sandburg, and Robert Frost. Mencken sold it in 1935. It then became an increasingly conservative publication. In 1955 Time magazine reported that most of its top editors had quit because they were convinced that “attempts were being made to introduce antisemitic material” into the magazine.
37. Debunking, p. 309.
Chapter 4. The First Stirrings of Denial in America
1. Arnold Forster, “The Ultimate Cruelty,” ADL Bulletin (June 1959), pp. 1ff.
2. Ibid., p. 2.
3. Ibid.
4. Benjamin H. Freedman, “Six Million Jew Hoax,” Common Sense (May 1, 1959).
5. Forster, “The Ultimate Cruelty,” p. 2.
6. Arthur Butz, “The International ‘Holocaust’ Controversy,” Journal of Historical Review (Spring 1980), p. 6.
7. Our Sunday Visitor, June 14, 1959; Forster, “The Ultimate Cruelty,” p. 7.
8. Forster, “The Ultimate Cruelty,” p. 7.
9. Peter Baldwin, “The Historikerstreit in Context,” in Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust and the Historians’ Debate, ed. Peter Baldwin (Boston, 1990), p. 24.
10. Paul L. Berman, “Gas Chamber Games: Crackpot History and the Right to Lie,” Village Voice, June 10–16, 1981, p. 40; Harry Elmer Barnes, The Court Historians Versus Revionism, n.p., n.d., p. 3.
11. Novick, That Noble Dream, p. 208.
12. Charles A. Beard to Harry Elmer Barnes, June 28, 1924, Barnes Papers, Box 79, cited in Novick, That Noble Dream, p. 212.
13. His trip to Germany to expound on the Versailles treaty had a major impact on his subsequent historical views, Brainwashing, p. 24.
14. Brainwashing, pp. 13, 18.
15. Harry Elmer Barnes, “Revisionism and the Promotion of Peace,” Journal of Historical Review (Spring 1982), p. 61. This article originally appeared in Liberation (Summer 1958) and was subsequently republished as a pamphlet.
16. H. E. Barnes to C. C. Tansill, Nov. 7, 1950, cited in Doenecke, Not to the Swift, p. 105.
17. Barnes, “Revisionism and the Promotion of Peace,” p. 65.
18. Ibid., pp. 67–68.
19. H. E. Barnes to W. L. Neumann, Feb. 8, 1952, cited in Doenecke, Not to the Swift, p. 104.
20. Barnes, “Revisionism and the Promotion of Peace,” p. 68.
21. Harry Elmer Barnes, The Struggle Against the Historical Blackout (n.p., 1952), p. 11.
22. Barnes, “Revisionism and the Promotion of Peace,” p. 72.
23. Brainwashing, p. 3.
24. Har
ry Elmer Barnes to Oswald Garrison Villard, October 28, 1948, Harvard University.
25. Harry Elmer Barnes to Oswald Garrison Villard, March 5, 1949, Harvard University.
26. Brainwashing, p. 5.
27. Ibid.
28. Lucy Dawidowicz, “Lies about the Holocaust,” Commentary, Dec. 1980, p. 32.
29. David Leslie Hoggan, The Forced War: When Peaceful Revision Failed (Torrance, Calif., 1989).
30. Hoggan, The Forced War, p. 156.
31. Hilberg, The Destruction of European Jews, p. 92.
32. Hoggan, The Forced War, p. 101.
33. U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1938, vol. 2 (Washington, D.C., 1938), pp. 391–92.
34. Hoggan, The Forced War, p. 101.
35. U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1938, vol. 2, p. 361.
36. Helmut Krausnick, then director of the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, charged that Hoggan had actually engaged in forgery in the preparation of the book. See Krausnick’s foreword to Hermann Graml’s critique of Hoggan, Geschichte in Wissenschaft and Unterricht, August 1963, cited in Dawidowicz, “Lies About the Holocaust,” p. 32.
37. See Gerhard L. Weinberg’s review in American Historical Review, vol. 68, no. 1 (October 1962), pp. 104–5.
38. Brainwashing, p. 42.
39. Ibid. Barnes translated some of Rassinier’s works into English. See Lewis Brandon, “Introduction,” The Barnes Trilogy: Three Revisionist Booklets by Harry Elmer Barnes, Historian, Criminologist, Sociologist, Economist (Torrance, Calif., 1979). Brandon was the alias used by David McCalden, the first director of the Institute for Historical Review.
40. Harry Elmer Barnes, “ZionistFraud,” American Mercury, Fall 1968, reprinted in an appendix to The Myth of the Six Million (Los Angeles, 1969), p. 117.
41. Brainwashing, p. 32.
42. Ibid., p. 33.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid., p. 37 (italics added).
45. Harry Elmer Barnes, “Revisionism: A Key to Peace,” Rampart Journal (Spring 1966), quoted in Dawidowicz, “Lies About the Holocaust,” p. 33 (italics added).
46. Harry Elmer Barnes, “The Public Stake in Revisionism,” Rampart Journal (Summer 1967), pp. 19–41, republished in Journal of Historical Review (Fall 1980), p. 217 (italics added) (hereafter referred to as “The Public Stake”).
47. “The Public Stake,” p. 218 (italics added).
48. He specifically referred to Look, Mar. 21, 1967; Saturday Evening Post, Oct. 22, 1965, and Feb. 25, 1967. “The Public Stake,” pp. 205–30.
49. “The Public Stake,” p. 219 (italics added).
50. Ibid., p. 225 (italics added).
51. Ibid., p. 223 (italics added). Barnes apparently thought Brzezinka and Birkenau were two separate camps. Birkenau is the English translation of Brzezinka. Jonowska is Janówska.
52. Ibid., p. 222.
53. Gitta Sereny, “The Men Who Whitewash Hitler,” New Statesman, Nov. 1979, p. 670.
54. Even the former East Germany, which until 1990 did not accept responsibility for the Holocaust, acknowledged that it had occurred. It blamed the fascists, who persecuted the Communists.
55. “The Public Stake,” p. 228; Brainwashing, p. 2.
56. Brainwashing, p. 34.
57. Ibid., pp. 2, 25.
58. Ibid., p. 39.
59. Ibid., p. 42.
60. Ibid., p. 43.
61. Harry Elmer Barnes to Oswald Garrison Villard, November 11, 1945; Oswald Garrison Villard to Harry Elmer Barnes, November 14, 1945, in the collection of Harvard University. Barnes originally met Villard in 1926 when Villard had come to lecture in Barnes’s classes at Smith College. They both shared revisionist views regarding World War I and World War II, though Barnes was far more extreme about the latter.
62. Novick, That Noble Dream, p. 218.
63. “The Public Stake,” p. 219.
64. Ibid.
65. Memo from Barry Youngerman to Jerry Bakst, June 27, 1967, archives of the Anti-Defamation League, New York.
66. Justus Doenecke, “Harry Elmer Barnes: Prophet of a ‘Usable’ Past,” History Teacher, vol. 8 (Feb. 1975).
Chapter 5. Austin J. App: The World of Immoral Equivalencies
1. Arnold Forster, “The Ultimate Cruelty,” ADL Bulletin (June 1959), pp. 7–8.
2. New Yorker Staats-Zeitung und Herold, September 7, 1948; Leonard Dinnerstein, America and the Survivors of the Holocaust (New York, 1982), p. 222.
3. Thomas R. O’Donnell to Deborah E. Lipstadt, April 18, 1991; Thomas R. O’Donnell, telephone interview with author, Oct. 1992.
4. Austin App, “Foreword,” Morgenthau Era Letters, 2nd printing (Tacoma Park, Md., 1975).
5. App, A Straight Look, p. 40.
6. App, Morgenthau Era Letters, pp. 13–14.
7. Ibid., p. 21.
8. Ibid., p. 33.
9. S. F. Berton, “Das Attentat auf Reinhard Heydrich vom 27 Mai 1942: Ein Bericht des Kriminalrats Heinz Pannwitz,” Vierteljahrshefte fur Zeitgeschichte (July 1985), pp. 668–706. See also J. Bradley, Lidice: Sacrificial Village (New York, 1972); T. Wittlin, Time Stopped at 6:30 (Indianapolis, 1965); and “Lidice,” Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
10. App, Morgenthau Era Letters, p. 49.
11. Ibid., p. 51.
12. Ibid., p. 59.
13. Ibid., p. 66.
14. At the end of 1946 the official American total of Jewish survivors in the western zones of Germany, Austria, and Italy was 207,788. The Joint Distribution Committee, which assisted the survivors, estimated that there were 231,500. Many of these were refugees who had spent the war years in Central Asia. Dinnerstein, America and the Survivors, p. 278. See also Malcolm Proudfoot, European Refugees: 1939–1952 (Evanston, Ill, 1956), pp. 339, 341.
15. App, Morgenthau Era Letters, pp. 66–67. Judge Simon H. Rifkind was the army’s adviser on Jewish affairs in Germany in 1945–46.
16. “Repatriation of Displaced Persons, March 1946” (U.S. Zone), Monthly Report of Military Governor, U.S. Zone, April 20, 1946, cited in Dinnerstein, America and the Survivors, p. 275.
17. Austin App, The Six Million Swindle: Blackmailing the German People for Hard Marks with Fabricated Corpses (Tacoma Park, Md., 1973), p. 8.
18. App, Morgenthau Era Letters, p. 79.
19. Peter Kleist, Auch Du Warst Dabei! (You too were involved!), (Heidelberg, 1952), cited in Aronsfeld, The Text of the Holocaust, p. 53.
20. App, The Six Million Swindle, pp. 7–8.
21. App, Morgenthau Era Letters, p. 101 (italics added). He reiterated this argument in The Six Million Swindle, pp. 7–8.
22. App, The Six Million Swindle, p. 8.
23. Richard L. Rubenstein, The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future (New York, 1975), p. 22.
24. Max Weber, “Bureaucracy,” in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber, pp. 215–16. See also Talcott Parsons, “Introduction to Max Weber,” The Sociology of Religion (Boston, 1963) cited in Rubenstein, The Cunning of History, pp. 22–23.
25. App, Morgenthau Era Letters, p. 95.
26. App, The Six Million Swindle, p. 4.
27. App, “The Elusive ‘Six Million,’ ” American Mercury, Summer 1966, reprinted in The Myth of the Six Million (Torrance, Calif., 1978), p. 112.
28. App, The Six Million Swindle, p. 2.
29. “Reparations and Restitution,” Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, pp. 1255–59.
30. App, The Six Million Swindle, p. 29.
31. App, A Straight Look, p. 18 (italics added).
32. Ibid., pp. 5, 19, 39.
33. Robert Wistrich, Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred (New York, 1991), p. 53.
34. App, A Straight Look, pp. 19–20.
35. Henry Morgenthau, Germany Is Our Problem (New York, 1945).
36. App, A Straight Look, pp. 28–29.
37. Ibid., p. 30.
38. Ibid., p. 48.
39. Ibid.
; 40.. App, The Six Million Swindle, pp. 18–19.
41. Ibid., pp. 23–24.
42. Yisrael Gutman makes a similar argument in response to Arthur Butz’s claim that Yad Vashem’s inability to gather six million names is proof that such a number is a hoax. Yisrael Gutman, Denying the Holocaust (Jerusalem, 1985), p. 20.
43. Jerusalem Post, Aug. 17, 1986; IHR Newsletter (Oct.-Nov. 1987), p. 4.
44. Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, p. 631.
45. App, The Six Million Swindle, p. 9.
46. Ibid., p. 16.
Chapter 6. Denial: A Tool of the Radical Right
1. Sunday Times, Feb. 23, 1975; it was also published under the title Six Million Lost and Found.
2. New Statesman, Nov. 2, 1979, p. 670.
3. Sunday Times, Feb. 23, 1975.
4. Books and bookmen (May 1975), p. 5. For background on the ideology of the National Front see Richard C. Thurlow, “The Witches’ Brew,” in Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 5–6 (1978), pp. 1–9.
5. Seidel, The Holocaust Denial, p. 113.
6. New Statesman, Nov. 2, 1979, p. 670.
7. Holmes, “Historical Revisionism in Britain,” p. 6.
8. Daily Express, June 17, 1974.
9. C. H. Simonds, “The Strange Story of Willis Carto,” National Review, Sept. 10, 1971, p. 981.
10. After a number of years of continued litigation he withdrew his complaint; Davidowicz, “Lies About the Holocaust,” p. 33.
11. The Myth of the Six Million, pp. 1–3.
12. Holmes, “Historical Revisionism in Britain,” p. 6.
13. Richard Harwood, Did Six Million Really Die? The Truth at Last (London, n.d.), p. 28.
14. Ibid., p. 2.
15. Ibid., pp. 2, 3.
16. Martin Webster, “Why Zionism Opposes British Nationalism,” Spearhead (February 1977), p. 12.
17. Ibid., p. 3.
18. Ibid.
19. The Myth of the Six Million, pp. 2–3 (italics added).
20. For background on the Madagascar Plan see Leni Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry (New York, 1990), pp. 253–55; Philip Friedman, “The Lublin Reservation and the Madagascar Plan: Two Aspects of Nazi Jewish Policy during the Second World War,” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Studies (1953), pp. 151–77; Christopher R. Browning, The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office: A Study of Referat D3 of Abteilung Deutschland, 1940–1943 (New York, 1978).