A Brief History
by Ben S. Austin
This essay will attempt to provide a brief historical
review of Holocaust denial.
For an in-depth treatment of this question, the reader is referred to
two major works on the subject: Lucy S. Dawidowicz,Historians and
the Holocaust and Deborah Lipstadt, Denying
the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. The
material in the present essay draws heavily from these two excellent
works. Here I am concerned with the historical background and origins
of the movement. Primary attention will be given to Paul Rassinier,
Harry Elmer Barnes and Austin J. App.
The very first Holocaust
deniers were the Nazis themselves. As it became increasingly obvious
that the war was not going well, Himmler instructed
his camp commandants to destroy records,
crematoria and other sign of mass destruction
of human beings. He was especially adamant
with regard to those Jews still alive who
could testify regarding their experiences
in the camps.
In April, 1945, he signed an official order
(which still exists in his own handwriting)
that the camps would not be surrendered
and that no prisoner "fall into
the hands of the enemies alive." Apparently
Himmler knew that the "Final Solution" would be viewed as a
moral outrage by the rest of the world.
Historian Kenneth Stern (1993:6) suggests that many
top SS leaders left Germany
at the end of the war and began immediately the process of using their
propaganda skills to rewrite history. Shortly after the war, denial
materials began to appear. One of the first was Friedrich Meinecke's The German Catastrophe, (1950) in which he offered a brief
defense for the German people by blaming industrialists, bureaucrats
and the Pan-German League (an essentially antisemitic organization begun
by von Schoerner in Vienna prior to young Adolf
Hitler's arrival there) for the outbreak of World War I and Hitler's
rise to power. Meinecke was openly antisemitic;
nonetheless he was a respected historian.
There is a fairly clear historical development of
contemporary Holocaust denial. Surprisingly, its roots extend far beyond
the Holocaust itself and may be found
in the work of historical revisionists in Europe, principally France,
and in the United States who set out to absolve Germany of responsibility
for World War I.
Paul Rassinier, formerly a "political" prisoner at Buchenwald, was one of
the first European writers to come to the defense of the Nazi regime
with regard to their "extermination" policy. In 1945, Rassinier was
elected as a Socialist member of the French National Assembly, a position
which he held for less than two years before resigning for health reasons.
Shortly after the war he began reading reports of extermination in Nazi
death camps by means of gas
chambers and crematoria. His response was, essentially, "I was there
and there were no gas chambers." It should be remembered that he was
confined to Buchenwald, the first major concentration camp created by
the Hitler regime (1937) and that it was located in Germany. Buchenwald
was not primarily a "death camp" and there were no gas chambers there.
He was arrested and incarcerated in 1943. By that time the focus of
the "Final Solution" had long since shifted to the Generalgouvernement of Poland. Rassinier used his own experience as a basis for denying
the existence of gas chambers and mass extermination at other camps.
Given his experience and his antisemitism, he embarked upon a writing
career which, over the next 30 years, would place him at the center
of Holocaust denial. In 1948 he published Le Passage de la Ligne,
Crossing the Line, and, in 1950, The Holocaust Story and the Lie
of Ulysses. In these early works he attempted to make two main
arguments: first, while some atrocities were committed by the Germans,
they have been greatly exaggerated and, second, that the Germans were
not the perpetrators of these atrocities -- the inmates who ran the
camps instigated them. In 1964 he published The Drama of European
Jewry, a work committed to debunking what he called "the genocide
myth." The major focus of this book was the denial of the gas chambers
in the concentration camps, the denial of the widely accepted figure
of 6 million Jews exterminated and the discounting of the testimony
of the perpetrators following the war. These three have emerged in recent
years as central tenets of Holocaust denial. While none of these arguments
were new, Rassinier did introduce a new twist to Holocaust denial. Having
argued that the genocidal extermination of 6 million Jews is a myth,
he asks: Who perpetrated the myth, and for what purpose. His answer:
the Zionists as part of a massive Jewish/Soviet/Allied
conspiricay to "swindle" Germany out of billions of dollars in reparations.
This is a theme which would later be taken up by Austin J. App and by
the current crop of Holocaust deniers.
In 1977, the above works by Rassinier were re-published
by the Noontide Press under the title, Debunking the Genocide
Myth. The Noontide Press is the primary outlet for the Institute
of Historical Review. Toward the end of his life he wrote two additional
pieces, one on the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem (held in 1961) and one
on the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt. Both of these were translated by
American historian, and admirer of Rassinier, Harry Elmer Barnes. These
materials have been published by Steppingstones Publishing and are regularly
advertised for sale by the Institute For Historical Review. Thus, the
work of Rassinier takes its place in contemporary denial literature.
The claims of Rassinier can be easily refuted and
have received full treatment by Deborah Lipstadt and other reputable
historians. Briefly, however, Rassinier offers little evidence for most
of his claims, he totally disregards any documentary evidence that would
contradict his claims and attempts to explain away the testimony of
survivors as"emotional" exaggeration and the testimony of accused war
criminals as the result of "coercion." For instance, he completely ignores
Hitler's stated agenda in Mein Kampf (1923) and his famous
and oft-quoted speech of 1939 before the German Reichstag:
Today I want to be a prophet once more: If international
finance Jewry inside and outside of Europe should succeed once more
in plunging nations into another world war, the consequence will not
be the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry,
but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.
Similarly, he disregards the speeches of Himmler,
such as the address given to the leaders of the SS in 1943:
I also want to talk with you, quite frankly, on a very grave
matter. Among yourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly, and
yet we will never speak of it publicly....I mean the clearing out
of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish race. (Quoted in Jackson
Speilvogel, Hitler and Nazi Germany, 3rd ed., 1996:282).
Similarly, he disregards the Wansee
Protocol which stands as clear evidence of an official Nazi policy
of extermination.
As Lipstadt observes, the primary link between these
early revisionists and modern deniers was the U.S. historian, Harry
Elmer Barnes,the first American historian to take up the theme of Holocaust
denial. During World War I he was an outspoken, even vitriolic, supporter
of the Allied effort. After the war, however, he became highly pro-German
and seemed intent on defending the German people against any responsibility
for the war. While he blamed France and Russia for starting the war,
he stopped short, in his early work, of blaming the Jews, as Kaiser
Wilhelm had done. Barnes early work was fairly respectable historical
analysis despite the fact that his agenda was a clear denunciation of
U.S. foreign policy during World War I. These themes appear strongly
in his, The Genesis of the Great War, 1926, In Quest
of Truth and Justice, 1928 and World Politics in Modern
Civilization, 1930. His two-volume The History of Western
Civilization was widely adopted at prestigious schools throughout
the United States. It was not until the late 1950s that his analysis
extended to the issue of atrocities against Jews. This shift in his
agenda coincides with his discovery of French popular historian, Paul
Rassinier, and the American revisionist, David Leslie Hoggan.
Hoggan's dissertation at Harvard was a revisionist
work in which he blamed Britain for World War II and presented Hitler
as a victim of Allied manipulation. Throughout the work, Hitler is presented
as conciliatory, reasonable and sincere in his attempts to avoid war.
Barnes encouraged Hoggan to have the work published. After extensive
re-writing, it was published, in Germany in 1961, under the title, The
Forced War. The title reveals the thrust of the book -- World
War II was forced upon Hitler. An important concern of the book was
to downplay Nazi atrocities against Jews.
As historian, Deborah Lipstadt, observes:
Hoggan's book, on which Barnes heaped accolades, is full
of such misrepresentations in relation to British and Polish foreign
policy and concerning Germany's treatment of the Jews. His dissertation
contains few such observations. Barnes read the dissertation before
it was turned into a book and was in contact with Hoggan for a full
six years before the book was published. Barnes helped get it published
and provided a blurb for its jacket, obviously playing a significant
role in turning this "solid conscientious piece of work" into a Nazi
apoligia. (Denying the Holocaust,1993:73)
It was Barnes' discovery of Rassinier that seems to
have been the pivotal point in his thinking. He began by arguing that
the atrocity stories were exaggerated and slowly worked his way to the
conclusion that they were fabrications. Stopping short of denying the
Holocaust, Barnes attempted to connect the "exaggerated" atrocities
with German reparations to Israel. Following the earlier lead of Rassinier,
Barnes attempted to leave the impression that the size of the reparations
were determined by the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust when actually
the size of the reparations wad determined by the estimated cost of
resettling Jews from Germany and occupied territories to Israel.
Finally, Barnes attempted to raise doubts about the
Holocaust in general by raising doubts regarding the existence of gas
chambers as a means of extermination....The existence and implementation
of gas chambers for extermination purposes is a matter of special concern
to deniers since they symbolize more dramatically than anything else
the rational, systematic and impersonal nature of the killing machine.
Every Holocaust denier feels compelled to make this issue central the
argument. Barnes' contention was that the gas chambers were post-war
inventions Surely Barnes was aware of the extensive testimony provided
to the British as early as 1944 by Auschwitz escapee, Rudolph Vrba (see
Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz
And The Allies, 1981:190-198).
App's major contribution to Holocaust denial lies
in his codification of denial into eight fundamental tenets (The following
are adapted from Deborah Lipstadt, 1994:99-100):
- Emigration, not extermination was the Nazi plan for dealing with
Germany's "Jewish problem." His main evidence for this assertion
is that if Germany had planned total extermination, no Jews would
have survived.
- No Jews were gassed in any German camps and probably not at Auschwitz
either. He argued that the crematoria were designed to cremate those
who died from other causes -- natural illness, etc.
- Jews who disappeared during the years of WWII and have not been
accounted for did so in territories under Soviet, rather than German,
control.
- The majority of Jews who were killed by the Nazis were people
whom the Nazis had every right to "execute" as subversives, spies,
and criminals.
- If the Holocaust claims have any truth, Israel would have opened
its archives to historians. Instead, he claims, they have preferred
to continue perpetuating the Holocaust "hoax" by utilizing the charge
of "antisemitism" against anyone who questions it.
- All evidence to support the Holocaust "hoax" of 6 million dead
rests upon misquotes of Nazis and Nazi documents.
- Burden of proof argument. It is incumbent upon the accusers to
prove the 6 million figure. Instead, App argues, Germany has been
forced to prove that the 6 million is incorrect. This argument rests
upon App's (and others') assertion that reparations paid to Israel
by Germany are based on the 6 million figure. He consistently refers
to the reparations as a Zionist "swindle."
- Jewish historians and other scholars have great discrepancies
in their calculations of the number of victims. App takes this as
evidence that the claims are unverified.
The above assertions stand as the fundamental tenets
of contemporary Holocaust denial.
Holocaust denial is rooted in the isolationism and
historical revision of the WWI, post-War, WWII and Cold War periods.
By the mid to late 1960s, all the ingredients of contemporary Holocaust
denial were in place. Some of this background does, in fact, represent
legitimate historical revision. Other parts of it, however, depart from
the academic standards of historical analysis and move clearly in the
direction of politically and ideologically motivated historical denial.
One overarching characteristic of all deniers, the one characteristic
which binds them all together, is antisemitism. Regardless of the language
used to clothe their attacks upon memory and truth, it is the language
of hate and fear. Regardless of pretensions of scholarship and even
underlying traces of real scholarship, deniers ultimately come to rely
upon the least respectable of all strategies -- stereotyping. The works
of Rassinier, Barnes, Hoggan and App consistently fall back upon stereotypic
images of the Jewish people which have been perpetuated for centuries
and which show little sign of diminishing with the current crop of deniers.
Sources: The
Holocaust\Shoah Page |