The attempt to deny the Holocaust enlists a basic strategy of distortion. Truth is mixed with absolute lies, confusing readers who are unfamiliar with the tactics of the deniers. Half-truths and story segments, which conveniently avoid critical information, leave the listener with a distorted impression of what really happened. The abundance of documents and testimonies that confirm the Holocaust are dismissed as contrived, coerced, or forgeries and falsehoods.{3} This book is an effort to illuminate and demonstrate how the deniers use this methodology to shroud their true objectives.
My previous book on the Holocaust dealt with the American press’s coverage—or lack thereof—of the persecution of the Jews from 1933 to 1945. Much of the story that I told justly deserved the title Beyond Belief. For most editors and reporters this story was literally beyond belief, and the press either missed or dismissed this news story, burying specific news of gas chambers, death camps, and mass killings in tiny articles deep inside the papers.
When I turned to the topic of Holocaust denial, I knew that I was dealing with extremist antisemites who have increasingly managed, under the guise of scholarship, to camouflage their hateful ideology. However, I did not then fully grasp the degree to which I would be dealing with a phenomenon far more unbelievable than was my previous topic. On some level it is as unbelievable as the Holocaust itself and, though no one is being killed as a result of the deniers’ lies, it constitutes abuse of the survivors. It is intimately connected to a neofascist political agenda. Denial of the Holocaust is not the only thing I find beyond belief. What has also shocked me is the success deniers have in convincing good-hearted people that Holocaust denial is an “other side” of history—ugly, reprehensible, and extremist—but an other side nonetheless. As time passes and fewer people can personally challenge these assertions, their campaign will only grow in intensity.
The impact of Holocaust denial on high school and college students cannot be precisely assessed. At the moment it is probably quite limited. Revisionist incidents have occurred on a number of college campuses, including at a midwestern university when a history instructor used a class on the Napoleonic Wars to argue that the Holocaust was a propaganda hoax designed to vilify the Germans, that the “worst thing about Hitler is that without him there would not be an Israel,” and that the whole Holocaust story was a ploy to allow Jews to accumulate vast amounts of wealth. The instructor defended himself by arguing that he was just trying to present “two sides” of the issue because the students’ books only presented the “orthodox view.”{4} When the school dismissed him for teaching material that was neither relevant to the course nor of any “scholarly substance,” some students complained that he had been unfairly treated.{5} During my visit to that campus in the aftermath of the incident, a number of his students argued that the instructor had brought articles to class that “proved his point.” Others asserted, “He let us think.”{6} Few of the students seemed to have been genuinely convinced by him, but even among those who were not, there was a feeling that somehow firing him violated the basic American ideal of fairness—that is, everyone has a right to speak his or her piece. These students seemed not to grasp that a teacher has a responsibility to maintain some fidelity to the notion of truth.
High school teachers have complained to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council that when they teach the Holocaust in their classes, they increasingly find students who have heard about Holocaust denial and assume it must have some legitimacy. I have encountered high school and college students who feel that the deniers’ view should at least be mentioned as a “controversial” but somewhat valid view of the Holocaust. Colleagues have related that their students’ questions are increasingly informed by Holocaust deniaclass="underline" “How do we know that there really were gas chambers?” “What proof do we have that the survivors are telling the truth?” “Are we going to hear the German side?” This unconscious incorporation of the deniers’ argument into the students’ thinking is particularly troublesome. It is an indication of the deniers’ success in shaping the way coming generations will approach study of the Holocaust.
One of the tactics deniers use to achieve their ends is to camouflage their goals. In an attempt to hide the fact that they are fascists and antisemites with a specific ideological and political agenda—they state that their objective is to uncover historical falsehoods, all historical falsehoods. Thus they have been able to sow confusion among even the products of the highest echelons of the American educational establishment. A history major at Yale University submitted his senior essay on the Luftwaffe in the Spanish Civil War to the Journal of Historical Review, the leading Holocaust denial journal, which in format and tone mimics serious, legitimate social science journals. The student acknowledged that he had not closely examined the Journal before submitting his essay. He selected it from an annotated bibliography where it was listed along with respected historical and social science journals. Based on its description, title, and, most significantly, its proximity to familiar journals, he assumed it was a legitimate enterprise dedicated to the reevaluation of historical events.
Deniers have found a ready acceptance among increasingly radical elements, including neo-Nazis and skinheads, in both North America and Europe. Holocaust denial has become part of a mélange of extremist, racist, and nativist sentiments. Neo-Nazis who once argued that the Holocaust, however horrible, was justified now contend that it was a hoax. As long as extremists espouse Holocaust denial, the danger is a limited one. But that danger increases when the proponents of these views clean up their act and gain entry into legitimate circles. Though they may look and act like “your uncle from Peoria,” they do so without having abandoned any of their radical ideas.{7} David Duke’s political achievements are evidence of this. The neo-Nazi Duke, a former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and a Holocaust denier, was elected to the Louisiana state legislature in the late 1980s. Two years later he won 40 percent of the vote in the race for the U.S. Senate. In his November 1991 race for governor, he received close to seven hundred thousand votes. He subsequently entered the 1992 presidential campaign. Despite the fact that his efforts were soon eclipsed, he managed to attract a significant number of followers. Duke, who celebrated Adolf Hitler’s birthday until late in the 1980s, has been quite candid about his views on the Holocaust.{8} In a letter accompanying the Crusader, the publication of the National Association for the Advancement of White People (NAAWP)—an organization Duke created—he not only described the Holocaust as a “historical hoax” but wrote that the “greatest” Holocaust was “perpetrated on Christians by Jews.”{9} Jews fostered the myth of the Holocaust, he claimed, because it generates “tremendous financial aid” for Israel and renders organized Jewry “almost immune from criticism.”{10} In 1986 Duke declared that Jews “deserve to go into the ashbin of history” and denied that the gas chambers were erected to murder Jews but rather were intended to kill the vermin infesting them.{11} Under Duke the NAAWP advocated the segregation of all racial minorities in different sections of the United States. (Jews were to be confined to “West Israel,” which would be composed of Manhattan and Long Island.)