Revisionism vs. Rejection

...It is inconceivable to the authors that a killing program so massive in scale and so sophisticated in its execution could have been undertaken without orders from the top...

...Till the early 1990s reputable scholars pursued a policy of steadfastly ignoring the deniers, on the assumption that any confrontation would grant them unwarranted attention...

...Based on the authors' conversations with these men, this chapter gives a sense of the internal battles within the denial camp and the disparate types of personalities attracted to it...

...Holocaust denial, a negligible force everywhere in the world before the 1970s, grew in tandem with Holocaust consciousness, though on a much smaller scale...

...Whether Jewish leaders and organizations deliberately encouraged this for their own purposes, as Peter Novick has recently argued in The Holocaust in American Life, and whether or not this is healthy for the future of American Judaism, Holocaust consciousness is a fact of the contemporary Jewish world...

...Since the 1960s—which saw the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, the lead-up to the Six-Day War that appeared to threaten the destruction of Israel, and the first evocative writings of Elie Wiesel —"Holocaust consciousness" has entered the fabric of American Jewish life...

...Indeed, the proliferation of memorials and museums over the last decade, including one partially funded by the U.S...

...In seeking to explain what motivates the deniers, Shermer and Grobman turn to social psychology...

...For all of the concern in Jewish circles about Holocaust denial, surveys sponsored by the American Jewish Committee over the last few years reveal that—whatever its influence on the Arab mind—it has virtually no popular support in the Western world: Just 1 per cent of Americans, Swiss, Swedes, and Poles think it "possible" that the Holocaust never happened, while among Russians and Slovaks the figure is 2 per cent, Czechs, 3 per cent, and Australians 4 per cent...

...They further observe that all the reports about gassing come from people outside the "chambers"—as they of course had to, since no one in a gas chamber when it was in operation came out alive...

...As for the phenomenon itself, the authors proceed on two levels...

...It is no accident that today the governmentcontrolled press in Arab countries is the most prolific source of Holocaust denial...

...with banks and insurance companies disgorging the assets of victims...

...They show that mass gassings were to be sure quite possible, and that the considerable testimony by guards and kapos is believable...

...A second, more controversial, example is the debate over whether the entire extermination program was planned in advance—perhaps in Hitler's mind as early as 1919—or whether a vague determination to "do something" about the Jews gradually developed into the organized murder of millions under the conditions and contingencies of a world war...

...The authors hardly discuss, though, the centurieslong anti-Jewish legacy of a Western culture that has seen Jews as the enemy of Christendom...

...This, too, Shermer and Grobman show, is a legitimate exercise of historical revisionism because its aim is the truth...

...One instance of such revisionism in connection with the Holocaust is the virtually universal recognition today that far fewer people were killed at Auschwitz than previously assumed, and conversely, that many more were shot to death by the German Einsatzgruppen on the Russian front...

...Irving had charged that in her book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, Lipstadt had damaged his scholarly reputation by describing him as "one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial" who was "most facile at taking accurate information and shaping it to conform to his conclusions...

...And although history is not an exact science, the responsible historian tries to get as close to pure objectivity as possible...

...and with President Clinton drumming up public support for bombing Yugoslavia by invoking the "lessons" of the Holocaust, the idea that Holocaust denial poses some kind of threat to Jews is downright outlandish...

...Even in Austria, the birthplace of Hitler, where Nazi sympathizer Jörg Haider's Freedom Party is now part of the government, the figure is only 7 per cent...

...Basic to the historiographical analysis done by the authors is the difference between revisionism and denial...

...Shermer and Grobman went to the death camp sites, inspected and photographed them, and consulted with engineers and other experts in their effort to counter the deniers...

...While the Irving-Lipstadt case received relatively little attention in the mainstream press, the weeks of the trial, as well as the preceding preparatory months, were a time of great anxiety for the organized American Jewish community...

...In preparing the book they spent time with the deniers, got to know them, and discussed the Holocaust with them...

...Arthur Butz' The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, a classic of the movement, was published in 1976, and the first issue of The Journal of Historical Review, still the best known purveyor of Holocaust denial, appeared in 1980...

...The mindset of the denier, then, resembles that of the creationist, who cites the controversies between different contemporary varieties of the theory of evolution as proof that evolution is false...

...it seemed to feel it was in the dock with Lipstadt...

...In Great Britain, unlike the United States, the defendant bears the legal burden of proof in libel cases rather than the accuser...

...They also barely mention the use of Holocaust denial as a weapon against the legitimacy of the State of Israel, a nation the deniers believe was foisted on the world out of guilt feelings for a Holocaust that never happened...

...Moreover, their book received funding from the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles and its Museum of the Holocaust, indicating that this shift in strategy toward Holocaust denial does not merely reflect the vagaries of the authors but represents the considered judgment of the West Coast Jewish establishment...

...The aim is not truth, but the maintenance of a preconceived notion...

...government on the National Mall in Washington, reinforced the findings of public-opinion surveys: Many American Jews considered the Holocaust a central component of their Jewish identification...

...Reviewed by Lawrence Grossman Editor, "American Jewish Year Book" THIS past April 11, a British court threw out a libel suit brought by David Irving, a prolific writer on World War II and Nazi Germany, against Deborah Lipstadt, an American historian of the Holocaust...

...Even after the publication of Lipstadt's book in 1993—which actually followed the English translation of Pierre Vidal-Naquet's Assassins of Memory a year earlier—no bona fide historian would engage in conversation, let alone debate, with a denier...

...Judge Charles Gray, satisfied by the testimony of Lipstadt's expert scholarly witnesses, declared that Irving had not simply made sloppy mistakes in his writings about Hitler's anti-Jewish policies, but was indeed an "active Holocaust denier" and therefore had not been libeled...

...To take our two examples, the denier points to the downward revision in the number of Auschwitz victims as a telling blow to the very notion that Auschwitz was a death camp, and to the debate between the "intentional" and "contingent" theories of how the Holocaust developed as evidence that it might very well be a myth...

...Is it too much to hope that the next time a major American Jewish federation funds a book, it will be about the impact—both positive and negative—of Holocaust consciousness on the American Jewish community...

...IN contrast, the authors demonstrate, the deniers seize on every discrepancy between what was said about the Holocaust immediately after the War and what is known now, and pounce on every difference of opinion among historians, to conclude that the Holocaust is a hoax...

...David Irving ridicules the notion that there was a concerted Nazi policy of annihilating the Jews, denies the existence of gas chambers, and calls for a drastic revision downward in the number of Jews who died during World War II (most of whom, he insists, succumbed from disease...

...Shermer and Grobman respond that the order was probably given orally...

...The enemy can come in any form," they observe, "but the extremists we are concerned about here have chosen the Jews...

...Shermer and Grobman devote a full chapter to descriptions of the key figures in the denial movement—including David Irving...

...In the empirical realm, for example, the deniers stress that no written order with Hitler's signature calling for the annihilation of European Jewry has ever been found...

...Thus the possibility that he might win his case threatened to shake the world's acknowledgment of the Holocaust's reality and posed a threat to the collective Jewish psyche...

...Revisionism, they note, is the normal process whereby newly discovered information and changed contemporary perspectives continually alter our image of the past...

...BUT Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine, and Alex Grobman, an academic in the field of Holocaust studies, have broken that taboo in Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It...

...with the Pope visiting the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem that commemorates the Holocaust...

...on the "macro" level, they discuss historical truth, how we know it, and what motivates some people to become deniers...

...Hitler had learned a lesson from the hostile public reaction to his earlier directives authorizing euthanasia for German "mental defectives," they reason, and sought to hide the killing of the Jews behind a bureaucratic maze and euphemistic language...

...One comes away from this lively, wellmeaning book with the nagging question of whether it was worth engaging the arguments of the deniers, not to mention the deniers themselves...

...With Western governments issuing apologies for what their countries did not do to save Jews from the Holocaust...

...They claim, therefore, that there is no proof any such policy existed...

...Another favorite charge of the deniers is that the so-called gas chambers are a hoax, because the way they were constructed made their use for mass gassings of people impossible...

...Her personal predicament aside, why Jews should have cared so much about claims that are roughly equivalent to denying the world is round calls for an explanation...

...In fact, in his Foreword Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg goes so far as to place the book in the age-old Jewish tradition of "providing the refutations to those who attack our historic memory...

...On the "micro" level, they respond to specific attacks that have been made over the years against the veracity of the accepted "facts" of the Holocaust...

...There are those, they say, who tend to think in conspiratorial terms, who need the nefarious plots of "enemies" as the explanation for whatever is bothering them...