Deborah Lipstadt: Denying the Holocaust

Holocaust denial, which has well-established roots in Western and Central Europe, has in recent years manifested itself throughout the world. The following brief survey demonstrates the breadth of the deniers’ activities, many of which shall be explored in greater depth in the chapters that follow.

In 1992 a Belgian publisher of neo-Nazi material distributed thousands of pamphlets purporting to offer scientific proof that the gas chambers were a hoax. In 1988 in Britain over thirty thousand copies of Holocaust News, a newsletter which maintains that the Holocaust was a myth, were sent to Jewish communities in London, Glasgow, Newcastle, Birmingham, Cardiff, Norwich, and Leicester as well as to lawyers, schools, and members of Parliament throughout the country. (According to the Sunday Times, Holocaust News is published by the overtly racist British National party—which is composed of those who find the extremist National Front too mild. It campaigns for the repatriation of Jews and non-whites.) {21} 21 Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Nov. 6, 1992; The Times, Mar. 6, 1988.

In recent years Holocaust denial in England has undergone a disturbing new development. David Irving, the writer of popular historical works attempting to show that Britain made a tactical error in going to war against Germany and that the Allies and the Nazis were equally at fault for the war and its atrocities, has joined the ranks of the deniers, arguing that the gas chambers were a “propaganda exercise.” {22} 22 Daily Telegraph, July 10, 1992. Irving, long considered a guru by the far right, does not limit his activities to England. He has been particularly active in Germany, where he has regularly participated in the annual meetings of the extremist German political party Deutsche Volks Union. {23} 23 Sunday Telegraph, Jan. 12, 1992. In addition, he has frequently appeared at extremist-sponsored rallies, meetings, and beer hall gatherings. Irving’s self-described mission in Germany is to point “promising young men” throughout the country in the “right direction.” (Irving believes women were built for a “certain task, which is producing us [men],” and that they should be “subservient to men.” {24} 24 Daily Telegraph, July 10, 1992. Apparently, therefore, he has no interest in pointing young women in the right direction. [3] His solution to unemployment would be to declare the employment of a female a “criminal offense.” ) Ironically, young Germans who are dedicated German nationalists find Irving and other non-German deniers particularly credible because they are not themselves Germans. {25} 25 Independent on Sunday, May 10, 1992.

In France, Holocaust denial activities have centered around Robert Faurisson, a former professor of literature at the University of Lyons-2 whose work is often reprinted verbatim, both with and without attribution, by deniers worldwide. According to Faurisson the “so-called gassings” of Jews were a “gigantic politico-financial swindle whose beneficiaries are the state of Israel and international Zionism.” Its chief victims were the German people and the Palestinians. {26} 26 Frederick Brown, “French Amnesia,” Harpers, Dec. 1981, p. 70. Faurisson’s area of specialization is the rather unique field of the “criticism of texts and documents, investigation of meaning and counter-meaning, of the true and the false.” {27} 27 Nadine Fresco, “The Denial of the Dead: On the Faurisson Affair,” Dissent, Fall 1981, p. 467. There is a definite irony in his choice of field because Faurisson, whose methodologies have been adopted by virtually all other deniers, regularly creates facts where none exist and dismisses as false any information inconsistent with his preconceived conclusions. He asserts, for example, that the German army was given “Draconian orders” not to participate in “excesses” against civilians including the Jews; consequently, the massive killings of Jews could not have happened. In making this argument Faurisson simply ignores the activities of the Einsatzgruppen, the units responsible for killing vast numbers of Jews. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, one of Faurisson’s prime adversaries in France and someone who has studied him closely, observed that Faurisson is particularly adept at finding “an answer for everything” when encountering information that contradicts his claims. Faurisson interprets the Nazi decree which mandated that Jews wear a yellow star on pain of death as a measure to ensure the safety of German soldiers, because Jews, he argues, engaged in espionage, terrorism, black market operations, and arms trafficking. German soldiers needed a means to protect themselves against this formidable enemy. He even had an explanation as to why Jewish children were required to start wearing the star at age six: They too were engaged in “all sorts of illicit or resistance activities against the Germans” against which the soldiers had to be protected. Documents containing information that Faurisson cannot explain away or reinterpret, he falsifies. Regarding the brutal German destruction of the Warsaw ghetto, Faurisson wrote that in April 1943, “suddenly, right behind the front,” the Jews started an insurrection. The ghetto revolt, for which the Jews built seven hundred bunkers, was proof of the quite serious threat the Jews posed to German military security. Although it is true that the Jews started an insurrection, it was not right behind the front but hundreds of miles from it. Faurisson’s source for the information regarding the insurrection and the bunkers was a speech delivered in Posen in October 1943 by the Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler. But even Himmler was more honest than Faurisson: He described the uprisings as taking place in Warsaw and in “territories in the rear.” {28} 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.

Faurisson has not worked alone in France. In June 1985 the University of Nantes awarded a doctoral degree to a Faurisson protégé, Henri Roques, for a dissertation accusing Kurt Gerstein, one of those who transmitted the news of the gas chambers to the Allies, of being a “master magician” who created an illusion that the world accepted as fact. {29} 29 Vidal-Naquet, Assassins of Memory, p. 115. Implicitly denying the existence of the gas chambers, Roques tried to prove that Gerstein’s reports were so laden with inconsistencies that he could not possibly have witnessed gassings at Belzec, as he maintained. There exist a variety of official documents and testimonies attesting to Gerstein’s presence at these gassings. Roques, adhering to his mentor’s pattern of ignoring any document that contradicts his preexisting conclusions, simply excluded this material from his dissertation. {30} 30 Ibid. (After a public uproar Roques’ doctoral degree was revoked by the French minister of higher education in 1986. {31} 31 Guardian, July 3, 1986; Le Monde, July 4, 1986. )

Though Faurisson and most of his admirers are on the political right, they and their activities have been abetted by an extreme left-wing revolutionary group, La Vieille Taupe (The Old Mole). {32} 32 New Statesman, Apr. 10, 1981, p. 4. Originally a bookstore, it has become a publishing house that shelters an informal coterie of revolutionary types. Under the direction of its proprietor, Pierre Guillaume, it has distributed periodicals, cassettes, comic books, journals, and broadsheets all attesting to the Holocaust hoax. Guillaume is France’s leading publisher of neo-Nazi material. Twenty-four hours after the Klaus Barbie trial began in France, the first issue of Annals of Historical Revisionism, a journal edited by Guillaume and containing articles by Faurisson, was distributed for sale to Paris bookstores and kiosks. {33} 33 Annales d’Histoire Revisionniste, vol. 1, Spring 1987; Judith Miller, One by One by One: Facing the Holocaust (New York, 1990), p. 134.