Author: Kate Taylor | Date: February 2000

Whitewashing the past

The Holocaust stands as the most significant event in living memory. But very soon, there will be few who can give testimony to the atrocities that were carried out in the name of Nazism. As memories fade, the task of those who wish to hijack history is made much easier. Alongside the resurgence of neo-nazism in Europe is a growing number who claim that the Holocaust did not happen. Holocaust denial takes many forms but its roots can be found in the age-old myth of an international Jewish conspiracy. For far-right groups that hold antisemitism at the core of their world view, Holocaust denial is a crucial tool.

As we enter the new century, we leave behind us the events that marked the last. With the passing of time, collective memories of the Holocaust are increasingly weakened. But a political swing to the right and the growth of far-right groups in much of Europe have left us facing a new threat. For there is no tool more powerful to those who wish alter the past than fading memories.

Holocaust denial is not new. But for the latest wave of neo-nazi groups that are rearing their ugly head, it has become a necessary political weapon. The far right in both Britain and mainland Europe has attempted to throw a cloak of respectability around its shoulders. But the neo-nazi label has always brought with it images of the horror and barbarity that was carried out in its name. The biggest obstacle in the way of political credibility for these groups is the imagery of the Holocaust. With the recent electoral success of Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party in Austria, the far right appears to be seeking a modernised, clean image. In order to distance themselves from the nazi label, or to revive neo-nazism while removing its most unsavoury aspect, many groups are finding it necessary not to explain the Holocaust, but to explain it away.

As the late Ulster born David McCalden, founder of the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), an American pseudo academic organisation the primary aim of which is to deny the Holocaust, said: “If we can take the Holocaust propaganda and put it away, then there will be an open, frank, and free discussion on ethnic matters … If we can show that it didn’t happen as they said it did, the Israelis won’t have an excuse for depriving the Palestinians of their civil rights.”

There is a distinction made between Holocaust deniers, who refute the Holocaust outright, and Holocaust revisionists, who question certain aspects of it. But what Deborah Lipstadt illustrates so clearly in her book, Denying The Holocaust, is that most revisionism in relation to the Holocaust is tantamount to denial. To revise, for instance, the accepted view that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz, or to claim that the numbers that died were a vast exaggeration, is no less reprehensible than denial itself.

Holocaust denial does not take a single form. There are those who claim the Holocaust did not happen because there was no single, systematic “master plan” for the extermination of the Jews. David Irving has tried to show in his book, Hitler’s War, that Adolf Hitler had little knowledge of the Final Solution, and thus the Holocaust was in no way systematic.

A common theme in denial literature is refutation that gas chambers were used as a means of mass extermination. The most notorious proponent of this thesis is Fred Leuchter. Leuchter is a self-styled “scientific” expert on the gas chambers who concluded after carrying out “tests”, that they could not possibly have been used for killing millions of Jews. Despite the fact that Leuchter has no professional qualifications, Irving has claimed he was converted to the view that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz after meeting Leuchter in 1988.

There are also those who try to minimise the number of deaths that resulted from the Holocaust and relativise it, to pernicious effect. Attempting to downplay the systematic nature of the Holocaust, the propenents of this view argue that all wars produce casualties and, compared for instance to Stalinism or “Jewish bolshevism”, the Holocaust was in no way unique.

Those who attempted to deny the obvious and unambiguous started to appear as soon as the war had ended. One of the most important early revisionists was Paul Rassinier, a French historian. In his book entitled The Drama of the European Jews, he attempted to minimise the numbers killed, and his writings were infused with a deep antisemitism.

But it was not until the early 1970s that revisionism as a political tool really took off. Perhaps the most notable example can be found in the work of Richard Verrall, a leading member of the National Front and author of the booklet Did Six Million Really Die? This was the beginning of a proliferation of material attempting to challenge the Holocaust as an historical fact.

The British National Party, now headed by Nick Griffin, has always been held together by antisemitism. This is nowhere illustrated more clearly than in Griffin’s own booklet, Who are the Mindbenders?, in which he subscribes to the view of a Jewish conspiracy. But Griffin has also attempted to deny the Holocaust, in an attempt to distance his party’s ideology from images of mass extermination. In one issue of his publication, The Rune, Griffin launches a vicious attack on Irving for playing the “numbers game”. Using the sickening description the “Holohoax”, he writes: “I am well aware that the orthodox opinion is that six million Jews were gassed and cremated … Orthodox opinion also once held that the earth is flat… I have reached the conclusion that the ‘extermination’ tale is a mixture of Allied wartime propaganda, extremely profitable lie, and latter witch hysteria.”

Griffin sees the Holocaust as a lie propagated by Jews to make money: “As your Hollywood friend is fond of remarking, ‘there’s no business like Shoah business’.”

For these antisemitic rants, Griffin received a two year suspended jail sentence for inciting racial hatred.

Fascists have endlessly talked about “The Jewish Problem”. The myth of a Jewish conspiracy goes back centuries. The idea really took hold in the twentieth century was through the mass distribution of the notorious forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the 1920s and 1930s. Printed by the antisemitic tsarist regime in Russia, the book purports to be the minutes of a meeting of leading Jews across the world in which they plan global domination. The book was widely distributed in the Nazi era. The historian Norman Cohn labelled it a “warrant for genocide”.

The theme that the Jews are in some way to blame for their own predicament has fed much Holocaust denial literature. Robert Faurisson, a former professor of literature, is the main propagator of Holocaust denial in France. He continues this idea of a Jewish conspiracy to account for the “myth” of the Holocaust: “The alleged Hitlerian gas chambers and the alleged genocide of the Jews form one and the same historical lie, which permitted a gigantic financial swindle whose chief beneficiaries have been the state of Israel and international Zionism, and whose main victims have been the German people and the Palestinian people as a whole.” Through this theme antisemitism and anti-Zionism converge.

But this argument also contains the seeds of its own destruction. For at the heart of most denial literature is an inescapable paradox. On one level, deniers appear to justify the Holocaust by referring to the behaviour of Jews themselves. Yet at the same time they claim it never happened. They offer an excuse for antisemitism and genocide, while not conceding that it was a reality. Holocaust denial is part of the long line of historical literature that props up the myth of a Jewish conspiracy. Rich or poor, communist or capitalist, religious or non-religious, the Jews have been vilified. Holocaust denial leaves intact the stereotype of the deceitful, dishonest, powerful Jew. And no doubt this is why it is so important to the antisemitic far right.

As Griffin wrote in Spearhead: “Some ‘anti-Semitism’ may be provoked by the actions of certain Jews themselves, and thereby have a rational basis”. Yet he too fails to recognise the Holocaust as a reality. The headline on a leaflet distributed by the BNP, entitled Holocaust News, screams: “‘Holocaust’ Story an Evil Hoax”. Jean Marie Le Pen, leader of the Front National in France, has also espoused Holocaust denial concepts, particularly the work of Faurisson.

Academic trends may lend legitimacy to the arguments used by Holocaust deniers. As the assault on history, reason and rationality began to permeate academia under the name of postmodernism, it became reasonable to question anything. When, in 1991, the French postmodernist Jean Baudrillard wrote an essay entitled “The Gulf War did not happen”, using arguments very similar to those propagated by Holocaust deniers, the floodgates opened for similar works questioning the unquestionable. The challenge to rationality and grand narratives heralded a new kind of irrationality whereby anything is possible, even the impossible.

More and more, Holocaust denial is becoming academic. When those claiming to be serious academics, such as Irving, attempt to give mainstream legitimacy to such destructive ideologies, we cannot ignore the threat. The more academic the denial is in appearance, the more dangerous the rhetoric becomes. This assault on history is evident in a speech Irving made in Portland, Oregon: “It [the Holocaust] is something like a religion … The intellectual adventure is that we are reversing this entire trend within the space of one generation that in a few years time, no one will believe that particular legend anymore.”

Of course there will always be those, such as the neo-nazi White Aryan Resistance in America, who proclaim: “The truth is if ONLY one Jew was gassed, then that indeed would be the great tragedy”. But for those on the far right who seek political success through the electoral system, questioning the past is the greatest tactic for revival in the future.

The importance of the Holocaust is the lesson it holds for the whole of humanity. But if we allow deniers to weaken memory, then similarly, they will also weaken history. When the far right use the ideas of Holocaust denial, they are not trying to rewrite history, they are trying to annihilate it.

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