THE HOLOCAUST STORY:
How Much is False?
The Case for Open Debate
(This text appeared in the Daily Northwestern on 4 April
1991 as a full-page paid advertisement. It created rather a
stir at Northwestern and alerted the Deborah Lipstadt's and
other intellectual fascists on campus to the fact that there
was someone in America who was going to challenge the suppression
of free inquiry into the Holocaust story. This is the text that
Lipstadt pretends to critique in her 1993 book, Denying the
Holocaust, in her chapter on the "Battle for the Campus."
For my first reaction to her comments, see the chapter "Isn't
There a Name for This?," in my work-in-progress, Break His
Bones, posted on this site.)
THE CONTEMPORARY ISSUE
No subject enrages America's thought police more than Holocaust
revisionism. The politically correct line on the Holocaust story
is, simply, it happened. You don't debate "it." You do debate
every other historical event of course, but the Holocaust is
an exception. If someone does express doubt about some aspect
of the Holocaust story, it's politically correct to respond
with outrage, contempt and guilt-by-association smear tactics.
We used to call that behavior McCarthyite. Now we say it's "progressive."
The Holocaust lobby claims that it is a social good when
ideology replaces free inquiry, intimidation represses open
debate, and when the ideals of the university itself are exchanged
for intellectual taboos and not-so-secret political agendas.
Let's ask these people -- what makes such behavior a social
good? Who benefits?
THE HISTORICAL ISSUE
For half a century it has been asserted that during World
War II the German State had a policy to "exterminate" the Jews
and other peoples of Europe in execution gas chambers. This
allegation was institutionalized at the great Nuremberg trial,
led by the Soviets and the U.S. While the proceedings at Nuremberg
were politically correct, the evidence supports the then Chief
Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Harlan Fiske Stone, who called
the Nuremberg court simply "a lynching party for Germans."
Mainline Holocaust historians are under considerable pressure
from Revisionist scholarship to address the more blatant examples
of Holocaust fraud and falsehood. Increasingly, academics are
committing themselves to publishing their own revisions of the
orthodox Holocaust story. The "rewriting" of the Holocaust story
has begun in earnest.
AUSCHWITZ
Arno J. Mayer, chaired professor of European history at Princeton
University, has written in his Why The Heavens Did Not Darken,
that at Auschwitz more people died of "natural causes" than
were killed. Mayer is a Jew and himself a refugee from the Nazi
regime.
British historian David Irving, perhaps the most widely read
historian writing in English, has called the Auschwitz death-camp
story a "sinking ship" and states that there were "no gas chambers
at Auschwitz."
Yehuda Bauer, Director of Holocaust Studies at Hebrew University
in Jerusalem, states that is "patently false" that 4 million
Jews and others were killed at Auschwitz.
The Auschwitz State Museum has "revised" its half-century-old
claim that 4-million humans were killed there. The Museum now
says maybe it was 1 million. What documentary evidence does
the Museum proffer for the 1 million figure? None. The 4 million
number was engraved in stone at Auschwitz where it has been
seen by millions of tourists. What to do? A workman was ordered
to chisel out the 4 million number. Nothing to it, really. History
in the making. But where have those 3 million souls been the
last 45 years? And why is no one celebrating?
The Leuchter Report contains the results of the first-ever
forensic examination of the alleged gas chambers at Auschwitz.
The Report is the work of Boston engineer Fred A. Leuchter.
It concludes that no mass gassings ever did or ever could have
taken place in the so-called gas chambers. The chemical analysis
used in the Report was performed by the Alpha Analytical
Laboratories in Ashland MA. Fred Leuchter has called for an
international commission of scientists and historians to investigate
the so-called gas chambers of Auschwitz.
Winston Churchill wrote his monumental six-volume history
of World War II without mentioning the "gas chambers." or the
"extermination" of the Jews. Maybe it slipped his mind. On the
other hand, maybe not.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his memoir Crusade in Europe,
also forgot to mention the "gas chambers." Why wasn't the weapon
used to murder 6 million Jews worthy of a passing reference?
Was our future president being "insensitive" to Jews?
"THE PHOTOGRAPHS"
We've all seen "The Photographs." Endlessly. Newsreel photos
taken by U.S. and British photographers at the liberation of
the German camps, and especially the awful scenes at Dachau,
Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen. We have seen them so many times
over four decades we don't even have to ask what "they" are.
They're "The Photographs." These documents are typically presented
in a way where it is either stated or implied that the scenes
resulted from deliberate policies on the part of the Germans.
The documents are real. The uses to which they are put are base.
There was no German policy at any of those camps to deliberately
kill the internees. In the last months of the war Soviet armies
were advancing on Germany from the east. The British and U.S.
air arms were destroying every major city in Germany with saturation
bombing. Transportation, the food distribution system and medical
and sanitation services all broke down. That was the purpose
of the Allied bombing, which has been described as the most
barbarous form of warfare in Europe since the Mongol invasions.
It was successful.
Millions of refugees fleeing the Soviet armies were pouring
into Germany. The camps still under German control were overwhelmed
with internees from the eastern camps. By early 1945 the inmate
population was swept by malnutrition and by epidemics of typhus,
typhoid, dysentery and chronic diarrhea. Even the mortuary systems
broke down. When the press entered the camps with British and
U.S. soldiers, they found the results of all that. They took
"The Photographs."
The Allied propaganda machine was laboring furiously to produce
anti-German hate propaganda. "The Photographs" became their
most successful tools. Today the same tools are still being
used to "educate" Americans.
Still, at Buchenwald, Dachau and Bergen-Belsen tens of
thousands of healthy internees were liberated. They were
there in the camps when "The Photographs" were taken. There
are newsreels of these internees walking through the camp streets
laughing and talking. Others show joyful, well-fed internees
throwing their caps in the air and cheering their liberators.
You haven't seen those films and photographs, you say? Why
do you think that is? Does it suggest to you questions about
the camps that are not politically correct to ask?
THE DACHAU "GAS CHAMBERS"
In the first years after the war there was much eyewitness
testimony about "mass gassings" at Dachau. In his summing up
for the prosecution at Nuremberg, Sir Hartley Shawcross, chief
prosecutor for Great Britain, spoke of murder "conducted like
some mass production industry in the gas chamber (s) of... Dachau..."
Today no responsible scholar attempts to claim that there
were mass gassings at Dachau. Rabbi Marvin Heir, dean of the
Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies, states simply:
"There were no gas chambers at Dachau."
THE JEWISH SOAP STORY
This ugly rumor has been repeated endlessly in our media
and universities. First Amendment scholar Nat Hentoff can write
seriously that he has seen human soap made from the "tissues
of murdered Jews" displayed on stone tablets in the Chamber
of the Holocaust in Jerusalem.
Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer and Jewish-American historians
like Raul Hilberg and Deborah Lipstadt all state that this anti-German
hate story is untrue. Lipstadt writes: "The Nazis never used
the bodies of Jews, or for that matter anyone else, for the
production of soap."
"EYEWITNESS" TESTIMONY
As documentary "proofs" for the mass-murder of the European
Jews fall by the wayside, Holocaust historians depend increasingly
on "eyewitness" testimonies to support their theories. Many
of these testimonies are ludicrously unreliable.
Shmuel Krakowski is archives director for Yad Vashem, which
is the international center for Holocaust documentation in Jerusalem.
Krakowski states that more than 10,000 "eyewitness" testimonies
about German atrocities against Jews have been shown to be false
at Yad Vashem alone!
"HUMAN SKIN" LAMP SHADES
Uncounted Hollywood epics and "eyewitness" testimonies accuse
Germans of skinning Jews to make lamp shades from their hides.
General Lucius D. Clay, Military Governor of the U.S. Occupation
Zone of Germany (1947-49) discovered that the infamous "human
skin" lamp shades found at Buchenwald were actually made of
"goat" skin. Which of your professors has denounced this cheap
anti-German bigotry for what it is?
THE FREE INQUIRY ISSUE
Students and professors alike should be free to investigate
the Holocaust story in the same way they are free to examine
every other historical event. This is not a radical point of
view. The premises for it were worked out three centuries ago
during a little something called the Enlightenment. The tools
used to arrive at historical understanding are useless without
the rights of Free Inquiry and Open Debate.
We are told that it is "anti-Jewish" to question orthodox
assertions about German criminality. Yet we find that it is
Jews themselves like Mayer, Bauer, Hier, Hilberg, Lipstadt and
others who [are] beginning to challenge the establishment Holocaust
story. The charges of anti-Semitism are oftentimes, in fact,
used merely to suppress Revisionist scholarship and the free
exchange of ideas necessary to judge its merits.
Students should be encouraged to question who benefits from
promoting false Holocaust stories on the one hand and using
charges of "anti-Semitism" to suppress free inquiry into those
stories on the other.
It is difficult to understand why the concept of Free Inquiry
should be so alarming to those who manage our universities.
Free Inquiry makes no promise to Revisionism that it does not
make to every other school of thought. The promise of Free Inquiry
is that it will demonstrate what is true and false in Revisionist
scholarship at the same time that it does so for the orthodox
Holocaust literature.
Free Inquiry does not follow a political or ideological line
or it isn't free. Free inquiry is an equal-opportunity ideal.
Christian, Jew and Moslem, Black and White, professor and student
and layman -- it's there for everyone. Free Inquiry holds out
its arms to each one of us, urging us to embrace it, use it,
exhaust it in our passion for understanding.
Understanding, however, unlike Free Inquiry, promises nothing,
That's why there are professors willing to denounce a scholar
while refusing to exchange ideas with him. They would rather
see certain books suppressed than have to face the awful possibility
of coming to understand something that they have committed their
lives and their careers to not understanding.
THE MORAL ISSUE
When we suppress open debate on the Holocaust we promote
bad history and undermine the traditionally humane values of
the university. Bad history replaces historical understanding
with self-righteous nationalism both here and abroad. It encourages
us to scape-goat old enemies and to seek vengeance rather than
reconciliation. (It isn't easy, is it, to "reconcile" ourselves
with a people that skins Jews and cooks them?)
The suppression of Free Inquiry into the Holocaust story
corrupts public discourse, institutionalizes double standards
of justice, legitimizes charges of guilt-by-association and
a moral cowardice in facing our own limitations as individuals
and as a people.
Our refusal to allow critical examination of even the most
bizarre accusations made against Germans encourages men and
women to bear false witness, betray their chosen professions,
and contributes to the vulgarization of Jewish suffering.
Enough is enough!
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