THE HOLOCAUST STORY:
How Much is False?
The Case for Open Debate
by Bradley R. Smith
(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 McCarthy-ite.
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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