“Danger” of Holocaust Revisionism Spreading, Says Israeli Scholar

Israeli Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer is worried. In an article in the Israeli English-language daily Jerusalem Post, August 7, 1993, he warns that “America is the center of a world-wide Holocaust denial movement.”

According to the article, headlined “US is center of Holocaust revisionism,” Bauer also “named France as the second major center, followed by Sweden. He said the danger is spreading from South America and from France to the rest of the European continent, to the Third World, India and Japan.”

“Only a small percentage of people in different countries believe what is being spread by the revisionists,” Bauer went on. “In some countries it is eight percent, in others it is ten or twelve percent.”

Yehuda Bauer is head of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at Israel’s Hebrew University. As one of the world’s most prominent Holocaust experts, it has been his unenviable task to announce awkward but unavoidable concessions to truth – and thus to revisionist critics of the Holocaust story. In April 1990, he publicly acknowledged that the widely-repeated Holocaust tale that the Germans had manufactured bars of soap from the bodies of murdered Jews is a myth. A few months later, he had the equally unhappy task of acknowledging that the long-standing allegation that the Germans killed four million people at Auschwitz – a claim that was supposedly proven at the Nuremberg Tribunal – is likewise not true.

In the Jerusalem Post article, Bauer specifically mentions David Cole’s videotape about Auschwitz, calling it “a powerful video.” (“David Cole Interviews Dr. Franciszek Piper” is available on VHS from the IHR for $49.00, plus $ 2.50 for shipping.)

“Producer of the video is the Institute for Historical Review,” Bauer inaccurately goes on to say. (In fact, the IHR had nothing to do with the video’s production.) Israel, Bauer said, “lags behind the rest of the Western world” in producing video material to counter Holocaust revisionism.