Holocaust Museums Come under Attack from Washington to Berlin

In recent weeks and months. Holocaust museums and proposed Holocaust museums have encountered unprecedented criticism and reversals, in the United States, in Canada, and in Germany. While the critics have neither expressed nor been motivated by full-throttle Holocaust revisionism, they have nevertheless objections that are implicitly revisionist.

Take the fall of Walter Reich, who was forced to resign as director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on February 18. His dismissal didn’t come over his continued chutzpah in representing a door from Majdanek as proof of homicidal gassing at that camp, despite the unrefuted findings of CODOH associate Samuel Crowell that the replica of the door displayed is indistinguishable from a standard issue bomb shelter door. No, it was Reich’s widely publicized insistence on making the Museum an adjunct of hard-line Israeli occupation policy by trying to embarrass Yasir Arafat that forced the Museum’s board of directors to send Reich packing (despite a despairing public shriek from Mr. Holocaust himself, Elie Wiesel) Then again, hasn’t CODOH stressed over and over that the Museum serves the Holocaust lobby by promoting its “Holocaust agenda,” with strident support for Zionism, as exhibited in the Museum, at the top of the list?

Next, there’s the recent broadside, in the form of a letter drafted and signed by a group of Jews, launched against a film, Anti-Semitism, shown to all visitors to the USHMM. (The film was written by Reich’s predecessor, Rabbi Michael Berenbaum.) True, the letter doesn’t target the immediate historical issues—but it does take the Museum, one of the principal founts of the guilt trip the Holocaust lobby is working to impose on much of non-Jewish humanity, to task for propagating “libels against Christianity” (to wit, that Christianity was the chief inspiration for the “Holocaust”). Yes, these particular Jews have their motives-including promoting an alliance with fervently pro-Israel Christians—but now they’ve said what we’ve been saying: the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum spreads libel in the name of the Holocaust. It may be too early to take heart from Holocaustomaniac Leon Wieseltier’s sorrowful wheeze, “The cultural wars of America have arrived at the gates of Auschwitz” (New Republic, February 9, 1998)—but then again, we revisionists have long since been inside the Auschwitz gates.

In Canada, museum officials abandoned a plan to shoehorn Holocaust exhibits into the National War Museum in Ottawa on February 18. Canadian veterans showed unusual salt for this day and age by resisting the attempt to reduce space devoted to the exploits and sacrifices of Canadian troops in favor of Holocaustiana bearing no relation whatever to Canada’s combat role in either of the world wars. Nothing to challenge the gas chambers there, of course—but our neighbors to the north have inflicted, for the time being at least, a reverse to the growing tendency of the Holocaust to swallow up the larger history of the Second World War.

Even in Germany, where the Holocaust has been inflated to a state myth, and where challenging the gas chamber hoax is a criminal offense, a group of prominent intellectuals and artists, including Guenter Grass of all people, has raised a restive challenge to a Holocaust memorial projected for the heart of Berlin. Although the winning design for the football field-size monument hasn’t been chosen, it has been determined that the monument, which will lie between the Brandenburg Gate and the Potsdamer Platz, beside the future U.S. embassy, will be dedicated to the “six million” Jews alone.

Needless to say, the nineteen artists and writers who have objected to the new memorial dared raise no substantive objections to the Holocaust story, authorized version. Instead, they quibbled over the exclusion of Gypsies and the disabled (none seems to have thought of the many thousands of Berliners savaged by Anglo-American bombs or Soviet troops); the cyclopean scale of the expected monstrosity; and the fact that a bunker used by the late Dr. Joseph Goebbels adjoins the site of this latest German tribute to fallen and not-so-fallen Jews.

So that leaves it CODOH to say the unsayable, at least in Germany: if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, than Adolf Hitler has no more avid emulators in architectural grandiosity, or Joseph Goebbels in churning out nonstop propaganda, or Reinhard Heydrich in muzzling enemies of officially prescribed truths, than our friends in the Holocaust lobby. And that is why, we dare say, at long last reasonable people are beginning, slowly, to back away from the lobby, its cult, and its agenda.