Holocaust Studies: Appointment With Hate?

Let’s agree that one ideal of the university is to promote intellectual freedom, and one ideal of the professorial class is to teach students to honor it. Yet this is not true in Holocaust Studies. There, if students express doubt about “eyewitness” testimony, for example, even if it is demonstrably false, dishonorable or both, they understand they run the danger of being accused of being “hateful.”
Consider eyewitness testimony given by Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel.

Elie Wiesel as an “eyewitness” authority

EW claims he was “liberated” from Dachau (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 11 April 1983), “liberated” from Buchenwald (NYT, 2 Nov. 1986), and “liberated” from Auschwitz (NY Post, 23 Oct. 1986, and NYT, 4 Jan. 1987). One of these claims may be true. The others are false. Do the professors believe it matters?

EW claims in All Rivers Run to the Sea (NY, 1995): “I read [Immanuel Kant’s] The Critique of Pure Reason in Yiddish.” Kant’s Critique has not been translated into Yiddish. Here again, EW did not tell the truth. Does it matter?

EW claims that, after Jews were executed at Babi Yar in the Ukraine, “geysers of blood” spurted from their grave for “months” afterward (See Paroles d’etranger, 1982, p. 86). Impossible? Yes, it is. Do the professors believe it matters?

When Holocaust Studies professors are too fearful to condemn such claims, and those who make them, what are their students to do?

Elie Wiesel as an authority on “hate”

Elie Wiesel has won the hearts and minds of Holocaust Studies professors with his counsel on how to perpetuate a loathing for Germans:

Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of hate—healthy virile hate—for what the German personifies and for what persists in the German.

*(Legends of Our Time, “Appointment with Hate,” NY, Avon, 1968, pp. 177-178).

Students understand the implications of this statement when brought to their attention, while their professors appear not to. Perhaps if we change one word in Elie Wiesel’s sage advice, it will focus their attention:

“Every Palestinian, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of hate—healthy virile hate—for what the Jew personifies and for what persists in the Jew.”

Does this help?

How is EW perceived in Holocaust Studies? He is esteemed as a moral authority. Chairs are created in his honor. Students are taught to emulate him.

Holocaust Studies and the exploitation of hate

In Holocaust Studies, hate is all the rage. To merely note that Stephen Spielberg based his “factual” movie Schindler’s List on a cheap novel—is hate. To suggest that the “Diary” of Anne Frank is not an authentic personal diary (and should not be taught as such), but a “literary production” crafted by Anne, and after the war by others, from a cache of miscellaneous writings and inventions—that’s hate. Exposing false eyewitness testimony is hate. Exposing forged Nuremberg documents is hate. Exposing faked photographs and the use of torture by the Allies to produce confessions by Germans is hate. Asking for proof that one (one!) Jew was gassed in any German camp as part of a program of “genocide” is hate. Asking what “crimes against humanity” National Socialists committed during WWII that Republicans and Democrats did not commit is hate. To note that the story is immensely profitable for those who administer it is hate. Arguing for intellectual freedom regarding any of this—that’s hate too. That is, commenting on the record is hate. Telling the truth about the record is hate. Having an open mind is hate.

The unspoken ethical and intellectual scandal in Holocaust Studies is that key materials used in these programs are soaked through with fraud and falsehood—led by the use of false and ignoble eyewitness testimony. Here we have highlighted the hapless Elie Wiesel, but the literature is full of “eyewitnesses” who gave false testimony about gas chambers and a great many other matters.

For more information on Elie Wiesel and other problematic eyewitnesses—such as Simon Wiesenthal, Dr. Hadassah Bimko (Rosensaft), Filip Müller, Rudolf Vrba, Kurt Gerstein, Mel Mermelstein, go to our site on the Web and follow “revisionism.” For background on myself, follow my name.

Bradley R. Smith, Director
Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH)
POB 439016, San Diego CA, 92143