Other Victories for Revisionism

At the recent momentous event in the history of Holocaust revisionism, the Iran Holocaust conference (December 11 and 12, 2006), veteran revisionist scholar Robert Faurisson delivered a speech entitled, “The Victories of Revisionism.” Although it was not a history of the revisionist movement, it did list and discuss twenty important concessions to and victories by the Revisionist movement over the traditional view of the Holocaust. In his own words: “[The speech] deals only with victories that our opponents have had to concede to us either explicitly or implicitly.”[1]

This essay will list other significant concessions to and victories by Revisionism that Dr. Faurisson did not mention. [Editor's note: Professor Faurisson purposefully limited himself to twenty revisionist victories.]

1) At the post war Nuremberg Trials, the victorious powers charged that four million people were murdered at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp complex. The four million figure was concocted by the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission, and later reiterated by a Polish commission that investigated Auschwitz. Until 1990, the four million figure was backed by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, as it was engraved on memorial stones that were blessed by Pope John Paul II in his June 1979 visit to the camp.[2]

In 1989, Israeli Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer pointed out that the four million figure was a deliberate myth.[3] In his 2002 tome, The Case for Auschwitz, Holocaust historian Robert Jan van Pelt also admitted that the four million figure was a falsehood, and it was maintained to serve an ulterior political agenda.[4]

Why is this admission of such importance? One of the standard charges leveled against Holocaust revisionism is that it is an unfounded, foolish “conspiracy theory.” Consider the words of the bitter critic of Holocaust revisionism, Deborah Lipstadt. In her attack upon Arthur Butz’s revisionist study, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, she wrote: “Despite its veneer of impartial scholarship, Butz’s book is replete with same expressions of traditional anti-Semitism, philo-Germanism and conspiracy theory as the Holocaust denial pamphlets printed by the most scurrilous neo-Nazi groups.”[5]

Professor van Pelt also criticized Holocaust revisionism, because in his view it attacks the traditional view of the Holocaust “on the unproven assumption of a general conspiracy.”[6] In what some consider as the most important book on the Holocaust in the past decade, Jeffrey Herf’s The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust, it is claimed that conspiracy theories are a danger to the world. Here is what is stated on the dust jacket: “In an era when both anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories continue to influence world politics, Herf offers a timely reminder of their dangers…”[7]

In the “four-million-murdered-at-Auschwitz” falsehood, we have evidence that conspiracy (i.e., conscious intent to deceive for political purposes) was involved in the shaping of the Holocaust story. As Israeli historian Bauer pointed out, it was a deliberate myth concocted to serve ulterior political purposes, and van Pelt concedes that even into the 1980s the four million myth was put forth because it continued to serve a political purpose.

2) One of the standard dictums of the mainstream Holocaust historians is that the traditional view of this Jewish Holocaust is an indisputable fact that is not subject to debate. In the words of Deborah Lipstadt: “The existence of the Holocaust [is] not a matter of debate.”[8] In the aftermath of the Iran Holocaust conference, the Swiss Foreign Ministry expressed it as best as anyone: “The Shoah is a historical fact. It is unacceptable to call this into question.”[9]

According to premier Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec were three concentration camps in Nazi occupied Poland where approximately one million, five hundred thousand people were supposedly murdered.[10] Yet, in one of the most important Holocaust histories ever published, Professor van Pelt’s The Case for Auschwitz, it is admitted that the evidence for mass murder in these camps is very sparse at best, thus undermining the claim that the Holocaust is “indisputable fact.”

In regard to the alleged evidence for mass murder at these three camps and their role in the Holocaust, here is what he stated: “The evidence for the role of Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor—sufficient as it may be to come to a moral certainty about the wartime history of those places—is much less abundant. There are few eyewitnesses, no confession that can compare to that given by [Commandant of Auschwitz Rudolf] Hoss, no significant remains, and few archival sources.”[11]

3) Dr. Richard Evans, a Cambridge University historian, served as the principal expert witness for the Lipstadt defense team at the famous David Irving-Deborah Lipstadt libel trial in London in 2000. In his book in which he attempts to discredit Holocaust revisionism, he admits that non-Jewish corpses are exploited and used to prop up the Jewish Holocaust ideology. He wrote: “Visiting the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Wahsington, D.C., for example, I was struck by its marginalization of any other victims apart from the Jews, to the extent that it presented photographs of dead bodies in camps such as Buchenwald or Dauchau as dead Jewish bodies, when in fact relatively few Jewish prisoners were held there.”[12]

I believe I understand him correctly. He is claiming that the Holocaust Memorial Museum is promoting a falsehood, by using non-Jewish bodies to gain sympathy for Jews.

4) One of the main forms of evidence for the traditional view of the Holocaust is the eyewitness testimony of former concentration camp inmates and other “Holocaust survivors.” Yet, what the renowned “expert” on “Holocaust denial,” Deborah Lipstadt, admitted in her 1993 book casts doubt on the value of this form of evidence.

She wrote: “For a variety of reasons some [former Nazi concentration camp ] inmates did and still do embellish their experiences. Others sometimes adopt the experiences of fellow survivors as their own.”[13] Nevertheless, she argues that there are methods by which to corroborate the testimony of former concentration camp inmates. The reader is encouraged to examine her argument.

But even more revealing is this admission. Yad Vashem is Israel’s national memorial to the Holocaust. In reference to a very important concession from this Israeli institution, Lipstadt wrote: “[T]he Institute for Historical Review published a report from the Jerusalem Post in which the director of Yad Vashem’s archives reported that more than half of its testimonies from Holocaust survivors are ‘unreliable.’ According to Yad Vashem officials, these testimonies have never been used as evidence in Nazi war crimes trials because survivors who wanted to be ‘part of history’ may, in fact, have allowed their imaginations to ‘run away with them.’”[14]

It seems as though a day does not go by that the mass media does not try to “prove” that the “Nazi gas chambers” existed by using some “newly discovered eyewitness testimony” of former concentration camp inmates. Indeed, in the January 14, 2007 issue of the Chicago Tribune, it was reported that “new” testimony that “proves” the existence of the “Nazi gas chambers” was recently found.[15]

But here we have Deborah Lipstadt, a major Holocaust historian, unwittingly putting forth reasons that show that a large portion of this “eyewitness testimony” is simply unreliable. Since such a large portion of this “eyewitness testimony” has been declared unreliable, it is certainly correct for historians to be, at the very least, skeptical of all such testimony.

5) We close this essay with a tidbit of information from an Israeli source that corroborates a conclusion that Arthur Butz put forth as far back as 1976. “The consequence of World War II did not create Zionism as an effective political movement,” he observed,” they merely gave Zionism the world political victory it needed for the final stage of the takeover of Palestine. All world power had fallen to the U.S. and the Soviet Union, both of which were most friendly to the Zionist cause at the time. Under the circumstances the Arab position was hopeless, since it depended on the firmness and political independence of a Britain that was almost prostrate politically and economically.”[16]

I direct your attention the study of the Israeli historian, Benjamin Pinkus, The Jews of the Soviet Union. Buried in a footnote we read: “According to what Roosevelt told [Zionist leader] Stephen Wise in March 1945 (Weizmann archives, 18 March 1945): ‘The Big Three [Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin] agreed on handing over Palestine to the Jews. As far as the immediate future is concerned, Jewish immigration will be continued.’”[17]

So there you have it. An Israeli historian unwittingly put forth evidence that corroborates what Holocaust revisionist Butz had the historical vision to see in the 1970s.

Notes

copyright 2007

[1]

Dr. Robert Faurisson, “The Victories of Revisionism,” A paper read by Professor Robert Faurisson to the Tehran Holocaust Conference, December 11, 2006. Online: http://www.fpp.co.uk/Auschwitz/Faurisson/at_Teheran_conf_2005.html and http://www.codoh.com/viewpoints/vprfvict.html

[2]

Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, ed., Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp (Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 61-62.

[3]

Yehuda Bauer, “Auschwitz: The Dangers of Distortion,” Jerusalem Post International Edition, week ending September 30, 1989, p.7; Peter Steinfels, “Auschwitz Revisionism: An Israeli Scholar’s Case,” New York Times, November 12, 1989.

[4]

Robert Jan van Pelt, The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial (Indiana University Press, 2002), p.5.

[5]

Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (The Free Press, 1993), p. 126.

[6]

Robert Jan van Pelt, p.140.

[7]

Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During WWII and the Holocaust (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006).

[8]

Lipstadt, p.1.

[9]

See “Iran Hosts Anti-Semitic Hatefest in Tehran: Responses from World Leaders.” Online: http://www.adl.org/main_International_Affairs/iran_holocaust_conference.htm?Multi_page_sections=sHeading_4

[10]

Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews: Student Edition (Holmes & Meir, 1985), p. 338.

[11]

Robert Jan van Pelt, p. 5.

[12]

Richard J. Evans, Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial (Basic Book, 2001), p. 261.

[13]

Lipstadt, p. 53.

[14]

Ibid., p.101.

[15]

Ron Grossman, “Echoes of history: Holocaust voices resurface at IIT,” Chicago Tribune, January 14, 2007. Online: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-0701140387jan14,1,4214717.story?coll=chi-news-hed&ctrack=1&cset=true

[16]

Arthur Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry (Institute for Historical Review, 1976), p. 233.

[17]

Benjamin Pinkus, The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 346, footnote 98.