A Brief History of Holocaust Denial

By Ben S. Austin

This essay will attempt to provide a brief historical
review of Holocaust
denial. For an in-depth treatment of this question, the reader is
referred to two major works on the subject: Lucy S.
Dawidowicz,Historians and the Holocaust and Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and
Memory. The material in the present essay draws heavily from
these two excellent works. Here I am concerned with the historical
background and origins of the movement. Primary attention will be given to
Paul Rassinier, Harry Elmer Barnes and Austin J. App.

The very first Holocaust deniers were the Nazis
themselves. As it became increasingly obvious that the war was not going
well, Himmler
instructed his camp commandants to destroy records, crematoria and other
sign of mass destruction of human beings. He was especially adamant with
regard to those Jews still alive who could testify regarding their
experiences in the camps. In
April, 1945, he signed an official order (which still exists in his own
handwriting) that the camps would not be surrendered and that no prisoner
"fall into the hands of the enemies alive." Apparently Himmler knew that
the "Final
Soluion" would be viewed as a moral outrage by the rest of the world.

Historian Kenneth Stern (1993:6) suggests that many top
SS
leaders left Germany at the end of the war and began immediately the
process of using their propaganda skills to rewrite history. Shortly after
the war, denial materials began to appear. One of the first was Friedrich
Meinecke's The German Catastrophe, (1950) in which he offered a
brief defense for the German people by blaming industrialists, bureaucrats
and the Pan-German League (an essentially antisemitic organization begun
by von Schoerner in Vienna prior to young Adolf
Hitler's arrival there) for the outbreak of World War I and Hitler's
rise to power. Meinecke was openly antisemitic;
nonetheless he was a respected historian.

There is a fairly clear historical development of
contemporary Holocaust denial. Surprisingly, its roots extend far beyond
the Holocaust
itself and may be found in the work of historical revisionists in Europe,
principally France, and
in the United States who set out to absolve Germany of responsibility for
World War I.

Paul Rassinier, formerly a "political" prisoner at Buchenwald,
was one of the first European writers to come to the defense of the Nazi
regime with regard to their "extermination" policy. In 1945, Rassinier was
elected as a Socialist member of the French National Assembly, a position
which he held for less than two years before resigning for health reasons.
Shortly after the war he began reading reports of extermination in Nazi
death camps by means of gas
chambers and crematoria. His response was, essentially, "I was there
and there were no gas chambers." It should be remembered that he was
confined to Buchenwald, the first major concentration camp created by the
Hitler regime (1937) and that it was located in Germany. Buchenwald was
not primarily a "death camp" and there were no gas chambers there. He was
arrested and incarcerated in 1943. By that time the focus of the "Final
Solution" had long since shifted to the Generalgouvernement of
Poland. Rassinier used his own experience as a basis for denying the
existence of gas chambers and mass extermination at other camps. Given his
experience and his antisemitism, he embarked upon a writing career which,
over the next 30 years, would place him at the center of Holocaust denial.
In 1948 he published Le Passage de la Ligne, Crossing the Line,
and, in 1950, The Holocaust Story and the Lie of Ulysses. In these
early works he attempted to make two main arguments: first, while some
atrocities were committed by the Germans, they have been greatly
exaggerated and, second, that the Germans were not the perpetrators of
these atrocities -- the inmates who ran the camps instigated them. In 1964
he published The Drama of European Jewry, a work committed to debunking
what he called "the genocide myth." The major focus of this book was the
denial of the gas chambers in the concentration camps, the denial of the
widely accepted figure of 6 million Jews exterminated and the discounting
of the testimony of the perpetrators following the war. These three have
emerged in recent years as central tenets of Holocaust denial. While none
of these arguments were new, Rassinier did introduce a new twist to
Holocaust denial. Having argued that the genocidal extermination of 6
million Jews is a myth, he asks: Who perpetrated the myth, and for what
purpose. His answer: the Zionists as part of
a massive Jewish/Soviet/Allied conspiricay to "swindle" Germany out of
billions of dollars in reparations. This is a theme which would later be
taken up by Austin J. App and by the current crop of Holocaust deniers.

In 1977, the above works by Rassinier were re-published
by the Noontide Press under the title, Debunking the Genocide Myth.
The Noontide Press is the primary outlet for the Institute of Historical
Review. Toward the end of his life he wrote two additional pieces, one on
the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem (held in 1961) and one on the Auschwitz
trial in Frankfurt. Both of these were translated by American historian,
and admirer of Rassinier, Harry Elmer Barnes. These materials have been
published by Steppingstones Publishing and are regularly advertised for
sale by the Institute For Historical Review. Thus, the work of Rassinier
takes its place in contemporary denial literature.

The claims of Rassinier can be easily refuted and have
received full treatment by Deborah Lipstadt and other reputable
historians. Briefly, however, Rassinier offers little evidence for most of
his claims, he totally disregards any documentary evidence that would
contradict his claims and attempts to explain away the testimony of
survivors as"emotional" exaggeration and the testimony of accused war
criminals as the result of "coercion." For instance, he completely ignores
Hitler's stated agenda in Mein Kampf (1923) and his famous and
oft-quoted speech of 1939 before the German Reichstag:

Today I want to be a prophet once more: If international
finance Jewry inside and outside of Europe should succeed once more in
plunging nations into another world war, the consequence will not be the
Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the
annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.

Similarly, he disregards the speeches of Himmler, such as
the address given to the leaders of the SS in 1943:

I also want to talk with you, quite frankly, on a very grave
matter. Among yourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly, and yet
we will never speak of it publicly....I mean the clearing out of the
Jews, the extermination of the Jewish race. (Quoted in Jackson
Speilvogel, Hitler and Nazi Germany, 3rd ed., 1996:282).

Similarly, he disregards the Wansee
Protocol which stands as clear evidence of an official Nazi policy of
extermination.

As Lipstadt observes, the primary link between these
early revisionists and modern deniers was the U.S. historian, Harry Elmer
Barnes,the first American historian to take up the theme of Holocaust
denial. During World War I he was an outspoken, even vitriolic, supporter
of the Allied effort. After the war, however, he became highly pro-German
and seemed intent on defending the German people against any
responsibility for the war. While he blamed France and Russia for starting
the war, he stopped short, in his early work, of blaming the Jews, as
Kaiser Wilhelm had done. Barnes early work was fairly respectable
historical analysis despite the fact that his agenda was a clear
denunciation of U.S. foreign policy during World War I. These themes
appear strongly in his, The Genesis of the Great War, 1926, In
Quest of Truth and Justice, 1928 and World Politics in Modern
Civilization, 1930. His two-volume The History of Western
Civilization was widely adopted at prestigious schools throughout the
United States. It was not until the late 1950s that his analysis extended
to the issue of atrocities against Jews. This shift in his agenda
coincides with his discovery of French popular historian, Paul Rassinier,
and the American revisionist, David Leslie Hoggan.

Hoggan's dissertation at Harvard was a revisionist work
in which he blamed Britain for World War II and presented Hitler as a
victim of Allied manipulation. Throughout the work, Hitler is presented as
conciliatory, reasonable and sincere in his attempts to avoid war. Barnes
encouraged Hoggan to have the work published. After extensive re-writing,
it was published, in Germany in 1961, under the title, The Forced
War. The title reveals the thrust of the book -- World War II was
forced upon Hitler. An important concern of the book was to downplay Nazi
atrocities against Jews.

As historian, Deborah Lipstadt, observes:

Hoggan's book, on which Barnes heaped accolades, is full of
such misrepresentations in relation to British and Polish foreign policy
and concerning Germany's treatment of the Jews. His dissertation
contains few such observations. Barnes read the dissertation before it
was turned into a book and was in contact with Hoggan for a full six
years before the book was published. Barnes helped get it published and
provided a blurb for its jacket, obviously playing a significant role in
turning this "solid conscientious piece of work" into a Nazi apoligia.
(Denying the Holocaust,1993:73)

It was Barnes' discovery of Rassinier that seems to have
been the pivotal point in his thinking. He began by arguing that the
atrocity stories were exaggerated and slowly worked his way to the
conclusion that they were fabrications. Stopping short of denying the
Holocaust, Barnes attempted to connect the "exaggerated" atrocities with
German reparations to Israel. Following the earlier lead of Rassinier,
Barnes attempted to leave the impression that the size of the reparations
were determined by the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust when
actually the size of the reparations wad determined by the estimated cost
of resettling Jews from Germany and occupied territories to Israel.

Finally, Barnes attempted to raise doubts about the
Holocaust in general by raising doubts regarding the existence of gas
chambers as a means of extermination....The existence and implementation
of gas chambers for extermination purposes is a matter of special concern
to deniers since they symbolize more dramatically than anything else the
rational, systematic and impersonal nature of the killing machine. Every
Holocaust denier feels compelled to make this issue central the argument.
Barnes' contention was that the gas chambers were post-war inventions
Surely Barnes was aware of the extensive testimony provided to the British
as early as 1944 by Auschwitz escapee, Rudolph Vrba (see Martin Gilbert,
Auschwitz And The Allies, 1981:190-198).

App's major contribution to Holocaust denial lies in his
codification of denial into eight fundamental tenets (The following are
adapted from Deborah Lipstadt, 1994:99-100):

Emigration, not extermination was the Nazi plan for dealing with
Germany's "Jewish problem." His main evidence for this assertion is that
if Germany had planned total extermination, no Jews would have survived.

No Jews were gassed in any German camps and probably not at
Auschwitz either. He argued that the crematoria were designed to cremate
those who died from other causes -- natural illness, etc.

Jews who disappeared during the years of WWII and have not been
accounted for did so in territories under Soviet, rather than German,
control.

The majority of Jews who were killed by the Nazis were people whom
the Nazis had every right to "execute" as subversives, spies, and
criminals.

If the Holocaust claims have any truth, Israel would have opened its
archives to historians. Instead, he claims, they have preferred to
continue perpetuating the Holocaust "hoax" by utilizing the charge of
"antisemitism" against anyone who questions it.

All evidence to support the Holocaust "hoax" of 6 million dead rests
upon misquotes of Nazis and Nazi documents.

Burden of proof argument. It is incumbent upon the accusers to prove
the 6 million figure. Instead, App argues, Germany has been forced to
prove that the 6 million is incorrect. This argument rests upon App's
(and others') assertion that reparations paid to Israel by Germany are
based on the 6 million figure. He consistently refers to the reparations
as a Zionist "swindle."

Jewish historians and other scholars have great discrepancies in
their calculations of the number of victims. App takes this as evidence
that the claims are unverified.

The above assertions stand as the fundamental tenets of
contemporary Holocaust denial....

Holocaust denial is rooted in the isolationism and
historical revision of the WWI, post-War, WWII and Cold War periods. By
the mid to late 1960s, all the ingredients of contemporary Holocaust
denial were in place. Some of this background does, in fact, represent
legitimate historical revision. Other parts of it, however, depart from
the academic standards of historical analysis and move clearly in the
direction of politically and ideologically motivated historical denial.
One overarching characteristic of all deniers, the one characteristic
which binds them all together, is antisemitism. Regardless of the language
used to clothe their attacks upon memory and truth, it is the language of
hate and fear. Regardless of pretensions of scholarship and even
underlying traces of real scholarship, deniers ultimately come to rely
upon the least respectable of all strategies -- stereotyping. The works of
Rassinier, Barnes, Hoggan and App consistently fall back upon stereotypic
images of the Jewish people which have been perpetuated for centuries and
which show little sign of diminishing with the current crop of deniers.

Source: The
Holocaust\Shoah Page