Denial of the Holocaust: An Antisemitic Political Assault
Kenneth S. Stern
Holocaust denial is no more about the Holocaust than the medieval claim that Jews poisoned
wells was about water quality. Throughout history, antisemitic canards have influenced
people to understand their world through the scapegoating of Jews. Poisoners of wells. Killers
of Christ. Murderers of Christian children whose blood is drained to make matzah. Secret
conspirators who run the world. The hidden hand behind the slave trade. As Judge Hadassah
Ben Itto, president of the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists noted,
"They don't replace each other, these lies; the list becomes longer all the time." 1 Holocaust
denial is not only one of the more recent lies, it is also one of the most sophisticated.
The first major Holocaust-denying work appeared in 1976, when Arthur Butz, an American
professor of electrical engineering at Northwestern University, wrote The Hoax of the
Twentieth Century. He acknowledged that Jews were persecuted by the Nazis, but denied that
they were exterminated. Gas chambers, he alleged, were used merely for delousing. Many
who had not heard of Holocaust denial before heard about it through the controversy
surrounding Butz.
By 1978, professional antisemites, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis began to understand the
potential usefulness of Holocaust denial. The Holocaust was the central moral albatross of
Nazism. Exalting the Holocaust as a positive event in human history was not a way to make
friends or influence people. To deny the Holocaust would not only cleanse the image of
Nazism, it would also empower supernationalistic, xenophobic, antisemitic political groups
by making them believe they were the maligned victims of a suppressed truth.
In 1978 Willis Carto, the central force behind a network of antisemitic enterprises such as the
Liberty Lobby and the Noontide Press, opened a new organization called the Institute of
Historical Review (IHR). The IHR held its first conference in 1979. The white supremacists,
neo-Nazis, and Klansmen who attended were enthralled by what was called "Holocaust
revisionism". Yes, Jews were discriminated against in Germany, but they were not
exterminated. Yes, there were concentration camps, but no gas chambers. Yes, the pictures of
Jews in the camps at the end of the was were disturbing, but the Allies, not the Nazis, were to
blame because they destroyed rail lines, leaving people to die of starvation and typhus. "Yes",
stated with enough truth to sound believable, followed by a distorted "but" designed to flow
from that truth.
1
Kenneth S. Stern, ed., The Effort to Repeal Resolution 3379 (New York: American Jewish
Committee, 1991), p. 41.
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Holocaust "revisionism", the attendees quickly understood, was to look like a serious,
scholarly pursuit. It hijacked the name of "revisionist" from the school of real historians who,
after World War I, tried to explain the events of that war through new perspectives. And by
publishing a scholarly looking journal, the Journal of Historical Review, and holding
conferences, the IHR made every effort to mask its unadulterated pro-Nazi, antisemitic
agenda. Only the hard-core members would know that they could purchase Holocaust-denial
material along with antisemitica and material glorifying Hitler and the Third Reich, including
tapes of Luftwaffe marches and of Hitler's "best" speeches of 1933.
Holocaust denial fit well into the antisemitic and profascist agenda of hard-core antisemites. It
was crafted in the mold of a prosecutor's dream: crime, motive, and opportunity. The "crime"
was the Jews' inventing the story of the Holocaust. The "motive" was legitimacy for the state
of Israel and reparations from Germany. 2 The "opportunity" was the old antisemitic canard of
Jewish control of the media and of Hollywood. Since these building blocks of Holocaust
denial were cross-pollinating, if anyone – even someone who did not see the world through an
antisemitic lens – bought the premise of the allegation, the rest made perfect sense. For neoNazis and white supremacists, Holocaust denial fit into their preconceived notions of the
power and evil of Jews.
By the early 1990s, the IHR had become the spine of the international Holocaust-denying
movement, featuring speakers from around the world at its conferences and distributing
books, tapes, a journal, and other material in many languages all over the globe. The material
carefully used enough truth, and played on people's ignorance of the details of the Holocaust,
to sound credible.
Holocaust denial, therefore, builds on and improves the old-line antisemitic canards of Jewish
power and control. In its own insular dementia, it makes perfect sense, and any challenge to it
is dismissed as the work of evildoers who are trying to reassert their "big lie", that the Nazis
exterminated Jews.
History teaches, that any form of bigotry must not be ignored, even if it is "silly". All bigotry
is palpably absurd, but that has not stopped people from believing it and political movements
from using it. If "silly" hate can become empowering, all the more reason to take Holocaust
denial seriously, since denial blends enough truth with its pseudoscience and pseudohistory to
seem logical. Furthermore, the "logic" of Holocaust denial has a new currency in the postCommunist world.
World War II was the central defining event of the last half-century, especially in Europe. In
this wake, Communism was imposed on Eastern Europe, and relationships between the
2
Deniers never note that reparations work the other way – compensating survivors, not the dead. If
there were an incentive to play with numbers for financial gain, it would be to reduce the number of
dead and increase the number of survivors, not the other way around.
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Western European nations were realigned. The horror of extreme nationalism, of race-based
ethnic stereotyping, of hatred becoming an acceptable part of state ideology, of the logical
end point of antisemitism, became understood lessons of the Holocaust.
With the end of the cold war, the newly free countries of Eastern Europe have been throwing
off the old Communist party line (which never included the extermination of Jews in its
version of World War II history), and reestablishing their claims of national sovereignty.
Many of the last non-Communist national heroes were leaders of the Nazi puppet regimes. In
the Ukraine and elsewhere, people we call war criminals are having statues erected and streets
renamed in their honor. This redefinition of history, inevitable as it may be, plays right into
the hands of the Holocaust deniers.
Beyond Eastern Europe, repaint World War II without the Holocaust and what do you get?
Perhaps a war between competing systems that each had their demerits – capitalism, fascism,
Communism. Perhaps just an ugly phase of history, just as Stalin's USSR was an evil part of
history. Without the gas chambers and the Holocaust, Nazi Germany is relativized into just
another troubling part of human history. That, too, is good for the agenda of the deniers.
Imagine our eighteen-year-old again. What does it matter if he or she believes that the events
of his or her grandparents' youth were not as it generally accepted? If World War II and the
Holocaust were the defining events of the last half of the twentieth century, and an untrue
understanding of those events was imposed on Europe, all political formations and actions for
the last fives decades have been based on false assumptions. Asylum policies, programs that
promote pluralism and democracy and oppose xenophobia and nationalism-run wild, are all
suspect as manifestations of control by outside forces – meaning either by Jews or, in some
cases, by Americans (seen as controlled by Jews). The profascist political agenda of the
deniers is well served by the combination of the passage of time and the need for European
countries to redefine themselves in the aftermath of the cold war.
And even when outright denial of the Holocaust is not at play, the relativizing of the
Holocaust aids the deniers' agenda by blurring the unique aspects of the Holocaust. There are
sites of former concentration camps in Europe that note that internees were kept there from
the late 1930s until the late '40s. Not mentioned is that the first occupants were the victims of
the Nazis, and the later residents the Nazi victimizers captured after the war. Nazism and
fascism become blurred as yet another dark period of European history.
What has been the impact of Holocaust denial in the United States? With the exception of one
minor election in New Jersey in 1994 and a few other crackpots who have run, no one has
campaigned for office on a platform of Holocaust denial. Although many media outlets have
pandered to the Holocaust deniers by giving them airtime without knowing how to expose
their Nazi connections or the manner in which their lies are constructed, no major new group
has proclaimed that the Holocaust never happened. Even though a few untenured lecturers
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have taught Holocaust denial from time to time (until discovered and fired), there are no
colleges or universities where denial of the Holocaust is taught in the curriculum. 3 Yet key
American institutions – politics, the media, the campus – have had difficulty dealing with
Holocaust denial.
David Duke in Louisiana provides an example. Duke's denial of the Holocaust was well
known. Yet in his statewide races for senator and governor in the early 1990s, he garnered
nearly 700,000 votes and between 55 and 60 percent of the white vote. Undoubtedly, very
few voted for Duke because of his Holocaust denial. Yet for many, denial of a major
twentieth-century tragedy involving Jews was seen as quirkiness, not as a character defect
disqualifying him from elective office. "Oh that David"' no doubt some said, "yeah he has this
crazy thing about the Holocaust, but we like him because…" 4
For many reasons, Holocaust denial could very well become the conduit for much of the next
century's antisemitism. First, memory is a powerful antidote to lies. People who lived through
World War II remember the true character of Nazi Germany and the condition of European
Jewry after the war. Liberators and survivors alike can be brought into classrooms and
interviewed on television and in college newspapers, communicating personal experience that
grabs the mind because it also grabs the heart. 5 But soon the witnesses will be gone, and the
power of someone saying "this is what happened to me" will no longer exist. 6
Second, the collective memory of the Holocaust will be further removed as generation
succeeds generation. Currents events become history, become parents' history, then
grandparents' and great-grandparents' history. No matter how important or traumatic, history
loses currency with each succeeding generation. World War I is remembered today, correctly,
as an extreme example of cruelty in warfare – but its memory does not have the impact on
3
Contrasts this with the extreme racist Afrocentrists, like Leonard Jeffries of the City University of
New York and Tony Martin of Wellesley, who are tenured and teach antisemitic pseudoscience and
pseudohistory in the classroom.
4
Patrick Buchanan, who ran for president in 1992, also dabbled around the edges of Holocaust denial.
He questioned the workings of the gassing mechanisms at Treblinka based on a bizarre observation that
children had survived being trapped in a Washington, D.C. tunnel contaminated with diesel fumes, and
wrote of the "so-called Holocaust Survivor Syndrome" and the "group fantasies of martyrdom and
heroics."
5
Jens Ohlin, writing about the process through which he first decided to print, then decided to reject
and expose a Holocaust-denying ad, wrote:
As we prepare to go to press, students are still approaching me asking why I will not print the
advertisement. I tell them a story. I tell them about how last weekend I listened for two hours as the
father of a good friend recounted his experiences at Auschwitz. His mother and father were
exterminated during the Holocaust and he did manual labor at Buchenwald. He was 14 at the time.
It was the first time he had spoken in such detail about the Holocaust. I looked straight in his eyes, and
I knew then what my decision about the ad was going to be.
I tell anyone who asks me why I won't print the advertisement about that interview. If they looked in
his eyes, they wouldn't print the ad either. If they would, then they simply are not human. Skidmore
News, April 21, 1994, Special Supplement, p. 2.
6
Oral and video history projects are important catalogues of this information, but cannot replace the
ability to look someone in the eye.
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day-to-day living that it had in the 1920s and '30s. For Jews, the destruction of the Temple
two millennia ago is still remembered, as is the Inquisition five hundred years ago, but they
cannot have the same imprint on this generation as they did on those whose lives were
touched by these events. The Holocaust, as a unique episode in human history, will of course
be remembered, but as human history is cannot avoid the organic transformation of time. As
memory is affected by the passage of people and time, it allows a clearer field for those who
would distort events for political and bigoted purposes.
Third, the Holocaust deniers have large sums of money at their disposal. In addition to money
from their supporters, and some foreign sources (including some Arab nations), Jean Edison,
the granddaughter and heiress of Thomas Edison, left a bequest of at least $10 million
7
which is being used to promote Holocaust denial.
Fourth, Holocaust denial has become the accepted ideology of the far-right, neo-Nazi,
profascist groups. It is the ideological glue that allows them, despite their various differences,
to share a common understanding of history and of what that history says about the future. It
is helpful to them to believe that the post-World War II world was built on the foundation of a
lie (that fascism and Nazism were evils to be rejected).
History teaches that we ignore mass-based ideologies of hate at our peril. Already these forces
have pushed some mainstream political parties in Europe (especially in Germany) to accept
part of their agenda: restrictions on the liberal asylum laws that followed World War II.
Certainly, the mainstream parties are not being prodded to give credence to the anti-foreigner
policies of the far-far right because they doubt the Holocaust. But that they have been
influenced by these groups and co-opted some far-right issues means that the extremists
groups are seen as having some political legitimacy. The extremist groups are not denying the
Holocaust because they have a fetish about a few pages in the history books that they think
historians have gotten wrong, and that they want to correct. These people want power, and
Holocaust denial is a major conduit for their broader violent, bigoted, antisemitic, and antidemocratic agenda,
Fifth, denial of the Holocaust will be aided by the increasing relativizing of the Holocaust.
The entire stream of human history is polluted with stories of genocide and hatred, and it
serves no purpose to attempt to rank suffering or count tears. Each genocide was unique, and
it is precisely because of that uniqueness that we must learn from each of them, whether it be
the enslavement of blacks or the slaughter of American Indians or the mass murder of
Armenians or the Nazis' attempted annihilation of world Jewry.
7
See Doreen Carvajal, Civil War Rages Among Holocaust Revisionists," Los Angeles Times, May 8,
1994, p. Al. See also Herb Brin, "'Revisionists' Blow fuse with Edison Legacy," San Diego Heritage,
May 20, 1994, p. 1.
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But while the Holocaust was not a species outside of the human experience in bigotry, to label
it as just another example of that indulgence is to distort it. For example, Americans built
camps for Japanese-Americans during World War II, and that too was a horrible reflection of
prejudice. But there is no comparison, as some would make, between an internment camp in
the American West and Auschwitz. One was a temporary warehouse of human beings, the
other a manufacturing plant designed to produce corpses.
What was unique about the Nazi genocide was that it took place in a "modern" and
"enlightened" society that, during the course of war, had difficult choices to make. Should this
train be used to transport soldiers and weapons and supplies to fight the war, or to bring Jews
and Gypsies and gays and Communists and other to camps, many of which were no more than
factories of death? Uniquely in human history, the latter choice was uniformly made.
When the relativizers try to rob the Holocaust of that uniqueness, to make it just another
chapter in the interminable story of man's inhumanity to man, the necessary conclusion of
their "logic" is that there is no longer any need to understand how the Nazi Holocaust came
about, and how it worked. Those who want to merely turn the Holocaust into another generic
volume on a large shelf of human misery make is easier for those who want to remove the
volume outright.
Combining with all these factors is the historical attraction for antisemitic canards. Some
sequels are most successful than the original, and Holocaust denial – because of its play on
memory and history, and its political usefulness – has the potential to be even more disastrous
to people's views of Jews than the Jewish "conspiracies" posited in the Protocols of the Elders
of Zion, since it feeds off those fantasies and brings them to a new, and current, height.
If Holocaust denial had the potential to be a force for antisemitism and dangerous political
movements, how should it be combated now, when it is still in its infancy. 8
First, it cannot be ignored. Only twenty years ago many people suggested that the United
Nations resolution equating Zionism with racism should be ignored because it was absurd.
But soon the definition of Zionism as racism crept into placards in parades, statements of
8
Attitudinal surveys suggest that Holocaust denial is a relatively small, but potentially growing,
phenomenon. In 1994 less than 2 percent of Americans were hard-core Holocaust deniers. Yet, there is
great ignorance about the Holocaust itself. While 85 percent of Americans say they know what the term
refers to, in one poll only 24 percent, when asked to define the Holocaust, gave completely correct
answers. Furthermore, many Americans believe that the extent of the Holocaust has been exaggerated –
for example, a 1993 telephone survey in Georgia showed nearly 20 percent saying that while they
"believe the Holocaust was a real event… the number of people killed by the Nazis was probably
nowhere near six million," and nearly another 19 percent stating that they were "not sure whether the
Holocaust did or did not occur."
Data from Europe show more awareness of the facts of the Holocaust (24, 33, 35, and 59 percent of
Americans, British, French, and German respondents gave completely correct definitions of the
Holocaust respectively). Nonetheless, there is both a massive level of ignorance of the Holocaust and a
direct correlation between such knowledge and resistance to denial. Ignorance, too, must be a matter of
concern. See Tom Smith, Holocaust Denial: What the Survey Data Reveal (New York: American
Jewish Committee, 1994).
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speakers on campuses, into law books, dictionaries, and on television. At San Francisco State
University, Jewish students were told that they should not be allowed to run for student
government because, as Jews, they were Zionists, and, as Zionists, racists, and racists should
not be allowed to seek election. Racist canards grow, especially when planted by those with a
political purpose. They do not wither and die on their own.
Holocaust denial plays on lack of knowledge, antisemitic images, and political agendas. It
must therefore be combated in all of its aspects.
There are those who suggest that combating Holocaust denial is a matter of education, and to
a degree it is. Deniers play on ignorance, and therefore education is an essential component of
the fight against denial. But while it is necessary, it is not sufficient. Some suggest that
knowing history will ensure that history, or something that smells very much like it, cannot be
repeated. But human history proves otherwise. Hitler knew of the Armenian genocide by the
Turkish government in the early part of the twentieth century. That knowledge did not stop
him from designing a program of genocide; it gave him inspiration. Today, images of "ethnic
cleansing" in the former Yugoslavia resonate with those who understand the Holocaust. But
the world allows this 1990s genocide to occur because other "interests" are perceived as more
important than putting an end to the slaughter.
Knowledge is essential, and so educational programs and museums (such as the excellent U.
S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.) and Holocaust centers and oral
histories and conferences and books and research are all important. But they are not enough.
Holocaust deniers must be exposed for what they are, and their lies for how they are crafted.
They cannot be "debated", for at this stage that is all the deniers crave, the legitimacy of
debate. A debate presupposes that there are two "sides", each with a legitimate viewpoint, and
that there is agreement on a common set of ground rules to discuss their honest differences.
Deborah Lipstadt, author of Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and
Memory, says that to debate deniers is like "trying to nail Jell-O to a wall. They lie, they
fabricate". Furthermore, it is common practice to refuse to debate hatemongers. Jewish
organizational representatives, will not meet with Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members, David
Duke, or Louis Farrakhan because to do so suggests that their hatred is somehow not so
serious, when it is really beyond the pale of what is acceptable. To debate deniers is to give
them what they want – an image that allows them to hide their hatemongering behind a façade
of pseudoscience and pseudohistory. Of course, refusal to debate the deniers allows them to
suggest that the "externinationists" have something to hide. But the response is easy: credible
historians debate the Holocaust all the time – just not with Nazis.
Because the deniers hide behind credible scholarship (they suggest that any revision or new
insight by the real historians prove that their inquiries are just as valid), it is important that
people know the networks of white supremacy, Nacism, and fascism through which they
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operate. By and large, the people behind the Institute for Historical Review have
demonstrable neo-Nazi ties and Nazi affections.
It is also essential that their lies be exposed, not as debate, but so that people can understand
how easily they take a partial truth and use to distort reality. Take, for example, the claim that
Anne Frank's diary was a fraud because a copy of the manuscript had writing in ballpoint pen,
a 1951 invention. What the deniers don't say is that this writing consisted of emendations
made later by her father, and that the original edition of the diary was published in 1947.
Or take the matter of the gas chambers and the properties of Zyklon B gas. The deniers say
that there was more Prussian blue residue of the gas on the delousing chambers than on the
killing chambers, and that this should not be. What they do not say is that the person who
wrote this report for them, Fred Leuchter, was indicted and convicted in Boston for practicing
engineering without a license (his credentials were only a B.A. in history). Nor do they say
that, because people were actually killed in the chambers much quicker than lice, there was
less time for the gas to adhere to the walls, and thus to produce any residue. Nor do the
deniers – who point out the explosive properties of the gas and pictures of Nazi guards
smoking nearby – mention that it was deadly to humans at .03 grams per cubic meter, used to
kill people at 12 to 20 grams per cubic meter, but explosive at only 67.2 grams and above.
As the deniers craft new lies out of the minutiae of the day-to-day operation of the
extermination plans and practices of Nazi Germany, 9 research must be done regarding to each
and every new lie, again not as debate, but as exposure of their lack of credibility and
methods of deceit.
In addition to education and exposure of the deniers and their handiwork, a more
difficult but probably more important need is to combat their political agenda in its
entire range. Holocaust denial is an ideological lubricant for the growing forces in
the post-Communist era who want to make the world – especially Europe in the
twenty-first century – have some of the more devastating and brutal attributes of
twentieth-century fascism. Holocaust denial does not exist in a vacuum; it is a
political phenomenon which uses antisemitic canards as building blocks. A successful
strategy to combat it requires an acknowledgment that the entire structure is
problematic, not just those parts that defame the dead.
9
Regarding the crematoria, Yehuda Bauer writes, "[T]he incinerators at Auschwitz were built to
cremate nine corpses per hour. There were forty-six ovens and, at peak times, fifty-two, which were in
operation ten to twelve hours per day. Thus there was a potential possibility of cremating 4,043,520
corpses during the two years the incinerators were operational." For complete references exposing the
deniers' claims, see Kenneth S. Stern, Holocaust Denial (New York: American Jewish Committee,
1993), pp. 58-81.
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Kenneth S. Stern, “Denial of the Holocaust: An Antisemitic Political Assault,” Antisemitism
in America Today: Outspoken Experts Explode the Myths, Jerome A. Chanes (Ed.), Carol
Publishing, New York, 1995, 242-257.
With the help of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, Inc
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