Holocaust Denial: Will it Cast a Shadow on Holocaust Memory in the New Millennium?

Deborah E. Lipstadt

 

 

In addressing the topic of Holocaust denial it is crucial to begin with an assessment of the degree to which deniers have succeeded in spreading their beliefs. What is the current situation? Is it sha’at dahak, a crucial moment, or are we overreacting to a perceived, but not necessarily real, threat?

 

There exists little evidence that the deniers have made significant progress. Surveys taken in both Europe and in North America have consistently shown that deniers have convinced only an infinitesimally small number of people to believe that the Holocaust is a hoax. Despite the fact that the various surveys which have been conducted over recent years show exceptionally small numbers of people subscribing to the pseudo-theories propagated by Holocaust deniers, Jews are often skeptical of these results. In fact, Jews are often skeptical of results of surveys which demonstrate that there has been a general diminution of anti-Semitism, as has been the case in the United States. They argue that those who are interviewed in these surveys know that it is “politically incorrect” to express anti-Semitic views or to deny the Holocaust.

 

Whereas it once was acceptable to express an open hostility to Jews, in the postHolocaust world those sentiments are less acceptable. Respondents will, therefore, camouflage their true feelings.

As a result, many Jews contend that the results of these surveys do not correspond to reality, i.e. the true extent of anti-Semitism is far higher than the surveys demonstrate. Even if we allow that this may be an accurate assessment and that there is more anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial extant than the most sophisticated survey demonstrates, there still seems to be a tremendous gap between Jews’ perception of the extent of anti-Semitism and the reality of it. So too it is with Holocaust denial. When I assure audiences that Holocaust denial is not an existing threat, my assurances are treated by the audience with great skepticism despite the fact that there is no evidence that deniers have achieved significant inroads among the general populace. In fact, the opposite seems to be the case.

 

The construction of memorials and museums, the proliferation of courses and the appearance of ever increasing numbers of books on the topic all confirm that the Holocaust, and not the denial thereof, has increasingly become a topic of interest for portions for the general population. [It has become so, at the very least, for that portion of the population which reads books and attends museums. While not the majority, that portion of the population includes the intellectual and the decision making elite.] From the Mall in Washington, D.C., which is but a mile from the White House, to what has quickly become known as the Liebeskind Museum in Berlin, the Holocaust has found and, more importantly, has been given, a prominent place in the “popular” culture of North America and much of the European continent. For example, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has in its six years of existence consistently welcomed two million visitors a year, eighty percent of whom are not Jewish.

 

Were there extensive doubt about the existence of the Holocaust this would not be the case. One may not always agree with the manner in which the Holocaust is presented in these varied venues, e.g. as one of a long string of genocides. There is, however, no debate about whether it happened or not. The primary locale for such debates is on the deniers’ websites and on the pages of their journals. Another equally discredited source of Holocaust denial are the far-right extremists who have adopted and disseminate these pseudo-arguments. One need not look only at museums and books for evidence of the place the Holocaust holds in the popular imagination.

 

In recent years both government leaders and the media have frequently chosen the example of the Holocaust in order to contextualize their arguments. During the recent military campaign in Kosovo political leaders and journalists repeatedly drew analogies to the Holocaust. They compared what was being done to the Kosovars with what was done during the Holocaust. Some journalists called on political leaders to be sure that this time the world would not sit “idly by” as it had in the 1930s and 1940s.

 

Political leaders and journalists would not have used these analogies, however correct or incorrect they may have been (and many, it should be noted, were gross exaggerations) had they thought that they would not resonate with the general populace or at the least, an important segment thereof. They certainly would not have relied on comparisons to the Holocaust as a means of bolstering their current cause if they believed significant numbers of people doubted the truth of the Holocaust. Let me digress for but a moment.

 

It is important to stress that I refer to outright denial and not to those attempts by some German historians and politicians to relativize the Holocaust. These historians and politicians have argued, as part of what became known in the 1980s as the historians’ struggle, that not only was there nothing unique about the Holocaust but that the third Reich was “only” emulating Stalin’s treatment of the peasants and others when it persecuted and annihilated the Jews. Some among them, e.g. Ernst Nolte, even attributed Hitler’s anti-Jewish policies and statements in 1939 to provocative remarks by foreign Jews.

 

However much one might disagree with their historical analysis, their views do not fall within the confines of Holocaust denial. Yet even as we note that the relativizers are not deniers, they do, it should also be acknowledged, make life more comfortable for deniers. Deniers use portions of the relativizers’ arguments for their own purposes and hide behind the relativizers’ respectable credentials.

 

If it is indeed the case that when we speak of denial we are talking of a phenomenon that has little impact, why then should we be concerned about Holocaust denial and the deniers? Would it not be wiser to simply dismiss them as irrelevant? Why should we worry about a group which disseminates a pseudo-historical theory which contravenes all manner of evidence and scores of witnesses? Might it not be strategically wiser and certainly more efficient to just ignore them and the false theories they propagate? Deniers can be described as the historical equivalent of flat earth theorists. As such, why should they be worthy of our time or our concerns?

 

Astronomers and earth scientists do not expend time and energy contending with people who believe the sun revolves around the earth. Similarly, biologists do not write books dedicated to refuting “creationists,” i.e. those who argue that the world was created as it is explicitly described in the book of Genesis. Should we not emulate the stance of these scientists who dismiss as irrelevant the flat earthers, the creationists, and others who propose equally crazy pseudo-theories which are suspended in air and contravene all evidence?

 

NASA, the American governmental agency in charge of space exploration, does not expend efforts refuting those who charge that the various moon landings actually took place on a stage set in Nevada. They do not consider them worthy of their time or their energies.

There is also a strategic argument to be made for ignoring deniers. When we confront them there is always the danger that in some measure we are inadvertently granting them the publicity they so crave.

 

By overreacting to the threat posed by Holocaust deniers we grant them the credibility that they have not yet been able to achieve on their own. It would be tragic if those of us who are interested in both exploring and preserving the history of the Holocaust would be inadvertently responsible for helping deniers achieve something that they have never been able to accomplish through their own efforts: attaining the status of a significant contemporary danger.

 

To act as if Holocaust denial is currently a major threat to truth and memory is to accord the deniers more credit than they deserve and, in a manner of speaking, is to assist them in their quest to spread their pseudo-history. Nonetheless, despite the fact that their theories are no more plausible than those proposed by the flat earthers, I believe it an error to ignore them. If deniers have achieved so little, why then do I believe it would be a mistake to ignore them? The reason we must not ignore them has less to do with the situation today and far more to do with the future.

 

It is my conviction that deniers do not represent, to borrow a phrase from American legal parlance, a clear and present danger. The threat they pose is not one whose results will be evident in the not so distant future. Their impact will be limited as long as there are those alive who can say, “This is my story. This is what happened to me.”

 

Deniers find survivors an impediment because they can speak in the first person singular. My concerns are focused on a time, one which, we must sadly admit, is not in the far off distant future. When first hand witnesses are no longer alive, deniers will find it much easier to ply their wares. But that fight must take very specific forms and be directed at a specific audience. Its objective must not be to try to change the mind of those who propagate Holocaust denial.

 

I do not believe that we should invest time in either debating deniers or convincing them that they are wrong. Deniers are, as is evident to anyone who has examined any of their publications or websites, anti-Semites. Anti-Semitism is a form of prejudice. Prejudice means that a person has made up their mind prior to hearing the facts [pre-judge]. They do not wish to be “confused with the facts.” One cannot argue in a rational fashion with a prejudiced person.

In fact, to use rational arguments in order to convince a prejudiced person that their view is wrong is to suggest that their beliefs have a rational basis. Moreover, to enter a debate with them is to elevate them to an “other side.” Denial is not an iconoclastic view of history. It is complete and total fiction, fiction created with a diabolical objective.

Moreover, deniers falsify, fabricate and manipulate data at will. Anything which contradicts their preconceived notions they ignore. Debating someone who adopts such tactics is an impossibility. Who then should the audience be? Not the deniers themselves but the many people who, having little if any knowledge of the Holocaust, might be inclined to fall prey to their views. For example, a person who might, after exploring their website, emerge asking: “How do we know there really were gas chambers? How do we know the Diary of Anne Frank is not a hoax? How do we reach the figure six million?” Confused after having read all sorts of fraudulent information disseminated by deniers, they must be given the facts. In other words, when fighting the deniers our audience should not be the deniers themselves but should be their potential audience.

 

The best way of accomplishing this goal, of course, is to educate people about the facts of the event and not to have to wait to undo the damage wrought by their encounter with deniers. Historians must ensure that people are aware of this phenomenon so that upon encountering it they understand its roots, modus operandi, and ultimate objective. That objective is not simply “looney” history. Holocaust deniers have, by and large, a distinct political agenda. They attempt in a variety of ways to “resurrect” the reputation and possibly the political future of National Socialism.

 

The only way of doing so is to strip it of the worst blot on its record, the Holocaust. And how should this fight be waged? Not by “proving” that the Holocaust happened. We should fight Holocaust denial by exposing the absurdity of the deniers’ charges. The best vehicle to be used in doing so is not, in fact, the testimony of survivors but the documents left to us by the perpetrators.

 

Those documents can be used to corroborate personal testimony. The personal word of the survivor has an emotional impact that cannot be matched. The voice of the witness is emotionally powerful and can convey the horror of the event in a way that nothing else can. Yet, because deniers make all sorts of pseudoscientific and pseudo-historical claims, the most efficacious way to demolish those claims is with the words and the documents of the perpetrators themselves.

 

Survivors’ testimony can then serve to buttress the conclusions we reach from the documents. This process of relying on different types and sources of proof, often called triangulation, is the most substantial manner of demolishing the deniers arguments.

Finally, we must recognize that there is no need to answer every one of their charges. If that were our strategy there would be, to quote Ecclesiastes, “no end to the matter.” But some of the primary charges made by the deniers can be easily answered. For example, deniers stress their claim that there were no gas chambers. Not only can proof of their existence be provided but the specious and untenable nature of the deniers’ claims can also be overwhelmingly demonstrated. Destroying that claim obviates the necessity to answer many of the other claims made by deniers.

 

In waging this fight we must ultimately recognize two things: there is something unbelievable about the Holocaust and, so too, there is something quite appealing about denial. Even when all aspects of the Holocaust are explicitly documented and understood there still remains, even for the most experienced scholar, something about it that beggars the imagination.

 

Even with all the research that has been done about the Holocaust, there is something about it which remains “beyond belief.” Consequently, there are people who might more easily fall prey to the deniers’ claims. That may be why some scholars who have written about this event have used the via negativa to try to explain to their readers how the Holocaust could have happened. In other words, rather than try to “explain” what made the Holocaust possible — a task they still find impossible — they identify those elements without which it would have been impossible, e.g. centuries of Christian anti-Semitism, a world wide depression, a sentiment in Germany that the country had been “stabbed in the back” at the end of World War I, a Versailles treaty which left the democratic Weimar government financially and politically burdened, Hitler and a German populace willing to accept National Socialist ideology in its entirety.

There is also something appealing about Holocaust denial even to “good” people who are not attracted to conspiratorial and anti-Semitic theories. I know of no one who would not prefer to live in a world where a Holocaust would be an impossibility. So too, I know of no one who would not prefer to live in a world where all sorts of destructive acts — from sexual abuse of children to genocide — never happened. The problem, of course, is that we do not live in such a world.

 

Deniers seduce well intentioned but ill informed and unsuspecting individuals by offering them the opportunity to live in a “repaired” world. Deniers seek to convince these individuals that the Holocaust is a myth. Deniers take advantage of the unprecedented horror of the event and the fact that it is, in some measure, “beyond belief” to achieve their goals.

 

In sum then, we must fight denial but not fight with the deniers. We must recognize that they are a danger, but a limited danger. Even as we explore and expose this phenomenon we must not elevate it in importance. And we must engage in this effort with the facts. The facts of this event constitute the still small voice which will do the most to protect truth and memory from the assault being waged against it.