Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time (38 page)

3. Open hatred of opponents. Because these opponents (actually "enemies" in the extremists' eyes) are seen as a part of or sympathizers with "The Conspiracy," they deserve hatred and contempt.

4. Little faith in the democratic process. Mainly because most believe "The Conspiracy" has such influence in the U.S. government, and therefore extremists usually spurn compromise.

5. Willingness to deny basic civil liberties to certain fellow citizens, because enemies deserve no liberties.

6. Consistent indulgence in irresponsible accusations and character assassination.

The Core and the Lunatic Fringe of Holocaust Denial

The development of the Holocaust denial movement has striking parallels with the development of other fringe movements. Since deniers are not consciously modeling themselves after, for example, the creationists, we may be tracking an ideological pattern common to fringe groups trying to move into the mainstream:

1. Early on, the movement includes a wide diversity of thought and members representing the extreme fringes of society, and it has little success in entering the mainstream (creationism in the 1950s; denial in the 1970s).

2. As the movement grows and evolves, some members attempt to disassociate themselves and their movement from the radical fringe and try to establish scientific or scholarly credentials (creationism in the 1970s when it became "creation-science"; denial in the 1970s with the founding of IHR).

3. During this drive toward acceptability, emphasis moves away from antiestablishment rhetoric and toward a more positive statement of beliefs (creationists abandoned the antievolution tactic and adopted "equal-time" arguments; IHR has broken with Carto and generally deniers are trying to shed their racist, antisemitic reputation).

4. To enter public institutions such as schools, the movement will use the First Amendment and claim that its "freedom of speech" is being violated when its views are not allowed to be heard (creationists legislated equal-time laws in several states in the 1970s and 1980s; Ziindel’s Canadian "free speech" trials [see figure 19]; and Bradley Smith's advertisements in college newspapers).

5. To get the public's attention, the movement tries to shift the burden of proof from itself to the establishment, demanding "just one proof" (creationists ask for "just one fossil" that proves transitional forms exist; deniers demand "just one proof
¹
' that Jews were killed in gas chambers).

The Holocaust denial movement has its extremes, and members of its lunatic fringe commonly hold neo-Nazi and white supremacist views. Holocaust denier and self-proclaimed white separatist Jack Wikoff, for example, publishes
Remarks
out of Aurora, New York. "Talmudic Jewry is at war with humanity," Wikoff explains. "Revolutionary communism and International Zionism are twin forces working toward the same goal: a despotic world government with the capital in Jerusalem" (1990). Wikoff also publishes statements such as this one, made in a letter from "R.T.K." from California: "Under Hitler and National Socialism, the German troops were taught White racism and never has this world seen such magnificent fighters.
Our job is re-education with the facts of genetics and history"
(1990). Interestingly,
Remarks
is endorsed by Bradley Smith, and Wikoff reviews books
for JHR.

Another denier newsletter,
Instauration,
featured in its January 1994 issue an article titled "How to Cut Violent Crime in Half: An Immodest Proposal," with no byline. The author's solution is vintage Nazi:

There are 30 million blacks in the U.S., half of them male and about one-seventh of the males in the 16 to 26 age bracket, the violent sector of the black population. Half of 30 million is 15 million. One-seventh of 15 million is a little more than 2 million. This tells us that 2 million blacks, not 30 million, are committing the crimes. The Soviet Union had gulag populations that ran as high as 10 million at various times during the Stalin era. The U.S. with much more advanced technology should be able to contain and run camps that hold at least 20% of that number. Negroes not on drugs and with no criminal record would be released from the camps once psychological and genetic tests found no traces of violent behavior. As for most detainees, on their 27th birthday all but the most incorrigible "youths" would be let out, leaving room for the new contingent of 16-year-olds that would be replacing them. (p. 6)

The National Socialist German Workers Party, Foreign Organization (NSDAP/AO), hailing from Lincoln, Nebraska, publishes a bimonthly newspaper,
The New Order.
Here one can order swastika pins, flags, armbands, keychains, and medallions; SS songs and speeches; "White Power" T-shirts; and all manner of books and magazines promoting white power, neo-Nazis, Hitler, and antisemitism. The July/August 1996 issue, for instance, explains that "COMPLETE GLOBAL EXTINCTION of the NEGROID RACE (due to AIDS infection) will occur NO LATER than the year 2022 A.D." A happy face sits below this "good" news, with the slogan "Have a Nazi Day!" About Auschwitz, the reader is told, "With systematic German precision, each and every death was recorded and categorized. The small number of deaths over a three-year period is actually a testament to how humane, clean and healthy the conditions were at the SS labor camp in Poland!" The problem, of course, is that "the yids will use the truth to support THEIR evil lies and paranoid persecution complex" (p. 4).

Mark Weber, David Irving, and company have actively distanced themselves from this side of Holocaust denial. Weber, for instance, has protested, "Why is this relevant? [Lew] Rollins used to work for IHR.
Remarks
is on the cusp. They used to be more-or-less revisionist. But [publisher Jack WikoffJ is now getting engaged more and more into racialist matters.
Instauration
is racialist. I suppose they're affiliated so far as they agree with some of the things we might put out. But there is no relationship" (1994b). Yet these folks and others of their ilk also call themselves "Holocaust revisionists," and their literature is filled with references to standard denial arguments and to IHR Holocaust deniers. And, across the spectrum of Holocaust denial, Ernst Ziindel is acknowledged as the spiritual leader of the movement.

For example,
Tales of the Holohoax
is dedicated to Robert Faurisson and Ernst Ziindel and thanks Bradley Smith and Lew Rollins. After fourteen pages of gross cartoon depictions of Jews and the "Holohoax," the author states, "The wild fables about homicidal gas chambers loosely grouped under the Orwellian Newspeak heading of the 'Holocaust,' have become the informal state religion of the West. The government, the public schools and the corporate media promote the imposition of this morbid, funeral-home-of-the-mind on young people, to instill guilt as a form of group-libel/hate propaganda against the German people" (House 1989, p. 15).

Not all deniers are the same, but the fact remains that in all Holocaust denial there is a core of racist, paranoid, conspiratorial thinking that is clearly directed at Jews. It ranges from crass antisemitism to a more subtle and pervasive form of antisemitism that creeps into conversation as "Some of my best friends are Jews, but..." or "I'm not antisemitic, but..." followed by a litany of all the things "the Jews" are doing. This bias is what drives deniers to seek and find what they are looking for, and to confirm what they already believe. Why do they say the Holocaust never happened? Depending on whom you ask, interest in history, money, perversity, notoriety, ideology, politics, fear, paranoia, hate.

14

How We Know the Holocaust Happened

Debunking the Deniers

The word
debunking
has negative connotations for most people, yet when you are presenting answers to claims of an extraordinary nature (and Holocaust denial surely qualifies), then debunking serves a useful purpose. There is, after all, a lot of bunk to be debunked. But I am attempting to do far more than this. In the process of debunking the deniers, I demonstrate how we know that the Holocaust happened, and that it happened in a particular way that most historians have agreed upon.

There is no immutable canon of truth about the Holocaust that can never be altered, as many deniers believe. When you get into the study of the Holocaust, and especially when you start attending conferences and lectures and tracking the debates among Holocaust historians, you discover that there is plenty of infighting about the major and minor points of the Holocaust. The brouhaha over Daniel Goldhagen's 1996 book,
Hitler's Willing Executioners,
in which he argued that "ordinary" Germans and not just Nazis participated in the Holocaust, is testimony to the fact that Holocaust historians are anything but settled on exactly what happened, when, why, and how. Nonetheless, an abyss lies between the points that Holocaust historians are debating and those that Holocaust deniers are promoting—their denial of intentional genocide based primarily on race, of programmatic use of gas chambers and crematoria for mass murder, and of the killing of five to six million Jews.

Methodology of Holocaust Denial

Before addressing the three main axes of Holocaust denial, let us look for a moment at the deniers' methodology, their modes of argument. Their fallacies of reasoning are eerily similar to those of other fringe groups, such as creationists.

1. They concentrate on their opponents' weak points, while rarely saying anything definitive about their own position. Deniers emphasize the inconsistencies between eyewitness accounts, for example.

2. They exploit errors made by scholars who are making opposing arguments, implying that because a few of their opponents' conclusions were wrong,
all
of their opponents' conclusions must be wrong. Deniers point to the human soap story, which has turned out to be a myth, and talk about "the incredible shrinking Holocaust" because historians have reduced the number killed at Auschwitz from four million to one million.

3. They use quotations, usually taken out of context, from prominent mainstream figures to buttress their own position. Deniers quote Yehuda Bauer, Raul Hilberg, Arno Mayer, and even leading Nazis.

4. They mistake genuine, honest debates between scholars about certain points within a field for a dispute about the existence of the entire field. Deniers take the intentionalist-functionalist debate about the development of the Holocaust as an argument about whether the Holocaust happened or not.

5. They focus on what is not known and ignore what is known, emphasize data that fit and discount data that do not fit. Deniers concentrate on what we do not know about the gas chambers and disregard all the eyewitness accounts and forensic tests that support the use of gas chambers for mass murder.

Because of the sheer quantity of evidence about the Holocaust—so many years and so much of the world involved, thousands of accounts and documents, millions of bits and pieces—there is enough evidence that some parts can be interpreted as supporting the deniers' views. The way that deniers treat testimony from the postwar Nuremberg trials of Nazis is typical of their handling of evidence. On the one hand, deniers dismiss the Nuremberg confessions as unreliable because it was a military tribunal run by the victors. The evidence, Mark Weber claims, "consists largely of extorted confessions, spurious testimonies, and fraudulent documents. The postwar Nuremberg trials were politically motivated proceedings meant more to discredit the leaders of a defeated regime than to establish truth" (1992, p. 201). Neither Weber nor anyone else has proven that most of the confessions were extorted, spurious, or fraudulent. But even if the deniers were able to prove that
some
of them were, this does not mean that they
all
were. On the other hand, deniers cite Nuremberg trial testimony whenever it supports their arguments. For example, although deniers reject the testimony of Nazis who said there was a Holocaust and they participated in it, deniers accept the testimony of Nazis such as Albert Speer who said they knew nothing about it. But even here, deniers shy away from a deeper analysis. Speer indeed stated at the trials that he did not know about the extermination program. But his Spandau diary speaks volumes:

December 20, 1946.
Everything comes down to this: Hitler always hated the Jews; he made no secret of that at any time. He was capable of tossing off quite calmly, between the soup and the vegetable course, "I want to annihilate the Jews in Europe. This war is the decisive confrontation between National Socialism and world Jewry. One or the other will bite the dust, and it certainly won't be us." So what I testified in court is true, that I had no knowledge of the killings of Jews; but it is true only in a superficial way. The question and my answer were the most difficult moment of my many hours on the witness stand. What I felt was not fear but shame that I as good as knew and still had not reacted; shame for my spiritless silence at the table, shame for my moral apathy, for so many acts of repression. (1976, p. 27)