THE DAILY NORTHWESTERN
April 4, 1991
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THE HOLOCAUST STORY: How Much is False?
The Case for Open Debate
By BRADLEY R. SMITH
THE CONTEMPORARY ISSUE
No subject enrages America's thought police more than Holocaust revisionism.
The politically correct line on the Holocaust story is, simply, it happened.
You don't debate "it." You do debate every other historical event of
course, but the Holocaust is an exception. If someone does express doubt
about some aspect of the Holocaust story, it's politically correct to
respond with outrage, contempt and guilt-by-association smear tactics.
We used to call that behavior McCarthy-ite. Now we say it's "progressive."
The Holocaust lobby claims that it is a social good when ideology replaces
free inquiry, intimidation represses open debate, and when the ideals
of the university itself are exchanged for intellectual taboos and not-so-secret
political agendas. Let's ask these people -- what makes such behavior
a social good? Who benefits?
THE HISTORICAL ISSUE
For half a century it has been asserted that during World War II the
German State had a policy to "exterminate" the Jews and other peoples
of Europe in execution gas chambers. This allegation was institutionalized
at the great Nuremberg trial, led by the Soviets and the U.S. While
the proceedings at Nuremberg were politically correct, the evidence
supports the then Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme court, Harlan Fiske
Stone, who called the Nuremberg court simply "a lynching party for Germans."
Mainline Holocaust historians are under considerable pressure from Revisionist
scholarship to address the more blatant examples of Holocaust fraud
and falsehood. Increasingly, academics are committing themselves to
publishing their own revisions of the orthodox Holocaust story. The
"rewriting" of the Holocaust story has begun in earnest.
Auschwitz
Arno J. Mayer, chaired professor of European history at Princeton University,
has written in his Why Did The Heavens Not Darken?, that
at Auschwitz more people died of "natural causes" than were killed.
Mayer is a Jew and himself a refugee from the Nazi regime. British historian
David Irving, perhaps the most widely read historian writing in English,
has called the Auschwitz death-camp story a "sinking ship" and states
that there were "no gas chambers at Auschwitz..." Yehuda Bauer, Director
of Holocaust Studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, states that
it is "patently false" that 4 million Jews and others were killed at
Auschwitz.
The Auschwitz State Museum has "revised" its half-century-old claim
that 4-million humans were killed there. The Museum now says maybe it
was 1 million. What documentary evidence does the Museum proffer for
the 1 million figure? None. The 4 million number was engraved in stone
at Auschwitz where it has been seen by millions of tourists. What to
do? A workman was ordered to chisel out the 4 million number. Nothing
to it, really. History in the making. But where have those 3 million
souls been the last 45 years? And why is no one celebrating?
The Leuchter Report contains the results of the first-ever
forensic examination of the alleged gas chambers at Auschwitz. The Report
is the work of Boston engineer Fred A. Leuchter. It concludes that no
mass gassings ever did or ever could have taken place in so-called gas
chambers. The chemical analysis used in the Report was performed by
the Alpha Analytical Laboratories in Ashland MA. Fred Leuchter has called
for an international commission of scientists and historians to investigate
the so-called gas chambers of Auschwitz.
Winston Churchill wrote his monumental six-volume history of World War
II without mentioning the "gas chambers" or the "extermination" of the
Jews. Maybe it slipped his mind. On the other hand, maybe not. Dwight
D. Eisenhower, in his memoir Crusade in Europe, also forgot
to mention the "gas chambers." Why wasn't the weapon used to murder
6 million Jews worthy of a passing reference? Was our future president
being "insensitive" to Jews?
"The Photographs"
We've all seen "The Photographs." Endlessly. Newsreel photos taken by
U.S. and British photographers at the liberation of the German camps,
and especially the awful scenes at Dachau, Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen.
We have seen them so many times over four decades we don't even have
to ask what "they" are. They're "The Photographs." These documents are
typically presented in a way where it is either stated or implied that
the scenes resulted from deliberate policies on the part of the Germans.
The documents are real. The uses to which they are put are base. There
was no German policy at any of those camps to deliberately kill the
internees. In the last months of the war Soviet armies were advancing
on Germany from the east. The British and U.S. air arms were destroying
every major city in Germany saturation bombing. Transportation, the
food distribution system and medical and sanitation services all broke
down. That was the purpose of the Allied bombing, which has been described
as the most barbarous form of warfare in Europe since the Mongol invasions.
It was successful.
Millions of refugees fleeing the Soviet armies were pouring into Germany.
The camps still under German control were overwhelmed with internees
from the eastern camps. By early 1945 the inmate population was swept
by malnutrition and by epidemics of typhus, typhoid, dysentery and chronic
diarrhea. Even the mortuary systems broke down. When the press entered
the camps with British and U.S. soldiers, they found the results of
all that. They took "The Photographs."
The Allied propaganda machine laboring furiously to produce anti-German
hate propaganda. "The Photographs" became their most successful tools.
Today the same tools are still being used to "educate" Americans. Still,
at Buchenwald, Dachau and Bergen-Belsen tens of thousands of healthy
internees were liberated. They were there in the camps when "The Photographs"
were taken. There are newsreels of these internees walking through camp
streets laughing and talking. Others show joyful, well-fed internees
throwing their caps in the air and cheering their liberators. You haven't
seen those films and photographs, you say? Why do you think that is?
Does it suggest to you questions, about the camps that are not politically
correct to ask?
The Dachau "Gas Chambers"
In the first years after the war there was much eyewitness testimony
about "mass gassings" at Dachau. In his summing up for the prosecution
at Nuremberg, Sir Hartley Shawcross, chief prosecutor for Great Britain,
spoke of murder "conducted like some mass production industry in the
gas chamber (s) of... Dachau...."
Today no responsible scholar attempts to claim that there were mass
gassing at Dachau. Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center
for Holocaust Studies, states simply: "There were no gas chambers at
Dachau."
The Jewish Soap Story
This ugly rumor has been repeated endlessly in our media and universities.
First Amendment scholar Nat Hentoff can write seriously that he has
seen human soap made from the "tissues of murdered Jews" displayed on
stone tablets in the Chamber of the Holocaust in Jerusalem. Israeli
historian Yehuda Bauer andJewish-American historians like Raul Hilberg
and Deborah Lipstadt all state that this anti-German hate story is untrue.
Lipstadt writes: "The Nazis never used the bodies of Jews, or for that
matter anyone else, for the production of soap."
"Eyewitness" Testimony
As documentary "proofs" mass-murder of the European Jews fall by the
wayside, Holocaust historians depend increasingly on "eyewitness" testimonies
to support their theories. Many of these testimonies are ludicrously
unreliable.
Shmuel Krakowski is archives director for Yad Vashem, which is the international
center for Holocaust documentation in Jerusalem. Krakowski states that
more than 10,000 "eyewitness" testimonies about German atrocities against
Jews have been shown to be false at Yad Vashem alone!
"Human Skin" Lamp Shades
Uncounted Hollywood epics and "eyewitness" testimonies accuse Germans
of skinning Jews to make lamp shades from their hides.
General Lucius D. Clay, Military Governor of the U.S. Occupation Zone
of Germany (1947-49) discovered that the infamous "human skin" lamp
shades found at Buchenwald were actually made of "goat" skin. Which
of your professors has denounced this cheap anti-German bigotry for
what it is?
THE FREE INQUIRY ISSUE
Students and professors alike should be free to investigate the Holocaust
story in the same way they are free to examine every other historical
event. This is not a radical point of view. The premises for it were
worked out three centuries ago during a little something called the
Enlightenment. The tools used to arrive at historical understanding
are useless without the rights of Free Inquiry and Open Debate. We are
told that it is "anti-Jewish" to question orthodox assertions about
German criminality. Yet we find that it is Jews themselves like Mayer,
Bauer, Hier, Hilberg, Lipstadt and others who beginning to challenge
the establishment Holocaust story. The charges of anti-Semitism are
oftentimes, in fact, used merely to suppress Revisionist scholarship
and the free exchange of ideas necessary to judge its merits.
Students should be encouraged to question who benefits from promoting
false Holocaust stories on the one hand and using charges of "anti-Semitism'
to suppress free inquiry into those stories on the other.
It is difficult to understand why the concept of Free Inquiry should
be so alarming to those who manage our universities. Free Inquiry makes
no promise to Revisionism that it does not make to every other school
of thought. The promise of Free Inquiry is that it will demonstrate
what is true and false in Revisionist scholarship at the time that it
does so for the orthodox Holocaust literature.
Free Inquiry does not follow a political or ideological line or it isn't
free. Free Inquiry is an equal opportunity ideal. Christian, Jew and
Moslem, Black and White, professor and student and layman -- it's there
for everyone. Free Inquiry holds out its arms to each one of us, urging
us to embrace it, use it, exhaust it in our passion for understanding.
Understanding, however, unlike Free Inquiry, promises nothing. That's
why there are professors willing to denounce a scholar while refusing
to exchange ideas with him. They would rather see certain books suppressed
than have to face the awful possibility of coming to understand something
that they have committed their lives and their careers to not understanding.
THE MORAL ISSUE
When we suppress open debate on the Holocaust we promote bad history
and undermine the traditionally humane values of the university. Bad
history replaces historical understanding with self-righteous nationalism
both here and abroad. It encourages us to scape-goat old enemies and
to seek vengeance rather than reconciliation. (It isn't easy, is it,
to "reconcile" ourselves with a people that skins Jews and cooks them?).
The suppression of Free Inquiry into the Holocaust story corrupts public
discourse institutionalizes double standards of justice, legitimizes
charges of guilt-by-association and a moral cowardice in facing our
own limitations as individuals and as a people.
Our refusal to allow critical examination of even the most bizarre accusations
made against Germans encourages men and women to bear false witness,
betray their chosen professions, and contributes to the vulgarization
of Jewish suffering.
Enough is enough!
--Bradley R. Smith
This article is sponsored by Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust
(CODOH). If you would like to access Revisionist scholarship on the
Holocaust, or arrange for a speaker to appear on your campus, call [presently
this is a fax number only] (209) 733 2653, or write CODOH PO box 3267
Visalia CA 93278. (Member: National Association Against Censorship:
National Association for College Activities: Free Press Association)
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