In the Shadow of World War II
Denial’s Initial Steps
The end of World War II meant the defeat of Adolf Hitler’s dream of a Third Reich. Most rational people assumed it also meant the end of fascism as an ideology. As long as fascism could be linked with Nazism, and Nazism, in turn, could be linked with the horrors of the Final Solution, then both would remain thoroughly discredited. There were those, however, who were not willing to abandon these political systems. They knew that the only means of trying to revive them would be to separate them from the Holocaust and the multitude of atrocities that accompanied it. Nowhere would this effort be more evident in the immediate aftermath of the war than in France, where Holocaust denial found some of its earliest proponents.
Within a few years after the liberation of Europe the effort to minimize the scope and intensity of the Nazi atrocities was overtaken by claims that the death of six million Jews was not only greatly exaggerated but a fabrication. Though the earliest deniers did not become part of a larger group, their tactics and arguments have since become integral elements of contemporary Holocaust denial. They made little, if any efforts, to disguise their antisemitism.
In 1947 Maurice Bardèche, a prominent French fascist, began a concerted attack on Allied war propaganda. He also engaged in a vigorous defense of the Nazis. In his first book, Letter to François Mauriac, Bardèche strongly defended the politics of collaboration. In his second, Nuremberg or the Promised Land, he contended that at least a portion of the evidence regarding the concentration camps had been falsified and that the deaths that had occurred there were primarily the result of war-related privations, including starvation and illness. Bardèche claimed that since the end of the war the world had been “duped by history.”{1} According to Bardèche, Nazi documents that spoke of the “final solution of the Jewish problem” were really referring to the proposed transfer of Jews to ghettos in the east.
His fundamental argument was not only that the Nazis were not guilty of atrocities, but that the true culprits were the Jews themselves. Jews, both those who died and those who survived, deserved no sympathy because they had helped to instigate the war by supporting the Treaty of Versailles. He argued that it was morally wrong to hold German soldiers or officers of any rank culpable for following orders. Nazi Germany had to defeat the Communists in order to survive. A strong state with a strong and loyal army were absolute necessities for it to do so. The Nuremberg trials were both morally and legally wrong because they punished Germany for having done what was needed in order to defeat Stalin. For Bardèche the Allies’ bombing policy constituted a war crime.
While some of these notions, particularly those regarding the Versailles treaty and the Allied bombing policy, were being articulated by others, including isolationists in the United States, Bardèche was the first to contend that the pictorial and documentary evidence of the murder process in the camps had actually been falsified. He was also the first to argue that the gas chambers were used for disinfection—not annihilation.
Bardèche’s dubious credentials—he remained a committed fascist all his life—made him a controversial figure in denial circles. Despite his contentions that the Holocaust was a myth and that the Nazis were wrongly implicated, Bardèche has never been openly embraced by contemporary deniers. That has not kept them from adopting his ideas. Though they use his arguments, they rarely mention him by name because of his political views, about which he was always quite explicit. Indeed, he began his book What Is Fascism? with the unequivocal declaration: “I am a fascist writer.”
In Bardèche’s second book he laid out his objectives, which remain, almost verbatim, the credo of contemporary deniers: “I am not defending Germany. I am defending the truth…. I know a lie has been put about, I know a systematic distortion of facts exists…. We have been living with a falsification: it captures the imagination.”{2} Today deniers protest that they are neither for Germany nor against Jews. They are not out to defend Hitler or castigate the Allies. They are interested only in revising history so that it will convey the truth. But such claims notwithstanding, examination of their methods and arguments reveals that since Bardèche’s work, truth has been the antithesis of their enterprise.
The next assault on the history of the war also emanated from France. In 1948 Paul Rassinier, a former Communist and a Socialist who had been interned in the concentration camps of Buchenwald and Dora, published Le Passage de la Ligne (Crossing the line). This was the first in a series of books he would write during the next two decades intended to show that survivors’ claims about the behavior of the Nazis, particularly in relation to the atrocities, could not be trusted. Rassinier, who became a member of the Communist party in 1922 when he was sixteen, left the Communists in the mid-1980s and joined the Socialists. When the war broke out he became part of the resistance. Eventually he was captured and sent to Buchenwald. On liberation in 1945, he returned to France and was elected a Socialist member of the National Assembly, where he served for a year. Shortly thereafter he began a prolific publishing career, the bulk of which was devoted to vindicating the Nazis by proving that the atrocity accusations against them were inflated and unfair. Given his earlier role in the French resistance, his arguments have the flavor of the utterances of a repentant sinner.
His books are a mixture of blatant falsehoods, half-truths, quotations out of context, and attacks on the “Zionist establishment.” In 1977 Rassinier’s major books concerning the Holocaust were reissued in one volume, Debunking the Genocide Myth, by the Noontide Press, which publishes neo-Nazi material and is connected with the California-based headquarters of the contemporary deniers, the Institute for Historical Review. The first part of this composite volume is made up of his first two works, Crossing the Line and The Lie of Ulysses, in which he focused on the concentration camps and the behavior of both inmates and Nazis administrators. He set out two propositions: Survivors exaggerate what happened to them, and it was not the SS that was responsible for the terrors of the camps but the inmates to whom they entrusted the running of the camps. He dismissed as gossip the testimony of survivors who claimed they had witnessed atrocities and denigrated the credibility of their assertions regarding the number of Jews who had been killed. “Concerning figures the ‘witnesses’ have said and written the most improbable things. Concerning the implementation of the means of killing, also.”{3} He described concentration camp literature as “a collection of contradictory pieces of ill-natured gossip.”{4}
Rassinier initially limited his argument regarding the killing process to denying that there was a policy of annihilation. People may have been killed, he declared, but those who conducted such “exterminations” were acting on their own and not in the name of “a state order in the name of a political doctrine.”{5} Rassinier sought to absolve the National Socialist leadership from responsibility for the gas chambers, claiming there appeared to have been no official Nazi policy of gas exterminations. Though Rassinier would eventually deny the existence of gas chambers altogether, in these early works he stopped short of doing so and posited that there probably had been exterminations by gas, but not as many as had been claimed. At this time even the most extreme neo-Nazi groups were not denying that gas chambers had been used to murder Jews. Instead of denying Nazi atrocities, however, they defended them—one of the major distinctions between the earliest deniers and more recent ones. Bardèche, Rassinier, Barnes, App, and others among the first generation of deniers differ from those who followed them. The first group sought to vindicate the Nazis by justifying their antisemitism. While they argued that the atrocities were exaggerated or even falsified, they also contended that whatever was done to the Jews had been deserved because the Jews were Germany’s enemy. Distorting the truth, they blamed Jews for Germany’s financial and political plight and made the wildly exaggerated claim that Jews had been the prime beneficiaries of the chaos of Weimar. Jews were disloyal citizens, likely to be subversives and spies.