Ultimately it was arguments such as these that conclusively demonstrated that Rassinier’s Holocaust denial was no more than a guise for the expression of a classic form of antisemitism. Though Rassinier’s work may be “distinguished” by its Holocaust denial, it is in fact no different from the myriad of antisemitic tirades that have been published over the centuries. His invective about Jewish power and influence and his conviction that Jews have the most sinister intentions qualify him for the company of a host of antisemites.
His are the observations of a man whose work is cited by all subsequent deniers as the formative influence in their thinking. Rassinier’s and Bardèche’s contributions to the evolution of Holocaust denial in France would eventually be magnified by the work of their protégé Robert Faurisson, a former professor at the University of Lyons, who today is one of the leading Holocaust deniers. But shades of French fascism and Holocaust denial would also be found in the political arena, as exemplified by the policies and statements of Jean-Marie Le Pen and his political party, the National Front. They constitute Bardèche’s and Rassinier’s most important legacies and demonstrate that both fascism and Holocaust denial have found a sympathetic environment in contemporary France.
CHAPTER FOUR
The First Stirrings of Denial in America
Holocaust denial found a receptive welcome in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s—particularly among individuals known to have strong connections with antisemitic publications and extremist groups. Their Holocaust denial was preceded by their antisemitism.{1} Until the beginning of the 1970s Holocaust denial in the United States was primarily the province of these fringe, extremist, and racist groups, though they found unexpected support in a number of seemingly respectable circles.
The earliest deniers in the United States were extremely receptive to Paul Rassinier’s arguments that the Holocaust had been created by Jewish leaders in order to control the world’s finances and increase support for Israel. Like Rassinier they tried to demonstrate that it was statistically impossible for millions of Jews to have died. Their arguments were unsophisticated, crude, and often lacking in any attempt to prove their point. In 1952 W. D. Herrstrom, an American antisemite, declared in Bible News Flashes that there were five million illegal aliens in the United States, most of whom were Jews. These were the Jews who were supposed to have died in the Holocaust. “No use looking in Shickelgruber’s [Hitler’s] ovens for them. Walk down the streets of any American city. There they are.”{2} In 1959 James Madole, who published the racist National Renaissance Bulletin, wrote: “Although the World Almanac attests to the fact that fewer than 600,000 Jews ever lived in Germany the Jews persisted in their monstrous lie that Nazi Germany had cremated six million of their co-racials.”{3} Madole’s chicanery is easily exposed. While it is true that Germany’s Jewish population was less than six hundred thousand in 1933, most of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust were not German Jews. Benjamin H. Freedman, who provided the financial support for the antisemitic publication Common Sense, argued in 1959 that there were many million more Jews in the United States than Jews were willing to admit. These were the six million “allegedly put to death in furnaces and in gas chambers between 1939 and 1945.”{4} Offering an argument that would be echoed in the 1970s by a number of Holocaust deniers, including Arthur Butz of Northwestern University, Freedman contended that the American Jewish community was opposed to a question about religious affiliation on the census because it would reveal that the Jews who had “allegedly” died were actually in the United States.[1]
The well-known American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell called the Holocaust “a monstrous and profitable fraud.” He echoed Freedman’s notion that the six million “later died happily and richly in the Bronx, New York.” In June 1959, in an article entitled “Into the Valley of Death Rode the Six Million. Or Did They?” American antisemite Gerald L. K. Smith’s Cross and the Flag informed its readers that the six million Jews were in the United States.{5}
Such blatant attempts to confuse readers were typical of deniers’ behavior during the first two decades after the war. Ultimately most of these people had little impact because they could so easily be dismissed as extremists and right-wingers. Nonetheless their arguments eventually worked their way into the mainstream of Holocaust denial. In subsequent years their statistical claims would become if not more sophisticated then certainly more complicated.{6} Flagrant falsehoods would be entwined in complex arguments, confusing those who did not know the facts.
Not all the early deniers had overt associations with extremist groups. Consequently they were able to make some of their accusations in more mainstream publications. In the June 14, 1959, issue of the widely circulated Catholic weekly Our Sunday Visitor a letter writer claimed: “I was able to determine during six post-war years in Germany and Austria, there were a number of Jews killed, but the figure of a million was certainly never reached.”{7} Newspaper editors who received denial material from Boniface Press, the publishing outlet run by App, turned to the Anti-Defamation League to ask for clarification. One editor requested documentation demonstrating that Jews had really died.{8}
Harry Elmer Barnes was the most direct link between the two generations of American revisionists and the Holocaust deniers.{9} Some of his numerous books and articles, particularly those on Western civilization, were used as required texts through the 1960s at prestigious American universities, including Harvard and Columbia. Barnes also lectured widely at other universities throughout the United States, his arguments about needless American participation in World War I winning the admiration of many people in the United States and abroad, including the publisher of the Nation, Oswald Garrison Villard; the Socialist leader Norman Thomas; the journalist H. L. Mencken; and the historian Charles Beard. At one time he served as bibliographic editor of Foreign Affairs.{10}
But from the outset Barnes’s career was not without controversy. During World War I he had been an ardent advocate of the Allied cause. The material he submitted to the National Board for Historical Service, the principal vehicle for dissemination of pro-Allied propaganda by historians, was deemed “too violent to be acceptable,” and those involved in the effort described him as “one of the most violent sort of shoot-them-at-sunrise Chauvinists.”{11} But his views changed dramatically after the war. With the zeal of a convert, he moved to the isolationist, pro-German end of the political spectrum and stayed there for the rest of his life. Much of his work relied on polemics and flamboyant tactics. He so savaged advocates of the “orthodox” view of the war that even those who agreed with him recoiled from his reliance on ad hominem attacks.{12} When he publicly accused Bernadotte Schmitt, a prominent and well-respected historian at the University of Chicago, of adjusting his historical conclusions in order to advance his academic career, he evoked the ire of numerous academics, including revisionists. According to Barnes, Schmitt concluded that Germany was responsible for precipitating the war in order to obtain his prestigious university post. This kind of attack typified Barnes’s subsequent attacks on those who disagreed with him. He was convinced that his beliefs constituted objective truth; consequently anyone who took a different view was neither objective nor honest.
1
American Jewish organizations have traditionally opposed such a question because they believe it would violate the constitutional guarantee of the separation of church and state.