Ultimately App’s arguments are a composite of faulty assertions, manipulation of data, and above all, outright antisemitism. He has done more than just draw on preexisting antisemitic imagery. He has made a significant contribution to contemporary anti-Jewish propaganda in the United States and abroad. His distillation of Holocaust denial into these eight assertions, each of which plays on an antisemitic theme, has proven extremely useful to individuals and groups which not only deny the Holocaust but wish to portray the Jews as able to control American foreign policy for their own diabolical ends. It has also proved extremely efficacious for those who would delegitimize the existence of Israel.
Together App, Barnes, Rassinier, Bardèche, and Hoggan constitute the most significant figures in the evolution of the denial hoax. Those who followed them discarded some of their more blatant and vulgar arguments, learning how to render them in a slightly more oblique fashion. But with the fundamental text established, virtually all the rest would be commentary.
CHAPTER SIX
Deniaclass="underline" A Tool of the Radical Right
In the late 1960s and 1970s, neofascist organizations and political parties in Western Europe, especially in England, grew in number and strength. These groups—which vehemently opposed the presence in their countries of blacks, Asians, Arabs, Jews, and all non-Caucasian immigrants—were responsible for launching a series of violent attacks on immigrants, minority groups, and Jewish institutions. In England the neofascist National Front built its political agenda on opposition to the immigration of Africans and East Asians from Commonwealth countries. By 1977 it was polling close to a quarter of a million votes in national elections.
These groups, whose ideology embraced racism, ethnocentrism, and nationalism, faced a dilemma. Since World War II, Nazism in general and the Holocaust in particular had given fascism a bad name. Those who continued to argue after the war that Hitler was a hero and national socialism a viable political system, as these groups tended to do, were looked upon with revulsion. Consequently Holocaust denial became an important element in the fabric of their ideology. If the public could be convinced that the Holocaust was a myth, then the revival of national socialism could be a feasible option.
This effort to deny the Holocaust was materially assisted by the publication in 1974 of a twenty-eight-page booklet, Did Six Million Really Die? The Truth at Last, by Richard Harwood. Sent to all members of Parliament, a broad spectrum of journalists and academics, leading members of the Jewish community, and a wide array of public figures, for close to ten years it was the preeminent British work on Holocaust denial.{1} Within less than a decade, more than a million copies had been distributed in more than forty countries.{2} Because at first glance it seemed to be a sober scholarly effort, many outside the circle of deniers were confused by the claims it made. Deniers continually cite it as an authoritative source.
Given the pamphlet’s wide distribution, there was significant public curiosity about the identity of both the author and publisher. Richard E. Harwood was described as a writer who specialized in the political and diplomatic aspects of World War II and who was “at present with the University of London.” It did not take the British press long to discover that this was false. The University of London told the Sunday Times that Harwood was neither a staff member nor a student and was totally unknown to it; it returned all mail to Harwood marked “Addressee Unknown.”{3} In fact Richard Harwood was a pseudonym for Richard Verrall, the editor of Spearhead, the publication of the British right-wing neofascist organization the National Front. Did Six Million Really Die? is identical in format, layout, and printing with Spearhead.{4} Neither the National Front nor Verrall denied that he was the editor of the pamphlet.{5} In 1979, in a letter to the New Statesman, Verrall, who had a degree in history from the University of London, responding to articles on the Holocaust, reiterated the pamphlet’s basic arguments and defended its conclusions against attacks that had appeared in the British press. He did so despite the fact that most of his conclusions had already been shown to be false.{6} He made no attempt to challenge the assertion that he was the author, even though the article in the New Statesman specifically identified him as such. His letter to the magazine was described by the editors as one of “numerous mock-scholarly letters” it regularly received from Verrall and his cohorts.
In addition to concealing the author’s true identity, the publishers also attempted to camouflage their identity. Though the booklet listed the address of its publisher, Historical Review Press, the address was that of a vacant building whose landlord, the British press discovered, was Robin Beauclair, a farmer with established connections to the National Front and various other organizations all of which were dedicated to defending “racial purity.”{7} Asked by the press about the publication, he declared the Holocaust part of a network of “Jewish propaganda” and revealed his own deep-rooted antisemitism. “Don’t you know that we live under Jewish domination? The entire mass media is Jewish controlled. It is time that we as British people dictated our own destiny.”{8}
Not an original creation, this work was largely based on a small American book, The Myth of the Six Million, published in 1969 by Noontide Press, a subsidiary of the antisemitic Liberty Lobby. The American publication contained both an unsigned publisher’s foreword and an introduction by an E. L. Anderson, identified as a contributing editor to American Mercury, which by that time had become unabashedly antisemitic. The anonymous publisher was apparently Willis Carto, founder of the Liberty Lobby, Noontide Press, and the Institute for Historical Review. Carto had, as we shall see in a subsequent chapter, long-standing ties to a mélange of extremist right-wing political groups in the United States. (According to Carto’s former associates, E. L. Anderson was a pseudonym of his.{9}) The Myth of the Six Million also contained an appendix consisting of five articles that had originally appeared in the Carto-controlled American Mercury in 1967–68. They included App’s “The Elusive ‘Six Million,’” Barnes’s “Zionist Fraud,” Teressa Hendry’s “Was Anne Frank’s Diary a Hoax?”, “The Jews That Aren’t,” by Leo Heiman, “Paul Rassinier: Historical Revisionist,” by Herbert C. Roseman, and a review of Rassinier’s book by Harry Elmer Barnes.
The American publication was apparently written by David Hoggan, the Harvard Ph.D. whose work had influenced Harry Elmer Barnes. In 1969 he sued Noontide Press for damages, claiming authorship of The Myth of the Six Million.{10} (The book’s introduction described the author as a college professor who had written this booklet in 1960 but had been unable to obtain a publisher daring enough to take the risks involved. It claimed that he could not reveal his identity because he wanted “one day [to] retire on a well-earned pension.”{11})