Both these publications consistently mixed truth with fiction, accurate with fabricated quotes, and outright lies with partially correct information. The manner in which the British work liberally paraphrased the American publication indicates that in many instances Harwood may not have gone back to the original sources but simply repeated what the Americans had already said.[1] The Americans, in turn, had done their own borrowing from other deniers. This liberal borrowing was not something out of the ordinary for deniers, who make it a practice to draw on other deniers not only for their sources but for verification. They have long engaged in what has been described as an “incestuous merry-go-round [of] cross-fertilizing and compounding [of] falsehood.”{12} The basic arguments cited in both works are based on material gleaned from Rassinier, though in certain instances they go even further in their extremism.{13}
These publications constitute vivid examples of the relationship between Holocaust denial, racist nationalism, and antisemitism. Harwood complained that the “big lie” of the Holocaust stymied the growth of nationalism, and that whenever Britain or any other European nation attempted to preserve its “national integrity,” it was immediately branded as neo-Nazi.{14} Preservation of a nation’s national integrity had a specific meaning for both publications. The Holocaust myth threatened the “survival of the Race itself.” Harwood echoed the familiar extremist charge that the Anglo-Saxon world faced the gravest danger in its history: the presence of “alien races” in its midst. Linking Holocaust denial and the defense of the “race,” he argued that unless something was done to halt the immigration and assimilation of non-Caucasians, Anglo-Saxons were certain to experience not only “biological alteration” but the “destruction” of their European culture and racial heritage.{15}
This argument—a standard element in National Front ideology—blamed Jews for engineering the racial and national degeneration of England as well as Europe as a whole. Shortly after the publication of Harwood’s pamphlet, a National Front leader accused Jews of pouring “billions” into promoting “race mixing” in order to weaken nationalist identity throughout the world, thereby enhancing the possibility of their own world domination.{16} According to Harwood, Jews have used the Holocaust myth to preserve their heritage and, at the same time, render other peoples “impotent” in their attempts at self-preservation.{17} In his view, Jews, who have relied on their formidable powers of manipulation, have reaped personal and communal gains at a substantial cost to the well-being and security of other nations. (There was no doubt, of course, that the nations Harwood was referring to were white ones.) Harwood complained that any time a person dared to speak of the race problem, he or she was branded a racist, a code word for Nazi, and that Nazi was, of course, synonymous with a perpetrator of the Holocaust.{18}
The introduction to the American book made the same connection, arguing that the Holocaust myth made it impossible for America to deal with its “overwhelming race problem.” The Holocaust had caused Nazism to fall into disrepute, consequently the problems that emanated from “Negro-White contact” in the same society could not be addressed for what they really were: biological and political. Anyone who dared to do so was accused of advocating “racism, the very hallmark of the Nazi!”{19} Since the 1960s and the increased immigration of non-Caucasians into Europe, particularly to Britain and France, the extreme right in each of these countries has articulated this strange mélange of arguments that knit together racism, the revival of fascism, and Holocaust denial. In North America they have been espoused by an array of right-wing extremist groups. Given the connection between these two ideologies, it is logical to expect the Holocaust “hoax” to remain a fixed component of the litany of arguments posed by these extremist fringes of society.
In order to rehabilitate the reputation of National Socialism, these two publications tried to prove that the Nazis’ intention was emigration, not annihilation. First they argued that the Final Solution was nothing but a plan to evacuate all Jews from the Reich. Then they tried to give this evacuation plan historical legitimacy by linking it with the name of the founder of the modern Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl. They claimed that the Nazis were simply trying to realize Herzl’s original goal of transferring all the Jews to Madagascar. In fact Herzl never addressed the issue of Madagascar. At one point he briefly considered Uganda as an alternative to the land of Israel but dropped the idea when it met with furious opposition from other Zionists.
This is not the only way Harwood used revised history to transform the Nazis into supporters of immigration. Attempting to prove that the Nazis were primarily interested in a benign population transfer, he wrote that a main plank of the National Socialist party platform before 1933 was Jewish emigration to Madagascar. In fact emigration of the Jews was never included by the Nazis in their party platform prior to 1933, let alone used as a main plank.{20} The Madagascar Plan was never mentioned as a possibility until the late 1930s. The Nazi slogan was Juda Verrecke, “perish Judah,” not “emigrate Judah.” The full meaning of Juda Verrecke is lost in English translation. It is akin to perishing like a “lice-ridden cur.”{21} Nazi leaders, among them Josef Goebbels, Julius Streicher, and Hans Frank, frequently described Jews as vermin in need of extermination. In 1929 Goebbels wrote: “Certainly the Jew is a human being. But then the flea is a living thing too—only not a pleasant one. Since the flea is not a pleasant thing, we are not obliged to keep it and let it prosper… but our duty is rather to exterminate it. Likewise with the Jews.”{22} In an article in the Völkischer Beobachter in 1921 Hitler described the Jews as “lice and bugs sucking the German people’s blood out of its veins.”{23}
The claim that the Nazis were interested in Jewish emigration exemplifies how deniers draw falsehoods from truth. Emigration was indeed employed by the Nazis in the thirties as a means of ridding the Reich of Jews. From 1933 until 1939 the Nazis vigorously pushed the Jews to emigrate, and more than three-hundred-thousand, or approximately 50 percent of the German Jewish population, did so. While deniers use this data to portray the Nazis as benignly engaged in a population transfer, the Nazis’ true intentions during the 1930s were to brutally destroy the German Jewish community and simultaneously sow seeds of antisemitism abroad. During the prewar period this was their means of creating a Germany that was Judenrein. The chaos of the war allowed them or, some would argue, forced them to move from emigration to annihilation.[2] But even emigration—when employed by the Nazis as a solution to the Reich’s Jewish “problem”—had diabolical intentions. A Foreign Office memorandum of January 25, 1939, delineated the more cynical aspects of the emigration plan: “The poorer and therefore more burdensome the immigrant Jews to the country absorbing them, the stronger the country will react and the more favorable will the effect be in the interest of German propaganda.”{24} As the Nazis exported penniless and desperate Jews, they also exported antisemitism. This was, in part, the reason why they stripped Jews of their possessions through an increasingly onerous emigration tax. By January 1939 they had been totally excised from the German economy. On occasion Reich leaders simply took groups of Jews and placed them outside Germany’s borders, forcing their neighbors to have to accommodate a large group of destitute immigrants. The best known of these incidents took place on the Polish border at the end of October 1938 on the eve of Kristallnacht, the anti-Jewish Nazi pogrom of November 1938 during which hundreds of synagogues were destroyed and twenty-six-thousand Jews were put into concentration camps.
1
For example, both the American and the British authors describe Eichmann’s assistant as “a nervous wreck and addicted to uncontrollable fits of sobbing for hours” (pp. 46, 11). In addition, Dr. M. Nyiszli, the author of
2
Scholars debate at what point in 1941 the Nazis decided to murder all the Jews in their sphere of influence. The prospect of having many millions of Jews, including those in the Soviet Union, under their rule when they overran that country led them to conclude that murder was the only “efficient” means of dealing with the Jewish “problem.” Intentionalists argue that the Nazis intended from the outset to eventually murder the Jews and that there was a high degree of consistency and orderly sequence in the Final Solution. Functionalists believe that there was no blueprint for the murder of the Jews but that the annihilation program was initially a means for the Nazis to emerge from a blind alley into which they had maneuvered themselves. Functionalists argue that in its first stages the murder program was improvised, and it proceeded in a haphazard fashion.
I do not intend to enter the debate between the intentionalists and the functionalists. Both groups essentially agree that the war and especially the invasion of the Soviet Union made the annihilation process possible—irrespective of when and how the idea originated. Until 1939 the Nazis tried to get rid of the Jews by pressuring them into emigration. After that time they forcibly extruded them. For an excellent summary of this entire debate see Michael R. Marrus, The Holocaust in History, (New York, 1989 [pbk.]), pp. 34–48.