The emigration myth—the idea that the Nazis stuck to their original aim of getting rid of Jews by emigration—is easily refuted by Nazi documents, newspapers, and journals themselves, which are replete with statements by high-ranking officials and party leaders, attesting to their ultimate objective. The Nazi leader, Dr. Robert Ley, articulated these intentions in 1942 when he said that it was not enough to “isolate the Jewish enemy of mankind. The Jews have got to be exterminated.”{25} In his testimony at Nuremberg, Victor Brack, who was in charge of the gassing of fifty-thousand mentally deficient and chronically ill Germans and Jews under the euthanasia program from 1939 to 1941, acknowledged that by March 1941, it was no secret among higher party circles that the “Jews were to be exterminated.”{26} In a May 1943 article in the Berlin weekly Das Reich, Goebbels announced: “No prophetic utterance by the Fuhrer is being fulfilled with so gaunt an assurance and inescapable force as that another world war would cause the extinction of the Jewish race.”{27} In October 1943 Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, told high-ranking officers in Posen that “we had a moral duty towards our people, the duty to exterminate this people [the Jews].”{28}
Based on these and a multitude of other statements by Nazi leaders, including Hitler’s own January 1939 promise to exterminate the Jews and his wartime repetition of that promise, there is no doubt that while emigration was employed to rid Germany of its Jewish population during the 1930s, once Poland came under Nazi control and portions of the Soviet Union, with its large Jewish populations, were targeted to be conquered, annihilation became German policy.
Antisemitism was such a fundamental aspect of national socialism that even the most creative denier cannot claim it did not exist. Thus what they cannot deny or distort, they rationalize. We have already seen this in the attempts to portray German Jews as spies and partisans who deserved whatever the Nazis meted out. Harwood widened that scope. He interpreted Nazi antisemitism as Germany’s legitimate response to attacks on it by “international Jewry.” He argued that Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann’s statement in 1939, on the outbreak of the war, that the Jews would stand by Great Britain and fight on the side of the democracies, constituted the Jews’ declaration of war on Nazi Germany and transformed them into a threat to Germany’s security.{29} Actually Weizmann never mentioned Great Britain in his statement but spoke of the democracies in general. Harwood added the reference to Great Britain. Harwood insisted that under the tenets of international law Hitler had the right to declare Jews enemy agents intent on prosecuting a war against the Reich. They could therefore be legitimately subjected to a policy of internment.
Harwood ignored the fact that Nazi antisemitic policies antedated Weizmann’s pronouncement by almost seven years. Weizmann’s statement was a response to those policies, not the reverse. Since 1933 Germany had excluded Jews from most professions and subjected them to economic boycotts, incarceration, physical violence, and horrendous degradation. This process was followed by the disenfranchisement of German Jews under the 1935 Nuremberg laws and the destruction and brutality of Kristallnacht in 1938. Weizmann was speaking as a leader of a stateless people who were in no position to wage a war of any kind against an independent, well-armed nation.{30} He was, after all, a citizen of Great Britain and Palestine was a British-mandated territory. A declaration of loyalty to the democracies in their war against Germany was the least—and, on some level, the most—he could do.
This ploy to cast Nazi antisemitism as a legitimate response to a threat to Germany’s security could be dismissed were it not for the way it has been adopted by prominent historians. The German historian Ernst Nolte, whose books on fascism have become historical classics, espoused the same argument regarding Weizmann’s statement in his attempt to lessen Nazi responsibility for the outrages of World War II. Nolte was the historian most prominently associated in the 1980s with what has become known in Germany as the Historikerstreit, an effort by some historians, particularly those with conservative political tendencies, to normalize and relativize the history of the Nazi period by arguing that many Nazi policies, including persecution of the Jews, were defensive reactions to foreign threats and were no different from what other countries have done in the past. Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s invitation to President Ronald Reagan to join him in a wreath-laying ceremony at Bitburg was a political manifestation of this historical tendency to try to normalize the German past, particularly its National Socialist past. By asking the American president to accompany him to a German military cemetery that included fallen SS soldiers in an act of reconciliation, Kohl was attempting to lessen the historical blot on German nationalism and patriotism. He was not trying to rewrite or deny the past but to cast it in a different light.{31} One of the dangers of Holocaust denial is that it so stretches the parameters of the argument regarding Germany’s wartime behavior that it renders Nolte’s kind of relativism increasingly respectable. (For a fuller discussion of the relationship between relativism and denial see chapter 11.)
Echoing Harwood, Nolte contended that Weizmann’s official declaration at the outbreak of hostilities gave Hitler good reason “to be convinced of his enemies’ determination to annihilate him much earlier than when the first information about Auschwitz came to the knowledge of the world.”{32} What power the Jews had to effect Hitler’s annihilation Nolte did not specify. When Nolte was criticized on this point in light of prewar Nazi persecution of Jews, he said that he was only quoting David Irving, the right-wing writer of historical works. How quoting Irving justified using such a historically invalid point remains unexplained, unless one wishes to see it as a reflection of Nolte’s personal predilections.{33} As we shall see in subsequent chapters, Irving, who had frequently proposed extremely controversial theories about the Holocaust, including the claim that Hitler had no knowledge of it, has become a Holocaust denier.
These works demonstrate how deniers misstate, misquote, falsify statistics, and falsely attribute conclusions to reliable sources. They rely on books that directly contradict their arguments, quoting in a manner that completely distorts the authors’ objectives. Deniers count on the fact that the vast majority of readers will not have access to the documentation or make the effort to determine how they have falsified or misconstrued information.
Harwood attempted to prove that it was statistically impossible for six million Jews to have perished at the hands of the Nazis. The most cursory examination of his sources reveals his spurious methodology. He cited Chambers Encyclopedia, which according to Harwood concluded that the total Jewish population of prewar Europe was 6,500,000. “This would mean that almost the entire number were exterminated.” How then, Harwood asks, was it possible for so many Jews to emigrate to other countries or to receive reparations if almost all had been annihilated?{34}