In a fashion that has become typical of all deniers, Harwood relied on traditional antisemitic stereotypes to make his case. He asserted that Germany’s persecution of the Jews was the major reason the Allies went to war.{66} This claim was intended to buttress the antisemitic stereotype of the power of the Jews to compel the Allies to accede to their wishes. Harwood conveniently ignored the fact that Germany began the war by attacking Poland on September 1, 1939. The United States, which was well aware of the extent of the suffering of the Jews, did not enter the war in Europe until after Pearl Harbor, when Germany declared war on the United States. All the Allies had carefully tracked Germany’s treatment of the Jews since 1933. They had not declared war on Nazi Germany after the Nuremberg laws, Kristallnacht, or any of the numerous indignities meted out to the Jews in the prewar period. The United States, which knew of the massacres of Jews on the Russian front in 1941, did not act to help. Clearly, had it been mistreatment of the Jews that prompted the Allies to act, they should have gone to war long before they did.
Harwood also misconstrued the Nuremberg trials. He claimed that the court accepted three-hundred-thousand “written affidavits” containing charges against those accused of war crimes. Harwood insisted that the large number of affidavits was indicative of the extent of the hoax. At the Zundel trial Raul Hilberg, who was called as an expert witness, estimated that in the aggregate approximately forty-thousand documents had been submitted by the prosecution. Included in these were copies of German correspondence and Third Reich documentation. Notwithstanding the fact that the assertions regarding three-hundred-thousand affidavits has no basis in truth, it has become a standard part of Holocaust denial. Harwood’s most outlandish assertion regarding the trial was that defense lawyers at Nuremberg were prevented from cross-examining prosecution witnesses.{67} The most cursory examination of the records of the Nuremberg trials indicates that attorneys had the opportunity to conduct cross-examinations.
Harwood also attempted to convince readers that the Diary of Anne Frank was a fraud. In a section entitled “Best-Seller a Hoax,” he asserted that the Diary was part of the “fabrication of a propaganda legend.”{68} Harwood was not the first to try to cast doubt on the authenticity of the Diary. He was building on attacks on the Diary’s credibility that had begun as early as 1957. (For a more complete discussion of the deniers’ campaign against the Diary see appendix.) This theme would be more fully developed by French denier Robert Faurisson and would be at least partially responsible for the 1989 decision of the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation to issue a critical edition of the Diary firmly verifying its authenticity.{69}
Given the vast array of misstatements, misquotes, and outright falsifications in Harwood’s pamphlet, questions regarding its impact remain. Until the publication of The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, by Arthur Butz of Northwestern University, it remained the most frequently cited work on Holocaust denial. Because it is shorter and more cheaply reproduced than Butz’s, it remains in circulation today. It is, of course, impossible to assess the precise degree to which it has entered mainstream literature. But on at least one occasion its arguments were cited virtually verbatim in a major British publication—not as examples of distortions and fallacious findings by a right-wing extremist, but as legitimate historical research.
In 1974 a lengthy two-part review of Joachim Fest’s biography of Hitler appeared in the English magazine books and bookmen.[5] The review was written by Colin Wilson, a well-known British novelist and critic, who periodically reviewed books for the magazine. At the end of the second part of his review of Fest’s book, the reviewer added what he himself described as “a curious—but highly relevant—postscript.”{70} Wilson related that a number of years earlier he had received an advertisement from a Dublin publisher for The Myth of the Six Million. “Curious” about this, he sent off for it, only to discover that the publisher had sold out. While he was writing the Fest review he received the pamphlet by Richard Harwood of the University of London. Wilson summarized Harwood’s argument:
What Harwood says, briefly, is that Hitler had no reason to murder Jews when he needed them for forced labour. He goes on to point out that the total number of Jews in Europe before the war was six and a half millions [sic], and that one and a half million emigrated abroad. Harwood cites figures from international organizations—all quoted—to demonstrate that there were not more than three million Jews in Nazi Germany.{71}
Wilson was impressed by Harwood’s denial of the existence of extermination camps and accepted as fact his allegation that most of the memoirs about the camps were “journalistic forgeries, churned out like pornography for an audience that revels in horrors.” He also believed Harwood accurately cited figures from international organizations such as the ICRC. Wilson acknowledged that when he checked Raul Hilberg’s “gigantic, half-million word” book and the fifty-plus other books he had in his library on the topic he found it hard to believe that the Holocaust was “all an invention.” He conceded that there was plenty of evidence to prove that the Third Reich detested Jews and that Hitler would have “thought nothing of exterminating” them. Nonetheless, after reading Harwood’s volume he found it pertinent to ask whether the Nazis had really exterminated six million Jews or whether claims that they had were just another “emotional historical distortion.” Finally, in his most provocative musing thus far—others would follow—he wondered, if the Final Solution had indeed been a hoax, “would it not be better to be prepared to face the whole truth, no matter how unpleasant?”{72} Wilson left no doubt that Harwood had convinced him of the unpleasant truth: The Holocaust was a myth.
As was to be expected, Wilson’s ruminations launched an avalanche of letters to the magazine, including two from Harwood. Many of the letters cited evidence contradicting Harwood’s conclusions. In the face of such information Wilson became even more passionate in his defense of Harwood’s views. In response to this barrage of letters he offered a strange prediction that, it could be argued, reflected his own personal biases: “Some time over the next ten years or so, an Israeli historian is going to write a book called The Myth of the Six Million. It will cause a tremendous scandal; he will be violently attacked—and will become a rich man. And no one will be able to accuse him of being anti-Jewish.”{73} Wilson was trying to bolster his case by relying on the same argument made by both Barnes and App: Jews accuse those who question the existence of the Holocaust of being antisemites in order to silence them.
Regarding the books he had collected on the topic, he wrote, “I would like to know how many of my fifty books on the death camps are forgeries.”{74} His willingness tacitly to accept Harwood’s contention that the books were forgeries or “communist propaganda,” and to ignore the possibility that Harwood might be the forger, is particularly telling. In response to still more letters, he described Harwood’s tone as “reasonable and logical” and “devoid of hysteria or emotional antisemitism.” He explained that Harwood made sense to him because he quoted figures and listed his sources and his tone was “generally rather pedantic.” This evaluation by Wilson is further evidence of why the new pseudo-academic style adopted by deniers in recent years is so dangerous. Their packaging, which mimics legitimate scholarly research, confuses consumers. Readers are more susceptible to being influenced by an academic style than by poorly printed extremist and racist publications.{75}