In 1978 Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, Vichy France’s commissioner of Jewish affairs and the person responsible for coordinating the deportation of Vichy Jews to death camps, told the French weekly L’Express that the Nazi genocide was a typical Jewish hoax. “There was no genocide—you must get that out of your head.” Expressing the standard denier’s explanation for this hoax, he charged that the Jews’ aim was to “make Jerusalem the capital of the world.” The rather ambiguous headline of the article, which ran without any editorial comments, was “Only Lice Were Gassed in Auschwitz.”{37} Leon Degrelle, the leader of the World War II fascist movement in Belgium and a Nazi collaborator, called on the European right to accept neo-Nazis as honorable allies. He also wrote an “Open Letter to the Pope about Auschwitz,” informing the Polish-born cleric, who had witnessed the war at close range, that there were no gas chambers or mass annihilation in Hitler’s Third Reich and that Jews who had been killed were actually murdered by American and British bombings.{38}
But one does not have to be a committed neo-Nazi to be receptive to deniers’ arguments. In Paris, in an interview with the leftist monthly Le Globe, Claude Autant-Lara, one of France’s most acclaimed film directors and at the time a member of the European parliament, described the Holocaust as a legend “stuffed” with lies and claimed that France was in the hands of a left-wing cabal dominated by Jewish internationalists and cosmopolitans.{39}
In Austria, where the Kurt Waldheim affair uncovered hidden antisemitism, Holocaust denial has been centered around a number of neo-Nazi publications including the newspaper Sieg, which states that the number of Jews who died under Nazi rule was less than two hundred thousand.{40} The publisher, Walter Ochensberger, has been repeatedly convicted by Austrian courts for the crime of “incitement.” During lecture tours in various countries including the United States, he has preached the doctrine of denial.{41} The publisher of another neo-Nazi denial magazine, Halt, was indicted for Holocaust denial activities.{42} In addition to Seig and Halt, denial publications targeted at schoolchildren have appeared in Austria.{43} Since the late 1980s the American Ku Klux Klan has established groups in both Germany and Austria. These groups have added Holocaust denial to their traditional racist extremism.{44}
In certain parts of Europe, Holocaust denial has found its way into the general population. In the fall of 1992 a public opinion poll in Italy, where a wide array of denial publications have appeared, revealed that close to 10 percent of the Italian population believe the Holocaust never happened.{45}
Denial arguments have permeated the work of those who would not describe themselves as deniers. An English play entitled Perdition charged that Zionist leaders both during and after the war were a separate class of rich capitalists who betrayed the Jewish masses to the Nazis. The playwright described the Holocaust as a “cozy set of family secrets, skeletons in closets.” In a key passage, the leading character charges that Jews who died in Auschwitz “were murdered, not just by the force of German arms but by calculated treachery of their own Jewish leaders.”{46} Though the play did not deny the Holocaust, the result was the same: The perpetrators were absolved and the victims held responsible.
But it has not only been Europe that has witnessed this phenomenon. Since 1965, Holocaust denial material has been available throughout Latin America. In Brazil, much of it has been released by a publishing house specializing in Portuguese-language antisemitic materials. This publisher recently claimed that within four years of publication, one of its denial books had appeared in twenty-eight editions and was read by two hundred thousand people. (Though the figures may be highly inflated, the publisher did boost sales by offering bookstore owners extremely generous terms, allowing them to keep half the cover price as opposed to the usual 30 percent, and giving them 120 days to pay, a major benefit in a country with a 40 percent monthly inflation rate. Obviously, profit was not the publisher’s primary motive.{47}) Holocaust deniers have also been active in Argentina, Mexico, Chile, and Peru.
In Australia and New Zealand, Holocaust denial has adopted a particularly deceptive guise. The Australian League of Rights, camouflaging its intentions behind a facade of defending civil liberties, is in fact an ardently antisemitic organization. Its bookstore sells an array of traditional antisemitic works, including denial tracts, and its leader, John Bennett, has called the Holocaust a “gigantic lie” designed to foster support for Israel. Under him the League of Rights has brought prominent deniers and neo-Nazis to Australia, including Fred Leuchter, the self-described “engineer” and gas chamber expert who claims to have conducted scientific tests at Auschwitz and Majdanek proving that the gas chambers there could not have functioned as homicidal killing units. (For an analysis of Leuchter’s report see chapter 9 and the Appendix). The league’s meetings have been addressed by an assortment of Holocaust deniers, including hard core Nazis and representatives of the California-based Institute for Historical Review. When Leuchter was in Australia, he was interviewed on the radio and given other significant media coverage. The league, which uses conspiracy theories to attract economically vulnerable members of the working class, informed unemployed timber workers that their jobs had been lost because Jewish bankers had taken over their forests and lands.{48} The Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission describes the league as the most “influential and effective as well as the best-organized and most substantially financed racist organization in Australia.”{49}
New Zealand has its own League of Rights whose activities approximate those of its Australian counterpart. Because these leagues do not have the same offensive public image that some of the more blatantly antisemitic and neo-Nazi groups do, they have been more successful at winning popular support. By projecting an image of being committed to the defense of free speech, these pseudo-human rights organizations have attracted followers who would normally shun neo-Nazi and overtly antisemitic organizations and activities. The manner in which they obfuscate and camouflage their agenda is the tactic Holocaust deniers will increasingly adopt in the future. It is part of the movement’s strategy to infiltrate the mainstream.
In Japan, an array of antisemitic books have reached the best-seller list in recent years. Masami Uno, the author of some of the most popular of these books, asserts that Jews form a “behind-the-scenes nation” controlling American corporations. His books link Jews to Japan’s deepest economic fears, declaring America a “Jewish nation” and proclaming Jews responsible for Japan bashing. Uno, whose books have sold millions of copies, has told Japanese audiences that the Holocaust is a hoax and the Diary of Anne Frank full of “lies.”{50} Holocaust denial in Japan must be seen as part of the country’s revisionist attitude toward World War II in general. Japan has ignored those aspects of the war that focus on its own wrongdoings. Japanese textbooks distort the historical reality of the Japanese “rape of Nanking,” calling it the “Nanking Incident.” No mention either is made of the medical experiments conducted by the Japanese on prisoners of war, or the army’s exploitation of Korean “comfort women.” Even the attack on Pearl Harbor is presented as a defense tactic which the Japanese were compelled to take because of America’s refusal to acquiesce to reasonable Japanese demands. The use of Koreans as slave labor is also left unmentioned in official war histories.{51} Since the Holocaust deniers try to prove that it was the Allies, not the Axis, who committed atrocities during World War II, Holocaust denial may find an increasingly receptive audience in Japan, particularly if the economic situation there worsens and a scapegoat is needed.