Lucy Dawidowicz, a fierce critic of the OAH response, wondered what those historians would evaluate: “Perhaps that the neo-Nazis did not have proper academic credentials or that they failed to use primary sources?”{113} Carl Degler, a past president of the OAH, defended the suggestion that the OAH should sponsor an analysis of the Journal. He argued that once historians begin to consider the “motives” behind historical research and writing, “we endanger the whole enterprise in which the historians are engaged.” Following the same pattern as the student editors who described the contents of the denial ad as opinions, views, and ideas, he described the articles contained in the Journal as “bad historical writing.” Given the Journal’s contents and its publisher’s identity, Degler’s categorization of it as bad history was described by Dawidowicz as a “travesty.”{114}
A far-less-ambiguous position was adopted by the editors of the Journal of Modern History, when the Liberty Lobby bought its subscription list and sent out antisemitic material. The journal’s editors sent a letter of apology to its subscribers acknowledging that an “antisemitic hate organization” had obtained its mailing list. It “repudiate[d] and condemn[ed] the propaganda” that readers had received and apologized that both the readers and the academic discipline had been “abused in this thoroughly scurrilous manner.”{115}
Another attempt to force professional historians to treat Holocaust denial as a legitimate enterprise began in 1990, when members of various university history departments began to receive letters soliciting support for “Holocaust revisionism.” That same year the American Historical Association’s (AHA) annual meeting was disrupted by pickets calling for recognition of a book charging Gen. Dwight Eisenhower with consciously causing the death of a million German POWs at the end of the war.[7] The AHA issued a statement noting that 1995 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the defeat of Nazism and calling on scholars to “initiate plans now to encourage study of the significance of the Holocaust.”{116}
The AHA statement referred to the Holocaust but did not explicitly say that the Holocaust was a fact of history. According to the then-president of the AHA, William Leuchtenburg, it did not want to “get into the business of certifying what is and is not history.”[8] Moreover, he believed that for a group of historians to say there had been a Holocaust was tantamount to “an organization of astronomers saying there is a moon.”{117} The press, he believed, would simply ignore such a statement. In December 1991 the AHA unanimously adopted a statement deploring the “attempts to deny the fact of the Holocaust” and noting that “no serious historian questions that the Holocaust took place.”{118} Leuchtenburg opposed allowing deniers a table at the convention because the AHA was a professional organization and they were not professionals. It would be the equivalent of the AMA allowing quacks to hawk miracle cures at its meetings.
The OAH was also a target of the deniers. In November 1991 the OAH’s executive committee agreed to allow its newsletter to publish a call by the IHR’s Journal of Historical Review for “revisionist” papers. This action was taken after David Thelen, the editor of the OAH’s scholarly journal, the Journal of American History, refused to list articles by deniers because it was the responsibility of an academic publication to “make judgments on the quality of scholarship.”{119} He felt it was harder to refuse them space in the association’s newsletter because it contained both scholarly and nonscholarly information. Joyce Appleby, OAH president, protested the executive committee’s decision to accept the announcement in the OAH Newsletter. “This is not a question of respecting different points of view but rather of recognizing a group which repudiates the very values which bring us together,” Appleby wrote. It was the responsibility of a professional organization to make “professional judgments” and, Appleby asserted, “these people are not professionals and to allow them to advertise is to legitimate them.”{120}
Mary Frances Berry, a former president of the OAH and a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania, disagreed with Appleby. She compared the debate within the OAH to campus codes against “hate speech,” to which she objected. Her primary concern was “guaranteeing civil liberties for everyone.” She argued that since the OAH did not have a general policy regarding advertisements it would accept or reject, it was obligated to accept everything it received.{121} The next issue of the OAH Newsletter contained a series of letters regarding the decision to include the ad and Appleby’s dissent. A group of prominent historians, including Thelen and Berry, wrote in support of the inclusion of denial announcements.{122} They argued that however “abhorrent” the goals of the Journal of Historical Review, the constitutional principle of free speech as well as the OAH’s commitments to freedom of expression and the search for historical truth demanded that the ad be printed. In an apparent attempt to “balance” their support of the ad, they suggested a variety of strategies for dealing with the future efforts by the Journal of Historical Review and other deniers to place ads in OAH publications. One idea was that the OAH “pressure” the deniers’ journal to abide by international standards of scholarship, including that experts in appropriate fields evaluate articles submitted to the journal. Given the way they handle documents and data, it is clear that deniers have no interest in scholarship or reason. Most are antisemites and bigots. Engaging them in reasoned discussion would be the same as engaging a wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in a balanced and reasoned discussion of African Americans’ place in society. But on some level Carl Degler was right: Their motive are irrelevant. Some may truly believe the Holocaust a hoax—just as hundreds of antisemites believed the Protocols genuine. This does not give the contents of their pronouncements any more validity or intellectual standing. No matter how sincerely one believes it, two plus two will never equal five. Among the historians’ other suggestions was that a “truth-in-advertising” group be created to unmask the misleading claims in denial notices and announcements and that this group insist that their exposure be published along with the deniers’ claims. But such a suggestion would imply that a debate was being conducted by mainline historians and “revisionists.”{123} The historians’ ideas, offered in the name of an attempt to resolve a situation that confounds many academics, played directly into the deniers’ hands. Given the response of such eminent teachers of history, it is not surprising that the Daily Northwestern, Northwestern University’s student newspaper, writing in support of inviting Arthur Butz to debate his “unorthodox view” of the Holocaust, declared that “even outrageous and repugnant theories sometimes deserve a forum.”{124} Students emulated exactly what these professors had done. They had elevated what the Harvard Crimson had properly characterized as “utter bullshit” to the level of a theory deserving of a forum. After the IHR’s announcement appeared, the executive board voted to establsih a policy henceforth to exclude such advertisements and announcements from the newsletter. There was significant debate within the OAH’s leadership on this matter, and the decision to exclude denial ads in the future passed by one vote.{125}
7
The deniers have cited these contentions, which have been subjected to serious historical and methodological critiques, to support their claims that whatever atrocities the Nazis committed, those committed by the Allies were worse.
8
The full text of the resolution read “As we approach the fiftieth anniversary of the downfall of the Nazi regime in 1995, the American Historical Association calls attention to the need to initiate plans now to encourage study of the significance of the Holocaust. To that end the association will make available the names of experts on the history of the event.”