Because the movement to disseminate these myths is neither scholarship nor historiography, I have chosen to eschew the term revisionism whenever possible and instead to use the term denial to describe it. The deniers’ selection of the name revisionist to describe themselves is indicative of their basic strategy of deceit and distortion and of their attempt to portray themselves as legitimate historians engaged in the traditional practice of illuminating the past. For historians, in fact, the name revisionism has a resonance that is perfectly legitimate—it recalls the controversial historical school known as World War I “revisionists,” who argued that the Germans were unjustly held responsible for the war and that consequently the Versailles treaty was a politically misguided document based on a false premise. Thus the deniers link themselves to a specific historiographic tradition of reevaluating the past. Claiming the mantle of the World War I revisionists and denying they have any objective other than the dissemination of the truth constitute a tactical attempt to acquire an intellectual credibility that would otherwise elude them.
Revisionism is also the name given to a more contemporary approach to historical research. Associated with the noted historian William Appleman Williams, a past president of the Organization of American Historians, it addresses itself to questions of American foreign policy particularly as they relate to the origins of the Cold War and the conflict between the West and the Communist world. Because this form of revisionism is critical of American foreign policy, which it sees as motivated by a desire for hegemony via open-door imperialism, it is a useful model for the deniers.{74} While many historians strongly disagree with its particular bias, all agree that for the “Wisconsin school,” as Williams’s followers came to be known, and its descendants, the canons of evidence are as incontrovertible as they are for all other historians. In contrast, evidence plays no role for deniers.
Finally I abjure the term revisionist because on some level revisionism is what all legitimate historians engage in. Historians are not just chroniclers—they do not simply retell the tale. Each one tries to glean some new insight or understanding from a story already known, seeking some new way of interpreting the past to help us better understand the present. That interpretation always involves some constant “re-visioning” of the past. By its very nature the business of interpretation cannot be purely objective. But it is built on a certain body of irrefutable evidence: Slavery happened; so did the Black Plague and the Holocaust.
In order to maintain their facade as a group whose only objective is the pursuit of truth, the deniers have filled their publications with articles that ostensibly have nothing to do with World War II but are designed to demonstrate that theirs is a global effort to attack and revise historical falsehoods. Articles on the Civil War, World War I, and Pearl Harbor are included in their journals as a means of illustrating how establishment historians, with ulterior political motives, have repeatedly put forward distorted views of history. The deniers aim to undermine readers’ faith in “orthodox” historians’ commitment to transmitting the truth. They argue that this tactic of distortion by “court historians” for political means reached its zenith in the Holocaust “myth.”
What claims do the deniers make? The Holocaust—the attempt to annihilate the Jewish people—never happened. Typical of the deniers’ attempt to obfuscate is their claim that they do not deny that there was a Holocaust, only that there was a plan or an attempt to annihilate the Jewish people.{75} They have distorted and deconstructed the definition of the term Holocaust. But this and all the ancillary claims that accompany it are embedded in a series of other arguments. They begin with a relatively innocuous supposition: War is evil. Assigning blame to one side is ultimately a meaningless enterprise. Since the central crime of which the Nazis are accused never happened, there really is no difference in this war, as in any other, between victor and vanquished.{76} Still, they assert, if guilt is to be assigned, it is not the Germans who were guilty of aggression and atrocities during the war. The real crimes against civilization were committed by the Americans, Russians, Britons, and French against the Germans. The atrocities inflicted on the Germans by the Allies were—in the words of Harry Elmer Barnes, a once-prominent historian and one of the seminal figures in the history of North American Holocaust denial—“more brutal and painful than the alleged exterminations in the gas chambers.”{77} Once we recognize that the Allies were the aggressors, we must turn to the Germans and, in the words of Austin App, a professor of English literature who became one of the major “theoreticians” of Holocaust denial, implore them “to forgive us the awful atrocities our policy caused to be inflicted upon them.”{78}
For some deniers Hitler was a man of peace, pushed into war by the aggressive Allies.{79} According to them, the Germans suffered the bombing of Dresden, wartime starvation, invasions, postwar population transfers from areas of Germany incorporated into post-war Poland, victors’ vengeance at Nuremberg, and brutal mistreatment by Soviet and Allied occupiers. Portrayed as a criminal nation that had committed outrageous atrocities, Germany became and remains a victim of the world’s emotional and scholarly aggression.
But it is showing the Holocaust to have been a myth that is the deniers’ real agenda. They contend that the ultimate injustice is the false accusation that Germans committed the most henious crime in human history. The postwar venom toward Germany has been so extreme that Germans have found it impossible to defend themselves. Consequently, rather than fight this ignominious accusation, they decided to acknowledge their complicity. This seeming contradiction—namely that the perpetrators admit they committed a crime while those who were not present exonerate them—presents a potential problem for the deniers. How can a group that did not witness what happened claim that the perpetrators are innocent while the perpetrators acknowledge their guilt? The deniers explain this problem away by arguing that in the aftermath of World War II the Germans faced a strategic conflict. In order to be readmitted to the “family of nations,” they had to confess their wrongdoing, even though they knew that these charges were false. They were in the same situation as a defendant who has been falsely convicted of committing horrendous crimes. He knows he will be more likely to receive a lenient sentence if he admits his guilt, shows contrition, and makes amends. So too the innocent Germans admitted their guilt and made (and continue to make) financial amends.