How Enemies of the West are succeeding at diminishing history’s darkest hour.By Alan M. Dershowitz
Ever since American GIs liberated the first Nazi death camps, the world has been stunned and disgusted by the magnitude of the Third Reich’s genocidal crimes.
While touring the forward areas of the First and Third armies in 1945, Allied Gen. Dwight Eisenhower wrote Gen. George C. Marshall:
The most interesting—although horrible—sight that I encountered during the trip was a visit to a German internment camp near Gotha. The things I saw beggar description … The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in position to give firsthand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to “propaganda.”
Eisenhower’s eyewitness testimony was compelling. The testimony of thousands more around the globe was overwhelming and tragic. The documentation brought forth of Hitler’s crimes against children, the aged, women, families and other civilians—at Nuremberg and in subsequent years, through the work of tireless researchers seeking to comprehend, through interviews and the conservation of documents, the horror of those events—simply can’t be denied. No rational person could doubt that the programmatic slaughter of millions of innocent civilians had occurred under German auspices and right under our noses. The Germans kept scrupulous records of the genocide they were committing, and these records are available for all to read, along with eyewitness accounts, many of which are videotaped.
Now try to imagine Eisenhower’s shock and dismay—and that of the hundreds of thousands of liberators and survivors—if he could learn that only 60 years after his eyewitness testimony, the denial of these horrors as mere “propaganda” has not only occurred but is on the rise around the globe. Indeed, in recent years, Holocaust denial has become not only more and more prominent, but more acceptable across the world—especially in parts of Europe.
This ascent of historical revisionism—euphemistic for bigotry and hatred—has now become a subject of study, replete with journals, centers and so-called experts. This pseudo-science reached its zenith with the Holocaust denial conference in Iran late last year. The conference, which included speeches by David Duke, the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, brought together 67 “researchers” from 30 countries under the banner of “intellectual freedom” to make mendacious claims—for example, that as few as 2,000 people died at the Auschwitz death camps. The German government itself concluded that as many as 1.6 million died at Auschwitz. Its commandant, who was executed following the war, confessed to complicity in the genocide.
This propaganda effort is part of an even more widespread phenomenon that—while on its face seems less shocking than outright denial—is in a way far more insidious. We might call it Holocaust minimization. Rather than outright deny the Holocaust, so-called scholars claim to be revising the history of the Holocaust to be more “accurate,” and in so doing, dramatically misrepresent its actual scope and magnitude.
Pseudo-scholars like Norman Finkelstein—an anti-American and anti-Israel propagandist who teaches at DePaul University and is up for tenure—attempt to take away the uniqueness of the Holocaust by alleging that massacres of equal size are commonplace in history—an argument that is demonstrably false. Further, Finkelstein tries to deny justice to Holocaust survivors by alleging that their attempts to reclaim their property and assets after the war were the creation of a Jewish industry based on greed rather than justice. He and his supporters accuse witnesses like Elie Weisel of lying about their accounts. He denies the reality of the survivors. In this respect, as one survivor told me, he is worse than a Holocaust denier because he denies the experiences of those still living. By misdirection, or by eating away at the uniqueness of the Holocaust at the margin, these minimalists subvert the legacy and the lessons of a genocide unparalleled in human history.
Finkelstein’s research has been trashed by real scholars. University of Chicago professor Peter Novick warns, “No facts alleged by Finkelstein should be assumed to be really facts, no quotations in his book should be assumed to be accurate, without taking the time to carefully compare his claims with the sources he cites … Such an examination reveals that many of those assertions are pure invention.”
Neo-Nazis and outright Holocaust deniers love Finkelstein. Listen to Ernst Zundel, the notorious Hitler lover and Holocaust denier who is now in prison in Germany, who says Finkelstein is “exceedingly useful to us and to the Revisionist cause. He is making three-fourths of our argument, and making it effectively. Never fret—the rest of the argument is being made by us, and will topple the lie within our lifetime. We would not be making vast inroads in Europe with our outreach program, were it not for his courageous little booklet, ‘The Holocaust Industry.’”
Zundel’s wife and fellow Neo-Nazi, Ingrid Rimland, refers to Finkelstein admiringly as the “Jewish David Irving”—a reference to the well-known Holocaust denier and admirer of Hitler. Finkelstein himself admires Irving’s dubious research.
Finkelstein is also an admirer of Hezbollah, the terrorist organization that killed hundreds of U.S. soldiers in Lebanon. He is on record as saying that his “chief regret is that I wasn’t even more forceful in publicly defending Hezbollah against terrorist intimidation and attack.”
It is not surprising, therefore, that when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his henchmen created a list of the most virulent Holocaust deniers in the world to invite to their notorious Holocaust “conference” in Tehran last year, high among those on the list were the neo-Nazi David Duke and Norman Finkelstein. Finkelstein’s name appeared on the schedule alongside Duke’s, though apparently Finkelstein, at the last minute, decided not to appear. The reason Finkelstein offered for eventually declining the invitation had nothing to do with any principled opposition to being a speaker at such an anti-Semitic event. Instead, he claimed that negotiations with the Iranians broke down over details. He says that he wanted “at least 45 minutes to speak” but they wouldn’t agree to his conditions.
Despite his shoddy reputation and close association with Neo-Nazis, and perhaps because of it, Finkelstein continues to be a popular speaker on college campuses around the country and throughout the world. He is invited by hard-left, anti-American and anti-Israel groups that are the first to demand that U.S. Army recruiters be kept off campus. His message of Holocaust minimization and Holocaust justice denial is being accepted by more and more young radicals.
Still others, including historian Jörg Friedrich, try to deflect German guilt for the Holocaust by claiming moral equivalency between the Allied bombings of Dresden and the extermination of the Jews and others by the Reich. This view completely disregards that Dresden, while taking a terrible civilian toll, was a legitimate act of belligerent reprisal for the relentless bombing of civilians in London and elsewhere.
These same apologists for Hitler’s crimes attack the conduct of U.S. leaders and heroes—heroes like Dwight Eisenhower. A popular myth of late alleges that Eisenhower set up death camps for Nazi POWs after the fall of Berlin, starving millions to death as an act of revenge on behalf of his Jewish ancestry. In reality, according to Eisenhower biographer and the late historian Stephen Ambrose, Eisenhower faced a food crisis across Europe, a result of the continent’s decimation. The postwar death toll is estimated at less than 1 million, a far cry from the 6 million innocents who perished at the hands of the Nazis with absolutely no military justification. The postwar suffering of the German population was a result of the war, not a result of Eisenhower’s malice, nor of a deliberate U.S. policy.
What is the ultimate effect of these efforts to minimize or outright deny the Holocaust and the unique suffering of its victims? It should go without saying that these people enable, justify and encourage anti-Semitism, of which there is a rising tide in Europe. But further, and perhaps less obviously, Holocaust denial is a form of anti-Americanism. By denying the magnitude of the Holocaust—or by claiming somehow that the Allies perpetrated comparable crimes on the German people to even the score—deniers and minimizers downplay the contribution of American GIs who fought to end the horror of Nazism and to liberate the people held in the murderous grip of the Reich.
Holocaust denial is anti-truth, anti-Semitic, anti-American and anti-democracy. In America, where free speech prevails, Holocaust deniers have the constitutional right to express their bigoted views. But all decent Americans have the obligation to defeat them in this marketplace of ideas, just as our greatest generation of soldiers defeated their predecessors on the battlefield.
Alan M. Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard University. His most recent book is “Preemption: A Knife That Cuts Both Ways” (W.W. Norton, 2006).
Reader letters
From: Joe T freetothink123[at]yahoo.com
To: normangf[at]hotmail.com
Subject: Not a bad idea!
Date: Thu, 3 May 2007 16:05:48 -0700 (PDT)
Hey lowlife:
In your comments to Brandi Azua letter you write:
Finkelstein comments:
Readers will not be surprised to learn that the article in question was written by Professor Dershowitz (in the current issue of The American Legion magazine). It seems that having failed to turn academia against me, he’s now trying to rouse the U.S. army to do me in.
From: michael.werner3[at]us.army.mil
To: normangf[at]hotmail.com
Date: Wed, 02 May 2007 05:45:57 -0400
Subject: Disgrace
Received: from [10.240.32.177] (Forwarded-For: [56.0.143.23]) by mail5.int.ps1.us.army.mil (mshttpd); Wed, 02 May 2007 05:45:57 -0400
Message-ID: e3dfc94f22779.46382595@us.army.mil
Finklestein, you’ve probably been cursed so many times that you would need an advance calculator to keep track. I’ll just say that you’re an absolute disgrace to your country, your religion, your parents, and to yourself. When you meet your maker, I sincerely hopes he sends you to hell. I intend to write to DePaul to keep you from getting tenure so you stop broadcasting your lies and hate propaganda. See you, scumbag. Just hope I don’t run into you in the street.
From: “Azua, Brandi M” BMAzua[at]schreiner.edu
To: NormanGF[at]hotmail.com
Subject: Propaganda?
Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 16:57:08 -0500
Hi there,
I have come across an article that describes you as an Anti-American and Anti-Israel propagandist who wants to take away the uniqueness of the Holocaust by alleging that massacres of equal size are commonplace in history. Is this true, Mr Finkelstein? If so, you are one sick individual. How can you say this never happened!?! How can you be anti-American yet live in America? You know I think that maybe you should do all of us patriotic Americans and SOLDIERS a favor and just pack your bags and leave America and go to lets say, Iraq. American Soldiers do not need to be putting their lives on the line to protect someone like yourself.
Thank you!
And you may reply if you want to.Having read this article that describes you as this person I just had to write you and find out for myself. I really can’t beleive there are people out there like you it is just so sad and a complete waste of life.
Finkelstein comments:
Readers will not be surprised to learn that the article in question was written by Professor Dershowitz (in the current issue of The American Legion magazine). It seems that having failed to turn academia against me, he’s now trying to rouse the U.S. army to do me in.
