Holocaust Deniers Invade World Wide Web

By John Spurlock

Visitors to the website for the Committee on the Open Discussion of the Holocaust [CODOH] are greeted by a picture of Edmund Burke and a quote: "All history, so far as it is not supported by con-temporary evidence, is romance.
By the time you read this, you have probably already come to like the middle-aged man whose picture appears below Burke's quote as the web site comes into focus. He's discussing the Holocaust and invoking the great political thinker to introduce a wide range of documents about the great crime of the 20th century.

But that is not what CODOH is all about. CODOH (which really means its founder, leader, and sole employee, Bradley Smith) promotes the astonishing claim that the Holocaust never happened. CODOH, along with a tangle of other websites, have taken the decades-old attack into high tech communications. These "Holocaust deniers" make a series of claims, each one outrageous in itself.

According to the deniers: There was no Nazi program to eliminate Jews. Death camps never existed. No Jews were gassed. The widely cited estimate of six million Jewish dead is wildly exaggerated. The Jews who died were collateral casualties of war.

Ephrairn Kaye, author of Desecrators of Memory (Yad Vashem, 1997) traces Holocaust denial to the Nazis who carried out the mass murder of European Jews. The Nazi leadership channeled enormous resources into the ongoing destruction of Jewry and also into disposing of bodies and dismantling the death camps. The postwar denial began by 1948, with Paul Rasiner's Crossing the Line.

The motivations for promoting the big lies of denial vary. Many deniers are antisemitic. Some are neo (or nor so neo) Nazis- Yet denial appeals to a wider range of people than those who fall into these two categories. Bradley Smith, of CODOH, appears to have little attraction to racism and seems only mildly antisemitic (note; he claims not to be antisemitic, but in his monthly letter, "Smith's Report," often runs antisemitic cartoons). For Smith, Holocaust denial has become a substitute for his frustrated artistic endeavors. A failure at nearly everything else he had done in life, Smith found a purpose and goal for his life when he first read a tract of lies about the Holocaust.

As the hobbyhorse of a few crackpots, Holocaust Denial seems harmless. But return to CODOR on the web and you may reach a different conclusion. The benign image of Brad Smith (who includes a Christmas letter each year in his newsletter) asks only that we come to the topic with open minds, and with just the slightest willingness to doubt the "official" story. And how many of us lack that small willingness to suspect that "official" versions may serve some dark interest? How many Americans have believed in Communist conspiracies (and with some justification) or in governmental cover-ups (with even more justification)? For someone unfamiliar with the historical literature and the primary documents on the Holocaust (and let's face it, that is most of us), the notion of the Holocaust as an "official" version may have some credibility. As the deniers quibble over some tiny piece of evidence, they may appear to know what they are talking about.

Everyone who studies history intelligently, rather than naively, comes from a point of view and generally serves some interest. There are no noumenal "facts" apart from interpretations of one kind or another. But history is not simply the discussion of various opinions based on whatever evidence comes to hand. It is disciplined inquiry and demands that interpretations meet standards of proof. No matter how horrifying, the Holocaust is among the best documented of world historical events. Consider the following tests:

1. We have direct evidence, both from documents and from oral histories. During his visit to Seton Hill in October, Ephrairn Kaye brought copies of German documents in which special police detachments in the Soviet Union listed the Jews they had killed, village by village.

   Rudolf Hoess, Auschwitz commandant, wrote matter-of-factly of the process by which Jews would be prepared for the gas chamber. When persons became refractory or hysterical, they were "led away behind the building and shot in the back of the neck with a small-caliber weapon."

2. These are not gems pulled from a small cache of evidence, but two simple, horrifying examples of the best organized mass murder in history.

   
   The evidence is massive, almost incomprehensibly massive. Readers of any work of Holocaust history will see from the references that German archives are bursting with material concerning the Holocaust. Open Daniel Goldhagen's work, Hitler's Willing Executioners, and you will find chapters on police units in occupied territories, death marches, and Jewish "work" in the concentration camp. (Y. Neffer, a prisoner at Majdanek: "Work was actually unproductive, and its purpose was exhaustion and torture.")

Most of the material Goldhagen presents is new. Historians simply have not had enough time since World War II to sift through all of the documents of the Holocaust, and the opening of formerly Soviet archives has enormously increased the quantity of material.

Holocaust denial will not disappear. It demands that we all know our Holocaust history a bit better. Those of us who are teachers need to teach about the Holocaust with all the skill and knowledge that we can master

John Spurlock, CIHS '91, Professor of History and Chair of the Humanities Division, Seton Hill University.