______________________________________________________________
Joel
Stuart Hayward: Holocaust Revisionism in New Zealand: The ‘Thinking-man’s
Anti-Semitism?’
Without
Prejudice,
No 4 December 1991, pp.38-49
***
Joel
S A Hayward is a tutor and post-graduate history student at the University of
Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, and is currently working on a thesis
entitled ‘The Worldwide Growth and Impact of Holocaust Revisionism’. In
1989, Hayward formed a national society – which he headed until his workload
forced him to step down in July 1991 – called Opposition to Anti-Semitism,
Inc., which has been effective in educating Jewish New Zealanders about local
forms and manifestations of anti-Semitism. He has also had numerous articles
published in New Zealand newspapers and periodicals.
***
‘Holocaust
revisionism’ is the term given to the crusade to deny the Nazi genocide of
approximately six million Jews during the Second World War.
Since
its inception in 1978, the Institute for Historical Review (IHR) has
spearheaded, under a guise of objective scholarship, the movement to refute
the authenticity of the Holocaust and to distribute pseudo-scholarly material
which claims that the Holocaust is merely a monstrous fabrication.
From
1981 onwards, the IHR’s annual International Revisionist Conference has been
the platform for such scholars to present lectures denying the veracity of the
Holocaust. The IHR makes cassettes of these lectures, and selected papers are
published in the IHR’s quarterly journal, The Journal of Historical
Review. This type of Holocaust revisionist material – the ‘thinking
man’s anti-Semitism’ – is disseminated worldwide.
‘Revisionism’
– as distinct from ‘Holocaust revisionism’ – is not new, however.
After the Bolshevik Revolution, the term was used by Marxist scholars to
designate various types of deviation from established viewpoints. Following
the First World War, Dr Harry Elmer Barnes and numerous other historians, both
in the victor nations and the defeated, ‘revised’ the official history of
the victors with research which permanently weakened the hypothesis of sole
German responsibility for the outbreak of war in 1914. Whilst the term
‘revisionism’ came to designate historical findings on World War I which
were partly or totally contrary to the ‘commonly accepted view’,
‘revisionism’ now defines all historical findings, on any historical
period, contrary to the Establishment version.
Second World War
revisionism has, since the mid-1970s. become very popular. Books are being
written, and sold in their millions, which occasionally paint Churchill,
Roosevelt, Stalin and Truman as malevolent tyrants, whilst the Nazi regime and
its leaders are partly rehabilitated, painted in colours less harsh. Despite
this, one must not make the mistake of labeling these historians as
‘Nazis’ or ‘Fascists’. The vast majority are objective, well-respected
scholars – including Pulitzer Prize winners
- whose views on the outbreak, course and conclusion of the war are completely
dependent on the evidence provided by original records and documents from the
war period, often hidden away in archives that governments and established
powers had kept sealed up until recently.
Holocaust
revisionism, however, is something quite different from this genuine desire
for historical truth, the difference being the motive. The motive behind the
denial of the Holocaust is the desire to rehabilitate fully the Third Reich
and also to attack and discredit the Jewish people by ‘proving’ that the
Holocaust is merely a well-executed Jewish lie, that it did not happen nor
could have happened. It is the manifestation in New Zealand of this Holocaust
revisionism, as distinct from revisionism in general, which is the subject of
this discourse.
It would be
natural to assume that neo-fascists in New Zealand would find Holocaust
revisionism a very acceptable form of anti-Semitism, yet at the grass-roots
level neo-fascists tend to enjoy believing in the Holocaust, the humiliation
and murder of millions of their racial enemies.
On the night of
November 14/15, 1981, the Webb Street Synagogue and Jewish Community Centre
(Wellington) were desecrated with dozens of Nazi signs and slogans in what is
probably still New Zealand’s worst case of anti-Semitic vandalism. The
slogans and signs – almost identical to those painted during a torrent of
anti-Semitic incidents in 1979
- clearly indicate that the offenders believed in the reality of the Nazi
genocide; written across the Centre’s walls were the words ‘BELSON [sic.]
WAS A GAS’, and the name of the Auschwitz doctor responsible for deciding
who was to be gassed, Joseph Mengele, appeared alongside numerous swastikas
and ‘SS’ signs.
Perhaps the most
interesting slogan was a German phrase ‘Tod dem Juden’ (Death to the
Jews) – a Nazi rallying cry of the 1930s – which indicates that the
offenders, unless German speakers, had copied this phrase from literature
dealing with the Holocaust and Third Reich period. In fact, the copying of
Nazi slogans in German has long been a common feature of anti-Semitic
vandalism in New Zealand, the first example probably being the painting of the
words – with incorrect grammar – ‘Juden Schwein aus gehen’ (Jewish
Swine, Get Out) during a period of anti-Semitic activity in Christchurch in
1960.
Judging by the
very nature of anti-Semitic vandalism, and the copious number of spelling
errors contained inn the slogans painted, it would not be unreasonable to
conclude that the culprits are poorly educated. However, the frequent use of
German phrases , and names and places unique to the Holocaust and, of course,
the shocking way they are intended to mortify Jews, indicates that these
people accept the truth of the Holocaust and delight in reminding Jews of the
horror of that period. Clearly the anti-Semites involved in this type of
vandalism are not ‘Holocaust revisionists’.
Whilst the
majority of those who adhere, or claim to adhere to Nazi doctrines are young,
usually identify themselves as ‘White Power’, ‘Skins’, or
‘Skinheads’, their ideology comes from traditional 1930s National
Socialism. Their knowledge of that period, however, tends to be limited, and
scholarly arguments such as Holocaust revisionism have no appeal to them.
Nevertheless,
there are neo-fascists in New Zealand whose commitments to nazi ideals is
anything but superficial. Durward Colin King-Ansell formed the National
Socialist Party of New Zealand in 1969, the party adhering to ‘true’ Nazi
ideology. King-Ansell himself had been sentenced in 1967 to 18 months’
imprisonment for throwing a brick through an Auckland synagogue window and
lighting a fire on its steps. In 1977 King-Ansell was convicted, under Section
25 of the Race Relations Act 1971, of publishing a pamphlet likely ‘to
incite hostility or ill-will’ towards the Jewish people. The conviction was
upheld on appeal, although a $400 fine was substituted for the original
sentence of three months’ imprisonment. Interestingly, a book
written about the 1977 case has recently been ‘exported’ to the United
States, where it is being sold as a ‘new release’ by the Sons of Liberty,
the publishing and distribution arm of James K Warner’s anti-Judaic and
anti-Zionist New Christian Crusade Church. Since 1990 they have also sold Eric
D Butler’s infamous book, Censored History [see below].
King-Ansell’s
organizational ability enabled him to establish a small but active party which
maintained a high public profile throughout the 1970s and gained the support
of several ‘Bootboy’ and ‘Skinhead’ groups well into the 1980s. Having
read widely on the Nazi era, and being in direct contact with American and
Australian Nazi groups, King-Ansell was one of the first New Zealanders to
come into contact with, and then proclaim, Holocaust revisionist theories.
In 1971 he
traveled to Australia, where he became active in the affairs of the National
Socialist Party of Australia (NSPA) and formed friendships with such leading
Australian Nazis as Alan Parziani, Ken Gibbett and Edward Cawthron, who was
the editor of the Australian National Socialist Journal and author of
the booklet entitled The Big Lie. Cawthron’s The Big Lie was
the first mass distribution Holocaust revisionist booklet published in
Australia. It opened with these words: ‘Wherever you see or hear a Jew
teaching, do not think otherwise than that you are hearing a poisonous
basilisk who with his face poisons and kills people… be on your guard
against them!
Despite this nonsense, Cawthron himself has had an outstanding academic
career, gaining a B Sc with first-class honours at the University of Adelaide
in 1963 and being awarded a PhD in 1970. Holocaust revisionism is certainly
the pièce
de résistance
of educated anti-Semites.
Cawthron and his
lengthy revisionist booklet, which follows the arguments of Paul Rassinier,
must have had a large influence on King-Ansell; after his return to New
Zealand in 1972, articles on “The Holocaust Swindle’ and ‘The Myth of
the Six Million’ began to appear in The Observer, the journal of
King-Ansell’s National Socialists. Believing that ‘the talk of the
extermination camps is nonsense’,
King-Ansell has endorsed the Holocaust revisionist perspective for almost two
decades now.
King-Ansell has
certainly influenced the opinions, regarding the Holocaust, of many of the
neo-fascists in direct contact with him and his literature, yet it should be
noted that the vast majority of those in New Zealand who identify themselves
as Nazi in their ideology – including ‘White Power’, ‘Skinheads’,
and ‘Bootboys’ – have never had contact with King-Ansell’s National
Socialists and, therefore, have not been influenced by the Holocaust
revisionist theories he extols. Also, King-Ansell’s influence outside the
small National Socialist movement is non-existent. His openly racist views,
his adoration of Adolf Hitler and his passion for wearing Nazi uniforms reined
any chance he had of seducing members of the public-at-large to the Holocaust
revisionist perspective.
The New Zealand
National Front (NZNF) was ‘officially’ formed in 1977, with the directors
being careful to avoid comparison with the fascism of the 1930s or groups like
King-Ansell’s National Socialists, desiring instead to draw comparisons with
the contemporary British National Front. However, the NZNF retained an
emphasis on ‘racial purity’ which included traditional anti-Semitic
arguments. Members of the NZNF were also able, in the late 1970s, to attain
and distribute large numbers of Holocaust denial pamphlets and books, such as
Richard Harwood’s (a pseudonym for Richard Veral of the British National
Front)
crude work, Did Six Million Really Die? (now re-titled Six Million
Lost and Found), a book also being distributed by a Christchurch group,
Viking Youth, which formed in 1979.
In June 1977,
David Crawford, Chairman of the NZNF, wrote a detailed and lengthy letter in
the University of Canterbury’s student newspaper, CANTA (No 11), in which he
explained the key points of the Holocaust revisionist arguments. Part of his
letter reads: ‘There is NO EVIDENCE in existence, even in the memories of
Hitler’s secretaries, which shows any [Nazi] intent to exterminate Jews.
This may come as a shock to some of your liberal readers, but nevertheless it
is a fact’.
Crawford’s
letter was written in defence of a full-page Holocaust-denying article,
written by a Mr Stephen Ladanyi, which had appeared in CANTA three weeks
earlier (No.8). Ladanyi asserted that his revisionist article was merely
‘presenting here a summary of the main evidence against the myth as prepared
by the other side’. Ladanyi’s choice of the word ‘myth’ to describe
the Holocaust does much to dispel the notion that his article was written as
an objective historical analysis, as he claimed it was.
In March 1981,
those activists who had formed the nucleus of the NZNF, feeling that the group
had served its purpose, formed a new organization, New Force, which changed
its name in 1983 to the Nationalist Workers’ Party (it had no connection to
the Australian group of the same name). Despite a major purge of
‘extreme-right elements’
to gain a degree of respectability, New Force/Nationalist Workers’ Party
maintained its links with its British counterparts, and continued to
disseminate Holocaust revisionist material
There were
numerous other small neo-fascist groups in the 1970s and 1980s, especially in
Christchurch where a number of these groups believed in the veracity of the
Nazi genocide – for them the Holocaust was a time of near success for
Hitler’s policy of racial hygiene; something to be proud of – the majority
of ‘organised’ neo-fascists in New Zealand have had at least a basic
‘education’ in Holocaust revisionist theories.
This conclusion
is supported by statements made to the present writer (10/1/910 by Mr Ernest
Thornton, Secretary of Conservative Front (NZ), a neo-fascist organization
based – and still operating – in Christchurch, which has ideological links
with the re-formed National Front in Britain. In Thornton’s view,
‘virtually all the hard-line right-wing groups promote revisionism. It is
generally accepted as part and parcel of right-wing political ideology’.
In the August
1989 issue of Frontline, the Conservative Front’s monthly magazine,
appeared a review of Professor Robert Faurisson’s Holocaust revisionist
booklet, Were Six Million Jews Exterminated? The laudatory review was
written by Kerry Bolton, a member of the Front and editor of The Realist.
Bolton had previously been a member of the National Socialist Party, had been
North island Director of the NFNZ, and had been involved with the foundation
of the New Force.
It is difficult
to determine how large the Conservative Front’s membership is, or to what
extent it disseminates Holocaust revisionist literature. Thornton told the
present writer (10/1/91) that he ‘passed on revisionist material to
individual members…some hostile to the idea that six million Jews were
killed by Hitler’s government, but some not so’. Another of Thornton’s
statement is more enlightening: ‘I emphasize most firmly that it is not our
intention to stir up anti-Jewish feeling, although I would say that most of
our members harbour such feelings, to a greater or lesser extent.’
Neo-fascists are
not, however, the only ones to propagate Holocaust revisionism in New Zealand,
and in actual fact their influence in this area has been vastly outweighed by
such institutions as Western Destiny Publications and the New Zealand League
of Rights, who have managed to ‘peddle their wares’ to a much larger
percentage of New Zealanders than the neo-fascists could.
Western Destiny
Publications began in 1965 and was primarily a mail order service providing
various right-wing groups with books which supported their views. In 1980 the
bookshop moved from Hamilton to Christchurch, where it began to provide
material for members of such groups as Tax Reform Integrity Movement (TRIM)
and Zenith Applied Philosophy (ZAP). Functioning as a prominent retail shop in
the heart of Christchurch, the shop attracted customers from neo-fascist
groups, right-wing groups, members of the public-at-large and oddly,
conservative Protestant evangelical groups.
Among the large
selection of books sold by Western Destiny Publication were several Holocaust
revisionist works, most notably The Hoax of the Twentieth Century by Dr
Arthur Butz. This weighty tome has become the ‘Bible’ of Holocaust
revisionism, and is praised by the IHR as being ‘a thoroughly academic
compendium of primary research that refutes all major orthodox assertions
regarding the Holocaust’.
The bookshop also sold traditional anti-Semitic works, such as Henry Ford’s The
International Jew and the nefarious The Protocols of the Learned Elders
of Zion.
In 1985,
complaints about specific books being sold by Western Destiny Bookshop were
received by the Race Relations Office (RRO), which was already seeking to have
the same books, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century and The
International Jew, banned from sale in an Auckland bookshop owned by the
New Zealand League of Rights, after the New Zealand Jewish Council lodged a
complaint.
The RRO requested
that the bookshop remove the books from sale, something the League’s shop
refused to do. An article in the New Zealand Herald (19/4/85) states
that the League of Rights believed the issue was one of ‘freedom of
expression’ and that it would fight the moves by the RRO to take it and the
books to the Equal Opportunities Tribunal.
It would appear,
however, that Western Destiny Publications was more responsive, as the books
were fairly
promptly taken down from display. By
February 1986 their retail shop in Christchurch had ceased operating.
Interestingly,
the matter received a good deal of media coverage. For example, Professor P R
Hart of the University of Waikato, and expert on the Third Reich, spoke out
against the banning of Holocaust revisionist material, despite saying that
‘these books are not to be believed’ and they contain ‘ nonsense’. To
Hart, the issue was one of freedom of thought; be believed the books should
still be sold ‘in the interests of intellectual freedom’ but
‘obviously’ they should not be sold to minors.
In any event,
after discussion with Jewish community leaders and after reflecting on various
similar cases overseas, the proceedings commissioner resolved not to refer the
issue to the Equal Opportunities Tribunal.
The New Zealand
League of Rights has certainly not limited its operations to running the
above-mentioned retail outlet.
Eric D Butler, the League’s Australia-based founder, tours New Zealand
regularly (his last tour was in August-September, 1990), conducting public
meetings throughout the country. The League publishes several newsletters,
including On Target, which comes out fortnightly, and The New Times,
which is published monthly. The League also operates an extensive cassette
tape service, Conservative Tapes, which lists 132 titles in its 1990
catalogue, and a book service, Conservative Books, which lists over 350
titles in its 1990 catalogue.
It is not within
the scope of this paper to detail the history and activities of the New
Zealand League of Rights, which was established in 1971. The subject at hand
is the dissemination of Holocaust revisionist material, therefore only those
activities of the League – anti-Semitic or otherwise –
which are related to the subject matter will be discussed in this
study.
The League of
Rights distributes more Holocaust revisionist material – through its
bookshops, book-stands at public meetings, and mail-rder book and tape
catalogues – than any other organization in New Zealand. In fact, the League
of Rights has probably distributed more Holocaust revisionist literature than
the combined total of that disseminated by the above-mentioned groups. The
League certainly does not have the same odious public image that neo-fascists
have, and it has been quite successful in attracting support form people who
would not consider themselves anti-Semitic in any way.
Eric Butler
himself denies the Holocaust in its presently-recognised historical terms. In
his iniquitous book, Censored History,
published in the late 1970s, Butler devotes an entire chapter to ‘The Myth
of the Six Million’. Claiming that ‘the propaganda built around the story
of the six million is mind-numbing’ (p37), Butler attempts to prove that the
Holocaust never happened, that it is merely a Jewish lie designed to gain
political and financial support for the Jewish people and the State of Israel.
In 1979 Butler
published another book, Releasing Reality, Social Credit and the Kingdom of
God.
In this anti-Semitic work, a summary of the ideology of C H Douglas, Butler
asserts that there is a Jewish ‘conspiracy’ to destroy the fabric of
non-Jewish society, and that Socialism and Communism are political systems
devised by Jews for that purpose. Butler notes that ‘the rank and file of
Jews are regarded by their leaders [“the conspirators’] as the expendable
raw material of their power plan’ (p53). Amongst this nonsense, Butler slips
in plenty of Holocaust revisionism. The Holocaust, writes Butler, is just one
of the tools use dby the Jews to gain the support they need to carry out their
devious plan for world domination. For example: ‘In spite of the fact that
since the publication of Dr A R Butz’s scholarly and meticulously-documented
work, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, there is no longer any doubt
that the story of the gassing of six million Jews by the Germans is a
carefully fostered myth by Zionist propagandists and their dupes, the myth is
used constantly in an attempt to stifle rational discussion of the “Jewish
Question”’ (p52).
Butler has
provided the ideological direction of the New Zealand League of Rights for
almost to decades. In 1980 David Thompson, National Director, echoed
Butler’s views during his own explanation of the League’s distribution of
Holocaust revisionist literature: ‘We rate Harwood’s book on the Six
Million as interesting, but recommend Dr Butz’s work, The Hoax of the
Twentieth Century, as the most valuable yet produced. The subject of the
Six Million is not merely an academic one, it relates to the question of
international power politics and the role of propaganda’.
In the 1970s and
early 1980s, the New Zealand League of Rights offered for sale only three or
four different Holocaust revisionist books. However, this small number of
titles offered is not indicative of the League’s level of endorsement of the
Holocaust revisionist perspective. By the late 1970s, Holocaust revisionism
was very much a part of the League’s ideology. The small number of
revisionist titles offered directly corresponds to the small number of
Holocaust revisionist books published in English. There were numerous other
tiles available to the League – such
as Professor Rassinier’s Le Mensonge d’Ulysse (in French) or Dr
Wilhelm Stäglich’s
Der Auschwitz Mythos
(in German) – but very few of these had been translated into English.
With the
establishment of the Institute for Historical Review in 1978, many of these
foreign language works were translated into English for the first time. There
were also new Holocaust denial books being written by IHR members.
By 1985 the New
Zealand League of Rights had caught up with these developments and had begin
to advertise for sale such titles as Rassinier’s Debunking the Genocide
Myth and Ditlieb Felderer’s Anne Frank’s Diary – a Hoax, a
book which ‘proves’, according to the League’s book catalogue of that
year, that the heroic story of Anne Frank is nothing more than a ‘propaganda
fable’. Other Holocaust revisionist titles included in the 1985 catalogue
were Dr A J App’s The Six Million Swindle; Walter Sanning’s The
Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry; Richard Harwood’s Nuremberg
and Other War Crimes Trials and Six Million Lost and Found; and, of
course, Dr Butz’s The Hoax of the Twentieth Century.
Despite this
rapid growth in the number of Holocaust revisionist books being offered for
sale by the League in 1985, there was only one Holocaust denial audio-tape
available: A Christian Perspective of the Six Million Hoax, by Jeremy
Lee, Assistant National Director of the Australian League of Rights. Lee’s
insidious audio-cassette, recorded before an Australian audience in 1983,
presents his own historical andn theological reasons as to why the Jews are an
anti-Christ people and how they have, for 2,000 years, tried to dominate
Christian society. In doing so, lee explains, in considerable depth, that the
Jews use the ‘myth’ of the Holocaust to manipulate the powers of the world
into supporting and financing Israel.
The 1987 book
catalogue of the New Zealand League of Rights shows that several revisionist
books on the Second World War have been added, most notably Antony C
Sutton’s Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler and British historian
David Irving’s The War Path. Whilst these books present a perspective
on the war that would be unpalatable to most Jews, they are not anti-Semitic
and do not deny the veracity of the Holocaust in its presently-recognised
historical terms.
The
1987 catalogue also shows the addition of two books which are clearly
Holocaust revisionist: Rassinier’s The Real Eichman Trial, and Colin
Vary’s The Victims, a book which attempts to prove that the numerous
photographs of Jewish corpses piled up at the death-camps have been
‘doctored’ for propaganda purposes.
The
New Zealand League of Rights has been quick to seize upon any international
news that could be useful to ‘prove’ to its members that the Holocaust is
mythical. For example, in the 13 June, 1988 issue of On Target there
appeared an editorial on the Israeli trial of John Demjanjuk, found guilty in
April 1988 of war crimes and crimes against the Jewish people and humanity.
The editorial calls the trial ‘an obscene travesty’ and asserts that ‘as
the great “Holocaust” propaganda myth shows signs of wear and tear under
scrutiny of revisionist historians, there was evidently a need to try to
refurbish it with a massively publicized show trial’.
In
1988 Mr Ernst Zündel, a German-born Canadian, was ont rial in Toronto for
‘spreading false information’ by publishing a Canadian edition of Did
Six Million Really Die? Which claims, amongst other things, that no Jews
were ever gassed during the Second World War. Zündel had previously beent
ried on the same charge in 1985 and was sentenced to 15 months’
imprisonment. However, in January 1987 the Ontario Court of Appeal overturned
the judgment and ordered a re-trial, which began on 18 January 1988.
Fred
A Leuchter, a self-styled specialist engineer and consultant in the united
States for the design and construction of execution gas chambers, was asked by
the defence to travel to Poland to discover if the rooms at Auschwitz could
ever have been used to gas people, as claimed. His written statement to the
Court, on his return, sets out the methodology and findings of the first
forensic examination of the actual Polish sites where the gassings are stated
to have happened. Leuchter’s ‘verdict’, after examining the sites and
analyzing samples taken from the floors and walls for their cyanide content,
is that the ‘chambers’ in Auschwitz could not have been used, then or now,
as execution gas chambers. *
*
Leuchter’s credentials as an engineer have been challenged by legal
authorities in the United States, with the judge in the Zündel case ruling
conclusively that he had neither the formal training nor the practical
experience to conduct the kind of ‘scientific study’ which he purports to
have made of the gas chambers at the Nazi death camps (see Arthur Goodman,
‘Leuchter:Exposed and Discredited by the Court’, in Shelly Shapiro (ed.) Truth
Prevails–Demolishing Holocaust Denial: the End of ‘The Leuchter Report’,
New York, 1990, p 79. Moreover, his ‘report’ – which the judge refused
to accept as evidence in the Zündel trial (loc.cit.) – has been totally
discredited by the author of an exhaustive study of the gas chambers at
Auschwitz, Jean-Claude Pressac: ‘Based on false knowledge, inducing fake
reasoning and leading to false interpretations, The Leuchter Report is
inadmissible because it was produced in illegal conditions; because it
overlooks the most basic historical data; because it is scuttled by gross
errors of calculation; and because it is suspect of falsification. The
Leuchter Report lands in the cesspool of pretentious human folly’.
(Jean-Claude Pressac, ‘The Deficiencies and Inconsistencies of The
Leuchter Report’, in Shelly Shyapiro (ed.) op. cit. p55) – [Ed. Without
Prejudice]
British
historian David Irving was also present at the Zündel trial of 1988, giving
‘expert evidence’ on the Third Reich. Upon reading The Leuchter Report,
as Leuchter’s findings came to be called, Irving said on 22 April 1988 that
the report was a ‘shattering’ document which would become essential
reading for any future historian writing on the Second World War.
For
the New Zealand League of Rights this was the ultimate opportunity to
‘prove’ that the Holocaust never happened: firstly, an objective
engineering scientist, who personally examined the ‘gas chambers’,
concludes that no Jews could possibly have been gassed in them and, secondly,
a best-selling historian agrees with him.
In
the 30 October 1989 issue of On Target there was a large sales
advertisement for The Leuchter Report and an editorial praising David
Irving for finally denying that the Holocaust happened: ‘Irrespective of
what may be said about British historian David Irving, it is obvious that he
is a man of great intellectual integrity. At a press conference held in London
on June 23rd, Mr Irving announced how he ad come to reject the
story of the mass gassing of Jews at Auschwitz, Poland…’.
The
editors of On Target have repeatedly praised Irving for his new
Holocaust revisionist beliefs, but it is The Leuchter Report itself
which has won the most acclaim. According to the League of Rights, as a result
of Leuchter’s report ‘it is now only a matter of time before the Holocaust
Myth is consigned to the dustbin of history’.
Ernst
Zündel has become quite a celebrity amongst Holocaust revisionists and the
extreme right. In the years since he was first put on trial in 1985, there
have been numerous books published about him and his fight for ‘freedom of
speech’. In reality, however, these books are not about freedom or
individual rights. They are simply intended to get unsuspecting people –
concerned about personal liberties – exposed to Holocaust revisionism. The
issue of whether Zündel should or should not have published Holocaust denial
material is clearly secondary ton the central theme of these books, which is
that the Holocaust never occurred, that it is just a ‘Zionist lie’.
According
to one such book, The Great Holocaust Trial by Michael A Hoffman:
‘The “Holocaust” isn the closest thing to a state religion that the West
has seen since medieval times. The majority of people are almost hopelessly
brainwashed, frightened to death of the “poor, persecuted and powerless
Zionists” and simply incapable of going against the massive power of the
State, the Press and the Jewish lobby’.
The
New Zealand League of Rights sells the above title, plus two other Holocaust
revisionist ‘courtcase’ titles: The Zündel Trial and Free Speech
by Doug Christie, and Thought Crimes: The Keegstra Case by Doug Collins
(James Keegstra, another Canadian, was convicted in 1985 on similar charges to
Zündel, although his trial attracted far less publicity than Zündel’s).
The League promotes these books as if they are only about civil liberties, and
thus it would be possible for a person ton purchase these books thinking they
are about cases dealing with violation of human rights. In this way the League
is able to get those people reading Holocaust revisionism who would ordinarily
avoid anything that looked anti-Semitic.
The
1990 tape catalogue of the New Zealand League of Rights shows the recent
acquisition of numerous audio-cassettes of recent speeches at IHR conventions
by leading Holocaust revisionists. The most dangerous of these cassettes is
clearly Were Six Million Gassed? By Fred Leuchter. Leuchter’s
presentation of his ‘scientific’ evidence is quite disarming; it does not
seem anti-Semitic, and to someone with no scientific background it would
appear very objective, lucid and logical. It could easily sway people who lack
this background into believing that no gassings ever occurred and, therefore,
that there was no Holocaust.
This
is the principal dilemma arising from the dissemination of recent Holocaust
revisionist material, which is not overtly anti-Jewish. People could read
these books or listen to these tapes, not knowing that they are in fact very
anti-Semitic, and believe them. It is then only a small step, from
believing that the Holocaust never occurred to hating the ‘liars’ who say
it did: the Jews.
Conclusion
At
present, only a few New Zealanders would be aware that there is a campaign in
New Zealand to deny the veracity of the Holocaust. Essentially, this is
because no-one has taken the distribution of the Holocaust revisionist
material to court in an attempt to have the distribution stopped. This type of
trial has, without exception, created very negative feelings towards Jews in
those countries where this legal action has occurred. These legal battles have also given the revisionists a
great deal of free publicity. In light of this, and of the fact that there is
a free-speech issue involved, it is this author’s opinion that the
suppression of Holocaust revisionist literature should not be attempted.
Instead,
the Jewish community in New Zealand should try to keep the Holocaust in the
collective memory of other New Zealanders. Sensitive presentations on the
Holocaust could be arranged, for both Jews and non-Jews; survivors could
testify to their experiences; facts could and should be presented.
Thus,
in conclusion, it has been shown that Holocaust revisionism is considered by
most scholars to be the form of anti-Semitism which least resembles
anti-Semitism: under a guise of objective scholarship, Holocaust revisionists
forcefully attack Jews, whilst not using any of the traditional anti-Semitic
texts, methods or slander.
Holocaust
revisionism has been a small but integral part of extreme-right ideology in
new Zealand for almost 20 years. In the 1970s and early 1980s, Holocaust
revisionism was promoted principally by neo-fascists. It is evident,
nonetheless, that many neo-fascists are not attracted to such ‘scholarly’
arguments and prefer to believe in the Holocaust, whilst others, who lack
‘connections’ to organized neo-fascist groups, have had little or no
exposure to holocaust revisionist literature.
The
influence of neo-fascist Holocaust revisionism on new Zealand society has been
extremely negligible. However, other institutions, such as Western Destiny
Publications and the New Zealand League of Rights, have been more successful
in their efforts to circulate Holocaust revisionist material. The League of
Rights – clearly the largest distributor of this material in New Zealand –
has, through deceptive advertising and the contrived defence of ‘free
speech’, been able to get this literature into the hands of people who would
otherwise avoid anything overtly anti-Semitic.
