In a sense, history is always being revised, sometimes on the basis of newly discovered documents, sometimes from a different political position, sometimes employing a new methodology. The term "revisionism" however, has been applied to historical analyses that are at variance with mainstream history. The revisionist approach has been generally identified with studies of World War I, World War II and the Cold War. World War I revisionists try to absolve Germany of the blame for starting the war, while World War II revisionists travel much the same route, often blaming Roosevelt for "tricking" America into war. The Cold War revisionists argue that the Cold War is a result of the imperial ambitions of the United States. In many of these studies the historical record is skewed, often in order to promote a political position. This position generally involves a rehabilitation of such states as Wilhelmine Germany, National Socialist Germany or Stalinist Russia.
While historians may have differences of interpretation regarding epochal events such as these, there is also general international agreement as to the essentials. And, as Jacques Barzun points out, the historian's greatest strength, is "his regard for evidence." This regard fosters challenges: "What do I know? How do I know it?" These questions raise the question of motive. Barzun also notes that "[I]n speaking of an historian's motive for writing history, one must distinguish between his purpose and his motive properly so-called - what moves him to study and write, as compared with what he hopes to supply." In 1895, Lord Acton thought the problem simple: "Truth is the only merit that gives dignity and worth to history." If truth is removed from history, what is left?
Most of the revisionist topics mentioned above have had few adherents, perhaps because the weight of both historical record and common sense favors their refutation. However, one other revisionist topic has enjoyed considerable notoriety, and a apparently large number of believers. This is the subject of the Holocaust. It is here particularly that motive and intention become crucially important to understand.
The revisionist methodology concerning the Holocaust can be traced to the work of Harry Elmer Barnes. He has been described as "presumptive doyen of American isolationist historians, guru to fledgling libertarians, and patron saint of neo-Nazi cranks and crackpots in search of academic legitimacy." Barnes became obsessed with the subject of war responsibility, first for World War I, and then World War II. He believed that "vested political and historical interests" were behind the "official" accounts of Germany's responsibility for the outbreak of World War I. This perceived conspiracy was carried over into his work on World War II and finally, Korea. His work was so marked by contentiousness that most of it had to be privately printed. Barnes' attitude to the powers that be probably made it inevitable that he would end up whitewashing Hitler's Reich. In a 1962 pamphlet called Blasting the Historical Blackout he questioned the "alleged wartime crimes of Germany." Four years later, in 1966, he published "Revisionism: A Key to Peace," in which, as Lucy Dawidowicz argues, Barnes "for all practical purposes denied that Hitler's Germany had committed mass murder."
Dawidowicz supports this claim by quoting from Barnes' own writing:
Even if one were to accept the most extreme and
exaggerated indictment of Hitler and the National
Socialists for their activities after 1939 made by
anybody fit to remain outside a mental hospital, it is
almost alarmingly easy to demonstrate that the
atrocities of the Allies in the same period were more
numerous as to victims and were carried out for the most
part by methods more brutal and painful than alleged
extermination in gas ovens.
In France Paul Rassinier came to even more explicit conclusions than Barnes did. His first book was published in 1949 and in it he asserts that the survivors grossly exaggerated the atrocities committed by the Nazis. By 1964 Rassinier had come up with statistical proof of the Holocaust conspiracy. He asserted that precisely 4,416,108 of the six million Jews claimed to have been murdered were actually alive. Where exactly they were was never explained. Barnes and Rassnier met in the early 1960s. Barnes was suitably impressed with Rassinier's scholarship and agreed to translate Rassinier's 1964 book Le Drame des Juifs Europeens. When the book appeared in English it was dedicated to "James J. Martin & the late Harry Elmer Barnes: Pioneers in Revisionist History."
Both Rassinier and Barnes died in the late 1960s but their writings continued to inspire neo-Nazis of many countries. The anonymous 1969 book The Myth of the Six Million contained a pseudonymous introduction praising Barnes as "one of America's greatest historians." It was subsequently discovered that Willis A. Carto, head of Liberty Lobby, which Dawidowicz calls "the best financed anti-Semitic organization in the United States, wrote this introduction." Noontide Press, a Liberty Lobby subsidiary, published the Myth of the Six Million. Barnes' reviews of Rassinier books were published in American Mercury also owned by Liberty Lobby. The thesis of The Myth of the Six Million is apparent from its title. It attempts to support its thesis by disproving all the evidence of the murder of the European Jews. Not content to throw doubt on the testimony of survivors, the author attempts also to discredit the eyewitness testimony of Nazi participants. For example, the testimony of Rudolf Hoess, SS commandant of Auschwitz, is discredited since it was obviously obtained through torture.
An academic scandal erupted in 1976 when it was revealed that Arthur Butz, author of The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, was a professor of electrical engineering at Northwestern University. Butz stated that the Jews of Europe had not been "exterminated and that there was no German attempt to exterminate them." Part of Butz's argument consisted of comparing the work of various revisionists with that of other historians, whom he labeled "extermination mythologists."
Butz's extracurricular career was finally exposed in the New York Times in 1977. The resulting notoriety greatly embarrassed Northwestern University, especially when Jewish contributors threatened to end their financial support. The University refused to fire Butz, holding fast to the concept of academic freedom and the right of tenure. To placate all those enraged by Butz's claims; the University organized a series of lectures on the historical fact of the Holocaust. Dawidowicz was one of those asked to participate, but had reservations about how it was being handled:
As one of the four lecturers at Northwestern, I argued
in private with some members of the faculty and the
administration that the university's response was
inadequate, for it seemed to me that they regarded the
affair merely as an unfortunate incident affecting
Jewish sensibilities.... No one at this great center of
learning seemed to regard Butz's absurdities as an
offence against historical truth, a matter supposedly of
concern to an intellectual and academic community.
Even before Butz's book was published in 1976 the neo-Nazis made a bid for academic respectability. In the early1970s they seized the idea of using terms like "historical review" and "revisionism" to gain academic attention. In 1979 Willis Carto announced the creation of an Institute for Historical Review, funded by Liberty Lobby. The first public manifestation of this new idea was a "Revisionist Convention" held at Northrup College campus in Los Angeles in 1979. Leading lights of the pseudo-scholars read papers denying that the Holocaust occurred. The fact that the trappings of an academic convention could be a successful disguise was demonstrated by the genuine horror of the Northrup Board of Governors when they found out the exact nature of this "convention."
Carto announced at the convention that the Institute for Historical Review would soon publish a quarterly journal. In 1980 the Journal of Historical Review appeared. It contained articles by the headliners at the revisionist convention: Butz, Faurission, Arthur App, and Ugo Walendy. A cause celebre followed the appearance of the Journal of Historical Review when, after obtaining the mailing list of the Organization of American Historians, Carto mailed a copy to each of its 12,000 members. Many of the members were upset that they received this journal; more surprisingly, however, many were not. One of the revisionist tracts, The Revisionist Historians and German War Guilt, received a respectful review in the preeminent journal of American historians, American Historical Review.
If the American response to the revisionists has been tepid, the French response has been vigorous. In Le Monde, February 21, 1979, thirty-four of France's leading historians signed a declaration attesting to the historical veracity of the Holocaust and scorning those who would attempt to deny the Nazi crimes. As Dawidowicz notes, "the concluding paragraph could well serve as a guide to American historians":
Everyone is free to interpret a phenomenon like the
Hitlerite genocide according to his own philosophy.
Everyone is free to compare it with other enterprises of
murder committed earlier, at the same time, later.
Everyone is free to offer such or such kind of
explanation; everyone is free, to the limit, to imagine
or to dream that these monstrous deeds did not take
place. Unfortunately they did take place and no one can
deny their existence without committing an outrage on
the truth. It is not necessary to ask how technically
such mass murder was possible. It was technically
possible, seeing that it took place. That is the
required point of departure of every historical inquiry
on this subject. This truth it behooves us to remember
in simple terms: there is not and cannot be a debate
about the existence of the gas chambers.
In the final analysis it may be claimed that none of the pseudo-academic posturing of the revisionists matters, for surely no reasonable person could believe the monstrous lies of the revisionists. Yet it can also be argued that these allegations do matter, for one reason, the matter of truth noted by the French historians. Truth is often a lonely figure, needful of defenders. It is not a matter of indifference whether historical views are true or not. There are three functions to history, as Landes and Tilley affirm, all of them crucial to a healthy society:
History is, first of all, the custodian of the
collective memory and as such performs the important
function of nourishing the collective ego. Second, it is
in all societies a primary vehicle of the socialization
of the young, teaching them the past so that they may
know who they are and behave appropriately in the
present. Third, it is the branch of inquiry that seeks
to arrive at an accurate account and valid understanding
of the past.
Hence, without understanding and supporting the function of history, truth withers and we are impoverished for it. It is little wonder that there are those who would deny the historical occurrence of such an event as the Holocaust. Precisely because it is an event so monstrous in conception, so insidious in evil, its historical veracity must always be protected, so that indeed history cannot repeat itself.
The sheer scale of the barbarity of annihilation often causes doubts; people wonder how such cruelty could occur and this is where doubts begin. It is not surprising that people could doubt such an event. Having no experience of evil can make a person doubtful of its existence; living a pleasant existence assumes its reality for others. Most people in Canada live an essentially forward-directed existence, giving little thought to the past, for unlike the present the past cannot be changed. The "small" evils and inequities of life - the homeless, African famine, AIDS - are problems that we believe can be solved with the liberal application of money and technology. An historical event like the Holocaust can never be changed: it is fixed in history, and so, for some it must be ignored. And when people seek to remind us of that terrible time we are prone, at first, to sympathetic equanimity, but if they persist, to annoyance. This is not an unnatural reaction; people prefer to confront the horrid on their own terms. The story that follows is an account of what happened when those who would remind us of the Holocaust clashed with those for whom the remembrance was not a personal tragedy but only an historical memory.