I have believed every eyewitness account about German monstrosity

I’m on the mezzanine of the Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. A Libertarian Party convention is taking place and there are a lot of people milling around. As I walk through the crowd I pause to accept a photocopy of a newspaper article that a man is passing out. The man quickly starts telling me that the stories about six million Jews being killed during World War II are not true.

I’m stunned. It’s as if some character from an outer space movie has come down to earth and zapped me with a beam from his ray gun. I’ve heard about people like the fellow who is confronting me, but I have never actually seen one. He’s a small, thin, middle-aged man with a white pointy beard, clear blue eyes, and a ruddy com-plexion—the picture of health. He speaks fast, in a well-mannered, articulate way, as if he’s afraid he might lose me to some other interest.

In the first instant I don’t truly grasp what he is saying. Then I understand that he is telling me that the stories about German gas chambers are not true, and that many of the stories I have heard all my life about gas chambers and the Holocaust are meant to gain sympathy for Jews at the expense of Germans. I feel sweat appear on the palms of my hands.

The first thing I want to do is to get away from the man. I’m excruciatingly aware of the many other people around us, that they can hear what he is saying. He has almost certainly proselytized those others before I arrived. The others, then, have already heard what I’m hearing now, and in my imagination each of them has one eye on me, waiting to see what my first move will be, waiting to judge me.

I feel ashamed listening to the man talk about Jews. I feel ashamed holding the photocopied article in my hand. I’m listening, but after the first few words I don’t understand anything he’s saying. My brain has closed itself down in self-defense. And yet, at the same time, I’m aware that the man sounds knowledgeable, and even sincere.

I feel trapped between what I take to be the man’s sincerity and my own embarrassment. I want to get away from him, to hand back his flyer and turn away so that those who are watching can see that I reject, out of hand, everything he is saying. At the same time, because of his honest and open manner, I don’t want to cause him to feel ashamed by rejecting him publicly. I have never looked into the history of the Holocaust. I’m ignorant of the whole business. What right do I have to do something that will embarrass another simply because he’s saying that he does not believe what I believe? And then the man makes my decision for me.

He turns to a new arrival and begins his spiel all over again.

Thankful, and at the same time feeling defiled by the fact that I am still holding the flyer in my hand, I walk toward a large trash can. Even at that moment I know that the problem for me is not so much that I am holding the flyer as that I am being observed by others to be holding it and that they know what it says. I had accepted the flyer innocently, in deference to another’s sincerity. The shame I feel, the defilement even, does not come from inside me but from the others, from what I understand to be the standards of my peers.

As I approach the trash can I glance down at the flyer’s head-line. It’s titled “The Problem of the Gas Chambers, or The Rumor of Auschwitz.” What rumor, I wonder? What problem? There isn’t anything there that rings a bell for me. The author of the article is a certain Professor Robert Faurisson. I’ve never heard of him. Then I notice that the article had originally appeared in Le Monde, the Paris daily. It’s confusing. I have no idea at all what the “problem” of the gas chambers might be, or what the “rumor” of Auschwitz refers to. It sounds crazy. And I have never heard of Faurisson. But I am familiar with Le Monde. Le Monde is one of a handful of world-class newspapers.

What, then, is Le Monde doing printing an article critical of the gas chambers, the Holocaust, or whatever? I had intended to drop the flyer into the trashcan on principle. In my circle you just do not read materials that might make Jews feel uncomfortable. It’s a principle. At the last moment, the mind caught by the mystery suggested by the association with Le Monde, I fold up the flyer and put it in my back pocket.

All day I go about my business at the convention, the flyer in my back pocket. Tonight, alone in my room, like a thief, I take it out and read it, all the while conscious of the fearfulness in my behavior, the lack of self-respect. I am aware that I am reading something that everyone I know, and all the people I like best, will think is bigoted and dirty, and that I am doing it at a time and in a place where they cannot find me out. I have spent years learning to accept the weaknesses in my character and to stand aside from them, yet here I am, forty-nine years old, hiding in my room with a photocopy of a translation of a newspaper article, fearful and ashamed.

Several weeks pass. How can I possibly explain what has happened to me? I have read a newspaper article written by a professor I have never heard of, which has been translated from the French by who knows who, given to me on a hotel mezzanine by a stranger who is probably a crank, forwarding a thesis that is outrageous—and dangerous.

Outrageous because it makes claims that I have never dreamed I would hear made. Dangerous because —why? I don’t know. But a sense of tension and danger envelops the thing. I sense immediately into the reading that if I do not reject everything that this Professor Faurisson has written, I will be in danger of suffering great losses, though I cannot say exactly what. At the same time, I was willing to read the Faurisson article with something of an open mind. Very carefully. Why?

I’ll probably never know the why of it. But the source of original publication is given, along with the date, so theoretically it is possible to check the accuracy of the translation. Key statements in the text are sourced. Anyone willing to spend an hour or so in a good library could discover for himself if Faurisson is being honest in those instances. I am impressed by the simplicity of his claims, the objectivity of his tone, dealing as he does with a matter of tremendous significance, from a point of view that is absolutely radical.

My being willing to read the article with an open mind, if I can use that term, might be due simply to my ignorance. I have never read a scholarly work on the Holocaust, and have not paid much attention to the stories of Holocaust “survivors.” Maybe it’s because there are no heroes in the stories I have heard. Masses of sheep-like people being herded to the slaughter. Helplessness, passivity, pathos. No heroes to create tragedy from catastrophe.

Maybe that’s it. Ignorance, a disinterest in suffering unredeemed by heroic action, and finally a kind of primary boredom with a wretched story told and told and retold far too often. That being so, how is it that I remain so stunned after reading Faurisson’s thesis? If the stories had not interested me in the first place, why should I be affected so profoundly by the discovery that there are those who do not believe the stories? Doesn’t my lack of interest in the Holocaust annul my right to be shocked by the possibility that Faurisson has his finger on something?

The really surprising fact for me is that despite my ignorance of the Holocaust and my realization, on reflection, that I was bored with hearing about it, I have believed everything I have ever heard about it. Not the shadow of a doubt has ever crossed my mind about even one Holocaust story, and over the years I have heard hundreds of them, some over and over and over again. I have believed every eyewitness account about German monstrosity that I have ever heard. It has never occurred to me to compare what such people say about Germans on the one hand, and what they say about Arabs and Palestinians on the other.

Maybe that’s why something broke in me that night in my apartment when I read Faurisson’s article. Maybe I had believed too rigidly for too long. There has been no room in my mind for doubt. The Germans committed every monstrous crime against the Jews that they have been accused of committing. I have absolutely believed that. My mindset has been that of an absolutist.

There was nothing there that would allow me to give a little. I was absolutely rigid in my believing. Intellectually then, psychologically, something had to break. My mind welcomed it—but in my heart I felt the awful anxiety that only great insecurity can create.

I knew that first night that I would have to do something about the break, the suspicion that had entered my mind. I knew that first night but I have done nothing. Week follows week and I do not lif t a finger to check out a single assertion made by Faurisson about Auschwitz or the gas chambers. I keep a daily journal, the purpose of which is to make an honest man of me, but there is not a whisper in it about one of the most stunning moments of my life. I’m aware of the evasion. I can’t make myself move on it.

Today, three months after the central event of my recent life, the last day of December, I telephone the Central Library in Los Angeles and ask the history department if it has a copy of Arthur Butz’s The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. I don’t think they will have it, but they do. I ask the lady to hold it for me at the desk. I feel a little apprehension, a little excitement. I try to identify the moment that I decided, at last, to make the telephone call, what was behind it in that exact moment after all the other moments that have passed these last three months, but I can’t.

As I climb the library steps I feel the body growing heavy and burdened. It’s comical. I feel an exhausting load accumulating on my shoulders. I can see the whole thing operating. It’s pathetic. I understand that I am afraid that I am going to find out something that I really do not want to find out. I’m not certain that I will find it out, but I sense that I will. I want to find it out, all right—curiosity killed the writer. What I do not want is to experience what I am afraid I will experience if the German gas chamber stories do begin to unravel before my eyes.

A middle-aged woman is at the reference desk. As I approach her to ask for Butz’s book I feel the shame rise up inside me. When I ask for the book the lady appears to avert her eyes as she hands it to me. It’s as if she recognizes the shameful act that I am about to perform but does not want me to see it in her eyes—that she understands that I want to read a book that no person with decent sensibilities would want to read.

At a reading table I discover that Arthur R. Butz is an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at Northwestern University. Electrical engineering? Computer sciences? Butz tackles this issue straightaway:

There will be those who will say that I am not qualified to undertake such a work, and there will even be those who will say that I have no right to publish such things. So be it. If a scholar, regardless of his specialty, perceives that scholarship is acquiescing, from whatever motivation, in a monstrous lie, then it is his duty to expose the lie, whatever his qualifications. It does not matter that he collides with all “established” scholarship in the field, although that is not the case here, for a critical examination of the “holocaust” has been avoided by academic historians in all respects and not merely in the respect it is treated in this book.

That is, while virtually all historians pay some sort of lip service to the lie, when it comes up on books and papers on other subjects, none has produced an academic study arguing, and presenting the evidence for either the thesis that the exterminations did take place or that they did not take place.

If they did take place then it should be possible to produce a book showing how it started and why, by whom it was organized and the lines of authority in the killing operations, what the technical means were and that those technical means did not have some sort of more mundane interpretation (e.g. crematoria), who were the technicians involved, the numbers of victims from the various lands and the time tables of their executions, presenting the evidence on which these claims are based together with reasons why one should be willing to accept the authenticity of all documents produced at illegal trials. No historians have undertaken anything resembling such a project; only non-historians have undertaken portions.

“With these preliminary remarks,” Butz writes, “I invite your study of the hoax of your century.” I am struck by the selfconfident and dispassionate tone of his voice. Who knows? Maybe he doesn’t have a case against Jews. I suppose—I am certain—that that is the question around which so much of my apprehension and evasiveness circles. While I understand, intellectually, that reasonable men can openly question the truth of any historical question, in my heart I have not believed it. In my heart I have believed that only men with an ax to grind against Jews would allow themselves to question the orthodox history of the Holocaust.

I begin looking carefully through The Hoax. It takes me less than two hours to decide that something I have believed for 35 years with all my heart and all my mind, that a uniquely monstrous German regime had intentionally murdered six million Jews in an attempt to physically destroy them as a people, has probably not been demonstrated to be true. Less than two hours.

The gigantic, brutal transfers of populations by the Germans and Soviets, the tremendous chaos of the war itself, the fact that the sources of “post-war primary data are private Jewish or Communist sources (exclusively the latter in the all-important cases of Russia and Poland)…”—if that’s true, there was no way to know how many Jews were left in Europe in 1945 or to know accurately how they were distributed around the planet.

It is not only that I have believed the “six million” figure with such certainty, but that I have believed so deeply all the implications—including the endless torrent of accusations of unique German monstrosity—that went along with it. I have believed without reservation, but in thirty five years I have not made the slightest effort to substantiate what my believing has accused others of. I have been willing to live my life believing something that morally condemns an entire people of complicity in horrifi  criminal behavior without ever bothering to investigate the evidence supporting a single charge made against them. The very least I could have done was to say: “I’ve heard the stories, I have heard them over and over, but I don’t really know if they are true or not.”
The only way I can explain such intellectually immature and, finally, contemptible life-long behavior is to admit, simply, that it has been easy to believe what everyone else believes and difficult not to. The believing takes no energy, no courage, no common sense. Trying to find out the truth about such terrible accusations against others would have taken all that and more. Merely standing aside from opinion and not participating in that of others— that would have taken energy, too. In my laziness I had allowed myself to be swamped with belief.

I go to the desk and ask the librarian to help me run down some comment on Butz’s Hoax. She takes a run at it but can’t turn up anything. I return to the text. I peruse the acknowledgements, the final remarks. I go over the appendices, notes, references, the index. Hoax is extensively documented, the established history of the Holocaust is confronted openly, and discounted in scores of places. And yet, so far as I can find out by consulting the stan-dard indices and guides, not one periodical, not one newspaper, not one historian, not a single journalist, critic, or scholar has published one word to either confirm or deny one statement, one shred of the evidence presented by Butz to the effect that the poison gas chamber stories are falsehoods and even deliberate lies.

The mind is racing and shooting around like crazy. I walk through the library from one department to another, upstairs and down. Something is wrong with the gas chamber stories.

Something is wrong with the story of the six million and what is wrong is being covered up. Something is wrong with the silence that has buried Butz’s book. Something is wrong in the academic community, and not only among the historians. Something tremendous is going on, or not going on as it were, and the ramifications could prove to be endless. There is an immense amount of work to do. The air in the library is thick with complication. I feel as if I’m swimming in a sea of suppression, censorship, and evasion. [...]

Now I start telling her about The Hoax of the Twentieth Century.

It’s been in the back of my mind that I have to tell her and a few minutes ago when I first saw her standing there, I think that’s what started the anxiety. I speak very carefully. Her family on both sides lost a lot of relatives in the Holocaust. Jenny and Sol both grew up on the Holocaust story. One night in Westwood Sol and Betty and Jenny and I watched a movie called The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. It was about a family of cultured Italian Jews, including an elegant daughter about Jenny’s age, who were rounded up and sent off to the Germans to who knows what. By the end of the film Jenny was sobbing uncontrollably. Her body was actually convulsing. It was unnerving.

This morning the first thing she says is: “Well, Bradley, where did all those people go?” She’s smiling very broadly like she does when she’s challenging someone and knows that the other person knows he’s being challenged. I say that nobody’s really looked for them yet and maybe there aren’t nearly so many missing as we’ve been told. I say: “The Germans said they put them in the Soviet Union. Who knows? The real issue is the gas chambers. It’s an easier approach to the problem. You don’t have to run down six million people one by one. The gas chambers were either there or they weren’t. I think Butz might be right. He says they weren’t there.”

She asks if I’ve been to the Simon Wiesenthal Center to ask the scholars in residence there what they think about Butz’s book.

I say no, I haven’t. We speak very quietly and carefully, standing across the dining room table from each other and in the end she says: “Well, Bradley, it sounds fascinating. It really does. I don’t know how it’s going to add up. It’s going to make trouble for you, that’s for sure. But it’s fascinating. I have to say that.”
“I was worried about telling you.”
“Were you, Bradley?”
“Yes.”
“Wait until you tell Sol.”
“I guess so.”
“Sol won’t feel the same way I do.” She’s smiling very broadly, in her challenging way.
“What worries me is that I’m afraid I’m going to be reviled.”
“You will be, Bradley. You’re going to be associated in every-body’s mind with all the worst kind of people. It’s all set up. It’s all set up. It’s right there waiting for you.”
“I really look forward to this.”
“It makes me think you’ve found a new way to be on the outside looking in.”
[...]

“Mommy says you’re the most moral person she knows.”
“Your mother has always been on my side.” I felt a lit t le uncomfortable. I fell silent. Marrissa was silent too, stroking Princess absentmindedly while the dog gazed up at her adoringly. I took the Sherman Way exit and headed west toward the pound.
“Bradley, are you going to do another issue of your paper?”
“I think so.”
“Why do you want to publish something that makes people feel bad?”
“Did you feel bad about something you read in the paper?”
“I don’t think of myself being Jewish. I just don’t have those feelings at all. I feel like everybody else. Like an American.”
“Did your mother feel bad about something I wrote?”
“I think she struggled with it. Mommy definitely feels Jewish.”
“I feel an obligation to publish it. There’s a lot of lying going on about the gas chamber stories. Straight out lying. I stumbled onto it. A lot of stuff's being covered up that shouldn’t be covered up. People are being accused of crimes they didn’t commit. I don’t like it. I’m going to write about it and I’m going to go on publishing what I write. I don’t know how far the lying goes but I think it goes right to the top. I don’t know how important any of it is but I’m going to go straight ahead with it. I’m doing the right thing, within the context of my life.”
“If you’re not sure it’s important, why would you go on writing things that hurt people’s feelings?”
“Marrissa, do you mean why would I write things that might hurt Jewish feelings?”
“That’s what you do, isn’t it?”
“What if your mother was German rather than Jewish, and you were told all your life that she had done horrible things when she was young, then you discovered that some of the things you had been told were false but people went on saying them anyhow?”
Marrissa didn’t say anything.
“What if you were told all your life that your German father had been a monster when he was young? What if it had been pounded into you year after year after year and then one day you found out that one, just one of the monstrous acts you had been taught to believe he had committed, he hadn’t committed? You found out by accident, because you had always been a true believer in your father’s monstrosity and guilt, but you found out? Do you think you’d let it slide?”
“I’ve never thought about how Germans feel.”
“Think about it now. Put yourself in the place of a German girl. How would you feel?”
“I still think I wouldn’t write something that made others feel bad.”
“That’s not fair, Marrissa. After all the war hate against the Germans you still see in the movies, on the television, that you read in the papers and in books and magazines. Has there ever been anything to compare with it? Have you ever heard of any society in history so obsessed with making a whole people feel bad?”
“I’ve never thought about Germans one way or the other.”
“I can understand that. One of the things a writer does is look at the others in the same light that he uses to see himself. That’s one of the things that separate artists from others. It’s natural for a Jewish kid to grow up trusting Jews and being suspicious of Germans. When you get older the time comes to start seeing through the implications of all that. If you want to.”
“I don’t think I like what you’re doing,” Marrissa said. “I can’t prove it’s wrong, but I don’t think I like it.”
“Uh huh.”
“Everybody says you’re wrong about the Holocaust. Everybody.”
“Not the Holocaust, Marrissa. The gas chambers. I am absolutely not wrong about the gas chambers because I’m only asking questions about them. I’m asking, is this piece of information about the gas chambers accurate? This particular gas chamber story, does it make sense? Is there any real evidence to support it, or am I supposed to take somebody’s word for it? I’m told it’s bad taste to ask questions about the gas chambers. I don’t think so. Not bad taste, not good taste. Not moral, not immoral. I ask questions about the gas chambers to find out what’s going on there. I’m not sneaking around about it either. You should look into your reasons for not liking it that I’m asking these particular questions when you’ve never thought that it was wrong to ask any of the other questions that I’ve gone around asking. Then you should look into the reasons your professors don’t like it either. If you do, you’ll get a whiff of what obsessive conformity and sniveling evasion are all about. You’ll see professorial bowing and scraping before received opinion that’ll turn your stomach. You’ll discover…”

“Why are you getting mad?”
“That’s not mad. That’s intensity.”
“I just don’t know what to think,” Marrissa said. “I don’t have the information to say that you’re wrong, or that you’re right either.”
“I understand that.”
“I have this gut feeling though.”
“Well, what do you think, Kid? Right or wrong?”
“Wrong, Asshole.” She put one hand to her mouth and laughed until tears came from her eyes.

From BRADLEY R. SMITH
A Personal History of Moral Decay