The Strange Case of David Irving

Differences of opinion between these two schools, and discrepancies in the evidence, have recently permitted the emergence of something that is more of a phenomenon than a "school," by which I mean the movement of "Holocaust denial" or (because it consists of two contrasting tendencies) "Holocaust revisionism." This movement contains some Nazi revivalists in Germany and elsewhere, some crackpots and conspiracy theorists and one practicing historian, an Englishman named David Irving. Among revisionist forces there is even more confusion; they either argue that nothing much happened at all and that the whole thing is a fabrication or they maintain that the unforgettable piles of corpses were the result of epidemics, to be blamed on the disruption of food and medical supplies by Allied bombing. (It will be seen at once that this latter faction has no good explanation for why the Jews of Europe were packed into remote camps in the first place.)

The toxicity of the argument is increased by four other factors. First, there are those who maintain that the German people have been blamed enough and that endless suggestions of collective guilt--accompanied by incessant demands for compensation--are an insult and possibly a provocation. Second, there are those who resent the exploitation of the Holocaust, or Shoah, by extreme Israeli nationalists. Third, there is a collective awareness that neither the international community nor organized Jewry did much to help the victims when it could have made a difference. Finally, in many countries, including Germany and France, it is actually a crime to dispute the established version of events, which means that the "revisionist" movement now has its free-speech martyrs. While in the United States, protected as it is by the 1st Amendment, the Holocaust has become a secular religion, with state support in the form of a national museum. Accusations of ill will or bad faith are often made against anyone with reservations about the elevation of this project into something combining a cult, an entertainment resource and an industry, each claiming to represent the unvoiced dead. Indeed, I myself feel constrained to state here that my mother's family is of German and Polish Jewish provenance and that on my wife's side we have not just an Auschwitz "survivor" in our lineage but a man--David Szmulewski--who was one of the leaders of the communist resistance in the camps as well as one of those who smuggled evidence out of it and later testified against the war criminals in court. I look forward to a time when I won't feel any need to mention this.