Published in The Abuse of Holocaust Memory by Manfred Gerstenfeld, 2009

The awareness of the Holocaust in the Western world has greatly increased since World War II. Leon Jick wrote that “in the years immediately following the end of the Second World War, consideration of the destruction of European Jewry was not merely avoided, it was repressed.”1

Michael Berenbaum, executive editor of the new edition of the Encyclopedia Judaica, illustrated one aspect of this when speaking about Holocaust studies more than twenty-five years after World War II: “This field was in its infancy in the 1970s and was then taught in two American universities only. When the historian Raul Hilberg did his doctorate in the 1950s, his professor said that he could go ahead but it would be his academic funeral. Indeed he could only find a publisher for The Destruction of the European Jews in 1961, if its publication was subsidized.”2

The historian Peter Novick concluded that Hilberg’s book and the political theorist Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem caused a lot of debate and interest in the Holocaust in the US, but that it was not a lasting trend.3

Since the 1980s, the Holocaust has gradually become a more central element of collective memory in many countries.4 This is particularly the case in Germany, the countries that were its wartime allies, as well as those that were occupied by it.

At the same time, collective memory in the Western world has to a large extent fragmented. There are fewer and fewer issues of the past that a majority of people in many countries know about at least in some detail. Increasing secularization is one reason for this decline in common memorial heritage. In many places there is no longer a widespread familiarity with the Bible. Christian value-concepts have also been diluted and no longer serve as a common bond in many Western nations.

In this growing historical vacuum where other elements of collective memory have faded away, the importance of the Holocaust has increased. The twentieth- century mass murder of the Jews stands out as a major historical event that many people have heard about in differing degrees. This is also true in the United States, which fought the Germans overseas and where religion occupies a greater place in society than in many European countries.

One of the many indicators of this is the large number of visitors — mostly non-Jews — to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.5 Another such indicator was the large number of heads of state who participated in the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust in 2000.

The extreme criminal character of the Holocaust and its many facets lend themselves well to metaphorical use; the more so as society requires a real or imagined metaphor of absolute evil. An example of the latter in the Christian world was for a long time the Antichrist. Extreme racist nationalists invented the Untermensch, people of a subhuman race.

Aspects of the Holocaust are often correctly cited and accurately utilized. The wider familiarity with the subject, however, also makes it prone to a multitude of distortions. Its history and terminology are manipulated for a variety of purposes. This includes the abuse of elements of the Holocaust as a tool against one’s enemies, and in particular Jews and Israel. Other Holocaust falsifications derive from a variety of motivations.

Information on and illustrations of the abuse of Holocaust memory could fill an encyclopedia. There is enough material for books about specific topics — for instance, Holocaust deflection, whitewashing, or equivalence. Concerning the means of counteracting abuses, a number of subjects also merit treatment in a book. One is the issue of apologies by the successors of governments, parliaments, institutions, and corporations that were perpetrators or bystanders during the Holocaust.

The material in this book can also be used for several other types of analysis. The nature of the abuses, their motivations, and the reactions to them provide prisms into various aspects of contemporary society. One of these is the better understanding of the broader issue of mutations in perceptions of the past.6 For this the changes not only of Holocaust memory, but also of its abuses over time, could serve as a paradigm.

Categories of Abuse

Hence, in this volume a strategic approach to the many issues at stake had to be taken. Holocaust distortions are grouped into eight categories. To better clarify these manipulations, they have frequently been illustrated with vignettes. The amount of information on some subjects, however, is so large that only a very small selection of examples could be included.

The analysis hereinafter also includes cases that, in the strict sense, are not abuses of the Holocaust but rather manipulations based on other elements of Germany’s Nazi past. One example of this type of distortion is comparing persons with Hitler or other German leaders.

Recent Events

Holocaust-memory-related events and distortions that occurred in the twelve months before the publication of this book reveal how the memory of the genocide has become an instrument for many purposes, and also an indicator of both values and their degradation in various societies. These are two of the many roles that aspects of the Holocaust fulfill in Western and sometimes also other societies.

A listing of some Holocaust-related issues that were picked up by the international media shows their great variety. In September 2008, the genocide- promoting Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad once more addressed the United Nations General Assembly. He again made anti-Semitic remarks and drew some applause from delegates.7 In November, there were ceremonies to mark the lapse of seventy years since Kristallnacht. In many of these it was mentioned how this event was an indicator of developments to come in Hitler’s Germany.

During Israel’s Gaza campaign in late December 2008 and January 2009, there were many anti-Israeli demonstrations. In some of them, calls were heard for the extinction of Israel and the murder of the Jews. These were often made by Muslims. In a number of gatherings in Western cities, signs were carried equating Jews with the Nazis and the Star of David with the swastika.8

On 27 January 2009, the United Nations held its annual ceremony for International Holocaust Remembrance Day. General Assembly president Miguel d’Escoco Brockmann of Nicaragua skipped the event. He had hugged Ahmadinejad at the UN plenary and had often made virulent anti-Israeli statements. He inverted the Holocaust when he described the situation in Gaza as “genocide.”9 Various Jewish organizations had come out against his participation. A press release of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was titled: “General Assembly President Unfit to Participate in U.N. Holocaust Ceremony.”10

Bishop Williamson, Durban 2

In February, Pope Benedict XVI lifted the excommunication of four bishops of the fundamentalist Society of St. Pius X. One of these, Bishop Richard Williamson, is an outspoken Holocaust denier. Jewish organizations protested against this step. The canceling of Williamson’s excommunication led to an international debate that included strong criticism of the pope, from both Catholics and other gentiles.

The Durban 2 review conference took place in Geneva in April 2009. It was supposed to deal with the battle against racism. Ahmadinejad, the world’s leading inciter to genocide, was one of its most prominent speakers. Before the conference this Holocaust denier was received by Swiss president Hans-Rudolf Merz.

The conference also illustrated another development: increasingly, extreme positions of current Holocaust abusers are whitewashed in various ways. One example was when Ahmadinejad spoke at the Geneva conference and the Vatican representative remained in the room. The reason given was that the Iranian president left out a sentence from his draft speech about Holocaust denial. What remained of the text should have been more than sufficient for the Vatican diplomat to walk out.11

The United States, Canada, and several European countries did not attend the conference; the delegations of all other European Union states as well as some others, walked out when Ahmadinejad spoke. The Swiss and Norwegians, however, were among those who stayed.12 Norwegian foreign minister Jonas Gahr Støre criticized Ahmadinejad in his speech in the plenary. Many other delegates who remained in the hall applauded the man who, more than any other world leader, espouses the call for the mass murder of Jews.

The Pope, Facebook, Demjanjuk

In the debate around the visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinian Authority in May, much attention centered on his attitude toward the Holocaust. In connection to the visit, the Vatican first denied that the pope had ever been a member of the Hitler Youth but a few hours later said he had been forced to join the movement. This had been known for a long time.13

Many other recent events drew international attention to Holocaust issues and Holocaust distortion. Suspected Nazi death-camp guard John Demjanjuk was taken into custody in Germany in May 2009 after he was deported from the United States.14 When German doctors decided in July 2009 that Demjanjuk was fit to stand trial, this again received much international media attention.15

A variety of media also reported on various Holocaust-denial groups on Facebook. The site managers refused to ban these groups unless they were based in a country where such denial is a criminal offense.16

The Holocaust was also a topic in a much-discussed speech by U.S. president Barack Obama in Cairo in June. Some of his remarks were misleading.17 Thereafter the president went to Germany where he visited the concentration camp Buchenwald together with German chancellor Angela Merkel and Elie Wiesel.18

In the same month a white supremacist shot a security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. This incident drew far more international attention than if a guard of any other American museum had been shot. Obama stated that the killing had saddened him.19

Also in June attention was given to the fact that Anne Frank, had she lived, would have been eighty years old. She was remembered on this occasion in many places around the world, some far-flung. One of these was Wayanad in the Indian province of Kerala. There a number of activities for youth aged fifteen to eighteen were planned in her memory.20

At the end of June, almost fifty countries participated in the Prague Conference, which urged governments to increase the care of Holocaust survivors. The conference also called for the return of or compensation for private property taken from Jews during the Holocaust. Poland, which participated in the gathering, was seen as the major offender on this issue as it has no private- property restitution laws.21 This conference was mentioned in hundreds of media stories around the world.

In July, Bernie Ecclestone, a billionaire who holds part of the rights to the promotion of Formula One automobile racing, said that dictators like Adolf Hitler “got things done.” After much criticism Ecclestone withdrew his words and said, “I’m just sorry I was an idiot. I sincerely genuinely apologize.”22

The international references to the Holocaust and the Nazi period are extremely disparate. In July, for instance, German prosecutors launched an inquiry into whether an artist who had produced garden gnomes, raising their arms in a Hitler salute, and the Nuremberg gallery that exhibited them, were breaking the law.23

The next Holocaust-related item that drew some international attention was the burning down of the barracks where Anne Frank had worked in the Dutch transit camp Westerbork. The barracks had been used for decades as an agricultural warehouse but was soon to be reconstructed at the camp’s memorial site. Anne Frank was deported from Westerbork to the east. She later died in the German concentration camp Bergen-Belsen.24

A few days later attention was drawn to the mayor of the Romanian city Constanta, who was seen goose-stepping with his son in German army uniforms during a weekend fashion show. He was quoted as saying, “I wanted to dress like a Wehrmacht general because I’ve always liked this uniform, and admired the rigorous organization of the German army.”25

At the end of the month, the American Jewish Committee in Berlin filed a complaint against the German Amazon site. It asked prosecutors to investigate whether the site had broken German laws against Holocaust denial by selling books with far-Right content. Holocaust denial is a crime in Germany that can lead to punishment of several years in prison.26

At the beginning of August, the American talk-show host Rush Limbaugh wrote: “Obama’s got a health care logo that’s right out of Hitler’s playbook.” He went on to make a whole list of similarities between the Democratic Party and the Nazi Party in Germany. This drew attention from a variety of mainstream papers.27 Abraham Foxman, national director of the ADL, asserted, “Regardless of

the political differences and the substantive differences in the debate over health care, the use of Nazi symbolism is outrageous, offensive and inappropriate…. Americans should be able to disagree on the issues without coloring it with Nazi imagery and comparisons to Hitler.”28

A few days later the Central Council of Jews in Germany, the roof organization of German Jewry, said it wanted Germany to lift the ban on publishing Hitler’s book Mein Kampf. The group’s secretary-general Stephan J. Kramer stated that a new scholarly edition of the book should contain comments that would educate future generations on the evils of Nazism.29

Although the Holocaust keeps regularly coming to the fore of the international media, there is simultaneously a certain Holocaust fatigue in parts of Western society. Many people do not want to be reminded of what happened and now seems long ago. Yet the past several months prove again that ongoing events make mentioning the memory of the Holocaust — be it true or false — almost unavoidable and likely to remain so.

A Second Holocaust?

The debate about whether the Holocaust can happen again has been waged for decades at differing levels of intensity, mainly among Jewish communities but also elsewhere. This discussion about a possible Second Holocaust again developed in the United States during the major outburst of anti-Semitism — only in part disguised as anti-Israelism — in the new century. In April 2002, American columnist Ron Rosenbaum stated that the “second Holocaust” was a phrase coined by Philip Roth in his 1993 novel Operation Shylock. Rosenbaum claimed it was likely — rather than novelistic — that sooner or later a nuclear weapon would be detonated by Arab fundamentalists in Tel Aviv.30

The writer Leon Wieseltier reacted to this and similar pessimistic articles by saying that the Jews had found both safety and strength. He concluded: “The Jewish genius for worry has served the Jews well, but Hitler is dead.”31 Rosenbaum countered by claiming Wieseltier was fleeing into denial as there were many Hitler-like examples of demonization of the Jews in the Arab world. He referred to Palestinian justification of the Holocaust, the denial of the Holocaust by an Egyptian government paper while supporting Hitler if he had indeed exterminated the Jews, and a Saudi government broadcast of a cleric calling for the annihilation of the Jews.32

The genocidal  remarks by Ahmadinejad have,  however,  stimulated the debate on the possibility of a Second Holocaust, which has increasingly become the subject of speculation.

The sociologist Zygmunt Baumann has offered another perspective linking the Holocaust to structural elements of modern society. He states that the Holocaust was a product of men who were educated in the most refined culture of Western society. It was thus a product of Western society and civilization. Since nothing fundamental has changed in Western societies, the study of the Holocaust is of more than academic interest. In Bauman’s view, even though another Holocaust may not occur, the infrastructure and mechanisms for a similar event are still in place.33

The Holocaust and Public Discourse

 The Holocaust will continue to play an important role in public discourse for a long time to come. The following analysis of the main categories of Holocaust distortion can help identify and interpret such manipulations. This may also facilitate responses against them.

The various reactions to such distortions also serve as an indicator of the mood of societies. Examples are the ways in which the Western world responded to Ahmadinejad’s genocidal pronouncements.34 The names of those in the Western world who have met with Ahmadinejad should be retained for the future. They can be confronted with their misbehavior, for instance, when they make public statements. The Mennonite Central Committee was among those particularly active in organizing meetings and events with Ahmadinejad.35 Among the attendants were many prominent representatives of American churches.

We live in times of major flux and uncertainty. In such periods it is particularly important to document events. In this way the identity of the hate-mongers and distorters of Holocaust history will be preserved. This may help in the battle against future such distorters.

In reading this book, it will emerge how numerous are the abuses of Holocaust memory. With no detailed analysis available of many of the phenomena exposed, one cannot quantify their relative importance. The emphasis must be laid on qualitatively exposing as many aspects as possible instead of in-depth analysis of a few of them.

Notes

1. Leon Jick, “‘Method in Madness’: An Examination of the Motivations for Nazi Mass Murder,” Modern Judaism, Vol. 18, No. 2 (May 1998): 153–172.
2. Manfred Gerstenfeld, “The Transformation of Jewish Knowledge over the Decades: The New Edition of the Encyclopedia Judaica,” an interview with Michael Berenbaum, Changing Jewish Communities, 27, 16 December
3. Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 134–142.
4. One definition of collective memory is a set of ideas, stories, and representations of the past which are produced, reproduced and reshaped within a community or a group. Collective memory is thus a social construction of the past and is found in the cultural resources which the group (the community in question) shares. Working with the memory means selecting and storing information and using it on various occasions. In the same way that memory is part of human consciousness, collective memory is part of the group’s or community’s historical consciousness.
   Barbara Törnquist-Plewa, “The Jedwabne Killings — a Challenge for Polish Collective Memory: The Polish Debate on Neighbors,” in Klas-Göran Karlsson and Ulf Zander, eds., Echoes of the Holocaust: Historical Cultures in Contemporary Europe (Lund, Sweden: Nordic Academic Press, 2003), 143.

5. ushmm.org/research/library/faq.
6. “An individual constantly orients himself on a temporal axis, interpreting the past, understanding the present and predicting the future by employing his historical This is a process that can be more or less refined and more or less consciously carried out, but it is nonetheless always going on.” Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 177.

7. ADL, “Ahmadinejad’s Speech to the N. Puts His Anti-Semitism on Full Display,” Press Release, 23 September 2008.
8. Manfred Gerstenfeld and Tamas Berzi, “The Gaza War and the New Outburst of Anti- Semitism,” Post-Holocaust and Anti-Semitism, 79, 1 April 2009.
9. “Israel Accused of Gaza ‘Genocide,’” Al Jazeera English, 14 January 2009.
10. ADL, “General Assembly President Unfit to Participate in N. Holocaust Ceremony,” Press Release, 23 January 2009.
11. Bradley Klapper and Alexander G. Higgins, “Ahmadinejad Dropped Holocaust Denial from Speech,” AP, 21 April 2009.
12. Hubert Mooser, “Warum die Schweiz Ahmadinejad den Hof macht,” Basler Zeitung, 22 April [German]
13. Nick Squires and Tim Butcher, “Don’t Mention the Pope’s Hitler Youth Past, Says the Vatican,” Daily Telegraph, 13 May 2009.
14. Karin Matussek, “Demjanjuk ‘Fit Enough’ to Stay in Jail, Official Says,” Bloomberg, 13 May 2009.
15. Nicholas Kulish, “Germany: Demjanjuk Cleared for Trial,” New York Times, 4 July 2009.
16. JTA, “Facebook Won’t Ban Holocaust Denial Groups,” 10 May 2009.
17. ADL, “Obama in Cairo: An Error of Omission,” Press Release, 4 June 2009.
18. “Visiting Buchenwald, Obama Speaks of the Lessons of Evil,” com, 5 June 2009, http://edition.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/06/05/obama.germany/.
19. “US Holocaust Museum Guard Killed,” BBC News, 11 June 2009, http://news.bbc. uk/2/hi/americas/8094076.stm.
20. “Anne Frank Fans in Kerala Pay Homage on Her 80th Birthday,” The Hindu, 12 June 2009.
21. “Prague Shoah Summit Urges Return of Jewish Real Estate, Art,” Haaretz, 1 July 2009.
22. Alan Henry,  “Bernie  Ecclestone  Apologises  for  His  Adolf  Hitler  Remarks,”  The Guardian, 7 July 2009.
23. “Police Investigate ‘Nazi’ Gnome,” Daily Telegraph, 16 July 2009.
24. AFP, “Fire Destroys Anne Frank’s Barracks in Netherlands,” 19 July 2009.
25. Radu Marinas, “Romania Mayor and Son Parade as Nazis,” Reuters UK, 20 July 2005.
26. AP, “Amazon in Hot Water for Selling Holocaust-Denial Books in Germany,” Fox News, 24 July 2009.
27. Eric Zorn, “Godwin’s Law — Rush Limbaugh Is the Big Fat Loser,” Chicago Tribune, 6 August 2009.
28. Dan Eggen, “ADL Condemns Nazi Slurs in Health Care Debate,” Washington Post, 7 August 2009.
29. Dave Itzkoff, “Germany Asked to Lift Ban on ‘Mein Kampf,’” New York Times, 11 August
30. Ron Rosenbaum, “‘Second Holocaust,’ Roth’s Invention, Isn’t Novelistic,” New York Observer, 14 April 2002.
31. Leon Wieseltier, “Against the Ethnic Panic of American Jews: Hitler Is Dead,” The New Republic, 27 May 2002.
32. Ron Rosenbaum, “Can Wieseltier, C.’s Big Mullah, Have It Both Ways?” New York Observer, 10 June 2002.
33. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989),
34. Manfred Gerstenfeld, “Ahmadinejad Calls for Israel’s Elimination and Declares War on the West: A Case Study of Incitement to Genocide,” Jerusalem Viewpoints, 536, 1 November 2005.
35. Dexter Van Zile, “Mennonites against Israel,” Post-Holocaust and Anti-Semitism, 83, 2 August, 2009.