Deborah E. Lipstadt

SOURCE: "The Evolution of American Holocaust Revisionism," in Remembering for the Future: Working Papers and Addenda, Vol. III, edited by Yehuda Bauer and others, Pergamon Press, 1989, pp. 2579-93.

[Lipstadt is an American historian and educator whose writings focus on modern Jewish history. In the following essay, she traces the evolution of American Holocaust revisionism.]

The roots of American Holocaust revisionism can be found in the work of an influential group of progressive American historians who were deeply disturbed by American involvement in World War I. Some of these historians were highly respected scholars who probably never dreamt that their historiographic approach and arguments would be utilized by a small but prolific group of individuals—most of whom are neither historians nor people of respected standing in the scholarly world—to place history on trial and to revise the truth.

In the aftermath of World War I a school of revisionist historians including prominent and respected figures such as Sidney B. Fay and Charles Beard sought to exonerate Germany from sole responsibility for the war. They were particularly distressed by the Allied use of German guilt in order to impose a severe peace and to extract what they considered to be unfair punishment. As a result in part of their attacks, criticism of the Versailles treaty was heard in a variety of circles in the United States. Despite widespread American disillusionment with the treaty, the most vociferous and fervent of these revisionists were relentless in their attacks on it and on Allied behavior in general. It was not until the first bombs were dropped on Pearl Harbor that some of these revisionists abandoned their battle to exonerate Germany. What had begun as a historical enterprise had become a battle to prevent the United States from becoming involved in any overseas conflagration. A scholarly enterprise had been turned into a political quest of major proportions.

These historians did not wage this battle alone. Their colleagues included prominent politicians, publishers, academics and other public figures. Among the better known members of this group were Charles Lindbergh, Colonel Robert McCormick, General R. E. Wood, Charles A. Beard, and Chester Bowles.

Despite the fact that there is but a limited personal link between these progressive/isolationist historians and the Holocaust revisionists the historiographic connection between them is crucial, for the former unwittingly provided the fertile soil in which the latter were nurtured. Even in their choice of the name revisionist, the Holocaust revisionists have have sought to associated themselves with what was a radical and controversial but generally legitimate school of thought, particularly as it pertained to World War I.

In the immediate aftermath of World War II a number of these isolationists once again took up the cudgels on behalf of Germany. They had varied objectives. Some, possibly prompted by their German American roots, wished to win more lenient economic and political conditions for a defeated Germany. Others may have been motivated by their middle-western Populist roots. In addition, there were those who were anti-communist and who believed that post-war Germany provided the best defense against the spread of communism. Many of them argued that Nazi Germany had also been an excellent defense but the Allies had been blind—or had been blinded—to this fact. There were of course some among these critics who were simply and unambiguously fascist, xenophobic and openly antisemitic. (Best known among the latter were Gerald L. K. Smith, Gerald Winrod, and Upton Close.) Not all of those who were critical of Allied policy were associated with extremists and fringe elements. Some, particularly those who were closely identified with mainstream cultural and economic groups, were well respected individuals. They included Robert Taft, columnist Felix Morley, who had been editor of the Washington Post, Charles A. Beard and Robert Hutchins, the president of the University of Chicago.

Initially the World War II revisionist argument was focused on the Pacific conflict. Revisionists claimed that Roosevelt had sought a "back door" by which to maneuver America into World War II. In order to ensure American entry into the war, he had concealed the information which had reached him indicating that an attack on Pearl Harbor was forthcoming from the chiefs of the American armed forces. Convinced of Roosevelt's complicity in allowing the Pearl Harbor attack to occur, the Chicago Tribune accused him of deliberately sacrificing the lives of thousands of American soldiers. These isolationists generally shared a belief that a military and political conspiracy of major proportions had been perpetrated in order to drag this country into the war. In terms of their approach to the facts, it was this conviction that a conspiracy had existed that had the greatest impact on their findings.

But their critique was not limited to the Pacific theater. Led by journalists including John Flynn, George Morgenstern and William Henry Chamberlin, the critics turned their attention to the European arena and argued that Pearl Harbor was part of a bigger and more complex picture. They believed the Roosevelt administration had needed a war to divert public attention from the failures of the New Deal. John T. Flynn's The Roosevelt Myth accused Roosevelt of finding war a "glorious, magnificent escape from all the insoluble problems of America." Nothing had been accomplished by the war except to "put into Stalin's hands the means of seizing a great slab of the continent of Europe." The book, which was turned down by all major publishers because of its inflammatory rhetoric, was eventually published by what would become the leading revisionist publisher and reached the number two position on the New York Times best seller list.

Ignoring the uniqueness of Nazi atrocities, many of the World War II revisionists dismissed the notion the war could be defined as a moral struggle. All the sides, they argued, had been equally devious. George Morgenstern, an editor of the Chicago Tribune, offered one of the earliest American post-war examples of equalizing or "relativizing" wrong doings when he argued that none of the major powers involved in either Europe or Asia "could come to the United States with clean hands or represent itself as either a democracy or an exemplar of justice." While the Fascist "slave states" were "abhorrent to decent people," the British Empire which "rested upon the exploitation of hundreds of millions of natives," was equally abhorrent. Stalin's regime was "no more exemplary" than Hitler's.

Scholarly and historical works followed these apace. In certain cases they were limited to severe attacks on Roosevelt and his domestic and foreign policy. In his two volumes on the topic, American Foreign Policy in the Making and President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, Charles Beard was relentless in his critique of America's involvement in the war which, he claimed, left the country in greater danger than before and had enhanced the power of Stalin's ruthless regime.

There were those who, not satisfied with an attack on Roosevelt's policy, took their efforts a step further and sought to portray Germany as the much maligned victim of Allied aggression. It was this aggression, they claimed, which had forced the Germans to take the extreme steps for which they were now being castigated. Their arguments were important because they served as the intellectual model for those who would eventually seek not just to exculpate Germany for the Holocaust but to deny its existence all together.

The most obvious and direct link between the two generations of American isolationist historians and the Holocaust revisionists was Harry Elmer Barnes. During his long career Barnes occupied a prominent position in both the World War I and World War II isolationist camps. The war was hardly over when Barnes was attacking those who failed to acknowledge Allied responsibility for the war. But Barnes did not simply blame the Allies for having provoked the war, he claimed that a pervasive historical "blackout" had been created which was designed to prevent the truth about World War II from emerging. A vigorous conspiracy had been put in place by "court historians" to quash any information which might tarnish Roosevelt's image. Barnes argued that the blackout was necessary to silence critics such as himself who might try to question American "intervention" in World War II.

Barnes' diatribe about this "conspiracy" was contained in a lengthy pamphlet, "The Struggle Against Historical Blackout." It appeared in 1947 and by 1952 had undergone 9 printings. In this and subsequent pamphlets he issued after the war, Barnes contended that virtually all of Hitler's political and military moves including the occupation of Czechoslovakia were justified as a necessary means of "rectifying" the injustices of Versailles. In a letter to fellow revisionist historian Charles Tansill, Barnes described Hitler's demands in 1939 as the "most reasonable of all." In a letter to Harvard historian William Langer, who had authored a two volume defense of America's pre-war policies, Barnes wrote that he considered "the greatest public crime in human history" to be Roosevelt's foreign policy.

Charles C. Tansill's Back Door to War argued that Hitler had given Poland the opportunity of serving as "chief satellite in the Nazi orbit." The Poles' refusal, which was responsible for the outbreak of the war, was prompted—according to Tansill and many of his compatriots—by promises and guarantees the Poles had received from the British, promises Britain had made at America's urging. It was, therefore, American machinations which were ultimately responsible for World War II.

Many of these revisionists, irrespective of whether they came from the political, journalistic or academic world, believed that sinister conspiratorial forces had been responsible for getting us into the war. They looked for and claimed to have found an interventionist "plot." This conviction about the existence of a conspiracy and their quest to find the conspirators prompted them to adopt hyperbolic rhetoric and proffer extreme arguments. As Nadine Fresco noted [in "The Denial of the Dead: On the Faurisson Affair," Dissent, Fall 1981], "one cannot establish a science whose only ethic is suspicion." Beyond the similarity in arguments made by the World War II revisionists and the Holocaust revisionists, it is this conspiracy theory which is one of the most compelling links between the two groups.

Some of the isolationist/revisionists were more sympathetic to Hitler than others. But irrespective of their differing views of Hitler virtually all of them were compelled to either totally eliminate or minimize the uniqueness of the Nazis' annihilation of the Jews and murder of millions of others from their evaluation of the war. While a few revisionists acknowledged it, e.g. William Henry Chamberlin, others simply ignored it. The more extreme among them took matters a step further and tried to neutralize German actions. It was the next generation, with Barnes at the helm, that took the ultimate step and tried to deny that they took place.

These isolationists/revisionists were engaged in an attempt to help Germany achieve a renewed moral standing in the world. They were almost unanimous in their belief that a strong revived Germany was the key to the future of Western Europe. They recognized that the Allies in general and Americans in particular were likely to balk at aiding a country which was perceived of as "cruel, if not genocidal." It was necessary, therefore, to lessen if not totally dissipate the unique qualities of German wartime behavior. They did so in two ways, by minimizing the severity of Germany's actions and by finding comparable Allied wrongs which would serve as immoral equivalents.

They severely assailed Allied policy towards Germany and Germans in the post-war period. Ignoring similar conditions in other parts of Europe, they riled against the food shortages in Germany and demanded special American immigration permits for Germans. Senator William Langer (Rep-North Dakota), who had vigorously opposed Roosevelt's foreign policy, spoke of a "savage and fanatical plot" to destroy fifteen million German women and children. (Extreme concern about the conditions of the German population did not always ipso facto indicate a lack of concern about what Jews had experienced. Langer was one of the outspoken Peter Bergson supporters in the Senate during the war. In 1943, he had publicly criticized the Bermuda Conference on the floor of the Senate and warned that "2,000,000 Jews in Europe have been killed off already and another 5,000,000 Jews are awaiting the same fate unless they are saved immediately. Every day, every hour, every minute that passes thousands of them are being exterminated." Langer's positions both during the war and after it are attributable in great measure to his opposition to the Democrats' foreign policy.)

Many of the isolationists/revisionists were particularly critical of a plan proposed by Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau which would have prevented the economic rehabilitation of Germany. Though the plan was never put into effect it was repeatedly cited by both World War II revisionists and Holocaust revisionists as an example of the Allies' diabolical attitude towards Germany. (Henry Regnery, an active revisionist publisher, published a book by a Stanford economist, Karl Brandt, who compared Morgenthau's proposal with the Nazi plan to destroy millions of Jews through starvation.)

The major thrusts of their attacks on Allied post-war action focused on the Nuremberg trails and the mass transfer of German citizens from Czechoslovakia and Poland in the immediate aftermath of the war. Senator Langer of North Dakota claimed that three million of the refugees had died en route. One prominent isolationist journalist, Freda Utley, described these population transfers as "crimes against humanity." Her choice of this particular phrase, which had already been given wide currency as a result of the Nuremberg indictments was telling. The Chicago Tribune accused the French of not permitting over half a million German prisoners of war to return home. According to the paper they were being kept as "slaves," denied food sufficient to allow them to work and beaten by "Moroccan savages."

These kind of charges would subsequently be used by "relativizers"—those who argue that while what the Nazis did was wrong other groups have behaved in a similar fashion—and "revisionists" alike in an attempt to free Germany of any unique burden of guilt. Many of these isolationist historians seemed, according to Justus Doenecke who has written a sympathetic portrait of them, to draw righteous justification from the fact that as a result of the population transfers, food shortages, Nuremberg trials, and the de-Nazification programs, they had found a way to portray Germany as the victim and America as the "malicious power." [Not to the Swift: The Old Isolationists in the Cold War Era, 1982]. This is not meant to suggest that Allied behavior in the immediate aftermath of the war was without fault. There had not been sufficient planning for this period and, consequently, there were many shortcomings in Allied post-war policies. The de-Nazification program, for example, was applied unequally and many inequities in punishment resulted from it. However, the vigor of the isolationists' attacks on the program did not abate even when it became clear that the Truman administration wished to change it.

Within months of the end of the war certain isolationist politicians and historians were engaged in an attempt to lessen any burden of responsibility or guilt which would be imposed on Germany as a whole. Lindbergh, in an interesting choice of phrases, opposed imposing punishment of an "eye for an eye." Some depicted the Germans as a people who themselves had been persecuted. Former Governor of Wisconsin, Philip La Follette, for example, described the Germans as the first victims of Nazi brutalities. But in order to free Germany of its particular burden of guilt those engaged in this struggle had to directly address the issue of the atrocities committed under the Nazis. Frederick Libby of the National Council for the Prevention of War, tried to mitigate Germany's burden by arguing that "no nation has a monopoly on atrocities. War itself is the supreme atrocity."

Others seemed inclined to try to create some doubt about the veracity of the various reports of Nazi horrors. They referred to them as "atrocity stories," a term which in the aftermath of World War I had begun to be commonly used as a synonym, particularly in the press, for something that was either totally untrue or greatly exaggerated. At the very least such a term had to conjure about doubts about the trustworthiness of the report. (General doubts about the reports of mass murder and other atrocities committed by the Germans had persisted as late as when the camps were liberated. In April 1945, the BBC had chosen not to broadcast its own reporter's account of the liberation of Buchenwald because it feared the public would not believe him. It waited a number of days until it received Edward R. Murrow's account. Because Murrow was held in such high esteem by the British, the BBC was convinced that his description of the horrors perpetrated by the Germans would be more likely to be accepted as accurate. Even Murrow worried that his report would be dismissed as exaggerated and in his famous broadcast he asked his listeners, "I pray you to believe what I have said.")

Robert Maynard Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, a vigorous isolationist who had been an adviser to America First, wrote in 1945 that "the wildest atrocity stories" could not change the "simple truth" that "no men are beasts." (The implicit message in Hutchins' juxtaposition of the terms "wild atrocity story" with "simple truth" may have been unintended, but it must have had a subtle but important impact on readers.) An article in the Progressive by William B. Hesseltine, a historian at the University of Wisconsin, compared the mythical atrocity stories which had been circulated in the aftermath of the Civil War to those which emerged from Germany after the end of hostilities there. (A virtually identical argument would be made two decades later in an essay in the Holocaust revisionist publication, the Journal of Historical Review. By finding supposed historical parallels revisionists hoped to demonstrate that the case at hand was not the only time the public had been tricked.)

Many of these critics questioned the legality of the Nuremberg trials and accused the Allies of hypocrisy in holding them. They further "relativized" Germany's atrocities by arguing that the atrocities performed by the Allies were no different from those of the Nazis. William Neumann, whose pamphlet "Genesis of Pearl Harbor," had been one of the earliest publications attacking America's pre-war foreign policy, believed that Allied atrocities were the "point by point" equivalent of the Nazis. Stalin had invaded Poland in 1939, England and France had declared war on Germany and the United States had committed "acts of aggression" on Germany before Pearl Harbor. Had the outcome of the war been reversed the Allied leaders would have found themselves in the docket. Citing the Hitler-Stalin pact, Charles Beard questioned the validity of the trials.

Isolationist historians were not alone in criticizing the trial. Senator Taft argued that the trials were marked by a "spirit of vengeance" and the Chicago Tribune believed that Russia's participation transformed them into a "kangaroo court." Eventually Robert McCormick, the publisher of the Chicago Tribune and probably America's most important isolationist, refused to have dinner with former Attorney General Francis Biddle because he was a "murderer." The New York Daily News declared that the defendants' "real crime was that they did not win."

By the end of the 1950s the foundation had been set for those who would not simply relativize or seek to mitigate Germany's behavior. Many of the arguments which would form the foundation of Holocaust revisionism were well established within a decade of the end of the war. They included [the notion that] Hitler had only wanted peace and never planned to engage Europe in war; the Allies, bent on their own power quest, had forced Germany into war; the atrocities the Nazis were accused of committing were wildly exaggerated; a multitude of nations had committed similar wrongdoings but had never been called to account in the fashion similar to what had been done to Germany; and that Allied behavior during the war was as bad—if not worse—than Germany's.

With the exception of Harry Elmer Barnes, there was one thing that these critics of American involvement in the war and post-war Allied policy never suggested: that the atrocities had not happened. They may have claimed that they were not as bad as had been reported. They may have ignored their moral implications in order to argue that Allied and Axis behavior were virtually equal, but they did not deny that they were fact. Accusations to that effect would begin to be current in America in the 1950s.

Within a little over a decade after the liberation of Europe claims were being made in American that the death of the six million was not only greatly exaggerated but a total fabrication. (The earliest of these claims seem to have originated in Europe. In 1947 Maurice Bardeche, a leading French fascist, wrote two books attacking Allied war propaganda and claimed that a portion of the evidence regarding the concentration camps had been falsified. Shortly thereafter Rassinier's work appeared.) Most of these statements came from individuals with established antisemitic connections. They appear to have come to their Holocaust denial via their antisemitism.

From the very outset the deniers began by playing what one observer has called "a weird kind of numbers game." This became a persistent part of the revisionist argument. Attempts were and are made to demonstrate that it was statistically impossible for millions of Jews to have died. The arguments generally ignore established facts. In one of the early examples of American revisionism James Madole, who published the "National Renaissance Bulletin," ignored the fact that most of the Jewish victims had lived outside of Germany and wrote that "although the World Almanac attests to the fact that fewer than 600,000 Jews ever lived in Germany the Jews persisted in their monstrous lie that Nazi Germany had cremated six million of their co-racials." In subsequent years the numbers arguments would become slightly more sophisticated.

Benjamin H. Freedman who provided the financial support for the antisemitic publication "Common Sense" argued that there were many million more Jews in the United States than Jews were willing to admit. These were the 6,000,000 "allegedly put to death in furnaces and in gas chambers between 1939 and 1945." Offering an argument that would be echoed in the 1970s by a number of Holocaust revisionists, including Arthur Butz, Freedman contended that the reason the American Jewish community was opposed to a question about religious affiliation on the census was that it would reveal that the Jews who had "allegedly" died were actually in the United States.

The well-known American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell called the Holocaust "a monstrous and profitable fraud." Rockwell agreed with Freedman's notion that the six million "later died happily and richly in the Bronx, New York."

In June 1959 Gerald L. K. Smith's "Cross and the Flag" informed its readers that the six million Jews were in the United States. The article was entitled "Into the Valley of Death Rode the Six Million. Or Did They?"

Though most of these claims of Holocaust denial were only printed in neo-fascist and antisemitic publications some gained wider circulation in more respectable and mainstream publications. A letter by Austin J. App in the Catholic paper "Brooklyn Tablet" offered proof that the figure of the six million was a "bloated libel." In the June 14, 1959 issue of the widely circulated Catholic weekly "Our Sunday Visitor" a letter writer claimed that "I was able to determine during six post-war years in Germany and Austria, there were a number of Jews killed, but the figure of a million was certainly never reached."

By the early 1960s more forceful exonerations of the Germans and explicit denials of the Holocaust began to appear. In France Paul Rassinier published a second work on the topic, the Drama of the European Jews which denied that millions of Jews had been killed by gas chambers. Rassinier, who had already published a book in 1949 claiming that the suffering of the Jews had been greatly exaggerated, had a major impact on Barnes. (In the 1970s Barnes translated Drama of the European Jews into English.)

In Germany Der erzwungene Krieg: Die Ursachen und Urheber des 2 Weltkriegs [The Imposed War: The Origins and Originators of World War II] written by an American, David Hoggan, was published by a house with known links to neo-Nazi groups. The book has been aptly described as an apology for Nazi Germany. According to Hoggan the English had to bear the responsibility for the war. Hitler had no desire to go to war and would not have done so if the Poles, encouraged by the British, had not pushed him into it. Hoggan's book, which voiced many of the arguments made by the World War II isolationists/revisionists, was attacked by German and American scholars as containing forgeries and unwarranted allegations and conclusions. It had started out as a Ph.D thesis at Harvard. In the intervening decade between the completion of this dissertation and its publication in Germany the book had transformed in part, it appears, through the influence of Barnes.

Barnes became one of Hoggan's vigorous defenders and often cited the book. His attack on the alleged conspiracy continued in 1962 when he published Blasting the Historical Blackout. In it he praised both A.J.P. Taylor's exoneration of Hitler's Germany and Hoggan's work. Barnes continued his diatribes about Allied wartime and post-war behavior in 1963 with the publication of "Revisionism and Brainwashing" which attacked the notion of German guilt for the two World Wars.

Apparently still somewhat reluctant to explicitly deny the existence of the Holocaust, he referred to the "alleged wartime crimes of Germany." Barnes praised Rassinier for questioning the existence of gas chambers in concentration camps in Germany and for shedding doubt on many of the "claims" made about the Holocaust. Although he did not specifically say that the Holocaust did not happen, his true intentions regarding the Holocaust were revealed in his reference to the death of six million Jews as a "theory" and his condemnation of historians and contemporary Germans for failing to admit that the "atrocities of the Allies were more brutal, painful, mortal and numerous than most extreme allegations made against the Germans." In a subsequent article Revisionism: A Key to Peace published in 1966 Barnes argued that it was "easy to demonstrate that the atrocities of the Allies … 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 an article in Rampart Journal published in the summer of 1967 Barnes again expressed his doubts about the existence of a German plan to annihilate the Jews when he wrote of the "doings real or alleged at Auschwitz." He further rewrote the historical record by describing the assignment of the Einsatzgruppen as "battling guerilla warfare behind the lines." Ignoring the fact that information on gas chambers in various death camps had been publicized even before the war ended, he claimed that when it was "demonstrated that there had been no systematic extermination" in German concentration camps, those who wanted to maintain the evil image of the Nazi empire "moved [attention] on to Auschwitz, Treblinka, [and] Belzec" and claimed that there were gas chambers there.

He and other revisionists faced a fundamental challenge. They tried to exonerate Nazi Germany but the post-war German government accepted responsibility for the war and its atrocities. He severely castigated the government and academic community of the Federal Republic of Germany for not fighting this "unfair" verdict. He contrasted their behavior with the willingness of Weimar Germany to defend itself, contending that it was post-war Germany's behavior which was responsible for preventing "the restoration of Germany to its proper position of unity, power and respect among the nations of the world."

Barnes' standing as a historian is a matter of some dispute. There are those who argue that while Barnes' work was once respected it is now dismissed by scholars because of his obsession in his latter years with a conspiracy theory particularly as it related to World War II and the Holocaust. However, that Barnes' legacy is still at least somewhat in-tact was made clear by a 1975 edition of History Teacher, a publication of the Society for History Education which is located at California State University at Long Beach. Entitled "Harry Elmer Barnes: Prophet of a 'Usable' Past" the publication identified Barnes as someone who practiced the "scholarship of commitment." History Teacher is designed to aid teachers in finding interesting and exciting ways of presenting historical information to their students.

According to the author Justus Doenecke, "the causes he [Barnes] heralded resemble our own and the dilemmas he faced are hauntingly familiar." Barnes' views regarding the Holocaust were never mentioned in this lengthy essay in which Barnes was portrayed as a useful model for those who believed in the relevance of history. His conviction that Allied atrocities overshadowed those of the Germans was also ignored. There was a passing reference to his tendency to present views which are only "partially digested." Any teacher who, having chosen to rely on Barnes' work, came upon his views about the Holocaust might well take them seriously—if they were not valid would History Teacher have suggested him as a role model for teachers?

Barnes was not the only American academic who attempted to exonerate Germany by denying the Holocaust. By the late 1950s Austin J. App, a professor of English, was not only writing to the Catholic Brooklyn Tablet offering "proof" that the figure of six million was "a bloated libel," but was appearing before varied audiences attacking Jews and accusing them of perpetrating a hoax. In the mid-1960s he wrote an article in American Mercury entitled "The Elusive Six Million." In this and subsequent articles he accused Zionists of wanting to "use the figure of six million vindictively as an eternal club for pressuring indemnities out of West Germany and for wringing financial contributions out of American Jews."

Even before issuing his explicit denials of the Holocaust, App had long been engaged in attacks on Jews and their supposed control of newspapers and radio. His articles and essays had appeared in various antisemitic publications. In the August 1948 issue of Cross and Flag he called for the re-education of Jews "away from their eye for an eyeism." In an article which appeared in Conservative Viewpoint in April 1970 he argued that the "most enormous massacre in history continues to be discreetly played down or ignored altogether because it was committed against German civilians by Anglo-Americans for the benefit of Soviet Russia."

In 1973 in a pamphlet entitled "The Six Million Swindle: Blackmailing the German People for Hard Marks with Fabricated Corpses," App reiterated his fully formulated argument that the accusation against Hitler that he wanted to exterminate all Jews was "a totally fabricated, brazen lie." He admitted that the Nazis wanted the Jews to emigrate but they had no intention to murder them. Relying on what has since become the standard method by which Holocaust revisionists dismiss evidence which contradicts their conclusions, he contended that the affidavits by Nazis admitting to the existence of a Final Solution are "often outright frauds" and that all testimony by Jews regarding mass murder was "in part or whole perjured, often well rewarded and altogether unreliable." This blanket denial of the validity of any evidence attesting to the Holocaust, including that by eyewitnesses, has become a centerpiece of the revisionists' methodology. Simply put, anything which disagrees with their foregone conclusion is dismissed.

In "The Six Million Swindle" App set out eight arguments about the Holocaust which were eventually adopted by the Institute for Historical Review as well as other revisionist groups and incorporated as the fundamentals of Holocaust revisionism. The eight assertions were:

1. The Reich wanted Jews to emigrate. Emigration, never annihilation, was its plan for the "solution" to Germany's Jewish "problem."
2. No Jews were gassed in any concentration camps. The Hitler gas chambers never existed.
3. The majority of Jews who disappeared and are still unaccounted for fell afoul in territories controlled by USSR.
4. Those Jews who did die at the hands of the Germans were subversives, spies and criminals.
5. The Jewish State has kept people from researching the topic for fear that the truth will emerge. Israel has been the principal beneficiary of this fraud.
6. The Jews have no evidence to prove a Holocaust occurred. They misquote Eichmann and other Nazis in order to try to substantiate their claims.
7. The burden of proof rests on the accusers not on the accused.
8. The main evidence that six million did not die is that Jewish researchers have discrepancies in their own research. Different Jewish historians offer different conclusions as to the number of victims who died at the hands of the Nazis. There are "ridiculous discrepancies in their calculations."

App seems to have missed a basic flaw in this last argument. If this were truly a fraud perpetrated by the Jews one would think that they would have seen to it that no discrepancies were allowed to creep into research by Jewish scholars. Yisrael Gutman has pointed out a similar flaw in another revisionist argument in relation to the "numbers game." Arthur Butz, in his attempt to prove that the Holocaust was a hoax, points out that Yad Vashem had only two and a half to three million sheets of testimony for the deceased. If Yad Yashem is really a deceitful and falsifying agency, as Butz claims it is, they should have had no trouble forging the additional sheets to fill their complement of six million.

The goal of Barnes, David Hoggan, Austin J. App and other revisionists both in the United States and in Europe was not simply to exonerate Germany but to de-demonize Hitler. Barnes argued that Hitler was unfairly portrayed in Western historical literature as a "pathological demon," a portrayal which was necessary in order to justify Allied "terrorism." In order to "make the thesis of diabolism sink in and stick," the Allies needed to find something "different and dramatic" with which to accuse Hitler. They did so by placing upon him the sole responsibility for starting the war and for committing unprecedented atrocities.

By the beginning of the 1970s the effort in the United States to exculpate Hitler and Germany of any unique inhumanity was in full swing.

Revisionism in the United States became a much more formidable obstacle to truth and a greater purveyor of hatred in the 1970s with the publication of a book by a professor at Northwestern University and with the founding of an institute to formally disseminate Holocaust revisionism and provide it with the veneer of academic respectability.

The publication of Arthur Butz's The Hoax of the Twentieth Century in 1976 won for the revisionists considerable media attention. Butz's position as a professor at one of the most prestigious universities in the country enhanced the sense of controversy. For many people it seemed hard to reconcile Holocaust revisionism with the pursuit of truth to which universities and their faculty are generally dedicated. The book was the subject of news articles in many of the nation's major papers. But Butz's contribution to this cause did not rest only in the fact that he was a professor at one of America's more important educational institutions. In his arguments and his methodology, he took a significantly different tack than his predecessors, one which revealed a far more subtle and sophisticated approach to this material than had been evidenced earlier.

What distinguished Arthur Butz from virtually all of the revisionists who preceded him was the veneer of scholarship and impression of seriousness and objectivity which he was able to convey. Well versed in academic etiquette, the format of his book immediately indicated that he understood the nuances of scholarly debate and would use them to his advantage. In contrast to many of the previous publications, particularly the poorly printed pamphlets which had typified much revisionist work, his book contained the requisite narrow margins, myriad of footnotes, and large bibliography. All these were items which generally distinguish serious scholarly works from popular ones. He quoted many of the prominent historians who worked in this field and thanked a number of legitimate research centers and archives. At first glance a reader had little reason to imagine the true import of his work.

More important than the form of the publication, however, was Butz's willingness to directly confront a host of issues. In an effort that was clearly designed to disarm an innocent reader, he did not shy from addressing issues which most revisionists had ignored. Not only did he cite the incriminating evidence offered at Nuremberg but he gave short shrift to the notion which had generally been offered by revisionists, that the Nuremberg defendants had been tortured into admitting their guilt. Rather, he argued, the defendants recognized that the world was so convinced that a Holocaust took place that they could not possibly deny it and hope to be believed.

The world has much more sympathy for the repentant sinner than for the unrepentant sinner. Even though the Germans had done no wrong, according to Butz, the world was so intent on seeing them as guilty that it was counterproductive for them to try to protest and maintain their innocence. They therefore used the next best means of defense: admit that it had occurred—even though they knew it had not—but argue that they had nothing to do with it. This approach provided Butz with the means to respond to one of the most oft-heard criticism of the revisionists: why do Germans not deny that the Holocaust happened? Because the "hoax" has been so widely accepted, if they did deny it they would only earn the enmity and contempt of the rest of the world.

His aura of scholarly objectivity was further enhanced by his willingness to find fault with other revisionist writers. He called The Myth of the Six Million, one of the earliest full length American revisionist publications, a "terrible" book. Of equal importance in establishing his scholarly veneer was his willingness to concede that as many as 1,000,000 Jews may have actually died. Moreover, he was willing to acknowledge that the Einsatzgruppen may have murdered civilians and that the Jews were "singled out for special persecution" by the Germans. These were things which many Holocaust revisionists found very hard to admit.

He did not try to totally "whitewash" German wartime behavior and, in contrast to Barnes, App, Rassinier and others, he did not try to justify the German persecution of the Jews by claiming that Jews were disloyal, that they could not be trusted or that they were interested in causing Germany's defeat. He gives the impression at times of being almost critical of Nazi antisemitism.

In this regard Butz even differs from some of the contemporary German historians. Ernst Nolte believes that once the war broke out the Nazis were justified in considering the Jews as a threat to their well being and security because Jewish leaders, e.g. Chaim Weizmann, had pledged loyalty to the Allies.

Among the more significant but subtle aspects of his tactics was that in the book and in articles published subsequently in the Journal of Historical Review (JHR) Butz addressed and acknowledged the validity of a number of the criticisms which were and are commonly used to shed doubt on the revisionists' methodology. One of the oft cited issues is that in the revisionists' ranks there are virtually no respected historians or individuals trained in this area of research. There are professors of engineering and physics but few historians. Butz bemoaned this and attributed it to the fact that respected scholars had been "frightened … away" from questioning something that is as "established as the Great Pyramid." It was because of this "sorry situation" that non-historians, such as himself, were left to investigate this area. If only others would fulfill their scholarly duties he could return to his electrical engineering.

He also acknowledged the validity of the criticism that this material did not not appear in the standard scholarly journals but was published in "ideological publications" such as the Spotlight and National Zeitung. Butz admitted that there should be a "distinction between the matters treated by scholars and those treated in the popular press." In an optimal situation this material would appear in scholarly journals, but because of the conspiracy which exists to prevent its publication the normal channels of scholarly research had been blocked to those who would tell the truth. In the interest of exposing the "hoax," it was necessary for those who worked in this field to publish their findings in these ideological publications.

Butz's work appears to have been a major impetus for the founding of the Institute for Historical Review (IHR). Established in the late 1970s at the instigation and with the support of long time antisemite and Liberty Lobby leader, Willis Carto, the IHR was dedicated to "proving" that the Holocaust was a hoax perpetrated on the world by Zionists and other supporters of the State of Israel.

As was the case with Butz's book, the Institute was designed to win scholarly and academic acceptance for revisionism. Though the main thrust of its work was to expose the Holocaust as a "myth," its publications and conferences included discussion of other instances in which the "totems of 'history'" were "manipulat[ed]" by people with a "vested interest" in doing so.

The IHR quickly attracted to its midst a conglomeration of "cranks" as well as those who claimed to be the heirs to a genuine intellectual legacy. They drew on the work of those World War II isolationists/revisionists who had been so opposed to American involvement in foreign wars that they had rejected or ignored reports of Nazis wrong doings and were convinced that Allied military conspiracies had forced this country into war.

But all the IHR's efforts for academic respectability notwithstanding, it drew its major support and inspiration from Willis A. Carto, head of Liberty Lobby, a well established ultra-right antisemitic organization which publishes the antisemitic and anti-Zionist Spotlight and which maintains direct connections with other antisemitic publications including the American Mercury, Washington Observer Newsletter, and Noontide Press. Only the most superficial attempt has been made by either the IHR or any of these publications to camouflage the connection between them. In fact at one point the IHR, Noontide Press and the American Mercury all shared the same post office box. The publications which were part of this antisemitic network were known for their anti-Israel publications many of which contained alleged details of a "World Zionist Conspiracy." In some of them Israel was referred to as a "bastard state."

Carto had long been associated with the idea of Holocaust revisionism. In 1969 he wrote the introduction to one of the earliest American Holocaust revisionist publications, The Myth of the Six Million. (Its author was listed as "Anonymous." However, in all likelihood he was David Hoggan.) Carto blamed "international Jews" for the defeat of Hitler which "was the defeat of Europe. And America." How, he wondered, "could we have been so blind?" The Jews, it seemed, had conspired to achieve this goal and had the unique power to defeat Hitler, Europe and America. In September 1979 Spotlight described Carto as one of the "organizers of the convention."

Another individual with neo-Fascist and antisemitic connections who was associated with the Institute was William David McCalden, who until he was uncovered used the name Lewis Brandon. A former member of the National Front, McCalden edited antisemitic and racist publications in England prior to coming to the United States. He eventually had a falling out with Carto and left the Institute. He is currently still quite active in revisionist affairs, publishing his own materials and speaking at various gatherings.

The first IHR conference, which was held in late summer 1979 at the Northrop campus in Los Angeles, featured presentations by those whose names had already become associated with Holocaust revisionism. Though the IHR gatherings attracted their quota of eccentrics there were some people present who still had established reputations. One of these was James Martin, who was Barnes' protege and who eventually was seen by the revisionists as the leader of American Holocaust revisionism. Martin was a contributor to the 1970 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica and had authored a number of works including one he co-wrote with a respected Libertarian scholar, Leonard Liggio. When Rassinier's book was translated into English it was dedicated to Barnes and Martin.

The convention passed a resolution calling on the Congress of the United States to "investigate, interalia, the truth of the alleged extermination of the six million Jews in Europe during World War II."

Though the IHR's main objective was to engage in Holocaust denial it occasionally included in its journals articles that have no connection with World War II or the Final Solution. This was obviously part of an attempt to demonstrate that the boundaries of the revisionist enterprise transcend the denial of the Holocaust. Lewis Brandon (David McCalden), in a letter which was distributed to students on various campuses, argued that history had long been manipulated by those who were "willing to parrot … just what the establishment wants them to," and that the IHR was dedicated to ending this. In the Spring 1982 edition of the journal an article by Barnes entitled "Revisionism and the Promotion of Peace" argued that revisionism was dedicated to the "honest search for historical truth and the discrediting of misleading myths that are a barrier to peace and goodwill among nations." It was, Barnes claimed, an "effort to correct the historical record in the light of a more complete collection of historical facts, a more calm political atmosphere and a more objective attitude."

The Holocaust, revisionists claimed, was not the only instance in which the historical record had been manipulated. Other events which demanded a revisionist examination were the American Revolution (the policies of the British were not that harsh), the War of 1812 (Madison was not pushed into war but made the decision based on his own convictions), the German invasion of Belgium in World War I (the British would have done the same thing if the Germans had not gotten there first) and Theodore Roosevelt's role in the Spanish American War (he ordered an attack on the Spanish fleet as part of his American imperialist and expansionist philosophy). As was often the case with revisionist arguments, the issues they raised had a kernel of truth to them. By demonstrating that in each particular case popular impressions were not entirely accurate they apparently believed that they could lull the reader into accepting that a revisionist approach was needed in relation to the Holocaust.

This was the objective of Mark Weber's article on Civil War "concentration camps." Weber claimed that false reports about the suffering of Northern prisoners in Southern prisoner camps caused the North to order similar "special treatment" for prisoners in its camps. Exaggerations about conditions in the South multiplied with the passage of time as former prisoners wrote books supposedly documenting their experiences. The commander of Andersonville, the most notorious camp in the South, was executed because "in the imagination of inmates [he] became the cruel and inhuman author of all their sufferings." Weber described the proposal that Andersonville be maintained as a permanent reminder of the war as "shades of Dachau." Echoing Butz's approach to the conditions which faced Jews during World War II, Weber admitted that many prisoners on both sides had died but no one "deliberately killed prisoners." Rather "bad management, especially in the South, resulted in so much death and suffering."

The ultimate objective of Weber's work was revealed when he drew a direct parallel between the two wars and the world's reaction to them:

In the Civil War as in the Second World War, the victorious side hysterically distorted the actual conditions in the camps … to brand the defeated adversary as intrinsically evil.… All the suffering and death in the camps of the side that lost the war was ascribed to a deliberate policy on the part of an inherently atrocious power. The victorious powers demanded "unconditional surrender" and arrested the defeated government leaders as "criminals."

There was one major difference, according to Weber, "in that the Civil War rendition of Sonderbehandlung never achieved the sinister notoriety of its Second World War counterpart." Nonetheless, Weber argued, in both wars

the social-political system of the side that lost each war was deemed not merely different but morally depraved. The defeated side was judged ethically in terms of its readiness to atone for past sins and embrace the social systems of the conquerors.

But these momentary excursions into other issues are tangential to the true purpose of the IHR, the JHR and other North American revisionist enterprises. The objective was clearly stated in an IHR publication, Dealing in Hate by Michael F. Connors. "A final accounting must exculpate Germany of any unique inhumanity in the waging of World War II, just as revisionist scholarship has exonerated her of sole or even primary guilt for the war itself." Consequently the bulk of the articles which have thus far appeared in their journal and the various other publications the IHR issued concerned themselves with Germany's role in World War II in general and with the Holocaust specifically.

The World War II issue that is of prime importance to the revisionists is the question of Pearl Harbor. Continuing the battle which had been begun by the isolationists/revisionists in the months immediately after World War II ended, an entire issue of the JHR was devoted to this topic. Its explicit objective was to portray Roosevelt as the man who allowed the attack to take place so that America would be forced to enter the war. This obsession with Pearl Harbor has a dual objective: Firstly, to demonstrate Roosevelt's and, by association, the American government's duplicity.

Secondly it is designed to dispel the claim, supposedly made by the Allies and the "Court Historians" that World War II was a moral, as opposed to a power, struggle. The revisionists believe that if they can demonstrate that this was at its heart a conflagration like all others, then they can argue that any unique accusations of guilt or trials for special war crimes are invalid. In this case the revisionists have established a "straw man" in order to knock him down. America never claimed that it entered the war for moral reasons. But, as Josef Joffe has observed in relation to the historians' struggle currently raging in Germany, proving that the Allies were motivated by the "age-old quest for power and advantage" is far more subtle than trying to create an "immoral equivalence" of the gulag vs. the death camps or Auschwitz vs. Dresden.

In contrast to Nolte and his compatriots, the Holocaust revisionists do not accept the reality of Auschwitz or the other death camps. However, if they cannot achieve their aim of convincing the public that the Holocaust was a "hoax" then at the very least they want to convince it that all sides were equally evil. Any attempt to single one party out for special punishment and unique moral guilt is itself immoral. It is on this basis that the IHR has attracted "fellow travelers" such as David Irving and John Toland. This may well be the future direction that American revisionism will take. If it does it will, in all sad likelihood, acquire a far more receptive audience than it has through outright denial of the Holocaust. These are the kinds of arguments which find an attentive ear in contemporary America. This is a society which is peculiarly ahistorical and consequently, as the psychiatrist Walter Reich has observed, there is a current notion that "everything is debatable and that nothing should be accepted as true that was not personally seen and experienced." In light of recent developments in the Middle East such equivalencies have gained a particular currency.

Among the questions that remain to be assessed is the impact the Institute and its revisionist colleagues have had on North America beliefs regarding the Holocaust. What is clear is that Holocaust revisionism constitutes a major assault on truth. Revisionism, from its earliest manifestations to its most extreme form fosters an implicit distrust of historical assertions, particularly those that have an "official" imprimatur. Holocaust revisionism takes this assault on historical truth a step further and melds it with basic antisemitism. The result is a body of material that by all logical considerations should be accorded as much weight as the "flat earth" school of thought. However, the long history of prejudice and the sustained life of antisemitism has taught that simply because a notion is bizarre and irrational does not mean it will not find those willing to enthusiastically espouse it.

Deborah E. Lipstadt

SOURCE: "The Battle for the Campus," in Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, The Free Press, 1993, pp. 183-208.

[In the following essay, Lipstadt investigates the controversy over the appearance of a Holocaust denial advertisement in various college newspapers in the United States.]

In the early 1990s American college campuses became loci of intensive activity by a small group of Holocaust deniers. Relying on creative tactics and assisted by a fuzzy kind of reasoning often evident in academic circles, the deniers achieved millions of dollars of free publicity and significantly furthered their cause. Their strategy was profoundly simple. Bradley Smith, a Californian who has been involved in a variety of Holocaust denial activities since the early 1980s, attempted to place a full-page ad claiming that the Holocaust was a hoax in college newspapers throughout the United States. The ad was published by papers at some of the more prestigious institutions of higher learning in the United States.

Entitled "The Holocaust Story: How Much Is False? The Case for Open Debate," the ad provoked a fierce debate on many of the campuses approached by Smith. His strategy was quite straightforward: He generally called a paper's advertising department to ascertain the charge for publication of a full-page ad and then submitted camera-ready copy and a certified check in the proper amount. On occasion he inquired in advance whether a paper would be willing to run this particular ad. Even when he was rejected, the attempt to place the ad won him significant media attention. Campus newspapers began to use his name in headlines without identifying him, assuming readers would know who he was. Articles, letters, and op-ed pieces defended Holocaust denial's right to make its "views" known. But not all the results were necessarily what Smith would have wanted. On some campuses there was a backlash against him and Holocaust denial. Courses on the Holocaust that had languished on the back burner for an extended period materialized in the next semester's offerings. Campus administrators admitted that the ad constituted the final push necessary to move these courses from the planning stage to the schedule books. Professors from a wide variety of disciplines included discussion of the Holocaust in their courses. Movies, speakers, photographic exhibits, and other presentations relating to the Holocaust were brought to campus. Students participated in rallies, teach-ins, and protests.

This response prompted some observers to argue that the controversy had a positive impact. Students had become increasingly aware not only of the Holocaust but of the contemporary attempt to subvert history and spread antisemitism. While this may be a relatively accurate analysis of the immediate outcome of Smith's endeavor, there is another more sobering and pessimistic aspect to the matter. Analysis of the students', faculty's, and administration's responses reveals both a susceptibility to the worst form of historical revisionism and a failure to fully understand the implications of Holocaust denial, even among those who vigorously condemned it.

This was not Smith's first use of college newspapers to spread Holocaust denial. For a number of years Smith, along with other deniers, had been placing small ads containing the phone number and address of the Committee on Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH), an organization Smith had created with fellow denier Mark Weber in 1987. According to the ADL [Anti-Defamation League], CODOH was initially funded by the late William Curry, a Nebraska businessman known for his antisemitic activities. In 1986, he first attempted to place an ad denying the Holocaust in a campus newspaper. He sent one thousand dollars to the Daily Nebraskan for a full-page ad claiming the Holocaust was a hoax. The paper rejected the ad. Shortly thereafter Curry died, and Smith continued his work.

Smith claims that he has no connection to any other denial group and his only association is with CODOH. He has had a long-standing association with the IHR [Institute for Historical Review], serving as a contributing editor of its newsletter since June 1985. At the time he was placing the ads he still maintained a relationship with it. In 1986 he launched the IHR radio project, writing a regular column on the project for the IHR's newsletter, in which he touted his success in getting Holocaust denial onto the radio. Under the auspices of the IHR he planned to tour colleges and universities to speak about "Holocaust fraud and falsehood." Smith's objective was not to "plant seeds" for coming generations but to "take revisionist scholarship directly into our universities NOW!" In a letter to his followers he announced that the IHR had guaranteed to pay a portion of both his "start-up costs" and his "on-going expenses."

Before becoming involved with the IHR's radio project, Smith published Prima Facie, which he dedicated to "monitoring Holocaust Cultism, Censorship and Suppression of Free Inquiry." In it he attacked Mel Mermelstein, who had successfully challenged the IHR's demand for "proof" that the Holocaust happened. Smith's description of Mermelstein—as a "yokel" who had sued the institute because it refused to believe that "a hank of hair and a jar full of ashes proves" that Jews were "exterminated" in gas chambers—typified the tone of the newsletter. Mermelstein had developed a "tongue so twisted he could drill his own teeth."

Articles from Prima Facie have been reprinted in Spearhead, the publication of the right-wing extremist British National party. One such article referred to a wire service report of how a Gestapo officer watched with a smile as his German shepherd dog killed an elderly Jew in Poland in 1942. Smith's use of sarcasm in his attempt to cast doubt on the story was a hallmark of his style.

Let's say the dog was an 80-pounder—hell let's say it was a 100-pounder! Now let's say the elderly Jew was frail and small, perhaps only a 100-pounder himself. Hell, let's say he was an 80-pounder! I do want to be fair about this. So one question to get straight about the German dog and the elderly Jew is this: How much of the one could the other really eat?

Smith's accomplice was Mark Weber, co-director of CODOH, one of the more active spokesmen for Holocaust denial, and a former member of the National Alliance, a pro-white organization. Spotlight described Weber as the "shining star" of defense witnesses at the Zundel trial. At the trial and in denial publications Weber has argued that the Jews who died were the "unifortunate victims" not of an extermination program but of "disease and malnutrition brought on by the complete collapse of Germany in the final months of the war." Repeating a denial argument that had first been voiced by Austin App, Weber contended that if the extermination program had actually existed, the Jews found alive by the Allied forces at the war's end "would have long since been killed."

Born in 1951, he was educated in a Jesuit high school in Portland, Oregon. In an interview in November 1989 with the University of Nebraska Sower he expressed his concern about the future of the white "race" in the United States and about the future of the country. Weber contended that the country was heading in one of two possible directions. Either it would become "a sort of Mexicanized, Puerto Ricanized country," a result of the failure of "white Americans" to reproduce themselves, or it would break up because of long-standing racial problems. He rejected the possibility of a unified American heritage or culture based on a multiplicity of races and groups. He did not think it desirable or feasible for "black Americans to be assimilated into white society." He seemed to yearn for a time when the United States was defined as a "white country" and nonwhites were "second-class citizens." This gave the country a "mooring, an anchor." He bemoaned the fact that "today we don't even have that." As the newspaper controversy became more public and Weber became more publicly involved in denial activities, his ideas on race were increasingly left unarticulated.

One of the first papers approached by CODOH, which for all intents and purposes consisted of Smith and Weber, was Pennsylvania State University's Daily Collegian. After running the small ad that contained CODOH's number for a few weeks it dropped it in response to campus criticism. Smith immediately sent a series of letters to local newspapers accusing the Daily Collegian of trying to "suppress and even censor radical scholarship." It may have been the "Sturm und Drang" he created with this small ad that persuaded him to expand his efforts.

Shortly after his failed attempt at Penn State he experienced the same problem with the Stanford Daily, which had been running a similar ad for a period of seven weeks. The editor cancelled it due to student protests. Smith, implying that Hillel, the Jewish student organization, controlled the Daily's coverage of other issues, including American politics in the Middle East, urged the editor to take a stand for "free inquiry and open debate" by running the ad. He told Hillel students that it was in Jews' best interests to know the truth about the Holocaust.

In his publication Revisionist Letters, Smith tried to differentiate between antisemites who used Holocaust denial to attack Jews and his putative objective of uncovering the truth. He asserted that his editorial policy objective was to encourage "exposes of bigotry and antisemitism" in Holocaust "revisionism." An article in the magazine argued that the participation of "Nazi apologists" in Holocaust denial circles precluded the participation of other supporters, particularly the radical left. The author, Laird Wilcox, wondered how "revisionists" could argue that their speech was suppressed when there was a "substantial element in [their] own ranks that doesn't believe in it [free speech], except for themselves." Smith reiterated this idea in a column in his local newspaper, admitting that although the "search for truth" about the Holocaust was not antisemitic, there were "bigots" in the movement who were "self-avowedly anti-Jewish and who used revisionist scholarship as an attack on Jews." Smith seemed to be aware that any linkage of his efforts with extremist and racist groups would be a liability, particularly on campus.

His effort to distance himself from these overtly antisemitic groups was reflective of a shift by deniers to sever their overt ties to an array of neo-Nazi and extremist groups. Leonard Zeskind, the research director of the Center for Democratic Renewal in Kansas City, Missouri, and a respected specialist on extremism in America, categorized Smith's efforts as reflective of a general shift among "white supremacists" and extremists away from the political margins into the mainstream by avoiding any overt association with swastika-bedecked or white-sheeted fascist groups. David Duke's re-creation of his past during the presidential campaign was an example of this strategy, which confuses many people who can easily identify the objectives of the Klan, White Aryan Nation, and Posse Comitatus but who find it more difficult to recognize extremism when it is cloaked in a seemingly rational and familiar garb.

The ad Smith began to circulate in the spring of 1991 contained the deniers' familiar litany of claims. It declared the gas chambers a fraud, photographs doctored, eyewitness reports "ludicrously unreliable," the Nuremberg trials a sham, and camp internees well fed until Allied bombings destroyed the German infrastructure in the most "barbarous form of warfare in Europe since the Mongol invasions," preventing food from being delivered and causing the inmates to starve. According to Smith the notion of a Nazi attempt to destroy the Jews was the product of Allied efforts to produce "anti-German hate propaganda." Today that same propaganda was used by powerful forces to "scape-goat old enemies," "seek vengeance rather than reconciliation," and pursue a "not-so-secret political agenda."

He repeated the familiar protest that his sole objective was to uncover the truth through an open debate on the Holocaust—debate that had been suppressed by a powerful but secret group on campus as part of their larger political agenda. "Let's ask these people—what makes such behavior a social good? Who benefits?"

The ad contended that denial was forcing "mainline Holocaust historians" to admit the "more blatant examples" of Holocaust falsehoods. It was the deniers who had forced them to revise the "orthodox" Holocaust story. They had had to admit that the number of Jews killed at Auschwitz was far smaller than originally claimed, and had been made to confess that the Nazis did not use Jewish cadavers for the production of soap. It is correct that in recent years newly revealed documentation has allowed scholars to assess more precisely the number of Jews thought to have been murdered at Auschwitz. It is also accurate that scholars have long written that despite wartime rumors to the contrary, the Nazis apparently did not use Jewish cadavers for soap. There has been a wide array of other "revelations" by Holocaust historians, all part of the attempt to uncover the full details of one of the most horrifying acts of human destruction. Smith suggested to his readers that scholars and others who work in this field, all of whom vigorously repudiate Holocaust denial, have been compelled to admit the truth of deniers' claims: "We are told that it is 'anti-Jewish' to question orthodox assertions about German criminality. Yet we find that it is Jews themselves like Mayer, Bauer, Hier, Hilberg, Lipstadt and others who beginning [sic] to challenge the establishment Holocaust story." This notion—that deniers have exposed the truth and mainline historians are scrambling to admit it—remains a linchpin of the deniers' strategy. It has two objectives: to make it appear that Jewish scholars are responding to the pressure of the deniers' findings and to create the impression that Holocaust deniers' "questions" are themselves part of a continuum of respectable scholarship. If establishment scholars, particularly those who are Jews, can question previously accepted truths, why is it wrong when Bradley Smith does the same?

Though much of the ad consisted of familiar rhetoric, Smith added a new twist that had a particular resonance on American college campuses. Since the 1980s the concept of "political correctness" has been a source of academic conflict. Conservative political groups have accused the "liberal establishment" of labeling certain topics politically incorrect and therefore ineligible for inclusion in the curriculum. Smith framed his well-worn denial arguments within this rhetoric, arguing that Holocaust revisionism could not be addressed on campus because "America's thought police" had declared it out of bounds. "The politically correct line on the Holocaust story is, simply, it happened. You don't debate 'it.'" Unlike all other topics students were free to explore, the Holocaust story was off limits. The consequences, he charged, were antithetical to everything for which the university stood. "Ideology replaces free inquiry, intimidation represses open debate, and … the ideals of the university itself are exchanged for intellectual taboos." While most students who had to decide whether the ad should be published did not overtly succumb to CODOH's use of the political correctness argument, many prove prone to it, sometimes less than consciously—a susceptibility evident in their justifications for running the ad. Among the first universities to accept the ad were Northwestern, the University of Michigan, Duke, Cornell, Ohio State, and Washington University.

At the University of Michigan the saga of the ad had a strange twist. Smith mailed camera-ready copy directly to the Michigan Daily. According to the paper's business manager, the ad "slipped through without being read." When it appeared the business staff was appalled to learn what they had allowed to happen. On the following day they placed a six-column ad in the paper apologizing for running Smith's ad and acknowledging that its publication had been a mistake. They declared it a "sorrowful learning experience for the staff." The manager told the Detroit Free Press, "We make mistakes like any organization."

The story might well have ended here—an example of faulty monitoring by a segment of the staff of the Michigan Daily—but the issue became more complicated when, despite the fact that those responsible for running the ad acknowledged doing so as a mistake, the editorial board attempted to transform a blunder into a matter of principle. They recast a snafu as an expression of freedom of speech. On the same day that the advertising staff published its apology, the front page carried an editorial explaining that, though the editors found the ad "offensive and inaccurate," they could not condone the censorship of "unpopular views from our pages merely because they are offensive or because we disagree with them." Editor in chief Andrew Gottesman acknowledged that had the decision been in his hands, he would have printed the ad. He argued that rejecting it constituted censorship, which the editorial board found unacceptable.

The following day a campus rally attacked both Holocaust denial and the paper's editorial policies. Stung by student and faculty condemnations and afraid that its editorial was being interpreted as an endorsement of CODOH, the editorial board devoted the next issue's lead editorial to the topic. Condemning Holocaust denial as "absurd" and "founded on historical fiction and anti-Jewish bigotry," they dismissed it as irrational, illogical, and ahistorical propaganda. The editors accurately assessed the ad as lacking intellectual merit. Nonetheless, they continued to support its publication. Their powerful condemnation of Holocaust denial in general and Smith's ad in particular appeared under a banner quoting Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black's opinion on free speech: "My view is, without deviation, without exception, without any ifs, buts, or whereases, that freedom of speech means that you shall not do something to people either for the views they have or the views they express or the words they speak or write."

The strange set of circumstances at Michigan—snatching a constitutional principle from the jaws of a mistake—was further complicated by the entry of the university's president, James Duderstadt, into the debate. In a letter to the Daily he declared the ad the work of "a warped crank" and proclaimed that denying the Holocaust was to "deny our human potential for evil and to invite its resurgence." But he, too, defended the paper's decision, which was more of a nondecision, to run the ad. The president asserted that the Daily had a long history of editorial freedom that had to be protected even when "we disagree either with particular opinions, decisions, or actions." Most disturbing was Duderstadt's elevation of Smith's prejudices to the level of opinions.

There was no doubt about the message the editors and the president were trying to convey: As absurd, illogical, and bigoted as the ad may be, First Amendment guarantees were paramount. The dictates of the American constitution compelled the Daily to publish. None of those involved seemed to have considered precisely what the First Amendment said: "Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech or of the press." Those who argued that free speech guarantees acceptance of the ad ignored the fact that the First Amendment prevents government from interfering in any fashion with an individual's or group's right to publish the most outlandish argument. The New York Times made this point in an editorial when it adamantly repudiated the notion that this was a First Amendment question: "Government may not censor Mr. Smith and his fellow 'Holocaust revisionists,' no matter how intellectually barren their claims."

To call rejection of the ad censorship was to ignore the fact that, unlike the government, whose actions are limited by the First Amendment, these papers do not have a monopoly of force. If the government denies someone the right to publish, they have no other option to publish in this country. But if a paper rejects someone's column, ad, or letter, there are always other publications. The First Amendment does not guarantee access to a private publication. It is designed to serve as a shield to protect individuals and institutions from government interference in their affairs. It is not a sword by which every person who makes an outlandish statement or notorious claim can invoke a Constitutional right to be published. Nor did the Michigan Daily seem to notice how Justice Black, whom they quoted, framed it: "you shall not do something to people…" No one was advocating "doing" anything to Smith.

One of the most ardent advocates of the free-speech argument was the Duke Chronicle. In an editorial column the editor in chief, Ann Heimberger, justified the paper's decision by acknowledging that while the paper knew it could reject the ad, it "chose" to accept it as an expression of the paper's desire to "support the advertiser's rights." The editorial board believed that it was not the paper's responsibility to protect "readers from disturbing ideas," but to "disseminate them."

Echoing his Michigan colleague, Duke University president Keith Brodie repeated the free-speech defense in a statement that, though it contained a strong refutation of the ad, was more vigorous in its support of the Chronicle's publication of the ad. To have "suppressed" the ad, he argued, would have violated the university's commitment to free speech and contradicted its "long tradition of supporting First Amendment rights."

When the Cornell Daily Sun ran the ad, the editors justified the decision in an editorial statement warning that "page twenty will shock most readers" but proclaimed that it was not the paper's role to "unjustly censor advertisers' viewpoints." Echoing their colleagues on many of the other campuses that printed the ad, the editors declared that they decided to print it because the "First Amendment right to free expression must be extended to those with unpopular or offensive ideas." Neeraj Khemlani, the editor in chief of the Daily Sun, said his role was not to "protect" readers. Cornell president Frank H. T. Rhodes joined his colleagues at Duke and Michigan in defending the paper's decision.

The University of Montana's paper, the Montana Kaimin, also used the First Amendment to defend its publication of the ad. The editor contended that it was not the paper's place to "decide for the campus community what they should see." The University of Georgia's paper, the Red and Black, expressed the hope that publishing the ad would affirm America's unique commitment to "allowing every opinion to be heard, no matter how objectionable, how outright offensive, how clearly wrong that opinion may be." After the ad appeared the paper's editor defended the decision by describing it as "a business decision," arguing that "if the business department is set up to take ads, they darn well better take ads." Given the juxtaposition of these two explanations, there was, as Mark Silk, an editorial writer for the Atlanta Constitution, pointed out, something dubious about "this high-minded claim."

After an extensive debate Washington University's Student Life decided to run the ad. When the ad appeared in the paper, Sam Moyn, the opinion editor, was responsible for conveying to the university community the reasoning behind the staff's "controversial action." The editors, he wrote, conceived of this as a free-speech issue: "The abridgement of Mr. Smith's rights endangers our own." The St. Louis Post Dispatch defended the students' actions. Declaring the ad "offensive, provocative and wrong," it praised the student newspaper's courage to print it and stated that its actions strengthened the cause of freedom of speech. The University of Arizona also depicted its actions as protecting the First Amendment. The editor in chief, Beth Silver, proclaimed that the mission of student newspapers is "to uphold the First Amendment and run things that are obviously going to be controversial and take the heat for it." This attitude—we have to do what is right irrespective of the costs—was voiced by a number of papers. Ironically, it echoed a theme frequently voiced by the deniers themselves: We will tell the truth, the consequences notwithstanding.

At Ohio State University the decision-making process was complex. The Lantern's advertising policy is in the hands of a publications committee comprising faculty, students, editorial board members, and the paper's business manager. University policy requires committee approval before acceptance of an ad designating a religious group. The committee voiced five to four to reject CODOH's submission. But the story did not end there. Enjoined by the committee's decision from running the ad, the Lantern's editor, Samantha G. Haney, used her editorial powers to run it as an op-ed piece, explaining that the paper had an "obligation" to do so. This decision gave Smith added legitimacy and saved him the $1,134 it would have cost to place a full-page ad in the paper.

A lengthy editorial explaining the Lantern's decision condemned Bradley Smith and his cohorts as "racists, pure and simple" and the ad as "little more than a commercial for hatred." Nonetheless the newspaper had to publish it because it could not only "run things that were harmless to everyone." Haney and her staff rejected the suggestion that they turn to the Ohio State History Department to "pick apart" the ad fact by fact. That, they explained, might suggest that the ad had some "relevancy" and some "substance," which they were convinced it did not. Given that one of the rationales the Lantern offered for publishing the article was that "truth will always outshine any lie," its refusal to ask professional historians to elucidate how the ad convoluted historical fact seemed self-defeating. It seemed to reflect an understandable reluctance to accord denial legitimacy. There is no better example of the fragility of reason than the conclusion by these editorial boards that it was their obligation to run an ad or an op-ed column that, according to their own evaluation, was totally lacking in relevance or substance.

In contrast to the position adopted by James Duderstadt at the University of Michigan, Ohio State's president, Gordon Gee, attacked the decision to give Smith space in the newspaper, declaring the deniers' arguments "pernicious" and "cleverly disguised" propaganda that enhanced prejudice and distorted history.

When this issue was being debated at Ohio State, a CBS reporter came to that campus to film a segment on Holocaust denial for a network show on hatred and extremism in the United States. Alerted in advance to the pending controversy, the cameras were conveniently present when the editor received a call from Smith congratulating her for running the ad and standing up for the principles of free speech and free press. When Haney hung up, the television reporter, who was standing nearby, asked how she felt. She turned and somewhat plaintively observed that she thought she had been had.

Not all the papers subscribed to the First Amendment argument; indeed, some explicitly rejected it. The University of Tennessee's Daily Beacon dismissed the idea that not running the ad harmed the deniers' interests: It was not "censorship or even damaging." Pennsylvania State University's Daily Collegian, which had been one of the first to receive an ad from Smith, denied that the issue was one of free speech. After seeing student leaders and numerous individuals on campus inundated with material by deniers, the paper reasoned that those behind the ad had sufficient funds to propagate their conspiracy theory of Jewish control without being granted space in the paper.

In an eloquent editorial the Harvard Crimson repudiated Smith's claim to a free-speech right to publish his ad. To give CODOH a forum so that it could "promulgate malicious falsehoods" under the guise of open debate constituted an "abdication" of the paper's editorial responsibility. The University of Chicago Maroon agreed that while the deniers "may express their views," it had "no obligation at anytime to print their offensive hatred."

The argument that not publishing the ad constituted censorship was not only a misinterpretation of the First Amendment but disingenuous. The editorial boards that reached this decision ignored the fact that they all had policies that prevented them from running racist, sexist, prejudicial, or religiously offensive ads. (Some of the papers in question even refuse cigarette ads.) How could they square their "principled" stand for absolute freedom of speech with policies that prevented them from publishing a range of ads and articles? Why was Bradley Smith entitled to constitutional protection while an ad for an X-rated movie, Playboy, the KKK, or Marlboros was not? Recognizing this inconsistency, some of the boards tried to reconcile these two seemingly contradictory positions by adopting a stance that drew them even further into the deniers' trap. They argued that Holocaust denial was not antisemitic and therefore not offensive. The Cornell Daily Sun editorial board determined that the "ad does not directly contain racist statements about Jewish people." Valerie Nicolette, the Sun's managing editor, told the Chronicle of Higher Education that the editors had evaluated the ad based on their standards of "obscenity and racism" and decided that it passed. When a group of Jewish students at Duke met with the editorial board of the Duke Chronicle to protest the running of the ad, they were told that the paper's policy was not to run any ad that was "racist or contained ethnic slurs" but that this ad did not fall into that category.

Andrew Gottesman, who vigorously argued that he could not condone "censorship" of Smith's advertisement and whose Michigan Daily published its ringing denunciation of Holocaust denial under Justice Hugo Black's interpretation of the First Amendment, admitted that there were ads he would not run in the paper. This ad, however, did not deserve to be "banned from the marketplace of ideas, like others might be." Among those he would ban were a Ku Klux Klan announcement of lynching or a beer ad with a woman holding a beer bottle between her breasts. For Gottesman keeping such sexist and racist ads out of the paper would not constitute censorship; keeping Smith's out would. When Washington University's Student Life published the ad, an editorial explained that it did so in the interest of preventing "freedom of ideas from disappearing from its newspapers." Yet the same paper includes the following policy statement on its advertising rate card: "Student Life reserves the right to edit or reject any advertisement which does not comply with the policies or judgment of the newspaper."

The claim that the rejection of the ad constituted censorship also revealed the failure of editorial staffs and, in certain cases, university presidents to think carefully about what their papers did regularly: pick and choose between subjects they covered and those they did not, columns they ran and those they rejected, and ads that met their standards and those that did not. The Daily Tar Heel, the paper of the University of North Carolina, proclaimed that as soon as an editor "takes the first dangerous step and decides that an ad should not run because of its content, that editor begins the plunge down a slippery slope toward the abolition of free speech." What the Tar Heel failed to note was that newspapers continuously make such choices. As Tom Teepen, the editor of the Atlanta Constitution's editorial page, observed, "Running a newspaper is mainly about making decisions, not about ducking them." In fact the Duke Chronicle, whose editor had wondered how newspapers founded on the principles of free speech and free press could "deny those rights to anyone," had earlier rejected an insert for Playboy and an ad attacking a fraternity.

While some papers justified their decision by arguing that the ad was not antisemitic and others leaned on the censorship argument, an even more disconcerting rationale was offered by many papers. They argued that however ugly or repellent Smith's "ideas," they had a certain intellectual legitimacy. Consequently it was the papers' responsibility to present these views to readers for their consideration. Those editors who made this argument fell prey to denial's attempt to present itself as part of the normal range of historical interpretation. That they had been deceived was evident in the way they described the contents of the ad. The editor in chief of the Cornell Daily Sun described the ad as containing "offensive ideas." The Sun argued that it was not the paper's role to "unjustly censor advertisers' viewpoints" however "unpopular or offensive." In a similar vein the University of Washington Daily defended giving Smith op-ed space because the paper must constitute a "forum for diverse opinions and ideas." Ironically, six weeks earlier, when it rejected the ad, it had described Smith's assertions as "so obviously false as to be unworthy of serious debate." The paper insisted that the op-ed column it eventually published was different because it was Smith's "opinion" and did not contain the "blatant falsehoods" of the ad. In the column Smith asserted that for more than twelve years he has been unable to find "one bit of hard evidence" to prove that there was a plan to "exterminate" the Jews, and that the gaschamber "stories" were "allegations" unsupported by "documentation or physical evidence."

The Michigan Daily engaged in the same reasoning. It would not censor "unpopular views" simply because readers might disagree with them. In a show of consistency, two weeks after Smith's ad appeared, the Daily supported the decision by Prodigy, the computer bulletin board, to allow subscribers to post Holocaust denial material. Prodigy, they contended, was similar to a newspaper, and like a newspaper it must be a "forum for ideas." In another suggestion that Smith's views were worthy of debate, the editor in chief of the Montana Kaimin argued that "this man's opinions, no matter how ridiculous they may be, need to be heard out there." According to the editor in chief of Washington University's Student Life, the board voted to run the ad because "we didn't feel comfortable censoring offensive ideas."

The Ohio State Lantern's explanation of why it let Smith have his "public say" despite the fact that it condemned Smith and CODOH as "racist, pure and simple," was more disturbing than the decision itself. The Lantern argued that it was "repulsive to think that the quality, or total lack thereof, of any idea or opinion has any bearing on whether it should be heard." It is breathtaking that students at a major university could declare repulsive the making of a decision based on the "quality" of ideas. One assumes that their entire education is geared toward the exploration of ideas with a certain lasting quality. This kind of reasoning essentially contravenes all that an institution of higher learning is supposed to profess.

The editors of Washington University's Student Life demonstrated a similar disturbing inconsistency. They dismissed Smith's claim to be engaged in a quest for the truth, describing him as someone who "cloaks hate in the garb of intellectual detachment." They believed that Smith was posing as a "truth seeker crushed by a conspiratorial society." Given their evaluation of Smith, his tactics, and the way conspiracy theorists have captured the imagination of much of American society, what followed was particularly disconcerting. Notwithstanding all their misgivings, the editors decided that they must give "Mr. Smith the benefit of the doubt if we mean to preserve our own rights." In an assertion typical of the confused reasoning that student papers nationwide displayed on this issue, the Student Life editors acknowledged that they could have suppressed Smith's views "if we attributed motives to him that contradict his statements. But we cannot in good conscience tell Mr. Smith that we 'know' him and his true intentions." Was not the fact that he was denying a historical fact about whose existence there is no debate among any reputable scholars indicative of something significant? The editorial board had concluded that "if we refused Mr. Smith's advertisement, we could censor anyone based on ulterior motives that we perceive them to harbor." At what point would the board feel it was appropriate to make a decision based on the objective merits of the information contained in the ad?

In this instance what the paper considered to be ulterior motives is what scholars call coming to a conclusion based on a wide variety of facts, including historical data. In giving Smith the "benefit of the doubt," the editors fell prey to the notion that this was a rational debate. They ignored the fact that the ad contained claims that completely contravened a massive body of fact. They transformed what the Harvard Crimson described as "vicious propaganda" into iconoclasm.

The most controversial interpretation about precisely what this ad represented was expressed by the Duke Chronicle. In a column justifying the paper's decision to run the ad, Ann Heimberger contended that "Revisionists are… reinterpreting history, a practice that occurs constantly, especially on a college campus." In a private meeting with Jewish student leaders on the Duke campus, the editors reiterated this argument. The students were told that the ad was neither racist nor antisemitic but was part of an ongoing "scholarly debate." The Duke editorial board viewed the advertisement more as "a political argument than as an ethnic attack." In editorials, articles, and interviews, those at the helm of the Duke Chronicle repeatedly referred to Holocaust denial as "radical, unpopular views," and "disturbing ideas" and argued that the ad was not a "slur" but an "opinion." By doing so they not only clung to their First Amendment defense, they gave the ad historical and intellectual legitimacy.

The Chronicle's acceptance of the ad and the editor's defense of having done so elicited two reactions. Bradley Smith, quite predictably, praised Heimberger's column as "fantastic" and an example of sound reasoning. A less laudatory response came from the Duke History Department, which, in a unanimously adopted statement, asserted that the ad aimed to "hurt Jews and to demean and demonize them." It was particularly vehement about Heimberger's contention that the ad was nothing more than a reinterpretation of history. The department observed that the "scholarly pretensions" of the ad were effective enough to deceive Heimberger so that she believed the ad's claims were part of the "range of normal historical inquiry." The statement continued:

That historians are constantly engaged in historical revision is certainly correct; however, what historians do is very different from this advertisement. Historical revision of major events is not concerned with the actuality of these events; rather it concerns their historical interpretation—their causes and consequences generally.

If the ad convinced Heimberger, one can only imagine its impact on individuals who have had less exposure to history and critical thinking.

There were, of course, those college newspapers that had no problem evaluating the ad's intellectual value. The Harvard Crimson repudiated the idea that the ad was a "controversial argument based on questionable facts." In one of the most unequivocal evaluations of the ad, the Crimson declared it "vicious propaganda based on utter bullshit that has been discredited time and time again." More than "moronic and false," it was an attempt to "propagate hatred against Jews." The editorial board of the University of Pennsylvania's Daily Pennsylvanian argued that "running an ad with factual errors that fostered hate" was not in the best interests of the paper.

The MIT Tech simply decided that it would not accept an ad that it knew "did not tell the truth." For the Brown Daily Herald the ad was "a pack of vicious, antisemitic lies" parading as "history and scholarship." The Daily Nexus, the publication of the University of California at Santa Barbara, refused the ad because of its "blatant distortions of truth and its offensive nature." The paper described receiving the ad itself and the more than one thousand dollars to print it as "chilling." The Dartmouth Review, no stranger to controversy, also rejected the ad. It acknowledged that by so doing it was denying "someone a forum through which to speak to the paper's readership" but explained that it had a "bond of trust" with the public, which expected it to abide by "standards of accuracy and decency." Accepting an ad "motivated by hatred and informed by total disregard to the truth" would be to violate that trust. The Chicago Maroon saw no reason why it should run an ad whose "only objective is to offend and incite hatred." The Yale Daily News "simply" let Smith know that it found the ad "offensive."

Some of the papers that ran the ad did so on the basis of what may be called the light-of-day defense, a corollary of the free-speech argument: In the light of day, truth always prevails over lies. Neeraj Khemlani of the Cornell Sun believed that by running the ad he had done the Jewish people a favor—reminding them that there were a "lot of people out to get [them]," which was something they needed to know. This attitude is reminiscent of the concept of "saving the Jews (or women, African Americans, or any other potentially vulnerable group) despite themselves." Michael Gaviser, business manager of the Daily Pennsylvanian, decided to run the ad because of his belief that Smith was a "dangerous neo-Nazi" of whom the public had to be aware. (His decision was reversed by the editorial board.)

A number of the nation's most prominent national papers echoed the light-of-day position. A Washington Post editorial rejected the freedom-of-the-press argument but accepted the light-of-day rationale. Acknowledging that college newspapers had no obligation to accept the ads, it argued that it was "bad strategy" automatically to "suppress" them. What the ad needed was the "bracing blast of refutation." The Post did not seem to consider the possibility that an article fully analyzing the ad would have served the same purpose. In an archetypal deniers' move Smith cited the Post's editorial as proof that the paper believed it both "ethical and permissible" to debate the "Holocaust story." He made the same claim about a New York Times editorial that left it up to each newspaper to decide whether to publish Smith's "pseudo-scholarly" and "intellectually barren" tract.

The Rutgers Daily Targum contended that publication of the ad constituted a means of defeating Smith. The editors argued that "you cannot fight the devil you cannot see." Exposing Smith's views through publication of his ad could thwart his objectives. The Targum correctly understood that the First Amendment did not apply—("CODOH was wrapped itself so tightly in the First Amendment it borders on suffocation.")—and the claim to be engaged in historical investigation was dismissed as "a sham." Nonetheless it chose to reprint Smith's ad in full on the editorial page, surrounding it with three op-ed pieces and an editorial, all of which attacked the ad's contents. In addition, an editors' note introducing the column noted that the ad had originally been rejected by the paper's business section because of "its false content and antisemitic nature." The editorial board argued that despite all this it was necessary to print the advertisement in full because, "more than anything else, [it] makes it painfully obviously that a clear and present danger exists." Reiterating this point in a letter to the New York Times, Targum editor Joshua Rolnick argued that publishing the ad in its entirety was the best way of "mobilizing the community in opposition to its hateful ideas."

The Targum's decision to print the ad as a column and surround it with dissenting opinion won it the editorial praise of the New York Times: "The editors thus transformed revulsion into education." Nevertheless there is reason to question that decision. First of all it saved Smith the approximately five hundred dollars it would have cost to purvey his extremist arguments. The paper proudly proclaimed that it had "not accepted any payment" from him, as if the acceptance of money made them accomplices. In fact it was Smith, Rolnick acknowledged, who had "encouraged" him to run it as an op-ed piece. Smith may well have recognized that, the dissenting articles notwithstanding, the full text of his ad was likely to win converts to his cause even as it mobilized some people against him. Given the space the Daily Targum devoted to the topic, a lengthy analytical piece quoting heavily from the ad and demolishing it point by point would have served the same purpose and given Smith less of a chance to lay out his "argument." Some wonder what was the danger of allowing Smith his say, particularly when surrounded by articles that firmly and swiftly refuted him. But the Daily Targum had given Smith just what he wanted: They made him the other side of a debate. Although it may not have been evenly balanced, although more room may have been given to the articles that surrounded his, and although editorials may have condemned him, he had nonetheless been rendered a point of view. Smith seems to be acutely cognizant of the efficacy of even bad publicity. That may well be why, when a rally at Rutgers denounced Holocaust revisionism and his ad, he declared himself "grateful and delighted" that the rally was held.

In the spring of 1992 Smith began to circulate a second ad that was essentially a reprint of an article from the Journal of Historical Review by Mark Weber. The article, entitled "Jewish Soap," blamed the postwar spread of the rumor that the Nazis made Jews into soap on Simon Wisenthal and Stephen Wise—a claim that has no relationship to reality. Echoing the first ad, it charged that historians of the Holocaust have "officially abandon[ed] the soap story" in order to "save what's left of the sinking Holocaust ship by throwing overboard the most obvious falsehoods." The point of this second effort, Smith acknowledged, was to submit a piece that was thoroughly "referenced." The ad was submitted with a cover letter that claimed that the original ad had been rejected by a number of papers because it was not "sourced." In contrast, every "significant claim" in the second ad was backed up by sources. Entitled "Falsus in Uno, Falsus in Omnibus [False in one thing, false in all]… The 'Human Soap' Holocaust Myth," the essay on soap was preceded by a statement citing Roman law: If a witness could not be "believed in one thing, he should not be believed in anything."

Most universities that received the second ad, including those who had accepted the first, rejected it out of hand. When it was submitted to the Ohio State Lantern, the editor immediately refused it, observing that "the only news value in this is that Bradley Smith is approaching schools again." Having been burned once, the editor seemed far more cognizant of Smith's motives. "The fact that it is Holocaust Remembrance Week indicates that he's in to ruffle some feathers and stir up trouble again." The arguments about the First Amendment and censorship no longer seemed to apply.

At the University of Texas the deliberations about the second ad were directly linked to what had occurred with the first ad. The editor of the Daily Texan, Matthew Connally, had wanted to run the first. However, after familiarizing himself with the "group behind the ad," he reversed his decision. "They were not only showing a disregard for the truth but they were doing it with malicious intent." The Texas Student Publication Board (TSPB), which has ultimate authority over the paper's advertising and financial affairs, supported Connally and voted to reject the ad. After hearing Connally's arguments, TSPB member Professor John Murphy, who initially voted in favor of running the ad, decided to oppose it.

But that was not the end of the story at Texas. In April the paper received Smith's second ad. Though the Daily Texan's editorial board was firmly against running it, they quickly discovered that the decision was not in their hands: They were told by the TSPB that they must run it. "We do not want to do this. But we're being told we must follow orders," a member of the editorial board told me sadly. This time Professor Murphy emerged as the ad's most vociferous supporter. According to the Houston Chronicle, Murphy, joined by other faculty members on the TSPB, argued that the paper needed to publish "divergent and unpopular opinion." Facing a situation in which it would be forced to publish something it "detested," the editorial board considered leaving all the pages blank except for the ad. (They were told that since this would affect advertising revenues, they did not have the authority to do so.)

The ad was scheduled to run on Holocaust Memorial Day, Yom HaShoah, 1992. Students opposed to the ad discovered that the internal regulations of the TSPB prohibited the newspaper from printing opinion ads unless all persons cited in those ads had granted permission to be quoted. I was among the scholars quoted in the ad. Fortuitously, I was scheduled to visit the campus to deliver a lecture on Holocaust denial the day before the ad's scheduled publication. When I indicated my opposition to being cited in the ad, an emergency meeting of the TSPB board was called to discuss the matter. I informed the board that I had not given my permission to be quoted in the ad and was opposed to being associated with it. I pointed out that the ad specifically violated their own regulations. Despite my objections and my announcement that I would explore the possibility of legal remedies should the ad be published, the TSPB voted to run it, postponing publication for a few days so that my name could be dropped and a rebuttal prepared. Two days later the university's legal counsel suggested that because individuals quoted in the ad had protested—by this time other professors mentioned in the ad had joined the protest—the ad should be dropped. The TSPB then voted to reject the ad. But the story did not end here. In February 1993 the TSPB compelled the paper to accept an ad promoting a video expose of the gas chambers by a CODOH member claiming to be a Jew. Based on advertisements and articles by this young man, the video apparently contains the same recycled arguments deniers have been making for years. Though the editorial board and the university president opposed the ad because it was "deceptively rigged," the TSPB ran the ad. The TSPB's three faculty members, two working professionals, and five of its six students voted for the ad.

During this period students were not the deniers' only campus targets. For more than two years—not for the first time—deniers had tried to insinuate themselves into the scholarly arena by finding ways to place Holocaust denial on the agenda of organizations of professional historians. They sought to force these groups to treat denial as a legitimate enterprise. In the spring of 1980 all members of the Organization of American Historians (OAH) received a complimentary copy of the first issue of the Journal of Historical Review. It was quickly revealed that the IHR had purchased the OAH's twelve thousand member mailing list. Some OAH members protested the sale of the list to this neo-Nazi group. Others argued that to deny anyone the right to purchase the list would be to abridge intellectual freedom. The executive secretary of the OAH proposed to resolve the issue by inviting a panel of "well-qualified historians" to analyze the Journal and evaluate it based on the "credentials of the contributors and the use of evidence." He would then transmit this evaluation to the OAH executive board so it could decide how to treat the matter.

Lucy Dawidowicz, a fierce critic of the OAH response, wondered what those historians would evaluate: "Perhaps that the neo-Nazis did not have proper academic credentials or that they failed to use primary sources?" Carl Degler, a past president of the OAH, defended the suggestion that the OAH should sponsor an analysis of the Journal. He argued that once historians begin to consider the "motives" behind historical research and writing, "we endanger the whole enterprise in which the historians are engaged." Following the same pattern as the student editors who described the contents of the denial ad as opinions, views, and ideas, he described the articles contained in the Journal as "bad historical writing." Given the Journal's contents and its publisher's identity, Degler's categorization of it as bad history was described by Dawidowicz as a "travesty."

A far-less-ambiguous position was adopted by the editors of the Journal of Modern History, when the Liberty Lobby bought its subscription list and sent out antisemitic material. The journal's editors sent a letter of apology to its subscribers acknowledging that an "antisemitic hate organization" had obtained its mailing list. It "repudiate[d] and condemn[ed] the propaganda" that readers had received and apologized that both the readers and the academic discipline had been "abused in this thoroughly scurrilous manner."

Another attempt to force professional historians to treat Holocaust denial as a legitimate enterprise began in 1990, when members of various university history departments began to receive letters soliciting support for "Holocaust revisionism." That same year the American Historical Association's (AHA) annual meeting was disrupted by pickets calling for recognition of a book charging Gen. Dwight Eisenhower with consciously causing the death of a million German POWs at the end of the war. The AHA issued a statement noting that 1995 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the defeat of Nazism and calling on scholars to "initiate plans now to encourage study of the significance of the Holocaust."

The AHA statement referred to the Holocaust but did not explicitly say that the Holocaust was a fact of history. According to the then-president of the AHA, William Leuchtenburg, it did not want to "get into the business of certifying what is and is not history." Moreover, he believed that for a group of historians to say there had been a Holocaust was tantamount to "an organization of astronomers saying there is a moon." The press, he believed, would simply ignore such a statement. In December 1991 the AHA unanimously adopted a statement deploring the "attempts to deny the fact of the Holocaust" and noting that "no serious historian questions that the Holocaust took place." Leuchtenburg opposed allowing deniers a table at the convention because the AHA was a professional organization and they were not professionals. It would be the equivalent of the AMA allowing quacks to hawk miracle cures at its meetings.

The OAH was also a target of the deniers. In November 1991 the OAH's executive committee agreed to allow its newsletter to publish a call by the IHR's Journal of Historical Review for "revisionist" papers. This action was taken after David Thelen, the editor of the OAH's scholarly journal, the Journal of American History, refused to list articles by deniers because it was the responsibility of an academic publication to "make judgments on the quality of scholarship." He felt it was harder to refuse them space in the association's newsletter because it contained both scholarly and nonscholarly information. Joyce Appleby, OAH president, protested the executive committee's decision to accept the announcement in the OAH Newsletter. "This is not a question of respecting different points of view but rather of recognizing a group which repudiates the very values which bring us together," Appleby wrote. It was the responsibility of a professional organization to make "professional judgments" and, Appleby asserted, "these people are not professionals and to allow them to advertise is to legitimate them."

Mary Frances Berry, a former president of the OAH and a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania, disagreed with Appleby. She compared the debate within the OAH to campus codes against "hate speech," to which she objected. Her primary concern was "guaranteeing civil liberties for everyone." She argued that since the OAH did not have a general policy regarding advertisements it would accept or reject, it was obligated to accept everything it received. The next issue of the OAH Newsletter contained a series of letters regarding the decision to include the ad and Appleby's dissent. A group of prominent historians, including Thelen and Berry, wrote in support of the inclusion of denial announcements. They argued that however "abhorrent" the goals of the Journal of Historical Review, the constitutional principle of free speech as well as the OAH's commitments to freedom of expression and the search for historical truth demanded that the ad be printed. In an apparent attempt to "balance" their support of the ad, they suggested a variety of strategies for dealing with the future efforts by the Journal of Historical Review and other deniers to place ads in OAH publications. One idea was that the OAH "pressure" the deniers' journal to abide by international standards of scholarship, including that experts in appropriate fields evaluate articles submitted to the journal. Given the way they handle documents and data, it is clear that deniers have no interest in scholarship or reason. Most are antisemites and bigots. Engaging them in reasoned discussion would be the same as engaging a wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in a balanced and reasoned discussion of African Americans' place in society. But on some level Carl Degler was right: Their motives are irrelevant. Some may truly believe the Holocaust a hoax—just as hundreds of antisemites believed the Protocols genuine. This does not give the contents of their pronouncements any more validity or intellectual standing. No matter how sincerely one believes it, two plus two will never equal five. Among the historians' other suggestions was that a "truth-in-advertising" group be created to unmask the misleading claims in denial notices and announcements and that this group insist that their exposure be published along with the deniers' claims. But such a suggestion would imply that a debate was being conducted by mainline historians and "revisionists." The historians' ideas, offered in the name of an attempt to resolve a situation that confounds many academics, played directly into the deniers' hands. Given the response of such eminent teachers of history, it is not surprising that the Daily Northwestern, Northwestern University's student newspaper, writing in support of inviting Arthur Butz to debate his "unorthodox view" of the Holocaust, declared that "even outrageous and repugnant theories sometimes deserve a forum." Students emulated exactly what these professors had done. They had elevated what the Harvard Crimson had properly characterized as "utter bullshit" to the level of a theory deserving of a forum. After the IHR's announcement appeared, the executive board voted to establish a policy henceforth to exclude such advertisements and announcements from the newsletter. There was significant debate within the OAH's leadership on this matter, and the decision to exclude denial ads in the future passed by one vote.

Writing in support of Appleby, the Los Angeles Times provided an interesting slant to the argument. It pointed out that the First Amendment guaranteed freedom of association as well as freedom of speech. As a result the OAH had the right to "exclude fake historians from its ranks." It was probably the most appropriate and possibly the most creative citation of the First Amendment during this entire debate. The responses to Holocaust denial by both students and faculty graphically demonstrate the susceptibility of an educated and privileged segment of the American population to the kind of reasoning that creates a hospitable climate for the rewriting of history. There were a variety of failures here. All of them are sobering indicators of the ability of Holocaust denial to gain legitimacy. There was a failure to understand the true implications of the First Amendment. There was also a failure by student editors to recognize that their high-minded claims about censorship were duplicitous, given their papers' policies of rejecting a broad range of ads and articles. In fact, campus policies are often more restrictive than those of the commercial press.

There was a failure to look at the deniers' own history and to understand what they represented. The observation of the Ohio State Lantern rings hauntingly in my ears: "It is repulsive to think that the quality, or total lack thereof, of any idea or opinion has any bearing on whether it should be heard." It is a response likely to make professors nationwide cringe. But, as we have seen, professors also showed their confusion on this matter.

Most disturbing was the contention voiced by students, faculty members, and university presidents that however ugly, the ad constituted an idea, opinion, or viewpoint—part of the broad range of scholarly ideas. However much they disassociated themselves from the content of the ad, the minute they categorized it as a "view," they advanced the cause of Holocaust denial. That students failed to grasp that the ad contravened all canons of evidence and scholarship was distressing. But those at the helm sometimes also failed to grasp that the ad was not advocating a radical moral position but a patent untruth. Writing in the Cornell Daily Sun, President Frank Rhodes couched the discussion in terms of freedom of the press, arguing, "Free and open debate on a wide range of ideas, however outrageous or offensive some of them may be, lies at the heart of a university community." Rhodes was positing that Holocaust denial should be considered an idea worthy of inclusion in the arena of open debate.

This assault on the ivory tower of academe illustrated how Holocaust denial can permeate that segment of the population that should be most immune to it. It was naïve to believe that the "light of day" can dispel lies, especially when they play on familiar stereotypes. Victims of racism, sexism, antisemitism, and a host of other prejudices know of light's limited ability to discredit falsehood. Light is barely an antidote when people are unable, as was often the case in this investigation, to differentiate between reasoned arguments and blatant falsehoods. Most sobering was the failure of many of these student leaders and opinion makers to recognize Holocaust denial for what it was. This was particularly evident among those who argued that the ad contained ideas, however odious, worthy of discussion. This failure suggests that correctly cast and properly camouflaged, Holocaust denial has a good chance of finding a foothold among coming generations.

This [essay] ends where it began. Given the fact that even the papers that printed the ad dismissed Smith's claims in the most derogatory of terms—absurd, irrational, racist, and a commercial for hatred—one might argue that the entire affair had a positive outcome. Rarely did the ad appear without an editorial or article castigating Holocaust denial. Students were alerted to a clear and present danger that can easily take root in their midst. Courses on the Holocaust increased in number. One could argue that all this is proof that CODOH's attempt to make Holocaust denial credible backfired.

My assessment is far more pessimistic. It is probably the one issue about which I find myself in agreement with Bradley Smith. Many students read both the ad and the editorials condemning it. Some, including those who read neither but knew of the issue, may have walked away from the controversy convinced that there are two sides to this debate: the "revisionists" and the "establishment historians." They may know that there is tremendous controversy about the former. They may not be convinced that the two sides have of equal validity. They may even know that the deniers keep questionable company. But nonetheless they assume there is an "other side." That is the most frightening aspect of this entire matter.