Resistance

GERMAR RUDOLF, RESISTANCE IS OBLIGATORYinition also belongs to philosophical, although not theological characterizations,and it is older than most of the others. But it would never haveoccurred to me to even consider the thought that those should be punishedwho do not accept this characterization or criticize it. It, too, belongsinto the realm of thoughts and concepts which can be discussedfreely and of which there must be several, or else society would be ledback to a religious or pseudo-religious and dogmatic rudiment.I am therefore even skeptical about the term “denying the Holocaust.”It in fact disparages those thusly criticized from the outset, becauseit imputes to him the complete knowledge of what the critic considersto be “true” and hence denies him good faith. The term “Holocaust”already implies an interpretation which must not be imposed byforce and punishment. According to my judgment only the insulting anddenigrating intention can be punishable. A procedure can be harshlycriticized, though, which is common to almost all anti-revisionists andto many revisionists, namely that they isolate the final solution from thehuge ideological conflict of this era and see it most as a result of an ethnicor even “racial” struggle between two people, of which the one is allgood and the other all evil.I summarize and explain my assessment in maximal brevity: Afterthe terror and blood sacrifices of the Second World War, the news aboutthe existence {p. 6} of “extermination camps in the east” caused unprecedentedhorror particularly in Germany, because nothing even remotelycomparable had so far existed in German history and becausethe attestations of an unlimited fanaticism on Hitler’s part lent credenceto these reports. Exactly this horror was the morally appreciable yet scientificallyunacceptable basis for extreme figures and alleged procedures(such as blowing steam into sealed chambers or mass killings ongigantic electric plates). “Revisions” were therefore ineluctable andhave also been made by the “established” science as indicated above.An international revisionism as a concentrate or an instrumentalizationof revisions had to arise with little less necessity than it had arisen afterthe First World War in opposition to the Allied thesis of an exclusiveGerman guilt. However, having arisen from this horror, it could notnecessarily be expected that it would ever dispute the reason for thishorror, and this has to be criticized sharply insofar as extended and specificanti-Jewish measures of extermination are negated and as long asthis is not merely about resisting certain interpretation of the final solution,also against the interpretation as a “Holocaust.” Within the realm290