Anti-semitism: Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the Present

190 ANTISEMITISM
years ago, a few days before God created Adam and Eve. When confronted
with astronomical evidence indicating that the universe is some twelve or
more billion years old, vast geological evidence that the earth itself is some five
billion years old, and fossil evidence that complex forms of life go back hundreds
of millions of years, they either fault the evidence and dating techniques
or, as a last resort, maintain that God planted this evidence to test our faith.
It is also purposeless to engage in dialogue with neo-Nazis, who distort,
manipulate, alter, and interpret facts to accord with an antisemitic worldview
and simply ignore other facts that cannot be bent to fit their agenda.* No discourse
is possible with people who mock survivors of Auschwitz and seek to
disguise hate, myth, and delusion behind the respected historical enterprise of
revisionism. Their fundamental aim is to sanitize the Nazis and make Jews the
real villains of World War II. An appeal to neither logic nor to decency will
lead these people to abandon their delusional view of the Jew and the Holocaust:
The true believer does not easily break with a faith that gratifies deeply
seated emotions. It would be a terrible mistake to engage in a dialogue with
members of the Holocaust denial sect, for this would grant these purveyors of
“gutter history” a measure of respectability and legitimacy.
Historians do debate certain questions related to the Holocaust—for example,
whether it was Hitler or SS leaders, seeking to prove their dedication
to the Führer and their commitment to Nazi ideology and values of the Third
Reich, who initiated the mass exterminations; the degree of Jewish resistance;
and the extent to which German citizens and other bystanders knew what was
happening. And they are open to and do engage in genuine revisions on the
basis of new findings—for example, reducing the number of French Jews deported
to the camps from 120,000 to 75,121 (of whom 2,564 returned) and reducing
the number of Jews murdered at Auschwitz from some 2 million to
about 1 million. They now dismiss the view that there were gas chambers at
Dachau concentration camp, which was located on German soil. While many
* Austrian historian Brigitte Bailer-Galanda says that these revisionists “not only distort
the number of murdered Jews cited in serious historical works but even construct ‘evidence’
by citing nonexistent letters of the International Committee of the Red Cross,
using pseudostatistics about the Jewish population of the world, or willfully misinterpreting
statistics about the number of deaths in concentration camps.” She elaborates
on the Red Cross: “One standard argument is that the International Red Cross stated
that only 300,000 Jews died in the course of National Socialist persecution. This lie has
been repeated for decades, despite the fact that the Red Cross repeatedly has formally
denied ever publishing such a statement.” “‘Revisionism’ in Germany and Austria,” Antisemitism
and Xenophobia in Germany after Unification, ed. Hermann Kurthen, Werner
Bergmann, and Rainer Erb (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 177, 182.