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

DENYING THE HOLOCAUST
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errs in his or her recollections, then the testimony of all survivors is disqualified.
If after the war a Nazi official lied about any aspect of the crimes committed
against Jews—usually to minimize his involvement—then the testimony of
all Nazi officials is dismissed. If any captured Nazi could be shown to have
been mistreated, then anything said about the Holocaust by all captured Nazis
is invalid.
A telling example of the Holocaust deniers’ assault on truth is The
Leuchter Report. In 1988 Fred Leuchter Jr. was hired by Ernst Zündel, a German
national residing in Canada, to gather evidence from concentration
camp sites in Poland that would prove that Jews were not murdered in gas
chambers. At the time Zündel, coauthor of The Hitler We Loved and Why and
a leading exporter from Canada to the United States and Germany of Nazi
memorabilia and antisemitic and Holocaust denial literature, was on trial for
publishing and distributing Harwood’s Did Six Million Really Die? Zündel
was being prosecuted for violating a Canadian statute which makes it a criminal
offense to disseminate knowingly false information harmful to the public
interest—in this instance, the lie of Holocaust denial. Leading Holocaust
deniers including Faurisson, Smith, and Irving traveled to Canada to assist
Zündel with his defense.
During his eight-day stay in Poland, Leuchter visited Auschwitz-Birkenau
and Majdanek, gathering “evidence” that would aid the deniers’ case. His report
concluded that Jews were not murdered in gas chambers at these camps.
Deniers, who heralded Leuchter as an engineer with expertise in gas chambers
and his report as “the first forensic examination of Auschwitz,” were gleeful.
Leuchter’s credibility, however, was quickly destroyed when he testified in
Zündel’s defense as an expert witness. In the prosecution’s cross-examination,
Leuchter revealed that he had misrepresented himself as an engineer. He held
an undergraduate degree in history, not engineering, had taken only basic college
chemistry and physics courses, and had no specific training in toxicology.
The court also discredited his methodology and conclusions. Zündel was sentenced
to nine months’ imprisonment. His conviction was later overturned
when the statute under which he was indicted was declared unconstitutional.
Since then the Canadian Human Rights Commission has brought further
accusations against Zündel and barred him from access to the Internet, which
he utilized to distribute great quantities of Holocaust denial literature and antisemitic
material, including his own concoctions and IHR publications. The
case against Zündel hinged on demonstrating that the ideological stereotypes
he employs in attacking Jews replicate antisemitica that date back to the Middle
Ages, that his propagating of antisemitic propaganda constitutes a historically