Jewish
Frontier

The American Jewish Yearbook, which is the American Jewish Committee's indispensable collector of relevant data on American Jewry, groups Holocaust denial together with several forms of contemporary antisemitism. The recent libel trial of Professor Lipstadt in London bears out the validity of that classification but it somehow misses the fact that there is something unique about the way this type of antisemitism seeks to hit at Jews. It wants nothing less than to erase even the memory of European Jews murdered in the Holocaust. It is horrendous because, following upon the physical destruction of European Jewry, it now aspires to deny the very Jewish presence in history. It aims its weapons at the inner secret of millennial Jewish survival, historic memory.

While Nazi propaganda spoke endlessly about the Jewish threat, Allied archival documents rarely mentioned Jews. During the refugee stage the preferred term was "political reftigee" although they were in fact overwhelmingly central European Jews extruded from German-held territory. The three agencies that the Roosevelt administration helped create to deal with the problem, the Intergovernmental Committee on Political Refugees, the Presidential Advisory Committee on Political Refugees, and the War Refugee Board, avoid the term "Jews." While Berlin was converting Roosevelt to the Jewish faith, his State Department was converting Jews to the neutral refugee category which it was hoped would help solve the refugee crisis by underplaying its Jewish character. When information of the actual plans for a "final solution" was given to Gerhard Riegner, the agent of the World Jewish Congress in Switzerland, the State Department tried desperately to suppress the news which was transmitted by diplomatic pouch. None of the wartime Allied Conferences, Teheran, Moscow, Yalta, Potsdam, that discussed the war crimes question ever placed the mass murder of the Jews on their agenda. It was as if this greatest crime of all wasn't happening. When the Polish Government in Exile requested retaliatory bombing of German cities for what was being done in Poland the request was denied, as was a later request to bomb the gas chambers and crematoria in the death camps. (There was no specific reference to Jews in these requests.) The cattle cars rolled to the death camps amidst an eerie silence. Nothing was said that might have informed Germans that their loved ones were giving up their lives in enormous numbers on the eastern front to implement an ideological goal driven by an obsession of the Fuehrer that had nothing to do with winning the war. Though Soviet POWs were the first victims of the Auschwitz murder process, the silence of the Kremlin on the genocide was even more profound than that of the United States and Britain. The Kremlin was intent on concealing the linkage that German propaganda sought to make between communism and the world Jewish enterprise which they called "Judeobolshevism." Stalin continued the total denial policy well after the war. At Babi Yar and the sight of other mass burial grounds, Jews as specific victims are not mentioned. Instead we are informed that citizens of the Soviet Union who lie buried. Jews became in death what they were rarely allowed to be in life, honored citizens of the nation.

The most direct reflection of the strategy of denial can be seen in the troubled history of the UN War Crimes Commission (UNWCC). Founded in 1943 when it became apparent that Berlin was waging a new kind of war especially in the east, the UNWCC experienced enormous difficulties in even discussing what was easily the most atrocious of the many war crimes being committed by a criminal state. Since major war criminals would be tried by tribunals in the countries where their crimes had been committed, it was argued the consideration of crimes against the Jewish people were not needed since such crimes fell under the jurisdiction of each state. Thus statements of warning and retribution rarely mentioned the crimes against the Jews. Concealment preceded denial. Not until a political crony from his days at Harvard, Robert (Birdie) Pell, whom Roosevelt appointed to the UNWCC, tried desperately to extend international law so that the genocide of the Jewish people could be considered, was the Holocaust even contemplated as a war crime. Pell fought valiantly but in the end was too weak to break the opposition which was even stronger in the British Foreign Office than the State Department. He was maneuvered out of his position in January 1945. The Charter of the IMT (International Military Tribunal) under which the Nuremberg war crimes trials were conducted in 1946 made no specific mention of the crimes against Jews. They had to be handled under other classifications such as "waging aggressive war" or "crimes against humanity" or "belonging to a criminal organization."

s the full extent of the Nazi depredations became known in the immediate postwar years, the concealment of the specific crime against the Jews continued. There are some readers who undoubtedly recall the rage in the American Jewish community when they learned that the handful of Jewish survivors housed in DP camps were often forced to share the same barracks with their tormentors. Only with the establishment of the state of Israel in May 1948 did some recognition of what had happened to European Jewry enter public consciousness. There are some who maintain that the very recognition of the Jewish state was based on a rare feeling of contrition in the international community for what had befallen European Jewry. It created a needed "window of opportunity" for the recognition of a Jewish state. It was that state that became the instrument for breaking through the denial and concealment of what had happened during the war.

It was in fact not until the capture of Adolf Eichmann and his trial that a full recognition and acknowledgment of what had happened in the death camps was made. Eichmann was tried on the specific charge of "crimes against the Jewish people" which gave the world a needed historical corrective. Predictably the cry of illegality soon arose. "How could Israel try Eichmann if the Jewish state did not exist at the time?" The Nuremberg charter called for major war criminals to be tried in the country where the crime was committed. That is why Rudolf Hoess, the Commandant of Auschwitz, was tried and executed in Poland. That meant of course that the hundreds of war criminals who dealt exclusively with the murder of Jews like the commanders of the Einzatsgruppen and the Ordnungspolizei who wandered behind the Wehrmacht from place to place doing their murderous work would escape punishment entirely. Israel argued that she was a successor agent to the Jews of Europe, a principal which had already been accepted by Konrad Audenauer, the Chancellor of the Bundesrepuhlik, in Israel's reparations agreement with Germany. Moreover, the "Crimes Against Humanity" category allowed any member of the family of nations to apprehend and try war criminals. Nevertheless there was resistance to the Eichmann trial in the Allied camp. It was couched in legal terms but beneath one could sense that the reluctance to recognize the "final solution" as a separate and unique crime continued well beyond the war years.

Lest the impression is given that Allied Holocaust denial is in the same category as that of David lrving's, we need to add that its relationship to antisemitism is quite different. Allied concealment was based partly on the fear that to make the war one to save the Jews would have interfered with the effort to mobilize a reluctant people to make the sacrifices required to win the war. Jews were after all not winning medals for popularity in the thirties and forties. The connection to antisemitism was indirect based as it is on the antisemitism which is believed to be latent in public consciousness in the Christian world. Contemporary holocaust denial, on the other hand, is a direct instrument of antisemitism seeking to delegitimize the Jewish people now returned to history. It seeks to deny Jews their history which for Jews especially serves as a building block for communal identity.

History is a battleground, a loss here can push Jewry off the historical canvas and into oblivion. So Professor Lipstadt's courtroom victory against David lrving, a holocaust denier who conceals his obsessive antisemitism, is an important one. There is a struggle not only for the continued existence of the Jewish state but also for a Jewish place in history. It is an existential struggle. That is also the reason why the increase of Holocaust denial in the Arab world is so disturbing. It was the creation of the Jewish state that allowed Jews to regain control of their history. When Arafat declares that there was no Jewish temple in Jerusalem, when his supporters claim that there was no Holocaust and that it is touted to garner the benefits a caring world reserves for those it has victimized, there can be no other answer than for Jews to continue to control the writing of their history. No people has better reason to know that it is better to be the masters of history than its victims. That truth, learned at a dear price, is what gives the Zionist movement its ability to sustain Jews wherever they are.