Holocaust and Genocide Denial

A Contextual Perspective

Paul Behrens, Olaf Jensen, Nicholas Terry, Paul Behrens, Olaf Jensen, Nicholas Terry

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317204152
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: International Law
• Index: Law

This book provides a detailed analysis of one of the most prominent and widespread international phenomena to which criminal justice systems has been applied: the expression of revisionist views relating to mass atrocities and the outright denial of their existence. Denial poses challenges to more than one academic discipline: to historians, the gradual disappearance of the generation of eyewitnesses raises the question of how to keep alive the memory of the events, and the fact that negationism is often offered in the guise of historical 'revisionist scholarship' also means that there is need for the identification of parameters which can be applied to the office of the 'genuine' historian. Legal academics and practitioners as well as political scientists are faced with the difficulty of evaluating methods to deal with denial and must in this regard identify the limits of freedom of speech, but also the need to preserve the rights of victims. Beyond that, the question arises whether the law can ever be an effective option for dealing with revisionist statements and the revisionist movement. In this regard, Holocaust and Genocide Denial: A Contextual Perspective breaks new ground: exploring the background of revisionism, the specific methods devised by individual States to counter this phenomenon, and the rationale for their strategies. Bringing together authors whose expertise relates to the history of the Holocaust, genocide studies, international criminal law and social anthropology, the book offers insights into the history of revisionism and its varying contexts, but also provides a thought-provoking engagement with the challenging questions attached to its treatment in law and politics.

Part I

Development and concept of genocide denial

Chapter 1

Alexander Ratcliffe

British Holocaust denial in embryo

Mark Hobbs

Exploring the roots of Holocaust denial is a valuable endeavour because it reveals a great deal about the development of ‘historical revisionism’ by far right groups and individuals. This chapter will examine the antecedents of British Holocaust negationism in the United Kingdom during the Second World War from an historical perspective. As a ‘bystander’ nation, Britain, with its close proximity to occupied Europe, proves to be a useful case study because individuals were denying Nazi crimes committed against European Jews whilst genocide was taking place. However, it was not in Britain that the first deniers were to be found; clearly the first to deny the atrocities against the Jews of Europe were the Nazis themselves. As Heinrich Himmler stated in a secret Posen speech in October 1943, the final solution was to be a ‘never to be written’ page of glory in Germany’s great history.¹ His words were matched with action, and evidenced by the destruction of records, dismantling of killing facilities and excavations of mass graves as the Soviet Army marched into Eastern Europe.²

This chapter centres on the British Second World War publications of Alexander Ratcliffe, a supporter of fascism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Semitism and leader of the neo-fascist Protestant Defence League. Other individuals, most notably the anti-Nazi anti-Semite journalist Douglas Reed, who was also proclaiming that the Jews were not being exterminated and arguing against the reports in the British media and House of Commons, will be examined for purposes of comparison. Ratcliffe was obstinate in his denial and attracted the attention of the British government on several occasions.³ Ratcliffe represents the beginning of a genealogy of Holocaust negationism in the United Kingdom; he had overt links with the far right individuals who would follow him – most notably Arnold Leese, leader of the Imperial Fascist League. Leese would tutor and finance Colin Jordan and other leading members of the National Front and British far right.⁴ Indeed, Ratcliffe, along with Reed and Leese, would become part of the history of Holocaust negationism. They would become the men who formulated news of the final solution in the rubric of existing anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.

Defining genocide denial is an important part of understanding differences in interdisciplinary approaches. For the historian, defining genocide denial, or in this instance Holocaust denial, is a multi-layered endeavour and different from legal definitions which did not exist within the context under study. For the historian, understanding the circumstances from which denial emerged is a prerequisite of the discipline; however, defining how it resembles denial today without anachronistically applying the label ‘denial’ based on modern conceptions of the term is a challenge. This is why it is useful to see denial like that of Ratcliffe and Reed as denial in ‘embryo’. It is clear that these forms of denial were attacking the validity of the genocidal events taking place in continental occupied Europe. These denials were also locked in a context in which knowledge about the final solution was fragmentary, incomplete and conceptualised within a framework in which anti-Semitism was an intrinsic part of the public and governmental discourses regarding Jews in the United Kingdom.⁵ Establishing legal definitions or social scientific classifications and then imposing them on a given individual or form of denial literature in their specific historical context is a complex endeavour. The law is situated in the practice of justice and prosecution, verdicts of guilty or not, whereas for the historian the classification of denial is positioned in the scholastic endeavour of explaining and contextualising. Understanding the law in relation to Holocaust denial in a given country is extremely valuable for the historian, as it not only delineates the legal framework in which denial is understood and judged, but it also reveals a great deal about a country’s approach to denial in its definition (or lack of such) within that legal system.

When thinking about individuals like Ratcliffe and Reed it is necessary to begin by posing four questions: first, what do we understand as ‘Holocaust denial’ in the material being examined? Second, in what context is Holocaust denial being placed? Third, what form is the denial taking, how were the arguments presented and what link does it have to contemporary denial? Fourth, what can we learn from this type of prototype denial? In what follows I explore these questions and think about the value of using historical methods to understand the context in which denial was formed and also how these early forms of denial help us better understand its relationship with contemporary Holocaust denial.

It is clear that ‘Holocaust denial’ is a misnomer and anachronistic, as the term ‘holocaust’ had not yet been mobilised into the cohesive and monolithic concept of the ‘Holocaust’ we understand today. It is therefore important not to be teleological, and to understand that what is being denied are the reports of massacres against Jews, persecution of the Jews and the idea that a mass extermination of the Jews of Europe was taking place.⁶ This early denial focused on the murder of Jews specifically rather than other victimised groups. It is significant that individuals like Reed and Ratcliffe were giving Nazi crimes and persecutions a distinctly Jewish dimension before the British government, legal professionals and historians had fully understood the nature of Nazi anti-Semitism and the forces driving the final solution. As Andrew Sharf explains, this lack of understanding about the nature of the crimes committed against the Jews of Europe, not just in Germany, and the suffering inflicted upon them, was in part due to an ‘inability to grasp the meaning of suffering wholly outside one’s immediate experience and for which there was little historical precedent’. Additionally, as Sharf also notes, such attitudes were also shaped by the ‘widespread dislike of Jews in England’.⁷

During the Second World War the British government adopted a policy of playing down the distinct Jewish dimension of Nazi crimes. As Tony Kushner emphasises, the British government maintained a strong desire not to ‘blend its universalist principles – of winning the war first and refusing to discriminate in favour of the persecuted Jews’.⁸ In essence, as Kushner demonstrates, the reason for this thinking was born out of a fear of public unrest if unassimilated Jews were rescued and brought to Britain.⁹ Kushner also explains how Britain objected to ‘stressing the Jewish aspects of the impact of the Nazi crimes, and the implications this had for rescue’ by the War Refugee Board.¹⁰ It is also salient to highlight the Ministry of Information’s explicit decree in 1941 which talked of the presentation of Nazi brutality and stated ‘horror stuff […] must be used very sparingly and must always deal with treatment of indisputably innocent people. Not with violent political opponents. And not with Jews’.¹¹ Ratcliffe therefore represented the fears of the British government in relation to the perceived potential of anti-Semitic outbursts. While the British government’s fears about anti-Semitism are evident from the material that Ratcliffe was publishing, it is clear that his denial of Jewish suffering was another matter.

Ratcliffe focused specifically on Jewish atrocity stories, and was at odds with the British government’s stance of relative silence or promotion of a narrative of universal suffering.¹² Thus in order to assess the material from Ratcliffe it must be understood that current understanding of the Holocaust cannot be brought to bear, and instead the material should be viewed in the context of wartime Britain, the context of the time, and within the culture of anti-Semitism, paralysis regarding questions of rescue, a lack of specific and corroborative detail, and a lack of understanding of the unprecedented nature of the crimes that were taking place.

Context and historicisation help understand the shape and form of negation during, and in the immediate aftermath of, the Second World War. Denial was not being published in literature devoted entirely to Nazi crimes against the Jews. Denial did not take the form with which we are familiar in contemporary society (for example, Arthur Butz’s The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry, or Richard Verrall’s Did Six Million Really Die?¹³). Indeed, it seems today as if Holocaust denial is the main aspect of the far right ‘history’ and conspiracy theory, and that other conspiracy theories about Jews stem from this idea rather than the other way around. These early examples of denial are texts that predominantly promoted pre-existing, pre-war, nineteenth-century anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.¹⁴ Denial of Nazi atrocities became absorbed into the remit of the conspiratorial anti-Semitic publications. For Ratcliffe, denial was the first line of argument and was attributable to his belief that the Jews were engaged in a programme of conspiracy and control of society.¹⁵ Ratcliffe’s primary aim was not solely directed at questioning the validity of the ‘atrocity stories’; instead, he highlighted the supposed Jewish control of Britain and the world. Ratcliffe explained at length his theory of how Jews control all major business and banks.¹⁶ With this mindset it is clear how denial of the final solution was absorbed into his mental landscape.

That Jews were placed at the centre of Ratcliffe’s denial of atrocity stories is not surprising and reveals a lot about the way in which anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist and far right figures viewed the world. Individuals like Ratcliffe believe the world is controlled by Jews, a world view which sees life through a Protocols of Zion prism. Ratcliffe demonstrates this in a pamphlet he released in 1946 entitled Twelve Falsehoods about the Jews: A Vindication, in which he presented ironic answers to questions he posed.¹⁷ The arguments and sources used by Ratcliffe would also be adopted by the deniers who succeeded him, and indicate why such individuals believed that the Jews would ‘benefit’ from the Holocaust and understood the creation of the State of Israel from this conspiratorial epistemology.

The arguments presented and the form or presentation were dependent on the author, but in the case of Ratcliffe it is clear that denial was a very simplistic argument. The presence of negationism alongside conspiratorial notions regarding the Jews justifies his claims that ‘atrocity’ stories were ‘mere invention’. Ratcliffe also sought to place the ‘atrocity stories’ alongside other examples of ‘atrocity stories’ from the Jews, stating ‘[f]or when was there a war in which Jews were not “persecuted”? It not being generally known, of course, that most wars of Europe have their origin in Jew propaganda one way or another’.¹⁸ Ratcliffe later stated that ‘only an idiot (there is no other word for it) would place any confidence in the ridiculous stories of the “atrocities” committed under Hitler towards the Jews. Some of the stories and especially the “photographs” (probably faked in Jewish cinema studios) are enough to make a cat laugh’.¹⁹ Ratcliffe then supported these claims by resting his arguments on the book Falsehoods in War Time by Arthur Ponsonby.²⁰ Ratcliffe used the book to explain how atrocity stories used in the First World War had been a form of propaganda, these stories had been created in ‘lie photograph factories in the hands of Jews’. Ratcliffe prophesied that ‘when the war is over we will have another “Falsehood in War Time” with the press condemning the very lying photographs which they themselves published in regard to Hitler’s “atrocities” against the Jews’. Afte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• PART I: Development and concept of genocide denial
• PART II: Holocaust and genocide denial around the world
• PART III: Dealing with Holocaust and genocide denial
• Concluding thoughts
• Index