The skeptical eye: dancing with the Fuhrer.

There's a scene in the Mel Brooks movie The Producers where Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel visit a writer whose stage play could be the guaranteed flop they need to make a million dollars. (Rent the film if you need an explanation.) The writer is a deranged Nazi and his play, Springtime for Hitler, is subtitled "A Gay Romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgarten." He invites Wilder and Mostel to celebrate and, while singing old German drinking songs over schnapps, says wistfully: "Not many people knew this, but the fuhrer was a terrific dancer."

"Really?" Mostel replies tentatively. "I never dreamed. . . . "

"Zat is becauss you were taken in!" shouts the playwright. "Zey told lies."

That's sort of the experience I had reading David Irving, the historian-at-large of the neo-Nazi Institute for Historical Review. Irving is somewhat unique among this crowd, and not just because his last name's Irving; some of his books, unlike those of the other Holohoaxers, are actually available in otherwise respectable bookstores. The Sunday Times of London e n en his aid (albeit reluctantly) in obtaining the recently discovered Goebbels diaries from Moscow. And Irving's circulation in neo-Nazi circles does give him some unique career opportunities; in 1992, he announced that he'd recently obtained the original transcripts and some surviving tapes of Adolf Eichmann's memoirs, dictated throughout the late 1950s.

In 1989, Irving delivered a speech to a neo-Nazi rally held (big surprise) in a Munich beer cellar. Irving declared that Hitler had never ordered the mass murder of the Jews and that, apart from Jews being shot or used as slaves, there were no gas chambers--and therefore no mass murders. Defending himself in court three years later, Irving referred to the Holocaust as a "blood lie" that had been cruelly propagated against the people of Germany.

(Remember, these folks are a whole new realm of extreme. Other Holohoaxers maintain that the Jews died from food shortages, that they were merely well-cared-for slave laborers, and even that a swimming pool had been built for their personal recreational use at Auschwitz.)

Accepting Irving's contention that Hitler was out of the loop for the final solution would require ignoring the fact that Hitler had a phenomenal memory for logistics and military information. Very little went on in the Reich that he didn't know about or couldn't recall in detail. And to suppose that Hitler didn't sanction mass murder would require ignoring hundreds of hours of speeches calling for the extermination of European Jewry. The Goebbels diaries reveal Hitler's jubilation over the notorious 1938 Kristallnacht, in which he ordered the arrests of 20,000 to 30,000 Jews, saying that they would "pay dearly for their own mistakes." On the fifty-third anniversary of this event, Irving addressed a gathering of neo-Nazis in Halle, Germany. He hailed the resurgent nationalism that was driving the Nazi revivalist movement and assured his listeners that their numbers would double over the next few years.

Irving's take on Eichmann's memoirs is instructive' He claims that Eichmann thought the final solution meant merely exporting the Jews to Madagascar--which Irving feels "would have been an ideal solution to a perennial world tragedy."

But at one point in his memoirs, Eichmann himself stated that Reinhard Heydrich delivered the following message: "I've come from the Reichsfuhrer SS. The fuhrer has given the order for the physical destruction of the Jews." Irving promptly falls all over himself trying to explain this incriminating statement away--describing Eichmann as a scared fugitive grasping at any kind of extenuating circumstance, and reminding us that this is a postwar document and so we have to be cautious about taking it at face value, etc., etc. (Never mind all those documents written during the war about how well the gas chambers were working.)

Irving also dwells obsessively on how obsessive Eichmann was getting while in Argentina:

He keeps coming back to the horrible

thought. Did they manage to

use us? Did the Zionists use the

Nazis to further their own ends?

Was the Holocaust something

they themselves inflicted on their

own body, in order to bring about

their Zionist cause in the long

run?

But rather than contest these ridiculous ravings, Irving relates an instructive little story: Eichmann claimed that a young girl had been removed from a camp-bound train because she wasn't Jewish, but at the waiting station where she was deposited, a Jewish man protested having a non-Jew left there. This story, Irving says, is an "ugly depiction of the way man behaves unto man." Amazing: Adolf Eichmann is a put-upon, persecuted bureaucrat and a man on his way to the concentration camps becomes a symbol of human evil. Welcome to David Irving's moral universe.

As you might have guessed by now, the IHR's Journal of Historical Review isn't exactly bursting with useful historical research. It's basically a hate-sheet, filled with diatribes about how the Jews have somehow strong-armed several continents' worth of scholars, historians, and journalists. Most of the Holohoaxers are fond of retelling stories about how they fearlessly stood fast to their principles in the face of intimidation and harassment from the Jews. They've also somehow convinced themselves that the Holocaust "myth" is essential in maintaining massive U.S. support for Israel every year.

The most powerful figure in the Holohoax movement is millionaire Willis Carto. Carto's financial largesse endows any number of anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi organizations, such as the Liberty Lobby, its newsletter the Spotlight, David Duke's misnamed Populist Party, the Noontide Press, and the IHR. Carto himself stays very much in the shadows; I ran a few searches on newspaper databases and found only a handful of passing references. But Carto is listed on IHR letterhead as its founder, and the business license for Noontide/IHR was filed by his wife Elisabeth.

Carto denies that he is either a Nazi or an anti-Semite. He characterizes himself as an "anti-Zionist," which (in his scheme of things) means belated support for the Nazis during World War II. During the late 1950s, his newsletter Right recommended that people join George Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi Party. In a passage remarkably like the ravings in Eichmann's diaries, Carto wrote:

Who is using who? Who is calling

the shots? History supplies

the answer to this. History tells

us plainly who our Enemy is. Our

Enemy today is the same Enemy

of 50 years ago and before--and

that was before Communism. The

Communists are "Using" the Jews

we are told . . . who was "using"

the Jews fifty years ago--one hundred

or one thousand years ago?

History supplies the answer. The

Jews came first and remain Public

Enemy No. 1. Or, to put a finer point to it:

In fact, no objective Scholar can

deny today that the world would

be a far better place to live if Germany

had won--even if it had

meant the defeat of American

arms!

A lot of the other materials sold by Carto's enterprises are mainly for long-term fans of the Third Reich. One can obtain reprints of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, coffee-table books of Hitler's paintings, memoirs of Nazi high officials, and biographies of famous anti-Semites. For a splash of multiculturalism, there are books on race and IQ scores. And if that ain't enough, the Spotlight runs ads for books about Nikola Tesla's energy theories, quasi-survivalist tomes on military tactics and changing your identity, and regular columns on investing in silver, "the Gentile metal." Ernst Zundel has even reportedly written about a secret Nazi stash of UFOs at the South Pole, under the pen name of "Christof Friedrich." (I'd love to get hold of that one.)

And so we come full circle, back to the Harry Elmer Barnes isolationist crowd discussed last issue. The fascist movements in America in the 1930s were based upon an anti-Semitism that seems unbelievable today. Back then, Charles Coughlin was a Catholic priest whose radio broadcasts pushed a pro-Hitler, hate-the-Jews-and-free-the-silver-markets message; today, even a creep like David Duke has to smokescreen his agenda behind silky codewords. But that's beginning to change; the words regarding mass extermination are being minced less and less these days.

It's at this point that Holocaust revisionism cannot be seen as anything other than part of a global neo-Nazi movement. It encompasses skinheads in London and Berlin, armed-and-dangerous American groups like the Posse Comitatus and Christian Identity, former Nazis still alive and active in Europe, and even the Nation of Islam and the minions of Bo Gritz and Lyndon LaRouche.

One indication of the interrelatedness of these groups came from an investigation by the Simon Weisenthal Center this past year. A journalist posed as the representative of a fictitious Australian white supremacist magazine called the Right Way in order to gain the confidence of neo-Nazis operating in Germany. Several of the Nazis contacted claimed to be close friends with Willis Carto and IHR head Mark Weber. This claim was borne out by Weber's contacting the journalist--at a phone number known only to the Nazis he contacted--to obtain a copy of the Right Way. (When Weber met with the journalist, he bitched at length about how little Carto was paying him. There goes his promising career.)

The moral debates about the Holocaust are pretty much the only things the Reich produced that will last a thousand years. There's the question of whether such horrors can happen at any time, to any people, or whether it's a scar that Jews alone will collectively bear. People can argue over whether the Holocaust has been trivialized through its numerous dramatizations and reevaluations, or whether a less psychologically intriguing form of mass murder deserves to be compared with it. But frankly, the Holohoaxers just don't deserve such weighty treatment. In fact, it would be an insult to leap from them to such questions.

So instead, as promised last issue, I'd like to propose a simple test which the Holohoaxers can do to settle the matter once and for all. Fred Leuchter's arguments about the gas chambers being unworkable are the most oft-cited of the Holohoaxers' claims. Let's see them prove it--and put some of Willis Carto's money to good use for a change.

All they have to do is build another gas chamber, being sure to follow the specs for the ones found at the camps. Then they can climb right in and have the requisite amount of Zykion-B introduced.

I don't see why the Holohoaxers have passed up this definitive, Evel Kneivel approach for so long. After all, if they're wrong, they can at least pride themselves on having stayed in the Fuhrerbunker until the very end, so to speak. They'd also avoid having to face the scorn and ridicule that is usually the lot of failed "heretics."

And if they survive--if any of them comes goose-stepping out after an hour or so--I promise to retract every rotten thing I've said about them in these columns. Scout's honor.