Blood and Politics (41 page)

When the stain of postwar division was erased by unification and annexation, many believed the period of punishment had ended. German nationalism could now be separated from “Auschwitz,” they reasoned. It was a notion similar to that held by many in the United States who felt that Confederate nationalism should be considered separately from the horrors of chattel slavery. In the first moments after formal unity, a commentator for one of the Federal Republic’s premier liberal newspapers hoped that “Auschwitz will not remain a standard of condemnation at which Germans reflexively lapse into intense self-analysis.”
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The logic may be circular, but it was compelling. If Germany had been divided as punishment for “Auschwitz,” then “Auschwitz” was directly linked to German national identity in the postwar period. And if unification ended the punishment, then it should also lead to a reconsideration of German nationalism. To complete the circle: a reconsideration of German nationalism then would mean a reconsideration of Auschwitz. By this reasoning, unification and the attendant freshly assertive nationalism—rather than the outrageous insults of skinheads in the plaza or small groups of deniers meeting in a hotel room—altered the German debate on the Holocaust.

Unification did in fact transform much of Germany’s thinking about its own history. And not just in the East, where the history of Soviet occupation and Communist rule was rewritten. One study conducted during this period found that 58 percent of Germans agreed with the statement “It is time to put the memory of the Holocaust behind us.” A separate question found that 39 percent agreed that “Jews are exploiting the Holocaust for their own purposes.”
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The debate over the link between the Holocaust and German national identity, however, had actually emerged first among scholars in West Germany prior to unification. Known as the
Historikerstreit
, or historians’ debate, in the mid-1980s, it prefigured a wider reconsideration in 1990.

The central figure in this debate was the historian Ernst Nolte. To Americans, Nolte is probably best known as the author of
Three Faces of Fascism
, a 1963 overview of German National Socialism, Italian Fascism, and the Action Française. To Germans, Nolte was a commanding personality among postwar intellectuals who taught modern European history at the Free University in West Berlin prior to unification.
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Nolte’s camp of historians expressed the victimization felt by West Germans and their quest for relief from the burden of “Auschwitz.” (In 1986 one German newspaper commissioned a polling study that concluded that the German people were subject to “humiliation” and that
Germany was an “injured nation” because of the national identification of its history with Hitler’s crimes and anti-Semitism.
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) To that end, Nolte sought to disassociate the uniqueness of the Holocaust from Germany.

In 1986 Nolte unofficially opened the debate by decoupling the annihilation of European Jewry from anti-Semitism. Instead, he argued, Hitler’s crimes were consequences arising from Lenin’s ghost and Stalin’s crimes. “Auschwitz is not primarily the result of traditional anti-Semitism and was not just one more case of ‘genocide,’” he argued. (The quotation marks are Nolte’s.) Rather it was “the fear-borne reaction to the acts of annihilation that took place during the Russian Revolution.”

More than just an argument that Russian Communists forced Hitler to murder the Jews, Nolte claimed that the Nazis did only what the Bolsheviks had done first: “the so-called annihilation of the Jews by the Third Reich was a reaction or a distorted copy and not a first act or an original,” the once-respected historian wrote.
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Prior to unification, Nolte’s denial of the centrality of anti-Semitism did not extend to denying the genocide itself—despite his use of qualifying quotation marks when using the word “genocide.” He also conceded that the Nazis were more efficient murderers than the Communists. While he recognized the irrationality and horror of Germany’s “quasi-industrial” murder machine, his argument provided solace for the guilt-stricken. The machine patent belonged to the Soviet Union, after all, not to German engineers.
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After unification (and the Cold War’s end), however, the terms of the Historikerstreit debate changed. Nolte was explicit. “With German unification, of course, everything has changed, because one of the main points made by [my opponents] was that if you do not accept their way of interpreting German history, then you endanger peaceful coexistence [between the West and the USSR]. You also show yourself to be a German nationalist who wanted to reunite the nation by annexing the communist ‘German Democratic Republic.’” Since East Germany had already been annexed and war had not broken out, Nolte believed his opponents’ entire position was “no longer valid.”
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While Nolte’s brand of nationalism had been a marginal set of ideas prior to unification, now these same concepts were Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s government policy. The change in discussion was reflected in a thousand venues large and small. Even the museum of Nazi atrocities at the site of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp outside East Berlin added a small exhibit on the Soviets’ postwar use of the camp. The force of the
Wende
(turn-around) was so strong that one of Nolte’s preunification opponents switched sides. “Nolte’s approach, the center of the socalled
Battle of the Historians, was actually philosophically correct,” the former antagonist conceded.
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In essence, Nolte stepped forward first to argue for a new method of historical inquiry. If unification legitimized German nationalism, then the normalization of German nationalism meant that the murder of European Jews should be reexamined. Although he did not deny the “genocide,” he did demand that Germany’s national claims be considered free from the burdens imposed by Hitler and Holocaust. Willis Carto and the Institute for Historical Review aimed at the same target, even if they were shooting at it from a different ideological spot. Nolte’s success in the Historikerstreit encouraged the hopes of white supremacists and Holocaust “revisionists” in the United States, who believed a larger attempt to rewrite history was afoot.

Germany long occupied pride of place for the American movement. For so-called Christian Identity adherents, Germans were regarded as descendants of the biblical tribe of Judah, and Germany by right was the Lion of Europe. Mainstreamers and vanguardists alike saw in Germans a reflection of themselves: embattled Aryans with fingers in the dike protecting Western Civilization from flooding. Tom Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance, among others, gloried at the similarities. “Right now the Skinheads in Germany are very strong and united,” he argued. “They are extremely White Power and they don’t tolerate anything from anyone. They basically have the same problem we do with immigrants.”
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William Pierce also considered Germany Aryandom’s once and future fatherland, although prior to 1990 he had few followers. And in Nebraska a character named Gary Lauck turned himself into a middle-aged bag carrier for hard-core National Socialists in the Federal Republic, producing German-language literature in the United States and then smuggling it into Germany, where it was ruled illegal.

The broadest, most effective ties with German anti-Semites, however, were held by Willis Carto. His wife was a German national, and
The Spotlight
carried occasional articles written in Bonn. And his Institute for Historical Review published German-language literature for distribution in Europe. As a result, it was natural for the institute to examine many of the same questions posed by Nolte when it met for its tenth conference just thirteen days after German unification.

A cautious optimism animated the meeting in a D.C. hotel ballroom. The IHR was being heard on talk radio, a perfect medium for angry white men and unverifiable rumormongering. A deliberately controversial advertising program in campus newspapers had turned into a clever
two-for-one publicity bonanza. One of the IHR’s offshoots contacted student newspapers with a basic it-didn’t-happen-let’s-talk-about-it display ad. Whether or not the newspapers accepted the paid advertisements, a debate on “free speech” and “free inquiry” followed. The IHR then got free coverage in local radio, television, and newspaper markets, something that had eluded it since the days of the so-called fifty-thousand-dollar reward. In addition, the market stayed solid for the IHR’s books and insiders’ journal. With the changes in Germany, a breakthrough appeared possible for the first time in decades.
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Nolte’s advocacy of an explicitly nationalist German historiography registered high on the list of positive portents. That weekend Robert Countess, one of the IHR’s prized scholars, brought news of his own discussions with Nolte. Countess, who held a master’s degree from Georgetown University and a doctorate in religion from Bob Jones University, taught history at the University of Alabama in Huntsville until his death in 2005. While in Berlin during the summer of 1990, Countess said, he had met with Nolte.
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He was respectfully received by the German historian, but his efforts to convert Nolte to IHR-style revisionism had failed. Nevertheless, Countess invited Nolte to address a future IHR conference.

According to Countess’s conference remarks, Nolte had said he would agree to a future invitation, with a proviso. An eminent Holocaust historian, such as Yehuda Bauer, must also speak at the meeting. Countess concluded that Nolte might never become a “full-fledged” revisionist, but he could serve as a “bridge” between the IHR and the wider public since he held ideas common to both mainstream historians and the institute.

Like the IHR, for example, Nolte contended that Jews had attained an unwarranted permanent, privileged status because of the Holocaust.
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In addition, during the Historikerstreit he had smeared William Shirer’s classic account of Hitler’s Germany,
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
, as “clearly anti-German.”
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Further, Nolte contended that a statement by Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann in September 1939 claiming that in the event of war Jews would fight on the side of England could have justified “treating the German Jews as prisoners of war.”
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Most important, Nolte ratified the heart of the IHR’s claims that its “revisionism” was unfairly vilified. “All attempts to make the National-Socialist past knowable like any other past and to strive for ‘objectivity,’” he wrote during the Historiker debate, “are stigmatized with the word ‘apologist.’”
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Nolte never fully embraced those he called radical revisionists, and he never stooped low enough to attend any of the IHR’s conferences.
His reference points remained in Germany, where rewriting the history of the twentieth century occupied everyone, from skinheads distributing swastika stickers to government officials charged with creating a national consensus encompassing territories East and West. The question facing IHR regulars that weekend was straightforward: Could they translate the changes in Europe into an American vernacular?

Mark Weber shouldered the task that weekend in Washington, D.C. Uniquely suited to the task, Weber had studied history in Munich and remained fluent in German. As a young editor for Pierce’s National Alliance, he had tackled international issues. And now, about to be in the employ of Willis Carto, Weber had started “debating” the Holocaust on network television.
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In an hourlong keynote speech, Weber connected the dots between the transformation of Europe and the IHR. “While revisionism is going full scale ahead in Eastern Europe,” he told attendees, “it is needed now here in America.”
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By Weber’s telling, the IHR was about to vanquish its foes. The fall of the Berlin Wall meant an accelerated retreat by the “Holocaust lobby” at home. And American victory in the Cold War would soon mean the end of foreign aid to Israel. All would combine to stimulate public support for the IHR.
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At its banquet dinner, the IHR presented evidence that greater public acceptance awaited it with the appearance of John Toland. The author of several bestselling military histories, his 1971 book about Japan,
The Rising Sun
, had won a Pulitzer Prize. Toland’s prominence far exceeded that of anyone previously associated with the IHR. None of his books, including his biography of Hitler, questioned the facts of the Holocaust. Nevertheless, the IHR considered Toland’s Pearl Harbor tale
Infamy
“strongly Revisionist.” Its newsletter could justifiably claim that the “participation of so prestigious and courageous a writer” was a milestone.
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Toland’s banquet speech, although considered the “catch of the conference,” added nothing to the historical record. Instead, it was a self-absorbed recounting of his meetings with Nazi war heroes and stories about research and writing. Still, the IHR was thrilled by Toland’s presence because it meant that “we Revisionists are no longer talking to ourselves.”
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Despite these changes, a bunker mentality informed this conference, just as it had dominated meetings past. Precautionary steps again kept the conference’s actual location secret until the last moment. After pre-registering by mail, attendees were given a phone number to call upon arrival in D.C. At that point they were diverted to a hotel on Dupont Circle in Northwest Washington. There, in a rented room, Elisabeth Carto checked credentials, issued ID tags, and directed traffic to the
conference site itself, a ballroom in another hotel.
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The circuitous route reinforced the participants’ belief that the IHR was victimized by the “enemies of free speech.”

At that moment the IHR, however, remained a political enterprise atop a borderline movement, not an academically accepted organization of historians.
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The same number attended that weekend as had in the past: about 125. Half were returnees. Half the speakers’ list repeated performances as well. The usual excuses for small attendance fooled only the IHR themselves: the group didn’t want large numbers, the staff contended; big crowds were too hard to control. And most of the speeches emphasized the idea that they all were victims, a certain sign of their marginality.
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