Dealing With Holocaust-Denial : A commemoration of the historical crime opens in Washington

Between 1933 and 1945 Nazi Germany systematically persecuted Europe’s Jews and murdered two-thirds of them. That singular and still essentially incomprehensible process of mass destruction--which came to be known to history as the Holocaust--is likely to stand for all time as the epitome of willful evil.

In Warsaw this week the uprising 50 years ago by the remnants of the Jewish ghetto against Adolf Hitler’s SS troops, given a lead role in organizing and carrying out the extermination of nearly 6 million Jews, has been commemorated. In Washington an impressive Holocaust Museum is being dedicated today. In Los Angeles a similar facility, devoted to the broad theme and necessity of universal tolerance, has opened.

Memorials are erected to aid memory, in intuitive agreement with George Santayana’s warning that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. And so the Holocaust and the worst in human behavior that it represents are solemnly remembered . . . except by those who are ignorant of its existence, or who profess to believe that it never happened at all.

For some time now, in a few areas of North America and elsewhere, a perverse industry dealing in Holocaust-denial has flourished. The line of the Holocaust-denialists is that there never was a mass organized effort to exterminate Europe’s Jews, that those Jews from so many nations who perished at the hands of the Nazis did so only in the context of the larger war, that the very concept of the Holocaust is a hoax by which the world has been taken in.

Who believes this line? Certainly not anyone who has troubled to look at the voluminous documentary record of what the Nazis and their collaborators across Europe set out to do, and in fact so largely accomplished. Certainly not anyone who has seen the grisly photographic evidence of the death camps or listened to the testimony of their pitifully few survivors. Yet some do believe the denialist line, or at least have never bothered to seek out the facts.

Astonishingly, a Roper Organization survey conducted for the American Jewish Committee found that 22% of adults and 20% of high school students believe the Holocaust may never have happened. Twelve percent of adults and 17% of high schoolers say they don’t know if the Holocaust took place. Fully 38% of adults and 53% of high school students report that they don’t know the meaning of the word Holocaust.

This dismayingly wide area of disbelief, or lack of interest, seems to cut across age and education lines. Elie Wiesel, the Nobel laureate and a Holocaust survivor, finds the numbers frightening. So indeed should every other American. Ignorance is the soil in which hatred and intolerance flourish. History shows that the toxins they produce threaten all of civilization.