According to The Telegraph, an 89-year-old German woman, Ursula Haverbeck a.k.a. “Nazi-Grandma,” has been condemned for claiming that the murder of Jews at Auschwitz was not “historically proven.” The German Constitutional Court is quoted as declaring (I hope the substance of the translation is better than its grammar):
The dissemination of untrue and deliberately false statements of fact can not [sic] contribute to the development of public opinion and thus do [sic] not fall in the remits of protection for free speech.
The denial of the Nazi genocide goes beyond the limits of the peacefulness of public debate and threatens public peace.
Libération, a French leftist daily, also reports the court decision.
Like many—it must be 99% of mankind—I have never done any serious research on the Holocaust. Over the years, I read a number of newspaper or magazine stories and saw some photographs. The only book I read thoroughly was Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men (HarperCollins, 1992), a very troubling book, which was translated in French and published by a Paris publisher I was associated with. I also skimmed through a negationist book published in Toronto by negationist Ernest Zündel, Did Six Million Really Die: Report of the Evidence in the Canadian ‘False News’ Trial of Ernst Zündel – 1988. The book was prefaced by another negationist, Robert Faurisson, an ex-professor of literature at the Université de Lyon in France.
With such cursory information, how can I believe that the Holocaust happened roughly the way it is generally described? The main reason is that I know the topic has been debated for decades and that, on the free market for ideas, negationism lost. Very, very few credible people who have studied the history of the Holocaust, if any, support the claims of Haverbeck or Zündel.
Right now, a rational belief in the Holocaust depends mainly on the survival of free speech in America. It is still a risky freedom, as the topic is not exactly the ideal research choice for a young historian, except if he knows his conclusion in advance. But government at least stays out of it. If denial of the Holocaust were also criminalized in America, imagine what the situation would be in another half century. We would have no serious reasons to believe that the Holocaust ever happened. The starting point of the economics of Holocaust beliefs is that information is costly. So it is often rational to believe the ideas that have survived the test of debates. Provided there are free debates. Here as elsewhere, free competition is good. On the Holocaust, the debate was free for many decades; now, it is probably only in America that it remains free, that is, not censored by government. Witness, the cases of Haverbeck, Zündel, and Faurisson, all prosecuted for their ideas during the last three decades.
The absence of dissent, including by dissenters deemed cranks, is worse than their presence in the market.
In On Liberty (1869), John Stuart Mill made the same point:
If even the Newtonian philosophy were not permitted to be questioned, mankind could not feel as complete assurance of its truth as they now do. The beliefs which we have most warrant for, have no safeguard to rest on, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded. If the challenge is not accepted, or is accepted and the attempt fails, we are far enough from certainty still; but we have done the best that the existing state of human reason admits of; we have neglected nothing that could give the truth a chance of reaching us: if the lists are kept open, we may hope that if there be a better truth, it will be found when the human mind is capable of receiving it; and in the meantime we may rely on having attained such approach to truth, as is possible in our own day. This is the amount of certainty attainable by a fallible being, and this the sole way of attaining it.
It is depressing that many our contemporaries have forgotten this, naïvely trusting the state to tell them what is true.
READER COMMENTS
Matthias Goergens
Aug 22 2018 at 8:59am
You know that there’s about 200 other countries out there? What makes America so special?
robc
Aug 22 2018 at 9:40am
http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/
Shane L
Aug 22 2018 at 11:15am
I agree entirely with the principle, but also question the idea that the US is the only country in the world where debate about the Holocaust is not censored. Wikipedia suggests that Holocaust denial laws exist in “16 European countries and Israel”. It notes that Holocaust denial is illegal in some other countries under less specific laws; yet it seems that the discussion is free in the vast majority of countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial
Incidentally, in debates with some Islamist sceptics of the Holocaust I have found that they point to denial laws as evidence that the Holocaust never happened. That is, laws prohibiting discussion of some event suggest that the alleged event may have been fabricated. I would suggest such laws are therefore counterproductive.
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 22 2018 at 5:44pm
Good comment, Shane. I should have been more precise or prudent. What seems clear is that negating the Holocaust is an offense in most, if not all, major Western countries.
Joe Torben
Aug 23 2018 at 2:59am
Clearly proven wrong by this:
And then you double down by saying:
Seriously? Don’t you know how many countries there are in Europe? Your general point is correct and important, but doubling down on specific, but non-essential, facts when you are shown to be clearly wrong doesn’t make you look good at all.
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 23 2018 at 11:03am
Not that I really worry how I “look,” but see my comment below.
David Henderson
Aug 22 2018 at 12:27pm
Excellent point and well said.
SaveyourSelf
Aug 22 2018 at 1:35pm
I weep for Germany.
Mark Brady
Aug 22 2018 at 5:43pm
Well said, Pierre and Shane L.
Here is another reason to confirm the wisdom of exiting the European Union.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial#European_Union
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 23 2018 at 11:01am
One question that has been raised above is how many countries forbid denial of the Holocaust. One must distinguish two sorts of prohibitions: (1) denial of the Holocaust proper; (2) laws against “hate speech” or other such circumlocutions, which are often used to prosecute negationism. Type (1) is not as common of type (2) but, all in all, as Charles Small says, the U.S. is “definitively the exception.” Mark Steyn says that “The First Amendment really does distinguish the U.S., not just from Canada but from the rest of the Western world.” That seems to be a commonly accepted opinion. Mark Brady’s comment above is also useful.
michael pettengill
Aug 24 2018 at 1:53pm
Where is the evidence Ursula Haverbeck is questioning the history of Germany?
The only thing I see is evidence she denies the history of Germany, just like Trump denies that he said the opposite of what he says now just a few hours earlier.
Or like various people in US courts stating the court has no authority over them because the US government is invalid, unconstitutional, against God, etc.
She has taken no action to find evidence that refutes the events and actions of Germany while Hitler was leader of Germany.
Denial of evidence and conclusions is not questioning.
Note Federal Rule 11, which restricts the “free speech” rights of parties, authorizing monetary penalties for any statement the court deems obviously false.
For example, a person persisting in a tort related to the Holocaust Museum authorized by Congress on Federal land claiming it is a lie and thus unconstitutional, or such, would result in court sanctions after an initial rejection by a Federal Court.
Persisting with a simple denial would never be considered “questioning” by any Fdderal court, where every matter is a “questioning”, of facts, law, procedure, etc.
Jim Rose
Aug 24 2018 at 9:18pm
Eishenhower ensured that as many ordinary soldiers as possible visited the death camps to ensure there were as many eyewitness as possible. He anticipated the emergence of Holocaust denial.
Philipp L
Aug 27 2018 at 4:54am
Is history really always a construct of interpretations, that as a philosophy always needs to be defended against critical thoughts?
In Germany and other European states that history is still a fact – very much visible in our every day lifes. I am not talking about anonymous monuments that were built by governments. But every day we walk on the streets, small stepping stones are embedded in our way – stating the names and birth places of those deported and the place they died.
We walk by the ruins of the old synagogues razed to the ground after 1938. In the memory of our families live the stories of how the Jews were deported – taken away by buses. Their shops closed, their homes left empty. We walk by their hideouts, the most famous one being the house in Amsterdam that provided shelter for Anne Frank’s family but definitely not the only one. There they may have lived for years before being taken away.
I agree that the interpretation of history – also what happened or not happened – should not be a privilege of the powerful. That is something that George Orwell warned us about. However, the outright denial of reality that this lady tried to defend has nothing to do with a real debate about history.
It may be easy in a country with little tangible history to think that history is nothing but construction. That is the impression I get. But in a country where every year hundreds of undetonated, dangerous WW2- and WW1-bombs are still being found, old bunkers under the palaces of the imperial ages in the shadows of medieval castles and fortresses under which forgotten lie the fundaments of roman architecture history has always a factual site.
Yes, the interpretation of those facts and the search for truth should always be allowed and supported. But standing in front of the graves of the forgotten and claiming that their lives were not real is disrepectful and hurting.
That history is so blatantly obvious and real that people who claim otherwise cannot be considered people in the search of truth. They are trying to defend an ideology of racism and facism. The law does not undermine the search for truth and does not stop revision of what we consider history, it protects society from the lies and outrageous hypocrisy of facists and racists.
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