Nazi Popes and historical revisionism

The corporate media and blogosphere have spewed forth a mass of Irving-related prose since his guilty verdict. By and large, the commentary has been quite formulaic

1. Irving is a disgraceful human being

2. Anyone who denies that the Holocaust happened is mad or wicked, or both

3. However, locking him up for a thought crime makes a nonsense of all that crap we were saying about the right to publish those Danish cartoons a couple of weeks ago

All of which is reasonable.

Five minutes spent on Irving’s web site is enough to prove to anyone that he is a rabid anti-Semite. We’re not talking, say, of any confusion between a concern over the actions of the Israeli government and Jewish people as whole here. Irving is the real deal. He hates the lot.

And the Holocaust did happen. Even the most ardent Holocaust Revisionist does not deny the existence of the network of concentration camps, the deportations, or the Einsatzgruppen extermination squads that roamed Nazi occupied territories. I personally know far too many people whose families fled persecution from Europe in the 1930s to believe that this business could sanely be considered a hoax.

But yes, jailing someone for stating an opinion that in itself does not represent a call for violence or hatred does run counter to our supposed Western values.

And there, most commentaries stop. Arguably because that is all that needs to be said but also because people have real concerns when it comes to discussing the Holocaust.

They might get locked up.

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My personal issues with prosecuting people for Holocaust Denial or any other form of historical revisionism are as much practical as based on any notion of free speech…

History gets revised all the time

And that includes the Holocaust

There is undoubtedly an impressive body of eyewitness and documentary evidence of what went on during the Holocaust.

However, when you speak with veterans of wars or other historical events, one of the things that often strikes you is how little they knew about what really was going on outside their field of view. They sat in their foxholes or were herded onto a train quite unknowing of the larger picture.

It is the job of the historian to gather those individual accounts and fit them into a larger story. And to do that they turn to the testimony of people as high up the chain as possible and also to documentary or other physical evidence.

Even with an event that took place sixty or seventy years ago, fresh material still comes to light. In the case of the Holocaust we now have declassified ‘Ultra’ decrypted communications and the collapse of the Soviet Union brought a surge of material previously unseen by Western historians. Those same Western historians also discovered that the Soviets had not been above fabricating and circulating fake historical material after the war. On top of all that there is still material in government archives that won’t be declassified for another 40 years or more. Right now, there’s a debate raging about whether to make a huge German archive of concentration camp documentation available to the public for the first time.

All of this new material means that Holocaust Revisionism is a fact of life.

And even if you feel sure you have access to all the relevant facts, there’s still the thorny matter of interpretation.

One facet of the Holocaust story I am personally uncomfortable with is a growing tendency by some polemicists to suggest that, somehow, in a manner reminiscent of the Christian notion of original sin, we are all responsible for the Holocaust. I’ve seen work by researchers who have gone to great efforts to prove that the Allies knew about the Holocaust almost immediately, that they should have done more to stop it and are therefore complicit in what happened.

Bullshit

I live in a country that bankrupted itself fighting Fascism. It didn’t back down even when it was facing what seemed to be almost certain defeat. And accusing Britain of complicity in the Holocaust is spitting on the graves of the people who died in that fight.

Even before the war started, Britain was a haven for people seeking refuge from Nazi persecution. When Black Shirts tried marching through the East End of my home town they got their teeth kicked in.

Should we have taken more refugees? With hindsight certainly but hindsight is one of the cheapest tricks in a historian’s armoury. Should we have bombed Auschwitz? Again, there's a big dollop of hindsight required and the Germans would have had the place up a running again in a few days anyway. We gave them lots of practice at that sort thing.

Similar charges have been made against Pope Pius XII. While there’s no denying that he and the Catholic Church went to some efforts to save persecuted Jews, some commentators claim that he should have done more. This claimed lack of action has been spun over the last few decades to a point where some people even seem to believe that Pius was virtually assisting Hitler.

I’m not buying that one either. This was the same Pope who gave haven to 2-3,000 Jews in Castel Gandolfo, crammed in so tight they were sleeping on staircases. Deportations of Jews from Italy were hampered to a point of ineffectiveness. The vast majority of Italian Jews survived the War. Catholic priests from across Europe died in the same camps as the Jews did. I have seen as much evidence of those historical events as I have of the Holocaust.

As with the British complicity thing, I see the attack on Pius as politically inspired revisionism. No one was thinking or talking like this in the 1950s or 1960s.

Some people’s opinions have changed, and I question their motivations as much as I do Irving's.

But these people are as entitled to their opinions, bollocks as they are, as I am to mine.

Now, getting back to the Irving thing and whether it is hypocritical for locking him up for expressing an opinion…

Who gets to decide what the official version of an historical event is and what truths are set in stone? Is someone unconvinced by the notion of the Nazi Pope a Holocaust Denier? Who gets to decide what the official interpretation of history is? An Austrian judge?