Practice and Practitioners of Holocaust Denial

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In Moses’ words, the “catechism” consisted of five strands: 1) the Holocaust is unique because it was the unlimited extermination of Europe’s Jews for the sake of extermination, without the pragmatic considerations that characterize other genocides; 2) it was thus a Zivilisationsbruch (civilizational rupture) and the moral foundation of the nation; 3) Germany has a special responsibility to Jews in Germany and a special loyalty to Israel; 4) anti-Semitism is a distinct prejudice and a distinctly German one — it should not be confused with racism; 5) and anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.

Leading to Debate

Moses’ claims, not least his use of the term “catechism” with all of its religious connotations, gave rise to considerable debate in Germany and beyond. (The key texts are now collated on the New Fascism Syllabus .) Notably, many female scholars, especially women of color, engaged in this debate, which opened a space for a discussion of issues relating to German colonial history, postcolonial approaches to German history and the Holocaust.

But when the discussion took place in the feuilletons of distinguished German-language newspapers, the authors were mainly middle-aged white men. Here, the criticisms, now bound up with the belated German publication of Michael Rothberg’s 2009 book, “Multidirectional Memory,” tended to be more defensive of German memory culture and critical of Moses’ supposed intentions. Left-liberal historians such as Gotz Aly and Dan Diner, who had been instrumental in freeing the federal republic from its self-exculpatory and conservative-nationalist postwar culture, bringing the Holocaust into the center of the national discussion, seemed especially incensed; though this is hardly surprising since these were the very people Moses had in his sights, using an Arendt-inspired tone that seemed designed to enrage.

The “catechism debate” has revealed some intriguing fault lines in the German politics of memory. Moses’ insistence that the terms of his catechism mean that what began as a progressive movement to make Holocaust memory central to the Berlin republic’s self-understanding has gradually become a conservative shutting down of critical voices who want to address German colonialism and current-day racism has touched a nerve. The responses can be read on the New Fascism Syllabus website, where many fair-minded respondents, such as historian Frank Biess, have attempted to grapple honestly with Moses’ claims and to set out what they think their limits are.

Yet the debate is significant not just in its own right, but because it has spilled over into the reception of Moses’ new , “The Problems of Genocide,” a reception that is itself inseparable from the debate over Rothberg’s book, which turned — contrary to Rothberg’s intention to facilitate open discussion — on the extent to which the Holocaust in German memory culture prevents discussion of German (or wider) colonial atrocities or modern-day racism.

What Does He Say?

What does Moses argue in his book? The clue lies in the subtitle, “Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression.” By this, he signals that his argument is less about the politics of Holocaust memory — though this features in the book — than the way in which the concept of genocide, contrary to the intentions of many lawyers, historians and political theorists, facilitates rather than hinders atrocities and human rights abuses across the world.

Critics, especially Holocaust historians, have been quick to condemn what they regard as a conspiracy theory at the heart of the book, namely that Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who coined the term “genocide” and campaigned all his life to have it incorporated into international law, was a Jewish exclusivist who worked with non-Jewish groups in a way that allowed him to get them to take his concept seriously, but who was only concerned with the fate of the Jews under Nazi rule.

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Moses does indeed set out something like this argument, saying that to “mobilise action about Jews … it made strategic sense to link the fate of Jewish and non-Jewish victims of Nazis under a single conceptual umbrella. This is the task that Lemkin’s genocide concept was designed to perform. Far from unthinkingly eliding the differences between Jewish and non-Jewish victims as supposed by Lemkin’s critics decades later, uniting them was the point of the concept.” His conclusion is that “if anyone is to blame for the problems of genocide, it is Lemkin.” In response, Omer Bartov, exemplifying the critical reading of Moses’ book, claimed in an Einstein Forum that Moses was putting forward what sounds like a “Jewish–Zionist ����dz�.”

Moses’ reading is debatable. Putting it forward requires dismissing Lemkin’s own autobiographical claims that he was moved, as a child, by learning of the Ottoman Empire’s massacres of Armenians and, more importantly, asserting that Lemkin remained a Jewish Zionist-nationalist from the 1920s — an orientation well by James Loeffler — through to the wartime and postwar period. But this is a reading that, albeit contestable, is well within the norms of intellectual history.

Revisionism is what historians do all the time, and there is nothing about Moses’ position that justifies reaching for one’s metaphorical gun. Besides, this is not the heart of the book, which has a far more expansive remit than Lemkin and Holocaust historiography, taking in a remarkable range of references in world history. He has set out his argument plainly and in detail on numerous occasions. (See, for example, his with Geoff Eley at the University of Michigan or his on the New Books in Genocide Studies website.)

What Does This Mean?

It seems that what is happening here exemplifies Moses’ argument that Holocaust studies is riven by paranoia. Why should seeing the Holocaust as exemplifying the “problems of genocide” — understood in Moses’ terms — mean that one is downplaying the Holocaust? The opposite is the case: The Holocaust should tell us something about the destructive potential of modern states, but it has been siloed in a way that reduces the force of its potential critique, permitting “business as usual” in the modern world. Why, to return to old debates in genocide studies, should placing the Holocaust in a comparative context diminish its significance?

If one were to compare the Holocaust with the Boston Tea Party or the Peterloo Massacre, the critics would be justified in objecting. But analyzing it alongside other horrific occurrences, such as the Armenian, Rwandan or Cambodian genocides or cases of genocide in settler-colonial contexts, not only allows one to understand genocide as a generic phenomenon, but it also throws into sharper relief what distinguishes the Holocaust from other genocides — since none are the same. One can be a responsible Holocaust historian and still subscribe to the idea that motivates genocide studies.

This is a case of fighting the wrong enemy. In the same way that the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) sometimes seems more concerned about which historians have signed the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism and reinforcing its own singular and narrow definition of anti-Semitism than about combating the radical right, especially as it seeps into mainstream politics in the United States and elsewhere, Moses’ critics have embarked on seeking to have him “canceled” in a kneejerk fear that his critical takedown of the “genocide” concept paves the way to anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.

What Dirk Moses is seeking to do is to show how the idea of genocide has had opposite effects to those intended, if not by Raphael Lemkin, then by his followers today. He is hardly proposing a world of anarchy or an opening the floodgates to scholarly anti-Semitism. One does not have to agree with everything that Moses says to accept that this is a serious book. Dismissing it as anti-Semitic is nothing more than paranoia in action.

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His main suggestion was that France “must make the island Madagascar available for the solution of the Jewish question,” that the 25,000 French citizens living there already should be resettled and compensated, and that “all Jews deported to Madagascar will from the time of deportation be denied the citizenship of the various European countries by these countries.” The idea was received enthusiastically by Adolf Eichmann’s section of the Reich Main Security Office, the umbrella organization for the German police and security forces, including the SS and its intelligence agency, the SD. His office noted in a memorandum sent to Rademacher on August 15, 1940, that “To prevent lasting contact between the Jews and other nations a solution in terms of an overseas island is superior to all others.”

Hosting Refugees and Migrants Is a Global Public Good

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In preparation for deporting Jews to Madagascar, groups of Jews from Alsace-Lorraine and the areas of Baden and the Saarland (into which Alsace and Lorraine were incorporated following the defeat of France) were transported in sealed trains to the Gurs concentration camp in the south of France, to be held there in catastrophic conditions under which many, especially the elderly, died, prior to their journey overseas.

Stages of Dehumanization

The propaganda value of the Madagascar Plan was, from the Germans’ point of view, huge: They planned to trumpet their “humanity” in granting the Jews self-government — under German supervision, of course — on the island while preventing the creation of a Jewish “Vatican State of their own in Palestine,” as Rademacher put it. Furthermore, the Jews would “remain in German hands as a pledge for the future good conduct of the members of their race in America.”

The Nazis never managed to deport French or German Jews to Madagascar, as their failure to defeat Britain meant that the British Navy retained control of the Indian Ocean. But the Madagascar Plan had its value: It was an important mental stage in the process by which the Nazis moved from schemes to remove Jews from Germany, then from Europe altogether and then, during the war, to murdering Jews in situ, where they lived, and finally creating specially-designed extermination camps to which Jews were sent from across Europe, beginning with the Jews of occupied Poland.

Notions that the Jews would be left to create their own self-governing society were pure eyewash. The scheme was inherently genocidal in that there were no plans to provide for the deportees on their arrival. As the Holocaust historian Christopher Browning , the Madagascar Plan, which, “like a spectacular meteor … blazed across the sky of Nazi Jewish policy, only to burn out abruptly,” was “an important psychological step toward the road to the Final Solution.”

In the last few days, the UK press has reported that civil servants have been instructed to look at creating offshore centers for “processing” migrants and asylum seekers. The places mooted have been Moldova, Morocco, Papua New Guinea and the South Atlantic islands of Ascension and St. Helena, both British territories. None are straightforward options, for reasons of corruption and internal strife (Moldova, especially over Transnistria); lack of willingness on the part of the local authorities (Morocco), or sheer distance (PNG, to which there are no direct flights from the UK, is 8,500 miles away).

But the island solutions are the most remarkable. So remote that it is used solely as a transit point for goods on their way to the Falkland Islands, Ascension, like St. Helena, has a minute population, lies 5,000 miles from the UK, and the cost of building and staffing such a center would be astronomical. One begins to wonder whether these plans have been thrown out to the public in order to make the more likely decision to use in UK waters seem sensible.

A Threat Within and Without

There are important differences between the Nazis’ plans to deport Jews from Europe to Madagascar and the UK Home Office’s investigations into sending migrants as far as possible offshore. I am not suggesting that what the UK government is talking about is genocidal or that the idea is borne of hatred and fear of a specific group of people believed to be part of a worldwide conspiracy to destroy the British people, in the way that leading Nazis believed that Jews were a threat to the Aryan “race.” The Jews were believed to be a threat within, who had to be expelled; migrants to the UK are perceived as a threat from outside, whose entry into the country must be prevented, albeit a “threat” that resonates with those who believe that the UK is already being “Islamized,” meaning that the danger already lies within.

Nevertheless, the logic of what the Home Office is talking about does stem from the sort of fantasies and fears that have driven the persecution of minorities throughout modern history. The notion that the UK is full and cannot accept more immigrants, despite more than 40,000 deaths from COVID-19; the idea that migrants have chosen to come to Britain because they “know” they will receive better housing and welfare than long-established locals; the fear that migrants bring disease and crime, and that they will refuse to adapt to “our way of life” — all of this lies behind current and mooted policies that are as irrational as they are infantile.

The Australian policy of holding migrants in PNG or on Nauru in appalling conditions has resulted in spiraling mental and physical illnesses. The spending of huge sums of money by Frontex and by the UK Border Guard in the Mediterranean and the English Channel has not stopped migrants from traveling, and the hypocrisy of blaming people traffickers is eye-watering given that such criminal gangs only exist because of the lack of proper channels for migration.

It has been shown many times that the migrants who make the journey are among the most enterprising and energetic people in the world, desperate only to make better lives for themselves. Treating them like criminals will make them, many of whom already extremely vulnerable, ill. The cost to the taxpayer of running these centers will be far greater than the gain to the economy of allowing migrants in and letting them work.

Above all, the idea of sending migrants to far-flung places is a policy of fear and paranoia — a fear of pollution and paranoia about difference. It is a ludicrous, though deeply harmful concept, and one which will not stop migrants trying to get to the UK. Most important, it is one whose logic points only in the direction of increasingly radical measures. When we have a government that is willing to break international law in , how long will it be before the UK breaks it in another, with respect to human rights legislation or the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, even if only in a “specific and limited” way?

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Forlì is an ordinary kind of town, well off the tourist track, in the Emilia-Romagna region of northeast Italy. Its streets are quiet, and it boasts few of the architectural gems that characterize Italian cities. It is overshadowed by Ravenna to the south and the magnificent medieval Biblioteca Malatestiana in Cesena a few miles away. It does, however, have a claim to fame: It is the nearest large town to Predappio, the birthplace of Benito Mussolini.

With characteristic self-importance, Mussolini decided that Forlì should become the starting point of a pilgrimage to Predappio. As a result, the town has an oversized, pompous railway station, which leads directly onto a wide avenue along whose streets are modernist apartments built for the town’s Fascist elite and which leads to the Rationalist Quarter, a conglomeration of buildings built in the clean, modern style.

Among them is the former GIL (Gioventù Italiana del Littorio, Italian Youth of the Lictor, or the Fascist Party’s youth wing) building. Designed for mixed use, it housed a swimming pool, cultural center, fencing hall and gymnasium — healthy minds in healthy bodies. Like the buildings that surround it, it would not look out of place in Bauhaus Tel Aviv. The Fascist inscription that still adorns the tower, however, makes plain that context matters. The architect, Cesare Valle, was also responsible for the building next door, the Collegio Aeronautico della GIL, “Benito Mussolini,” or the aeronautical college of 1940. This building was designed to train pilots and to celebrate Italian aeronautical prowess, and is clearly inspired by the Futurists’ obsession with speed, violence and disdain for the weak.

To enter the building is to have quite a surprise: All around the internal courtyard is a series of mosaics celebrating the history of flying. This is a town and region famous for its mosaics from the Byzantine period onward; those in the San Vitale Cathedral in Ravenna are breathtaking. But along with the Wright Brothers and the other expected usual suspects, the mosaics provide an unashamedly Fascist interpretation of history. The uniformly grey and white mosaics are, it has to be said, beautiful, especially because of the impression made by the sheer quantity of them.

Amongst them are mosaics depicting famous flying units from the Great War, with the injunction to the students to “live dangerously,” quotations from Gabriele d’Annunzio, maps indicating the spread of Italy’s Fascist empire and images celebrating the tonnage of bombs dropped on Greece and Ethiopia. “I am bold, not prim” (Ardisco, non ordisco), one of them reads, or “The keyword is a simple categorical imperative for all: OVERCOME!” (La parola d’ordine è una sola categorica e impegnativa per tutti: VINCERE!) The message is unmistakable and, in its restrained aesthetic poise, powerful.

The biggest surprise is not merely the existence of these mosaics, however, which have survived the intervening decades in apparently good condition. Rather, it is the fact that the college continues to be used as a school. As the bell rings for the end of lessons, a crowd of teenagers, typical of any European school, throngs the courtyard moving on to the next class. They seem oblivious to the mosaics and to the visitors examining them.

Here is the problem. It is virtually impossible to imagine children in Germany attending a school adorned with swastikas or other accoutrements of the Nazi past; indeed, it would be illegal. Italy, as many commentators have observed in recent months, is a long way behind Germany when it comes to dealing with its Fascist past. A recent film imagining Mussolini’s return to the Italy of 2018, Sono tornato (I’m Back), is an obvious copy of Timur Vermes’ novel about Hitler, Er ist wieder da (Look Who’s Back).

Italy seems to be, in a curious echo of Fascist Italy’s relationship with the Third Reich, in a slow, responsive position, driven by events in Germany. In fact, the existence of Nazi Germany has assisted this process of not coming to terms with the past, since it was always easy to point to Nazi Germany and suggest that Italian Fascism, by comparison, was simply not as serious, not as dangerous. The notion of Mussolini as a kind of buffoon whose absurd self-representation left him ripe for satire has long meant that by comparison with Hitler he has been seen as more of a comedy figure than anything else.

Yet those who travel to Predappio to give the Fascist salute at his grave clearly do not regard Mussolini in that light. The history of Italian aggression against its neighbors and in Africa, the implementation of the 1938 Race Laws and the involvement of Italians in the Holocaust during the period of the Italian Social Republic (the Salò Republic) after the German occupation in 1943 speak against the notion of Italian Fascism as basically ridiculous and harmless.

Besides, as Italians well know, and as we have seen on the world stage, being ripe for satire is no guarantee against electoral success. In the run-up to the elections on March 4, warnings about xenophobic, nationalist violence grew stronger in Italy. Yet with each warning, and even in the aftermath of�� the murder of six Africans by neo-Nazi activist Luca Traini in Macerata in February, the success of Silvio Berlusconi’s coalition, which includes groups who in Italian terms would be identified as “post-fascist,” grew. The same is true of the only marginally less suspect Cinque Stelle (Five Star) movement, which seems to espouse a kind of socialist nationalism.

How can it be otherwise when fascism is the background, the mood music to people’s everyday lives, even in the most solidly anti-fascist region of Emilia-Romagna? Italy needs to tackle its fascist past with urgency and renewed vigor if the country is not to find out that its myths about fascism are not just widespread, but dangerously wrong.

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