c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.)

(UNDATED) My worst fear is that the neo-Nazi followers of Hitler might achieve their ultimate victory once the last Holocaust survivor dies a natural death.

With no live witnesses to tell the horrific story of how 6 million Jews were murdered in the heart of Europe between 1933 and 1945, evil persons who make a profession of denying the reality of humanity’s greatest crime would be free to spread the pathological “Big Lie” that the Holocaust never happened.

Indeed, the poisonous weeds of Holocaust denial have already entered into the garden of respectable scholarship, and, incredibly, otherwise intelligent people, under the always-handy umbrella of free inquiry, have seriously “debated” the reality of Auschwitz and other death camps.

Happily, two recent events have utterly smashed the heinous assertion that there are two legitimate opposing views about the Holocaust.

Because Pope John Paul II’s March 23 address at Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial was so personal and emotional, most observers overlooked the powerful repudiation of Holocaust denial by the spiritual leader of the world’s 1 billion Roman Catholics.

But a close look at the pope’s words in Jerusalem clearly reveals his abhorrence for everyone who trivializes or dismisses the catastrophe that was the Holocaust: “My own personal memories are of all that happened when the Nazis occupied Poland during the War. … I have come to Yad Vashem to pay homage to the millions of Jewish people who, stripped of everything, especially their human dignity, were murdered in the Holocaust. … How can we fail to heed their cry? No one can forget or ignore what happened. No one can diminish its scale.”

While wicked people will still offer the world their intellectual feces as the “truth” about the Holocaust, John Paul II’s six words, “No one can diminish its scale,” have dealt the Holocaust deniers a crushing and permanent refutation.

Chief among those wicked people is the 62-year-old English writer David Irving, who has declared, “More people died in the back of (Ted) Kennedy’s car at Chappaquidick than died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.” Irving has termed the Auschwitz death camp a “Disneyland for tourists.” His hatred for Jews is so deep that he asked a female Holocaust survivor “how much money she had made from her tattoo.” The tattoo, of course, was the prisoner number that the Nazis irrevocably burned into the woman’s skin.

Because Irving once had a reputation for serious scholarship, even his indecent, grotesque statements about the Holocaust had a certain credibility in some serious academic quarters. But in one of her books, Deborah Lipstadt, a prominent historian at Atlanta’s Emory University, correctly labeled Irving a dangerous Holocaust denier.

An outraged Irving brought a libel suit against Lipstadt, and a bitter nine-week trial took place this year in London.

British law compels defendants in such cases to prove their innocence, a reversal from traditional American court proceedings in which a person is presumed innocent until proven guilty. One of the few things Irving and Lipstadt agreed on was to eschew a jury trial and rely instead on the decision of a single judge.

Perpetually arrogant and filled with anger toward Lipstadt, Irving chose to be his own attorney during the complex case in which the Emory professor offered overwhelming evidence about the historical truth of the Holocaust. Lipstadt’s publisher, Penguin Books, strongly supported its author.

Lipstadt’s legal team presented the handwritten account that Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi SS leader and a major Holocaust criminal, had submitted in a futile defense effort during his trial in Jerusalem nearly 40 years ago. That damning and detailed description of the inner workings of the German death machinery had never been released by Israel until the London trial.

On April 11, Judge Charles Gray issued a decision requiring two hours to read. It was a total vindication for Lipstadt and a searing defeat for Irving.

Gray specifically called Irving “a right-wing extremist who promotes neo-Nazism.” The judge was unrelenting in his assault on Irving’s claim as a reputable historian: “(Irving) deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence … and denied the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz. … He is an active Holocaust denier … anti-Semitic and racist.”

Because British law requires the loser in such cases to pay the legal costs of the trial, Irving now owes about $3.2 million. Following the verdict, Lipstadt said the anti-Semitic Irving “had danced on the graves” of the 6 million murdered Jews. It was one of the most expensive and vulgar dances the world has ever seen.

DEA END RUDIN