Where I Stand — Mike O’Callaghan: Be a voice for the dead

Thursday, April 20, 2000 | 9:23 a.m.

Mike O'Callaghan is the Las Vegas Sun executive editor.

Defrocked historian, Hitler biographer and Holocaust denier David Irving isn't the only denier of historical facts. American professor Deborah Lipstadt exposed Irving in her book "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory" and in a London courtroom last week.

Japan, 55 years after World War II, still finds it difficult to admit using Koreans as slave laborers and their women as "comfort girls." It was but 12 years ago that Bernardo Bertolucci's film "The Last Emperor" was sanitized when shown in Japan. Removal from the film was the 30-second segment showing the 1937 rape of Nanking, China.

Little in Asia has come close to the level of denying past actions that still exists among many anti-Semitic writers in Europe. Although Japan has developed a few of its own Jew haters, who rework historical facts to suit their needs.

Lipstadt, in her book, fingered David Irving as having gone so far as to join other doubters about the authenticity of Anne Frank's diary. The beating up of the dead child reached the lowest levels when, in 1978, Ditlieb Felderer called Anne a sex fiend and her diary "the first child porno." Only a thorough examination of the diary by the respected Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation lowered the critics' voices. This was accomplished by a 250-page technical report on the handwriting, ink, paper and other aspects supporting the diary's authenticity.

Three years ago I read "The Good Old Days" ("Schoene Zeiten" in German) edited by Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen and Volker Riess. The book's title came from the cover of a photo album kept by Treblinka concentration camp commander Kurt Franz. It contains the letters, diaries and reports written by the executioners and their friends during the Holocaust.

As I wrote in 1997, the documents in "The Good Old Days" are typically precise and clear: For example, seven sheets of one report from a camp in Lithuania list the people killed every day. Aug. 29, 1941, was a busy day when "582 Jews, 1,731 Jewesses, 1,467 Jewish children" for a total of 3,782 were killed. The sum total at the bottom of sheet seven listed 137,346 killed up to Dec. 1, 1941.

"In the Babi Yar ravine near Kiev, 33,771 Jews were killed during the last two days of September 1941. Truck driver Fritz Hoefer describes what he saw when he arrived. 'The moment one Jew had been killed, the marksman would walk across the bodies of the executed Jews to the next Jew, who had meanwhile lain down, and shoot him. It went on in this way uninterruptedly, with no distinction being made between men, women and children. The children were kept with their mothers and shot with them.' "

The book is a collection put together by Germanic writers who have dug deep into the problems of their own people. Klee had earlier written the book "Euthanasia in Nazi Germany." Dressen is an attorney dedicated to investigating Nazi crimes, and Riess is a historian.

Walter Reich, writing in the Los Angeles Times, concludes that "Anti-Semitism is an ancient plague. One of its modern weapons is Holocaust denial. As discredited as that weapon is, it will continue to be fired. And, because of the Holocaust's almost unimaginable nature, that weapon will, even among good and fair people, sometimes find its receptive -- and destructive -- mark."

Will the deniers of the Holocaust ever disappear? Only when anti-Semitism disappears, and that won't happen during our lifetimes. In the meantime our memories of a little girl and millions of people butchered by haters must be refreshed to defend those who no longer can defend themselves.