“Revisionism” or revisionisms?

The word “revisionism” has taken on many meanings throughout the 20^th century, thus sometimes raising misunderstandings. Certain historiographical revisionisms often solicit, and have solicited, methodological clarifications, like, for example, in the use of sources. The discovery of never-seen-before sources, the use of documentation kept in never-before-explored archives, the multiplication of exclusive witness accounts may allow us to throw new light on historical events believed to be known perfectly, but about which, there was an imperfect knowledge.

Other revisionisms may derive from a modification of “interpretative paradigms” which orientate an exploration of the past in the present, on the basis of transformations in society throughout various ages and of the change of pathways of the collective memory[1]. All these revisionisms may question again, above and beyond the prevailing interpretation and above and beyond their value and intention, a shared historical consciousness. Therefore, if in some cases they appear «fertile» or at least «debatable» and therefore allow a natural evolution of historiographical research, in others they are, as Enzo Traverso underlines, «profoundly inauspicious»[2]. In relation to the use and “abuse” of historical revisionism however, things are still further complicated, whenever a critical school, re-examining the events of WW II, has not only arrived at redimensioning the general judgement on Nazism or simply at refusing the unique nature of the Holocaust. It has reached the point of denying the extermination of the Jews of Europe and at hitting the bearing structures of “official” contemporary historiography in relation to the so called “final solution”, touching, in this way, every now and then, fields which go beyond the historical scientific discipline and which Jürgen Habermas summed up in his brief and efficient formula of the public use of history[3].

This “negationism” has claimed a thought school status, proposing its own work method against that used by yet another school, which is defined “exterminationism”  by it[4].

Actually if we well consider,  the issue,  according to which the extermination of the Jews – with all thematic articulations that result, from that which we call the invention of the gas chambers and the ovens to the absence of a precise written order by Hitler – represented an immense lie, especially in order to legitimize the existence of the State of Israel, inserted itself at times into that argumentative whole which came from the rich, as it is a long-standing, anti-Semitic tradition, which next to the figure of the Jew as plotter or financier, also told the story of the Jew as a “person who leans towards falseness”[5]. Before accusing the Zionists of having invented the “death of the Jews”, it was therefore necessary to affirm that this death was but a lie: a legend exploited till scarcely credible, till «craziness» [6].

Thus, from Europe to the United States, the negationist phenomenon, based especially on the disowning of the extermination of the Jews, developed both in its most open Neo-Nazi version and in that one of certain marginal circuits of the culture of the Left. We should emphasise, indeed, that for some time it has affected only some sectors of the radical Right, characterized, in certain cases, by a type of negationism tendency – often qualifiable as a necessary precondition for regaining political militancy[7] –, from the end of  the Seventies and, in particular, following the works of Robert Faurisson, lecturer of French Literature and literary critic of the University of Lyon, it attempted a type of  expansion outwards. Through Faurisson, actually, negationism attempted to propose a historical research “reduced” to a sort of natural science as a weapon to attack the consolidated idea of the extermination of the Jews and to accuse the historiography on Nazism of a partiality and ideologism, presenting itself as the only credible historical reconstruction in that it is anti-ideological[8]. In this way, the French professor, taking on the role of “catalyst” within this movement of ideas and attempting to propose an academically and scientifically “legitimate” reading, “transformed” that which, from public opinion, may have been perceived as just a «negligible heretical and delirious sect» into a real case that achieved some notoriety[9]. Compared to the phase of the so called protonegationism of Bardèche and Rassinier[10], negationism from Faurisson onwards revealed a hegemonic tendency dictated by the intention not to put itself up anymore as a consolatory “historiography of the defeated”, rather as a historiography valid for all, able to redefine the common memory of Nazism and arrive at overcoming it[11].

The issue of the gas chambers

Faurisson, in the Seventies, began to apply his study method of literary texts to the writing of memoires relating to the repression and extermination of the Jews in WW II. The professor arrived at, not only, putting the truthfulness of the diary of Anne Frank in doubt[12], but also at denying the use of gas chambers and the existence of a plan of Nazi extermination of the Jews, radically reducing the number of Holocaust victims.

In actual fact, doubts concerning the gas chambers or regarding the presence of these in all areas of the Reich, as was the belief following the end of the war, had begun to circulate around Europe since the Sixties, and especially, following the publication of a letter drawn up by Martin Broszat: collaborator and future  director of the Munich Institute of Contemporary History. In his letter, published by the German weekly newspaper “Die Zeit” in August 1960, Broszat had affirmed that gas chambers had never been built in the territory of the old German Reich, and especially not so in the concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald:

Neither at Dachau, nor at Bergen-Belsen, nor at Buchenwald have Jews or other prisoners ever been gassed. The gas chamber at Dachau was never completed and put “into operation”. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners, who died in Dachau or in other concentration camps located within the borders of the former Reich (rather, within the German borders of 1937), were the victims, especially of, the catastrophic hygienic conditions and provision of supplies: in just the twelve months from July 1942 to June 1943, 110,812 people died of disease and hunger in all concentration camps of the Reich, according to official statistics kept by officers of the SS. The mass annihilation of the Jews using gas began in 1941-1942 and carried out solely in certain suitably chosen places and set out with adequate technical equipment, first of all in occupied Polish territory (but absolutely not in the former Reich): at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sobibor, Treblinka, Chelmno and Belzec. There, and not at Bergen-Belsen, Dachau or Buchenwald, were constructed those instruments of mass annihilation, camouflaged as showers or fumigation chambers. This necessary distinction does definitely not take anything away from the criminal character of the institution of concentration camps. Though, it might help to put an end to the fatal confusion from which it results that many inveterate historians adopt, for polemical purposes, arguments, which are right per se, but  taken out of their context […][13].

In 1968, the discussion had been taken up again by the French historian, Olga Wormser-Migot, who, unleashing a storm of protests, had written that, as for the concentration camps of Mauthausen and Ravensbrück, the survivors’ accounts contradict and there being gas chambers might not have been real[14].

In the following decade, as hinted at, the question came up again, triggering off  heated debates through the figure of Faurisson. In 1978, in the French Neo-Fascist magazine “Défense de l’Occident” an essay written by the French professor: Le problème des chambres à gaz[15] appeared. The article, which in Italy would then have been translated and published by Andrea Chersi at the beginning of the Eighties[16], in a very brief manner, put in doubt the existence of gas chambers, precisely for so-called technical reasons. For example, as far as the gas chambers of the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau are concerned, the French professor wrote:

In situ, there are a room “rekonstruiert”, as well as some rubble. An execution by gas has nothing to do with death by asphyxiation, whether accidental or suicidal. In the case of an execution, the gas chamber operator and his helpers must not run any kind of risk […]. After use the gas was breathed in and thus neutralized. The guards have to wait for more than an hour before going into the small room. We ask ourselves how, at Auschwitz-Birkenau for example, 2,000 men could have got into a room of 210 square metres (!), then granules of the extra-strong insecticide, Zyklon B could have been sprayed upon them (?); finally, immediately after the death of the victims, a group of people, without anti-gas masks, could have been sent into that room saturated in hydrogen cyanide to take out the poison-soaked bodies. Two documents of German industrial archives catalogued by the Americans at Nuremberg tell us, on the other hand, that Zyklon B adhered to surfaces, it could not undergo forced ventilation and it required aeration of approx. 24 hours, etc. Other documents which are to be found in loco […] and have been described nowhere, show besides that that room of 210 square metres, today in ruins, was nothing but a rudimentary morgue (“Leichenkeller”), located underground (to protect it from the heat) and equipped with a single and modestly-proportioned entrance and exit door. On the crematorium of Auschwitz (as in general, throughout the camp), there is an enormous bulk of documentation […]. Instead, on the “gas chambers”, we have nothing: neither a construction order, nor a design, nor an ordinance of any kind, nor a plan, nor an invoice, nor a photograph. In hundreds of trials, nothing of the kind was ever able to be produced[17]. 

By way of his arguing, Faurisson insisted that following the end of the war, «the Germans, the International Red Cross, the Vatican» would «all […] have pitifully declared, along with many others: “The ‘gas chambers’? We know nothing».

According to his reconstruction,

one single “gas chamber” never existed in one single German concentration camp: here is the truth. The non-existence of “gas chambers” is good news which would mean a mistake should it still be hidden. Like if we declare “Fatima” a fraud, this does not mean attacking a religion; thus, declaring “gas chambers” a historical lie, does not mean going against those who were deported. It means responding to the duty of telling the truth[18].

Faurisson, at the same time, points out the fact that he is not being an apologist for National Socialism.

Reading these pages – he points out –, one might interpret my ideas as being a sort of apology for National Socialism. Actually, for reasons that I won’t expose here, the person, the ideas or the politics of Hitler fascinate me even less than those things concerning Napoleon Bonaparte do. Simply, I refuse to believe the propaganda of the victors, for whom Napoleon would have been “the ogre”, while Hitler would have been “Satan”. It has to be clear for all that the only worry that animates my research is the truth; I call “truth” the opposite of error and lie. I will consider all accusations or insinuations of Nazism defamatory[19].

This article was published again, at the end of the same year, in “Le Monde” newspaper, igniting a dispute which was played out in the French newspaper and which saw Faurisson and other famous historians as leading role-players. This debate, indeed, led to the publication of the so-called Declaration of the thirty-four historians, drawn up by Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Léon Poliakov, in which Faurisson was reminded that there could be no doubt as to the fact of the extermination.

We must not ask ourselves – the Declaration read – how,  technically, such a mass assassination was possible. It was technically possible because it happened. This is the obligatory starting-point of every historical research on this matter. […] there is no, nor can there be any debate concerning the existence of gas chambers[20].

Marxist negationism

The explosion of the Faurisson affair in France, besides having created a worldwide stir[21] and having given origin to numerous legal trials against the professor[22], had, as we have hinted, a more immediate repercussions: the birth of Marxist negationism. Some militants of the Left, like Pierre Guillaume and Serge Thion, adhered, indeed, to the ideas of Faurisson and their activities rotated around La Vielle Taupe, a left-leaning French revolutionary publishing house[23].

On the wave of La Vielle Taupe, in Italy too, at the beginning of the Eighties, a current of Marxist negationism came to life and had Andrea Chersi and, especially, Cesare Saletta as its main representatives. Andrea Chersi, who came from the situationist group[24], translated some essays of Thion, previously published by La Vielle Taupe, as well as, as we have seen, the first significant articles of Faurisson. If that of Chersi remained an isolated case and his activity seemed like a provocative, transgressive editorial initiative, Saletta’s – a militant of Communist extremism which followed the ideas of Amedeo Bordiga, instead was, from this perspective, extremely significant.

The initial contributions of the intellectual on these arguments, published in a small periodical of the Left, were two articles where the thinking of Paul Rassinier was analysed[25]. These works may be considered the first attempts of sketching  Marxist negationism in Italy.

The theoretical presuppositions of the theses of Saletta stem from the conviction that the massacres of the Jews, even if, according to the reconstruction of the Communist intellectual, in much less quantities compared to those which «exterminationist vulgate tells tales of»[26], were to be attributed not to any precise will of the upper Nazi hierarchies, rather to the creation of a politically and militarily confusing situation, following  the act of various factors

which, given the chaos into which Germany was sinking in the final year of the war, ever more did evade all possibility of checking and ever less did correspond to original interventions, however infamous, of those who constructed that concentration camp universe, and constructing that universe, an important role could only have attributed, this goes without saying, to terror[27].

In this context, the deportations and the extermination of the Jews were not considered as being non-existent. The «ruthless anti-Jewish persecution which the Nazi regime made itself responsible for» and which should be considered with true repulsion was, indeed, not denied, but, as we have said, the existence of a «planned extermination», deriving from a «general broad design and basically unitary» wanted to be put in doubt [28].

Therefore, the Holocaust, in such a reconstruction, would have represented a sort of crazed variable of the anti-Semitic policy of Nazism. As if the latter had plunged into a heterogenesis of aims, having built a concentration camp universe whose sole purpose was the exploitation of Jewish manpower and which had transformed, due to the unfavourable way the war was going, into an efficient machine producing death, against the will of its own inventors[29]. They would only have the responsibility «first and foremost before history» to have lost control of this event, the tragic nature of which, led to the «generalized emersion of certain behaviour» which «modelled itself on the harder ones among those that Marx called social laws of nature»[30].

In this light, and that is within a context of historical materialism[31], Marxism a priori could not admit the existence of the gas chambers, because the extermination of many people, who could have been used for manpower reasons, did not answer to the logic of capitalism.

If we are to understand these considerations relating to the concentration camp universe within Marxist negationist lay-out, we have to pause on what emerges from the reading of an article that appeared in 1979, in an anonymous form, in the French magazine “La guerre sociale” inspired to Bordiga’s ideas, and entitled, De l’exploitation dans les camps à l’exploitation des camps[32], whose Italian edition was edited by the same Saletta. As the Italian communist intellectual wrote in the Premessa to this brief pamphlet, the article, even though outdated, offered an excellent starting-point in order to understand the theoretical presuppositions from which the negationist school of a Marxist matrix came[33]. It is no chance, indeed, that Saletta and the other editor of the Italian edition chose to put as sub-heading to the work: Una messa a punto marxista sulla questione del revisionismo storico (A Marxist formulation of the question of historical revisionism). In this leaflet, the fact that the creation, the exploitation as well as the ever greater use of forced labour in the concentration camps would have represented a form, albeit primitive, of capitalist development, was made clear.

The large-scale use of forced labour – we read in the article – is a symptom of ancientness from the capitalist point of view: it testifies to an incapacity to let the mainspring of the waged work enter into being […]. A caricature of waged work, forced labour does that which the specific logic of capital does not take on board […]. It is the consequence of a leak in the logic of capitalism […]. The massive deportations of Jews and non-Jews took place especially in 1942-44, since that was the time that Germany needed all its force in a war it was beginning to lose […]. They had to substitute German workers, who had been sent to the front, with deportation prisoners and volunteers[34].

Therefore the camps, in light of this, would have been «a product of capitalism not just as regards their origins, but so too in their working»[35]. The lagers, thus, not being «places impermeable to mercantile logic» reproduced «the worse traits that are typical of contemporary capitalism»[36]. The concentration camp, to be considered «as the company or the nation in normal times», was in this way an aberrant form of the totalitarian system of capital, in all its manifestations[37].

The development of capitalism – one further writes in the article – the invasion of all social life by products and the State, creates an ever more suffocating and totalitarian world. Stalinism and Nazism represented monstrous forms of this rise of totalitarianism of capital  […]. If we start from its real existence, not from the mythology of it all, the concentration camp phenomenon is not the confirmation, rather it is the denial of the anti-totalitarian ideology. Power is forced to place people in the camps because it is insecure and not omnipotent. The functioning of the camps reproduces and accentuates the aberrations and the difficulties of control of the present social life[38].

This text would appear to mark the welding-together of negationist themes and the attempt to read Nazism and Capitalism together.

The insistence on Nazi crimes has the first function of justifying WW II and, more generally, the defence of democracy against Fascism: WW II would not have been so much a conflict between nations and imperialisms, as rather a struggle between mankind, on the one hand, and barbarity, on the other[39].

Criticism of the legitimizing use of anti-Fascism and the rewriting, in anti-capitalist terms, of the history of WW II would necessarily go through, within this context, the opposition at every attempt to «show a wish to massacre in the Nazis»[40].

If these were the theoretical presuppositions out of which the current of  Marxist negationism exploded, it is rather easy to understand how the negation of the Holocaust, for this movement of ideas, became the fundamental premise for the criticism of an ideology, anti-Fascism, which was considered reactionary and anti-proletarian. From such points of view, referring to the thesis of Bordiga, who states that the «worst product of Fascism would have been anti-Fascism», as far as Marxist negationism is concerned, his “work” of “revision” would not intend «bringing back onto the scene regimes assimilable» to those known in the interwar years, «since the most certain outcome of such a turn-around would mean the suffocation of the seeds of another rising of the anti-capitalist struggle» rather allowing «a rebirth of class struggle»[41]. The aim would, therefore, be that of spreading such ideas, thus gaining a «non marginal audience» any longer, especially among the revolutionary movements of the Left which

either they know nothing, and this is that which is most frequently ascertained, or they have heard it vaguely hinted at and have gone beyond it; and, this, because they have not grasped the implications which from their point of view the question is able to have (the mental habits disseminated throughout the environment, and which have so much of a part in the subjective incapacity to operate for a perspective overcoming a minority condition, does not prepare them to understand these implications, we must recognise it), and because in their attitude as regards the right-wing totalitarian regimes much of the bequeathals of that conventional left-wing line survives whose anti-Fascism, even in its most radical aspects, has always suffered because of the boundary of being all together, even if not without intimate contradictions, within the dialectics between the forms in which the capital exercises its political domination: from which the survival of a conditioned reflection which induces them to reject every matter which appears to them intrinsically right wing (which does not mean that it is, at all)[42].

To deny the so-called extermination theories, for Saletta and for Marxist negationism, it meant, therefore, striking at anti-Fascism, retained as being an inter-class ideology generated by the alliance between Stalinism and Anglo-Saxon Imperialism to suffocate Western revolutionary processes[43]. Another presupposition upon which these theories flood was represented by the delegitimization of the existence of the State of Israel, a State which sprang out of Zionism. In this way, through its birth, a “reactionary solution” of the Jewish issue would have been found[44]. Precisely on this point, the issue would have ceased to be one exclusively of history and become one of politics[45].

The crumbling of its foundation myth – wrote Saletta – would take from Israel the possibility, precious in all respects, of making the scolding weigh upon the whole world or thereabouts that scolding of a co-responsibility in producing a tragedy which, in the terms consecrated by the Holocaust vulgate, never happened. There was a tragedy, though, of lesser dimensions, it was articulated in totally different terms, in a less worse way, from those solidified in myth[46].

Such positions, however, were maintained on the level of a criticism of Zionism and the State of Israel, rather than sliding down into anti-Semitism simply. Therefore, making it clear that in «perpetuating the legend» and in the initiatives of anti-revisionists a «fundamental role» had been undertaken by the Zionist movement, it believed it only right to underline that «anti-Zionism and revisionism» would have nothing in common with  «the leprosy of anti-Semitism»[47].

In Leftist Holocaust revisionism, as a final analysis, a heated criticism of Zionism accused of having magnified the differentiation of the Jewish identity, supporting an ethnic, cultural and political separation of European Jews therefore seems to emerge.

Zionism has one, primary interest – wrote Saletta to explain this “Jewish question” – to feed a permanent spiritual condition of insecurity and precariousness in the Jews of the diaspora, because a condition of this kind is the only one which can favour the strengthening in them of the solicitations, which originate from the common religious and cultural base, to maintain a link with Israel which, when accurately used, represents the most precious kind of resource among those which the Zionist state may create. For Zionism, the ghetto even now has a fundamental function: herein, and not just herein, it is the heir of those reactionary rabbis who, in the end of all the interdictions and the legal equalization of Jews with all others, no longer subjects, rather citizens, saw the start of the dissolution of Hebraism. Once the material ghetto was gone, it therefore becomes necessary that it continues to survive on the psychological level. Today it is no less effective than days gone by; less manifest… yes, but no less effective: it has become interiorized […]. And now, there is the ghetto, once again. […] The tendency towards “so much the worse, so much the better” is a constant mantra of Zionism. […]. [If], absurdly, a single State enacted, quod deus avertat, such a policy and reintroduced the obligation for the Jews to openly wear the star of David, we may be sure that, even if within a negative judgement of the meaning and of the implications of the thing, the viewpoint of Zionism would be that not all evil comes to do harm[48].

A matter of historiographical research

It is of use to highlight that Marxist negationism has had reasonable diffusion and “institutionalization” in France with the founding by La Vielle Taupe, in 1987, of the magazine “Annales d’histoire révisionniste”, later to become “Revue d’histoire révisionniste”[49], and throughout Italy thanks to the publishers Graphos of Genoa, with a Marxist - Bordiga-ite matrix. The latter from the Nineties takes on a systematic work directed to introduce the themes of Holocaust revisionism into the Italian cultural debate[50], nearly equalling that activity of extreme right-wing publishing houses[51].

In the light of the ideas we have analysed till now, going back to reflect upon notions from whence we started this brief discussion, is interesting in order to examine the concept of Holocaust historical revisionism, both that which means to put Auschwitz into context[52] and the negationism which rather would like to re-dimension, if not simply deny the extermination of the Jews. Without here excessively resting on the historiographical question, for which we refer to another article in this anthology that treats deeply the matter[53], we intend to underline that the issue of Holocaust revisionism places us right in front of the topic of historicizing Auschwitz. It is useful to state, to repeat what Pier Paolo Poggio said, that reducing Nazism and the «crimes perpetuated by it in the Holocaust», sustaining that about «this there can be no history», means «[consigning] the monopoly of research and historical representation to revisionism»[54]. Such an attitude reveals, how important it can be to leave the issue of historiographical research open in order to reflect upon and understand the extermination. At the same time, nevertheless, we need to highlight that if certain “revisionisms” must be fought, maybe we may question ourselves about the usefulness of cataloguing them all into one negative whole. In other words, when we talk about “revisionisms”, we have their opposite as point of reference: that is a  theologized history. Thus, as Traverso affirms, since the Holocaust had already become a “civil religion” of the West – with all those positive consequences but also with all the dangers –, it would be useful to fight such “revisionisms” without however opposing it to a “normative” vision of history. This would mean, exactly, accepting and considering legitimate only the dogma of official history. Actually, there should be neither official historians nor revisionist historians, rather just critic historians[55].