Academic Freedom Requires Allowing Holocaust Revisionism

The argument is the academic-freedom version of the broader denier complaint. It conflates the academic-freedom norm with a freedom-from-evidential-standards norm. The two are different things. Academic freedom is the principle that scholars should be able to pursue their research and publish their findings without political or ideological pressure from the state, the institution or the wider society. It is not the principle that any claim, however unsupported by evidence, must be treated as a legitimate scholarly contribution. The peer-review system, the editorial decisions of academic journals, the hiring decisions of academic institutions, and the professional reputation of scholars all turn on the evidential and analytical quality of work, not on its political content. Holocaust revisionist work is excluded from the academic mainstream because it is not adequate scholarship by the relevant standards, not because of its political content. The exclusion is the academic system functioning as it is supposed to function; it would not change if the relevant claims were politically inoffensive but evidentially baseless.

What the academic-freedom norm actually protects

Academic freedom in its classical formulation, as expressed in the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure of the American Association of University Professors, protects: (a) the freedom of scholars to conduct research on subjects of their choice; (b) the freedom of scholars to publish the results of that research; (c) the freedom of teachers to address subjects within their field of expertise without prior restraint by the institution; (d) the freedom of scholars and teachers to participate in public political discourse without institutional sanction. The norm is intended to protect the academic enterprise from political interference, particularly from the state, but also from institutional administrators, donors, and external pressure groups.

The norm is not a guarantee of publication, hiring, or platforming. The relevant decisions remain in the hands of editors, peer reviewers, hiring committees and other professional bodies, who exercise judgement on the basis of standards internal to the relevant scholarly community. Standards of evidence, methodology, citation practice, argumentative coherence and engagement with the relevant scholarly literature all apply. Scholarship that fails these standards can be properly excluded by the gatekeeping institutions; the exclusion is not a violation of academic freedom but the operation of the system that academic freedom is designed to protect.

This is true across all fields. The flat-earth proposition is excluded from geology and physics journals not because of political pressure but because it fails the evidential and methodological standards of those fields. The Lysenkoist genetic propositions are excluded from biology journals not because of political pressure but because they have been refuted by the available evidence. The standards of exclusion are internal to the disciplines.

Why Holocaust revisionism fails

Holocaust revisionism, in the sense the deniers mean it (work that contests the central elements of the historical Holocaust: the gas chambers, the killing operations, the death toll, the regime’s intent), fails the standards of historical scholarship by which any historical work is judged. The relevant standards include: engagement with the primary documentary record; engagement with the existing scholarly literature; methodological transparency about source selection and use; consistency with the evidence at multiple points of triangulation (documents, testimony, physical evidence, demographic data); and openness to revision in the light of new evidence. Holocaust denial work characteristically fails on each of these dimensions.

The Leuchter Report (1988), the foundational denier document on the Auschwitz gas chambers, was based on samples taken without permission from the Auschwitz site, analysed using methods inappropriate to the historical questions being asked, and presented in a form that ignored the Polish Forensic Institute’s competing study (the Markiewicz Report of 1994) showing that the proper methodology produced different results. The Mr Justice Gray judgment in Irving v. Lipstadt (2000) examined the Leuchter Report in detail and found it to be methodologically inadequate to the conclusions Leuchter had drawn from it. The Rudolf Report and the Lüftl Report, attempted defences and updates of Leuchter’s work, were similarly examined and found wanting. The denier scholarship on Auschwitz fails standards of forensic methodology that any university chemistry or environmental science department would apply.

The denier scholarship on the documentary record (the gas chamber design documents, the Operation Reinhard records, the Einsatzgruppen reports, the Korherr Report, the Höfle Telegram, the Wannsee Protocol) characteristically either ignores the documents, dismisses them as forgeries without addressing the chain of custody and authentication, or selectively quotes them out of context. The detailed work of the Auschwitz architect Robert Jan van Pelt, of the British historian Richard J. Evans, and of the German historians Christopher Browning, Peter Longerich and many others has demonstrated, point by point, the methods by which the deniers handle (and mishandle) the documentary record. The deniers’ work characteristically does not engage with the rebuttal scholarship; the standard pattern is the production of further denial materials that ignore the rebuttals, with the same methodological problems repeated.

This is not a question of political content. The work fails the standards of the field. If it were submitted to a peer-reviewed journal of European history under a pseudonym with no political associations, it would be rejected for the same reasons. The political associations of the deniers are downstream of the methodological inadequacy of their work, not the other way round.

The genuinely revisionist scholarship

The history of the Holocaust does, of course, include genuine scholarly revisionism in the proper academic sense: the continuous revision of established interpretations on the basis of new evidence and argument. The Hilberg-Bauer-Friedländer-Browning generation revised the earlier Reitlinger interpretation. The Goldhagen book (Hitler’s Willing Executioners, 1996) prompted a revision of the role of ordinary Germans in the killing. The post-1989 opening of the Eastern European archives produced revisions of the Operation Reinhard, Einsatzgruppen, and ghetto histories. The Browning-Longerich debate over the timing of the Final Solution decision is a revisionist debate within the field. The Mark Roseman, Christopher Dieckmann, Wendy Lower and other generation of younger historians have continued the revisionist work. None of this is denial; all of it is scholarship that engages the existing literature, the archive, and the methodological standards of the field.

The deniers’ use of “revisionist” as a self-description is a deliberate misappropriation of the proper academic term. Real revisionism modifies interpretations on the basis of evidence; denier “revisionism” rejects the established findings on the basis of methodologically inadequate work or of no work at all. The two have nothing in common except the shared word.

Why the claim is harmful

The claim is harmful because it conscripts the academic-freedom principle, which serves an important function in the protection of scholarly inquiry, to provide cover for work that fails the standards the principle is designed to protect. Academic freedom is the freedom of scholars to pursue evidentially serious work without political interference; it is not a guarantee that any claim must be granted academic standing. The deniers’ attempt to dress their work in the academic-freedom vocabulary requires the listener to accept that all standards of scholarship are political censorship in disguise, which is not how the academic system actually works and not what academic freedom is supposed to protect.

What does academic freedom actually protect? On what grounds is denier work excluded from the academic mainstream? Are those grounds distinguishable from political censorship?

See also

• Ordinary People Who Became Killers, Reserve Police Battalion 101
• The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution
• The Einsatzgruppen
• The Leuchter Report Proved No Gas Chambers

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Sources

• American Association of University Professors, “1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure”, https://www.aaup.org
• Charles Gray (Mr Justice Gray), Judgment in Irving v. Penguin Books Ltd and Deborah Lipstadt, 11 April 2000, with the detailed examination of the methodological adequacy of denier work
• Robert Jan van Pelt, The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial, Indiana University Press, 2002
• Richard J. Evans, Lying about Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial, Basic Books, 2001
• Jan Markiewicz, Wojciech Gubała and Jerzy Łabędź, A Study of the Cyanide Compounds Content in the Walls of the Gas Chambers in the Former Auschwitz and Birkenau Concentration Camps, Institute of Forensic Research, Kraków, 1994 (the Markiewicz Report rebutting Leuchter)
• Fred A. Leuchter, An Engineering Report on the Alleged Execution Gas Chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek, Poland, Samisdat, 1988 (the Leuchter Report, the canonical denier document)
• Deborah E. Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, Free Press, 1993
• Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?, University of California Press, 2000
• Ronnie S. Landau, The Nazi Holocaust: Its History and Meaning, third edition, I.B. Tauris, 2016, on the proper revisionist scholarship versus denialism
• Holocaust Denial on Trial, online archive of trial materials, Emory University, https://www.hdot.org
• Anti-Defamation League, “Holocaust Denial: An Online Guide to Exposing and Combating Anti-Semitic Propaganda”, https://www.adl.org
• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Combatting Holocaust Denial: Origins of Holocaust Denial”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org