More than a half century after WWII, at the desperate urging of a passionate Survivor, a young investigative reporter finds herself caught between numerous versions of the same story. Played out against the backdrop of deadline reporting and journalistic integrity, playwright Jeff Cohen’s critically-acclaimed The Soap Myth questions who has the right to write history—those who have lived it and remember, those who study and protect it, or those who would seek to distort its very existence? And what is our responsibility once we know the truth?
What is the Holocaust?
As defined by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:
The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its allies and collaborators. The Nazis came to power in Germany in January 1933. They believed that the Germans belonged to a race that was “superior” to all others. They claimed that the Jews belonged to a race that was “inferior” and a threat to the so-called German racial community.
Between 1933 and 1945, using the cover provided by World War II for much of that time, the Holocaust occurred in every country in Nazi-occupied Europe. In addition to Jews, millions of non-Jews also deemed inferior or otherwise considered to be enemies of the state were persecuted and murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators.
Historical Figures in The Soap Myth
Michael Berenbaum – American professor, author, and rabbi who is a leading authority on the History of the Holocaust.
Sigmund Mazur – Laboratory Assistant at Danzig Atomical Institute, who testified during the Nuremburg Trials.
Dr. Josef Mengele – Known as “The Angel of Death,” the most prominent of the SS physicians who carried out torturous medical experiments on prisoners and oversaw the selection process at Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.
Dr. Sigmund Rascher – SS physician who carried out medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners. Rascher sent detailed reports on the results of his experiments to SS leadership.
L.N. Smirnov – Member of the Prosecution Team of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in the Nuremburg Trials; Chief Counsellor of Justice.
Glossary
Discrimination against Jewish people for racial or religious reasons. Religious antisemitism has existed for thousands of years, but Hitler and the Nazis defined the Jews racially, believing them to be infecting the “Aryan” population.
Term used in Nazi Germany to refer to non-Jewish and non-Roma (Gypsy) Caucasians. Northern Europeans with especially “Nordic” features such as blonde hair and blue eyes were considered by so-called race scientists to be the most superior of Aryans, members of a “master race.”
Also known as Auschwitz II, construction of Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp began in October 1941. Of the three main camps in the Auschwitz camp complex, Auschwitz-Birkenau had the largest prisoner population and, by the spring of 1942, murder of prisoners by gassing was moved there. Jewish deportees arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau underwent selection immediately upon arrival; the majority were sent to the gas chambers while a small number were designated to perform slave labor.
Built by the Nazis in 1937 near the German city of Weimar to contain political opponents, Jewish prisoners were also incarcerated there beginning in late 1938. Over the course of the war, Buchenwald evolved into a force labor camp. Prisoners were also subjected to medical experimentation.
A place where large numbers of people, especially political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area with inadequate facilities, sometimes to provide forced labor or to await mass execution. Nazi concentration camps served a variety of functions and were called by different names: labor camps; transit camps; prisoner-of-war camps; concentration camps, and death camps or killing centers, often referred to in Nazi parlance as extermination camps. The Nazis established about 42,500 camps and ghettoes between 1933 and 1945.
The first Nazi concentration camp, Dachau was built outside Munich, Germany, in March 1993 to contain the Nazi’s political opponents. The camp remained in operation for the entirety of the Nazi period and served as a training center for SS concentration camp guards. Although not considered a killing center, gas chambers and crematoria were in operation at Dachau. Prisoners were also subjected to medical experimentation.
A forced march of Nazi prisoners from camps in the east toward the German interior at the end of World War II. German armed forces were trapped between the Soviets to the east, and the advancing Allied troops from the west. Treated with enormous brutality during the forced marches, thousands of prisoners died either by starvation, exhaustion, or were shot to death.
Actions taken with the intent to negatively change the manner in which a person or group of people are perceived. Dehumanization reduces the target group to objects therefore no longer human and worthy of human rights, dignity and life. The Nazis dehumanized the Jews before The Final Solution, comparing them to rats. During the Holocaust dehumanization of Jews was crucial for perpetrators to carry out their horrifying tasks.
A euphemism used by the Nazis to refer to their intent to kill every Jewish person in Europe.
Sealed off rooms where poisonous gas (either the insecticide Zyklon B or Carbon Monoxide) is used to kill all those inside.
Followers of the Jewish faith. Jews originated as a separate ethnic and religious group around the second millennium BCE, living in the land of Israel. Jewish diaspora sent many Jews to Europe over centuries. Ashkenazi Jews are a Jewish diaspora population who merged in the Holy Roman Empire around the end of the first millennium. Many Ashkenazi Jews in Central and Eastern Europe largely maintained their Orthodox way of life in Shtetls, which were small, mainly Jewish villages. Yiddish, a mix of Hebrew and Germanic languages, was the language widely spoken by Jews of Central and Eastern Europe. Many Jewish families did not think of themselves as that different from their Christian neighbors, assimilating into their country’s culture and society.
The Nazis established killing centers for efficient mass murder. Unlike concentration camps, which served primarily as detention and labor centers, killing centers (also referred to as “extermination camps” or “death camps”) were almost exclusively “death factories”, with little to no purpose besides the mass killing of human beings. German SS and police murdered nearly 2,700,000 Jews in the killing centers either by asphyxiation with poison gas or by shooting. The six killing centers were Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka. All were located in Nazi-Occupied Poland.
Satisfying the requirements of Jewish ritual law, especially food or places where food is prepared.
The discovery of concentration camps by Allied forces and the freeing of prisoners. The first major concentration camp liberated was Majdanek in July of 1944 by the Soviet Army. Many did not believe the horrors the Soviets described. Auschwitz was liberated on January 26, 1945. Many Auschwitz survivors were forced west on death marches away from the advancing Soviet Army and liberated in Germany in April and May of 1945. After liberation many thousands of camp inmates perished because they were too weak to live. Others survived and began looking for family members with the help of the Red Cross, often in vain. After liberation many survivors needed months of medical attention in various European countries. Other survivors began to rebuild their lives in displaced persons’ camps. From 1945 to 1952, more than 250,000 Jewish displaced persons (DPs) lived in camps and urban centers in Germany, Austria, and Italy.
Members of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. The Nazi Party was formed in 1920. They promised a strong central government, increased Lebensraum (“living space”) for Germanic peoples, formation of a national community based on race, and racial cleansing via the active suppression of Jews, who would be stripped of their citizenship and civil rights. The Nazis proposed national and cultural renewal based upon a mythic vision of Germany’s past. The party, especially its paramilitary organization Sturmabteilung (SA; Storm Detachment; Brownshirts), used physical violence to advance their political position, disrupting the meetings of rival organizations and attacking their members (as well as Jewish people) on the streets. Nazification of Germany occurred after Adolf Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933.
A series of trials of high-ranking Nazis from across the political, military, and economic realms, carried out by the International Military Tribunal, a joint effort of the Allied governments (the United States, United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union). Chief United States Prosecutor Robert H. Jackson based his case on documentary evidence, believing witness testimony to be potentially unreliable in a case of this magnitude; the other countries’ prosecutors relied on a combination of documentation and testimony.
A Russian word which historically means sporadic violent attacks by local non-Jewish populations on Jews in the Russian Empire. Kristallnacht was a carefully organized nationwide pogrom. During WWII, Nazis encouraged indigenous populations living in newly conquered Soviet territory in launching pogroms. Pogroms did not end after the war, in Kielce, Poland, local residents launched a pogrom against surviving and returning Jews in the city on July 4, 1946. The pogrom in Kielce was one of the factors that led to a mass westward migration of hundreds of thousands of Jews who had survived the Holocaust.
Forms of information used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda and a master of the manipulation of truth, used books, film, newspapers, and radio to further notions of racial superiority and the persecution of Jews.
A Jewish scholar or teacher, especially one who studies or teaches Jewish law; a person appointed as a Jewish religious leader.
Schutzstaffel- Hitler’s elite guard. Divisions of the SS carried out numerous aspects of the “Final Solution,” including serving as commandants of killing centers and concentration camps.
The Treblinka killing center was created for the purpose of carrying out the “Final Solution”. Except for a small number of prisoners tasked with helping the SS to carry out the killing function of the camp, deportees murdered within a few hours of arriving at Treblinka.
The Day of Atonement; the holiest day of the Jewish year, during which observant Jews fast and atone for the sins of the previous year.
Holocaust Denial and Distortion
Over 75 years ago, Allied and Soviet troops moved across Europe in a series of offensives against Nazi Germany, encountering concentration camps and mass graves, and exposing the shocking magnitude of Nazi horrors. On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops liberated the Auschwitz complex. A few months later, American soldiers marched into the interior of Germany, liberating major concentration camps such as Buchenwald, Dachau, and Mauthausen as well as hundreds of subcamps. In May, Germany unconditionally surrendered.
The conditions in the camps, and of Survivors and victims, were documented by official military photographers as well as by individual soldiers. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, visited several liberated camps personally and issued orders that available service members and local residents alike were required to view the conditions in the camps first-hand, in order to bear witness to what had occurred. On April 15, 1945, during at the recently-liberated Ordruff concentration camp, General Eisenhower said, “The things I saw beggar description…the visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering…I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations to propaganda.”
David Irving, once respected as the author of historical works on World War II and Nazi Germany, has come to be known as one of the most prominent Holocaust deniers in the world. In 1996, Irving sued historian and Emory University professor Deborah Lipstadt for libel for calling him a Holocaust denier. In a highly-publicized trial in the British courts in 2000, Irving was found to be a “neo-Nazi polemicist” and lost his case. In 2006, Irving served time in an Australian prison for denying the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz. He has become a hero among extremists and has lost all credibility among mainstream historians.
In recent years, the government of Iran has engaged in systematic denial and distortion of the Holocaust by publicly questioning the murder of six million Jewish people by Nazi Germany and promoting antisemitic and anti-Holocaust rhetoric. A Holocaust cartoon contest held in May 2016 by organizations sponsored or promoted by government entities, and a resulting public exhibition of the entries, resulted in condemnation from the international community and calls for the Iranian government to denounce the exhibition. Just months earlier, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, 2016, Supreme Leader Ali Khameini said in a video, “No one in European countries dares to speak about the Holocaust, while it is not clear whether the core of this matter is clear or not. Even if it is a reality, it is not clear how it happened.”
In more recent years, the trend has moved away from outright denial of the Holocaust. Instead, efforts to distort or minimize the severity of the events. As defined by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA):
“Holocaust denial in its various forms is an expression of antisemitism. The attempt to deny the genocide of the Jews is an effort to exonerate National Socialism and antisemitism from guilt or responsibility in the genocide of the Jewish people. Forms of Holocaust denial also include blaming the Jews for either exaggerating or creating the Shoah for political or financial gain as if the Shoah itself was the result of a conspiracy plotted by the Jews. In this, the goal is to make the Jews culpable and antisemitism once again legitimate.”
The denial or distortion of history is an assault on truth and understanding. Denial and distortion are motivated by agendas that are neither about the genocide nor about greater understanding of a documented historical event. Some Holocaust deniers, so-called “revisionists,” claim to be authentic scholars, when instead they manipulate facts to support a particular ideological position. Hiding their hatred or prejudicial intent under the guise of free speech, they claim to offer an alternate version of Holocaust history. Because legitimate scholars do not doubt that the Holocaust happened, denial plays no role in legitimate historical debate.
Comprehension and memory of the past are crucial to how we understand ourselves, our society, and our goals for the future. Intentionally denying or distorting the historical record threatens communal understanding of how to safeguard democracy and individual rights.
IHRA’s full definition of Holocaust Denial and Distortion is available online.
Hate Rhetoric, Then and Now
Hate Speech is defined as “abusive or threatening speech or writing that expresses prejudice against a particular group, especially on the basis of race, religion, or sexual orientation.” There is no legal definition of “hate speech” in the United States, and such speech is protected by the First Amendment.
According to the State Department’s Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, “dangerous speech” is “speech that increases the risk for violence and atrocities against certain people because of their membership in a group. These groups can be based on ethnic, religious, or racial identities; among other characteristics. Dangerous speech includes speech that encourages its audience to accept, condone, and commit violence against people who belong to a targeted group.”
Hate rhetoric is expressed not only through words, but through the use of symbols, coded language, and imagery.
SYMBOLS & IMAGERY
The symbol most associated with Nazi ideology is the swastika. Prior to the 20th century, this ancient symbol had almost exclusively benign association and was most often associated with good fortune. The Nazi Party adopted the swastika as a symbol in 1920 at the urging of Adolph Hitler, who associated the swastika’s origins in Asia with the Nazis’ mythical and romanticized notions of the “perfect Aryan.”
Contemporary white supremacist groups, including neo-Nazis, use a range of symbols drawing from Nazi iconography and ideology. These include swastikas and other insignia used on Nazi uniforms, German-language phrases, and numbers and acronyms represented coded phrases. The Anti-Defamation League maintains a searchable database of hate symbols, available here.
PROPAGANDA
Propaganda is defined by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as “biased information designed to shape public opinion and behavior.” Under the guidance of Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, the Nazis used propaganda relentlessly, appealing to people’s fears under the guise of patriotism. Nazi propaganda encouraged pride in a strong, “Aryan” Fatherland while markedly excluding Jews—and anyone deemed a threat to the Aryan ideal. Stereotypes of Jews perpetuated by Nazi propaganda persist today.
In this Nazi propaganda poster promoting Aryan supremacy and national pride, a boy wearing a uniform for the Hitler Youth, stands proudly while giving the Nazi salute and holding the Nazi flag. The Hitler Youth prepared German teens and boys for military service while indoctrinating them into Nazi ideology. The League of German Girls provided similar indoctrination for girls while preparing them to be wives and mothers. Over 80% of eligible youth belonged to these organizations.
This Nazi propaganda poster reinforces antisemitic stereotypes and Nazi tropes by depicting a Jewish man (identified by a badge in the shape of a Jewish star with the word Jude, German for “Jew”, on it) with a large nose cowering fearfully. His clothing is meant to imply that he is wealthy, another antisemitic stereotype. A hand points accusingly at him, while the text, “Der is schuld am Kriege! (Who is to blame for the war!)” reinforces the Nazi promoted lie that Germany lost the war due to sabotage by German Jewish soldiers.
PROPAGANDA NOW
As with symbols, white supremacist groups continue to draw inspiration from the Nazis in creating propaganda. This poster announcing the “Unite the Right” rally, held in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, combines Nazi imagery and antisemitic tropes, including a strong, white “everyman” preparing to smash a Jewish star (colored red, thus perpetuating the stereotypical—and erroneous—association between Jews and communism), and a fiendish, bearded caricature meant to represent the “Jewish threat.”
Essential Tips, Tools, and Resources you can use to TAKE A STAND
The most important tool each of us has in response to antisemitism and hate rhetoric is our voice. Speaking out and identifying hate speech as such is essential step in preventing it from becoming normalized or accepted.
Educate yourself about the history of the Holocaust and about contemporary hatred. Visit Illinois Holocaust Museum’s Take a Stand Center to learn about Upstanders around the world working toward safe and equitable communities, and explore actions you can take in your community.