In the American Humanist magazine Free Inquiry, its Editor, Professor Paul Kurtz, wrote ‘We can take nothing for granted: some relatively unknown religious ideology may again sweep the world’ (Kurtz, 1994). From a rationalist perspective the disadvantage of religion is that it is capable of facilitating radical social changes which may be undesired. If a religion were to be unrecognized as such it could avoid the modern policy of separating Church and State.

The theme of this review is that a new religion has indeed become established. In what may, to future generations, be a remarkable exemplification of ambivalence, the new creed has been adopted and is being promoted by leading Humanists. Humanist publications seek to rationalize and debunk claims of supernatural forces, UFO phenomena and pseudoscience, but in this study the processes which are cited as the origin of such claims are applied to Humanists themselves. ‘We can sometimes see the error or foolishness in other people’s beliefs. It is very difficult to see the same in our own’ wrote one contributor to Free Inquiry’s sister magazine, Skeptical Inquirer (Alcock, 1995).

That some Humanists have succumbed to a religious faith appears on first examination to be a blatant contradiction. However when we learn from Wolpert that ‘many scientists are deeply religious’ this apparent inconsistency is resolved. He reports that around fifty percent of scientists are religious (1992: xiii, 150). Since both religion and science are the product of sublimation, individuals who sublimate their sexual drives are more likely to enter into these activities, including several at once.

Dawkins wrote of religious faith that ‘it is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that [it] seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness’ (1989: 330). Wolpert adds that ‘the capacity for self-delusion, even among scientists, should never be underestimated: conviction can have profound effects on observation’ (Wolpert: 1992: 141). Both Dawkins and Wolpert are noted Humanists. In addition to the examples quoted by Wolpert, in the 18th century there was a school of philosophers, which included Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who maintained that chimpanzees and other anthropoid apes were man (Baker, 1974: 22-23). A more contemporary example might be the events which have followed the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Baigent & Leigh, 1991). Humans have an enormous capacity for false perception and denial.

The postulate to be presented here is that the Holocaust, the putative extermination of six million Jews during WWII, satisfies the criteria of the contagion, the heuristic and the commonplace. Details of these and the phantom and granfalloon phenomena were collected and summarized by A. R. Pratkanis, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of California (1995). It is argued that Holocaust imagery and its associated philosophy displays religious characteristics, and this thesis may illustrate how a religion can evolve. Readers who balk at this 20th century heresy are reminded that it is perilously easy to distort history and if this scenario cannot be reviewed impartially then something is clearly amiss. In the most cogent and scholarly treatment of this topic to date Dr. A. R. Butz (1977) gave the Donation of Constantine as an example of a hoax which took many centuries to debunk. The truth can only be arrived upon when both sides of an argument are considered; we might even regard intolerance of opposing views as conclusive proof of perversion. Wolpert further remarked that ‘One should be suspicious of ideas... which have been so easily incorporated into our everyday thinking’ (1992: 135). ‘Man, it has been said, is not “a veridical animal,” but his habit of lying is not nearly so extraordinary as his amazing readiness to believe’ (Ponsonby, 1991: 13).

The distinction must firstly be made between the common perception of the Holocaust, orthodox historical opinion and the view of the Revisionist heretics. A direct correspondence exists between this demarcation and that of the laity, clergy and the infidels of medieval Christian culture (Harper-Bill, 1988: 149). The laity was the people of simple faith who believed what they were told by the clergy, while the higher clerics at least attended Theological Colleges and considered difficult themes like transubstantiation and the various contradictions in the divine text. Unbelievers were isolated, if not actively persecuted.

The ‘orthodox’ historical opinion taken is that of Keegan and Messenger, both Sandhurst military historians. Their view is that mass exterminations only took place on Polish territory (Keegan, 1989: 286-288; Messenger, 1989: 97). Specifically, neither Dachau nor Buchenwald were extermination camps. Kurtz (1994) provides a typical example of how erroneous convictions can be founded and maintained: ‘With me remain painful memories of the horrible Holocaust’ he wrote, ‘we arrived at Dachau and Buchenwald just after their liberation.’ Kurtz is one of many individuals who still believe that the large numbers of casualties found in concentration camps at that time were victims of a Holocaust. ‘We are all even more prone to error when rare or emotionally laden events are involved’ proposed Alcock (1995): ‘Experiences accompanied by strong emotion may leave an unshakable belief in whatever explanation appealed to the individual at the time.’ Mainstream historians now accept that, despite what was concluded at Nuremberg, no mass execution gas chambers existed in the German camps and that the inmates in them died from other causes, mainly starvation and typhus.

According to the International Committee of the Red Cross,¹ ‘in the chaotic condition of Germany after the invasion during the final months of the war, the camps received no food supplies at all and starvation claimed an increasing number of victims’ (ICRC, 1948: 83). The Allies, despite protests from the ICRC, had continually bombarded the supply lines to the camps, exacerbating the already severe conditions prevailing near the end of the war. In this regard the ICRC had protested as early as 15 March 1944 about ‘the barbarous aerial warfare’ (ICRC, 1947: 78). Many tens of thousands of camp internees died, especially in the winter and spring of 1945, during the unimaginable turmoil of the closing stages of the war. Epidemics of typhus in the camps were common.² ‘In times of crisis – war, stock frenzy, pestilence, riot... a society will have indefinite fears, hopes, and anxieties, but its contact with reality will be quite tenuous’ suggests Paulos (1995).

The essence of the contagion is that if one vivid report is received, any superficially similar phenomena will be attributed to the same cause. Besides the occasion when the Devil’s footprints were purportedly seen in the snow and ice of Devonshire in February 1855, a more recent instance occurred in Holland in 1978 when 100 sightings of an escaped panda were reported even though the animal had been killed within a few yards of the zoo from which it had escaped (Nickell, 1996). In the first case sightings of unusual footprints were attributed to the Devil and in the second, many equivocal glimpses of animals were thought to be the panda. The human capacity for dual interpretation is a likely origin of the contagion phenomenon.

In the Holocaust, many sinister features may be duplicate and assumed. For example, any large hospital has a crematorium but the installations in the concentration camps have been imbued with deep significance. Auschwitz, the largest camp by far, had a typical population of 70,000³ and so the absence of such a facility would have been unusual. A similar situation may exist with the gas used to fumigate clothes and buildings in attempts to control the lice which were the vector of typhus.

In 1988 the American engineer Fred Leuchter visited the Auschwitz, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek camps to take samples of the residues of Zyklon B (hydrocyanic acid) which would inevitably remain if the supposed gas chambers had really been used as such. They were the first forensic tests ever undertaken of the putative gas chambers. Leuchter is a consultant who has been hired by the American Prison Service to advise on the construction of their gas chambers. Residues of cyanide in Delousing Facility No. 1 at Birkenau, which was the control sample, were 1000 times higher than in samples taken from the communal shower areas which are supposed to have served as gas chambers for mass killing. Residues in the latter were consistent with a single fumigation cycle having been performed. Leuchter (1989) concluded:

After reviewing all of the material and inspecting all of the sites at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek, your author finds the evidence is overwhelming. There were no execution gas chambers at any of these locations. It is the best engineering opinion of this author that the alleged gas chambers at the inspected sites could not then have been, or now, be utilized or seriously considered to function as execution gas chambers.

Subsequent reports by the chemist Germar Rudolf (Kammerer & Solms, 1993) and the President of the Austrian Chamber of Engineers Walter Lüftl have agreed with Leuchter’s conclusions with regard to Auschwitz.

As Verall relates in Did Six Million Really Die?,⁴ despite inspections by the International Committee of the Red Cross of numerous concentration camps, throughout the 1,600 pages of their Report of the IRCC on its Activities during the Second World War not a single mention is made of any gas chamber. Butz, Verall and Rassinier have all argued that there were not even six million Jews in occupied Europe at the time and have expended considerable effort demonstrating demographically that large numbers of survivors remained.⁵ Rassinier (1978), an inmate in several camps, has given a credible account of what life in them was really like as well as debunking the first wave of fanciful elaborations by inmates who were in the same camps as he. Only a proportion of the prisoners were Jews and the camps were largely administered by the inmates themselves. Both the British and American governments employed concentration camps during WWII to incarcerate potentially subversive elements (Ponting, 1990: 151-152). The mortality rate in Japanese POW camps was almost seven times that in the German POW camps (Johnson, 1983: 428).

In his pre-war persecution of the kulaks (‘rich peasants’) Stalin transported huge numbers of his own countrymen to camps and around a quarter are said to have died even before their arrival. Literally, kulak means ‘tight fist’ although the grip may have been an oppressive or a protective one: its original, pre-Bolshevik definition was ambiguous (Smith, 1989: 123). Just as the charge of ‘Nazi’ or ‘fascist’ is nowadays likely to be made against anyone who expresses certain opinions, in Stalin’s regime of terror the meaning of kulak progressively became ‘anyone who refuses to sell their grain to the state’ and ultimately ‘anyone who doesn’t toe the party line.’ The same capacity for dual interpretation upon which the contagion relies can also be used to change the meaning of words to further political goals (Wat, 1990: 357-358). Reitlinger (1953: 3) concedes of the term ‘Final Solution’ that ‘previously the expression had been used quite loosely in varying contexts, the underlying suggestion always being emigration.’⁶

Historical truth is not exempt from scientific standards (Hyman, 1995). Both history and science must be amenable to change as new information becomes available whereas ‘theology is not open-ended’ (Cohn-Sherbok, 1989: 73); it starts with the immutable assumption that God exists. However disconcerting this thesis may be to some (and objections having an emotional origin must be treated with suspicion), given the premise that a characteristic of certain races is a tenuous grasp on reality⁷ this postulate appears to be a consistent one. Jews might create religious concepts as other cultures produce popular music and if so then every now and again there is bound to be a hit. Rabbi Jacobs (1964: 211) posed an interesting conjecture:

If we suppose, for instance, that a group of devout believers wished to retell the story of Dunkirk in terms of God’s miraculous acts through which He saved mankind from the horrors of Hitlerism, naturally they would not treat the events as would the factual historian. They would highlight certain events, they might sing special hymns of praise to the heroic little boats which snatched the soldiers out of the jaws of death and captivity. They might perhaps exaggerate the numbers of these or, conversely, they might describe the might of the foe in terms unwarranted by the evidence. If we then imagine that the resulting saga was added to from time to time and that later events in which the devout saw God’s hand were somehow fitted into the picture, we have some idea of how a record can be at one and the same time grounded in actual events and yet partake of the nature of a fictitious narrative.

The new term is Holocaustianity⁸ and perhaps a quintessential example of what Jacobs describes is the following (Justman, 1995: 73):

The story is told that after his escape from the Warsaw ghetto a famous rabbi was invited to see Winston Churchill and advise him on how to bring about Germany’s defeat. The rabbi (the story goes) replied as follows: ‘There are two possible ways, one involving natural means, the other supernatural. The natural means would be if a million angels with flaming swords were to descend on Germany and destroy it. The supernatural would be if a million Englishmen parachuted down on Germany and destroyed it.’ Churchill, being a realist, chose the natural method, angels with flaming swords.

Hilberg (1961: v) claims that the German bureaucracy determined ‘to destroy, utterly and completely, the Jews of Europe.’ According to one Holocaust theologian, Fackenheim, ‘It is a sacred duty to remember the Holocaust. The intention of the Nazis was to eliminate all Jews – no survivor was to be left to tell the story of the horrors which took place’ (Cohn-Sherbok, 1989: 46). Yet a search of a psychological database will yield scores of references to ‘Holocaust survivors’ and living ‘victims of the Holocaust.’ Use of the term genocide⁹ presents a similar semantic problem since clearly the Jewish race is not extinct, nor can it be claimed with veracity to have ever been remotely close to such a state. Nevertheless, claims of ‘the deliberate and systematic near-annihilation of the Jews’ (Rich, 1987) are accepted without question. Here, it is proposed, we need to examine our capacity to tolerate such misuse of words and contradictory definitions.

There is an almost complete absence of criticism of Holocaust claims in the literature yet confirmation of the present thesis can still be found. Its basic emotionality is discussed by Lisus and Ericson (1995) and McCarroll et al. (1995). The phenomenon of the ‘professional Holocaust witness’ is uncritically documented by Bar-Tur and Levy-Schiff (1994); survivors ‘fared better in their subsequent lives than has been indicated by much of the psychoanalytic and psychological literature’ (Lee, 1988) and even ‘went to lengths to create memories to victims’ (Zweig, 1987). This subject may have been dominated by ‘professional witnesses’ since the first post-war trials (Halow, 1993).¹⁰

A heuristic is an if... then rule which follows non-rigorous logic (Pratkanis, 1995). A common heuristic is the assumption that an expensive item is superior to one which costs less. The conclusion which follows the premise may generally be true, but then important exceptions occur. For example, the price of tobacco, alcoholic drinks or perfume bears little relation to its actual cost of production.

Another heuristic is ‘There’s no smoke without fire.’ The Christian creed (the Godhood of Christ, the Resurrection etc.) would hardly be accepted by a critical historian yet these beliefs have persisted for two millennia.

Of relevance here is the heuristic that something which is established at a trial must be true, because the rumours of a Holocaust which were circulating at the end of WWII were given substance at the Nuremberg Trials. However these were not formal trials as most people know them but a highly unusual series of Military Tribunals. The following extracts from the Charter of the International Military Tribunal, defining the terms under which it and the subsequent Nuremberg Military Tribunal were to operate, are sufficient to demonstrate that by no stretch of the imagination can they be considered a proper legal process:

Article 19. The Tribunal shall not be bound by technical rules of evidence. It shall adopt and apply to the greatest possible extent expeditious and non-technical procedure, and shall admit any evidence which it deems to have probative value...

Article 21. The Tribunal shall not require proof of facts of common knowledge but shall take judicial notice thereof...

The Tribunals discarded virtually all inhibitions as far as proper legal procedures were concerned, and can accurately be described as a travesty. Although there was sanctimonious talk of having ‘a fair trial,’ practically anyone could take the witness stand and say almost anything they liked. ‘It is the experience of criminology that witness testimony is not among the best of evidence’ opined the judge in the 1963 trial of R. K. L. Mulka (Butz, 1977: 187). Even defendants’ confessions cannot be relied upon; they may be coerced under physical or psychological torture and can be reliably induced even in unwitting subjects (Kassin & Kiechel, 1996). The legal basis of these trials is well summarized by Veale (1968: 213).

An example shall be given which typifies the attitude and procedures of these post-war Tribunals. At the IMT one defendant, Gustav Krupp, was the elder of a family which ran Fried. Krupp A.G., a large corporation concerned with naval shipbuilding, armament supply and mining. The elder Krupp was charged, amongst other things, with using slave labour. When it became clear that Gustav Krupp was too old and sick to stand trial, the prosecution attempted to substitute his son Alfried in his place (IMT vol. I: 84; Butz, 1977: 21-22). This failed, and later at the NMT Alfried Krupp and another eleven leading company personnel were tried. Half-way through the 11-month trial, on 16 January 1948, the defence counsel walked out of the court in protest, although the prosecution of several defendants continued regardless. The defence staff were eventually marshalled and six leading defence counsel were themselves taken into custody for contempt of court. An account of this debacle is contained in NMT volume XV (996-1013).

Many of the documents which were submitted to these Tribunals are not reliable; originals were not produced in court and have not been retained (Porter, 1996: 5-7). Porter reports that the Nuremberg Trials found for the existence of execution ‘steam chambers’ at Auschwitz and Treblinka. At the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) Japanese defendants were convicted of making ‘human soup’ (1996: 14, 23). The only forensic report ever submitted to the Tribunals, USSR-54, ‘proved’ that the Germans were responsible for the Katyn massacre (Porter, 1998).

It may be that an existing heuristic can only be displaced when impressive events occur (or, at least, believed to have occurred). The consensus both before and after Darwin was that Occidentals are the most resourceful, inventive and scientific race of mankind and thus are best-equipped to check man’s primordial, destructive instincts. The Holocaust has changed that: ‘From this moment, fundamental assumptions about our civilization have no longer stood unchallenged’ (Hilberg, 1961: 760). The new heuristic, which often remains implicit, is that if Occidental males are allowed to follow their instincts then certain groups whom they regard as inferior will end up being herded into gas chambers. According to this creed, humans are capable of anything – the most proud race indulged in systematic mass murder on an unprecedented scale, and ‘Social Darwinism terminates in Hitler’s holocaust’ (Johnson, 1983: 731).¹¹

Irving (1996: 91-92) has recently reported the discovery of a missing document which shows that in the spring of 1942 Hitler had repeatedly ordered the solution of the Jewish problem ‘postponed until after the war was over’ and, as far as the mass extermination of Jews is concerned, admits Johnson, ‘Hitler never referred to it’ (1983: 418).

A reasonable and humane method of eugenic control would simply be to require that a licence be obtained for the production of a child. That such control is necessary is quite plain (Lynn, 1995).

In another study by this author¹² Malign Encouragement is encouraging an opponent to pursue an adverse strategy. One example of Malign Encouragement is a state financing the pacifist movement of a country with which it is at war. A consequence of the Holocaust ethos is that Jews are allowed to dominate the American film and broadcast media industries, which have world-wide influence, almost without criticism. Lichter et al. (1997) remark that ‘It has become an article of faith in Hollywood that the mass audience can be educated while it is entertained.’ Jews also appear to occupy many influential positions in the British media.

Television as a tool of emotional and psychological manipulation has a power which is unprecedented in human history. With its biased portrayals of white perpetrators and black victims (Estep & Macdonald, 1985; Sheehan, 1995) and ceaseless promotion of miscegenation, the mass media appears to be fostering an Occidental suicide cult. Science is no longer depicted as beneficial and capable of solving problems but actually detrimental (Evans, 1996). Hilberg however claims that ‘Jews seek to perfect their position in society by perfecting the society in which they live’ (1961: 763).

Jews collectively condemn racism but their ambivalence is profound (Shahak, 1994; 1995). With seemingly rare frankness Ariel (1996: 109) asks ‘How can we value equality, tolerance, and religious pluralism, on one hand, while believing that God favours the Jews and has reserved for us a special destiny, on the other hand?’ Judaism is essentially the theology of a people, i.e. a race, because ‘Israel, God, and the Torah are one’ (Ariel, 1996: 134; Einstein & Kukoff, 1989: 157). Consistent with this theme, in relation to the Holocaust we can read that ‘those who participated in this tragedy murdered the God of Israel six million times’ (Cohn-Sherbok, 1989: 47) and that ‘Six million Jews were not murdered. One Jew was murdered, six million times over’ (Gutman, 1990: 524).

According to Pratkanis (1995), ‘commonplaces are widely accepted beliefs that can serve as the basis of an appeal.’ The Holocaust can certainly be included in this category; for example, it is recognized among Jewish fund-raising organizations that the Holocaust is an efficient income promoter. Other examples of contemporary commonplaces are that if something is natural it is better, or that science neglects the psychic and spiritual side of man.

A phantom object is ‘an unavailable goal that looks real and possible; it looks as if it might be obtained with just the right effort, just the right belief, or just the right amount of money, but in reality it can’t be obtained’ (Pratkanis & Farquhar, 1992; Pratkanis, 1995). An out-of-stock consumer good, unobtainable love-object, the conditional arrival of a Messiah, a Heavenly afterlife or earthly Utopia are all examples of phantoms.

If the phantom is earthly and unattainable, the adherent of the phantom is insatiable and may constantly seek external scapegoats to blame for the non-appearance of his ideal. So precious is his grand objective that fact becomes secondary; emotions can become so charged that reason is lost amid a swell of passions.

Arguably, three essential components of a religion are hope, faith and the catharsis of guilt. Christianity has been in decline for several decades in Western society but humans still have a religious nature and the ideology of the Holocaust may have satisfied the need for something to believe in. Faith is vested in the utopia on Earth which is to arrive when the ideal of a multiracial, ‘rainbow’ society is achieved in which racism has been eradicated and everyone, regardless of their colour or creed, will live together in harmony. ‘Humanism today advocates the building of a world community and the development of a global ethics that transcends ethnic differences’ wrote Kurtz (1995), ‘those who oppose these ethical values are the enemies of humankind.’

The latter part of this statement further points to the existence of a granfalloon: ‘a proud and meaningless association of human beings’ (Vonnegut, 1976; Tajfel, 1981; Turner, 1987; Pratkanis, 1995). The granfalloon, like the phantom, can serve as an effective propaganda device. The ease and rapidity with which granfalloons can be established is surprising. Quoting Pratkanis (1995):

Granfalloons are powerful propaganda devices because they are easy to create and, once established, the granfalloon defines social reality and maintains social identities. Information is dependent on the granfalloon. Since most granfalloons quickly develop out-groups, criticisms can be attributed to those ‘evil ones’ outside the group, who are thus stifled. To maintain a desired social identity, such as that of a seeker or a New Age rebel, one must obey the dictates of the granfalloon and its leaders.

In a study of the granfalloon phenomenon by the social psychologist Henri Tajfel subjects were assigned to group X or group W merely by the toss of a coin. Then ‘total strangers were acting as if those in their granfalloon were their close kin and those in the other group were their worst enemies’ (Pratkanis, 1995).

The reaction which can follow criticism of Holocaust claims is similar to that which might have been provoked on questioning the existence of a Supreme Deity hundreds of years ago. Indeed Butz (1977: 188-189) and Kretschmer (1993) have compared the Nuremberg Tribunals to early witchcraft trials in which the existence of the Devil was never questioned and denial of it was completely impractical as a defence. The defendants at Nuremberg were placed in just as impossible a position. Quoting Ernest Jones (in Wolpert, 1992: 53), ‘The average man of today does not hesitate to reject the same evidence of witchcraft that was so convincing three centuries ago, though he usually knows no more about the true explanation than the latter did.’ Comparisons can be drawn between images of Jews being herded into the Nazis’ diabolical gas chambers and the Devil shovelling coals to torment the wicked in the fires of Hell. Imagery of this kind, presenting Germans (and especially Hitler) as personifications of evil, may be examples of what Smith (1995) describes as ‘continuations of religious assumptions from the past in different guise.’ In the modern incarnation of this theme however the victims are portrayed as completely innocent: ‘They died because of the sins of others’ (Cohn-Sherbok, 1989: 30). Similarities exist between the claimed Nazi extermination of six million Jews and a number of Talmudic accounts (Butz, 1977: 245-247; Yadin, 1971: 255-259). ‘The Holocaust was not a unique occurrence’ writes Cohn-Sherbok (1989, 79); ‘it was rather the most recent manifestation of the demonic outburst of evil.’ Some Holocaust features, such as the ‘human soap,’ are obvious echoes of First World War propaganda.¹³

Besides vilification, opponents of the Revisionist view have employed unscrupulous methods and sometimes even the tactics of the mob. Johnson (1983: 708) surmised that ‘Utopianism is never far from gangsterism.’ Such attitudes are justified because ‘the Holocaust must continue to be resisted in contemporary society’ (Cohn-Sherbok, 1989: 49) and there are frequent allusions to ‘the struggle against antisemitism and racism’ (Gutman, 1990: 524). Information is strictly controlled, with almost complete suppression of any data which casts doubt upon the orthodoxy which has successfully been established.¹⁴

According to Hoffman¹⁵ Holocaustianity seeks to ‘replace Calvary with Auschwitz as the central ontological event of Western Civilization.’ A rational argument exists that the contemporary, exaggerated perception of the Holocaust has developed from wartime propaganda to an ethos which numerous factions find highly advantageous to sustain. These groups are so multifarious that it is easier to specify the single group to whose advantage it is not: decent, white, heterosexual males. Certain perceptions are tabooed because Occidental male awareness and his ability to discriminate exposes strategies which the executors of conflicting strategies wish to disguise. They seek to control information and the modern capacity to do so via the mass media is unprecedented.

By extending the boundaries of anathema and suppressing open discussion about the disparate traits of races a new religion has effectively been instituted. We are certainly dealing with religious ideas because not just words but also numbers have assumed values and interpretations which are deeply symbolic; they have become ‘theological concepts’ (Cohn-Sherbok, 1989: 33).

Holocaustianity is inferior to Christianity because it has a dishonest catechism (it claims that black equals white) and it inadequately discharges guilt. Reitlinger, for example, believes that ‘it does not make the guilt of the living German any less, if the figure of six million turns out to be an over-estimate’ (1953: 489). Guilt is placed onto men, with their supreme and unforgivable sin being the Holocaust. Occidental males are incapacitated by false guilt and self-doubt; every race is encouraged to be proud of its culture except Europids and one can talk about thoroughbred dogs but never humans. The product is a society which discriminates in every subtle and significant way against the very people who are most valuable to it.

Former labour camps and ‘museums’ now serve as shrines and virtual churches (see Lisus & Ericson, 1995). This postulate of the essentially religious nature of the Holocaust also accounts for the uncritical acceptance of the incredible cremation rates which were supposed to have been attained in the Germans camps; according to some claims the Nazis killed every Jew in the world several times over.¹⁶ ‘We can switch this critical thinking unit on or off’ proposed Alcock (1995), ‘we may switch it off entirely if dealing with religious or other transcendental matters.’ Forged atrocity photographs can be found in any sizeable public library.¹⁷ These ‘photographs’ (many are merely reproductions of drawings) originated from the Soviet Bloc during the Cold War (see also Barron, 1990).

Despite historians’ awareness that no gas chambers existed in the German camps, guilt-laden homages are still made to them and overtly religious testimonies are made of how ‘the birds stopped singing’ or ‘the flowers refused to grow.’ There are a number of accounts of showers, and a building at Auschwitz, being modified for demonstration purposes immediately after the war.¹⁸ Undoubtedly many atrocities occurred during WWII but the scenarios presented by Reitlinger, Hilberg et al. simply cannot withstand critical examination. Their claims are fantastic and their sources are very frequently unreliable.¹⁹

The paramount goal of civilization must be truth, freed of religious or political dogma, because progress can only be based upon it. Sir Stanley Unwin (1960: 328) wrote:

The enemy of subversive thought is not suppression, but publication: truth has no need to fear the light of day; fallacies wither under it. The unpopular views of today are the commonplaces of tomorrow, and in any case the wise man wants to hear both sides of every question.

The perception which is obtained when unpopular views are suppressed is at best a distortion and at worst a delusion.