Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time (33 page)

Donahue:
David, you are familiar, and know, and have traveled with Ernst Ziindel. Is that so?

Cole:
No, I have not traveled with Ernst Ziindel.

Donahue:
Did you meet him in Poland?

Cole:
I met him in Poland. I met him twice in my entire life.

Donahue:
All right, what did you do, have a beer? I mean, what's travel mean? [Audience laughter.] You met him in Poland. He is a neo-Nazi. You don't deny that?

Cole:
No, I'm sorry Phil. This is not about who I've met in my life. I just met you. Does that mean I'm Mario Thomas? [Loud audience laughter.] This is about physical evidence. This is about Zyklon-B residue. This is about windows in a gas chamber . . .

Donahue:
Were you bar mitzvahed David?

Cole:
I'm an atheist. I made that clear to your production staff.

This meaningless chatter went on for several more minutes until a commercial break. The producer, page, make-up artist, and microphone technician now escorted me into the studio. My entrance had the look and feel of a prizefighter going into the ring. The producer told me to stay away from the technical matters and stick to analyzing their methods. In the days prior to the show, he had interviewed me extensively and I had told him everything I would say. There should have been no surprises.

I launched into my presentation, knowing that I only had a few minutes. After summarizing the methods of deniers, I began to move into their specific claims. Now was the time to put up on the screen the photographs and blueprints of gas chambers and crematoria and the short quotes about "elimination" and "extermination" of Jews that I had provided. Instead, Donahue showed film footage from Dachau, now known
not
to have been an extermination camp. Unfortunately, no one had told Donahue where the footage was taken or anything else about it. Cole promptly nailed him.

Cole:
I'd like to ask Dr. Shermer a question. They just showed the Dachau gas chamber in that footage. Is that gas chamber ever claimed to have killed people?

Shermer:
No. And in fact, the important point here . . .

Donahue:
There is a sign at Dachau notifying tourists of that fact.

Cole:
That it was not used to kill people. So why did you just show it in the clip?

Donahue:
I'm not at all sure that was Dachau.

Cole:
Oh, that was Dachau. Now wait a minute. You're not sure that was Dachau?
You
show a clip on
your
show and you're not sure it was Dachau?

I jumped in to try to redirect the discussion back to the point: "History is knowledge and like all knowledge it progresses and changes. We continually refine our certainty about claims. . . . And that's what historical revisionism is all about." Meanwhile, David Cole left the studio, disgusted that he had not been allowed to make his points. Donahue said, "Let him walk!"

Thinking that I had done fairly well in analyzing the methodologies of the deniers, I was comfortably awaiting the next segment when the producer came running over to me. "Shermer, what are you doing?
What are you doing?
You need to be more aggressive. My boss is furious. Come on!" I was shocked. Apparently either Donahue thought the Holocaust deniers could be refuted in a matter of minutes or he was hoping I would just call them antisemites as he did and be done with it. It was suddenly obvious that Donahue was not privy to the briefing I had given the producer. As I anxiously tried to think of new things to say, the studio audience and callers started asking questions, resulting in talk-show chaos.

One caller wanted to know why Smith was doing this to the Jews. The ensuing exchange demonstrated the problem of having a host and guests who are not prepared to deal with the specific claims and tactics of the deniers.

Smith:
One of the problems here is we have a feeling that if we talk about this issue nobody is involved but Jews. Germans are involved. For instance, if we tell, there is something vulgar about lying about Germans and thinking that it's proper. For example, it was a lie that Germans cooked Jews to make soap from them. It was a lie . . .

Shermer:
No, not a lie. It's a mistake . ..

Judith Berg
[from the front row]: It was true. They made lampshades and they cooked soap. That's true.

Smith:
Ask the professor.

Shermer:
Excuse me, historians make mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes. We're always refining our knowledge, and some of these things come down and they don't turn out to be true. But let me tell you what I think is going on here . . .

Smith:
Ask why they're doing that to this woman. Why have they taught this woman to believe that the Germans cooked and skinned .. .

Berg
[jumps out of seat, screaming]: I was seven months in Auschwitz. I lived near the crematorium as far as I am from you. I smelled.... You would never eat roast chicken if you had been there. Because I smelled .. .

Smith:
Let's get to the bottom of one thing. She says soap and lampshades. The professor says you're mistaken.

Berg:
Even the Germans admit it. They admit it that they had lampshades ...

Donahue
[to Smith]: Do you have any empathy at all?. . . Are you concerned about the pain that you cause this woman?

Smith:
Sure, but why should we ignore the Germans who are accused of this despicable story?

Berg
[in an emotion-filled voice, pointing finger at Smith]: I was seven months there. If you are blind someone else can see it. I was seven months there . ..

Smith:
What does that have to do with soap? No soap, no lampshades. The professor says you're wrong, that's all.

Berg:
He wasn't there. The people there told me not to use that [soap] because it could be your mother.

Smith:
A doctor of history, Occidental College. He says you're mistaken.

Because Mrs. Berg had told me that she had seen Nazis burning large numbers of bodies in an open field, I began to explain: "They burnt bodies in mass graves ..." but I was cut off when Donahue broke for a commercial.

Before the show, I had told both Mrs. Berg and Mrs. Glueck not to exaggerate or embellish anything, to just tell the audience exactly what they remembered. Most survivors know little about the Holocaust outside of what happened to them half a century ago, and deniers are good at tripping them up when they get dates wrong or, worse, claim they saw someone or something they could not have seen. By turning her actual experience of seeing burning bodies into evidence for human soap, Mrs. Berg provided a perfect setup, and Smith capitalized on it. He not only avoided the issue of burning bodies and undermined the credibility of what Mrs. Berg
did
see but also managed to make it look as if I and other Holocaust historians were on his side. Donahue, having exhausted his knowledge of the Holocaust, returned to the free-speech issues and, once again, antisemitism and
ad hominem
attacks on Smith's character and credentials. During each of the subsequent segments, the producer stood on the sidelines pointing at me and mouthing, "Say something! Say something!"

Because of the chaos during the commercials and stimulation overload during the show, it was difficult for me to know how the program was perceived by viewers. I thought that it was a total disaster and the deniers had bested me, that I had made a fool of myself in front of my colleagues and let down the historical profession. Apparently, that was not the case. I have received hundreds of calls and letters from historians and the general public telling me that the deniers looked like cold-hearted buffoons and that I was the only one who kept his cool throughout the mayhem of the program.

I have also received letters and calls that focus on another issue. One Holocaust scholar was furious with me for accepting an invitation to "debate" the deniers (if you can call what happens on a talk show a debate). Had it not been for me, she argued mistakenly, there would have been no show. In a private correspondence, she told me that she was "amazed" that I "would be naive enough to allow yourself to be drawn into making them the other side." How one should respond to claims one finds repugnant is a personal matter. But we should consider the ramifications of not responding. For example, when I speak with Holocaust scholars, they occasionally will say something like "Off the record, I do not place much validity in survivors' testimony because their memories are faulty" or "Off the record, the deniers have identified some things that need further research." In my opinion, trying to keep these things off the record is going to backfire on historians. The deniers already know these things and are publicizing them. Do we want the public to think that we are covering up "problems" with the Holocaust story or that we have somehow missed these things? At every lecture I have ever given on Holocaust denial, when I state that the human soap story is generally a myth, audiences are shocked. No one but Holocaust historians and Holocaust deniers seems to know that the mass production of soap from Jews is a myth. (According to Berenbaum [1994] and Hilberg [1994], no bar of soap has ever tested positive for human fat.) Do we want the Bradley Smiths and the David Coles of the world explaining such things to the public? By keeping silent on such important issues, our inaction may come back to haunt us.

Of course, Holocaust historians are reluctant to speak out on such important issues because Holocaust deniers use such statements ruthlessly against the Holocaust. Consider the case of Elizabeth Loftus. In 1991, world-renowned memory expert and University of Washington psychology professor Elizabeth Loftus published her autobiographical work,
Witness for the Defense.
Loftus is well known for the stand she has taken against the abuse of "memory recovery" therapies. Through her research, she has shown that memory is not as reliable as we would like to think.

As new bits and pieces of information are added into long-term memory, the old memories are removed, replaced, crumpled up, or shoved into corners. Memories don't just fade .. . they also grow. What fades is the initial perception, the actual experience of the events. But every time we recall an event, we must reconstruct the memory, and with each recollection the memory may be changed—colored by succeeding events, other people's recollections or suggestions. . .. Truth and reality, when seen through the filter of our memories, are not objective facts but subjective, interpretative realities. (Loftus and Ketcham 1991, p. 20)

In 1987, Loftus was asked to testify for the defense of John Demjanjuk, the Ukrainian-born Cleveland autoworker who was tried in Israel for allegedly helping to kill hundreds of thousands of Jews at Treblinka, where he was said to have been known as "Ivan the Terrible." The problem was in proving that Demjanjuk was Ivan. One witness, Abraham Goldfarb, first stated that Ivan was killed in a 1943 uprising but later identified Demjanjuk as Ivan. Another witness, Eugen Turowski, who initially had no recognition of Demjanjuk, announced after Goldfarb's testimony that Demjanjuk was Ivan. All five witnesses who positively identified Demjanjuk lived in Israel and had attended a commemoration of the Treblinka uprising in Tel Aviv. But twenty-three other Treblinka survivors did not make a positive identification.

Loftus was caught in a dilemma: "'If I take the case,' I explained, having talked this out with myself hundreds of times, 'I would turn my back on my Jewish heritage. If I don't take the case, I would turn my back on everything I've worked for in the last fifteen years. To be true to my work, I must judge the case as I have judged every case before it. If there are problems with the eyewitness identifications I must testify. It's the consistent thing to do'" (p. 232). Loftus then asked a close Jewish friend for advice. The answer was clear: '"Beth, please. Tell me you said no. Tell me you will not take this case.'" Loftus explained that there was a possibility of mistaken identity based on old and faulty memories. '"How could you?'" was the friend's reaction. "'Ilene, please try to understand. This is my work. I have to look beyond the emotions, to the issues here. I can't just automatically assume he's guilty.'" In the ultimate choice between loyally to one's people and loyalty to the search for truth, Loftus's friend made it clear which she should choose. "I knew that in her heart she believed I had betrayed her. Worse than that, much worse, I had betrayed my people, my heritage, my race. I had betrayed them all for thinking that there might be a possibility that John Demjanjuk was innocent" (p. 229).

John Demjanjuk was indeed found innocent by the Israeli Supreme Court. Loftus went to Israel to watch the trial but chose not to testify. Her explanation reveals the human side of science: "As I looked around the audience filled with four generations of Jews ... it was as if these were my relatives, and I, too, had lost someone I loved in the Treblinka death camp. With those kinds of feelings inside me, I couldn't suddenly switch roles and become a professional, an expert. ... I couldn't do it. It was as simple and agonizing as that" (p. 237).

I have great respect for Loftus and her work, and considerable regard for the courage it took to make such an honest and soul-searching confession. But do you know how I heard about this story? From the deniers, who sent me a review of the book from their own journal, in which it was claimed that "Loftus is perhaps more culpable than the elderly persons who bore false witness against the defendant. For unlike the aging witnesses who were no longer able to distinguish truth from falsehood, and who had come to believe their own false testimony, Loftus knew better" (Cobden 1991, p. 249). I met Loftus at a conference and talked to her at length about how the deniers were using her work. She was shocked and had no idea this was happening. No wonder Holocaust historians are tempted to keep dilemmas under wraps.