Romanian Holocaust denial

RAFAEL MEDOFF

The Romanian government's statement that "there was no Holocaust inside Romanian borders between the years 1940-1945" is a shocking and blatant falsehood.

It is also the latest example of a new type of Holocaust-denial.

The fact is that more than 400,000 Jews from Romania were murdered during the Holocaust. Nearly half of them were machine-gunned to death by the German "Einsatzgruppen" squads, assisted by the Romanian army, in 1941. Many of the remainder were murdered in Romanian death camps.

But Romania is not alone in distorting the facts of the Holocaust.

The journalist Christopher Hitchens has adopted a line from Holocaust deniers, claiming it is "now undisputed" that "there were no gas chambers or extermination camps on German soil, in other words, at Belsen or Dachau or Buchenwald."

In a similar vein, Arab spokesmen routinely claim that the Palestinian Arabs played no role in the Holocaust. This assertion surfaced among the Israeli Arabs who recently visited Auschwitz. Yossi Klein Halevi, who took part in the visit, reported in The New Republic that as they entered the Auschwitz grounds, one of the Arab participants remarked: "Arabs had nothing to do with this."

Halevi writes that he thought, "What about ... the Mufti, the Palestinian leader who spent the war years as a Nazi propagandist in Berlin?"

The Mufti - Haj Amin el-Husseini, the undisputed religious and political leader of the Palestinian Arabs - also organized Arab sabotage squads that parachuted into the Mideast to attack Allied facilities. He also persuaded the Nazis to reject a prisoner exchange that would have freed 4,000 Jewish children, who were then shipped to Auschwitz.

The Mufti recruited Bosnian Muslims for an all-Muslim unit of the SS called the "Handschar" division; 38 of its officers were tried as war criminals.

Now contrast the Romanian and Arab denials with the actions of the leaders of Austria, Croatia and Poland.

Then-Chancellor Franz Vranitsky of Austria admitted before parliament in 1991 that the Austrians were not "Hitler's first victims," but rather willing participants in Nazism.

Then-president of Croatia, Franjo Tudjman, publicly apologized in 1994 for a book he had authored in which he whitewashed the Croatian role in the slaughter.

Polish President Aleksander Kwaeniewski last year publicly acknowledged that Polish citizens, not the German occupation forces, were primarily responsible for the massacre of 1,600 Jews in the Polish town of Jedwabne in July 1941.

Whether or not Romanian and Arab leaders acknowledge their roles in the Holocaust remains to be seen. However, their extreme distortions of Holocaust history are nothing less than a new version of Holocaust denial.

Rafael Medoff is director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies. Visit the Web page, www.WymanInstitute.org.

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