Scholar records the roots of
Marshfield Holocaust denier

By Andrea Waxman
of The Chronicle staff

History professor Jeff Kleiman knew about the Holocaust denial activities of a Marshfield woman for a number of years before he began to write about her.

He and she had had several exchanges in the letters to the editor section of a Marshfield newspaper and a “shouting match” in a public arena, Kleiman said in a recent telephone interview with The Chronicle.

But that was before he became a Holocaust scholar. A professor at the University of Wisconsin-Marshfield/Wood County, Kleiman did research in Poland and Germany as a Fulbright Scholar in 2002-03.

He visited Milwaukee last weekend as scholar in residence at Beth El Ner Tamid Synagogue, where he spoke about Jewish life in Poland and Holocaust denial.

“I always wanted to study the Holocaust but I lacked the courage,” he said. Initially, he worried, that as a Jew, he might not bring the objectivity that he thought was required of a professional historian and also that the foreign language expertise needed for that kind of research might be too difficult.

Kleiman, who has taught at UW-Marshfield for almost 20 years and who had met Holocaust survivors as a child growing up in Boston, was nevertheless drawn to the subject.

By 1997, he said, he had changed his focus from American urban history of the Progressive era and the politics of religion, culture and ethnicity to post-World War II Europe.

Particularly interested in exploring how the Europeans recovered from the war and how they, especially the Germans, came to terms with the mass murder, Kleiman read extensively and attended international conferences.

He began presenting papers at those conferences, he said, and “the upshot is I got very good responses and a lot of encouragement” from fellow scholars.

Realizing he had a perfect subject for research right there in Marshfield, Kleiman decided to start talking with a local Holocaust denier — who has been in previous Chronicle articles but whose name he does not want to use before he completes his research.

She is a German native, born in 1935, who was 10 when the war ended and 20 when she came to the U.S. He began interviewing her in 2000 “to answer my own curiosity and to begin to get an insight into what question Holocaust denial is the answer to,” Kleiman said.

He learned that “a quarter to a third of what she was telling me was based on what her father [a German army corporal] told her or on what his experiences were.”

Kleiman persuaded her to loan him her father’s wartime diaries, some 300 photos including a photo album the father had made for a sister who had come to the U.S. in the 1920s, and 36 photocopied letters from her father to his sister, written between 1946 and 1953. Kleiman later got her to turn these materials over to a German archivist for permanent safekeeping.

Kleiman suddenly possessed something of tremendous value to an historian, “a wonderful private archive,” and though not exactly like all Germans of her generation, she was “a very nice representative figure [who] spoke for many people who shared her views in silence,” he said.

Complicity of silence

This woman airs movies on public access cable channels, puts up displays and donates books to the public library, speaks and writes letters, among other activities, all purporting to prove that the Holocaust never happened.

Rather, she says, it was all part of a conspiracy on the part of powerful Jews to dominate the world. And Kleiman’s premise for his work, he said, is that she is important because she’s not unique.

“She’s out there; she’s visible; she’s articulate, but she’s not just one person. She’s part and parcel of something bigger.”

Kleiman said that this Marshfield Holocaust denier and others like her see Germany as a victim of Hitler, of the Russian invasion, and of the Allied bombing of her cities, among others.

And though he believes that Germany has done more to examine its past than has Japan, or the United States with regard to Native Americans and Vietnam, Kleiman said that the deniers are receiving external validation from a growing body of literature in Germany that questions such things as the morality of the Allies bombing German cities.

When asked why she was willing to speak with someone she knew was a Jewish professor who did not accept her version of reality, Kleiman said “my sense is that she shares because she believes that if I see [the events of wartime Germany] through her eyes, and her father’s eyes, I will see that she is right.”

The psychological mechanics of denial is another piece of this puzzle that Kleiman is examining. With the help of psychiatrists at the Marshfield Clinic, Kleiman has come to understand that denial is a two-fold process in which a painful reality is denied and an alternate reality is substituted. It’s like a mental illness, he said.

“With Holocaust denial, the alternate reality is the powerful Jewish conspiracy.” The deniers argue that the powerful Jews have fabricated the evidence of the Holocaust, Kleiman said.

Researching the Holocaust has given Kleiman the intellectual and emotional fulfillment he never felt when he was focusing on American history, he said.

But his greatest disappointment has been the complacency of his community, particularly the Christian religious community, in the face of this woman’s activities.

“There is no outrage expressed in the newspaper and the people who promote Holocaust denial take that silence as agreement with them.

There has never been any formal response from any of the churches and what has bothered me the most is the complicity of silence,” Kleiman said.

Kleiman, who said his research is about 80 percent complete, plans to publish his findings in a book titled “Between Father and Daughter: The Roots of Holocaust Denial.”