Auschwitz-Birkenau museum denies artist

The New York Times recently reported that a group of comic book legends — Neal Adams, Joe Kubert and Stan Lee – have teamed up to support Dina Gottliebova Babbitt’s claim to the artwork she painted which is currently held by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum. During the Holocaust, Babbitt and her mother were transported to the death camp where her skills caught the attention of Dr. Josef Mengele.

By February 1944, Mrs. Babbitt had come to the attention of Mengele, who was dissatisfied with the photographs he had taken of the Gypsy, or Romany, prisoners in his effort to prove their genetic inferiority. He asked Mrs. Babbitt to paint their portraits to capture their skin tones better. She agreed, but only after insisting that her mother be spared from death. (The story reproduces five of the portraits.)

After liberation, Babbitt moved to the United States where she worked as an animator for various film studios. Strangely, the museum released a statement seven years ago concerning the sketchy provenance of the paintings, which arrived with no offer to return them to their original owner.

Auschwitz museum officials, in a statement issued in 2001, indicated that they had bought six of Mrs. Babbitt’s watercolors in 1963 from an Auschwitz survivor and acquired a seventh in 1977. In 1973 the museum asked her to verify her work but did not offer to return the items. The museum has argued that the artwork is important evidence of the Nazi genocide and part of the cultural heritage of the world. (The museum did not respond to telephone calls and an e-mail message requesting comment.)

The museum has claimed that returning the paintings to her might encourage other survivors to ask for their property which would cause a decrease in the number of artifacts on display. Piotr Cywinski, the museum’s director, went one step further in defending their position by stating that Babbitt wasn’t the rightful owner, but rather they belonged to Mengele. Such a claim is inherently contrary to the way in which museum’s (of any type) function; provenance, ownership, and credit has become the rule-of-the-day, and when those principles are questioned, objects are returned to their rightful owners.

Even as lawyers and reconciliation groups fight to get “looted” art returned to its rightful pre-war owners (or their heirs), it seems strange that a memorial museum would wind up on the opposite end of such a fight. Furthermore, the museum’s assertions have been both ridiculous and reckless, especially considering that the purpose of such institutions is to promote education of genocide through the lens of personal history and remembrance.

The comic (pdf version): Comics for a Cause

UK honors disabled Holocaust victims

Even though Holocaust education often centers on the plight of the Jewish people, a greater number of museums have been memorializing the other victims in recent years. This past week, the Holocaust Centre in Nottinghamshire unveiled a memorial plaque, the first of its kind in the UK, to remember the disabled victims of the Holocaust.

Survivors, celebrities and disability groups were at the event, where a rose and plaque were dedicated to the memory of the Holocaust’s disabled victims.

Plans for a permanent sculpture were also revealed at the Holocaust Centre in Laxton, Nottinghamshire.

Artist Alison Lapper said it had been “an amazing day”.

Ms Lapper, who was the model for Marc Quinn’s statue that occupied Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth, added: “It is so important that these people have finally been put on the map.

“It has been an excellent day, I hope it has opened people’s hearts and minds.”

The centre’s Stephen Smith said there had been “little recognition” of the persecution the disabled suffered.

The prejudice that drove the Nazi’s hatred of the Jews was equally to blame for the policies against the handicapped.

Forced sterilization began in earnest in 1934, where an estimated three to four hundred thousand mentally ill patients were given vasectomies or tubal ligations. By 1939, Hitler had enacted “Operation T-4” which authorized a euthanasia program against the handicapped, resulting in the deaths of 200,000 – 250,000 people.

Denial is endemic

While Holocaust denial gets the lion’s share of press when it comes to the subject of “genocide revisionism,” it’s certainly not the only case. In fact, in recent years, as the United States has contemplated recognizing the Armenian genocide, the voices of angered Turks has been added to the cacophony of those who strive to paint history in a different light.

In fact, Gregory Stanton (the president of Genocide Watch) included Denial as the eighth, and final, stage of genocide in the briefing paper he presented to the U.S. State Department in 1996:

Denial is the eighth stage that always follows a genocide. It is among the surest indicators of further genocidal massacres. The perpetrators of genocide dig up the mass graves, burn the bodies, try to cover up the evidence and intimidate the witnesses. They deny that they committed any crimes, and often blame what happened on the victims. They block investigations of the crimes, and continue to govern until driven from power by force, when they flee into exile. There they remain with impunity, like Pol Pot or Idi Amin, unless they are captured and a tribunal is established to try them.

The best response to denial is punishment by an international tribunal or national courts. There the evidence can be heard, and the perpetrators punished. Tribunals like the Yugoslav, Rwanda, or Sierra Leone Tribunals, an international tribunal to try the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and ultimately the International Criminal Court must be created. They may not deter the worst genocidal killers. But with the political will to arrest and prosecute them, some mass murderers may be brought to justice.

While Stanton was primarily speaking about “active” cover-ups immediately preceding a genocide, its fascinating (and depressing) that such acts quickly move from action into mainstream discourse. Even when trials have taken place, evidence has been presented, and testimony has been gathered, the crime is still an on-going source of controversy years after the fact.

David Irving is no doubt one of the better known Holocaust deniers, but he’s only one example of the plethora of those who seek to diminish the crime through the guise of scholarly debate. As academics and researchers alike begin to dig deeper into the origins and events of other modern genocides (Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Darfur, et al.), a stream of fresh deniers are following along with their own versions of what happened in each of these cases.

For example, it was recently announced that one such group of deniers (called negationists by allAfrica) are heading to a conference later this month — The Media and Rwanda: The Difficult Search for the Truth. The event is being sponsored by Les Editions les Intouchables, who published a book by Canadian Politician Robin Philpot entitled Ça ne s’est pas passé comme ça à Kigali (“It did not happen like that in Kigali”). Based on the reported speakers, the sphere of discourse is going to be largely limited to those who are attempting to revise as they revisit what took place in Rwanda.

Even though Stanton did an excellent job of outlining the various stages of genocide, it seems like the eighth needs to be expanded beyond the immediate vicinity of the crime. As denial is constantly expanding with the pace of scholarship, and it often grows rather than diminishes over time, it seems apt to address the problem, particularly considering the rate at which the information age has accelerated the course of such specialized revisionism.

Holocaust surviving Congressman passes away

Tom Lantos, the only Holocaust Survivor ever to serve in Congress, passed away on Monday at the age of 80 from complications of cancer.

A champion of civil liberties, Lantos founded the Congressional Human Rights Caucus and supported human rights struggles against both right-wing and left-wing regimes in China, Russia, Myanmar, Darfur and wherever official pressure could, as he put it, “prevent another Holocaust.” He also was passionate about animal rights, working to stop seal hunts, dog killings in foreign countries, and horse slaughter, bear baiting and the operation of puppy mills at home.

He also used his post as chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee to highlight human rights violators. He argued that nations with bad records had no place on the U.N. Human Rights Commission, that Beijing should not be awarded the 2008 Olympics because of its human rights record, and that corporations had an obligation to protect individuals and press freedoms. When executives of Yahoo Inc. appeared before the committee last year to defend their role in the jailing of a journalist by Chinese officials, Lantos said, “While technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are Pygmies.”

The first legislation Lantos sponsored upon being elected in 1980 was to give honorary American citizenship to Raoul Wallenberg, the diplomat who saved thousands of Jews, including the Congressman and his aunt.

Numerical Holocaust Denial

Udo Voigt, the leader of the (Neo-Nazi) National Democratic Party, recently made a statement saying that he did not believe the number of Jews killed at the hands of Nazis was correct.

“Six million cannot be right. At most, 340,000 people could have died in Auschwitz,” he said in an interview with Iranian journalists.

“The Jews always say: ‘Even if one Jew died that is a crime.’ But of course it makes a difference whether one has to pay for six million people or for 340,000.”

I’m not certain if this is one of those facts that the media is simply getting wrong or if Voigt is speaking of the total numbers killed during the Holocaust and attributing all of them to Auschwitz. Current figures put the total number of Jewish prisoners who died in Auschwitz at 1 million, along with 75,000 Poles, 20,000 Gypsies, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and 10,000 members of other nationalities.†

The Holocaust Encyclopedia, ed. Walter Laqueur (Yale University Press, 2001), p. 44.