Corsair on page 129 asks why German academics and historians do exercise their freedom and lead the way in publishing articles that question the Holocaust. Quite right. I mean, its not as if anyone was going to lock them up.
Indeed, no, it's not like anyone was going to lock them up for most of the postwar era, and even today the current law on incitement to racial hatred (revised in the mid-90s) is softer on genuine scholarly research than it is on overt propaganda.
That law could not prevent the appearence of a properly researched work offering firm proof of what had actually happened to the Jews of Europe in Nazi hands, and demonstrating that of the 5-6 million assumed dead, there was hard evidence that 4-5 million had survived. But no such work will ever be written, because there is no such hard evidence.
The simple fact is that denial has never convinced more than a couple of academics in Germany, and those it has convinced, are now dead from natural causes. They were part of the same Flakhelfer generation that produced Helmut Kohl along with many other public figures of the second half of the existence of West Germany, like Guenther Grass or the historian Martin Broszat. Or indeed, Ernst Nolte, who flirted with some revisionist ideas before rejecting the fundamental arguments and who thus earned himself an irate attack from a younger Germar Rudolf, writing under one of his many pseudonyms.
Unfortunately for you, German revisionists have tended towards the neo-Nazi or psychotic, deny-everything end of the spectrum. This is undeniable. Walendy and Staeglich were NPD, Weckert was an associate of Michael Kuehnen, the brains behind the Kameradschaften. Christophersen ran his own little boutique nutzi party. Others belonged very much to the Nazi-era generation, like Heinz Roth, an admitted former SA member, or SS-Obersturmbannfuehrer Peter Kleist. Their pamphlets are so poorly organised, researched and written that I almost have a soft spot for them, so dreadful are they, and it's not difficult to see how unconvincing they would be to an academic in the 60s or 70s, never mind today.
These homegrown truthseekers successfully undermined any possibility of propagating revisionist ideas beyond the far right, by engaging in blatantly propagandistic activities that fell foul of public-order offences before the IHR was even active. When you have a guy like ex-Hitlerjugend division member Friedhelm Busse staging demonstrations about the Holocaust lie, then you have a serious PR problem. Or if your coterie decides that a really effective way to spread the word about revisionism is to drone on about Anne Frank's diary being a hoax, and thus to trigger private prosecutions for libel from Otto Frank until his death in the early 1980s, which were routinely lost by the deniers in question.
The homegrown truthseekers had an unerring knack of stepping up their revisionist propaganda offensives at precisely the same moments as neo-Nazis decided to resort to terrorism (late 70s/early 80s) or thuggish violence against immigrants and asylum-seekers (early 90s). Unsurprisingly, laws got tightened each time there were such outbreaks of neo-Nazi activity. The connection is undeniable, and explicitly so with the lex Deckert revision of article 130 in the mid-90s.
The funniest thing about the 'gosh academics are afraid of prosecution and afraid for their careers' line is how in this case, it panders to a racist stereotype of Germans as law-abiding Prussians which is obvious nonsense. No chilling effect could ever be 100% effective, and yet in this case, it seemingly is. That's truly remarkable.
It's also belied by the fact that academics in other countries aren't chasing the revisionist hare, either, no matter what laws are in place. You'd be hard pressed to scrape together the names of 40 professors or other academics who have flirted with revisionism since 1945. The nutters over in the 9/11 forum wave around a list of 400, and they're all crazy.
