An unlikely media sensation, David Cole is a Jewish Holocaust denier who calls racists losers' but feels compelled to advance their agendas.
This past summer, television satellite dish owners in North America were treated to a new low in Holocaust denial: a videotaped report from Auschwitz claiming that the death camp had housed a sort of precursor to Club Med for Jews under Third Reich protection .
Broadcast by Showcase America, a Colorado-based public access company, the report filled a segment of the weekly program "The Voice of Freedom." Until the show was pulled early in September due to protests by the Los Angeles-based Wiesenthal Center, the program (together with a weekly short-wave broadcast) served as a regular stump for Ernst Zundel, 54, a German-born neo-Nazi and notorious Holocaust denier now living in Toronto. Accompanying Zundel on his unholy pilgrimage to Poland was David Cole, a 23-year-old Jew from Los Angeles, once a member of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, the Jewish Defense League and the World Jewish Congress.
Zundel described Cole as a "comrade in arms" who was helping his "struggle to free Jews and Germans from this monkey on their backs." Cole did so by finagling his way into the gas chambers, wearing a yarmulke, and then claiming that the chambers' door opens both ways and that the room lacked the tell-tale blue stains of Zyklon-B use. In addition, Cole and Zundel suggested on camera that the SS swimming pool was actually used for racing competitions by inmates and that the Nazis made no provision to fence off the railway unloading area to prevent prisoners from escaping.
Aaron Breitbart, a senior researcher at the Wiesenthal Center, observes that many of history's most notorious anti-Semites, including Stalin and several Nazi leaders (though not Hitler himself), had their own "house Jews." Since World War II, there have also been Jews, most of them anti-Zionist,
who have in some way assisted Holocaust deniers.
But according to Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the Center's associate director, Cole - with his first-ever broadcast by a Holocaust denier from within the gates of Auschwitz - may be unique.
"I can't think of any other Jew," he says, "who has gone so far in aiding and abetting enemies of the Jewish people."
Cole's efforts have made him into something of a media star. In January 1992, he was the subject of a segment on revisionism produced by the CBS tabloid TV show "48 Hours." Wired for sound, Cole wandered through a Holocaust-related rally at UCLA, provoking participants about their "Holocaust fantasies." He is also an oft-sought guest on radio and TV talk shows.
Cole arrived for an interview with The Jerusalem Report at a restaurant in the heavily Jewish Pico-Robertson neighborhood of Los Angeles unshaven and in jeans, T-shirt and a baseball cap. He was born in L.A. to Dr. Leon Cole, a University of Southern California researcher and physician who, his son says, spent his last years battling charges he had plied celebritie s, including Elvis Presley, with narcotics. Cole's mother divorced Leon Cole when David was 14 and married a sportswear manufacturer who had survived the London Blitz. Cole observes that his stepfather re mains scandalized by his activities. The stepfather declined to be interviewed.
Cole grew up in trendy West Los Angeles. His mother had little use for Judaism, he says, or, for that matter, most accepted norms of parenting. Left to his own devices, he developed a disregard for authority. His Jewish education, which he received at his stepfather's insistence, consisted of a single day at Sunday school at the local Temple Isaiah. "When the next weekend came around," he recalls, "I remember hiding under the table screaming. This stuff didn't speak to me."
Neither did high school. Although interested in English and theater, he never completed his studies. Indeed, Cole says that one of the attractions of Holocaust denial was its liberal entry requirements. "What fascinates me abou t revisionism," he said, "is that as a lay person, I've been able to learn, and become an active part in, the process of putting together this jigsaw puzzle. It didn't take a PhD, because we're not really talking about a discipline that you have to be in school 10 years to master. All it really does is try to discern fact from fiction. Any good mind - anybody's good mind, no matter what their background - can do that."
Cole sees no contradiction in advancing the agendas of racists, though he disparages them as "losers." Holocaust denial, he insists, is a purely intellectual exercise. There is no need, he believes, to drag in issues of personal responsibility or communal consequences.
"I would never want to live in a world run by Zundel," says Cole. "He's a very funny, very nice, very charming man. He is also a Nazi. But how am I helping National Socialism by writing about history the way I see it? People have an inalienable right to use information the way they want to. Most people use this (kind of information) because they want to make money." Cole says he has not made any significant money from his work.
Cole came to Holocaust denial through the back door. Fascinated by politics but too lazy ("nothing interferes with my sleep," he says of himself) to take a degree in political science or history, Cole undertook, instead, to join every political organization that would take him. "From 1987 onward," he recounted, "I was everywhere. I ran a chapter of the Revolutionary Communist Party. I ran a John Birch Society chapter. I had about five different names, and there was, literally, not a part of the American political spectrum I wasn't involved in. I was a supporter of, and subscriber to, the ADL and the JDL. I have a World Jewish Congress card. I worked for the Heritage Foundation on the right, and the ACLU on the left.
"My point in doing this," he says, "was that I felt superior to ideology and to the poor, brainwashed idiots who toil their lives away in pursuit of abstract concepts. I wanted to learn as much as I could about the subject, and to write a book about it."
When Cole starting receiving denial literature, relatives and friends suggested he ignore it. The naturally perverse Cole became intrigued as a result. He says he had been a "diehard believer" in every conventional Holocaust account he encountered. But then - this contention has become a staple of Holocaust denial - he decided he had been bamboozled. He was impressed with such classic revisionist arguments as the claim that Jews had never been made into soap and that the numbers for Auschwitz deaths were wildly inflated. He now says he believes the Holocaust never even happened.
In 1988, living on a trust fund set up by his parents to finance his education, Cole joined an atheists group in Los Angeles, where he met Institute for Historical Review co-founder (with Willis Carto) David McCalden. The IHR is the California-based denial organization that survivor Mel Mermelstein successfully sued over a reward it had offered to anyone who could offer proof of the Holocaust. Cole says he befriended McCalden in the hope he would be taken back to his secret Nazi lair, where he would expose him as a Hitler-loving racist.
There was no basement Valhalla. But there was a perverse symbiosis. McCalden took over his education. And Cole agreed to infiltrate meetings McCalden couldn't attend. McCalden recently died from AIDS, and Cole continued his odyssey with IHR Journal editor Mark Weber.
Cole hooked up with Zundel during the latter's legal travails, writing a letter to the Ontario attorney general on his behalf, and lecturing in Canada. The two agreed to meet in Poland, and after their Auschwitz interlude, Zundel introduced him to neo-Nazis in Germany and Austria. In a letter to The Jerusalem Report, Zundel acknowledged taking heat from his fellow anti-Semites for collaborating with Cole, and losing some contributor support as well.
"I do not detest Jews, just some," he wrote, "and I did not swallow the canary - I am simply impressed by young David Cole's absolute candor and incorruptible honesty to report what he finds."
Writing in an April issue of his newsletter, "Power: Zundelists vs. Zionists," Zundel declared that Cole "shows far more courage than all those Nazi-uniform fetishists who adorn themselves in the medals and uniforms of a bygone generation, while they booze themselves into a drunken stupor… I take the young Jew David Cole any time over the beer-guzzling cowards and snivelers and critics of my action."
Cole attests that their association is not unique. He claims he has met a number of Jews, in and out of academe, who suspect they have been sold a bill of goods about the Holocaust. He will not divulge their names, he says, because Holocaust denial remains the domain of crank extremists and anti-Semites. "Only the extremists are involved," he said, "because who else wants the tsuris?"
But eventually, believes Cole, the revisionist outlook will win a place within the mainstream. When it does, he suggests, many of these overburdened Jews will slither out of the closet. David Cole hopes that on that sunny day, he will be there to point the way.