The German Lost Cause: Neo-Confederates, Holocaust Deniers, and the Transatlantic Far Right, 1980s–90s

Scholars have increasingly examined the parallels between the Confederate “Lost Cause” myth and the Nazis’ defeat in World War II, while journalists have brought our attention to the growing presence of Civil War iconography, including the Confederate flag, in German far-right circles. Moving beyond comparisons and parallels, my paper examines how the Confederate “Lost Cause” and the Nazi “Lost Cause” myths have mutually reinforced one another since the end of World War II. In particular, during the 1980s and 1990s, American neo-Confederates and German Holocaust deniers explicitly used the shared idea of a “Lost Cause” as the basis for transatlantic collaboration. My paper approaches this topic through the transatlantic networks of a prominent American neo-Confederate lawyer, Kirk Lyons, during the 1980s and 1990s. From his headquarters in Black Mountain, NC, Lyons became a major player in international Holocaust denier circles. During the trial of the notorious Toronto-based Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel, Lyons represented the American engineer Fred Leuchter, who testified that the gas chambers did not exist. Leveraging Zündel’s transnational ties, Lyons was then invited on lecture tours throughout Germany in the early 1990s, where he networked with German neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers. Lyons thus helped lay the foundation for the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, and White Aryan Resistance to seek closer collaboration with Germans in the 1990s. By 1995, Lyons had established such close ties to Germany that he became the lawyer for the German neo-Nazi Andreas Strassmeir, who had first come to the United States to participate in Civil War reenactments and was later involved in conspiracy theories about the Oklahoma City Bombing. Overall, the paper invites a conversation about not only the ideologies but also the social networks that have shaped the global far right.