The Holocaust Denial Movement...

A lovely blonde to lead the way...

London socialite Lady Renouf courts global attention as the attractive face of Holocaust denial. Who would guess she was once plain Michele Mainwaring, a beauty queen from the NSW central coast? Peter Wilson meets her.

At 22, Michele Mainwaring was a beauty queen from the NSW central coast whose titles included “Miss Zhivago” for being judged the local woman who looked most like Julie Christie in the biggest film then showing. By 42, she was a London socialite with a grand house and ballroom who called herself “Countess Griaznoff” and posed for family portraits with her Russian husband and two daughters in costumes that could have been designed for Omar Sharif’s film.

Now, at 62, she is known as Lady Renouf, from her short-lived second marriage, and on the wall of her apartment in upmarket Kensington, London, is a photo of her being kissed by Omar Sharif during the brief period they dated about a decade ago.

But it is not her glamorous social life that has recently made Miss Newcastle-Hunter Valley 1968 mildly famous in Britain, Germany and Australia. “This woman is especially dangerous,” says Dr Efraim Zuroff, the chief Nazi-hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem, “because she is so attractive and can put a pretty face on a very ugly movement.”

That movement is Holocaust denial, a decades-old attempt to play down the Nazi atrocities against Jews and other minorities.
After showing no interest in Jews or World War II until her 50s, Renouf now travels the world speaking at conferences, alongside former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke and other extremists, arguing that the Holocaust has been massively exaggerated and that in any case the Jews are to blame. The only prominent female denier, the girl from The Entrance, NSW, has met Iran’s Holocaust-denying president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and lauded him as a champion of free speech and democracy despite charges by human rights groups that his regime tortures dissidents and stifles free speech.

Some experts are worried that, as the last witnesses of the Holocaust die, the deniers could gain ground in the West by focusing their propaganda on students at university and high school. The deniers were bolstered last month by Pope Benedict’s acceptance back into the Catholic Church of ultra-conservative British bishop Richard Williamson, who claims that historical evidence is “hugely against six million having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler … I believe there were no gas chambers”. The political and public outcry across Europe at the pope’s decision - not least in his native country, Germany, where Holocaust denial is a crime - shows the depth of feeling that surrounds the issue.

Other Holocaust historians such as Zuroff say the deniers’ biggest impact is in the Arab world and among Muslims in countries such as Britain. “For political and religious reasons there is just a closed mindset [in the Arab world] and that is where people openly say the Holocaust never happened,” he says. “Or they invert it against Israel - that we are the new Nazis and the conflict right now is us committing a Holocaust against the Palestinians.”

With fears of rising anti-Semitism in Europe, and Israel under growing pressure over its conflict with the Palestinians, the denial movement is becoming more than “a loopy fringe group that can be ignored”, says Zuroff. “That is why this woman is just perfect for people like the Iranians … they have this blonde, pretty woman speaking in an English accent in Tehran [at a 2006 Holocaust denial conference] and on Iranian TV telling them they are right and the Jews are evil. This is a dangerous person.”