  We develop a model for the infrared, optical and soft X-ray emission of the
Crab pulsar in terms of anisotropic synchrotron emission by relativistic
particles in an outer gap scenario with a single energy distribution. It is
shown that such a distribution is naturally produced in an efficient pair
cascade and that the energy of the primary particles are limited by synchrotron
radiation. It is further shown that this synchrotron model is able to reproduce
the spectral shape between the infrared and soft X-rays and also the
corresponding luminosities. In particular, the long standing problem of the
rapid spectral decline towards infrared frequencies is understandable as
emission at very small pitch angles from low energy particles. Finally, we show
that the scaling of our synchrotron model explains the observed correlation
between the X-ray luminosity and the spin-down luminosity of the neutron star.
