Holocaust denial

Holocaust denial, or Holocaust distortion, is the false belief that the Holocaust did not happen, or was not as bad as it was. Holocaust deniers make false claims like these:
 They say that Adolf Hitler and the Nazis never planned to kill all the Jews of Europe, and that the Nazis only wanted to deport them.
 They say that the gas chambers built in the Nazi death camps were not used for mass murder; or they say that the whole idea of a gas chamber is impossible, so there couldn't have been any.
 They say that way less than six million Jews were killed, and that only a few hundred thousand died (often saying 271k).
 They say that documents and other evidence from the war period are fake documents and were made up by the Allies after the war.
 They say that Jews support what the deniers call a "Holocaust myth" in order to get money or political support for Israel or for themselves.
There is very strong and clear evidence that all these claims by Holocaust deniers are false.

Background

Various groups and organisations use different definitions of what Holocaust denial is. One of these is the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.

A trend of Holocaust denial, some state-sponsored, is seen in other European countries, including Austria, Croatia, 



  Czechia, Hungary, 

  Germany, Italy and Poland. Robert Rozett, “Competitive Victimhood and Holocaust Distortion,” The Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, XVI (2022); “Distorting the Holocaust and Whitewashing History: Toward a Typology,” XIII: 1 (2019); Yehuda Bauer, “Creating a “Usable” Past: On Holocaust Denial and Distortion,” XIV: 2 (2022); and Jan Grabowski, “The Holocaust and Poland's 'History Policy'” X: 3 (2016).
 Joanna Beata Michlic, “The Politics of the Memorialisation of the Holocaust in Poland: Reflections on the Current Misuses of the History of Rescue,” Jewish Historical Studies—Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, LIII: 1 (2022); Piotr Forecki, Po Jedwabnem: Anatomia pamięci funkcjonalnej (Kraków, 2018); Jan Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne (Princeton, 2001).
 Piotr Forecki, “Domestic ‘Assassins of Memory’: Various Faces of Holocaust Revisionism in Contemporary Poland,” presentation at a symposium in honor of Professor Antony Polonsky called “The Holocaust in Eastern Europe: sources, memory, politics,” March 16, 2021, UCL, London.
  Antony Polonsky and Joanna Beata Michlic (eds.), The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland (Princeton, 2009) and Laurence Weinbaum, “Amnesia and Antisemitism in the ‘Second Jagiellonian Age,’” Anti-Judaism, Antisemitism, and Delegitimizing Israel, Robert Wistrich (ed.) (Lincoln, 2016).
 “Professors Engelking and Grabowski case: Victory in the Warsaw Court of Appeal,” International Jewish Lawyers, https://www.ijl.org/engelking-and-grabowski-case13. For the full judgement, see https://www.ijl.org/grabowski_engelking-full.
  In the book Decoding Antisemitism, co-author Hagen Troschke said that the common strategies of such denial consisted of:

 Making some Holocaust perpetrators look better than they were
 Reducing the Holocaust responsibility to a small group of perpetrators
 Doubting the scientifically proven death tollLitvak, Meir, and Esther Webman. 2009. From Empathy to Denial. Arab Responses to the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press.
 Blaming Jews for the Holocaust
 Equating the Holocaust with other crimes against humanity

Some scholars said that Holocaust denial had gone mainstream 

  amid the rise of nationalism across Europe, where Jews were sometimes equated with the disliked Soviet communists against whom the Holocaust was considered "a reaction". 

Some described the phenomenon with the concept mnemonic politics, where nationalist governments distorted the Holocaust by painting their ethnic majority as the victims rather than the Jews or Roma.Kónczal, Kornelia, and Moses, A. Dirk. 2022. “Patriotic Histories in Global Perspective.” Journal of Genocide Research 24 (2): 153–157. CrossRef Google Scholar Such denial is sometimes rooted in the conspiracy theory that the focus on Jews is an EU plot to suppress national identitySoroka, George, and Krawatzek, Félix. 2019. “Nationalism, Democracy, and Memory Laws.” Journal of Democracy 30 (2): 157–171. CrossRef Google Scholar and promote "cosmopolitanism" and "multiculturalism".Ray, Larry, and Kapralski, Sławomir. 2019. “Introduction to the Special Issue – Disputed Holocaust Memory in Poland.” Holocaust Studies 25 (3): 209–219. CrossRef Google Scholar

Definition

Holocaust denial includes denying that the Holocaust ever happened, and also any of the following acts:

 Intentional efforts to excuse or minimize the impact of the Holocaust or its principal elements, including collaborators and allies of Nazi Germany;
 Gross minimization of the number of the victims of the Holocaust in contradiction to reliable sources;
 Attempts to blame the Jews for causing their own genocide;
 Statements that cast the Holocaust as a positive historical event. Those statements are not Holocaust denial but are closely connected to it as a radical form of antisemitism. They may suggest that the Holocaust did not go far enough in accomplishing its goal of “the Final Solution of the Jewish Question”;
 Attempts to blur the responsibility for the establishment of concentration and death camps devised and operated by Nazi Germany by putting blame on other nations or ethnic groups.

For instance, someone acknowledging that the Holocaust happened while denying the Nazi use of poison gas in the death camps is also a Holocaust denier.

Denialist claims

Below is a summary of usual claims made by Holocaust deniers.

 Type  Rhetoric Common 
 They say the Nazis "did not use death camps or gas chambers to kill Jews".
 Holocaust deniers say the Nazi regime was "only trying to deport Jews, not to kill all of them". They say there was "no official Nazi policy to kill Jews", and that "no Nazi leader ever gave an order to kill all of the Jews".Mathis, Andrew E. Holocaust Denial, a Definition, The Holocaust History Project, July 2, 2004, Retrieved 6 March 2013
 History experts agree that the Nazis killed at least 6,000,000 Jews during the Holocaust.Mathis, Andrew E. Holocaust Denial, a definition , The Holocaust History Project, July 2, 2004, Retrieved 6 March 2013 Holocaust deniers say that far fewer Jews actually died. They also claim that many of these victims died of diseases, like typhus, instead of being murdered by the Nazis.Michael Shermer & Alex Grobman. Denying History: : who says the Holocaust never happened and why do they say it?, University of California Press, 2000, , p. 106
 They say that evidence about the Holocaust is fake.
 They say there are errors and differences in stories told by Holocaust survivors and so the stories cannot be believed. Other They say the allies treated enemy prisoners of war just as badly as the Nazis treated the Jews. 
 They say that after being taken prisoner, many Nazis gave confessions about having committed war crimes. Holocaust deniers say these people said things that were not true because they were tortured.
 They say that during World War II, "the Allies made up fake stories about the Holocaust to make Germans look evil"
 Jews and the Allies "spread these fake stories as part of a bigger plan" to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine
 Jews continue to spread these stories to get sympathy and to get support for the state of Israel.

Tactics
Just Asking Questions
Just Asking Questions (JAQ) is a pseudoskeptical tactic often employed by Holocaust deniers to promote lies about the Holocaust by phrasing them as questions.

Sealioning

As a similar concept to JAQ, sealioning refers to the act of repeating the same questions that have already been answered while faking ignorance and politeness. 

  It is also a common tactic among Holocaust deniers on online forums and social media. 









Doubting Holocaust uniqueness

Some well-educated antisemites are more skillful at promoting Holocaust denial. 



  They do not deny that the Holocaust happened, but they cast doubt on the Holocaust's nature, ignore the historical context leading up to the Holocaust, and abusively compare the Holocaust to other historical events. They do this to whitewash the Holocaust and dehumanize Holocaust victims so as to whitewash Nazi antisemitism and justify the mass murder of Jews. Such behavior is rejected by mainstream historians, including Emil Fackenheim, Yehuda Bauer, Deborah Lipstadt and Daniel Goldhagen.

Some of them also accuse Jews of "owning the Holocaust" or "extorting compensation from European governments", and rewrite the Holocaust's history to inflate Jewish collaboration with Nazi Germans so as to blame Jews for their own suffering. 

  These false claims are common on social media, especially Reddit. 





Rebuttal


Historians agree that the Holocaust happened and that Holocaust deniers use bad research, get things wrong, and sometimes make facts up to support their claims. Many things together prove that the Holocaust did happen:

 Type  Details Written documents Like laws, newspaper articles, speeches made by Nazi leaders, and confessions from Nazi prisoners of war. The Nazis kept careful records, and many of them still exist. Even during World War II, many Germans knew about the Holocaust, and some tried to help save Holocaust victims. Eyewitness testimony  From those who witnessed Nazi war crimes. That includes Holocaust survivors, like people who survived the Nazi concentration camps. There is specific testimony about the gas chambers from Jewish Sonderkommandos (concentration camp inmates who helped load bodies from the gas chambers to the crematoria because this gave them a chance to survive). It also includes the word of Nazi leaders, Nazi concentration camp guards, and Allied soldiers who discovered the camps. Camps Pieces of Nazi concentration camps, death camps, and work camps still exist. Other evidence Including population statistics.

Holocaust deniers

Holocaust deniers usually call themselves Holocaust revisionists to make themselves look good.Lipstadt, Deborah, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, Penguin, 1993, , p. 25 Their usual claim is that the Holocaust is "a hoax made up by Jewish people working together."Mathis, Andrew E. Holocaust Denial, a definition , The Holocaust History Project, July 2, 2004, Retrieved 6 March 2013Michael Shermer & Alex Grobman. Denying History: : who says the Holocaust never happened and why do they say it?, University of California Press, 2000, , p. 106 It is a crime to deny the Holocaust in Israel and in many European countries, especially in Germany. Some Holocaust deniers, like Ernst Zündel, have been charged with crimes.

Prominent Holocaust deniers

 Name  Birth  Death  Origin  Affiliations Ali Khamenei 




 April 19, 1939Mashhad, IranSupreme Leader of Iran David Irving 



 March 24, 1938Hutton, Essex, EnglandA "historian" who is an alumnus of the ICL and UCL Ernst Zündel"Holocaust denier in Germany sentenced to five years in prison – Europe – International Herald Tribune", The New York Times, February 15, 2007. Retrieved November 14, 2009April 24, 1939August 5, 2017A German graphic artist Hutton GibsonAugust 26, 1918May 11, 2020Peekskill, New York, United StatesOpus Dei member Jean-Marie Le Pen"Le Pen Convicted for Racial Hatred", Associated Press, June 2, 1999. Retrieved November 14, 2009.June 20, 1928January 7, 2025La Trinité-sur-Mer, Morbihan, FranceFounder of the National Front Louis Farrakhan 











 May 11, 1933The Bronx, New YorkLeader of Black nationalist religious movement Nation of Islam (NOI) Paul RassinierMarch 18, 1906July 28, 1967Bermont, FranceA French Resistance fighter who survived a Nazi concentration camp Pierre Guillaume 

  December 22, 1940July 11, 2023FranceAn anarcho-Marxist Richard Williamson 



 March 8, 1940January 29, 2025Buckinghamshire, England, United KingdomSociety of Saint Pius X Robert Faurisson 


 January 25, 1929October 21, 2018Shepperton, EnglandUniversity of Lyon professor of literature Roger Garaudy"Writer fined for Holocaust writings", BBC News, February 27, 1998. Retrieved November 15, 2009.July 17, 1913June 13, 2012Marseille, FranceA former French Communist Party member

Related pages
 International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance
 Holodomor denial
 Deborah Lipstadt

Footnotes

References

Category:Controversies
Category:The Holocaust
Category:Genocide denial
Category:Conspiracy theories
Category:Antisemitism in Europe