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{{Short description|Denial of the genocide of Jews in World War II}} | |||
]'' by Richard Harwood (also known as ]). The Supreme Court of Canada found in 1992 that the book "misrepresented the work of historians, misquoted witnesses, fabricated evidence, and cited non-existent authorities."]] | |||
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{{Use American English|date=November 2023}} | |||
{{Use mdy dates|date=November 2023}} | |||
{{The Holocaust sidebar}} | |||
{{Antisemitism|Manifestations}} | |||
{{Neo-fascism|varieties}} | |||
] of ] is an ]<ref name="antisemitic" /><ref name="conspiracy" /> that asserts that the ] of ] by the ] is a fabrication or exaggeration.<ref>{{cite book|last1=Coady|first1=David|title=Conspiracy Theories: The Philosophical Debate|date=2019|publisher=]|isbn=978-1-315-25957-4|language=en|chapter=Conspiracy Theories and Official Stories *|quote=Holocaust denial is one, unfortunately widespread, example of a conspiracy theory.}}</ref><ref name="ushmmdenialmisinformation">{{cite web |title=Holocaust Deniers and Public Misinformation |url=https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/holocaust-deniers-and-public-misinformation |access-date=May 29, 2021 |website=encyclopedia.ushmm.org |publisher=] |language=en |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210519225227/https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/holocaust-deniers-and-public-misinformation |archive-date=May 19, 2021}}</ref>{{R|definition}} It includes making one or more of the following false claims:{{R|often claims|Key elements|Assertions}} | |||
*]'s "]" was aimed only at ] from the territory of the Third Reich and did not include their extermination. | |||
*Nazi authorities did not use ]s and ]s for the ] of Jews. | |||
*The actual number of Jews murdered is significantly lower than the accepted figure of approximately six million. | |||
*The Holocaust is a ] perpetrated by the ], ], or the ].<ref name="ushmmdenialmisinformation" />{{R|hoax}} | |||
The methodologies of Holocaust deniers are based on a predetermined conclusion that ignores ].{{R|predetermined}} Scholars use the term '']'' to describe the views and methodology of Holocaust deniers in order to distinguish them from legitimate ], who challenge orthodox interpretations of history using established historical ].{{R|terminology}} Holocaust deniers generally do not accept ''denial'' as an appropriate description of their activities and use the euphemism '']'' instead.{{R|Revisionist}} In some former ] countries, Holocaust deniers do not deny the mass murder of Jews but deny the participation of their own nationals in the Holocaust.{{R|post-Soviet}} | |||
{{AS}} | |||
{{otheruses4|the history, development, and methods of Holocaust denial|Criticism of Holocaust denial|Criticism of Holocaust denial}} | |||
Holocaust denial is considered a serious societal problem in many places where it occurs, and it is ]. | |||
'''Holocaust denial''' is the claim that the ] of Jews during ] — usually referred to as ]<ref name="definition">Donald L Niewyk, ''The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust,'' Columbia University Press, 2000, p.45: "The Holocaust is commonly defined as the murder of more than 5,000,000 Jews by the Germans in World War II." Estimates by scholars range from 5.1 million to 7 million. See the ]</ref> — did not occur in the manner and to the extent described by current scholarship; or, alternatively, that it did not occur at all. | |||
==Terminology and etymology== | |||
Key elements of this claim are the explicit or implicit rejection that the ] government had a policy of deliberately targeting ]s and people of Jewish ancestry for extermination as a people; that between five and seven million Jews<ref name="definition"/> were systematically killed by the Nazis and their allies; and that genocide was carried out at ]s using tools of mass murder such as ]s.<!-- | |||
Holocaust deniers prefer to refer to their work as historical revisionism, and object to being referred to as "]".{{R|Revisionist}} ] professor ] has written that: "The deniers' selection of the name revisionist to describe themselves is indicative of their basic strategy of deceit and distortion and of their attempt to portray themselves as legitimate historians engaged in the traditional practice of illuminating the past."{{sfn|Lipstadt|1993|p=25}} Scholars consider this misleading since the methods of Holocaust denial differ from those of legitimate historical revision.<ref>"The two leading critical exposés of Holocaust denial in the United States were written by historians Deborah Lipstadt (1993) and Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman (2000). These scholars make a distinction between historical revisionism and denial. Revisionism, in their view, entails a refinement of existing knowledge about a historical event, not a denial of the event itself, that comes through the examination of new empirical evidence or a reexamination or reinterpretation of existing evidence. Legitimate historical revisionism acknowledges a 'certain body of irrefutable evidence' or a 'convergence of evidence' that suggest that an event—like the black plague, American slavery, or the Holocaust—did, in fact, occur (Lipstadt 1993:21; Shermer & Grobman 200:34). Denial, on the other hand, rejects the entire foundation of historical evidence...."</ref> Legitimate historical revisionism is explained in a resolution adopted by the ] History Department, November 8, 1991, and reprinted in ''Duke Chronicle'', November 13, 1991, in response to an advertisement produced by Bradley R Smith's ]: | |||
{{blockquote|That historians are constantly engaged in historical revision is certainly correct; however, what historians do is very different from this advertisement. Historical revision of major events ... is not concerned with the actuality of these events; rather, it concerns their historical interpretation – their causes and consequences generally.<ref>{{cite book |title=Denying the Holocaust: the growing assault on truth and memory |edition=reprint |last=Lipstadt |first=Deborah E. |author-link=Deborah Lipstadt |year=1994 |publisher=Plume |isbn=978-0-452-27274-3 |url=https://archive.org/details/denyingholocaust00lips}}</ref>}} | |||
LONG FOOTNOTE FOLLOWS | |||
--><ref name="Key elements">Key elements of Holocaust denial: | |||
*"Before discussing how Holocaust denial constitutes a conspiracy theory, and how the theory is distinctly American, it is important to understand what is meant by the term "Holocaust denial." Holocaust deniers, or "revisionists," as they call themselves, question all three major points of definition of the Nazi Holocaust. First, they contend that, while mass murders of Jews did occur (although they dispute both the intentionality of such murders as well as the supposed deservedness of these killings), there was no official Nazi policy to murder Jews. Second, and perhaps most prominently, they contend that there were no homicidal gas chambers, particularly at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where mainstream historians believe over 1 million Jews were murdered, primarily in gas chambers. And third, Holocaust deniers contend that the death toll of European Jews during World War II was well below 6 million. Deniers float numbers anywhere between 300,000 and 1.5 million, as a general rule." Mathis, Andrew E. , ], July 2, 2004. Retrieved Dec 18, 2006. | |||
*"In part III we directly address the three major foundations upon which Holocaust denial rests, including... the claim that gas chambers and crematoria were used not for mass extermination but rather for delousing clothing and disposing of people who died of disease and overwork; ... the claim that the six million figure is an exaggeration by an order of magnitude - that about six hundred thousand, not six million, died at the hands of the Nazis; ... the claim that there was no intention on the part of the Nazis to exterminate European Jewry and that the Holocaust was nothing more than the unfortunate by-produce of the vicissitudes of war." Michael Shermer & Alex Grobman. ''Denying History: : who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and why Do They Say It?'', University of California Press, 2000, ISBN 0520234693, p. 3. | |||
*"Holocaust Denial: Claims that the mass extermination of the Jews by the Nazis never happened; that the number of Jewish losses has been greatly exaggerated; that the Holocaust was not systematic nor a result of an official policy; or simply that the Holocaust never took place." , ] website, 2004. Retrieved Dec 18, 2006. | |||
*"Among the untruths routinely promoted are the claims that no gas chambers existed at Auschwitz, that only 600,000 Jews were killed rather than six million, and that Hitler had no murderous intentions toward Jews or other groups persecuted by his government." , ], 2001. Retrieved June 28, 2007.</ref><ref name=Assertions>"The kinds of assertions made in Holocaust-denial material include the following: | |||
*Several hundred thousand rather than approximately six million Jews died during the war. | |||
*Scientific evidence proves that gas chambers could not have been used to kill large numbers of people. | |||
*The Nazi command had a policy of deporting Jews, not exterminating them. | |||
*Some deliberate killings of Jews did occur, but were carried out by the peoples of Eastern Europe rather than the Nazis. | |||
*Jews died in camps of various kinds, but did so as the result of hunger and disease. The Holocaust is a myth created by the Allies for propaganda purposes, and subsequently nurtured by the Jews for their own ends. | |||
*Errors and inconsistencies in survivors’ testimonies point to their essential unreliability. | |||
*Alleged documentary evidence of the Holocaust, from photographs of concentration camp victims to Anne Frank’s diary, is fabricated. | |||
*The confessions of former Nazis to war crimes were extracted through torture." , JPR report #3, 2000. Retrieved Dec 18, 2006.</ref> | |||
Lipstadt writes that modern Holocaust denial draws its inspiration from various sources, including a school of thought which used an established method to question government policies.<ref>{{cite book |first=Deborah E. |last=Lipstadt |author-link=Deborah Lipstadt |title=Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=_yLm_cHp_REC |date=December 18, 2012 |publisher=] |isbn=978-1-4767-2748-6 |quote=Modern Holocaust denial draws inspiration from a variety of sources. Among them is a legitimate historical tradition that was highly critical of government policies and believed that history was being used to justify these policies. The deniers consider themselves heirs of a group of influential American historians who were deeply disturbed by American involvement in World War I. These respected scholars, who called themselves revisionists, would have been appalled to learn of the purposes to which their arguments were put.}}{{Dead link|date=February 2024 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }}</ref> | |||
Many Holocaust deniers do not accept the term "denial" as an appropriate description of their point of view, and use the term '''Holocaust revisionism''' instead.<!-- | |||
In 1992, Donald L. Niewyk gave some examples of how legitimate historical revisionism—the re-examination of accepted history and its updating with newly discovered, more accurate, or less-biased information—may be applied to the study of the Holocaust as new facts emerge to change the historical understanding of it: | |||
FOOTNOTE BEGINS | |||
--><ref name="Revisionist">Refer to themselves as revisionists: | |||
*"Holocaust deniers often refer to themselves as ‘revisionists’, in an attempt to claim legitimacy for their activities." (, JPR report #3, 2000. Retrieved May 16, 2007) | |||
*"The deniers' selection of the name revisionist to describe themselves is indicative of their basic strategy of deceit and distortion and of their attempt to portray themselves as legitimate historians engaged in the traditional practice of illuminating the past." ]. ''Denying the Holocaust -- The Growing Assault onTruth and Memory'', Penguin, 1993, ISBN 0-452-27274-2, p. 25. | |||
*"Dressing themselves in pseudo-academic garb, they have adopted the term "revisionism" in order to mask and legitimate their enterprise." , "Holocaust Denial: An Online Guide to Exposing and Combating Anti-Semitic Propaganda", ], 2001. Retrieved June 12, 2007. | |||
*"Holocaust deniers often refer to themselves as ‘revisionists’, in an attempt to claim legitimacy for their activities." , JPR report #3, 2000. Retrieved May 16, 2007.<!-- | |||
FOOTNOTE ENDS | |||
{{blockquote|With the main features of the Holocaust clearly visible to all but the willfully blind, historians have turned their attention to aspects of the story for which the evidence is incomplete or ambiguous. These are not minor matters by any means, but turn on such issues as Hitler's role in the event, Jewish responses to persecution, and reactions by onlookers both inside and outside Nazi-controlled Europe.<ref>{{cite book |editor-last=Niewyk |editor-first=Donald L. |title=The Holocaust: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation |publisher=D. C. Heath and Company |date=1992 |page=7 |chapter=1: Introduction |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=GbcWAQAAIAAJ |isbn=9780618214624}}</ref>}} | |||
--></ref> Scholars, however, prefer the term "denial" to differentiate Holocaust deniers from legitimate ] who use established historical methodologies.<!-- | |||
In contrast, the Holocaust denial movement bases its approach on the predetermined idea that the Holocaust, as understood by mainstream historiography, did not occur.{{R|predetermined}} Sometimes referred to as "]", from the French term {{Lang|fr|négationnisme}} introduced by ],<ref>See Alain Finkielkraut, Mary Byrd Kelly, Richard J. Golsan. . ], 1998.</ref> Holocaust deniers attempt to rewrite history by minimizing, denying, or simply ignoring essential facts. ] writes: | |||
LONG FOOTNOTE FOLLOWS | |||
--><ref name=terminology>Denial vs. "revisionism": | |||
*"This is the phenomenon of what has come to be known as 'revisionism', 'negationism', or 'Holocaust denial,' whose main characteristic is either an outright rejection of the very veracity of the Nazi genocide of the Jews, or at least a concerted attempt to minimize both its scale and importance... It is just as crucial, however, to distinguish between the wholly objectionable politics of denial and the fully legitimate scholarly revision of previously accepted accepted conventional interpretations of any historical event, including the Holocaust." Bartov, Omer. ''The Holocaust: Origins, Implementation and Aftermath,'' Routledge, pp.11-12. Bartov is John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History at the Watson Institute, and is regarded as one of the world's leading authorities on ] (, The Watson Institute for International Studies). | |||
*"The two leading critical exposés of Holocaust denial in the United States were written by historians ] (1993) and ] and Alex Grobman (2000). These scholars make a distinction between historical revisionism and denial. Revisionism, in their view, entails a refinement of existing knowledge about an historical event, not a denial of the event itself, that comes through the examination of new empirical evidence or a reexamination or reinterpretation of existing evidence. Legitimate historical revisionism acknowledges a "certain body of irrefutable evidence" or a "convergence of evidence" that suggest that an event - like the black plague, American slavery, or the Holocaust - did in fact occur (Lipstadt 1993:21; Shermer & Grobman 200:34). Denial, on the other hand, rejects the entire foundation of historical evidence..." Ronald J. Berger. ''Fathoming the Holocaust: A Social Problems Approach'', Aldine Transaction, 2002, ISBN 0202306704, p. 154. | |||
*"At this time, in the mid-1970s, the specter of Holocaust Denial (masked as "revisionism") had begun to raise its head in Australia..." Bartrop, Paul R. "A Little More Understanding: The Experience of a Holocaust Educator in Australia" in Samuel Totten, Steven Leonard Jacobs, Paul R Bartrop. ''Teaching about the Holocaust'', Praeger/Greenwood, 2004, p. xix. ISBN 0275982327 | |||
*"] urges that denial of the Holocaust should not be called 'revisionism' because 'to deny history is not to revise it'. ''Les Assassins de la Memoire. Un Eichmann de papier et autres essays sur le revisionisme'' (The Assassins of Memory - A Paper-Eichmann and Other Essays on Revisionism) 15 (1987)." Cited in Roth, Stephen J. "Denial of the Holocaust as an Issue of Law" in the ''Israel Yearbook on Human Rights'', Volume 23, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1993, ISBN 0792325818, p. 215. | |||
*"This essay describes, from a methodological perspective, some of the inherent flaws in the "revisionist" approach to the history of the Holocaust. It is not intended as a polemic, nor does it attempt to ascribe motives. Rather, it seeks to explain the fundamental error in the "revisionist" approach, as well as why that approach of necessity leaves no other choice. It concludes that "revisionism" is a misnomer because the facts do not accord with the position it puts forward and, more importantly, its methodology reverses the appropriate approach to historical investigation... "Revisionism" is obliged to deviate from the standard methodology of historical pursuit because it seeks to mold facts to fit a preconceived result, it denies events that have been objectively and empirically proved to have occurred, and because it works backward from the conclusion to the facts, thus necessitating the distortion and manipulation of those facts where they differ from the preordained conclusion (which they almost always do). In short, "revisionism" denies something that demonstrably happened, through methodological dishonesty." McFee, Gordon. , ], May 15, 1999. Retrieved December 22, 2006. | |||
*"Crucial to understanding and combating Holocaust denial is a clear distinction between denial and revisionism. One of the more insidious and dangerous aspects of contemporary Holocaust denial, a la Arthur Butz, Bradley Smith and Greg Raven, is the fact that they attempt to present their work as reputable scholarship under the guise of 'historical revisionism.' The term 'revisionist' permeates their publications as descriptive of their motives, orientation and methodology. In fact, Holocaust denial is in no sense 'revisionism,' it is denial... Contemporary Holocaust deniers are not revisionists — not even neo-revisionists. They are '''Deniers'''. Their motivations stem from their neo-nazi political goals and their rampant antisemitism." Austin, Ben S. , The Holocaust\Shoah Page, ]. Retrieved March 29, 2007. | |||
*"Holocaust denial can be a particularly insidious form of antisemitism precisely because it often tries to disguise itself as something quite different: as genuine scholarly debate (in the pages, for example, of the innocuous-sounding Journal for Historical Review). Holocaust deniers often refer to themselves as ‘revisionists’, in an attempt to claim legitimacy for their activities. There are, of course, a great many scholars engaged in historical debates about the Holocaust whose work should not be confused with the output of the Holocaust deniers. Debate continues about such subjects as, for example, the extent and nature of ordinary Germans’ involvement in and knowledge of the policy of genocide, and the timing of orders given for the extermination of the Jews. However, the valid endeavour of historical revisionism, which involves the re-interpretation of historical knowledge in the light of newly emerging evidence, is a very different task from that of claiming that the essential facts of the Holocaust, and the evidence for those facts, are fabrications." , JPR report #3, 2000. Retrieved May 16, 2007. | |||
*"The deniers' selection of the name revisionist to describe themselves is indicative of their basic strategy of deceit and distortion and of their attempt to portray themselves as legitimate historians engaged in the traditional practice of illuminating the past. For historians, in fact, the name revisionism has a resonance that is perfectly legitimate -- it recalls the controversial historical school known as World War I "revisionists," who argued that the Germans were unjustly held responsible for the war and that consequently the Versailles treaty was a politically misguided document based on a false premise. Thus the deniers link themselves to a specific historiographic tradition of reevaluating the past. Claiming the mantle of the World War I revisionists and denying they have any objective other than the dissemination of the truth constitute a tactical attempt to acquire an intellectual credibility that would otherwise elude them." ]. ''Denying the Holocaust -- The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory'', Penguin, 1993, ISBN 0-452-27274-2, p. 25. | |||
</ref> | |||
{{blockquote|Negationism means the denial of historical ]. It is not a reinterpretation of known facts, but the denial of known facts. The term negationism has gained currency as the name of a movement to deny a specific crime against humanity, the Nazi genocide on the Jews in 1941–45, also known as the Holocaust (Greek: complete burning) or the ''Shoah'' (Hebrew: disaster). Negationism is mostly identified with the effort at re-writing history in such a way that the fact of the Holocaust is omitted.<ref>]. {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071025063927/http://voiceofdharma.org/books/negaind/ch1.htm |date=October 25, 2007 }}, ''Negationism in India: Concealing the Record of Islam'', ''The Voice of India'', 2002.</ref>}} | |||
Most Holocaust denial claims imply, or openly state, that the Holocaust is a hoax arising out of a deliberate ] to advance the interest of Jews at the expense of other peoples,<!-- | |||
In "Secondary Anti-Semitism: From Hard-Core to Soft-Core Denial of the Shoah", {{ill|Clemens Heni|de}} writes: | |||
LONG FOOTNOTE FOLLOWS | |||
{{blockquote|Contrary to the hard-core version, soft-core denial is often not easily identifiable. Often it is tolerated, or even encouraged and reproduced in the mainstream, not only in Germany. Scholars have only recently begun to unravel this disturbing phenomenon. Manfred Gerstenfeld discusses Holocaust trivialization in an article published in 2008. In Germany in 2007 two scholars, Thorsten Eitz and Georg Stötzel, published a voluminous dictionary of German language and discourse regarding National Socialism and the Holocaust. It includes chapters on Holocaust trivialization and contrived comparisons, such as the infamous "atomic Holocaust", "Babycaust", "Holocaust of abortion", "red Holocaust" or "biological Holocaust".<ref>{{cite journal |last=Heni |first=Clemens |date=Fall 2008 |title=Secondary Anti-Semitism: From Hard-Core to Soft-Core Denial of the Shoah |journal=Jewish Political Studies Review |location=Jerusalem |volume=20 |issue=3/4 |pages=73–92 |jstor=25834800}}</ref>}} | |||
--><ref>A hoax designed to advance the interests of Jews: | |||
*"The title of App's major work on the Holocaust, The Six Million Swindle, is informative because it implies on its very own the existence of a conspiracy of Jews to perpetrate a hoax against non-Jews for monetary gain." Mathis, Andrew E. , ], July 2, 2004. Retrieved May 16, 2007. | |||
*"Jews are thus depicted as manipulative and powerful conspirators who have fabricated myths of their own suffering for their own ends. According to the Holocaust deniers, by forging evidence and mounting a massive propaganda effort, the Jews have established their lies as ‘truth’ and reaped enormous rewards from doing so: for example, in making financial claims on Germany and acquiring international support for Israel." , JPR report #3, 2000. Retrieved May 16, 2007. | |||
*"Why, we might ask the deniers, if the Holocaust did not happen would any group concoct such a horrific story? Because, some deniers claim, there was a conspiracy by Zionists to exaggerate the plight of Jews during the war in order to finance the state of Israel through war reparations." Michael Shermer & Alex Grobman. ''Denying History: : who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and why Do They Say It?'', University of California Press, 2000, ISBN 0520234693, p. 106. | |||
*"Since its inception in 1979, the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), a California-based Holocaust denial organization founded by Willis Carto of Liberty Lobby, has promoted the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jews fabricated tales of their own genocide to manipulate the sympathies of the non-Jewish world." , ], 2000. Retrieved May 17, 2007. | |||
*"The central assertion for the deniers is that Jews are not victims but victimizers. They 'stole' billions in reparations, destroyed Germany's good name by spreading the 'myth' of the Holocaust, and won international sympathy because of what they claimed had been done to them. In the paramount miscarriage of injustice, they used the world's sympathy to 'displace' another people so that the state of Israel could be established. This contention relating to the establishment of Israel is a linchpin of their argument." ]. ''Denying the Holocaust -- The Growing Assault onTruth and Memory'', Penguin, 1993, ISBN 0-452-27274-2, p. 27. | |||
*"They picture a vast shadowy conspiracy that controls and manipulates the institutions of education, culture, the media and government in order to disseminate a pernicious mythology. The purpose of this Holocaust mythology, they assert, is the inculcation of a sense of guilt in the white, Western Christian world. Those who can make others feel guilty have power over them and can make them do their bidding. This power is used to advance an international Jewish agenda centered in the Zionist enterprise of the State of Israel." , "Holocaust Denial: An Online Guide to Exposing and Combating Anti-Semitic Propaganda", ], 2001. Retrieved June 12, 2007. | |||
*"Deniers argue that the manufactured guilt and shame over a mythological Holocaust led to Western, specifically United States, support for the establishment and sustenance of the Israeli state — a sustenance that costs the American taxpayer over three billion dollars per year. They assert that American taxpayers have been and continue to be swindled..." , "Holocaust Denial: An Online Guide to Exposing and Combating Anti-Semitic Propaganda", ], 2001. Retrieved June 12, 2007. | |||
*"The stress on Holocaust revisionism underscored the new anti-Semitic agenda gaining ground within the Klan movement. Holocaust denial refurbished conspiratorial anti-Semitism. Who else but the Jews had the media power to hoodwink unsuspecting masses with one of the greatest hoaxes in history? And for what motive? To promote the claims of the illegitimate state of Israel by making non-Jews feel guilty, of course." Lawrence N. Powell, ''Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Duke's Louisiana'', University of North Carolina Press, 2000, ISBN 0807853747, p. 445.<!-- | |||
END OF LONG FOOTNOTE | |||
==Background== | |||
--></ref> a predetermined conclusion that ignores extensive historical evidence to the contrary.<ref>Alan L. Berger, "Holocaust Denial: Tempest in a Teapot, or Storm on the Horizon?", in Zev Garber and Richard Libowitz (eds), ''Peace, in Deed: Essays in Honor of Harry James Cargas'', Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998, p. 154.</ref> For this reason, Holocaust denial is generally considered to be an ]<!-- | |||
===Denial as a means of genocide=== | |||
] argues that denial was invented by the perpetrators and employed as a means of genocide. For example, trucks of ] were labeled with ] symbols and victims were told that they would be "]". Douglas also cites the ] as an example of denial while genocide was ongoing, with Himmler referring to the Holocaust as "an unnamed and never to be named page of glory". According to Douglas, the denial of mass murder using gas chambers recalls the Nazi efforts to persuade the victims that they were actually harmless showers.<ref name=Douglas>{{cite book |first=Lawrence |last=Douglas |editor1-last=Hennebel |editor1-first=Ludovic |editor2-last=Hochmann |editor2-first=Thomas |title=Genocide Denials and the Law |date=2011 |publisher=] |isbn=978-0-19-987639-6 |chapter=From Trying the Perpetrator to Trying the Denier and Back Again |pages=55–56}}</ref> | |||
===Efforts to conceal the historical record=== | |||
LONG FOOTNOTE FOLLOWS | |||
--><ref>Antisemitic: | |||
*"It would elevate their antisemitic ideology — which is what Holocaust denial is — to the level of responsible historiography — which it is not." ], ''Denying the Holocaust'', ISBN 0-14-024157-4, p. 11. | |||
*"The denial of the Holocaust is among the most insidious forms of anti-Semitism..." Roth, Stephen J. "Denial of the Holocaust as an Issue of Law" in the ''Israel Yearbook on Human Rights'', Volume 23, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1993, ISBN 0792325818, p. 215. | |||
*"Contemporary Holocaust deniers are not revisionists — not even neo-revisionists. They are '''Deniers'''. Their motivations stem from their neo-nazi political goals and their rampant antisemitism." Austin, Ben S. , The Holocaust\Shoah Page, ]. Retrieved March 29, 2007. | |||
*"Holocaust denial can be a particularly insidious form of antisemitism precisely because it often tries to disguise itself as something quite different: as genuine scholarly debate (in the pages, for example, of the innocuous-sounding Journal for Historical Review)." , JPR report #3, 2000. Retrieved May 16, 2007. | |||
*"This books treats several of the myths that have made antisemitism so lethal... In addition to these historic myths, we also treat the new, maliciously manufactured myth of Holocaust denial, another groundless belief that is used to stir up Jew-hatred." Schweitzer, Frederick M. & Perry, Marvin. ''Anti-Semitism: myth and hate from antiquity to the present'', Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, ISBN 0312165617, p. 3. | |||
*"One predictable strand of Arab Islamic antisemitism is Holocaust denial..." Schweitzer, Frederick M. & Perry, Marvin. ''Anti-Semitism: myth and hate from antiquity to the present'', Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, ISBN 0312165617, p. 10. | |||
*"Anti-Semitism, in the form of Holocaust denial, had been experienced by just one teacher when working in a Catholic school with large numbers of Polish and Croatian students." Geoffrey Short, Carole Ann Reed. ''Issues in Holocaust Education'', Ashgate Publishing, 2004, ISBN 0754642119, p. 71. | |||
*"Indeed, the task of organized antisemitism in the last decade of the century has been the establishment of Holocaust Revisionism - the denial that the Holocaust occurred." Stephen Trombley, "antisemitism", ''The Norton Dictionary of Modern Thought'', W. W. Norton & Company, 1999, ISBN 0393046966, p. 40. | |||
*"After the Yom Kippur War an apparent reappearance of antisemitism in France troubled the tranquility of the community; there were several notorious terrorist attacks on synagogues, Holocaust revisionism appeared, and a new antisemitic political right tried to achieve respectability." Howard K. Wettstein, ''Diasporas and Exiles: Varieties of Jewish Identity'', University of California Press, 2002, ISBN 0520228642, p. 169. | |||
*"Holocaust denial is a contemporary form of the classic anti-Semitic doctrine of the evil, manipulative and threatening world Jewish conspiracy." , "Holocaust Denial: An Online Guide to Exposing and Combating Anti-Semitic Propaganda", ], 2001. Retrieved June 12, 2007. | |||
*"In a number of countries, in Europe as well as in the United States, the negation or gross minimization of the Nazi genocide of Jews has been the subject of books, essay and articles. Should their authors be protected by freedom of speech? The European answer has been in the negative: such writings are not only a perverse form of anti-semitism but also an aggression against the dead, their families, the survivors and society at large." Roger Errera, "Freedom of speech in Europe", in Georg Nolte, ''European and US Constitutionalism'', Cambridge University Press, 2005, ISBN 0521854016, pp. 39-40. | |||
*"Particularly popular in Syria is Holocaust denial, another staple of Arab anti-Semitism that is sometimes coupled with overt sympathy for Nazi Germany." ], ''Rethinking the Middle East'', Routledge, 2003, ISBN 0714654183, p. 104. | |||
*"Holocaust denial is a new form of anti-Semitism, but one that hinges on age-old motifs." Dinah Shelton, ''Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity'', Macmillan Reference, 2005, p. 45. | |||
*"The stress on Holocaust revisionism underscored the new anti-Semitic agenda gaining ground within the Klan movement. Holocaust denial refurbished conspiratorial anti-Semitism. Who else but the Jews had the media power to hoodwink unsuspecting masses with one of the greatest hoaxes in history? And for what motive? To promote the claims of the illegitimate state of Israel by making non-Jews feel guilty, of course." Lawrence N. Powell, ''Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Duke's Louisiana'', University of North Carolina Press, 2000, ISBN 0807853747, p. 445. | |||
*"Since its inception in 1979, the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), a California-based Holocaust denial organization founded by Willis Carto of Liberty Lobby, has promoted the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jews fabricated tales of their own genocide to manipulate the sympathies of the non-Jewish world." , ], 2000. Retrieved May 17, 2007. | |||
*"There is now a creeping, nasty wave of anti-Semitism ... insinuating itself into our political thought and rhetoric ... The history of the Arab world ... is disfigured ... by a whole series of outmoded and discredited ideas, of which the notion that the Jews never suffered and that the Holocaust is an obfuscatory confection created by the elders of Zion is one that is acquiring too much, far too much, currency." ], "A Desolation, and They Called it Peace" in ''Those who forget the past'', Ron Rosenbaum (ed), Random House 2004, p. 518.<!-- | |||
LONG FOOTNOTE ENDS | |||
====German efforts==== | |||
--></ref> ].<!-- | |||
{{See also|Sonderaktion 1005}} | |||
] unit pose next to a bone-crushing machine in the ] (photo taken in August 1944, after camp's liberation).]] | |||
While the ] was still underway, the Nazis had already formed a contingency plan that if defeat was imminent they would carry out the total destruction of German records.<ref name="klars-coth">{{cite book |url={{google books|id=NTjJDNi7fq4C|title=French Children of the Holocaust: A Memorial|page=|plainurl=yes}} |last1=Klarsfeld |first1=Serge |title=French Children of the Holocaust: A Memorial |author-link1=Serge Klarsfeld |date=1996 |location=New York |publisher=] |lccn=96031206 |isbn=9780814726624 |oclc=35029709 |page=xiii}}</ref> Historians have documented evidence that as ]'s defeat became imminent and Nazi leaders realized they would most likely be captured and brought to trial, great effort was made to destroy all evidence of mass extermination. ] instructed his camp commandants to destroy records, crematoria, and other signs of mass extermination.<ref name="Arad_1984">{{cite web |first=Yitzhak |last=Arad |author-link=Yitzhak Arad |url=http://www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%203576.pdf |title=Yad Vashem Studies XVI Operation Reinhard: Extermination Camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka |website=] |year=1984 |pages=205–239 |access-date=February 2, 2009 |archive-date=March 18, 2009 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090318073143/http://www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%203576.pdf |url-status=live}}</ref> As one of many examples, the bodies of the 25,000 mostly Latvian Jews whom ] and the soldiers under his command had shot at ] (near ]) in late 1941 were dug up and burned in 1943.<ref name="Ezer">{{cite book |last=Ezergailis |first=Andrew |title=The Holocaust in Latvia 1941–1944 – The Missing Center |pages=4–7, 239–270 |publisher=] (in association with the ]) |location=Riga |date=1996 |isbn=9984-9054-3-8}}</ref> Similar operations were undertaken at ], ] and other death camps.<ref name="Arad_1984"/> | |||
====French collaboration in archive destruction==== | |||
FOOTNOTE | |||
In ], the situation with respect to preserving war records was not much better, partly as a result of French state secrecy rules dating back to well before the war aimed at protecting the French government and the state from embarrassing revelations, and partly to avoid culpability. For example, at ], the ] destroyed nearly all of the massive archive of Jewish arrest and deportation.{{R|klars-coth}} | |||
--><ref>Conspiracy theory: | |||
*"While appearing on the surface as a rather arcane pseudo-scholarly challenge to the well-established record of Nazi genocide during the Second World War, Holocaust denial serves as a powerful conspiracy theory uniting otherwise disparate fringe groups..." , "Holocaust Denial: An Online Guide to Exposing and Combating Anti-Semitic Propaganda", ], 2001. Retrieved June 12, 2007. | |||
*"Before discussing how Holocaust denial constitutes a conspiracy theory, and how the theory is distinctly American, it is important to understand what is meant by the term 'Holocaust denial.'" Mathis, Andrew E. , ], July 2, 2004. Retrieved Dec 18, 2006. | |||
*"Since its inception in 1979, the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), a California-based Holocaust denial organization founded by Willis Carto of Liberty Lobby, has promoted the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jews fabricated tales of their own genocide to manipulate the sympathies of the non-Jewish world." , ], 2000. Retrieved May 17, 2007. | |||
</ref> | |||
===Efforts to preserve the historical record=== | |||
== Terminology: Holocaust denial or Holocaust revisionism? == | |||
====During the war==== | |||
The term "holocaust denial" is often objected to by the people to whom it is applied, who typically prefer "revisionism" or "revisionist".<ref name="Revisionist"/> Scholars believe that term to be deliberately misleading, however.<ref name=terminology/> While ] is the re-examination of accepted history, with an eye towards updating it with newly discovered, more accurate, or less-biased information, "deniers" seek evidence to support a preconceived theory, omitting substantial facts.<ref> | |||
One of the earliest efforts to save historical record of the Holocaust occurred during the war, in France, where ] records were carefully preserved and turned over to the new ]; however, the bureau then held them in secret, refusing to release copies later, even to the ] (CDJC).{{Citation needed|date=June 2020}}<!-- {{R|klars-coth}} --> | |||
*"Negationism means the denial of historical crimes against humanity. It is not a reinterpretation of known facts, but the denial of known facts. The term negationism has gained currency as the name of a movement to deny a specific crime against humanity, the Nazi genocide on the Jews in 1941-45, also known as the holocaust (Greek: fire sacrifice) or the ''Shoah'' (Hebrew: disaster). Negationism is mostly identified with the effort at re-writing history in such a way that the fact of the Holocaust is omitted." ]. , ''Negationism in India: Concealing the record of Islam'', The Voice of India, 2002. | |||
*"The two leading critical exposés of Holocaust denial in the United States were written by historians ] (1993) and ] and Alex Grobman (2000). These scholars make a distinction between historical revisionism and denial. Revisionism, in their view, entails a refinement of existing knowledge about an historical event, not a denial of the event itself, that comes through the examination of new empirical evidence or a reexamination or reinterpretation of existing evidence. Legitimate historical revisionism acknowledges a "certain body of irrefutable evidence" or a "convergence of evidence" that suggest that an event - like the black plague, American slavery, or the Holocaust - did in fact occur (Lipstadt 1993:21; Shermer & Grobman 200:34). Denial, on the other hand, rejects the entire foundation of historical evidence..." Ronald J. Berger. ''Fathoming the Holocaust: A Social Problems Approach'', Aldine Transaction, 2002, ISBN 0202306704, p. 154. | |||
*"This essay describes, from a methodological perspective, some of the inherent flaws in the "revisionist" approach to the history of the Holocaust. It is not intended as a polemic, nor does it attempt to ascribe motives. Rather, it seeks to explain the fundamental error in the "revisionist" approach, as well as why that approach of necessity leaves no other choice. It concludes that "revisionism" is a misnomer because the facts do not accord with the position it puts forward and, more importantly, its methodology reverses the appropriate approach to historical investigation... "Revisionism" is obliged to deviate from the standard methodology of historical pursuit because it seeks to mold facts to fit a preconceived result, it denies events that have been objectively and empirically proved to have occurred, and because it works backward from the conclusion to the facts, thus necessitating the distortion and manipulation of those facts where they differ from the preordained conclusion (which they almost always do). In short, "revisionism" denies something that demonstrably happened, through methodological dishonesty." McFee, Gordon. , ], May 15, 1999. Retrieved December 22, 2006. | |||
*"Holocaust deniers often refer to themselves as ‘revisionists’, in an attempt to claim legitimacy for their activities. There are, of course, a great many scholars engaged in historical debates about the Holocaust whose work should not be confused with the output of the Holocaust deniers. Debate continues about such subjects as, for example, the extent and nature of ordinary Germans’ involvement in and knowledge of the policy of genocide, and the timing of orders given for the extermination of the Jews. However, the valid endeavour of historical revisionism, which involves the re-interpretation of historical knowledge in the light of newly emerging evidence, is a very different task from that of claiming that the essential facts of the Holocaust, and the evidence for those facts, are fabrications." , JPR report #3, 2000. Retrieved May 16, 2007.</ref> | |||
In 1943, ], anticipating the need for a center to document and preserve the memory of the persecution for historical reasons and also support claims post-war, gathered together 40 representatives from Jewish organizations in ] which was under Italian occupation at the time<ref name="mdlShoah">{{cite web |url=http://www.memorialdelashoah.org/index.php/en/archives-and-documentation/the-cdjc-catalogue/the-history-of-the-center-of-contemporary-jewish-documentation-cdjc |title=The History of the Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation (CDJC) |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150316150400/http://www.memorialdelashoah.org/index.php/en/archives-and-documentation/the-cdjc-catalogue/the-history-of-the-center-of-contemporary-jewish-documentation-cdjc |archive-date=March 16, 2015}}</ref> in order to form a ''center de documentation''.<ref name="Jockusch">{{cite web |url={{google books|id=E2IhaiQwJQ8C|page=18|title=Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe|plainurl=yes}} |title=Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe |last1=Jockusch |first1=Laura |date=October 11, 2012 |publisher=] |isbn=9780199764556 |doi=10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199764556.001.0001}} as quoted in {{cite journal |url=https://www.academia.edu/1777831 |title=Khurbn Forshung (''destruction research'')– Jewish Historical Commissions in Europe, 1943–1949 |last1=Jockusch |first1=Laura |website=academia.edu |access-date=March 15, 2015 |archive-date=June 26, 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200626051235/https://www.academia.edu/1777831/_Khurbn_Forshung_Jewish_Historical_Commissions_in_Europe_1943-1949_ |url-status=live}}</ref> Exposure meant the death penalty, and as a result little actually happened before ].<ref name="ej-cdjc">{{Citation |last1=Mazor |first1=Michel |last2=Weinberg |first2=David |contribution=Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine (CDJC) |editor1-last=Berenbaum |editor1-first=Michael |editor2-last=Skolnik |editor2-first=Fred |title=Encyclopedia Judaica |volume=4 |edition=2 |pages=547 |series=Gale Virtual Reference Library |publisher=] |place=Detroit |date=2007 |contribution-url=http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CCX2587504110&v=2.1&u=imcpl1111&it=r&p=GVRL&sw=w&asid=00b7d473b9c8670353939c8535501ac3 |access-date=April 3, 2015 |archive-date=June 29, 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180629074246/http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CCX2587504110&v=2.1&u=imcpl1111&it=r&p=GVRL&sw=w&asid=00b7d473b9c8670353939c8535501ac3 |url-status=live}}</ref> Serious work began after the center moved to Paris in late 1944 and was renamed the CDJC.{{R|Jockusch|ej-cdjc}} | |||
Historical revisionism is an academic approach that holds that a given slice of history, as it has been traditionally told, ''may not'' be entirely accurate, and should hence be revised accordingly. Historical revisionism in this sense is a well-accepted and mainstream part of history studies, and it is applied to the study of the Holocaust as new facts emerge and change our understanding of it. A very different process unfolds when someone proceeds from the premise that a major element of human history ''is simply inaccurate'', and ignores or routinely minimizes evidence that conflicts with that premise. History done in this way is not revisionism, but denial.<ref> | |||
*McFee, Gordon. , ], May 15, 1999. Retrieved December 22, 2006. | |||
*Austin, Ben S. , The Holocaust\Shoah Page, ]. Retrieved March 29, 2007.</ref> | |||
====Immediate post-war period==== | |||
Because the term "revisionist" has become associated with Holocaust deniers, Holocaust historians today generally avoid using it to describe themselves, though they continue to study and revise opinions on aspects of the Holocaust. In the words of historian Donald Niewyk of ]: | |||
], ] and ] inspect an improvised crematory pyre at ].]] | |||
In 1945, General ], Supreme Allied Commander, anticipated that someday an attempt would be made to recharacterize the documentation of ] as propaganda and took steps against it.<ref>{{cite book|last1=Hobbs|first1=Joseph Patrick|last2=Eisenhower|first2=Dwight D.|last3=Marshall|first3=George Catlett|title=Dear General: Eisenhower's Wartime Letters to Marshall|date=May 12, 1999|publisher=Johns Hopkins University Press|location=Baltimore|isbn=0801862191}}</ref> Eisenhower, upon finding the victims of Nazi concentration camps, ordered all possible photographs to be taken, and for the German people from surrounding villages to be ushered through the camps and made to bury the dead.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Hobbs |first1=Joseph Patrick |last2=Eisenhower |first2=Dwight D. |last3=Marshall |first3=George Catlett |title=Dear General: Eisenhower's Wartime Letters to Marshall |date=May 12, 1999 |publisher=] |location=Baltimore |isbn=0801862191|page=223}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |title=World War II Liberation Photography |url=https://www.ushmm.org/collections/the-museums-collections/about/photo-archives/world-war-ii-liberation-photography |access-date=August 30, 2020 |website=] |language=en |archive-date=September 22, 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200922024859/https://www.ushmm.org/collections/the-museums-collections/about/photo-archives/world-war-ii-liberation-photography |url-status=live}}</ref> | |||
====Nuremberg trials==== | |||
<blockquote>"With the main features of the Holocaust clearly visible to all but the willfully blind, historians have turned their attention to aspects of the story for which the evidence is incomplete or ambiguous. These are not minor matters by any means, but turn on such issues as Hitler's role in the event, Jewish responses to persecution, and reactions by onlookers both inside and outside Nazi-controlled Europe."<ref>Niewyk, Donald L. (ed). ''The Holocaust: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation'', D.C. Heath and Company, 1992.</ref></blockquote> | |||
] | |||
The ] took place in Germany after the war in 1945–1946. The stated aim was to dispense justice in retribution for atrocities of the German government. This Allied intention to administer justice post-war was first announced in 1943 in the ] and reiterated at the ] and at Berlin in 1945.<ref name="Wright-1946">{{cite journal |last=Wright |first=Quincy |author-link= Quincy Wright |year=1946 |title=The Nuremberg Trial |journal=] |volume=246 |issue=1 |pages=72–80 |jstor=1025134 |doi=10.1177/000271624624600113 |s2cid=143138559 |issn=0002-7162}}</ref> While the intention was not specifically to preserve the historical record of the Holocaust, some of the core documents required to prosecute the cases were provided to them by the ], and much of the huge trove of archives were then transferred to the CDJC after the trials and became the core of future Holocaust historiography.<ref name="Bensoussan">{{cite book |url={{google books|id=aNzjTUT6jdYC|title=Holocaust Historiography in Context: Emergence, Challenges, Polemics and Achievements|plainurl=yes|page=245}} |title=Holocaust Historiography in Context: Emergence, Challenges, Polemics and Achievements |editor1-first=David |editor1-last=Bankier |editor2-first=Dan |editor2-last=Mikhman <!--|chapter=Jewish Contemporary Documentation Centre (CDJC) and Holocaust Research in France, 1945-1970--> |last1=Bensoussan |first1=Georges |date=2008 |publisher=] |pages=245–254 |isbn=9789653083264 |access-date=March 15, 2015}}</ref> | |||
The Nuremberg trials were important historically, but the events were still very recent, television was in its infancy and not present, and there was little public impact. There were isolated moments of limited public awareness from Hollywood films such as '']'' (1959) or the 1961 '']'' which had some newsreel footage of actual scenes from liberated Nazi concentration camps including scenes of piles of naked corpses laid out in rows and bulldozed into large pits, which was considered exceptionally graphic for the time. | |||
Holocaust denial is sometimes referred to as "negationism", from the French term ''Le négationnisme''. ] attempt to rewrite history by minimizing, denying or simply ignoring essential facts. According to ] | |||
<blockquote>"Negationism means the denial of historical crimes against humanity. It is not a reinterpretation of known facts, but the denial of known facts. The term negationism has gained currency as the name of a movement to deny a specific crime against humanity, the Nazi genocide on the Jews in 1941-45, also known as the holocaust (Greek: fire sacrifice) or the ''Shoah'' (Hebrew: disaster). Negationism is mostly identified with the effort at re-writing history in such a way that the fact of the Holocaust is omitted."<ref>]. , ''Negationism in India: Concealing the record of Islam'', The Voice of India, 2002.</ref></blockquote> | |||
Public awareness changed when the Eichmann trial riveted the world's attention fifteen years after Nuremberg.<ref name="yadvashem-impact">{{cite web |url=http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/eichmann/awareness_of_the_holocaust.asp |title=Shaping an Awareness of the Holocaust in Israeli and World Public Opinion |date=2015 |website=] |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20141023150544/http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/eichmann/awareness_of_the_holocaust.asp |archive-date=October 23, 2014 |access-date=June 26, 2015 |quote=In the annals of public awareness of the Holocaust period, nothing rivals the Eichmann trial as a milestone and turning point, whose impact is evident to this day. The trial introduced the Holocaust into the historical, educational, legal and cultural discourse, not merely in Israel and the Jewish world, but on the consciousness of all peoples of the world. Sixteen years after the end of the Holocaust, it focused attention upon the account of the suffering and torment of the Jewish people, as recounted to the judges. Its powerful, and one could claim, revolutionary, consequences continue right up to the present day.}}</ref><ref name="Shandler-1999a">{{cite book |last=Shandler |first=Jeffrey |title=While America Watches : Televising the Holocaust |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=NobvLCXFIOcC&pg=PA127 |access-date=June 26, 2015 |date=February 4, 1999 |publisher=], USA |location=New York |isbn=978-0-19-518258-3 |page=127 |chapter=4. The Man in the Glass Box |quote=The Eichmann case is widely cited as a marking a threshold in American awareness of the Holocaust, generating a 'renewed engagement' and 'heightened historical consciousness' as well as serving as a catalyst for a spate of American Holocaust literature, television programs, and feature films.}}</ref> | |||
== Claims == | |||
{{The Holocaust}} | |||
====Trial of Adolf Eichmann==== | |||
The three key claims of Holocaust deniers are:<ref name="Key elements"/><ref name=Assertions/> | |||
{{main|Eichmann trial}} | |||
In 1961, the ] captured ] in Argentina and brought him to ] to stand trial for war crimes. Chief prosecutor ]'s intentions were not only to demonstrate Eichmann's guilt personally but to present material about the entire Holocaust, thus producing a comprehensive record.<ref name="Cesarani-2005">{{cite book |last=Cesarani |first=David |author-link=David Cesarani |title=Eichmann: His Life and Crimes |publisher=] |location=London |year=2005 |orig-year=2004 |isbn=978-0-09-944844-0 |pages=252, 254–5, 325–7}}</ref> | |||
The Israeli government arranged for the trial to have prominent media coverage.<ref name=Birn-2011>{{cite journal |last=Birn |first=Ruth Bettina |title=Fifty Years After: A Critical Look at the Eichmann Trial |journal=Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law |year=2011 |volume=44 |pages=443–473 |url=http://law.case.edu/journals/JIL/Documents/(21)%20Birn_Darby.pdf |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131203021540/http://law.case.edu/journals/JIL/Documents/%2821%29%20Birn_Darby.pdf |archive-date=December 3, 2013 |access-date=April 2, 2015 |url-status=dead}}</ref> Many major newspapers from all over the globe sent reporters and published front-page coverage of the story.{{R|Cesarani-2005}} Israelis had the opportunity to watch live television broadcasts of the proceedings, and videotape was flown daily to the United States for broadcast the following day.{{R|Cesarani-2005}}<ref name=Shandler-1999b>{{cite book |last=Shandler |first=Jeffrey |title=While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust |year=1999 |publisher=] |location=Oxford; New York |isbn=0-19-511935-5 |page= |quote=The trial and the surrounding media coverage sparked renewed interest in wartime events, and the resulting increase in publication of memoirs and scholarly works helped raise public awareness of the Holocaust. |url=https://archive.org/details/whileamericawatc00shan_0/page/93}}</ref> | |||
*The Nazis had no official policy or intention of exterminating Jews. | |||
*Nazis did not use ]s to mass murder Jews. | |||
*The figure of 5-6 million Jewish deaths is a gross exaggeration, and the actual number is an ] lower. | |||
==Significant individuals and organizations== | |||
Other claims include the following: | |||
{{Category see also |Holocaust deniers}} | |||
*Stories of the Holocaust were a myth initially created by the ] to demonize Germans.<ref name=Assertions/> Jews spread this myth as part of a grander plot intended to enable the creation of a Jewish homeland in ], and now to garner continuing support for the state of ].<ref>A plot designed to garner support of Israel: | |||
*"The central assertion for the deniers is that Jews are not victims but victimizers. They 'stole' billions in reparations, destroyed Germany's good name by spreading the 'myth' of the Holocaust, and won international sympathy because of what they claimed had been done to them. In the paramount miscarriage of injustice, they used the world's sympathy to 'displace' another people so that the state of Israel could be established. This contention relating to the establishment of Israel is a linchpin of their argument." ]. ''Denying the Holocaust -- The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory'', Penguin, 1993, ISBN 0-452-27274-2, p. 27. | |||
*"Jews are thus depicted as manipulative and powerful conspirators who have fabricated myths of their own suffering for their own ends. According to the Holocaust deniers, by forging evidence and mounting a massive propaganda effort, the Jews have established their lies as ‘truth’ and reaped enormous rewards from doing so: for example, in making financial claims on Germany and acquiring international support for Israel." , JPR report #3, 2000. Retrieved May 16, 2007. | |||
*"Why, we might ask the deniers, if the Holocaust did not happen would any group concoct such a horrific story? Because, some deniers claim, there was a conspiracy by Zionists to exaggerate the plight of Jews during the war in order to finance the state of Israel through war reparations." Michael Shermer & Alex Grobman. ''Denying History: : who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and why Do They Say It?'', University of California Press, 2000, ISBN 0520234693, p. 106. | |||
*"They picture a vast shadowy conspiracy that controls and manipulates the institutions of education, culture, the media and government in order to disseminate a pernicious mythology. The purpose of this Holocaust mythology, they assert, is the inculcation of a sense of guilt in the white,Western Christian world. Those who can make others feel guilty have power over them and can make them do their bidding. This power is used to advance an international Jewish agenda centered in the Zionist enterprise of the State of Israel." , "Holocaust Denial: An Online Guide to Exposing and Combating Anti-Semitic Propaganda", ], 2001. Retrieved June 12, 2007. | |||
*"The stress on Holocaust revisionism underscored the new anti-Semitic agenda gaining ground within the Klan movement. Holocaust denial refurbished conspiratorial anti-Semitism. Who else but the Jews had the media power to hoodwink unsuspecting masses with one of the greatest hoaxes in history? And for what motive? To promote the claims of the illegitimate state of Israel by making non-Jews feel guilty, of course." Lawrence N. Powell, ''Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Duke's Louisiana'', University of North Carolina Press, 2000, ISBN 0807853747, p. 445.</ref> | |||
*Documentary evidence of the Holocaust, from photographs to the ], is fabricated.<ref name=Assertions/> | |||
*Survivor testimonies are filled with errors and inconsistencies, and are thus unreliable.<ref name=Assertions/> | |||
*Nazi confessions of war crimes were extracted through torture.<ref name=Assertions/> | |||
*The Nazi treatment of Jews was no different from what the ] did to their enemies in World War II.<ref>Shermer & Grobman, 2002, pp. 103-14.</ref> | |||
In the immediate aftermath of the war, prior to the extensive documentation efforts by the Allied forces, a sense of disbelief caused many to deny the initial reports of the Holocaust.<ref name="FoguKansteiner2016">{{cite book |first1=Claudio |last1=Fogu |first2=Wulf |last2=Kansteiner |first3=Todd |last3=Presner |title=Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=2MRADQAAQBAJ&pg=PA68 |date=October 17, 2016 |publisher=] |isbn=978-0-674-97051-9 |page=68}}</ref>{{clarify|date=July 2017}} Compounding this disbelief was the memory of ] of the ], an anti-German ] campaign during WWI, which was widely known to be false by 1945.<ref name="BBC fake news">{{cite news |title=The corpse factory and the birth of fake news |url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-38995205 |access-date=March 5, 2017 |work=] |date=February 17, 2017 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170228230334/http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-38995205 |archive-date=February 28, 2017}}</ref> | |||
== Examination and criticism of the claims == | |||
{{main|Criticism of Holocaust denial}} | |||
Holocaust denial is widely viewed as failing to adhere to ], principles that mainstream historians (as well as scholars in other fields) regard as basic to ].<ref>"(H)istory is the attempt to describe events of the past and move from description to analysis, in accordance with certain agreed rules of evidence, of analysis of language, and of logic." 'Yehuda Bauer, Historian of the Holocaust - Portrait of an Historian" — Online Dimensions, a Journal of Holocaust Studies, Fall, 2004</ref> The prevailing — and indeed virtually unanimous — consensus of mainstream scholars is that the evidence given by survivors, eyewitnesses, and contemporary historical accounts is overwhelming; that this evidence proves ] that the Holocaust occurred; and that it occurred as these sources say it occurred. | |||
The existence and nature of the Holocaust was well-documented by the heavily ] German government itself.<ref>"... the German bureaucrats' collective actions are relatively well-documented for the historian..." ], ''The Path to Genocide: essays on launching the final solution'', Cambridge University Press, 1992, ISBN 0521558786, p. 125.</ref> It was further witnessed by the ] forces who entered Germany and its associated ] states towards the end of ]. Among the evidence produced was film and stills that showed the existence of prisoner camps, as well as the testimony of those freed when the camps were entered. The Holocaust was a massive undertaking that lasted for years and was implemented across several countries, with its own ] ], a bureaucracy that left a large trail of documentation. Although Nazi officials made attempts to destroy evidence of the Holocaust when it became evident that their defeat was imminent, substantial documentation remained. After the Nazi defeat, many documents were recovered, including numerous reports written by the Nazis about the number of Jews killed, records of ] shipments of ]s to the camps, orders for tons of ] and other ]s, and large numbers of photographs and films of the camps and their victims. Many thousands of not-yet-decomposed bodies were found in ]s located near facilities that were indisputably ]. Thousands of interviews with survivors, perpetrators, and bystanders added to the massive level of documentation that attended the Holocaust. Diaries written by German anti-Nazis, such as ], not only confirm that the crimes took place, but also show the extent to which the average German was aware of the crimes. | |||
During the 1930s, the Nazi government used this propaganda against the British, claiming allegations of concentration camps were malicious lies put forward by the British government, and historians Joachim Neander and ] note that this story "encouraged later disbelief when early reports circulated about the Holocaust under Hitler".{{R|BBC fake news}} ], chairman of the British Joint Intelligence Committee, noted that these reports were similar to "stories of employment of human corpses during the last war for the manufacture of fat which was a grotesque lie"; likewise, '']'' commented that "The parallel between this story and the 'corpse factory' atrocity tale of the First World War is too striking to be overlooked."<ref name="bgd">{{cite book |last=Neander |first=Joachim |title=The German Corpse Factory. The Master Hoax of British Propaganda in the First World War |publisher=] |date=2013 |page=8–9}}</ref> Neander notes that "There can be no doubt that the reported commercial use of the corpses of the murdered Jews undermined the credibility of the news coming from Poland and delayed action that might have rescued many Jewish lives."<ref name="bgd"/> | |||
According to Shermer and Grobman, there is a "convergence of evidence" that proves that the Holocaust happened. This evidence includes: | |||
The ] movement has been revitalized by Holocaust denial. Small but vocal numbers of neo-Nazis realized that recreation of a Hitlerite-style regime may be impossible, but a replica might be produced in the future; the rehabilitation of Nazism, they concluded, required the discrediting of the Holocaust.<ref name=Atkins>{{cite book |first=Stephen E. |last=Atkins |title=Holocaust Denial as an International Movement |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=M9Uj6u6b-ZIC |year=2009 |publisher=] |isbn=978-0-313-34538-8 |quote=Holocaust denial has played an important role in the revitalization of the Neo-Nazi movement. There was a smaller but nonetheless vocal number of supporters in other Western European countries and the United States. These neo-Nazis realized that a Hitlerite regime was impossible, but a reasonable facsimile was possible in the future. These neo-Nazis and their allies realized that any rehabilitation of Nazism could be accomplished only by discrediting the Holocaust.}}</ref> ] has likewise relied upon Holocaust denial as a means of rehabilitation.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Bland |first=Benjamin |date=2019 |title=Holocaust inversion, anti-Zionism and British neo-fascism: the Israel–Palestine conflict and the extreme right in post-war Britain |url=https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0031322X.2018.1536347 |journal=] |language=en |volume=53 |issue=1 |pages=86–97 |doi=10.1080/0031322X.2018.1536347 |issn=0031-322X |access-date=May 11, 2024 |archive-date=May 11, 2024 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240511134816/https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0031322X.2018.1536347 |url-status=live}}</ref> | |||
#''Written documents''—hundreds of thousands of letters, memos, blueprints, orders, bills, speeches, articles, memoirs, and confessions. | |||
#''Eyewitness testimony''—accounts from survivors, Jewish ]s (who were forced to help load bodies from the gas chambers into the crematoria in exchange for the promise of survival), ] guards, commandants, local townspeople, and even high-ranking Nazis who spoke openly about the mass murder of the Jews | |||
#''Photographs''—including official military and press photographs, civilian photographs, secret photographs taken by survivors, aerial photographs, German and Allied film footage, unofficial photographs taken by the German military. | |||
#''The camps themselves''—concentration camps, work camps, and ]s that still exist in varying degrees of originality and reconstruction | |||
#''Inferential evidence''—population demographics, reconstructed from the pre-World War II era; if six million Jews were not killed, what happened to them all?<ref>Shermer & Grobman, 2002, p. 33.</ref> | |||
As a movement, modern Holocaust denial is associated with historical revisionism based on ] evidence<ref name="Rosenfeld2015">{{cite book |last1=Rosenfeld |first1=Alvin H. |title=Deciphering the new antisemitism |date=2015 |location=Bloomington and Indianapolis |publisher=] |isbn=9780253018694 |pages=250, 350 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ibfkCgAAQBAJ |quote="In the 1970s, Holocaust denial took up more sophisticated pseudoscientijfic methods and began to portray itself as a movement of historal revisionists..." |access-date=March 21, 2023 |archive-date=July 5, 2024 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240705094703/https://books.google.com/books?id=ibfkCgAAQBAJ |url-status=live}}</ref><ref name="Pigliucci_Philosophy_of_Pseudoscience_2013">{{cite book |last1=Pigliucci |first1=Massimo |last2=Boudry |first2=Maarten |title=Philosophy of pseudoscience : reconsidering the demarcation problem |date=2013 |publisher=] |location=Chicago |isbn=9780226051826 |pages=206 |url=https://archive.org/details/philosophyofpseu00unse/page/206/ |access-date=February 13, 2023}}</ref><ref name="Brittingham2020">{{cite journal |last1=Brittingham |first1=Matthew H. |title="The Jews love numbers": Steven L. Anderson, Christian Conspiracists, and the Spiritual Dimensions of Holocaust Denial |journal=] |date=September 2020 |volume=14 |issue=2 |pages=44–64 |issn=1911-0359 |eissn=1911-9933 |doi=10.5038/1911-9933.14.2.1721 |pmid= |s2cid=225256338 |url=https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1721 |quote="The preacher produced a nearly 40-minute video, "Did the Holocaust Really Happen?," in which he espoused what Deborah Lipstadt has called "hardcore" Holocaust denial, "den the facts of the Holocaust" in an "outright and forceful fashion." Though his “scientific” evidence for the "Holocaust hoax" or "Holocaust myth," as he often refers to the Holocaust, is mostly a regurgitation of the pseudoscientific arguments made by a more established group of Holocaust deniers, Anderson adds a spiritual dimension to Holocaust denial to make it attractive to Christian viewers." |doi-access=free}}{{Dead link|date=May 2023 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }}</ref><ref name="HirvonenKaristo2022">{{cite journal |last1=Hirvonen |first1=Ilmari |last2=Karisto |first2=Janne |title=Demarcation without Dogmas |journal=] |date=February 13, 2022 |volume=88 |issue=3 |pages=701–720 |issn=0040-5825 |eissn=1755-2567 |doi=10.1111/theo.12395 |pmid= |hdl=10138/345499 |s2cid=246834442 |url=https://philarchive.org/rec/HIRDWD |quote="On the one hand, there is science denialism, such as climate change scepticism, the anti-vaccination movement, and holocaust denial, which attacks well-established scientific theories and practices. On the other hand, there is the promotion of pseudotheory, the attempt to get doctrines like homoeopathy and intelligent design accepted as sciences even though they have no warrant for such merit (Hansson, 2017). Both types of pseudoscience have harmful effects on health, environment, education, and society...Paradigmatic pseudosciences can also be very different from one another. Think of, say, intelligent design, Holocaust denial, ancient astronaut hypothesis, homoeopathy, the anti-vaccine movement, astrology, or climate change scepticism. Because there are different forms of pseudoscience, one cannot rule out the possibility that different criteria are needed to distinguish them from science." |hdl-access=free}}</ref> and ]<ref name="Rosenfeld2015"/><ref name="Pigliucci_Philosophy_of_Pseudoscience_2013"/> including ] pseudoscientific journals,<ref name="CODOH_ADL">{{cite news |title=Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH) {{!}} Center on Extremism |url=https://extremismterms.adl.org/glossary/committee-open-debate-holocaust-codoh |access-date=February 13, 2023 |work=extremismterms.adl.org |publisher=] |date=2022 |language=en |archive-date=February 13, 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230213142838/https://extremismterms.adl.org/glossary/committee-open-debate-holocaust-codoh |url-status=live}}</ref> conferences, and professional organizations (e.g. '']'', ], ]).<ref name="HolocaustEncyclopedia_2001">{{cite book |last1=Laqueur |first1=Walter |last2=Baumel-Schwartz |first2=Judith Tydor |title=The Holocaust encyclopedia |date=2001 |location=New Haven |publisher=] |isbn=9780300084320 |pages=300 |quote="Holocaust revisionism enlists a wide variety of strategies and assumes many different forms adapted to the history and political cultures in which it operates. It has nonetheless developed into an international movement with its own networks, gatherings, public forums, propaganda, and pseudo-scientific journal"}}</ref><ref name="NESS_HD">{{cite news |last1=Novella |first1=Steven |title=Holocaust Denial |url=https://theness.com/index.php/holocaust-denial |access-date=February 13, 2023 |work=] |date=July 17, 2009 |quote="Those who deny that there ever was a Nazi genocide of Jews during World War II have used a similar style of arguing. Deniers have subjugated science, in this case historical science, to a political agenda, creating a pseudoscience called Holocaust Denial.... Inventing and promoting pseudoscience : Leuchter claims that the gas chamber was not really used against human beings.... Error #1: Leuchter estimates that a certain crematorium at Auschwitz could process only 156 bodies. He was apparently unaware of an SS report which confirms that the same building (which he describes) destroyed 4756 bodies in the course of a single 24 hour period. Error #2: He notes that the cyanide residue from one gas chamber wall is less than the residue from a wall inside a known delousing chamber. Leuchter claims that this is the most conclusive evidence that a "gas chamber" could not have been used for killing humans. His argument is based on the assumption that humans require much more cyanide than lice to die – an assumption that, as it happens, is wrong. In fact, lice require about a 50 times higher dose of cyanide gas than humans in order to die." |archive-date=February 12, 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230212144941/https://theness.com/index.php/holocaust-denial/ |url-status=live}}</ref><ref name="Whine2008">{{cite journal |last1=Whine |first1=Michael |title=Expanding Holocaust Denial and Legislation Against It |journal=Jewish Political Studies Review |date=2008 |volume=20 |issue=1/2 |pages=57–77 |jstor=25834777 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/25834777 |access-date=February 13, 2023 |issn=0792-335X |quote="Holocaust deniers, and the media they use, are changing as a consequence of international political developments... New forms of this propaganda encompassed pseudoscientific books and papers; crude denial material, usually published in leaflet form by small neo-Nazi groups; and what can be called political denial, which includes the most recent and increasingly potent source, namely, Islamists as well as Internet and television transmissions within some Muslim states. Many of the pseudoscientific publications available internationally were published under cover of fictitious academic publishing houses. These works included, for example, ''The Hoax of the Twentieth Century'' by Arthur Butz, ''Did Six Million Really Die?'' by Richard Harwood, and ''The Leuchter Report''. Historians challenged these and rebutted their false theses."}}</ref> | |||
Much of the controversy surrounding the claims of Holocaust deniers centers on the methods used to present arguments that the Holocaust allegedly ''never happened as commonly accepted''. Numerous accounts have been given by Holocaust deniers (including evidence presented in court cases) of claimed "facts" and "evidence"; however, independent research has shown these claims to be based upon flawed research, biased statements, or even deliberately falsified evidence. Opponents of Holocaust denial have compiled detailed accounts of numerous instances where this evidence has been altered or manufactured (see ] and ]). Evidence presented by Holocaust deniers has consistently failed to stand up to scrutiny in courts of law (see ]), further calling into question its veracity.{{Fact|date=June 2007}} | |||
===Maurice Bardèche=== | |||
Since the aim of Holocaust deniers is to prove that the Holocaust did not happen, there has been substantial debate on the right way to respond to deniers. Three schools of thought have evolved to deal with them. | |||
The first person to openly write after the end of World War II that he doubted the reality of the Holocaust was French journalist ] in his 1948 book {{lang|fr|Nuremberg ou la Terre promise}} ("Nuremberg or the Promised Land").<ref name=":2">{{harvnb|Igounet|2000|p=31}}: "{{lang|fr|Pour la première fois, depuis la fin de la guerre, un homme écrit qu'il doute ouvertement de l'existence des camps de la mort}}" </ref> Viewed as "the father-figure of Holocaust denial", Bardèche introduced in his works many aspects of ] and Holocaust denial ] and ideological structures; his work is deemed influential in regenerating post-war European far-right ideas at a time of identity crisis in the 1950–1960s.{{sfn|Algazy|1984|pp=208–209}}{{sfn|Barnes|2002|p=}}{{sfn|Bar-On|2016|p=}} His arguments formed the basis of numerous works of Holocaust denial that followed: "testimonies are not reliable, essentially coming from the mouth of Jews and communists", "atrocities committed in camps were the work of deportees ]]", "disorganization occurred in Nazi camps following the first German defeats", "the high mortality is due to the 'weakening' of prisoners and epidemics", "only lice were gassed in ]", etc.{{sfn|Igounet|2000|p=}}{{page needed|date=August 2024}} | |||
===Harry Elmer Barnes=== | |||
First, many scholars worry that to debate Holocaust denial will legitimatize it as a field of inquiry. This group thus refuses to recognize the veracity of denial scholarship.<ref>Wilhelm Heitmeyer and John Hagan, International Handbook of Violence Research, Springer: 2003</ref> | |||
], at one time a mainstream American historian, assumed a Holocaust-denial stance in his later years. Between ] and ], Barnes was an ] writer and a leader of the ] movement. Starting in 1924, Barnes worked closely with the ], a German government-funded think tank whose sole purpose was to disseminate the official government position that Germany was the victim of Allied aggression in 1914 and that the ] was morally invalid.{{sfn|Herwig|1987|pp=22–23 & 26}} Headed by Major Alfred von Wegerer, a {{lang|de|]}} activist, the organization portrayed itself as a scholarly society, but historians later described it as "a clearinghouse for officially desirable views on the outbreak of the war."{{sfn|Herwig|1987|pp=21–23 & 26}} | |||
Following World War II, Barnes became convinced that allegations made against Germany and ], including the Holocaust, were wartime propaganda that had been used to justify the United States' involvement in World War II. Barnes claimed that there were two false claims made about World War II, namely that Germany started the war in 1939, and the Holocaust, which Barnes claimed did not happen.{{sfn|Lipstadt|1993|p=75}} | |||
A second group of scholars, typified by historian ], have tried to raise awareness of the methods and motivations of Holocaust denial, while trying not to legitimize the deniers themselves. Lipstadt explained her goals: | |||
<blockquote>"We need not waste time or effort answering the deniers' contentions. It would be never-ending to respond to arguments posed by those who freely falsify findings, quote out of context and simply dismiss reams of testimony. Unlike true scholars, they have little, if any, respect for data or evidence. Their commitment is to an ideology and their 'findings' are shaped to support it."<ref>Deborah Lipstadt, 1992 interview with Ken Stern of the American Jewish Committee</ref></blockquote> | |||
In his 1962 pamphlet, ''Revisionism and Brainwashing'', Barnes claimed that there was a "lack of any serious opposition or concerted challenge to the atrocity stories and other modes of defamation of German national character and conduct".{{sfn|Lipstadt|1993|pp=73-74}} Barnes argued that there was "a failure to point out the atrocities of the Allies were more brutal, painful, mortal and numerous than the most extreme allegations made against the Germans".{{sfn|Lipstadt|1993|p=74}} He claimed that in order to justify the "horrors and evils of the Second World War", the Allies made the Nazis the "scapegoat" for their own misdeeds.{{sfn|Lipstadt|1993|p=75}} | |||
A third group, typified by the ], responds by confronting Holocaust denial head-on. They address the arguments and claims made by Holocaust denial groups by pointing out the errors of their evidence.<ref>Nizkor's approach: | |||
*"His Nizkor Project (which means "we will remember"), has compiled the largest collection of Holocaust-related materials that can be found on the Internet—literally thousands of documents. Its purpose is to offer point-by-point refutation of materials on the Holocaust denial/revisionist and anti-Semitic Web sites." Robert L. Hilliard & Michael C. Keith. ''Waves of Rancor: tuning in the radical right'', M.E. Sharpe, 1999, ISBN 0765601311, p. 250. | |||
*"A contrasting approach to the criminal justice one is that of Ken McVay, who runs the privately operated Nizkor Project's web site, which is used to challenge Holocaust deniers and hate propagandists on the internet. He links Holocaust denial and hate sites directly with his site and asks the webmasters of those sites to link their sites with his. A committed free speech activist, McVay does not agree with the criminal justice approach, but prefers to engage hate propagandists directly and to counter their propaganda with factual explanations." Daniel Wolfish & Gordon S. Smith. ''Who Is Afraid of the State?: Canada in a World of Multiple Centres of Power'', University of Toronto Press, 2001, ISBN 0802083889, p. 108.</ref> | |||
Barnes cited the French Holocaust denier ], whom Barnes called a "distinguished French historian" who had exposed the "exaggerations of the atrocity stories".{{sfn|Lipstadt|1993|p=74}} In a 1964 article, "Zionist Fraud", published in the '']'', Barnes wrote: "The courageous author lays the chief blame for misrepresentation on those whom we must call the swindlers of the crematoria, the Israeli politicians who derive billions of marks from nonexistent, mythical and imaginary cadavers, whose numbers have been reckoned in an unusually distorted and dishonest manner."{{sfn|Lipstadt|1993|p=74}} Using Rassinier as his source, Barnes claimed that Germany was the victim of aggression in both 1914 and 1939 and that reports of the Holocaust were propaganda to justify a war of aggression against Germany.{{sfn|Lipstadt|1993|p=74}} | |||
== History and development == | |||
===Early examples=== | |||
The first Holocaust deniers were the Nazis themselves. Historians have documented evidence that ] instructed his camp commandants to destroy records, crematoria and other signs of mass extermination, as Germany's defeat became imminent and the Nazi leaders realized they would most likely be captured and brought to trial. Following the end of World War II, many of the former leaders of the ] left Germany and began using their ] skills to defend their actions (or, their critics contended, to rewrite history). Denial materials began to appear shortly after the war.<ref>Martin Perry, Anti-Semitism, Palgrave: 2002</ref> | |||
===Harry Elmer Barnes=== | |||
] was at one time a mainstream historian with liberal credentials; he assumed a Holocaust-denial stance in the later years of his life. Between ] and World War II, Barnes became well known as an ] writer and a leader in the historical revisionism movement. Following World War II, he became convinced that allegations made against Germany and Japan, including the holocaust, was wartime propaganda used to justify U.S. involvement in WWII. | |||
===Beginnings of modern denialism=== | |||
Barnes' anti-war and mainstream historical revisionist writings are still held in high regard by some ]. Following the example of Barnes, a few other early libertarian writers also concerned with anti-war historical revisionism began to take a Holocaust-denial stance, including ]. Most libertarians, however — even those who otherwise hold Barnes' writings in high regard — reject his Holocaust denial.<ref>Phyllis B Gerstenfeld, Diana R Grant, Crimes of Hate. Sage Press, 2003, p 191</ref> Barnes' name has since been appropriated by some modern Holocaust deniers in an attempt to lend credibility to their cause, most notably ]. | |||
In 1961, a protégé of Barnes, ], published {{lang|de|Der erzwungene Krieg}} (''The Forced War'') in West Germany, which claimed that Germany had been the victim of an Anglo-Polish conspiracy in 1939. Though ''Der erzwungene Krieg'' was primarily concerned with the origins of World War II, it also down-played or justified the effects of Nazi ] measures in the pre-1939 period.{{sfn|Lipstadt|1993|p=71}} For example, Hoggan justified the huge one billion ] fine imposed on the entire Jewish community in Germany after the 1938 {{lang|de|]}} as a reasonable measure to prevent what he called "Jewish profiteering" at the expense of German insurance companies and alleged that no Jews were killed in the ''Kristallnacht'' (in fact, 91 German Jews were murdered in the {{lang|de|Kristallnacht}}).{{sfn|Lipstadt|1993|p=71}} Subsequently, Hoggan explicitly denied the Holocaust in 1969 in a book entitled ''The Myth of the Six Million'', which was published by the ], a small Los Angeles publisher specializing in antisemitic literature.<ref>{{cite book |last=Gottfired |first=Ted |title=Deniers Of The Holocaust: Who They Are, What They Do, Why They Do It |publisher=Twenty-First Century Books |date=2001 |page=29}}</ref> | |||
In 1964, ] published ''The Drama of the European Jews''. Rassinier was himself a concentration camp survivor (he was held in ] for having helped French Jews escape the Nazis), and modern-day deniers continue to cite his works as scholarly research that questions the accepted facts of the Holocaust. Critics argued that Rassinier did not cite evidence for his claims and ignored information that contradicted his assertions; he nevertheless remains influential in Holocaust denial circles for being one of the first deniers to propose that a vast Zionist/Allied/Soviet conspiracy faked the Holocaust, a theme that would be picked up in later years by other authors.<ref>{{cite book |first=Deborah E. |last=Lipstadt |author-link=Deborah Lipstadt |title=History on Trial |publisher=Harcourt |date=2005 |isbn=0-06-059376-8}}</ref>{{page needed|date=June 2020}} | |||
===The beginnings of the modern denial movement=== | |||
]: Nazi salute and Holocaust denial]] | |||
], a ] medieval English literature professor, is considered the first major mainstream American holocaust denier.<ref>{{cite book |last=Knight |first=Peter |title=Conspiracy Theories in American History: An Encyclopedia |volume=1 |year=2003 |publisher=] |isbn=978-1576078129 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=qMIDrggs8TsC&q=%22Austin%20App%22%20holocaust&pg=PA322 |page=322 |access-date=March 20, 2021 |archive-date=July 5, 2024 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240705094705/https://books.google.com/books?id=qMIDrggs8TsC&q=%22Austin%20App%22%20holocaust&pg=PA322 |url-status=live}}</ref><ref name="Atkins, Stephen E. 2009 pp. 153">{{cite book |last=Atkins |first=Stephen E. |year=2009 |title=Austin J. App and Holocaust Denial. Holocaust denial as an international movement |location=Westport, CT |publisher=Praeger |pages=153–155 |isbn=978-0-313-34539-5}}</ref> App defended the Germans and Nazi Germany during World War II. He published numerous articles, letters, and books on Holocaust denial, quickly building a loyal following. App's work inspired the ], a California center founded in 1978 whose sole task is the denial of the Holocaust.<ref>{{cite book |first1=Carlos C. |last1=Huerta |first2=Dafna |last2=Shiffman-Huerta |chapter=Holocaust Denial Literature: Its Place in Teaching the Holocaust |editor1-first=Rochelle L. |editor1-last=Millen |title=New Perspectives on the Holocaust: A Guide for Teachers and Scholars |publisher=] |date=1996 |isbn=0-8147-5540-2 |page=189}}</ref> | |||
A prominent early Holocaust denier was the American historian ], whose 1961 book ''Der Erzwungene Krieg'' (''The Forced War''), though primarily concerned with the origins of ], also down-played or justified the effects of Nazi ] measures in the pre-1939 period. Subsequently, Hoggan wrote one of the first books denying the Holocaust in 1969 entitled ''The Myth of the Six Million'', which was published by the ], a small Los Angeles publisher specializing in anti-Semitic literature.<ref>Gottfired, Ted: ''Deniers Of The Holocaust: Who They Are, What They Do, Why They Do It'' (Twenty-First Century Books, 2001). Page 29</ref> Hoggan became one of the early stars of the Holocaust denial movement, because he had a number of university professorships. | |||
The publication of ]'s '']: The case against the presumed extermination of European Jewry'' in 1976; and ]'s '']'' in 1977 brought other similarly inclined individuals into the fold.{{sfn|Lipstadt|1993|p=}}{{page needed|date=June 2020}} Butz was a tenured associate professor of electrical engineering at ]. In December 1978 and January 1979, ], a French professor of literature at the ], wrote two letters to '']'' claiming that the ] used by the Nazis to exterminate the Jews did not exist. A colleague of Faurisson, ], who initially shared Faurisson's views, later became convinced of the Holocaust's evidence while investigating documents at ] in 1979. He published his conclusions along with much of the underlying evidence in his 1989 book, ''Auschwitz: Technique and operation of the gas chambers''.<ref>{{cite book |last=Pressac |first=Jean-Claude |title=Auschwitz: Technique and operation of the gas chambers |url=http://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/pressac/technique-and-operation/ |via=Pratique de l'Histoire et Dévoiements Négationnistes |access-date=January 31, 2006 |year=1989 |publisher=The Beate Klarsfeld Foundation |location=New York |archive-date=January 28, 2017 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170128063557/http://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/pressac/technique-and-operation/ |url-status=live}}</ref> | |||
The next denier was ] historian ] who published ''The Drama of the European Jews'' in 1964. Rassinier was himself a concentration camp survivor (imprisoned in ] for his having helped French Jews escape the Nazis), and modern-day revisionists continue to cite his works as scholarly research that questions the accepted facts of the Holocaust. Mainstream historians point out that since Buchenwald was not a mass extermination camp, it would have been impossible for him to witness any gassings. Critics argued that Rassinier did not cite evidence for his claims and ignored information that contradicted his assertions; he nevertheless remains influential in Holocaust denial circles for being one of the first deniers to propose that a vast Zionist/Allied/Soviet conspiracy faked the Holocaust, a theme that would be picked up in later years by other authors.<ref>Deborah E. Lipstadt, ''History on Trial'', Harcourt:2005 </ref> | |||
], the former president of Northwestern University, has described Arthur Butz's view of the Holocaust as an "embarrassment to Northwestern".<ref name="bienen">{{cite web |url=http://www.northwestern.edu/president/arthurbutz.html |title=Message from President Bienen, Northwestern University |last=Bienen |first=Henry S. |date=February 6, 2006 |publisher=] |access-date=September 20, 2009 |archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20070501100921/http://www.northwestern.edu/president/arthurbutz.html |archive-date= May 1, 2007}}</ref> In 2006, sixty of Butz's colleagues from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science faculty signed a censure describing Butz's Holocaust denial as "an affront to our humanity and our standards as scholars".<ref name="tdn">{{cite news |url=http://dailynorthwestern.com/2006/02/16/archive-manual/students-faculty-oppose-butz-with-petitions/ |title=Students, faculty oppose Butz with petitions |last=Elizabeth |first=Campbell |date=February 16, 2006 |newspaper=The Daily Northwestern |access-date=May 17, 2012 |archive-date=January 16, 2014 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140116074722/http://dailynorthwestern.com/2006/02/16/archive-manual/students-faculty-oppose-butz-with-petitions/ |url-status=live}}</ref> The letter also called for Butz to "leave our Department and our University and stop trading on our reputation for academic excellence".{{R|tdn}} | |||
The Holocaust denial movement further grew with the publication of ]'s '']: The case against the presumed extermination of European Jewry'' in 1976. This book brought other similarly inclined individuals into the fold.<ref>Deborah Lipstadt, ''Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory'' 1994</ref> In December 1978 and January 1979, ], a ] ] of literature at the ], published two letters in '']'' claiming that the ] used by the ]s to exterminate the ]s did not exist. A colleague of Faurisson, ], who was initially a Holocaust denier like Faurisson, later became convinced of the Holocaust's evidence while investigating documents at ] in 1979. He published his conclusions along with much of the underlying evidence in his 1989 book, ''Auschwitz: Technique and operation of the gas chambers''.<ref> | |||
{{cite book | |||
| last = Pressac | |||
| first = Jean-Claude | |||
| title = Auschwitz: Technique and operation of the gas chambers | |||
| url = http://www.holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/pressac/technique-and-operation/ | |||
| accessdate = 2006-01-31 | |||
| year = 1989 | |||
| publisher = The Beate Klarsfeld Foundation | |||
| location = New York | |||
| language = English | |||
| isbn = | |||
}} | |||
</ref> | |||
===Institute for Historical Review=== | ===Institute for Historical Review=== | ||
In |
In 1978 the American ] activist ] founded the ] (IHR), an organization dedicated to publicly challenging the commonly accepted history of the Holocaust.<ref name="TooCloseForComfort">{{cite book |first1=Chip |last1=Berlet |first2=Matthew J. |last2=Lyons |title=Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort |location=New York |publisher=] |date=2000 |page=189}}</ref> The IHR's founding was inspired by ], a ] professor of medieval English literature and considered the first major American holocaust denier.{{R|Atkins, Stephen E. 2009 pp. 153}} The IHR sought from the beginning to establish itself within the broad tradition of historical revisionism, by soliciting token supporters who were not from a ] background such as ] and ], and by promoting the writings of French socialist Paul Rassinier and American anti-war historian Harry Elmer Barnes, in an attempt to show that Holocaust denial had a base of support beyond neo-Nazis. The IHR republished most of Barnes's writings, which had been out of print since his death. While it included articles on other topics and sold books by mainstream historians, the majority of material published and distributed by IHR was devoted to questioning the facts surrounding the Holocaust.<ref>{{cite book |first=Richard J. |last=Evans |title=Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial |publisher=] |date=2002 |isbn=0-465-02153-0}}</ref>{{page needed|date=June 2020}} | ||
In 1980, the IHR promised a $50,000 reward to anyone who could prove that Jews were gassed at Auschwitz. ] wrote a ]s of the '']'' and others including '']''. The IHR wrote back, offering him $50,000 for proof that Jews were, in fact, gassed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Mermelstein, in turn, submitted a notarized account of his internment at Auschwitz and how he witnessed Nazi guards ushering his mother and two sisters and others towards (as he learned later) gas chamber number five. Despite this, the IHR refused to pay the reward. Represented by public interest attorney ], Mermelstein subsequently sued the IHR in the ] for ], ], ], ], ], and ]. On October 9, 1981, both parties in the Mermelstein case filed motions for ] in consideration of which Judge Thomas T. Johnson of the ] took "] of the fact that Jews were gassed to death at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Poland during the summer of 1944,"<ref name="NYT">{{cite news |title=California Judge Rules Holocaust Did Happen |date=October 10, 1981 |page=A26 |newspaper=] |agency=] |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1981/10/10/us/california-judge-rules-holocaust-did-happen.html |access-date=November 20, 2010 |archive-date=October 19, 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181019142015/https://www.nytimes.com/1981/10/10/us/california-judge-rules-holocaust-did-happen.html |url-status=live}}</ref><ref name="order">{{cite web |url=http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/people/m/mermelstein.mel/ftp.py?people/m/mermelstein.mel//mermelstein.order.072285 |title=Mel Mermelstein v. Institute for Historical Review Judgment and Statement of Record |access-date=November 20, 2010 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110717102709/http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/people/m/mermelstein.mel/ftp.py?people%2Fm%2Fmermelstein.mel%2F%2Fmermelstein.order.072285 |archive-date=July 17, 2011 |url-status=dead}}</ref> judicial notice meaning that the court treated the gas chambers as common knowledge, and therefore did not require evidence that the gas chambers existed. On August 5, 1985, Judge Robert A. Wenke entered a judgment based upon the ] for Entry of Judgment agreed upon by the parties on July 22, 1985. The judgment required IHR and other defendants to pay $90,000 to Mermelstein and to issue a letter of apology to "Mr. Mel Mermelstein, a ] of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Buchenwald, and all other survivors of Auschwitz" for "pain, anguish and suffering" caused to them.{{R|order}} | |||
The IHR became one of the most important organizations devoted to Holocaust denial. In recent years the IHR underwent an internal power struggle which ousted Willis Carto. Under the subsequent leadership of ], the IHR has taken on an even more explicit neo-Nazi orientation than it had under Carto. Carto went on to found the '']'' magazine after his ousting from IHR, a magazine which is also devoted to Holocaust denial. | |||
In the "About the IHR" statement on their website, the IHR states, "The IHR does not 'deny' the Holocaust. Indeed, the IHR as such has no 'position' on any specific event...."<ref>{{cite web |url=http://ihr.org/main/about.shtml|title=About the IHR: Our Mission and Record |date=May 2018 |work=Institute for Historical Review |access-date=July 9, 2011 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071013154000/http://ihr.org/main/about.shtml |archive-date=October 13, 2007 |url-status=dead}}</ref> British historian ] wrote that the Institute's acknowledgment "that a relatively small number of Jews were killed" was a means to draw attention away from its primary beliefs, i.e. that the number of victims was not in the millions and that Jews were not systematically murdered in gas chambers.<ref>]. ''Telling Lies About Hitler: The Holocaust, History and the David Irving Trial'', ], 2002, {{ISBN|1-85984-417-0}}, p. 151. Quote: Like many individual Holocaust deniers, the Institute as a body denied that it was involved in Holocaust denial. It called this a 'smear' which was 'completely at variance with the facts' because 'revisionist scholars' such as Faurisson, Butz 'and bestselling British historian David Irving acknowledge that hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed and otherwise perished during the Second World War as a direct and indirect result of the harsh anti-Jewish policies of Germany and its allies'. But the concession that a relatively small number of Jews were killed was routinely used by Holocaust deniers to distract attention from the far more important fact of their refusal to admit that the figure ran into the millions, and that a large proportion of these victims were systematically murdered by gassing as well as by shooting.</ref> | |||
In recent published articles, volunteer organizations monitoring hate groups have stated that Holocaust denial groups, such as the IHR, have been having difficulty finding supporters (and especially financial sponsors) in the United States. As a result, spokespersons for the IHR and other denial groups have been traveling to the ] in an attempt to forge closer ties with extremist groups there. IHR spokespersons have been reported to have met with persons suspected of involvement with ] groups.<ref>, Kevin Coogan, Berkeley CA, USA</ref> | |||
===James Keegstra=== | |||
In an "About the IHR" statement on their website, the IHR states that "The Institute does not 'deny the Holocaust'."<ref>Institute for Historical Review website, "About the IHR" page. Retrieved June 12, 2007.</ref> The IHR journal, however, states: | |||
{{Further|R. v. Keegstra}} | |||
In 1984, ], a Canadian high-school teacher, was charged under the Canadian ] for "promoting hatred against an identifiable group by communicating anti-Semitic statements to his students". During class, he would describe Jews as a people of profound evil who had "created the Holocaust to gain sympathy." He also tested his students in exams on his theories and opinion of Jews.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Elman |first1=Bruce P. |editor1-last=DeCoste |editor1-first=F. C. |editor2-last=Schwartz |editor2-first=Bernard |title=The Holocaust's Ghost: Writings on Art, Politics, Law and Education |date=2000 |publisher=] |isbn=978-0-88864-337-7 |page=316 |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=lLnBSq7YP0gC&pg=PA316 |language=en |chapter=The Belzberg Lecture: Honouring Memory, Doing Justice: Holocaust Denial, Hate Propaganda and Canadian Law |access-date=March 4, 2022 |archive-date=July 5, 2024 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240705094705/https://books.google.com/books?id=lLnBSq7YP0gC&pg=PA316#v=onepage&q&f=false |url-status=live}}</ref> | |||
Keegstra was charged under s 281.2(2) of the ''Criminal Code''{{citation needed|date=June 2020}} (now s 319(2)), which provides that "Every one who, by communicating statements, other than in private conversation, wilfully promotes hatred against any identifiable group" commits a criminal offense.<ref>''Criminal Code'', RSC 1970, c C-34, s 281.2(2); now ''Criminal Code'', RSC 1985, c C-46, s 319(2).</ref> He was convicted at trial before the ]. The court rejected the argument, advanced by Keegstra and his lawyer, ], that promoting hatred is a constitutionally protected freedom of expression as per ]. Keegstra appealed to the ]. That court agreed with Keegstra, and he was acquitted. The Crown then appealed the case to the ], which ruled by a 4–3 majority that promoting hatred could be ] restricted under ]. The Supreme Court restored Keegstra's conviction.<ref>{{cite web |url=https://scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/695/index.do|title=R. v. Keegstra – SCC Cases (Lexum) |website=scc-csc.lexum.com |date=January 2001 |access-date=February 24, 2019 |archive-date=July 10, 2019 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190710021813/https://scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/695/index.do |url-status=live}}</ref> He was fired from his teaching position shortly afterward.<ref>*"The trouble erupted when the teacher's anti-Jewish (and, incidentally, anti-Catholic) views attracted complaints from certain Eckville parents, thereby inviting intervention from the district school superintendent, Robert David, in 1981. A train of events was launched that finally led to Keegstra's dismissal and subsequent indictment." Alan Davies, "The Keegstra Affair", in Alan T. Davies, ''Antisemitism in Canada: History and Interpretation'', Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1992, {{ISBN|0-88920-216-8}}, p. 228. | |||
<blockquote>"There is no dispute over the fact that large numbers of Jews were deported to concentration camps and ghettos, or that many Jews died or were killed during World War II. Revisionist scholars have presented evidence, which "exterminationists" have not been able to refute, showing that there was no German program to exterminate Europe's Jews, and that the estimate of six million Jewish wartime dead is an irresponsible exaggeration. The Holocaust — the alleged extermination of some six million Jews (most of them by gassing) — is a hoax and should be recognized as such by Christians and all informed, honest and truthful men everywhere."<ref>''Journal for Historical Review'', 1993, 13, 5, p. 32</ref></blockquote> | |||
*"Far from arguing that Keegstra had a civil right to continue spreading his dreck at Eckville High, civil libertarians wonder (along with the rest of Canada, we hope) why it took twelve years for the local school board to exercise its appropriate authority and fire him. But at least Keegstra was finally fired, and was finally removed from his position as Mayor of Eckville." John Dixon, {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070926232724/http://www.bccla.org/positions/freespeech/85keegstra.html |date=September 26, 2007 }}, ] Position Paper, 1986. Retrieved June 27, 2007.</ref> | |||
===Zündel trials=== | |||
Commentators and historians have noted the misleading nature of statements by the IHR that they are not Holocaust deniers. ], a senior editor for the Sierra Club Magazine, writes that: | |||
{{See also|Leuchter report}} | |||
<blockquote>"The question appears to turn on IHR's Humpty-Dumpty word game with the word Holocaust. According to Mark Weber, associate editor of the IHR's Journal of Historical Review , "If by the 'Holocaust' you mean the political persecution of Jews, some scattered killings, if you mean a cruel thing that happened, no one denies that. But if one says that the 'Holocaust' means the systematic extermination of six to eight millions Jews in concentration camps, that's what we think there's not evidence for." That is, IHR doesn't deny that the Holocaust happened; they just deny that the word 'Holocaust' means what people customarily use it for."<ref>], '']'', ], 1992, page 4.</ref></blockquote> | |||
The Toronto-based photo retoucher ] operated a small-press called ], which published and distributed Holocaust-denial material such as '']'' by Richard Harwood (a pseudonym of ] – a British neo-Nazi). In 1985, he was tried in '']'' and convicted under a "false news" law and sentenced to 15 months imprisonment by an ] court for "disseminating and publishing material denying the Holocaust".<ref name="Zundelcourt">{{cite court |litigants=R. v. Zundel |vol= |reporter= |opinion= |pinpoint= |court= |date=August 27, 1992 |url=http://scc.lexum.umontreal.ca/en/1992/1992rcs2-731/1992rcs2-731.html |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071012161758/http://scc.lexum.umontreal.ca/en/1992/1992rcs2-731/1992rcs2-731.html |url-status=dead}}</ref> The Holocaust historian ] was a witness for the prosecution at the 1985 trial. Zündel's conviction was overturned in an appeal on a legal technicality, leading to a second trial in 1988, in which he was again convicted. The 1988 trial included, as witnesses for the defense, ], ] and ]. The pseudo-scientific ] was presented as a defense document and was published in Canada in 1988 by Zundel's Samisdat Publishers, and in Britain in 1989 by Irving's Focal Point Publishing. In both of his trials, Zündel was defended by ] and ]. His conviction was overturned in 1992 when the Supreme Court of Canada declared the "false news" law unconstitutional.{{R|Zundelcourt}} | |||
Zündel had a website, web-mastered by his wife Ingrid, which publicized his viewpoints.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.zundelsite.org/ |title=Zundelsite |website=www.zundelsite.org |access-date=June 27, 2007 |archive-date=December 21, 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211221092253/http://www.zundelsite.org/ |url-status=live}}{{title missing|date=May 2022}}</ref> In January 2002, the ] delivered a ruling in a complaint involving his website, in which it was found to be contravening the ]. The court ordered Zündel to cease communicating hate messages. In February 2003, the American ] arrested him in ], US, on an immigration violations matter, and few days later, Zündel was sent back to Canada, where he tried to gain refugee status. Zündel remained in prison until March 1, 2005, when he was deported to Germany and prosecuted for disseminating hate propaganda. On February 15, 2007, Zündel was convicted on 14 counts of incitement under Germany's '']'' law, which bans the incitement of hatred against a portion of the population and given the maximum sentence of five years in prison.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.canada.com/topics/news/world/story.html?id=c61ce061-50b2-42a5-bb2f-a7bbaecccceb&k=32537 |title=German court sentences Ernst Zundel to 5 years in prison for Holocaust denial |agency=The Canadian Press |publisher=canada.com|date=February 15, 2007 |access-date=February 15, 2007 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070929104434/http://www.canada.com/topics/news/world/story.html?id=c61ce061-50b2-42a5-bb2f-a7bbaecccceb&k=32537 |archive-date=September 29, 2007}}</ref> | |||
According to British historian of Germany ]: | |||
<blockquote>"Like many individual Holocaust deniers, the Institute as a body denied that it was involved in Holocaust denial. It called this a 'smear' which was 'completely at variance with the facts' because 'revisionist scholars' such as Faurisson, Butz 'and bestselling British historian David Irving acknowledge that hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed and otherwise perished during the Second World War as a direct and indirect result of the harsh anti-Jewish policies of Germany and its allies'. But the concession that a relatively small number of Jews were killed was routinely used by Holocaust deniers to distract attention from the far more important fact of their refusal to admit that the figure ran into the millions, and that a large proportion of these victims were systematically murdered by gassing as well as by shooting."<ref>]. ''Telling Lies About Hitler: The Holocaust, History and the David Irving Trial'', Verso, 2002, ISBN 1859844170, p. 151.</ref></blockquote> | |||
===Bradley Smith and CODOH=== | ===Bradley Smith and the CODOH=== | ||
In 1987, Bradley R. Smith, a former media director of the Institute for Historical Review,<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.axt.org.uk/antisem/archive/archive2/usa/usa.htm|title=United States of America|date=1998|work=axt.org.uk|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080620114155/http://www.axt.org.uk/antisem/archive/archive2/usa/usa.htm|archive-date=June 20, 2008}}</ref> founded the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH).<ref> {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130115233738/http://www.adl.org/poisoning_web/codoh.asp |date=January 15, 2013 }} '']''. 2001. April 24, 2008.</ref> In the United States, CODOH has repeatedly attempted to place advertisements questioning whether the Holocaust happened, especially in college campus newspapers.<ref> {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130115233745/http://www.adl.org/holocaust/bradley_smith.asp |date=January 15, 2013 }} '']''. 2001. April 24, 2008.</ref> | |||
In 1987, Bradley R. Smith founded a group called the "Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust". He is former media director of the "Institute for Historical Review" which is known to be a clearing house for Holocaust denial propaganda. In the United States, CODOH has repeatedly tried to place newspaper ads questioning whether the Holocaust happened, especially in college campus newspapers. These ads typically cause a stir on each campus, whether or not they are actually run in the campus newspaper. Some newspapers have accepted the ads, some have rejected them. No matter which decision the editors make, most papers run an editorial defending their decision either on ] grounds or on the grounds that Smith's views are repugnant and rightfully kept out of the newspaper. During the early 1990s, CODOH's ad campaign attracted national controversy after many campus newspapers accepted the ads. This action became the subject of editorials in major newspapers such as '']''.{{Fact|date=June 2007}} Since ], CODOH's newspaper ad campaign has fallen into inactivity because most campus papers (with a few exceptions) reject the ads as a matter of course. Attempts to place the ads no longer generate the controversy they once did. Bradley Smith has more recently sought other avenues to promote Holocaust denial with little success. | |||
Bradley Smith took his message to college students—with little success. Smith referred to his tactics as the CODOH campus project. He said, "I don't want to spend time with adults anymore, I want to go to students. They are superficial. They are empty vessels to be filled." "What I wanted to do was I wanted to set forth three or four ideas that students might be interested in, that might cause them to think about things or to have questions about things. And I wanted to make it as simple as possible, and to set it up in a way that could not really be debated."<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/smith_codoh/words.asp?LEARN_Cat=Extremism&LEARN_SubCat=Extremism_in_America&xpicked=2&item=10 |title=Bradley Smith, Holocaust Denial, Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust – Extremism in America |publisher=] |access-date=March 26, 2013 |archive-date=January 15, 2013 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130115233646/http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/smith_codoh/words.asp?LEARN_Cat=Extremism&LEARN_SubCat=Extremism_in_America&xpicked=2&item=10 |url-status=live}}</ref> Holocaust deniers have placed "Full page advertisements in college and university newspapers, including those of ], ], ], and ]. Some of these ads arguing that the Holocaust never happened ran without comment; others generated op-ed pieces by professors and students".<ref>{{cite book |last=Shermar |first=Michael |author2=Alex Grobman |title=Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? |publisher=] |year=2000 |isbn=978-0-520-21612-9 |title-link=Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?}}</ref> On September 8, 2009, student newspaper '']'' ran a paid ad from Bradley R Smith. It was quickly criticized, and the editor issued an apology, saying publishing the ad was a mistake.<ref>{{Cite news |url=http://edition.cnn.com/2009/US/09/09/massachusetts.harvard.holocaust/index.html |title=Harvard Crimson says Holocaust denial ad published by accident |last=Buxbaum |first=Evan |date=September 10, 2009 |work=] |access-date=September 10, 2009 |archive-date=May 12, 2019 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190512200839/http://edition.cnn.com/2009/US/09/09/massachusetts.harvard.holocaust/index.html |url-status=live}}</ref><!-- For the whole paragraph as it falls under ]--> | |||
===James Keegstra=== | |||
{{more|R. v. Keegstra}} | |||
In 1984, ], a Canadian high-school teacher, was charged with denying the Holocaust and making anti-Semitic claims in his classroom as part of the course material. Keegstra and his lawyer, ], argued that the section of the ] (now section 319{2}), is an infringement of the ] (section 9{b}). The case was appealed to the ], where it was decided that the law he was convicted under did infringe on his freedom of expression, but it was a ]. Keegstra was convicted, and fired from his job.<ref> | |||
*. Retrieved June 27, 2007. | |||
*"The trouble erupted when the teacher's anti-Jewish (and, incidentally, anti-Catholic) views attracted complaints from certain Eckville parents, thereby inviting intervention fom the district school superintendent, Robert David, in 1981. A train of events was launched that finally led to Keegstra's dismissal and subsequent indictment." Alan Davies, "The Keegstra Affair", in Alan T. Davies, ''Antisemitism in Canada: History and Interpretation'', Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1992, ISBN 0889202168, p. 228. | |||
*"Far from arguing that Keegstra had a civil right to continue spreading his dreck at Eckville High, civil libertarians wonder (along with the rest of Canada, we hope) why it took twelve years for the local school board to exercise its appropriate authority and fire him. But at least Keegstra was finally fired, and was finally removed from his position as Mayor of Eckville." John Dixon, , ] Position Paper, 1986. Retrieved June 27, 2007.</ref> | |||
=== |
===Ernst Nolte=== | ||
The German philosopher and historian ], starting in the 1980s, advanced a set of theories, which though not denying the Holocaust appeared to flirt with an Italian Holocaust denier, ], as a serious historian.<ref name="Evans, Richard J. page 83">{{cite book |last=Evans |first=Richard J. |author-link=Richard J. Evans |title=In Hitler's Shadow |location=New York |publisher=] |date=1989 |page=83}}</ref> In a letter to the Israeli historian ] of December 8, 1986, Nolte criticized the work of the French Holocaust denier ] on the ground that the Holocaust did occur, but went on to argue that Faurisson's work was motivated by what Nolte claimed were the admirable motives of sympathy towards the Palestinians and opposition to Israel.<ref>Maier, Charles ''The Unmasterable Past'', Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988 page 190.</ref> In his 1987 book {{lang|de|Der europäische Bürgerkrieg}} (''The European Civil War''), Nolte claimed that the intentions of Holocaust deniers are "often honourable", and that some of their claims are "not obviously without foundation".{{R|Evans, Richard J. page 83}}<ref name=LipstadtDenying214>Lipstadt, Deborah ''Denying the Holocaust'', New York: Free Press, 1993 page 214</ref> Nolte himself, though he has never denied the occurrence of the Holocaust, has claimed that the ] of 1942 never happened and that the minutes of the conference were post-war forgeries done by "biased" Jewish historians designed to discredit Germany.{{R|LipstadtDenying214}} | |||
Former ] resident ] operated a small-press publishing house called Samisdat Publishing, which published and distributed Holocaust-denial material such as '']'' by Richard Harwood (a/k/a ] - a British neo-Nazi leader). In ], he was tried and convicted under a "false news" law and sentenced to 15 months imprisonment by an ] court for "disseminating and publishing material denying the Holocaust." Zündel gained considerable notoriety after this conviction, and a number of free-speech activists stepped forward to defend his right to publish his opinion. His conviction was overturned in 1992 when the Supreme Court of Canada declared the "false news" law unconstitutional.{{Fact|date=June 2007}} | |||
The British historian ] has argued that Nolte was operating on the borderlines of Holocaust denial with his implied claim that the "negative myth" of Nazi Germany was created by Jewish historians, his allegations of the domination of Holocaust scholarship by "biased" Jewish historians, and his statements that one should withhold judgment on Holocaust deniers, whom Nolte takes considerable pains to stress are not exclusively Germans or fascists.<ref name="Kershaw, Ian page 176">Kershaw, Ian ''The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretations'', London: Arnold, 1989 page 176</ref> In Kershaw's opinion, Nolte is attempting to imply that perhaps Holocaust deniers are on to something.{{R|Kershaw, Ian page 176}} | |||
Zündel has a Website, web-mastered by his wife ], which publicizes his viewpoints.<ref> Accessed 6/27/07</ref> In January 2002, the ] delivered a ruling in a complaint involving his website, in which it was found to be contravening the ]. The court ordered Zündel to cease communicating hate messages. In February 2003, the American ] arrested him in ], USA, on an immigration violations matter, and few days later, Zündel was sent back to Canada, where he tried to gain refugee status. Zündel remained in prison until ], ], when he was deported to ] and prosecuted for disseminating hate propaganda. On ] ] Zündel was convicted on 14 counts of incitement under Germany's ] law, which bans the incitement of hatred against a minority of the population, and given the maximum sentence of five years in prison.<ref>{{web cite|url=http://www.canada.com/topics/news/world/story.html?id=c61ce061-50b2-42a5-bb2f-a7bbaecccceb&k=32537 | title = German court sentences Ernst Zundel to 5 years in prison for Holocaust denial | author = Canadian Press | publisher = canada.com | date = February 15, 2007 | accessdate = 2007-02-15}}</ref> | |||
In a 1990 interview, Nolte implied that there was something to the ]: "If the revisionists and Leuchter among them have made it clear to the public that even 'Auschwitz' must be an object of scientific inquiry and controversy then they should be given credit for this. Even if it finally turned out that the number of victims was even greater and the procedures were even more horrific than has been assumed until now."<ref>{{cite book |last=Brinks |first=Jan Hermann |title=Children of a New Fatherland |location=London |publisher=] |date=2000 |page=108}}</ref> In his 1993 book {{lang|de|Streitpunkte}} (''Points of Contention''), Nolte praised the work of Holocaust deniers as superior to "mainstream scholars".<ref name="Wistrich, Robert S pages 293-301">Wistrich, Robert S. "Holocaust Denial" pages 293–301 from ''The Holocaust Encyclopedia'' edited by Walter Laqueur, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001 page 299</ref> Nolte wrote that "radical revisionists have presented research which, if one is familiar with the source material and the critique of the sources, is probably superior to that of the established historians of Germany".{{R|Wistrich, Robert S pages 293-301}}<ref>Lukacs, John ''The Hitler of History'' New York: Vintage Books, 1997, 1998 page 233.</ref> In a 1994 interview with {{lang|de|]}} magazine, Nolte stated "I cannot rule out the importance of the investigation of the gas chambers in which they looked for remnants of the ", and that "'Of course, I am against revisionists, but Fred Leuchter's 'study' of the Nazi gas ovens has to be given attention because one has to stay open to 'other' ideas."<ref>{{cite web |last=Charny |first=Israel |author-link=Israel Charny |title=The Psychological Satisfaction of Denials of the Holocaust or Other Genocides by Non-Extremists or Bigots, and Even by Known Scholars |publisher=Idea Journal |date=July 17, 2001 |url=http://www.ideajournal.com/articles.php?id=27 |access-date=August 7, 2015 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071224203627/http://www.ideajournal.com/articles.php?id=27 |archive-date=December 24, 2007 |url-status=dead}}</ref> | |||
=== Ken McVay and ''alt.revisionism'' === | |||
In the mid-1990s, the popularity of the ] brought new international exposure to many organizations, including Holocaust deniers and other groups. A number of authority figures stated publicly that the Internet allowed ] to introduce their messages to a widespread audience, and it was feared that Holocaust denial would gain in popularity as a result. However, this was not the case, largely due to the efforts of ] and the participants in the ] newsgroup '']''. | |||
The British historian ] in his 1989 book ''In Hitler's Shadow'' expressed the view that Nolte's reputation as a scholar was in ruins as a result of these and other controversial statements on his part.<ref>Evans, Richard ''In Hitler's Shadow'', New York, NY: Pantheon, 1989 page 123</ref> The American historian ] in a 2003 interview stated: {{blockquote|Historians such as the German Ernst Nolte are, in some ways, even more dangerous than the deniers. Nolte is an anti-Semite of the first order, who attempts to rehabilitate Hitler by saying that he was no worse than Stalin; but he is careful not to deny the Holocaust. Holocaust-deniers make Nolte's life more comfortable. They have, with their radical argumentation, pulled the center a little more to their side. Consequently, a less radical extremist, such as Nolte, finds himself closer to the middle ground, which makes him more dangerous.<ref>{{cite web |last=Gerstenfeld |first=Manfred |title=Denial of the Holocaust and Immoral Equivalence An Interview with Deborah Lipstadt |publisher=Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs |date=August 1, 2003 |url=http://www.jcpa.org/phas/phas-11.htm |access-date=June 21, 2007 |archive-date=August 16, 2007 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070816010915/http://www.jcpa.org/phas/phas-11.htm |url-status=live}}</ref>}} | |||
McVay, a Canadian resident, was disturbed by the efforts of organizations like the ] to suppress the speech of the Holocaust deniers. On ''alt.revisionism'' he began a campaign of "truth, fact, and evidence," working with other participants on the newsgroup to uncover factual information about the Holocaust and counter the arguments of the deniers by proving them to be based upon misleading evidence, false statements, and outright lies. He founded the ] to expose the activities of the Holocaust deniers, who responded to McVay with personal attacks and slander. McVay received a number of death threats, and the Nizkor Project soon became the number-one online foe of many Holocaust deniers.{{Fact|date=June 2007}} | |||
===Mayer controversy=== | |||
] | |||
In 1988, the American historian ] published a book entitled ''Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?'', which did not explicitly deny the Holocaust, but according to ] lent support to Holocaust denial by stating that most people who died at ] were the victims of "natural causes" such as disease, not gassing.<ref>Dawidowicz, Lucy ''What Is The Use of Jewish History?'', New York: Schocken Books, 1992 pages 129–130</ref> Dawidowicz argued that Mayer's statements about Auschwitz were "a breathtaking assertion".<ref>Dawidowicz, Lucy ''What Is The Use of Jewish History?'', New York: Schocken Books, 1992 page 130</ref> Holocaust historian ] has written that Mayer's book is as close as a mainstream historian has ever come to supporting Holocaust denial.<ref name="Pelt pages 47-48">Pelt, Robert Jan van ''The Case for Auschwitz'', Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002 pages 47–48</ref> Holocaust deniers such as ] have often cited Mayer's book as one reason for embracing Holocaust denial.{{R|Pelt pages 47-48}} Though Mayer has been often condemned for his statement about the reasons for the Auschwitz death toll, his book does not deny the use of gas chambers at Auschwitz, as Holocaust deniers often claim.<ref>{{cite news |last=Stein |first=Michael |title=The Mayer Gambit |newspaper=Nizkor Project |date=October 2, 2008 |url=http://www.nizkor.org/features/techniques-of-denial/mayer-01.html |access-date=June 4, 2009 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090502170033/http://www.nizkor.org/features/techniques-of-denial/mayer-01.html |archive-date=May 2, 2009 |url-status=dead}}</ref> | |||
Some mainstream Holocaust historians have labeled Mayer a denier. The Israeli historian ] wrote that Mayer "popularizes the nonsense that the Nazis saw in Marxism and Bolshevism their main enemy, and the Jews unfortunately got caught up in this; when he links the destruction of the Jews to the ups and downs of German warfare in the Soviet Union, in a book that is so cocksure of itself that it does not need a proper scientific apparatus, he is really engaging in a much more subtle form of Holocaust denial".<ref>Bauer, Yehuda "A Past That Will Not Away" pages 12–22 from ''The Holocaust and History'' edited by Michael Berenbaum and Abrahm Peck, Bloomington: ], 1998 page 15.</ref> | |||
=== David Irving and the Lipstadt libel case=== | |||
In 1998, the British author<ref name="DI_author">David Irving not a historian: | |||
* "In 1969, after David Irving's support for Rolf Hochhuth, the German playwright who accused Winston Churchill of murdering the Polish wartime leader General Sikorski, The Daily Telegraph issued a memo to all its correspondents. 'It is incorrect,' it said, 'to describe David Irving as a historian. In future we should describe him as an author.'" Ingram, Richard. , '']'', ] 2006. | |||
*"It may seem an absurd semantic dispute to deny the appellation of ‘historian’ to someone who has written two dozen books or more about historical subjects. But if we mean by historian someone who is concerned to discover the truth about the past, and to give as accurate a representation of it as possible, then Irving is not a historian. Those in the know, indeed, are accustomed to avoid the term altogether when referring to him and use some circumlocution such as ‘historical writer’ instead. Irving is essentially an ideologue who uses history for his own political purposes; he is not primarily concerned with discovering and interpreting what happened in the past, he is concerned merely to give a selective and tendentious account of it in order to further his own ideological ends in the present. The true historian’s primary concern, however, is with the past. That is why, in the end, Irving is not a historian." Irving vs. (1) Lipstadt and (2) Penguin Books, ] FBA, Professor of Modern History, ]], 2000, Chapter 6. | |||
*"State prosecutor Michael Klackl said: 'He's not a historian, he's a falsifier of history.'" Traynor, Ian. , '']'', ], ]. | |||
*"...Irving has never examined and interpreted facts for the simple reason that he is not a historian. He twists or suppresses evidence to fit a foregone conclusion -- the opposite of what any reputable historian does." Taylor, Charles. , '']'', ], 2001. Retrieved ], 2007. | |||
</ref> ] filed suit against American author ] and her publisher ], claiming that Lipstadt had ]ed him in her book ''Denying the Holocaust''. The statements made by Lipstadt included the accusation that Irving deliberately twisted and misrepresented evidence to conform to his ideological viewpoint. Under English libel law, which seeks primarily to protect the reputation of an individual, Lipstadt and her publisher bore the full burden of demonstrating that they had not shown "reckless disregard" for the truth (as would be required in an American courtroom), and also that the statements made were either true or that there was sufficient reason to believe them so. In other words, under British law, Lipstadt and her publisher had to prove that Irving had denied the Holocaust, and that the Holocaust had, in fact, happened.<ref>"In an American court Irving would have to prove that what Lipstadt wrote about him was false; he also would have to prove that she knew it was false. In Britain the libel laws favor the person suing. Here it would be up to Lipstadt to prove that what she wrote was true. And since Irving claimed that he couldn't be described as a 'Holocaust denier' because the gas chambers themselves were a hoax, Lipstadt and her lawyers were, in effect, forced to prove the reality of the Holocaust." D. D. Guttenplan, ''The Holocaust on Trial'', W. W. Norton & Company, 2001, ISBN 0393322920, p. 3.</ref> | |||
Defenders of Mayer argue that his statement that "Sources for the study of the gas chambers are at once rare and unreliable" has been taken out of context, particularly by Holocaust deniers.<ref>Shermer, Michael & Grobman, Alex ''Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?'', Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002 page 126.</ref> ] and ] observe that the paragraph from which the statement is taken asserts that the SS destroyed the majority of the documentation relating to the operation of the gas chambers in the death camps, which is why Mayer feels that sources for the operation of the gas chambers are "rare" and "unreliable".<ref>Shermer, Michael & Grobman, Alex ''Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?'', Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002 pages 126–127.</ref> | |||
Lipstadt and Penguin hired British lawyer ] and Cambridge historian ] to present her case. Evans spent two years examining Irving's work, and presented evidence of Irving's misrepresentations, including evidence that Irving had knowingly used forged documents as source material. The ] in the case, Mr Justice Gray, was ultimately persuaded by the evidence presented by Evans and others, and delivered a long and decisive verdict in favor of Lipstadt that referred to Irving as a "Holocaust denier" and "right-wing pro-Nazi ]," and confirmed the accusations of Lipstadt and Evans.<ref>Lipstadt, ''History on Trial''</ref> | |||
==False equivalence and effect== | |||
In 2006, Irving pleaded ] to the charge of denying the Holocaust in ], where Holocaust denial is a crime and where an arrest warrant was issued based on speeches he made in 1989. Irving knew that the warrant had been issued and that he was banned from Austria, but chose to come to Austria anyway. After he was arrested, Irving claimed in his plea that he changed his opinions on the Holocaust, ''"I said that then based on my knowledge at the time, but by 1991 when I came across the Eichmann papers, I wasn't saying that anymore and I wouldn't say that now,"'' Irving told the court. ''"The Nazis did murder millions of Jews."'' Upon hearing of Irving's sentence, Lipstadt said, "I am not happy when ] wins, and I don't believe in winning battles via censorship… The way of fighting Holocaust deniers is with history and with truth."<ref>BBC Report , February 20, 2006</ref> | |||
===Denialist focus on Allied war crimes=== | |||
The focus on so-called ] during the war has been a theme in Holocaust denial literature, particularly in countries where outright denial of the Holocaust is illegal.<ref>Stephen E. Atkins, ''Holocaust denial as an international movement'', ABC-CLIO, 2009, pg. 105</ref> According to historian ], the concept of "comparable Allied wrongs", such as the ] and the ],<ref>{{cite web|last=Evans|first=Richard|author-link=Richard J. Evans|title=Dresden and Holocaust Denial|work=David Irving, Hitler and Holocaust Denial: Electronic Edition|year=1996|url=http://hdot.org/en/trial/defense/evans/520e.html|access-date=December 23, 2013|archive-date=December 20, 2013|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131220011057/http://hdot.org/en/trial/defense/evans/520e.html|url-status=dead}}</ref> is at the center of, and a continuously repeated theme of, contemporary ]; she calls the phenomenon "immoral equivalencies".<ref>Lipstadt, Deborah. ''Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory'', Bt Bound, 1999, pg. 41</ref> In 1977, historian ], in a review of ]'s book '']'', maintained that the picture of World War II drawn by Irving was done in a such way to imply moral equivalence between the actions of the Axis and Allied states with both sides equally guilty of terrible crimes, leading to Hitler's "fanatical, destructive will to annihilate" being downgraded to being "no longer an exceptional phenomenon".<ref>Broszat, Martin. "Hitler and the Genesis of the 'Final Solution': An Assessment of David Irving's Theses" pages 390–429 from ''Aspects of the Third Reich'' edited by H.W. Koch page 395.</ref> | |||
===Propaganda=== | |||
==Recent developments and trends== | |||
According to James Najarian,{{who|date=December 2021}} Holocaust deniers working for the ] are not trained in history and "put out sham scholarly articles in the mock-academic publication, the '']''".<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Najarian|first1=James|year=1997|title=Gnawing at History: The Rhetoric of Holocaust Denial|journal=Midwest Quarterly|volume=39|issue=1|page=74|url=http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/9711065531 |access-date=February 9, 2011}}</ref> They appeal to "our objectivity, our sense of fair play, and our distrust of figurative language".<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Najarian|first1=James|year=1997|title=Gnawing at History: The Rhetoric of Holocaust Denial|journal=Midwest Quarterly|volume=39|issue=1|page=76|url=http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/9711065531 |access-date=February 9, 2011}}</ref> Thus, they rely on facts to grab the readers' attention. These facts, however, are strung by what Najarian calls "fabricated decorum" and are re-interpreted for their use. For example, they pay particular attention to inconsistencies in numbers.<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Najarian|first1=James|year=1997|title=Gnawing at History: The Rhetoric of Holocaust Denial|journal=Midwest Quarterly|volume=39|issue=1|page=80|url=http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/9711065531 |access-date=February 9, 2011}}</ref>{{clarify|date=December 2015}}<!-- Which "inconsistencies in numbers" are being referred to here? --> | |||
In France, Holocaust denial has become more prominent in the 1990s as "negationism," though the movement has existed in ultra-left French politics since at least the sixties, led by figures such as ] (who was involved in the bookshop ] during the 1960s). Recently, elements of the extreme far left and extreme far right in France have begun to build on each others' negationist arguments, which often span beyond the Holocaust to cover a range of anti-Semitic views, incorporating Marxist critiques of "Jewish capitalists," attempts to tie the Holocaust to the Biblical massacre of the ], critiques of Zionism and other material fanning what has been called a "conspiratorial Judeo-phobia" designed to legitimize and "banalize" anti-Semitism.<ref>Richard Joseph Golsan, ''Vichy's Afterlife,'' University of Nevada Press, 2003, p 130</ref> | |||
Holocaust denial propaganda in all forms has been shown to influence the audiences that it reaches. In fact, even the well-educated—that is, college graduates and current university students alike—are susceptible to such propaganda when it is presented before them. This stems from the growing disbelief that audiences feel after being exposed to such information, especially since Holocaust witnesses themselves are decreasing in number.<ref>{{cite journal|last=Lasson|first=Kenneth|year=2007|title=Defending Truth: Legal and Psychological Aspects of Holocaust Denial|journal=Current Psychology|volume=26|issue=3–4|page=256|url=http://www.schaler.net/Lasson.pdf|access-date=February 7, 2011|doi=10.1007/s12144-007-9013-7|s2cid=143382566|archive-date=November 5, 2017|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171105193336/http://www.schaler.net/Lasson.pdf|url-status=live| issn=0737-8262 }}</ref> Studies centered on the psychological effects of Holocaust denial propaganda confirm this assertion. Linda M. Yelland and William F. Stone, in particular, show that Denial essays decrease readers' belief in the Holocaust, regardless of their prior Holocaust awareness.<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Yelland|first1=Linda M.|last2=Stone|first2=William F.|year=1996|title=Belief in the Holocaust: Effects of Personality and Propaganda|journal=Political Psychology|volume=17|issue=3|page=559|jstor=3791968|doi=10.2307/3791968}}</ref> | |||
Recently the terms "Holocaust industry" and "Shoah business", have come into vogue among those who believe Jewish leaders use the Holocaust for financial and political gain. The term "Holocaust industry" was used as the title of a 2000 ] by ], a Jew and the son of Holocaust survivors. Finkelstein fully accepts the fact that the Holocaust occurred, but believes that its memory is being dishonestly exploited. However, his phrase has also been used by Holocaust deniers who believe the Holocaust was ''faked'' for the purpose of financial and political gain. | |||
==Middle East== | |||
In ] in 2001, ], the ideologue and vice-president of one of the country's largest political parties, the ] (formerly named ], Flemish Bloc), gave an interview on Dutch TV where he cast doubt over the number of ]s murdered by the ] during the ]. In the same interview he questioned the scale of the Nazis' use of ]s and the authenticity of ] diary. In response to the media assault following the interview, Raes was forced to resign his position but vowed to remain active within the party.<ref>, The Guardian, Friday March 9, 2001.</ref> Three years later, the Vlaams Blok was convicted of racism and chose to disband. Immediately afterwards, it legally reformed under the new name Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest) with the same leaders and the same membership.<ref>, BBC News, 9 November, 2004</ref> | |||
===General=== | |||
], the President of Egypt, told a German newspaper in 1964 that "no person, not even the most simple one, takes seriously the lie of the six million Jews that were murdered ."<ref>{{cite book|last=Satloff|first=Robert|title=Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust's Long Reach Into Arab lands|publisher=PublicAffairs|year=2007|page=163|isbn=9781586485108}}</ref><ref>{{cite book|last=Laqueur|first=Walter|title=The Changing Face of Antisemitism: From Ancient Times to the Present Day|publisher=Oxford University Press|year=2006|page=|isbn=9780195304299|url=https://archive.org/details/changingfaceofan00laqu/page/141}}</ref><ref>{{cite book|author=Robert S. Wistrich|title=Hitler's apocalypse: Jews and the Nazi legacy|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=acBtAAAAMAAJ|date=17 October 1985|publisher=Weidenfeld & Nicolson|isbn=978-0-297-78719-8|page=188|quote="President Nasser of Egypt in a notorious interview with the editor of the neo-Nazi Deutsche Soldaten und National Zeitung, published on 1 May 1964, insisted that No one, not even the simplest man in our country, takes seriously the lie about six million Jews who were murdered"}}</ref> | |||
Denials of the Holocaust have been promoted by various Middle Eastern figures and media. Holocaust denial is sponsored by some Middle Eastern governments, including Iran<ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6637685|title=Iran Further Isolates Itself with 'Holocaust Denial'|date=December 17, 2006|work=NPR.org|access-date=April 4, 2018|archive-date=September 1, 2018|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180901134402/https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6637685|url-status=live}}</ref> and Syria.<ref name="JVLSyria">{{cite web|title=Syrian Holocaust Denial|url=https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/syrian-holocaust-denial|website=jewishvirtuallibrary.org|publisher=Jewish Virtual Library|access-date=August 17, 2020|archive-date=December 17, 2016|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20161217011440/http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/syrdenial.html|url-status=live}}</ref> In 2006 ] writing in '']'', reported that "A respected Holocaust research institution recently reported that Egypt, Qatar and Saudi Arabia all promote Holocaust denial and protect Holocaust deniers."<ref>{{Cite news|author=Robert Satloff|author-link=Robert Satloff|title=The Holocaust's Arab Heroes|newspaper=The Washington Post|page=B01|date=October 8, 2006|access-date=October 29, 2010|url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/06/AR2006100601417.html|archive-date=November 21, 2018|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181121035318/http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/06/AR2006100601417.html|url-status=live}}</ref> | |||
=== Accusations of a Zionist conspiracy === | |||
Since 1960s, the ] ] of secret ties between the Nazis and the Zionist leadership. The thesis of 1982 doctoral dissertation of ], a co-founder of ] and one of the leaders of the ], who earned his Ph.D. in history at the ] with ] being his thesis advisor, was "The Secret Connection between the Nazis and the Leaders of the Zionist Movement"<ref> By Brynn Malone (History News Network)</ref><ref> by Yael Yehoshua (]) April 29, 2003</ref> In his 1983 book ''The Other Face: The Secret Connection Between the Nazis and the Zionist Movement'', based on the dissertation, Abbas wrote: | |||
<blockquote> | |||
"It seems that the interest of the Zionist movement, however, is to inflate this figure so that their gains will be greater. This led them to emphasize this figure in order to gain the solidarity of international public opinion with Zionism. Many scholars have debated the figure of six million and reached stunning conclusions—fixing the number of Jewish victims at only a few hundred thousand."<ref> by Dr. Rafael Medoff (The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies)</ref><ref> by Tom Gross</ref><ref> by Itamar Marcus (Palestinian Media Watch)</ref> | |||
</blockquote> | |||
Prominent figures from the Middle East have rarely made publicized visits to ]—] being the exception. In 2010, ] MK ] visited, following a previous visit of two other Arab-Israeli lawmakers, and a group of about 100 Arab-Israeli writers and clerics in 2003.<ref name="MK">{{cite news|date=January 26, 2010|url=http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/2.209/arab-mk-s-auschwitz-visit-draws-fire-from-jewish-arab-critics-1.262131|title=Arab MK's Auschwitz visit draws fire from Jewish, Arab critics|agency=]|newspaper=Haaretz|access-date=March 23, 2014|archive-date=October 19, 2015|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20151019074444/http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/2.209/arab-mk-s-auschwitz-visit-draws-fire-from-jewish-arab-critics-1.262131|url-status=live}}</ref> | |||
In his March, 2006 interview with '']'' Abbas stated: | |||
<blockquote> | |||
"I wrote in detail about the Holocaust and said I did not want to discuss numbers. I quoted an argument between historians in which various numbers of casualties were mentioned. One wrote there were 12 million victims and another wrote there were 800,000. I have no desire to argue with the figures. The Holocaust was a terrible, unforgivable crime against the Jewish nation, a crime against humanity that cannot be accepted by humankind. The Holocaust was a terrible thing and nobody can claim I denied it."<ref> by Akiva Eldar, '']''. March 30, 2006</ref> | |||
</blockquote> | |||
===Palestine=== | |||
=== Symposia on holocaust denial === | |||
{{See also|Racism in the Palestinian territories}} | |||
Individuals from the ], ], and a number of Palestinian groups have engaged in various aspects of Holocaust denial.<ref name="Karsh98">]. ''Arafat's War: The Man and His Battle for Israeli Conquest''. New York: Grove Press, 2003. p. 98–99.</ref> | |||
Individuals from the ] and ]ian governments, as well as the ] political group ] have recently published Holocaust denial statements.<ref>, , .</ref> Denials of the Holocaust have been regularly promoted by various Arab leaders and in various media throughout the Middle East.<ref>, </ref> In August 2002 the Zayed Center for Coordination and Follow-up, an ] think-tank whose Chairman, Sultan Bin Zayed Al Nahayan, served as Deputy Prime Minister of the ], promoted a Holocaust denial symposium in ].<ref>, '']'', August 28, 2002</ref> ] leaders have also promoted Holocaust denial; ] held that the Holocaust never occurred, that ] were behind the action of Nazis, and that Zionists funded Nazism. A press release by Hamas in April 2000 decried "the so-called Holocaust, which is an alleged and invented story with no basis"<ref>, 2000</ref> Holocaust denial has also been resisted by prominent intellectual figures in the Arab world; in 2001, an outcry led by Palestinian poet ], Lebanese writer ] and others brought about the cancellation of a conference the negationist Institute for Historical Review had planned to hold in Beirut.<ref></ref> | |||
] have promoted Holocaust denial;<ref> {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190428190244/https://scholarworks.law.ubalt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1386&context=all_fac |date=April 28, 2019 }}, Kenneth Lasson, ], 2007</ref> ] held that the Holocaust never occurred, that ] were behind the action of Nazis, and that Zionists funded Nazism.<ref name="wiesenthal"/> | |||
=== Iran and President Ahmadinejad === | |||
A press release by Hamas in April 2000 decried "the so-called Holocaust, which is an alleged and invented story with no basis".<ref> {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090110175744/http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateC05.php?CID=1946 |date=January 10, 2009 }}, 2000</ref> In August 2009, Hamas' ] that it would "refuse" to allow Palestinian children to study the Holocaust, which it called "a lie invented by the Zionists" and referred to Holocaust education as a "war crime".<ref>Hadid, Diaa (September 1, 2009) {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190523093127/http://archive.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2009/09/01/hamas_leader_denies_holocaust/ |date=May 23, 2019 }} ] via '']''</ref> Hamas continued to hold this position in 2011, when the organization's Ministry for Refugee Affairs said that Holocaust education was "intended to poison the minds of our children."<ref>Oster, Marcy (March 1, 2011) {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180618125959/https://www.jta.org/2011/03/01/news-opinion/israel-middle-east/hamas-to-u-n-dont-teach-holocaust |date=June 18, 2018 }} '']''</ref> | |||
Holocaust denial is relatively new to the Middle East, as Kenneth Jacobson, assistant national director of the ], said in an interview with ]: "Adopting the theories of Holocaust denial of Western scholars is a relatively new phenomenon in the Muslim world. The accepted attitude had been to say that whereas it was true the Holocaust had taken place, the Palestinians should not have to pay the price. A look at ]ian President ]'s statements shows that he has mixed the two approaches."<ref>Amiram Barkat, , Haaretz</ref> | |||
The thesis of the 1982 doctoral dissertation of ], a co-founder of ] and president of the ], was "The Secret Connection between the Nazis and the Leaders of the Zionist Movement".<ref> {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190331052749/http://hnn.us/articles/1414.html |date=March 31, 2019 }} By Brynn Malone (History News Network)</ref><ref> {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070310213751/http://www.memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Area=sr&ID=SR01503 |date=March 10, 2007 }} by Yael Yehoshua (]) April 29, 2003</ref><ref name="wiesenthal">{{cite web|url=http://www.wiesenthal.com/atf/cf/%7Bdfd2aac1-2ade-428a-9263-35234229d8d8%7D/denial_report.pdf|title=Holocaust Denial's Assault on Memory: Precursor to twenty first century genocide?|publisher=Simon Wiesenthal Center|year=2007 |access-date=May 2, 2012|author=Dr. Harold Brackman, Aaron Breitbart |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120206142427/http://www.wiesenthal.com/atf/cf/%7BDFD2AAC1-2ADE-428A-9263-35234229D8D8%7D/DENIAL_REPORT.PDF |archive-date=February 6, 2012 |url-status=dead}}</ref> In his 1983 book '']'' based on the dissertation, Abbas denied that six million Jews had died in the Holocaust; dismissing it as a "myth" and a "fantastic lie".<ref name="Abbas">{{cite web|url=http://www.thecommentator.com/article/1524/holocaust_denial_undermines_the_palestinian_cause|title=Holocaust denial undermines the Palestinian cause|publisher=The Commentator|date=August 14, 2012 |access-date=May 18, 2015|author=Jeremy Havardi |archive-date=January 30, 2019 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190130174348/http://www.thecommentator.com/article/1524/holocaust_denial_undermines_the_palestinian_cause |url-status=dead}}</ref> At most, he wrote, 890,000 Jews were murdered by the Germans. Abbas claimed that the number of deaths has been exaggerated for political purposes. "It seems that the interest of the Zionist movement, however, is to inflate this figure so that their gains will be greater. This led them to emphasize this figure in order to gain the solidarity of international public opinion with Zionism. Many scholars have debated the figure of six million and reached stunning conclusions—fixing the number of Jewish victims at only a few hundred thousand."{{R|wiesenthal}}<ref name="wymaninstitute.org"> {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110908080728/http://www.wymaninstitute.org/articles/2003-03-denier.php |date=September 8, 2011 }} by Dr. Rafael Medoff (The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies)</ref><ref name=autogenerated1> {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190205035253/http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/000032.html |date=February 5, 2019 }} by Tom Gross</ref> | |||
In a December 2005 speech, Ahmadinejad said that the Holocaust was a "fairy tale" that had been promoted to protect ], ramping up his rhetoric and triggering a fresh wave of international denunciation. He said, | |||
:"They have fabricated a legend under the name 'Massacre of the Jews', and they hold it higher than God himself, religion itself and the prophets themselves...(The West) deals very severely with those who deny this myth but does not do anything to those who deny God, religion, and the prophets." | |||
He also called for Israel to be relocated to Germany, or Austria, arguing it was these nations that persecuted the Jews, so they ought to bear the responsibility, not Palestinians forsaking their land to form a nation of Israel. He also suggested relocating Israeli Jews to the ].<ref>, ]</ref> | |||
In his March 2006 interview with '']'', Abbas stated, "I wrote in detail about the Holocaust and said I did not want to discuss numbers. I quoted an argument between historians in which various numbers of casualties were mentioned. One wrote there were 12 million victims and another wrote there were 800,000. I have no desire to argue with the figures. The Holocaust was a terrible, unforgivable crime against the Jewish nation, a crime against humanity that cannot be accepted by humankind. The Holocaust was a terrible thing and nobody can claim I denied it."<ref>{{cite news|url=http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/u-s-told-us-to-ignore-israeli-map-reservations-1.8840|title=U.S. told us to ignore Israeli map reservations|author=Akiva Eldar|newspaper=]|date=May 28, 2003|access-date=March 23, 2014|archive-date=January 20, 2013|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130120164725/http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/u-s-told-us-to-ignore-israeli-map-reservations-1.8840|url-status=live}}</ref> While acknowledging the existence of the Holocaust in 2006 and 2014,<ref name="Heinous">{{cite news|url=https://nypost.com/2014/04/27/palestinian-leader-abbas-admits-the-holocaust-was-heinous/|title=Palestinian leader Abbas admits the Holocaust was 'heinous'|newspaper=New York Post|date=April 27, 2014|access-date=May 18, 2015|archive-date=June 22, 2018|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180622164937/https://nypost.com/2014/04/27/palestinian-leader-abbas-admits-the-holocaust-was-heinous/|url-status=live}}</ref> Abbas has defended the position that Zionists collaborated with the Nazis to perpetrate it. In 2012, Abbas told ], a Beirut TV station affiliated with Iran and Hezbollah, that he "challenges anyone who can deny that the Zionist movement had ties with the Nazis before World War II".<ref name="Link">{{cite news|url=http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/01/23/abbas-alleges-link-between-zionists-and-nazis.html|title=Abbas Alleges Link Between Zionists And Nazis|website=The Daily Beast|date=January 23, 2013|access-date=May 18, 2015|author=Myers, David N.|archive-date=May 17, 2015|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150517195933/http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/01/23/abbas-alleges-link-between-zionists-and-nazis.html|url-status=live}}</ref> | |||
The remarks immediately provoked a blaze of international controversy as well as swift condemnation from government officials in Israel, Europe, and the United States. All six political parties in the German parliament signed a joint resolution condemning this Holocaust denial.<ref>, ''Expatica'', December 16, 2005</ref> | |||
Surveys conducted by ] of the ] found that the fraction of Israeli Arabs denying that millions of Jews were murdered by the Nazis increased from 28% in 2006 to 40% in 2008.<ref name=Smooha>{{cite web|author=Sammy Smooha|title=The 2008 Index of Arab-Jewish Relations in Israel: Main Findings and Trends of Change|url=http://soc.haifa.ac.il/~s.smooha/uploads/editor_uploads/files/Index2008MainFindings_TrendsChangeEng.pdf|year=2009 |access-date=June 18, 2014 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140806134653/http://soc.haifa.ac.il/~s.smooha/uploads/editor_uploads/files/Index2008MainFindings_TrendsChangeEng.pdf |archive-date=August 6, 2014 |url-status=dead}}</ref> Smooha commented: | |||
] political leader ] described Ahmadinejad's comments as "courageous" and stated that "...Muslim people will defend Iran because it voices what they have in their hearts, in particular the Palestinian people."<ref>Al Jazeera, </ref> In the United States, the ] condemned Ahmadinejad's remarks.<ref></ref> | |||
<blockquote>In Arab eyes disbelief in the very happening of the Shoah is not hate of Jews (embedded in the denial of the Shoah in the West) but rather a form of protest. Arabs not believing in the event of Shoah intend to express strong objection to the portrayal of the Jews as the ultimate victim and to the underrating of the Palestinians as a victim. They deny Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state that the Shoah gives legitimacy to. Arab disbelief in the Shoah is a component of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, unlike the ideological and anti-Semitic denial of the Holocaust and the desire to escape guilt in the West.{{R|Smooha}}</blockquote> | |||
On ] ], Ahmadinejad demanded a free evaluation of the real extent of the Holocaust "in order to find the ultimate truth." | |||
Mohammed Dajani, a Palestinian professor of the ] took his students to visit the ] in ], but was later forced to resign over accusations of "promoting Zionist narrative to gain international support for Israel" from antisemitic administrators. Still, he defended Holocaust education as necessary for peace,<ref>{{cite news|work=]|url=https://www.timesofisrael.com/palestinian-professor-who-took-students-to-auschwitz-holocaust-denial-imperils-peace|title=Palestinian professor who took students to Auschwitz: Holocaust denial imperils peace|date=17 September 2023}}</ref> | |||
In a ], ] interview with '']'', Ahmadinejad again questioned the Holocaust several times, insisting there were "two opinions" on it. When asked if the Holocaust was a myth, he responded "I will only accept something as truth if I am actually convinced of it".<ref>[http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,418660,00.html | |||
"We Are Determined": Spiegel interview with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad], '']'', May 30, 2006.</ref> | |||
{{Blockquote|text=Holocaust denial and distortion are historically incorrect, and factually wrong, and constitute a significant threat to morality and human dignity...}} | |||
Some of Ahmadinejad's supporters even propose an alternative genocide. Based on the story reported in the ], Iranian author and Holocaust denier ] claims that ] was the original Holocaust during which Jews exterminated all the original people of what is now ] and ]. He further claims that pre-15th century AD Iranian history is a Jewish fabrication to cover up that genocide in 6th century BC. | |||
=== Syria === | |||
On ], ], the "]" opened, to widespread condemnation.<ref>{{cite web | |||
In a speech delivered at the ]'s central committee meeting in December 2023, the Ba'ath party secretary-general ] claimed that there was "no evidence" of the killings of six million Jews during ]. Assad alleged that the Holocaust was "politicized" by ] to facilitate the mass-deportation of ] to ]. Assad also accused the U.S. government of financially and militarily sponsoring the ] during the ].<ref name="Silkoff">{{Cite news |last=Silkoff |first=Shira |date=20 December 2023 |title=Syria's Assad claims Holocaust was a lie fabricated to justify creation of Israel |work=The Times of Israel |url=https://www.timesofisrael.com/syrias-assad-claims-holocaust-was-a-lie-fabricated-to-justify-creation-of-israel/ |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20231220150406/https://www.timesofisrael.com/syrias-assad-claims-holocaust-was-a-lie-fabricated-to-justify-creation-of-israel/ |archive-date=20 December 2023}}</ref><ref name="i24news">{{Cite news |date=20 December 2023 |title=Syrian President Assad denies Holocaust and accuses U.S. of funding Nazis in controversial speech |work=i24news |url=https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/israel/diplomacy/1703081866-syrian-president-assad-denies-holocaust-and-accuses-u-s-of-funding-nazis-in-controversial-speech |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20231220142407/https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/israel/diplomacy/1703081866-syrian-president-assad-denies-holocaust-and-accuses-u-s-of-funding-nazis-in-controversial-speech |archive-date=20 December 2023}}</ref> Higlighting the ] during the ], Assad said: "there was no specific method of torture or killing specific to the Jews. The ] used the same methods everywhere."<ref name="Silkoff"/><ref name="i24news"/> | |||
| url = http://edition.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/12/11/iran.holocaust/index.html | |||
| title = Iran hosts Holocaust conference | |||
| accessdate = 2006-12-27 | |||
| date = ], ] | |||
| publisher = ] | |||
}}</ref> The conference, called for by and held at the behest of Ahmadinejad,<ref>{{cite web | |||
| url = http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1554321/posts | |||
| title = Iran: Holocaust Conference Soon in Tehran | |||
| accessdate = 2006-12-27 | |||
| date = ], ] | |||
| publisher = Adnkronos International (AKI) | |||
}}</ref> was widely described as a "Holocaust denial conference" or a "meeting of Holocaust deniers",<ref>*, '']'', December 13 2006. | |||
*, '']'', December 13 2006. | |||
*. '']'', December 13, 2006. | |||
*, '']'', December 13, 2006. | |||
*"THE CONFERENCE for Holocaust deniers hosted by Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a transparent polemical stunt." , '']'', December 13, 2006. | |||
*"WHAT'S THE perfect way to top off a Holocaust denial conference featuring input from the likes of such scholars as former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke?" , '']'', December 13, 2006. | |||
*, '']'', December 13, 2006. | |||
*, '']'', December 13, 2006. | |||
*, '']'', December 12, 2006. | |||
*, '']'', December 12, 2006. | |||
*, '']'', December 12, 2006. | |||
*, '']'', December 12, 2006. | |||
*, '']'', December 11, 2006. | |||
*, '']'', December 11, 2006. | |||
*"Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, speaking at a Tehran conference denying the existence of the Holocaust, said Israel will disappear like the Soviet Union." , '']'', December 12, 2006.</ref> though Iran insisted it was not a Holocaust denial conference.<ref>{{cite web | |||
| url = http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,453691,00.html | |||
| title = Berlin Counters Holocaust Conference | |||
| accessdate = 2006-12-27 | |||
| date = ], ] | |||
| publisher = ] | |||
}}</ref> A few months before it opened, the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi stated: "The Holocaust is not a sacred issue that one can't touch. I have visited the Nazi camps in Eastern Europe. I think it is exaggerated."<ref>{{cite news | title = Iran to Host Autumn Conference on Holocaust | publisher = Associated Press | url = http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,212003,00.html | date = 2006-09-03 | accessdate = 2006-09-11}}</ref> | |||
===Iran=== | |||
However ], the representative of Iran's supreme leader ], when asked in an interview "do you think the holocaust ever happened?" answered "Yes it did."<ref>Interview on ] newspaper. Link: http://www.baztab.ir/news/60678.php</ref> The same view was echoed by ], Iran's representative to the ], on ], ], when he said "the Genocide of the Jews did happen, and it should not happen again."<ref>Interview of Javad Zarif with Charlie Rose on the ], aired on February 13, 2007.</ref> | |||
] ], criticizing ]]] | |||
Former Iranian President ] frequently denied the Holocaust,<ref name="InternationalList1">Variously: | |||
* {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211112061120/http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4529198.stm |date=November 12, 2021 }}, BBC News, Accessed December 14, 2005. | |||
*Esfandiari, Golnaz. {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080820094906/http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2005/12/6f3acbdf-d5f9-4ba1-8c9d-278c700ae2ea.html |date=August 20, 2008 }}. Radio Free Europe. Accessed January 28, 2008. | |||
* {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090417214619/http://www.ncccusa.org/news/051216Ahmadinejad.html |date=April 17, 2009 }}. ]. Accessed December 16, 2007. | |||
* {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20081207130247/http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/10/27/ahmadinejad.reaction/index.html |date=December 7, 2008 }}. CNN. Accessed September 27, 2007. | |||
* {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20051216125829/http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/12/14/iran.israel/ |date=December 16, 2005 }}. ]. December 14, 2006.</ref> formally 'questioning' the reliability of the historical evidence,<ref name="Spiegel"> {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190512214220/https://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/spiegel-interview-with-iran-s-president-ahmadinejad-we-are-determined-a-418660.html |date=May 12, 2019 }}, ''Der Spiegel'' (May 30, 2006). Retrieved 07sep2013.</ref> although he on occasion confirmed belief in it.<ref> "However, I believe the Holocaust, from what we read, happened during World War II after 1930 in the 1940s."</ref><ref>{{Cite web|url=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=773638342167920349|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20110629105844/http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=773638342167920349|url-status=dead|title=Video of his speech on September 24, 2007. Timecode 22:28 to 22:37.|archivedate=June 29, 2011}}</ref> In a December 2005 speech, Ahmadinejad said that a legend was fabricated and had been promoted to protect Israel. He said: | |||
{{blockquote|They have fabricated a legend, under the name of the Massacre of the Jews, and they hold it higher than God himself, religion itself and the prophets themselves.... If somebody in their country questions God, nobody says anything, but if somebody denies the myth of the massacre of Jews, the Zionist loudspeakers and the governments in the pay of Zionism will start to scream.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://english.aljazeera.net/archive/2005/12/200849154418141136.html|title=Ahmadinejad: Holocaust a myth|work=]|access-date=July 9, 2008|archive-date=September 23, 2009|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090923231908/http://english.aljazeera.net/archive/2005/12/200849154418141136.html|url-status=live}}</ref>}} | |||
== Public reactions == | |||
A number of public figures and scholars have spoken out against Holocaust denial. Dr. William Shulman, director of the Holocaust Research Center, described the denial "…as if these people were killed twice",<ref>Sophia Chang , December 16, 2004</ref> a sentiment echoed by literary theorist ], who argued that "Forgetting the extermination is part of the extermination itself."<ref>Golsan, 130</ref> In 2006, UN Secretary General ] said: "Remembering is a necessary rebuke to those who say the Holocaust never happened or has been exaggerated. Holocaust denial is the work of bigots; we must reject their false claims whenever, wherever and by whomever they are made."<ref>BBC News, , January, 2006</ref> Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winner ] calls the Holocaust "the most documented tragedy in ]. Never before has a tragedy elicited so much witness from the killers, from the victims and even from the bystanders—millions of pieces here in the museum what you have, all other museums, archives in the thousands, in the millions."<ref></ref> He made a similar statement on a special edition of the '']'' after his final trip to ], along with host ]. | |||
The remarks immediately provoked international controversy as well as swift condemnation from government officials in Israel, Europe, and the United States. All six political parties in the German parliament signed a joint resolution condemning Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denial.<ref>, ''Expatica'', December 16, 2005.</ref> In contrast, ] political leader ] described Ahmadinejad's comments as "courageous" and stated, "Muslim people will defend Iran because it voices what they have in their hearts, in particular the Palestinian people."<ref>Al Jazeera,{{cite web|url=http://english.aljazeera.net/English/archive/archive?ArchiveId=17093|title=Hamas springs to Iran's defense |access-date=August 14, 2007 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071206115859/http://english.aljazeera.net/English/archive/archive?ArchiveId=17093 |archive-date=December 6, 2007}}</ref> In the United States, the ] condemned Ahmadinejad's remarks.<ref name=mpac>{{cite news|title=MPAC Rebukes Iranian President's Comments|url=http://www.mpac.org/article.php?id=231 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080617083103/http://www.mpac.org/article.php?id=231 |archive-date=June 17, 2008 |access-date=January 31, 2012|date=December 8, 2005}}</ref> In 2005, the Egyptian ] leader, ], denounced what he called "the myth of the Holocaust" in defending Ahmadinejad's denial of the Holocaust.<ref> {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170906201530/http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4554986.stm |date=September 6, 2017 }}, December 23, 2005.</ref> | |||
In January 2007 the ] condemned "without reservation any denial of the Holocaust", though ] disassociated itself from the resolution.<ref>, U.N. News Centre, January 26, 2007.</ref> | |||
On December 11, 2006, the Iranian state-sponsored "]" began to widespread condemnation.<ref>{{Cite news|url=http://edition.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/12/11/iran.holocaust/index.html|title=Iran hosts Holocaust conference|access-date=December 27, 2006|date=December 11, 2006|publisher=CNN|archive-date=February 1, 2019|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190201002703/http://edition.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/12/11/iran.holocaust/index.html|url-status=live}}</ref> The conference, called for and held at the behest of Ahmadinejad,<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.adnki.com/index_2Level.php?cat=Politics&loid=8.0.246551760&par=0 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060310075441/http://www.adnki.com/index_2Level.php?cat=Politics&loid=8.0.246551760&par=0|title=Iran: Holocaust Conference Soon in Tehran|date=January 5, 2006 |archive-date=March 10, 2006|publisher=Adnkronos International (AKI) |access-date=August 17, 2020 |url-status=dead}}</ref> was widely described as a "Holocaust denial conference" or a "meeting of Holocaust deniers",<ref>* {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20061225063527/http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20061213-120143-8384r.htm |date=December 25, 2006 }}, '']'', December 13, 2006. | |||
==Laws against Holocaust denial== | |||
* {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071011091846/http://canada.com/edmontonjournal/news/story.html?id=c4b5cf88-207a-487d-b785-b97e119099d8 |date=October 11, 2007 }}, '']'', December 13, 2006. | |||
Holocaust denial is illegal in a number of European countries. Many countries also have broader laws against libel or inciting racial hatred, as do a number of countries that do not specifically have laws against Holocaust denial, such as Canada and the United Kingdom. The Council of Europe's 2003 , concerning the criminalisation of acts of a racist and xenophobic nature committed through computer systems includes an article 6 titled ''Denial, gross minimisation, approval or justification of genocide or crimes against humanity'', though this does not have the status of law. | |||
*. '']'', December 13, 2006. | |||
* {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070121004453/http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20061213.wxholocaustprof13/BNStory/International/home |date=January 21, 2007 }}, '']'', December 13, 2006. | |||
*"The conference for Holocaust deniers hosted by Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a transparent polemical stunt." {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160303211047/http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2006/12/13/irans_great_pretender/ |date=March 3, 2016 }}, '']'', December 13, 2006. | |||
*"What's the perfect way to top off a Holocaust denial conference featuring input from the likes of such scholars as former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke?" {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070111102008/http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-iran13dec13,0,2528243.story?coll=la-opinion-leftrail |date=January 11, 2007 }}, '']'', December 13, 2006. | |||
* {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071223174719/http://www.zeenews.com/znnew/articles.asp?aid=341711&sid=WOR |date=December 23, 2007 }}, '']'', December 13, 2006. | |||
*{{usurped|1=}}, '']'', December 13, 2006. | |||
* {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20061219093121/http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/world/4396632.html |date=December 19, 2006 }}, '']'', December 12, 2006. | |||
* {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20061214071812/http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2006/12/12/europe/EU_GEN_Europe_Holocaust_Denial.php |date=December 14, 2006 }}, '']'', December 12, 2006. | |||
* {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210220161206/https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/dec/12/iran.israel |date=February 20, 2021 }}, '']'', December 12, 2006. | |||
* {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070108183925/http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2067598.ece |date=January 8, 2007 }}, '']'', December 12, 2006. | |||
* {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100613163056/http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087 |date=June 13, 2010 }}, '']'', December 11, 2006. | |||
* {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201210055610/https://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/11/world/middleeast/11cnd-iran.html |date=December 10, 2020 }}, '']'', December 11, 2006. | |||
*"Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, speaking at a Tehran conference denying the existence of the Holocaust, said Israel will disappear like the Soviet Union." {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071016065421/http://upi.com/NewsTrack/view.php?StoryID=20061212-072558-3819r |date=October 16, 2007 }}, '']'', December 12, 2006.</ref> though Iran denied it was a Holocaust denial conference.<ref>{{cite news|url=http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,453691,00.html|title=Berlin Counters Holocaust Conference|access-date=December 27, 2006|date=December 11, 2006|work=Der Spiegel|archive-date=April 6, 2023|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230406141032/https://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,453691,00.html|url-status=live}}</ref> A few months before it opened, the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi stated: "The Holocaust is not a sacred issue that one can't touch. I have visited the Nazi camps in Eastern Europe. I think it is exaggerated."<ref>{{Cite news|title=Iran to Host Autumn Conference on Holocaust|agency=Associated Press|url=https://www.foxnews.com/story/iran-to-host-autumn-conference-on-holocaust|date=September 3, 2006 |access-date=September 11, 2006|publisher=Fox News |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060930174449/http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,212003,00.html |archive-date=September 30, 2006 |url-status=live}}</ref> | |||
In 2013, in an interview with CNN, newly elected Iranian President ] condemned the Holocaust, stating: "I can tell you that any crime that happens in history against humanity, including the crime the Nazis created towards the Jews as well as non-Jews is reprehensible and condemnable. Whatever criminality they committed against the Jews, we condemn."<ref name="Saeed Kamali Dehghan">{{cite web|url=https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/25/iran-rouhani-recognises-holocaust|title=Iranian president Hassan Rouhani recognises 'reprehensible' Holocaust|author=Saeed Kamali Dehghan|work=The Guardian|date=September 25, 2013|access-date=December 11, 2016|archive-date=May 28, 2019|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190528221855/https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/25/iran-rouhani-recognises-holocaust|url-status=live}}</ref> Iranian media later accused CNN of fabricating Rouhani's comments.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.jpost.com/Iranian-Threat/News/Report-CNN-fabricated-Rouhani-Holocaust-interview-remarks-327171|title=Iranian press accuses CNN of 'fabricating' Rouhani Holocaust remarks|work=The Jerusalem Post - JPost.com|date=September 26, 2013|access-date=June 30, 2014|archive-date=March 2, 2021|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210302203415/https://www.jpost.com/Iranian-Threat/News/Report-CNN-fabricated-Rouhani-Holocaust-interview-remarks-327171|url-status=live}}</ref> | |||
{| class="wikitable" align="right" style="margin:10px" | |||
|+ Holocaust Denial Laws<ref>.</ref> | |||
! Country !! Text of Law(s) | |||
|- | |||
| Austria || '''National Socialism Prohibition Law (1947, amendments of 1992)''' | |||
§ 3g. | |||
He who operates in a manner characterized other than that in § § 3a – 3f will be punished (revitalising of the NSDAP or identification with), with imprisonment from one to up to ten years, and in cases of particularly dangerous suspects or activity, be punished with up to twenty years imprisonment | |||
In his official 2013 ] address, ] Grand Ayatollah ] questioned the veracity of the Holocaust, remarking that "The Holocaust is an event whose reality is uncertain and if it has happened, it's uncertain how it has happened."<ref>{{cite web|url=https://twitter.com/khamenei_ir/status/446928689943420928|title=Khamenei.ir|work=Twitter|access-date=March 23, 2014|archive-date=June 11, 2019|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190611091736/https://twitter.com/khamenei_ir/status/446928689943420928|url-status=live}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=http://backchannel.al-monitor.com/index.php/2014/03/8006/in-iran-new-years-address-khamenei-questions-holocaust/|title=In Iran new year's address, Khamenei questions Holocaust|work=al-monitor.com |access-date=March 23, 2014 |archive-date=March 24, 2014 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140324233740/http://backchannel.al-monitor.com/index.php/2014/03/8006/in-iran-new-years-address-khamenei-questions-holocaust/ |url-status=dead}}</ref> This was consistent with Khamenei's previous comments regarding the Holocaust.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/davidblair/100239211/what-does-irans-supreme-leader-really-think-about-the-holocaust/ |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131002100418/http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/davidblair/100239211/what-does-irans-supreme-leader-really-think-about-the-holocaust/ |url-status=dead |archive-date=October 2, 2013|title=What does Iran's Supreme Leader really think about the Holocaust?|work=News – Telegraph Blogs}}</ref> | |||
§ 3h. | |||
As an amendment to § 3 g., whoever denies, grossly plays down, approves or tries to excuse the National Socialist genocide or other National Socialist crimes against humanity in a print publication, in broadcast or other media. | |||
|- | |||
| Belgium || '''Negationism Law (1995, amendments of 1999)''' | |||
Article 1 | |||
Whoever, in the circumstances given in article 444 of the Penal Code denies, grossly minimises, attempts to justify, or approves the genocide committed by the German National Socialist Regime during the Second World War shall be punished by a prison sentence of eight days to one year, and by a fine of twenty six francs to five thousand francs. | |||
For the application of the previous paragraph, the term genocide is meant in the sense of article 2 of the International Treaty of 9 December 1948 on preventing and combating genocide. | |||
In the event of repetitions, the guilty party may in addition have his civic rights suspended in accordance with article 33 of the Penal Code. | |||
In 2015, the House of Cartoon and the Sarcheshmeh Cultural Complex in Iran organized the ],<ref>{{cite web |url=https://www.ushmm.org/m/pdfs/Iran-Holocaust-denial-timeline.pdf |title=Timeline: Holocaust Denial and Distortion from Iranian Government and Official Media Resources (1998–2016) |date=September 12, 2016 |website=] |access-date=June 9, 2019 |archive-date=March 15, 2017 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170315012458/https://www.ushmm.org/m/pdfs/Iran-Holocaust-denial-timeline.pdf |url-status=live }}</ref> a competition in which artists were encouraged to submit ] on the theme of Holocaust denial. The winner of the contest will receive $12,000. '']'', a popular Iranian newspaper, held a ] in 2006.<ref> {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180629102634/https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4621731,00.html |date=June 29, 2018 }} '']''. February 1, 2015. February 1, 2015.</ref> | |||
Art.2 | |||
In the event of a conviction on account of a violation under this Act, it may be ordered that the judgement, in its entity or an excerpt of it, is published in one of more newspapers, and is displayed, to the charge of the guilty party. | |||
===Turkey=== | |||
Art.3. | |||
In Turkey, in 1996, the Islamic preacher ] under the pen name of Harun Yahya, distributed thousands of copies of a book which was originally published the previous year, entitled ''Soykırım Yalanı'' ("The Genocide Lie", referring to the Holocaust) and mailed unsolicited texts to American and European schools and colleges.<ref>Michael Hopkins, {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190124202225/http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/organizations/harunyahya.html |date=January 24, 2019 }}, The TalkOrigins Archive .</ref> The publication of ''Soykırım Yalanı'' sparked much public debate.<ref name="axt">{{cite web|url=http://www.axt.org.uk/antisem/archive/archive1/turkey/turkey.htm|title=Turkey|date=1996|work=axt.org.uk |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120519190843/http://www.axt.org.uk/antisem/archive/archive1/turkey/turkey.htm |archive-date=May 19, 2012}}</ref> This book claims, "what is presented as Holocaust is the death of some Jews due to the typhus plague during the war and the famine towards the end of the war caused by the defeat of the Germans."<ref>{{cite web|url=http://members.fortunecity.com/vural/bks/HOLOCAUST.HTML|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20081208201358/http://members.fortunecity.com/vural/bks/HOLOCAUST.HTML|url-status=dead|archive-date=December 8, 2008|title=The Holocaust Deception|date=December 8, 2008}}</ref> In March 1996, a Turkish painter and intellectual, ], published a strongly worded critique of the book in the Ankara daily newspaper ''Siyah-Beyaz'' ("Black and White"). A legal suit for slander was brought against him. During the trial in September, Baykam exposed the real author of the book as Adnan Oktar.{{R|axt}} The suit was withdrawn in March 1997.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.axt.org.uk/antisem/archive/archive2/turkey/turkey.htm#Parties|title=Turkey|work=axt.org.uk|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120519184740/http://www.axt.org.uk/antisem/archive/archive2/turkey/turkey.htm#Parties|archive-date=May 19, 2012}}</ref><ref>{{Cite news|first=Laurie|last=Udesky|title=American Jewish organization sees emergence of 'Holocaust denial' in Turkey|work=] |archive-date=November 3, 2007|date=March 27, 1997|url=http://www.turkishdailynews.com.tr/archives.php?id=2371 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071103085344/http://www.turkishdailynews.com.tr/archives.php?id=2371}} {{dead link|date=April 2017 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }}</ref> | |||
Chapter VII of the First Book of the Penal Code and Article 85 of the same Code are also applicable to this Act. | |||
==Eastern Europe== | |||
Art. 4. | |||
The Centre for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism, as well as any association that at the time of the facts had a legal personality for at least five years, and which, on the grounds of its statutes, has the objective of defending moral interests and the honour of the resistance or the deported, may act in law in all legal disputes arising from the application of this Act. | |||
|- | |||
| Czech Republic / Slovakia || '''Law Against Support and Dissemination of Movements Oppressing Human Rights and Freedoms (2001)''' | |||
§ 260 | |||
(1) The person who supports or spreads movements oppressing human rights and freedoms or declares national, race, religious or class hatred or hatred against other group of persons will be punished by prison from 1 to 5 years. | |||
(2) The person will be imprisoned from 3 to 8 years if: | |||
a) he/she commits the crime mentioned in paragraph (1) in print, film, radio, television or other similarly effective manner, | |||
b) he/she commits the crime as a member of an organized group | |||
c) he/she commits the crime in a state of national emergency or state of war | |||
§ 261 | |||
The person who publicly declares sympathies with such a movement mentioned in § 260, will be punished by prison from 6 months to 3 years. | |||
§ 261a | |||
The person who publicly denies, puts in doubt, approves or tries to justify nazi or communist genocide or other crimes of nazis or communists will be punished by prison of 6 months to 3 years. | |||
|- | |||
| European Union || '''European Union Directive for Combating Racism and Xenophobia (2007)''' | |||
=== General === | |||
The following intentional conduct will be punishable in all EU Member States: | |||
In some Eastern European countries, such as Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, and Romania, Holocaust deniers do not deny the very fact of mass murder of Jews but deny some national or regional elements of the Holocaust.<ref name="post-Soviet" /> | |||
=== Soviet Union and Russia === | |||
publicly inciting to violence or hatred, even by dissemination or distribution of tracts, pictures or other material, directed against a group of persons or a member of such a group defined by reference to race, colour, religion, descent or national or ethnic origin; | |||
According to ], Soviet writers tended either to ignore or downplay the Holocaust, treating it as one small part of a larger phenomenon of 20 million dead Soviet citizens during the ]. According to Gitelman, Soviet authorities were concerned about raising the consciousness of Soviet Jews and retarding their assimilation to the greater Soviet population. The Holocaust also raised the issue of collaboration with the Nazi occupiers, an uncomfortable topic for Soviet historiography.<ref>{{cite book|last1=Dobroszycki|first1=Lucjan|last2=Gurock|first2=Jeffrey S.|title=The Holocaust in the Soviet Union: Studies and Sources on the Destruction of the Jews in the Nazi-Occupied Territories of the Ussr, 1941–1945|date=1993|publisher=M.E. Sharpe|isbn=1563241730|pages=3–29}}</ref> According to historian ] in modern Russia this trend has returned with the ], culminating with July 19, 2023, article of ] who argued that it were the Soviet citizens who were the victims of Holocaust in the first place. In a number of popular history project sponsored by Russian state Jews were mentioned as one of many victim groups, or not mentioned at all.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Болтянская |first=Нателла |date=July 31, 2023 |title=Как и почему Россия стала отрицателем Холокоста. Часть 1: "Без срока давности" |url=https://detaly.co.il/kak-i-pochemu-rossiya-stala-otritsatelem-holokosta/ |access-date=August 2, 2023 |website=Детали |language=ru-RU |archive-date=July 5, 2024 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240705095216/https://detaly.co.il/kak-i-pochemu-rossiya-stala-otritsatelem-holokosta/ |url-status=live }}</ref> Holocaust denial literature is freely published in Russia, and one of the most prominent authors, ], lives there since his escape from prosecution in Switzerland in the 2000s.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Atkins |first=Stephen E. |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=M9Uj6u6b-ZIC |title=Holocaust Denial as an International Movement |date=April 30, 2009 |publisher=ABC-CLIO |isbn=978-0-313-34538-8 |language=en |access-date=April 8, 2018 |archive-date=July 5, 2024 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240705095221/https://books.google.com/books?id=M9Uj6u6b-ZIC |url-status=live }}</ref> | |||
publicly condoning, denying or grossly trivialising crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes as defined in the Statute of the International Criminal Court (Articles 6, 7 and 8) directed against a group of persons or a member of such a group defined by reference to race, colour, religion, descent or national or ethnic origin, and crimes defined by the Tribunal of Nuremberg (Article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal, London Agreement of 1945) directed against a group of persons or a member of such a group defined by reference to race, colour, religion, descent or national or ethnic origin. | |||
=== Ukraine === | |||
Member States may choose to punish only conduct which is either carried out in a manner likely to disturb public order or which is threatening, abusive or insulting. The reference to religion is intended to cover, at least, conduct which is a pretext for directing acts against a group of persons or a member of such a group defined by reference to race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin. Member States will ensure that these conducts are punishable by criminal penalties of a maximum of at least between 1 and 3 years of imprisonment. | |||
The post-Soviet radical right activists in Ukraine do not question the existence of Nazi death camps or Jewish ghettos. However, they deny the participation of local population in anti-Jewish ]s or the contribution of national paramilitary organizations in capture and execution of Jews.<ref name="post-Soviet" /> Thus, denial of the antisemitic nature and participation in the Holocaust of the ] and the ] has become a central component of the intellectual history of the Ukrainian diaspora and nationalists.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Rudling |first=Per Anders |date=2011 |title=The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study in the Manufacturing of Historical Myths |url=https://www.academia.edu/1122859 |url-status=live |journal=The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies |issue=2107 |doi=10.5195/CBP.2011.164 |issn=2163-839X |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220319171628/https://www.academia.edu/1122859 |archive-date=March 19, 2022 |access-date=August 24, 2022 |doi-access=free}}</ref> | |||
|- | |||
| France ] || '''LAW No 90-615 to repress acts of racism, anti-semitism and xenophobia (1990)''' | |||
MODIFICATIONS OF THE LAW OF JULY 29, 1881 ON THE FREEDOM OF THE PRESS | |||
Art 8. - Article 24 of the law of July 29, 1881 on the freedom of the press is supplemented by the following provisions: | |||
In the event of judgment for one of the facts envisaged by the preceding subparagraph, the court will be able moreover to order: | |||
Except when the responsibility for the author of the infringement is retained on the base for article 42 and the first subparagraph for article 43 for this law or the first three subparagraphs for article 93-3 for the law No 82-652 for July 29, 1982 on the audio-visual communication, the deprivation of the rights enumerated to the 2o and 3o of article 42 of the penal code for imprisonment of five years maximum; | |||
=== Croatia === | |||
Art 9. – As an amendment to Article 24 of the law of July 29, 1881 on the freedom of the press, article 24 (a) is as follows written: | |||
In 2018, the ] warned about "the glorification of the ] regime and denial of the Holocaust" in Croatia, citing the placement of a plaque with the Ustasha-era salute ']' on the grounds of a concentration camp memorial site, far-right rallies and the concert of the controversial band ] among other events.<ref>{{cite news|title=US Warns about Ustasha Glorification and Holocaust Denial|url=https://www.total-croatia-news.com/politics/28735-us-warns-about-ustasha-glorification-and-holocaust-denial|publisher=Croatian News Agency (HINA)|date=May 30, 2018|access-date=April 21, 2020|archive-date=November 9, 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201109015519/https://www.total-croatia-news.com/politics/28735-us-warns-about-ustasha-glorification-and-holocaust-denial|url-status=dead}}</ref> ] of the Simon Wiesenthal Center describes Croatia as a "cradle of Holocaust distortion".<ref name="BIRN2">{{cite web|last1=Opačić|first1=Tamara|title=Selective Amnesia: Croatia's Holocaust Deniers|url=https://balkaninsight.com/2017/11/24/selective-amnesia-croatia-s-holocaust-deniers-11-16-2017/|website=BalkanInsight|publisher=BIRN|date=November 24, 2017|access-date=April 3, 2020|archive-date=January 22, 2021|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210122022345/https://balkaninsight.com/2017/11/24/selective-amnesia-croatia-s-holocaust-deniers-11-16-2017/|url-status=live}}</ref> Holocaust denial in Croatia typically involves the downplaying or denial of the ] carried out by the Ustasha regime, particularly against Serbs and Jews at the ] and it is done by public figures, though the regime's victims also included Roma and anti-fascist Croats.<ref name="BIRN2" /><ref>{{cite web|title=Croatia Must Not Whitewash the Horrors of Jasenovac|url=https://balkaninsight.com/2018/08/27/croatia-must-not-whitewash-the-horrors-of-jasenovac-08-27-2018/|website=Balkan Insight|date=August 27, 2018|access-date=April 17, 2020|archive-date=February 9, 2021|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210209044459/https://balkaninsight.com/2018/08/27/croatia-must-not-whitewash-the-horrors-of-jasenovac-08-27-2018/|url-status=live}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|last1=Rosensaft|first1=Menachem Z.|title=Croatia Is Brazenly Attempting to Rewrite its Holocaust Crimes Out of History|url=https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/246116/croatia-rewrite-holocaust-crimes-out-of-history|publisher=Tablet Magazine|date=October 9, 2017|access-date=April 3, 2020|archive-date=March 19, 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200319061627/https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/246116/croatia-rewrite-holocaust-crimes-out-of-history|url-status=live}}</ref> The Society for Research of the Threefold Jasenovac Camp in Croatia, an NGO with authors and academics among its members, claims that Jasenovac was a labor camp during World War II and that it was later used by Yugoslav Communists to imprison Ustasha members and regular Croatian Home Guard army troops until 1948, then alleged Stalinists until 1951.<ref>{{cite web|last1=Vladisavljevic|first1=Anja|title=Book Event Questioning WWII Crimes Planned for Zagreb Church|url=https://balkaninsight.com/2019/01/07/new-revisionist-book-on-jasenovac-wwii-camp-01-07-2019-1/|website=Balkan Insight|publisher=BIRN|date=January 7, 2019|access-date=April 17, 2020|archive-date=October 4, 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201004203436/https://balkaninsight.com/2019/01/07/new-revisionist-book-on-jasenovac-wwii-camp-01-07-2019-1/|url-status=live}}</ref> Following a series of book publications denying the Ustashe regime's crimes, the Simon Wiesenthal Center urged Croatian authorities in 2019 to ban such works, noting that they "would immediately be banned in Germany and Austria and rightfully so".<ref>{{cite web|title=Simon Wiesenthal Centre urges Croatia to ban Jasenovac revisionist works|url=http://hr.n1info.com/English/NEWS/a361178/Simon-Wiesenthal-Centre-urges-Croatia-to-ban-Jasenovac-revisionist-works.html|website=hr.n1info.com|publisher=N1 Zagreb|date=January 9, 2019|access-date=April 17, 2020|archive-date=October 9, 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201009060853/http://hr.n1info.com/English/NEWS/a361178/Simon-Wiesenthal-Centre-urges-Croatia-to-ban-Jasenovac-revisionist-works.html|url-status=dead}}</ref><ref>{{cite news|title=Jewish rights group urges Croatia to ban pro-Nazi book|url=https://apnews.com/11edaa150f63423989db3540cbbdbd69|publisher=Associated Press|date=January 9, 2019|access-date=April 17, 2020|archive-date=November 7, 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201107223954/https://apnews.com/11edaa150f63423989db3540cbbdbd69|url-status=live}}</ref> | |||
<<Art. 24 (a). - those who have disputed the existence of one or more crimes against humanity such as they are defined by Article 6 of the statute of the international tribunal military annexed in the agreement of London of August 8, 1945 and which were a carried out either by the members of an organization declared criminal pursuant to Article 9 of the aforementioned statute, or by a person found guilty such crimes by a French or international jurisdiction shall be punished by one month to one years imprisonment or a fine. | |||
=== Hungary === | |||
Art 13. - It is inserted, after article 48-1 of the law of July 29, 1881 on the freedom of the press, article 48-2 thus written: | |||
In Hungary, Holocaust distortion and denial take place in the form of downplaying the country's role in the killing and deportation of Jews. The ] committed numerous crimes and killed or deported Jews. A total of 437,000 Jews were deported by ]'s government in the ], an Axis collaborator.<ref>{{cite news|last1=Mansky|first1=Jackie|title=Why It Matters That Hungary's Prime Minister Denounced His Country's Role in the Holocaust|url=https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/holocaust-and-hungary-prime-minister-180964139/|website=Smithsonian Magazine|access-date=November 14, 2020|archive-date=November 9, 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201109040634/https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/holocaust-and-hungary-prime-minister-180964139/|url-status=live}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|title=Hungary: Holocaust Denial, Incitement and Intimidation|url=http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/14378|website=Israel National News|date=January 14, 2014|access-date=November 14, 2020|archive-date=October 6, 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201006110018/http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/14378|url-status=live}}</ref> | |||
<<Art. 48-2. - publication or publicly expressed opinion encouraging those to whom it is addressed to pass a favourable moral judgment on one or more crimes against humanity and tending to justify these crimes (including collaboration) or vindicate their perpetrators shall be punished by one to five years imprisonment or a fine. | |||
|- | |||
| Germany || '''§ 130 Law Against Public Incitement (1985, amendments of 1992)''' | |||
(1) Whoever, in a manner that is capable of disturbing the public peace: | |||
1. incites hatred against segments of the population or calls for violent or arbitrary measures against them; or | |||
2. assaults the human dignity of others by insulting, maliciously maligning, or defaming segments of the population, | |||
shall be punished with imprisonment from three months to five years... | |||
=== Serbia === | |||
(3) Whoever publicly or in a meeting approves of, denies or renders harmless an act committed under the rule of National Socialism of the type indicated in Section 220a subsection (1, statute on genocide), in a manner capable of disturbing the public piece shall be punished with imprisonment for not more than five years or a fine. | |||
In Serbia, Holocaust distortion and denial is manifested in the downplaying of ] and ]'s roles in the ] in concentration camps in ], by a number of Serbian historians.<ref name="Perica151">{{harvnb|Perica|2002|p=151.}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal|last1=Ramet|first1=Sabrina|title=The denial syndrome and its consequences: Serbian political culture since 2000|journal=Communist and Post-Communist Studies|year=2007|volume=40|pages=41–58|doi=10.1016/j.postcomstud.2006.12.004|url=https://online.ucpress.edu/cpcs/article/40/1/41/63/The-denial-syndrome-and-its-consequences-Serbian|access-date=April 17, 2020|archive-date=June 21, 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200621180604/https://online.ucpress.edu/cpcs/article/40/1/41/63/The-denial-syndrome-and-its-consequences-Serbian|url-status=live}}</ref> Serb collaborationist armed forces, including the ], were involved, either directly or indirectly, in the mass killings of mainly Jews and Roma as well as Croats, Muslims and those Serbs who sided with any anti-German resistance.<ref>{{cite book|last1=Ridgeway|first1=James|last2=Udovickii|first2=Jasminka|title=Burn This House: The Making and Unmaking of Yugoslavia|date=2000|publisher=Duke University Press|isbn=978-0-82232-590-1|page=133|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=GuGe9fy4raoC|access-date=May 27, 2020|archive-date=July 5, 2024|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240705095217/https://books.google.com/books?id=GuGe9fy4raoC|url-status=live}}</ref>{{sfn|Cohen|1996|pp=76–81}} Since the end of the war, Serbian collaboration in the Holocaust has been the subject of historical revisionism by Serbian leaders.{{sfn|Cohen|1996|p=113}} | |||
=== Slovakia === | |||
'''§ 189 Law Against Disparagement of the Memory of the Deceased (1992)''' | |||
In Slovakia, some anti-communist writers claim that ] was a savior of Jews or that the ] was not responsible for ].<ref>{{cite book|last1=Sniegon|first1=Tomas|title=Vanished History: The Holocaust in Czech and Slovak Historical Culture|date=2014|publisher=]|isbn=978-1-78238-294-2|language=en|location=New York|title-link=Vanished History: The Holocaust in Czech and Slovak Historical Culture|quote=As far back as during the Cold War, the SWC had adapted its ideological history usage to fit its main goal – to fight for a ‘Slovak Slovakia’.8 The Holocaust was used in the narrative, but to a small degree and without much attention from the surrounding world. The use of history was focused, above all, on defending the memory of Jozef Tiso. What was most important, it seemed, was not to question the Holocaust as such, but rather to present it as a German crime which in Slovakia was supported solely by a few German-friendly radicals whom Tiso, against his will, was forced to keep in the government so as not to enrage the Germans too much. |pages=77–78)}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |first=Nina |last=Paulovičová |editor1-first=John-Paul |editor1-last=Himka |editor2-first=Joanna Beata |editor2-last=Michlic |title=Bringing the Dark Past to Light. The Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe. |title-link=Bringing the Dark Past to Light |chapter=The "Unmasterable Past"? The Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Slovakia |location=Lincoln |publisher=] |year=2013 |isbn=978-0-8032-2544-2 |pages=549–590 |quote=Because of émigrés’ attempts to whitewash history and degrade historical scholarship in order to sustain the reservoir of national mythologization, liberal historians denounce the émigrés as “misinformers” and “misinterpreters.” The claims that fascism never occurred in Slovakia (František Vnuk), that the deportation of Jews was an “evacuation” (Milan S. Durica), that Tiso (whose anti-Semitic invectives fueled the radicalism against the Jewish minority) was a “martyr” and a “savior” of the Jews, and that the Holocaust should be omitted from the context of the Slovak national identity discourse are the key markers of the émigré historians’ views. (p. 564)}}</ref> | |||
==Western Europe== | |||
Whoever disparages the memory of a deceased person shall be punished with imprisonment for not more than two years or a fine. | |||
=== France === | |||
Section 194 Application for Criminal Prosecution | |||
In France, Holocaust denial became more prominent in the 1990s as {{lang|fr|]}}, though the movement has existed in ultra-left French politics since at least the 1960s, led by figures such as ] (who was involved in the bookshop ] during the 1960s). Elements of the extreme far-right in France have begun to build on each other's negationist arguments, which often span beyond the Holocaust to cover a range of antisemitic views, incorporating attempts to tie the Holocaust to the Biblical massacre of the ], critiques of Zionism, and other material fanning what has been called a "conspiratorial Judeo-phobia" designed to legitimize and "banalize" antisemitism.<ref>Richard Joseph Golsan, ''Vichy's Afterlife'', University of Nevada Press, 2003, p. 130.</ref> | |||
(1) An insult shall be prosecuted only upon complaint. If the act was committed through dissemination of writings (Section 11 subsection (3)) or making them publicly accessible in a meeting or through a presentation by radio, then a complaint is not required if the aggrieved party was persecuted as a member of a group under the National Socialist or another rule by force and decree, this group is a part of the population and the insult is connected with this persecution. The act may not, however, be prosecuted ex officio if the aggrieved party objects. The objection may not be withdrawn. | |||
|- | |||
| Israel || '''Law 5746 Prohibition of Holocaust Denial Law (1986)''' | |||
Definitions 1. In this Law, "crime against the Jewish people" and "crime against humanity" have the same respective meanings as in the "Nazis and Nazi Collaborators Law, 5710-1950. | |||
=== Belgium === | |||
Prohibition of Denial of Holocaust 2. A person who, in writing or by word of mouth, publishes any statement denying or diminishing the proportions of acts committed in the period of the Nazi regime, which are crimes against the Jewish people or crimes against humanity, with intent to defend the perpetrators of those acts or to express sympathy or identification with them, shall be liable to imprisonment for a term of five years. | |||
In Belgium in 2001, ], the ideologue and vice-president of one of the country's largest political parties, the ], gave an interview on Dutch TV where he cast doubt over the number of Jews murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust. In the same interview, he questioned the scale of the Nazis' use of gas chambers and the authenticity of ]'s diary. In response to the media assault following the interview, Raes was forced to resign his position but vowed to remain active within the party.<ref> {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200411130223/https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/mar/09/worlddispatch.thefarright |date=April 11, 2020 }}, ''The Guardian'', Friday, March 9, 2001.</ref> Three years later, the Vlaams Blok was convicted of racism and chose to disband. Immediately afterwards, it legally reformed under the new name Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest) with the same leaders and the same membership.<ref> {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190303022858/http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3994867.stm |date=March 3, 2019 }}, BBC News, November 9, 2004.</ref> | |||
In September 2024, the Belgian far-right ] party sparked controversy by putting a convicted Holocaust denier as one of its candidates in the upcoming municipal elections.<ref>{{cite news |last=Starcevic |first=Seb |date=18 September 2024 |title=Belgian far-right party puts convicted Holocaust denier up for local elections |url=https://www.politico.eu/article/belgium-far-right-party-vlaams-belang-holocaust-denier-roeland-raes-local-elections/ |access-date=19 September 2024 |work=Politico}}</ref> | |||
Prohibition of publication of expression for sympathy for Nazi crimes 3. A person who, in writing or by word of mouth, publishes any statement expressing praise or sympathy for or identification with acts done in the period of the Nazi regime, which are crimes against the Jewish people or crimes against humanity, shall be liable to imprisonment for a term of five years. | |||
=== Germany === | |||
Permitted publication 4. The publication of a correct and fair report of a publication prohibited by this Law shall not be regarded as an offence thereunder so long as it is not made with intent to express sympathy or identification with the perpetrators of crimes against the Jewish people or against humanity. | |||
The trial of a Canadian woman, Monika Schaefer, and her German-Canadian brother, Alfred Schaefer started in Germany in early July 2018. They were charged with {{lang|de|Volksverhetzung}} (literally 'incitement of the people', often phrased as 'incitement to hatred' in English-language media). The pair had published video clips on ] of their denial of the genocide of Jews. In the clips, Alfred Schaefer said that Jews wanted to destroy Germans, blamed them for starting both World Wars, and referred to the Holocaust as a "Jewish fantasy".<ref>Cohen, Reut (May 8, 2018) {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180707230455/https://www.bnaibrith.ca/canadian_alfred_schaefer_convicted_of_holocaust_denial_in_germany |date=July 7, 2018 }} ]</ref> Monika Schaefer was arrested in January 2018 in Germany while attending a court hearing of ].<ref> {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200223193320/https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/holocaust-denier-monika-schaefer-trial-jasper-alberta-germany-1.4735103Bell, |date=February 23, 2020 }} '']''</ref><ref>Staff (January 4, 2018) {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190206195309/https://edmontonsun.com/news/national/canadian-holocaust-denier-arrested-in-germany-report/wcm/84bc1065-59bc-4da1-963f-638940a457f3 |date=February 6, 2019 }} '']''</ref><ref>JTA (January 9, 2018) {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180707230508/https://www.timesofisrael.com/canadian-holocaust-denier-arrested-in-germany/ |date=July 7, 2018 }}'']''</ref> Schaefer had been the ] candidate in the ] riding of ] during the federal elections in 2006, 2008, and 2011, but was expelled from the party after news reports surfaced of a July 2016 video<ref>Alfred S. {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190808115751/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0_BZphQ7Qo |date=August 8, 2019 }} ]</ref> where she describes the Holocaust as "the most persistent lie in all of history" and insisted that those in concentration camps had been kept as healthy and as well-fed as possible.<ref>Staff (January 5, 2018) {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190807170547/https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/monika-schaefer-alberta-holocaust-denier-arrested-germany-1.4474400 |date=August 7, 2019 }} '']''</ref><ref>Fishman, Aidan (January 4, 2018) {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180707202207/https://www.bnaibrith.ca/canadian_holocaust_denier_arrested_in_germany_following_b_nai_brith_complaint |date=July 7, 2018 }} ]</ref> In late October 2018, Monika Schaefer was convicted of the charge of 'incitement of hatred'. She was sentenced to ten months while Alfred Schaefer, also convicted, received a sentence of three years and two months.<ref>{{Cite news|url=https://nationalpost.com/pmn/news-pmn/canada-news-pmn/alberta-holocaust-denier-guilty-of-inciting-hatred-in-german-court|title=Alberta Holocaust denier guilty of inciting hatred in German court|date=October 26, 2018|work=National Post|access-date=October 28, 2018|archive-date=June 23, 2023|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230623215748/https://nationalpost.com/pmn/news-pmn/canada-news-pmn/alberta-holocaust-denier-guilty-of-inciting-hatred-in-german-court|url-status=live}}</ref> | |||
=== United Kingdom === | |||
Filing of charge 5. An indictment for offences under this Law shall only be filed by or with the consent of the Attorney-General. | |||
In January 2019, a survey conducted by Opinion Matters, on behalf of the ] found that 5% of UK adults did not believe the Holocaust took place and one in 12 (8%) believed its scale has been exaggerated. One in five respondents incorrectly answered that less than 2 million Jews were murdered, and 45% couldn't say how many people were murdered in the Holocaust. Speaking in light of the survey's findings, ], chief executive of the ], said: "One person questioning the truth of the Holocaust is one too many, and so it is up to us to redouble our efforts to ensure future generations know that it did happen and become witnesses to one of the darkest episodes in our history."<ref name=guardian-20190127>{{cite news|url=https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/27/one-in-20-britons-does-not-believe-holocaust-happened|title=One in 20 Britons does not believe Holocaust took place, poll finds|last=Sherwood|first=Harriet|newspaper=The Guardian|date=January 27, 2019|access-date=February 2, 2019|archive-date=July 30, 2019|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190730023456/https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/27/one-in-20-britons-does-not-believe-holocaust-happened|url-status=live}}</ref> The ] programme '']'', specializing on statistics, investigated the survey finding it was unlikely to be accurate. Participants were incentivized to complete the online survey by shopping vouchers encouraging speedy answering, and the principal question was a "reverse question" with most participants having to give the reverse answer to surrounding questions requiring careful answering. Another question asked how many Jewish people had been murdered in the holocaust with only 0.2% of participants giving the answer zero, which was considered to be a closer estimate of the number of UK adults that did not believe the Holocaust took place.<ref name=bbcr4-20190201>{{cite AV media|url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00028cf|series=More or Less|title=Holocaust deniers, Venezuelan hyperinflation, Tinder likes|people=], Peter Lynn (Professor of Survey Methodology)|publisher=BBC Radio 4|date=February 1, 2019|time=0m27s|access-date=February 2, 2019|archive-date=August 16, 2019|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190816103617/https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00028cf|url-status=live}}</ref> | |||
|- | |||
| Lithuania || --- | |||
|- | |||
| Luxembourg || Article 457 (3) Anyone who has contested, minimised, justified or denied the existence of war crimes or crimes against humanity as defined in the statutes of the International Military Tribunal of 8 August 1945 or the existence of a genocide as defined by the Act of 8 August 1985 shall be punished with imprisonment of between 8 days and 6 months and/or a fine. A complaint must be lodged by the person against whom the offence was committed (victim or association) in order for proceedings to be brought. | |||
|- | |||
| Poland || '''Act of 18 December 1998 on the Institute of National Remembrance - Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation''' | |||
==Other== | |||
Article 55</br> | |||
He who publicly and contrary to facts contradicts the crimes mentioned in Article 1, clause 1 shall be subject to a fine or a penalty of deprivation of liberty of up to three years. The judgment shall be made publicly known. | |||
=== Japan === | |||
Article 1</br> | |||
Japanese Holocaust denial first appeared in 1989 and reached its peak in 1995 with the publication in February 1995 by the Japanese magazine ''{{ill|Marco Polo (magazine)|lt=Marco Polo|ja|マルコポーロ (雑誌)}}'', a 250,000-circulation monthly published by ], of a Holocaust denial article by physician Masanori Nishioka<ref>{{cite book|last=Falk|first=Avner|year=2008|title=Anti-Semitism: a History and Psychoanalysis of Contemporary Hatred|publisher=Praeger|location=Westport, CT|isbn=978-0-313-35384-0|page=106}}</ref> which stated: "The ']' is a fabrication. There were no execution ] in ] or in any other ]. Today, what is displayed as 'gas chambers' at the remains of the Auschwitz camp in Poland are a post-war fabrication by the Polish communist regime or by the ], which controlled the country. Not once, neither at Auschwitz nor in any territory controlled by the Germans during the Second World War, was there 'mass murder of Jews' in 'gas chambers."<ref></ref> The Los Angeles-based ] instigated a ] of Bungei Shunju advertisers, including ], ], and ]. Within days, Bungei Shunju shut down ''Marco Polo'' and its editor, Kazuyoshi Hanada, quit, as did the president of Bungei Shunju, Kengo Tanaka.<ref>{{Cite web |title=The IHR Denounces Campaign Against Japanese Publishing Company |url=http://www.ihr.org//jhr/v15/v15n2p-9_Weber.html |website=] |access-date=April 17, 2014 |archive-date=October 23, 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181023162624/http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v15/v15n2p-9_Weber.html |url-status=live }}</ref>{{Unreliable source?|date=September 2023}} | |||
This Act shall govern:</br> | |||
1. the registration, collection, access, management and use of the documents of the organs of state security created and collected between 22 July 1944 and 31 December 1989, and the documents of the organs of security of the Third Reich and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics concerning:</br> | |||
:a) crimes perpetrated against persons of Polish nationality and Polish citizens of other ethnicity, nationalities in the period between 1 September 1939 and 31 December 1989:</br> | |||
::- Nazi crimes,</br> | |||
::- communist crimes,</br> | |||
::- other crimes constituting crimes against peace, crimes against humanity or war crimes</br> | |||
:b) other politically motivated repressive measures committed by functionaries of Polish prosecution bodies or the judiciary or persons acting upon their orders, and disclosed in the content of the rulings given pursuant to the Act of 23 February 1991 on the Acknowledgement as Null and Void Decisions Delivered on Persons Repressed for Activities for the Benefit of the Independent Polish State (Journal of Laws of 1993 No. 34, item 149, of 1995 No. 36, item 159, No. 28, item 143, and of 1998 No. 97, item 604),</br> | |||
2. the rules of procedure as regards the prosecution of crimes specified in point 1 letter a),</br> | |||
3. the protection of the personal data of grieved parties, and</br> | |||
4. the conduct of activities as regards public education.<ref> | |||
* {{en icon}} '''old''' Retrieved July 28, 2007. | |||
* {{pl icon}} click '''''tekst ujednolicony''''' to see act. Retrieved July 28, 2007</ref> | |||
|- | |||
| Portugal|| '''Racial Discrimination Law''' | |||
=== Finland === | |||
§ 240 (2) – Anyone who, in a public meeting, in writing intended for dissemination, or by any other means of social communication, defames or insults an individual or group of individuals on grounds of their race, colour, or ethnic, national or religious origin, particularly by denying war crimes and crimes against peace or humanity, with the intention of inciting to or encouraging racial or religious discrimination shall be punished with imprisonment of from three months to two years or a fine. | |||
Holocaust denial started in Finland almost immediately after the war, with many Finns who had been involved in the ] publishing articles questioning the Holocaust. Prominent early Finnish Holocaust deniers include professor ], CEO ], architech ] and ambassador ].<ref>"!" (Äärioikeiston pikkupommit ja isänmaallinen paatos) Yle Areena. ].</ref><ref name=Kotonen>Tommi Kotonen: Politiikan juoksuhaudat – Äärioikeistoliikkeet Suomessa kylmän sodan aikana, s. 64–67. Atena, Jyväskylä 2018.</ref> ]'s Nazi group started distributing a Finnish translation of Richard Harwood’s ] in 1976.<ref>Häkkinen, Perttu; Iitti, Vesa (2022). Lightbringers of the North: Secrets of the Occult Tradition of Finland. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-1-64411-464-3. p. 146</ref> | |||
|- | |||
| Romania || '''Emergency Ordinance no.31 (2002)''' | |||
In 2013, the ] asked President Niinistö to condemn a neo-Nazi newspaper circulated to some 660,000 households. The newspaper published articles denying the Holocaust and articles such as "Zionist terrorism" and "CNN, Goldman Sachs and Zionist Control" translated from ].<ref name="yle2">Oosi, Riikka: Yle. October 21, 2013. Retrieved January 22, 2017.</ref><ref name="yle3">Hirvonen, Tuomas: Yle. November 4, 2013. Retrieved January 22, 2017.</ref><ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.wiesenthal.com/about/news/wiesenthal-centre-to-11.html|title=Wiesenthal Centre to President of Finland: "Condemn Kärkkäinen Department Stores Tycoon Publisher of Antisemitic Free Newspapers as a National Danger."|website=www.wiesenthal.com}}</ref> Popular Finnish alternative media sites ], Verkkomedia and ] are known for publishing articles denying the Holocaust.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://yle.fi/a/3-8407726|work=]|title=Holokausti on myytti ja muita väitteitä – näin toimii suomalainen vastamedia|date=11 July 2024}}</ref> Prominent modern Finnish Holocaust deniers include the owner of KauppaSuomi newspaper and department store tycoon ].<ref>{{cite news|last=Hyttinen|first=Kati|url=https://www.mtvuutiset.fi/artikkeli/tavarataloyrittaja-karkkaiselta-hurja-syytos-presidentti-sauli-niinistosta-nwo-katyri-kiisti-paivityksessaan-myos-holokaustin/8272656|title=Tavarataloyrittäjä Kärkkäiseltä hurja syytös presidentti Sauli Niinistöstä: "Nwo-kätyri" – kiisti päivityksessään myös holokaustin|work=]|date=24 October 2021|language=fi}}</ref> Members of the ] have also distributed material denying the Holocaust.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.iltalehti.fi/uutiset/a/2016012721026224|title=Suomen Vastarintaliike jakoi holokaustin kieltäviä lappuja ympäri kouluja: "Opettajat sanoivat, että ulos täältä"|work=]|date=23 November 2024}}</ref> | |||
(3) Promotion of the cult of persons who are guilty of crimes against peace and humanity, or of promoting fascist, racist or xenophobic ideologies through propaganda, carried out through any means, in public, shall be punished with imprisonment from 6 months to 5 years, and the loss of certain rights | |||
=== American youth === | |||
(4) Public negation of the Holocaust or its effects is punished with imprisonment from 6 months to 5 years, and the loss of certain rights. It is prohibited to erect or to maintain in public space, statues, statuary groups, or commemorative plaques celebrating persons guilty of committing crimes against peace and humanity as well as to name streets, boulevards, squares, parks or other public space after such persons. | |||
According to a 2020 survey of American adult Millennials and Generation Z members, 24% said the Holocaust might be a myth or had been exaggerated.<ref>{{Cite web|last=Conference|first=Claims|title=FIRST-EVER 50-STATE SURVEY ON HOLOCAUST KNOWLEDGE OF AMERICAN MILLENNIALS AND GEN Z REVEALS SHOCKING RESULTS|url=http://www.claimscon.org/millennial-study/|access-date=February 10, 2021|website=Claims Conference|date=August 13, 2020|language=en-US|archive-date=February 4, 2021|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210204100207/http://www.claimscon.org/millennial-study/|url-status=live}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|date=September 16, 2020|title=Nearly two-thirds of US young adults unaware 6m Jews killed in the Holocaust|url=http://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/16/holocaust-us-adults-study|access-date=February 10, 2021|website=The Guardian|language=en|archive-date=February 13, 2021|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210213030410/https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/16/holocaust-us-adults-study|url-status=live}}</ref> | |||
|- | |||
| Spain || '''Anti-Genocide Law (1971, amendments of 1995)''' | |||
==Reactions to Holocaust denial== | |||
Art. 607 (2) The diffusion by any means of ideas or doctrines that deny or justify the crimes in the previous section of this article, or tries the rehabilitation of regimes or institutions which they protect generating practices of such, will be punished with a prison sentence of one to two years. | |||
In 2022, the ] adopted a resolution aimed at combating Holocaust denial and antisemitism. The resolution was proposed by Germany and Israel.<ref>{{Cite news |date=January 20, 2022 |title=UN defines Holocaust denial in new resolution |language=en-GB |work=BBC News |url=https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60072506 |access-date=March 24, 2022 |archive-date=March 24, 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220324224821/https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60072506 |url-status=live }}</ref> | |||
|- | |||
| Switzerland || '''261bis Rassendiskriminierung / Discrimination Raciale (1995)''' | |||
===Scholars=== | |||
261bis Whoever publicly, by the word, the writing, the image, the gesture, by ways in fact or any other manner, lowered or discriminated of a way which undermines human dignity a person or a group of people because of their race, their ethnic membership or their religion or which, for the same reason, will deny, minimize coarsely or seek to justify a genocide or other crimes against humanity shall be punished by imprisonment of up to three years or a fine. | |||
{{See also|Irving v Penguin Books and Lipstadt}} | |||
|} | |||
Scholarly response to Holocaust denial can be roughly divided into three categories. Some academics refuse to engage Holocaust deniers or their arguments at all, on grounds that doing so lends them unwarranted legitimacy.<ref>{{cite book |author-link1=Wilhelm Heitmeyer |first1=Wilhelm |last1=Heitmeyer |first2=John |last2=Hagan |title=International Handbook of Violence Research |publisher=Springer |year=2003}}</ref> The second group of scholars, typified by the American historian ], have tried to raise awareness of the methods and motivations of Holocaust denial without legitimizing the deniers themselves. "We need not waste time or effort answering the deniers' contentions," Lipstadt wrote. "It would be never-ending.... Their commitment is to an ideology and their 'findings' are shaped to support it."<ref>Deborah Lipstadt, 1992 interview with Ken Stern of the American Jewish Committee</ref> A third group, typified by the ], responds to arguments and claims made by Holocaust denial groups by pointing out inaccuracies and errors in their evidence.<ref name=66-q&a>{{cite web|title=Holocaust denial – The IHR's Questions & Answers, and Nizkor's Responses|url=http://www.nizkor.org/features/qar/qar00.html|work=]|access-date=September 28, 2013|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131202230742/http://www.nizkor.org/features/qar/qar00.html|archive-date=December 2, 2013|url-status=dead}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |first1=Robert L. |last1=Hilliard |first2=Michael C. |last2=Keith |title=Waves of Rancor: tuning in the radical right |publisher=M.E. Sharpe |year=1999 |isbn=0-7656-0131-1 |page=250}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |first1=Daniel |last1=Wolfish |first2=Gordon S. |last2=Smith |title=Who Is Afraid of the State?: Canada in a World of Multiple Centres of Power |publisher=University of Toronto Press |year=2001 |isbn=0-8020-8388-9 |page=108}}</ref> | |||
<br style="clear:both;"> | |||
Of the countries that ban Holocaust denial, a number (Austria, Germany, Romania and Slovakia) were among the perpetrators of the ], and many of these also ban other elements associated with Nazism, such as Nazi symbols. Additionally, scholars have pointed out that countries that specifically ban Holocaust denial generally have legal systems that limit speech in other ways, such as banning ]. In the words of D. Guttenplan, this is a split between the "''] countries'' of the US, England and Wales, and former British colonies from the ''civil law countries of continental Europe and Scotland''. In ] countries the law is generally more proscriptive. Also under the civil law regime the judge acts more as an inquisitor, gathering and presenting evidence as well as interpreting it".<ref>D D Guttenplan, , ''Index of Free Expression, 2005''.</ref> | |||
In December 1991 the ], the oldest and largest society of historians and teachers of history in the United States, issued the following statement: "The American Historical Association Council strongly deplores the publicly reported attempts to deny the fact of the Holocaust. No serious historian questions that the Holocaust took place."<ref name=":0" /> This followed a strong reaction by many of its members and commentary in the press against a near-unanimous decision that the AHA had made in May 1991 that studying the ''significance of the Holocaust'' should be encouraged. The association's May 1991 statement was in response to an incident where certain of its members had questioned the reality of the Holocaust. The December 1991 declaration is a reversal of the AHA's earlier stance that the association should not set a precedent by certifying historical facts.<ref name=":0">{{cite web |url=http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/1991/9112/9112RES.CFM |title=AHA Statement on Holocaust Denial |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100201141606/http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/1991/9112/9112RES.CFM |archive-date=February 1, 2010 |publisher=] |access-date=October 11, 2013}}</ref> The AHA has also stated that Holocaust denial is "at best, a form of academic fraud".<ref name="adaaha">{{Cite book |last1=Gerstenfeld |first1=Phyllis B. |last2=Grant |first2=Diana Ruth |title=Crimes of hate: selected readings |publisher=] |page=190 |year=2004 |isbn=0-7619-2943-6}}</ref> | |||
Many Holocaust deniers claim their work should be protected by a universal right to ], and see these laws as a confirmation of their own beliefs, arguing that truth does not need to be legally enforced. However, the argument that laws punishing holocaust denial are incompatible with the ] and the ] have been rejected by institutions of the ] (the ],<ref>{{cite court|litigants=X. v. Federal Republic of Germany|court=]|date=16 July 1982}}</ref> the ]<ref>{{cite court|litigants=Lehideux and Isorni v. France|reporter=1998-VII, no. 92|court=]|date=23 September 1998|url=http://cmiskp.echr.coe.int/tkp197/view.asp?action=html&documentId=696122&portal=hbkm&source=externalbydocnumber&table=F69A27FD8FB86142BF01C1166DEA398649}}</ref>) and also by the ].<ref>{{cite court|litigants=Faurisson v France|vol=2|reporter=BHRC|opinion=UN Doc. CCPR/C/58/D/550/1993|pinpoint=1|court=]|date=1996}}</ref> | |||
Literary theorist ] described Holocaust denial as "part of the extermination itself".<ref>Golsan, 130</ref> Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winner ], during a 1999 discussion at the ] in Washington, D.C., called the Holocaust "the most documented tragedy in ]. Never before has a tragedy elicited so much witness from the killers, from the victims and even from the bystanders—millions of pieces here in the museum what you have, all other museums, archives in the thousands, in the millions."<ref>{{cite web |url=https://www.pbs.org/eliewiesel/resources/millennium.html |title=Millennium Evening with Elie Wiesel |work=] |date= April 12, 1999 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230405050622/https://www.pbs.org/eliewiesel/resources/millennium.html |archive-date=April 5, 2023}}</ref> | |||
Some people who do not deny that the Holocaust occurred nevertheless oppose such restrictions of free speech, including, despite her legal battle with David Irving, Deborah Lipstadt. In fact, most historians oppose such laws, including Raul Hillberg, Richard Evans and Pierre Vidal-Naquet. Other prominent opponents of the laws are ],<ref>, '']'', ], 2006. Retrieved January 2007.</ref> ], ],<ref>, '']'', ], 2006. Retrieved January 2007.</ref> and ]. An uproar resulted when ] used one of Chomsky's essays without explicit permission as a foreword to a book of Holocaust denial essays (see ]). | |||
Deborah Lipstadt's 1993 book, '']'', sharply criticized various Holocaust deniers, including British author ], for deliberately misrepresenting evidence to justify their preconceived conclusions. In the book, Lipstadt named Irving as "one of the more dangerous" Holocaust deniers, because he was a published author, and was viewed by some as a legitimate military historian. He was "familiar with historical evidence", she wrote, and "bends it until it conforms with his ideological leanings and political agenda". In 1996, Irving filed a libel suit against Lipstadt and her publisher, ]. Irving, who appeared as a defense witness in ]'s ] in Canada, and once declared at a rally of Holocaust deniers that "more women died in the ] than ever died in a gas chamber at ]",<ref>{{cite web |title=Irving v. Lipstadt |url=http://www.hdot.org/trial |website=Holocaust Denial on Trial |access-date=September 29, 2010 |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100927204545/http://www.hdot.org/trial |archive-date=September 27, 2010}}</ref> claimed that Lipstadt's allegation damaged his reputation. American historian ], an expert witness for the defense, wrote a comprehensive essay for the court summarizing the voluminous evidence for the reality of the Holocaust, and under cross-examination, effectively countered all of Irving's principal arguments to the contrary. ] historian ], another defense expert witness, spent two years examining Irving's writings and confirmed his misrepresentations, including evidence that he had knowingly used forged documents as source material. After a two-month trial in London the trial judge, ], issued a 333-page ruling against Irving, which referred to him as a "Holocaust denier" and "right-wing pro-Nazi polemicist".<ref>{{cite web |last=Bazyler |first=Michael J. |title=Holocaust Denial Laws and Other Legislation Criminalizing Promotion of Nazism |url=http://www1.yadvashem.org/yv/en/holocaust/insights/pdf/bazyler.pdf |website=International Institute for Holocaust Studies |publisher=] |access-date=September 29, 2010 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20111105153114/http://www1.yadvashem.org/yv/en/holocaust/insights/pdf/bazyler.pdf |archive-date=November 5, 2011}}</ref> | |||
=== European Union === | |||
There is a strong push to criminalize denying the Holocaust in the ]. On ] ] the EU adopted the Joint action/96/443/JHA concerning action to combat racism and xenophobia which prohibits public denial of the crimes defined in Article 6 of the Charter of the ] appended to the ] of ] ], insofar as it includes behaviour which is contemptuous of, or degrading to, a group of persons defined by reference to colour, race, religion or national or ethnic origin.<ref>. Europa.eu. July 27, 2005. Retrieved June 2007.</ref><ref>. ''Eur-lex.Europa.eu''. July 24, 1996. Retrieved June 2007.</ref> During the German presidency there was an attempt to extend this ban.<ref>. '']''. January 15, 2007. Retrieved June 2007.</ref> This was blocked by Britain and the Nordic countries.<ref>. ''Haaretz.com''. April 17, 2004. Retrieved June 2007.</ref> As a result the EU has not prohibited Holocaust denial outright, although a maximum term of three years in jail is optionally available to all member nations for "denying or grossly trivializing crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes."<ref>. '']''. April 19, 2007. Retrieved June 2007.</ref><ref>Bilefsky, Dan. . ''] (Europe}''. April 19, 2007. Retrieved June 2007.</ref> | |||
], an American resident in Canada, was disturbed by the efforts of organizations like the ] to suppress the speech of the Holocaust deniers, feeling that it was better to confront them openly than to try to censor them. On the ] newsgroup ''alt.revisionism'' he began a campaign of "truth, fact, and evidence", working with other participants on the newsgroup to uncover factual information about the Holocaust and counter the arguments of the deniers by proving them to be based upon misleading evidence, false statements, and outright lies. He founded the ] to expose the activities of the Holocaust deniers, who responded to McVay with personal attacks, slander, and death threats.<ref>{{Cite web |url=http://www.protocol.gov.bc.ca/protocol/prgs/obc/1995/1995_KMcVay.htm|website=Order of British Columbia |title=Biography: Kenneth McVay |access-date=June 30, 2008 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080516081625/http://www.protocol.gov.bc.ca/protocol/prgs/obc/1995/1995_KMcVay.htm |archive-date=May 16, 2008 |url-status=dead}}</ref> | |||
== Other genocide denials == | |||
{{main|Genocide denial}} | |||
===Public figures=== | |||
Other acts of genocide have met similar attempts to deny and minimize, most notably the ], which is denied by the ] Government, but also the ] and the ]. Gregory H. Stanton, formerly of the US State Department and the founder of Genocide Watch, lists denial as the final stage of a genocide development: "Denial is the eighth stage that always follows a genocide. It is among the surest indicators of further genocidal massacres. The perpetrators of genocide dig up the mass graves, burn the bodies, try to cover up the evidence and intimidate the witnesses. They deny that they committed any crimes, and often blame what happened on the victims."<ref>Gregory Stanton, , Genocide Watch</ref> | |||
A number of public figures have spoken out against Holocaust denial. In 2006, UN Secretary-General ] said: "Remembering is a necessary rebuke to those who say the Holocaust never happened or has been exaggerated. Holocaust denial is the work of bigots; we must reject their false claims whenever, wherever and by whomever they are made."<ref>{{cite news |work=] |url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4653666.stm |title=Annan condemns Holocaust denial |date=January 2006 |access-date=February 14, 2006 |archive-date=September 6, 2017 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170906210833/http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4653666.stm |url-status=live}}</ref> In January 2007, the ] condemned "without reservation any denial of the Holocaust", though Iran disassociated itself from the resolution.<ref>{{cite news |url=https://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=21355&Cr=holocaust&Cr1 |title=UN Assembly condemns Holocaust denial by consensus; Iran disassociates itself |work=U.N. News Centre |publisher=] |date=January 26, 2007 |access-date=June 28, 2017 |archive-date=November 26, 2017 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171126010350/http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=21355&Cr=holocaust&Cr1 |url-status=live}}</ref> | |||
In July 2013, Iran's then president-elect Hassan Rohani described Ahmadinejad's remarks about the Holocaust and Israel as "] rhetoric"<ref>{{cite news |agency=DPA |date=July 7, 2013 |url=http://www.haaretz.com/news/middle-east/1.534337 |title=Ahmadinejad touts Holocaust denial as great success of his tenure |newspaper=] |access-date=March 23, 2014 |archive-date=July 17, 2015 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150717185816/http://www.haaretz.com/news/middle-east/1.534337 |url-status=live}}</ref> and in September 2013 ] stated that "The Nazis carried out a massacre that cannot be denied, especially against the Jewish people" and "The massacre by the Nazis was condemnable. We never want to sit by side with the Nazis...They committed a crime against Jews — which is a crime against ... all of humanity."<ref>{{cite web |url=http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/09/25/20693723-irans-rouhani-on-holocaust-a-massacre-that-cannot-be-denied |title=Iran's Rouhani on Holocaust: 'A massacre that cannot be denied' |first1=Andrea |last1=Mitchell |first2=Tracy |last2=Connor |work=] |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130927154909/http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/09/25/20693723-irans-rouhani-on-holocaust-a-massacre-that-cannot-be-denied |archive-date=September 27, 2013}}</ref> While declining to give a specific number of Jewish victims, Iranian analysts suggested that "Rouhani pushed the envelope as far as it could go ... without infuriating the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and other conservatives back home."{{R|Saeed Kamali Dehghan}} | |||
== Notable Holocaust deniers == | |||
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{{col-end}} | |||
===Former Auschwitz SS personnel=== | |||
== See also == | |||
Critics of Holocaust denial also include members of the ]. Camp physician and SS-'']'' ] considered the facts of Auschwitz "so firmly determined that one cannot have any doubt at all", and described those who negate what happened at the camp as "malevolent" people who have "personal interest to want to bury in silence things that cannot be buried in silence".<ref>Frankfurter, Bernhard. ''Die Begegnung. Auschwitz-Ein Opfer und ein Täter im Gespräch''. Vienna, Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik, 1995, p. 102. cited in ]. ''The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial''. ], 2002, p. 291.</ref> ] handler and SS-'']'' ] said that anyone who maintains that nobody was gassed at Auschwitz must be "crazy or in the wrong".<ref>{{cite book |editor-last=Demant |editor-first=Ebbo |title=Auschwitz – "Direkt von der Rampe weg...." Kaduk, Erber, Klehr: Drei Täter geben zu Protokoll |language=de |trans-title=Auschwitz - "Straight from the ramp..." Kaduk, Erber, Klehr: Three perpetrators testify |page=114 |location=Hamburg |publisher=Rowohlt |date=1979 |isbn=3-499-14438-7}}</ref> SS-''Unterscharführer'' ] stated that he did not consider those who maintain such a thing as normal people.<ref>''Drei Deutsche Mörder. Aufzeichnungen über die Banalität des Bösen'', Germany 1998 (filmed in 1978). Directed by Ebbo Demant, produced by ].</ref> Hearing about Holocaust denial compelled former SS-'']'' ] to publicly speak about what he witnessed at Auschwitz, and denounce Holocaust deniers,{{sfn|Rees|2005|p=300}} stating: | |||
*] | |||
*] | |||
*] | |||
{{blockquote|I would like you to believe me. I saw the gas chambers. I saw the crematoria. I saw the open fires. I was on the ramp when the selections took place. I would like you to believe that these atrocities happened because I was there.{{sfn|Rees|2005|p=301}}<ref name="Online 2005">{{cite news |title=An SS Officer Remembers: The Bookkeeper from Auschwitz |newspaper=] |date=May 9, 2005 |url=http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/an-ss-officer-remembers-the-bookkeeper-from-auschwitz-a-355188.html |access-date=April 22, 2016 |archive-date=March 2, 2007 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070302085046/http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,355188,00.html |url-status=live}}</ref>}} | |||
==Notes== | |||
{{reflist|2}} | |||
===Holocaust denial and antisemitism=== | |||
== References == | |||
Holocaust denial is given as an example of antisemitism in the ],<ref>{{cite web |title=Holocaust Remembrance Press Release |url=https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/sites/default/files/press_release_document_antisemitism.pdf |publisher=Romanian Chairmanship |date=May 26, 2016 |access-date=April 15, 2018 |archive-date=October 24, 2017 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171024070944/https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/sites/default/files/press_release_document_antisemitism.pdf |url-status=dead}}</ref> adopted by the ] as well as the United Kingdom, Israel, Austria, Scotland, Romania, Germany and Bulgaria. The European Parliament voted in favor of a resolution calling for member states to adopt the definition on June 1, 2017.<ref>{{cite web |url=https://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/EU-Parliament-votes-in-favor-of-adopting-antisemitism-definition-494479 |title=EU Parliament votes in favor of adopting antisemitism definition |work=] |date=June 2017 |access-date=February 24, 2019 |archive-date=July 18, 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180718001345/https://www.jpost.com//Diaspora/EU-Parliament-votes-in-favor-of-adopting-antisemitism-definition-494479 |url-status=live}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |title=Fact Sheet: Working Definition of Antisemitism |url=https://holocaustremembrance.com/sites/default/files/fcat_sheet_working_definition_of_antisemitism.pdf |publisher=] |date=October 24, 2017 |access-date=August 17, 2020 |archive-date=July 13, 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180713161250/http://holocaustremembrance.com/sites/default/files/fcat_sheet_working_definition_of_antisemitism.pdf |url-status=dead}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=https://www.momentmag.com/defining-anti-semitism-conversation-eu-coordinator-combating-anti-semitism/ |title=Defining Anti-Semitism: A Conversation With the EU Coordinator on Combating Anti-Semitism |date=June 28, 2017 |access-date=April 15, 2018 |archive-date=June 18, 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180618025721/https://www.momentmag.com/defining-anti-semitism-conversation-eu-coordinator-combating-anti-semitism/ |url-status=dead}}</ref> | |||
<div class="references-small"> | |||
=== About Holocaust denial === | |||
*Richard J. Evans, "In Defense of History", New York: Norton, 1999 | |||
* Richard J. Evans, ''Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial,'' Basic Books, 2002 (ISBN 0-465-02153-0). As well as the story of the Irving case, this is an excellent case study on historical research. | |||
* Charles Gray, ''The Irving Judgment'', Penguin, 2000 (ISBN 0-14-029899-1). Actual text of the judgment in the Irving case. | |||
* Deborah Lipstadt, ''Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory'', Plume (The Penguin Group), 1994. Debunking Holocaust revisionism. | |||
* Donald L. Niewyk, ed. "The Holocaust: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation", ], 1992. | |||
* Robert Jan van Pelt, The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial. ISBN 0-253-34016-0 | |||
* Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman, "Denying History Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why do they Say it?" University of California Press ISBN 0-520-23469-3 | |||
* Michael Shermer, "Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of our Time", Freeman, New York 1997 | |||
* Michael Shermer, “Holocaust Revisionism Update: David Cole Recants/David Irving Says Churchill Knew About Pearl Harbor.” Skeptic 6, no. 1 (1998): 23-25 | |||
*], a documentary by Errol Morris. | |||
* by Mohammad Daoud, ''Syria Times'' September 6 2000, retrieved November 08 2005 | |||
* MEMRI Special Dispatch Series no 855, January 28 2005, retrieved November 08 2005 | |||
* Reuven Paz, ''Peacewatch'' 21 April 2000, retrieved November 08 2005 | |||
*Abbot A., "Holocaust Denial Research Disclaimed", Nature, 368, 1994 | |||
* John C. Zimmerman, "Holocaust denial : demographics, testimonies, and ideologies" Lanham, Md., University Press of America, 2000 | |||
* John C. Zimmerman, “Holocaust Denial.” Los Angeles Times, 16 Jan. 2000, M4 | |||
* ]: "Les carences et incohérences du Rapport Leuchter" «Jour J., la lettre télégraphique juive», 12 decembre 1988 | |||
* | |||
* Jean Claude Pressac "Les Crématoires d’Auschwitz: La Machinerie Du Meurtre De Masse", CNRS editions, Paris 1993 | |||
* Pierre Vidal-Naquet, "Les assassins de la mémoire", La Découverte, Paris 1987 | |||
*Pierre Vidal-Naquet, "Qui sont les assassins de la mémoire? | |||
in Réflexions sur le génocide. Les juifs, la mémoire et le présent", tome III. La Découverte 1995. | |||
* Brigitte Bailer-Galanda, Wilhelm Lasek, "Amoklauf gegen die Wirklichkeit. NS-Verbrechen und revisionistische Geschichtsschreibung".Wien, 1992 | |||
* George Wellers, "A propos du «Rapport Leuchter» et les chambres à gaz d’Auschwitz", "Le Monde Juif", 134, 1989 | |||
*Till Bastian , "Auschwitz und die «Auschwitz-Lüge»". Massenmord und Geschichtsfälschung", Beck’sche Reihe München, 1994 | |||
*Francesco Germinario, "Estranei alla democrazia. Negazionismo e antisemitismo nella destra radicale italiana" BFS Editore, Pisa 2001 | |||
* Francesco Rotondi,"Luna di miele ad Auschwitz. Riflessioni sul negazionismo della Shoah", Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, Napoli, 2005 | |||
* Flores M., ''Storia, Verità e Giustizia'', Mondadori, Milano 2001 | |||
* Valentina Pisanty, "L’irritante questione delle camere a gas. Logica del negazionismo", Bompiani, Milano 1998 | |||
* Ted Gottfried, "Deniers of the Holocaust: Who They Are, What They Do, Why They Do It", Brookfield Conn Twenty-First Century Books, 2001 | |||
* Henry Rousso, "Le dossier Lyon III : le rapport sur le racisme et le négationnisme à l’université Jean-Moulin", Paris, 2004 | |||
* Nadine Fresco "Les redresseurs de morts. Chambres à gaz: la bonne nouvelle. Comment on révise l'histoire", "Les Temps Modernes", 407, juin 1980 | |||
* Nadine Fresco, "The Denial of the Dead On the Faurisson Affair" 1981 | |||
* Georges Bensoussan "Négationnisme et antisionnisme: récurrences et convergences des discours du rejet", "Revue d'histoire de la Shoah", 166, mai-août 1999. Centre de documentation juive contemporaine 1999 | |||
*Valérie Igounet, "Dossier «Les terroirs de l'extrême-droite»: | |||
Un négationnisme stratégique",Le Monde diplomatique (mai 1998) | |||
*Pierre Bridonneau, "Oui, il faut parler des négationnistes", Éditions du Cerf 1997 | |||
* Yehuda Bauer “A Past that Will Not Go Away.” In The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined. Ed. Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck. Bloomington: Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum by Indiana University Press, 1998, 12-22 | |||
* Alan L. Berger, “Holocaust Denial: Tempest in a Teapot, or Storm on the Horizon?” In Peace, in Deed: Essays in Honor of Harry James Cargas. Ed. Zev Garber and Richard Libowitz. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998, 31-45. | |||
* Joseph Dan, “Four Ways of Holocaust Denial.” In Bruch und Kontinuität: Jüdisches Denken in der europäischen Geistesgeschichte. Ed. Eveline Goodman-Thau and Michael Daxner. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1995, 39-46 | |||
* Patrick Finney “Ethics, Historical Relativism and Holocaust Denial.” Rethinking History 2 (1998): 359-369. | |||
* Jan Markiewicz, WOJCIECH Gubala, JERZY Labedz, "A Study of the Cyanide Compounds Content in the Walls of the Gas Chambers in the Former Auschwitz & Birkenau Concentration Camps", Z Zagadnien Sqdowych, XXX, 1994 | |||
*Patrick finney, “Ethics, Historical Relativism and Holocaust Denial.” Rethinking History 2 (1998): 359-369. | |||
* Wayne Klein, “Truth’s Turning: History and the Holocaust.” In Postmodernism and the Holocaust. Ed. Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1998, 53-83 | |||
*Jonathan Petropoulos, “Holocaust Denial: A Generational Typology.” In Lessons and Legacies III: Memory, Memorialization, and Denial. Ed. Peter Hayes. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999 | |||
*Werner Wegner: "Keine Massenvergasungen in Auschwitz? Zur Kritik des Leuchter-Gutachtens", in: Die Schatten der Vergangenheit. Impulse zur Historisierung der Vergangenheit, hg. v. Uwe Backes, Eckhard Jesse und Rainer Zitelmann, Propyläen Verlag, Berlin 1990, S. 450 – 476, ISBN 3-549-07407-7 | |||
*Jürgen Zarusky: "Leugnung des Holocaust. Die antisemitische Strategie nach Auschwitz. Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Schriften Aktuell – Amtliches Mitteilungsblatt". Jahrestagung 9./10. Nov.1999, Marburg. Auch als Internet-Veröffentlichung (pdf-Dokument) erhältlich. | |||
* Martin Finkenberger/Horst Junginger (Hrsg.): "Im Dienste der Lügen. Herbert Grabert (1901–1978) und seine Verlage". Aschaffenburg : Alibri-Verl., 2004. ISBN 3-932710-76-2. | |||
*Thomas Wandres: "Die Strafbarkeit des Auschwitz-Leugnens". Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-428-10055-7 | |||
The ''Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity'' defines Holocaust denial as "a new form of anti-Semitism, but one that hinges on age-old motifs".<ref name=EGCAH45>{{cite book |quote=Holocaust denial is a new form of anti-Semitism, but one that hinges on age-old motifs. |first=Dinah |last=Shelton |title=Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity |publisher=Macmillan Reference |date=2005 |page=45}}</ref> The ] has stated that "Holocaust denial is a contemporary form of the classic anti-Semitic doctrine of the evil, manipulative and threatening world Jewish conspiracy"<ref name=ADLguide>{{cite web |url=http://www.adl.org/Holocaust/theory.asp |title=Introduction: Denial as Anti-Semitism |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110604020743/http://www.adl.org/holocaust/theory.asp |archive-date=June 4, 2011 |website=Holocaust Denial: An Online Guide to Exposing and Combating Anti-Semitic Propaganda |publisher=] |access-date=August 27, 2009}}</ref> and French historian ] has written that "Holocaust denial is a convenient polemical substitute for anti-semitism."<ref name=Igounet>{{cite news |last=Igounet |first=Valérie |url=http://mondediplo.com/1998/05/08igou |title=Holocaust denial is part of a strategy |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190613014018/https://mondediplo.com/1998/05/08igou |archive-date=June 13, 2019 |work=] |date=8 May 1998}}</ref> | |||
=== By Holocaust deniers === | |||
*], '']'', Newport Beach: Institute for Historical Review, 1994 (ISBN 0-9679856-9-2) | |||
*], ''My Life As a Revisionist'', The Journal of Historical Review, volume 9 no. 1 (Spring 1989), p. 5. | |||
*], ''Dissecting the Holocaust: The Growing Critique of 'Truth' and 'Memory''', Alabama: Theses & Dissertations Press, 2000 (ISBN 0-9679856-0-9) | |||
*], ''Der Holocaust auf dem Prüfstand'' (1992) | |||
*], '']" Noontide Press. | |||
*], ''The Great Holocaust Trial'', (June,1985 - 2nd Edition) ISBN 0-939484-22-6 | |||
*],], ], '']'', Chicago, Theses & Dissertations Press, 2005 (ISBN 1-59148-015-9) | |||
*], '''' (''Holocaust. The Most Depressing Zionist Lie of the XX Century''; 2006) | |||
*], '']'', Chicago: Theses & Dissertations Press, 2001 (ISBN 0-9679856-6-8) | |||
*], '''', Los Angeles: Prima Facie, 1987 (ISBN 0-943415-01-2) | |||
</div> | |||
==External links== | |||
===Examples of websites denying the Holocaust or parts thereof=== | |||
<!-- This is not, and not intended to be, a directory. See ] --> | |||
* A leading Holocaust denial organization | |||
* ] Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust | |||
* Vrij Historisch Onderzoek (Dutch for "Free Historical Research") | |||
*, Website of ] | |||
*, Website of ] | |||
* from the website of ] | |||
According to Walter Reich, psychiatrist and then a senior scholar at the ], one-time director of the ], and now professor of international affairs at ]: | |||
===Reports on and criticisms of Holocaust denial=== | |||
* — responses to Holocaust denial | |||
* — documents and essays on the Holocaust and its denial | |||
* | |||
* Published by the ] | |||
* - by ], discusses the style of arguments used by holocaust deniers | |||
*, Documents and resources relating to the David Irving vs. Penguin Books and ] trial | |||
*, the blog of ] | |||
* | |||
* How Holocaust deniers push hoaxes to sabotage the ] | |||
* | |||
* by Alex Grobman & Rafael Medoff at . Also available: | |||
* | |||
* at . April 22, 2000 | |||
* Written and Compiled by Itamar Marcus, also at | |||
*: An artist's attempt to show the damage caused by Holocaust denial by digitally removing evidence of the Holocaust from historic photos. | |||
* The Holocaust Cartoon contest on Memri TV Iran, denying the holocaust had happened. Mentions Robert Faurisson's work. | |||
* | |||
* Showcasing moral contempt and opportunities to take action | |||
*, Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center at the Center for Special Studies (C.S.S). December 25, 2006 | |||
* Scroll down for English text and signatures. | |||
{{blockquote|The primary motivation for most deniers is anti-Semitism, and for them the Holocaust is an infuriatingly inconvenient fact of history. After all, the Holocaust has generally been recognized as one of the most terrible crimes that ever took place, and surely the very emblem of evil in the modern age. If that crime was a direct result of anti-Semitism taken to its logical end, then anti-Semitism itself, even when expressed in private conversation, is inevitably discredited among most people. What better way to rehabilitate anti-Semitism, make anti-Semitic arguments seem once again respectable in civilized discourse and even make it acceptable for governments to pursue anti-Semitic policies than by convincing the world that the great crime for which anti-Semitism was blamed simply never happened—indeed, that it was nothing more than a frame-up invented by the Jews, and propagated by them through their control of the media? What better way, in short, to make the world safe again for anti-Semitism than by denying the Holocaust?<ref name=ReichNYT>{{cite news |last=Reich |first=Walter |author-link=Walter Reich |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1993/07/11/books/erasing-the-holocaust.html |title=Erasing the Holocaust |work=] |date=July 11, 1993 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230628213512/https://www.nytimes.com/1993/07/11/books/erasing-the-holocaust.html |archive-date=June 28, 2023}}</ref>}} | |||
===Audio testimony of Holocaust survivors === | |||
* Dr. Walter Ziffer, the last Holocaust survivor in Asheville, North Carolina as of April 11, 2004, discusses his internment in several camps, as well as the idea of Holocaust revisionism. | |||
The French historian ] described the motivation of deniers more succinctly, explaining, "One revives the dead in order the better to strike the living."<ref name=Vidal-NaquetMotivations>{{cite book |author-link=Pierre Vidal-Naquet |last=Vidal-Naquet |first=Pierre |url=http://www.anti-rev.org/textes/VidalNaquet92a/part-4.html |chapter=A Paper Eichmann (1980) – Anatomy of a Lie: On the Revisionist Method |title=Assassins of Memory |publisher=] |date=1992 |access-date=August 27, 2009 |archive-date=September 5, 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180905180131/http://www.anti-rev.org/textes/VidalNaquet92a/part-4.html |url-status=live}}</ref> German political scientist ] has argued, "Every denial of the Holocaust... contains an appeal to repeat it."<ref>{{cite book |last1=Küntzel |first1=Matthias |title=Holocaust Denial: The Politics of Perfidy |date=2012 |publisher=] |isbn=978-3-11-028821-6 |language=en |chapter=Judeophobia and the Denial of the Holocaust in Iran}}</ref> | |||
===Holocaust denial as state policy=== | |||
* | |||
* | |||
* | |||
** | |||
** | |||
{{Antisemitism topics|state=collapsed}} | |||
] | |||
] | |||
] | |||
] | |||
] | |||
==Examination of claims== | |||
{{Link FA|he}} | |||
{{Main|Evidence and documentation for the Holocaust}} | |||
The key claims which cause Holocaust denial to differ from established fact are:{{R|Key elements|Assertions}} | |||
] | |||
] | |||
*The Nazis had no official policy or intention of exterminating Jews. | |||
] | |||
*The Nazis did not use ]s to mass murder Jews.<ref name=NP-gas-chambers>{{cite web |title=Response to Holocaust denial on the existence of Gas Chambers and Crematoria |url=http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/orgs/american/skeptic-magazine/skeptic-12.html |work=] |access-date=November 16, 2013 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131120124932/http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/orgs/american/skeptic-magazine/skeptic-12.html |archive-date=November 20, 2013 |url-status=dead}}</ref> | |||
] | |||
*The figure of 5 to 6 million Jewish deaths is a gross exaggeration, and the actual number is an ] lower. | |||
] | |||
] | |||
Other claims include the following: | |||
] | |||
*Stories of the Holocaust were a myth initially created by the ] to demonize Germans,{{R|Assertions}} Jews having spread this myth as part of a grander plot intended to enable the creation of a Jewish homeland in ], and now to garner continuing support for the state of Israel.<ref>A plot designed to garner support of Israel: | |||
] | |||
*"The central assertion for the deniers is that Jews are not victims but victimizers. They 'stole' billions in reparations, destroyed Germany's good name by spreading the 'myth' of the Holocaust, and won international sympathy because of what they claimed had been done to them. In the paramount miscarriage of injustice, they used the world's sympathy to 'displace' another people so that the state of Israel could be established. This contention relating to the establishment of Israel is a linchpin of their argument." ]. ''Denying the Holocaust – The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory'', ], 1993, p. 27. {{ISBN|0-452-27274-2}}. | |||
] | |||
*"Jews are thus depicted as manipulative and powerful conspirators who have fabricated myths of their own suffering for their own ends. According to the Holocaust deniers, by forging evidence and mounting a massive propaganda effort, the Jews have established their lies as 'truth' and reaped enormous rewards from doing so: for example, in making financial claims on Germany and acquiring international support for Israel." {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110718044959/http://www.jpr.org.uk/Reports/CS_Reports/no_3_2000/index.htm |date=July 18, 2011 }}, JPR report No. 3, 2000. Retrieved May 16, 2007. | |||
] | |||
*"Why, we might ask the deniers, if the Holocaust did not happen would any group concoct such a horrific story? Because, some deniers claim, there was a conspiracy by Zionists to exaggerate the plight of Jews during the war in order to finance the state of Israel through war reparations." Michael Shermer & Alex Grobman. ''Denying History: who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and why Do They Say It?'', ], 2000, {{ISBN|0-520-23469-3}}, p. 106. | |||
] | |||
*"They picture a vast shadowy conspiracy that controls and manipulates the institutions of education, culture, the media and government in order to disseminate a pernicious mythology. The purpose of this Holocaust mythology, they assert, is the inculcation of a sense of guilt in the white, Western Christian world. Those who can make others feel guilty have power over them and can make them do their bidding. This power is used to advance an international Jewish agenda centered in the Zionist enterprise of the State of Israel." {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110604020743/http://www.adl.org/holocaust/theory.asp |date=June 4, 2011 }}, "Holocaust Denial: An Online Guide to Exposing and Combating Anti-Semitic Propaganda", ], 2001. Retrieved June 12, 2007. | |||
] | |||
*"The stress on Holocaust revisionism underscored the new anti-Semitic agenda gaining ground within the Klan movement. Holocaust denial refurbished conspiratorial anti-Semitism. Who else but the Jews had the media power to hoodwink unsuspecting masses with one of the greatest hoaxes in history? And for what motive? To promote the claims of the illegitimate state of Israel by making non-Jews feel guilty, of course." Lawrence N. Powell, ''Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Duke's Louisiana'', University of North Carolina Press, 2000, {{ISBN|0-8078-5374-7}}, p. 445.</ref> | |||
] | |||
*Documentary evidence of the Holocaust, from photographs to '']'', is fabricated.{{R|Assertions}} | |||
] | |||
*Survivor testimonies are filled with errors and inconsistencies and are thus unreliable.{{R|Assertions}} | |||
] | |||
*Interrogators obtained Nazi prisoners' confessions of war crimes through the use of torture.{{R|Assertions}} | |||
] | |||
*The Nazi treatment of Jews was no different from what the ] did to their enemies in World War II.<ref>Shermer & Grobman, 2002, pp. 103–14.</ref> | |||
] | |||
] | |||
Holocaust denial is widely viewed as failing to adhere to ] that mainstream historians (as well as scholars in other fields) regard as basic to ].<ref>"(H)istory is the attempt to describe events of the past and move from description to analysis, in accordance with certain agreed rules of evidence, of analysis of language, and of logic." "Yehuda Bauer, Historian of the Holocaust – Portrait of an Historian" – ''Online Dimensions, a Journal of Holocaust Studies'', Fall, 2004</ref> | |||
] | |||
] | |||
The Holocaust was well documented by the ] of the Nazi government itself.<ref>"... the German bureaucrats' collective actions are relatively well-documented for the historian...." ], ''The Path to Genocide: essays on launching the final solution'', Cambridge University Press, 1992, {{ISBN|0-521-55878-6}}, p. 125.</ref><ref>"According to the historian ], the United States alone captured forty thousand linear feet of documents on the murder of European Jews ... we can say that the Holocaust is a uniquely well-documented historical event." Deák, István. ''Essays on Hitler's Europe'', ], 2001, {{ISBN|0-8032-1716-1}}, p. 67</ref> It was further witnessed by the ] forces who entered Germany and its associated ] states towards the end of World War II.<ref>''Holocaust: The events and their impact on real people'', DK Publishing in conjunction with the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education, p. 146. "There our troops found sights, sounds, and stenches horrible beyond belief, cruelties so enormous as to be incomprehensible to the normal mind."</ref><ref>Kelly Oliver. ''Witnessing: beyond recognition'', ], 2001, {{ISBN|0-8166-3627-3}}, p. 90.</ref><ref>Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz. ''Image and remembrance: representation and the Holocaust'', 2003, Indiana University Press, {{ISBN|0-253-34188-4}}, pp. 205–206.</ref> It was also witnessed from the inside by non-Jewish captives such as Catholic ] member ] who wrote extensively and testified about his experiences in seven camps including Auschwitz-Birkenau<ref name="ina-shoah"> {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170629162948/http://grands-entretiens.ina.fr/video/Shoah |date=June 29, 2017 }}; audio recording</ref> and also produced the oldest contemporary sketch of a camp crematorium.<ref name=Wieviorka>Annette Wieviorka, ''Déportation et génocide. Entre la mémoire et l'oubli'', Plon, 1992, p. 249.</ref> | |||
] | |||
According to researchers ] and ], there is a "convergence of evidence" that proves that the Holocaust happened. This evidence includes:<ref>Shermer & Grobman, 2002, p. 33.</ref> | |||
]]] | |||
{{blockquote| | |||
#''Written documents''—hundreds of thousands of letters, memos, blueprints, orders, bills, speeches, articles, memoirs, and confessions. | |||
#''Eyewitness testimony''—accounts from survivors, Jewish '']s'' (who helped load bodies from the gas chambers into the crematoria in exchange for a chance of survival), ] guards, commandants, local townspeople, and even high-ranking Nazis who spoke openly about the mass murder of the Jews. | |||
#''Photographs''—including official military and press photographs, civilian photographs, secret photographs taken by survivors, aerial photographs, German and Allied film footage, and unofficial photographs taken by the German military. | |||
#''The camps themselves''—concentration camps, work camps, and ]s that still exist in varying degrees of originality and reconstruction. | |||
#''Inferential evidence'' or '']''—population demographics, reconstructed from the pre–World War II era; if six million Jews were not murdered, what happened to them?}} | |||
Much of the controversy surrounding the claims of Holocaust deniers' centers on the methods used to present arguments that the Holocaust allegedly ''never happened as commonly accepted''. Numerous accounts have been given by Holocaust deniers (including evidence presented in court cases) of claimed facts and evidence; however, independent research has shown these claims to be based upon flawed research, biassed statements, or even deliberately falsified evidence. Opponents of Holocaust denial have documented numerous instances in which such evidence was altered or manufactured (see ] and ]). According to ], "in our society of image and spectacle, extermination on paper leads to extermination in reality."<ref>], French "une tentative d'extermination sur le papier qui relaie l'extermination réelle" in ''Les assassins de la mémoire'', ''Un Eichmann de papier'', Postface de ], Nouvelle édition revue et augmentée, La Découverte, Paris, 2005, {{ISBN|2-7071-4545-9}}.</ref> | |||
==Laws against Holocaust denial== | |||
{{Main|Legality of Holocaust denial}} | |||
] | |||
Holocaust denial is explicitly or implicitly illegal in 18 countries: ], ], ], the ], ], Germany, ], Israel, ], ], ], the ], ], ], ], ], ], and ].<ref>Lechtholz-Zey, Jacqueline: Laws Banning Holocaust Denial. . Retrieved October 4, 2020.</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=https://www.jta.org/2014/05/05/global/russia-makes-holocaust-denial-illegal |title=Russia makes Holocaust denial illegal |date=May 5, 2014 |access-date=February 24, 2019 |archive-date=February 25, 2019 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190225044746/https://www.jta.org/2014/05/05/global/russia-makes-holocaust-denial-illegal |url-status=live}}</ref> Romania officially denied the Holocaust occurred on its territory up until the ] in 2004.<ref name=bbc-news>{{cite news |title=Romania holds first Holocaust Day |url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3736864.stm |access-date=September 24, 2013 |work=] |date=October 12, 2004 |archive-date=October 29, 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181029200156/http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3736864.stm |url-status=live}}</ref><ref>{{cite news |url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2997616.stm |title=Romania sparks Holocaust row |work=] |date=June 17, 2003 |access-date=May 22, 2010 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130928085609/http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2997616.stm |archive-date=September 28, 2013 |url-status=live}}</ref> The European Union's Framework decision on Racism and ] states that denying or grossly trivializing "crimes of genocide" should be made "punishable in all ]".<ref>{{Cite web |url=http://www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cms_data/docs/pressdata/en/misc/93739.pdf |title=See Luxembourg, April 19, 2007, 8665/07 (Presse 84) |access-date=January 8, 2010 |archive-date=November 11, 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201111185351/https://www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cms_data/docs/pressdata/en/misc/93739.pdf |url-status=live}}</ref> | |||
Such legislation remains controversial. In October 2007, a tribunal declared Spain's genocide denial law ].<ref>By way of {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080215233053/http://www.tribunalconstitucional.es/jurisprudencia/Stc2007/STC2007-5152-2000.html |date=February 15, 2008 }} of the ], which ruled the criminalization to be unconstitutional and void.</ref> In 2007 Italy rejected a denial law proposing a prison sentence of up to four years. In 2006 the Netherlands rejected a draft law proposing a maximum sentence of one year on denial of genocidal acts in general, although specifically denying the Holocaust remains a criminal offense there. The United Kingdom has twice rejected ]. Denmark and Sweden have also rejected such legislation.<ref>{{cite news |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/19/world/europe/19iht-eu.4.5359640.html |title=EU adopts measure outlawing Holocaust denial |first=Dan |last=Bilefsky |work=] |date=April 19, 2007 |access-date=February 8, 2017 |archive-date=April 4, 2019 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190404010722/https://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/19/world/europe/19iht-eu.4.5359640.html |url-status=live}}</ref> | |||
A number of deniers have been prosecuted under various countries' denial laws. French literature professor ], for example, was convicted and punished under the ] in 1990. Some historians oppose such laws, among them ], an outspoken critic of Faurisson, on the grounds that denial legislation imposes "historical truth as legal truth".<ref>{{cite web |quote=To live with Faurisson? Any other attitude would imply that we were imposing historical truth as legal truth, which is a dangerous attitude available to other fields of application. |url=http://www.anti-rev.org/textes/VidalNaquet92a/ |title=Pierre Vidal-Naquet: A Paper Eichmann (1980) – Anatomy of a Lie (10) |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190119100310/http://www.anti-rev.org/textes/VidalNaquet92a/ |archive-date=January 19, 2019}}</ref> Other academics favor ]. Holocaust denial, they contend, is "the worst form of racism and its most respectable version because it pretends to be a research".<ref>François de Smet, Philosopher of the ]: ''Le négationnisme est l'une des pires formes de racisme. Elle en est aussi sa version la plus « respectable », se parant des oripeaux de la science. C'est pour cela qu'il faut continuer à le sanctionner'', in '']'', on April 28, 2006</ref> Holocaust historian ] expressed her opposition to laws against expressing Holocaust denial, saying, "I don't think they work. I think they turn whatever is being outlawed into forbidden fruit." She also said that politicians should not be able to decide what can and cannot be said.<ref>{{cite magazine |last=Chotiner |first=Isaac |date=January 24, 2019 |url=https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/looking-at-anti-semitism-on-the-left-and-the-right-an-interview-with-deborah-e-lipstadt |title=Looking at Anti-Semitism on the Left and the Right: An Interview with Deborah E. Lipstadt |magazine=] |access-date=January 28, 2019 |archive-date=July 15, 2019 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190715004921/https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/looking-at-anti-semitism-on-the-left-and-the-right-an-interview-with-deborah-e-lipstadt |url-status=live}}</ref> | |||
===David Irving conviction=== | |||
In February 2006, Irving was convicted in Austria, where Holocaust denial is illegal, for a speech he had made in 1989 in which he denied the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz.{{R|release}} Irving was aware of the outstanding arrest warrant but chose to go to Austria anyway "to give a lecture to a far-right student fraternity".<ref name="release">{{cite news |title=Holocaust denier to be released |date=December 20, 2006 |url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6196073.stm |work=] |access-date=January 13, 2011 |archive-date=July 25, 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180725005507/http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6196073.stm |url-status=live}}</ref> Although he pleaded guilty to the charge, Irving said he had been "mistaken", and had changed his opinions on the Holocaust. "I said that then, based on my knowledge at the time, but by 1991 when I came across the Eichmann papers, I wasn't saying that anymore and I wouldn't say that now. The Nazis did murder millions of Jews."<ref name="BBCCenshorship">{{cite news |work=] |url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4733820.stm |title=Holocaust Denier is Jailed |date=February 20, 2006 |access-date=February 21, 2006 |archive-date=August 5, 2019 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190805031758/http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4733820.stm |url-status=live}}</ref> Irving served 13 months of a 3-year sentence in an Austrian prison, including the period between his arrest and conviction, and was deported in early 2007.{{R|release}} The episode sparked intense international debate over the limits of freedom of speech. Upon hearing of Irving's sentence, Lipstadt said:<blockquote>I am not happy when censorship wins, and I don't believe in winning battles via censorship.... The way of fighting Holocaust deniers is with history and with truth.{{R|BBCCenshorship}}</blockquote>According to '']'', upon Irving's return to the UK, he "vow to repeat views denying the Holocaust that led to his conviction" stating he felt "no need any longer to show remorse" for his Holocaust views.<ref>{{cite news |url=http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/europe/12/21/uk.irving.ap/index.html|title=Holocaust denier: 'No need to show remorse' |work=] |access-date=November 27, 2016 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070116221731/http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/europe/12/21/uk.irving.ap/index.html |archive-date=January 16, 2007}}</ref> | |||
==Genocide denials== | |||
{{Main|Genocide denial}} | |||
{{denial of mass killings}} | |||
Other acts of genocide have met similar attempts to deny and minimize them. ], formerly of the ] and the founder of ], lists denial as the final stage of a genocide development: "Denial is the eighth stage that always follows a genocide. It is among the surest indicators of further ]s. The perpetrators of genocide dig up the mass graves, burn the bodies, try to cover up the evidence and intimidate the witnesses. They deny that they committed any crimes, and often blame what happened on the victims."<ref>{{cite web |first=Gregory |last=Stanton |url=http://www.genocidewatch.org/aboutgenocide/8stagesofgenocide.html |title=Eight Stages of Genocide Denial |website=] |access-date=June 19, 2013 |archive-date=March 2, 2008 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080302002304/http://www.genocidewatch.org/aboutgenocide/8stagesofgenocide.html |url-status=live}}</ref> | |||
Holocaust denial is often compared to ] because of similar tactics of misrepresenting evidence, false equivalence, claiming that atrocities were invented by ] and that powerful lobbies manufacture genocide allegations for their own profit, subsuming one-sided systematic extermination into war deaths, and shifting blame from the perpetrators to the victims of genocide. Both forms of ] share the goal of rehabilitating the ideologies which brought genocide about.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Bloxham |first1=Donald |author-link=Donald Bloxham |title=The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians |title-link=The Great Game of Genocide |date=2005 |publisher=] |isbn=978-0-19-922688-7 |language=en |page=208}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |last1=MacDonald |first1=David B. |author-link=David Bruce MacDonald |title=Identity Politics in the Age of Genocide: The Holocaust and Historical Representation |date=2008 |publisher=] |isbn=978-1-134-08572-9 |language=en |page=133}}</ref> | |||
==See also== | |||
Holocaust: | |||
* ] | |||
* ] | |||
* ] | |||
* ] | |||
Other sources: | |||
* ] | |||
* ] | |||
* ] | |||
* ] | |||
{{clear}} | |||
==References== | |||
===Citations=== | |||
<references> | |||
<ref name="definition">{{cite web |url=https://www.ushmm.org/antisemitism/holocaust-denial-and-distortion |title=Holocaust Denial and Distortion |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230929174928/https://www.ushmm.org/antisemitism/holocaust-denial-and-distortion |archive-date=September 29, 2023 |website=] |access-date=September 28, 2017 |quote=Holocaust denial is an attempt to negate the established facts of the Nazi genocide of European Jewry. Holocaust denial and distortion are forms of antisemitism. They are generally motivated by hatred of Jews and build on the claim that the Holocaust was invented or exaggerated by Jews as part of a plot to advance Jewish interests.}}</ref> | |||
<ref name="often claims">{{cite web |url=http://www1.yadvashem.org/yv/en/holocaust/resource_center/faq.asp |title=How many Jews were murdered in the Holocaust? How do we know? Do we have their names? The Holocaust Resource Center Faqs |website=] |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200731203421/https://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/holocaust/resource_center/faq.asp|archive-date=July 31, 2020 |url-status=dead}} See also ] for the death toll.</ref> | |||
<ref name="Key elements">Key elements of Holocaust denial: | |||
*"Before discussing how Holocaust denial constitutes a conspiracy theory, and how the theory is distinctly American, it is important to understand what is meant by the term 'Holocaust denial'. Holocaust deniers, or 'revisionists', as they call themselves, question all three major points of definition of the Nazi Holocaust. First, they contend that, while mass murders of Jews did occur (although they dispute both the intentionality of such murders as well as the supposed deservedness of these killings), there was no official Nazi policy to murder Jews. Second, and perhaps most prominently, they contend that there were no homicidal gas chambers, particularly at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where mainstream historians believe over 1 million Jews were murdered, primarily in gas chambers. And third, Holocaust deniers contend that the death toll of European Jews during World War II was well below 6 million. Deniers float numbers anywhere between 300,000 and 1.5 million, as a general rule." Mathis, Andrew E. {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210213171733/https://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/denial/abc-clio/ |date=February 13, 2021 }}, ], July 2, 2004. Retrieved December 18, 2006. | |||
*"In part III we directly address the three major foundations upon which Holocaust denial rests, including ... the claim that gas chambers and crematoria were used not for mass extermination but rather for delousing clothing and disposing of people who died of disease and overwork; ... the claim that the six million figure is an exaggeration by an order of magnitude—that about six hundred thousand, not six million, died at the hands of the Nazis; ... the claim that there was no intention on the part of the Nazis to exterminate European Jewry and that the Holocaust was nothing more than the unfortunate by-product of the vicissitudes of war." Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman. ''Denying History: who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and why Do They Say It?'', University of California Press, 2000, {{ISBN|0-520-23469-3}}, p. 3. | |||
*"Holocaust Denial: Claims that the mass extermination of the Jews by the Nazis never happened; that the number of Jewish losses has been greatly exaggerated; that the Holocaust was not systematic nor a result of an official policy; or simply that the Holocaust never took place." {{webarchive|url=https://archive.today/20050216030123/http://www1.yadvashem.org/about_holocaust/faqs/answers/faq_35.html |date=February 16, 2005 }}, ] website, 2004. Retrieved December 18, 2006. | |||
*"Among the untruths routinely promoted are the claims that no gas chambers existed at Auschwitz, that only 600,000 Jews were killed rather than six million, and that Hitler had no murderous intentions toward Jews or other groups persecuted by his government." {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070404130634/http://www.adl.org/hate-patrol/holocaust.asp |date=April 4, 2007 }}, ], 2001. Retrieved June 28, 2007. | |||
*"In general, Holocaust denial consists of four central points: minimization of numbers killed, denial of use of gassing, denial of the systematic nature of the genocide, and claims that the evidence was fabricated, above all after the war." Mark M. Hull, Vera Moynes. ''Masquerade: Treason, the Holocaust, and an Irish Impostor'', ], 2017, p. 181. {{ISBN|978-0-80615836-5}} | |||
*"According to the deniers, the Nazis did not murder six million Jews, the notion of homicidal gas chambers is a myth, and any deaths of Jews that did occur under the Nazis were the result of wartime privations, not of systematic persecution and state-organised mass murder." Deborah Lipstadt. , History, ]. Retrieved June 7, 2018.</ref> | |||
<ref name=Assertions>"The kinds of assertions made in Holocaust-denial material include the following: | |||
*Several hundred thousand rather than approximately six million Jews died during the war. | |||
*Scientific evidence proves that gas chambers could not have been used to kill large numbers of people. | |||
*The Nazi command had a policy of deporting Jews, not exterminating them. | |||
*Some deliberate killings of Jews did occur, but were carried out by the peoples of Eastern Europe rather than the Nazis. | |||
*Jews died in camps of various kinds, but did so as the result of hunger and disease (most died to the unavailability of food due to allied bombings). The Holocaust is a myth created by the Allies for propaganda purposes, and subsequently nurtured by the Jews for their own ends. | |||
*Errors and inconsistencies in survivors' testimonies point to their essential unreliability. | |||
*Alleged documentary evidence of the Holocaust, from photographs of concentration camp victims to Anne Frank's diary, is fabricated. | |||
*The confessions of former Nazis to war crimes were extracted through torture." {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110718044959/http://www.jpr.org.uk/Reports/CS_Reports/no_3_2000/index.htm |date=July 18, 2011 }}, JPR report No. 3, 2000. Retrieved December 18, 2006.</ref> | |||
<ref name="terminology">Denial vs. "revisionism": | |||
*"This is the phenomenon of what has come to be known as 'revisionism', 'negationism', or 'Holocaust denial,' whose main characteristic is either an outright rejection of the very veracity of the Nazi genocide of the Jews, or at least a concerted attempt to minimize both its scale and importance.... It is just as crucial, however, to distinguish between the wholly objectionable politics of denial and the fully legitimate scholarly revision of previously accepted conventional interpretations of any historical event, including the Holocaust." ]. ''The Holocaust: Origins, Implementation and Aftermath'', Routledge, pp.11–12. Bartov is John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History at the Watson Institute, and is regarded as one of the world's leading authorities on ] ( {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20081216115629/http://www.watsoninstitute.org/contacts_detail.cfm?id=97 |date=December 16, 2008 }}, The Watson Institute for International Studies). | |||
*"The two leading critical exposés of Holocaust denial in the United States were written by historians ] (1993) and ] and Alex Grobman (2000). These scholars make a distinction between historical revisionism and denial. Revisionism, in their view, entails a refinement of existing knowledge about an historical event, not a denial of the event itself, that comes through the examination of new empirical evidence or a reexamination or reinterpretation of existing evidence. Legitimate historical revisionism acknowledges a 'certain body of irrefutable evidence' or a 'convergence of evidence' that suggest that an event—like the black plague, American slavery, or the Holocaust—did in fact occur (Lipstadt 1993:21; Shermer & Grobman 200:34). Denial, on the other hand, rejects the entire foundation of historical evidence...." Ronald J. Berger. ''Fathoming the Holocaust: A Social Problems Approach'', Aldine Transaction, 2002, {{ISBN|0-202-30670-4}}, p. 154. | |||
*"At this time, in the mid-1970s, the specter of Holocaust Denial (masked as 'revisionism') had begun to raise its head in Australia...." ] "A Little More Understanding: The Experience of a Holocaust Educator in Australia" in Samuel Totten, Steven Leonard Jacobs, Paul R Bartrop. ''Teaching about the Holocaust'', Praeger/Greenwood, 2004, p. xix. {{ISBN|0-275-98232-7}} | |||
*"] urges that denial of the Holocaust should not be called 'revisionism' because 'to deny history is not to revise it'. ''Les Assassins de la Memoire. Un Eichmann de papier et autres essays sur le revisionisme'' (The Assassins of Memory—A Paper-Eichmann and Other Essays on Revisionism) 15 (1987)." Cited in Roth, Stephen J. "Denial of the Holocaust as an Issue of Law" in the ''Israel Yearbook on Human Rights'', Volume 23, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1993, {{ISBN|0-7923-2581-8}}, p. 215. | |||
*"This essay describes, from a methodological perspective, some of the inherent flaws in the 'revisionist' approach to the history of the Holocaust. It is not intended as a polemic, nor does it attempt to ascribe motives. Rather, it seeks to explain the fundamental error in the 'revisionist' approach, as well as why that approach of necessity leaves no other choice. It concludes that 'revisionism' is a misnomer because the facts do not accord with the position it puts forward and, more importantly, its methodology reverses the appropriate approach to historical investigation.... 'Revisionism' is obliged to deviate from the standard methodology of historical pursuit, because it seeks to mold facts to fit a preconceived result; it denies events that have been objectively and empirically proved to have occurred; and because it works backward from the conclusion to the facts, thus necessitating the distortion and manipulation of those facts where they differ from the preordained conclusion (which they almost always do). In short, 'revisionism' denies something that demonstrably happened, through methodological dishonesty." McFee, Gordon. {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180629074312/https://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/revisionism-isnt/ |date=June 29, 2018 }}, ], May 15, 1999. Retrieved December 22, 2006. | |||
*"Holocaust denial can be a particularly insidious form of antisemitism precisely because it often tries to disguise itself as something quite different: as genuine scholarly debate (in the pages, for example, of the innocuous-sounding Journal for Historical Review). Holocaust deniers often refer to themselves as 'revisionists', in an attempt to claim legitimacy for their activities. There are, of course, a great many scholars engaged in historical debates about the Holocaust whose work should not be confused with the output of the Holocaust deniers. Debate continues about such subjects as, for example, the extent and nature of ordinary Germans' involvement in and knowledge of the policy of genocide, and the timing of orders given for the extermination of the Jews. However, the valid endeavour of historical revisionism, which involves the re-interpretation of historical knowledge in the light of newly emerging evidence, is a very different task from that of claiming that the essential facts of the Holocaust, and the evidence for those facts, are fabrications." {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110718044959/http://www.jpr.org.uk/Reports/CS_Reports/no_3_2000/index.htm |date=July 18, 2011 }}, JPR report No. 3, 2000. Retrieved May 16, 2007. | |||
*"The deniers' selection of the name revisionist to describe themselves is indicative of their basic strategy of deceit and distortion and of their attempt to portray themselves as legitimate historians engaged in the traditional practice of illuminating the past. For historians, in fact, the name revisionism has a resonance that is perfectly legitimate – it recalls the controversial historical school known as World War I 'revisionists', who argued that the Germans were unjustly held responsible for the war and that consequently the Versailles treaty was a politically misguided document based on a ]. Thus the deniers link themselves to a specific historiographic tradition of reevaluating the past. Claiming the mantle of the World War I revisionists and denying they have any objective other than the dissemination of the truth constitute a tactical attempt to acquire an intellectual credibility that would otherwise elude them." ]. ''Denying the Holocaust – The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory'', Penguin, 1993, {{ISBN|0-452-27274-2}}, p. 25.</ref> | |||
<ref name=Revisionist>Refer to themselves as revisionists: | |||
*"The deniers' selection of the name revisionist to describe themselves is indicative of their basic strategy of deceit and distortion and of their attempt to portray themselves as legitimate historians engaged in the traditional practice of illuminating the past." ]. ''Denying the Holocaust—The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory'', Penguin, 1993, {{ISBN|0-452-27274-2}}, p. 25. | |||
*"Dressing themselves in pseudo-academic garb, they have adopted the term 'revisionism' in order to mask and legitimate their enterprise." {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110604020743/http://www.adl.org/holocaust/theory.asp |date=June 4, 2011 }}, "Holocaust Denial: An Online Guide to Exposing and Combating Anti-Semitic Propaganda", ], 2001. Retrieved June 12, 2007. | |||
*"Holocaust deniers often refer to themselves as 'revisionists', in an attempt to claim legitimacy for their activities. There are, of course, a great many scholars engaged in historical debates about the Holocaust whose work should not be confused with the output of the Holocaust deniers. Debate continues about such subjects as, for example, the extent and nature of ordinary Germans' involvement in and knowledge of the policy of genocide, and the timing of orders given for the extermination of the Jews. However, the valid endeavour of historical revisionism, which involves the re-interpretation of historical knowledge in the light of newly emerging evidence, is a very different task from that of claiming that the essential facts of the Holocaust, and the evidence for those facts, are fabrications." " {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110718044959/http://www.jpr.org.uk/Reports/CS_Reports/no_3_2000/index.htm |date=July 18, 2011 }}", JPR report No. 3, 2000. Retrieved May 16, 2007.</ref> | |||
<ref name="predetermined">Predetermined conclusion: | |||
*"'Revisionism' is obliged to deviate from the standard methodology of historical pursuit because it seeks to mold facts to fit a preconceived result, it denies events that have been objectively and empirically proved to have occurred, and because it works backward from the conclusion to the facts, thus necessitating the distortion and manipulation of those facts where they differ from the preordained conclusion (which they almost always do). In short, 'revisionism' denies something that demonstrably happened, through methodological dishonesty." McFee, Gordon. {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180629074312/https://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/revisionism-isnt/ |date=June 29, 2018 }}, ], May 15, 1999. Retrieved December 22, 2006. | |||
*Alan L. Berger, "Holocaust Denial: Tempest in a Teapot, or Storm on the Horizon?", in Zev Garber and Richard Libowitz (eds), ''Peace, in Deed: Essays in Honor of Harry James Cargas'', Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998, p. 154.</ref> | |||
<ref name="hoax">A hoax designed to advance the interests of Jews: | |||
*"The title of App's major work on the Holocaust, ''The Six Million Swindle'', is informative because it implies on its very own the existence of a conspiracy of Jews to perpetrate a hoax against non-Jews for monetary gain." Mathis, Andrew E. {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210213171733/https://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/denial/abc-clio/ |date=February 13, 2021 }}, ], July 2, 2004. Retrieved May 16, 2007. | |||
*Another belief of deniers is the death of the millions of Jews was caused by sickness and disease.{{cite web|title=Holocaust Denial and Distortion|url=http://www.ushmm.org/antisemitism/holocaust-denial-and-distortion|publisher=]|access-date=November 6, 2013|archive-date=December 10, 2019|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20191210022522/https://www.ushmm.org/antisemitism/holocaust-denial-and-distortion|url-status=live}} | |||
*"Jews are thus depicted as manipulative and powerful conspirators who have fabricated myths of their own suffering for their own ends. According to the Holocaust deniers, by forging evidence and mounting a massive propaganda effort, the Jews have established their lies as 'truth' and reaped enormous rewards from doing so: for example, in making financial claims on Germany and acquiring international support for Israel." {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110718044959/http://www.jpr.org.uk/Reports/CS_Reports/no_3_2000/index.htm |date=July 18, 2011 }}, JPR report No. 3, 2000. Retrieved May 16, 2007. | |||
*"Why, we might ask the deniers, if the Holocaust did not happen would any group concoct such a horrific story? Because, some deniers claim, there was a conspiracy by Zionists to exaggerate the plight of Jews during the war in order to finance the state of Israel through war reparations." Michael Shermer & Alex Grobman. ''Denying History: who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and why Do They Say It?'', University of California Press, 2000, {{ISBN|0-520-23469-3}}, p. 106. | |||
*"Since its inception ... the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), a California-based Holocaust denial organization founded by Willis Carto of Liberty Lobby, has promoted the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jews fabricated tales of their own genocide to manipulate the sympathies of the non-Jewish world." {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110628184616/http://www.tau.ac.il/Anti-Semitism/asw2000-1/usa.htm |date=June 28, 2011 }}, ], 2000. Retrieved May 17, 2007. | |||
*"The central assertion for the deniers is that Jews are not victims but victimizers. They 'stole' billions in reparations, destroyed Germany's good name by spreading the 'myth' of the Holocaust, and won international sympathy because of what they claimed had been done to them. In the paramount miscarriage of injustice, they used the world's sympathy to 'displace' another people so that the state of Israel could be established. This contention relating to the establishment of Israel is a linchpin of their argument." ]. ''Denying the Holocaust – The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory'', Penguin, 1993, {{ISBN|0-452-27274-2}}, p. 27. | |||
*"They picture a vast shadowy conspiracy that controls and manipulates the institutions of education, culture, the media and government in order to disseminate a pernicious mythology. The purpose of this Holocaust mythology, they assert, is the inculcation of a sense of guilt in the white, Western Christian world. Those who can make others feel guilty have power over them and can make them do their bidding. This power is used to advance an international Jewish agenda centered in the Zionist enterprise of the State of Israel." {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110604020743/http://www.adl.org/holocaust/theory.asp |date=June 4, 2011 }}, "Holocaust Denial: An Online Guide to Exposing and Combating Anti-Semitic Propaganda", ], 2001. Retrieved June 12, 2007. | |||
*"Deniers argue that the manufactured guilt and shame over a mythological Holocaust led to Western, specifically United States, support for the establishment and sustenance of the Israeli state – a sustenance that costs the American taxpayer over three billion dollars per year. They assert that American taxpayers have been and continue to be swindled...." , "Holocaust Denial: An Online Guide to Exposing and Combating Anti-Semitic Propaganda", ], 2001. Retrieved June 12, 2007. | |||
*"The stress on Holocaust revisionism underscored the new anti-Semitic agenda gaining ground within the Klan movement. Holocaust denial refurbished conspiratorial anti-Semitism. Who else but the Jews had the media power to hoodwink unsuspecting masses with one of the greatest hoaxes in history? And for what motive? To promote the claims of the illegitimate state of Israel by making non-Jews feel guilty, of course." Lawrence N. Powell, ''Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Duke's Louisiana'', ], 2000, {{ISBN|0-8078-5374-7}}, p. 445</ref> | |||
<ref name="antisemitic">Antisemitic: | |||
*"Contemporary examples of antisemitism in public life, the media, schools, the workplace, and in the religious sphere could, taking into account the overall context, include ... denying the fact, scope, mechanisms (e.g. gas chambers) or intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of National Socialist Germany and its supporters and accomplices during World War II (the Holocaust)." {{cite web |url=http://fra.europa.eu/fraWebsite/material/pub/AS/AS-WorkingDefinition-draft.pdf |title=''Working Definition of Antisemitism'' |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110125001633/http://fra.europa.eu/fraWebsite/material/pub/AS/AS-WorkingDefinition-draft.pdf |archive-date=January 25, 2011 }} {{small|(33.8 KB)}}, ] | |||
*"It would elevate their antisemitic ideology – which is what Holocaust denial is – to the level of responsible historiography – which it is not." ], ''Denying the Holocaust'', {{ISBN|0-14-024157-4}}, p. 11. | |||
*"The denial of the Holocaust is among the most insidious forms of anti-Semitism...." Roth, Stephen J. "Denial of the Holocaust as an Issue of Law" in the ''Israel Yearbook on Human Rights'', Volume 23, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1993, {{ISBN|0-7923-2581-8}}, p. 215. | |||
*"Holocaust denial can be a particularly insidious form of antisemitism precisely because it often tries to disguise itself as something quite different: as genuine scholarly debate (in the pages, for example, of the innocuous-sounding Journal for Historical Review)." " {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110718044959/http://www.jpr.org.uk/Reports/CS_Reports/no_3_2000/index.htm |date=July 18, 2011 }}", JPR report No. 3, 2000. Retrieved May 16, 2007. | |||
*"This books treats several of the myths that have made antisemitism so lethal.... In addition to these historic myths, we also treat the new, maliciously manufactured myth of Holocaust denial, another groundless belief that is used to stir up Jew-hatred." Schweitzer, Frederick M. & Perry, Marvin. ''Anti-Semitism: myth and hate from antiquity to the present'', Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, {{ISBN|0-312-16561-7}}, p. 3. | |||
*"One predictable strand of Arab Islamic antisemitism is Holocaust denial...." Schweitzer, Frederick M. & Perry, Marvin. ''Anti-Semitism: myth and hate from antiquity to the present'', Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, {{ISBN|0-312-16561-7}}, p. 10. | |||
*"Anti-Semitism, in the form of Holocaust denial, had been experienced by just one teacher when working in a Catholic school with large numbers of Polish and Croatian students." Geoffrey Short, Carole Ann Reed. ''Issues in Holocaust Education'', ], 2004, {{ISBN|0-7546-4211-9}}, p. 71. | |||
*"Indeed, the task of organized antisemitism in the last decade of the century has been the establishment of Holocaust Revisionism – the denial that the Holocaust occurred." Stephen Trombley, "antisemitism", ''The Norton Dictionary of Modern Thought'', ], 1999, {{ISBN|0-393-04696-6}}, p. 40. | |||
*"After the Yom Kippur War an apparent reappearance of antisemitism in France troubled the tranquility of the community; there were several notorious terrorist attacks on synagogues, Holocaust revisionism appeared, and a new antisemitic political right tried to achieve respectability." Howard K. Wettstein, ''Diasporas and Exiles: Varieties of Jewish Identity'', ], 2002, {{ISBN|0-520-22864-2}}, p. 169. | |||
*"Holocaust denial is a convenient polemical substitute for anti-semitism." Igounet, Valérie. {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190613014018/https://mondediplo.com/1998/05/08igou |date=June 13, 2019 }}, '']'', May 1998. | |||
*"Holocaust denial is a contemporary form of the classic anti-Semitic doctrine of the evil, manipulative and threatening world Jewish conspiracy." {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110604020743/http://www.adl.org/holocaust/theory.asp |date=June 4, 2011 }}, "Holocaust Denial: An Online Guide to Exposing and Combating Anti-Semitic Propaganda", ], 2001. Retrieved June 12, 2007. | |||
*"In a number of countries, in Europe as well as in the United States, the negation or gross minimization of the Nazi genocide of Jews has been the subject of books, essay and articles. Should their authors be protected by freedom of speech? The European answer has been in the negative: such writings are not only a perverse form of anti-semitism but also an aggression against the dead, their families, the survivors and society at large." Roger Errera, "Freedom of speech in Europe", in Georg Nolte, ''European and US Constitutionalism'', ], 2005, {{ISBN|0-521-85401-6}}, pp. 39–40. | |||
*"Particularly popular in Syria is Holocaust denial, another staple of Arab anti-Semitism that is sometimes coupled with overt sympathy for Nazi Germany." ], ''Rethinking the Middle East'', ], 2003, {{ISBN|0-7146-5418-3}}, p. 104. | |||
*"Holocaust denial is a new form of anti-Semitism, but one that hinges on age-old motifs." Dinah Shelton, ''Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity'', Macmillan Reference, 2005, p. 45. | |||
*"The stress on Holocaust revisionism underscored the new anti-Semitic agenda gaining ground within the Klan movement. Holocaust denial refurbished conspiratorial anti-Semitism. Who else but the Jews had the media power to hoodwink unsuspecting masses with one of the greatest hoaxes in history? And for what motive? To promote the claims of the illegitimate state of Israel by making non-Jews feel guilty, of course." Lawrence N. Powell, ''Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Duke's Louisiana'', ], 2000, {{ISBN|0-8078-5374-7}}, p. 445. | |||
*"Since its inception ... the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), a California-based Holocaust denial organization founded by Willis Carto of Liberty Lobby, has promoted the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jews fabricated tales of their own genocide to manipulate the sympathies of the non-Jewish world." {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110628184616/http://www.tau.ac.il/Anti-Semitism/asw2000-1/usa.htm |date=June 28, 2011 }}, ], 2000. Retrieved May 17, 2007. | |||
*"The primary motivation for most deniers is anti-Semitism, and for them the Holocaust is an infuriatingly inconvenient fact of history. After all, the Holocaust has generally been recognized as one of the most terrible crimes that ever took place, and surely the very emblem of evil in the modern age. If that crime was a direct result of anti-Semitism taken to its logical end, then anti-Semitism itself, even when expressed in private conversation, is inevitably discredited among most people. What better way to rehabilitate anti-Semitism, make anti-Semitic arguments seem once again respectable in civilized discourse and even make it acceptable for governments to pursue anti-Semitic policies than by convincing the world that the great crime for which anti-Semitism was blamed simply never happened – indeed, that it was nothing more than a frame-up invented by the Jews, and propagated by them through their control of the media? What better way, in short, to make the world safe again for anti-Semitism than by denying the Holocaust?" Reich, Walter. {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230628213512/https://www.nytimes.com/1993/07/11/books/erasing-the-holocaust.html |date=June 28, 2023 }}, '']'', July 11, 1993. | |||
*"There is now a creeping, nasty wave of anti-Semitism ... insinuating itself into our political thought and rhetoric.... The history of the Arab world ... is disfigured ... by a whole series of outmoded and discredited ideas, of which the notion that the Jews never suffered and that the Holocaust is an obfuscatory confection created by the elders of Zion is one that is acquiring too much, far too much, currency." ], "A Desolation, and They Called it Peace" in ''Those who forget the past'', Ron Rosenbaum (ed), ] 2004, p. 518.</ref> | |||
<ref name="conspiracy">Conspiracy theory: | |||
*"While appearing on the surface as a rather arcane pseudo-scholarly challenge to the well-established record of Nazi genocide during the Second World War, Holocaust denial serves as a powerful conspiracy theory uniting otherwise disparate fringe groups...." {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110604020743/http://www.adl.org/holocaust/theory.asp |date=June 4, 2011 }}, "Holocaust Denial: An Online Guide to Exposing and Combating Anti-Semitic Propaganda", ], 2001. Retrieved June 12, 2007. | |||
*"Before discussing how Holocaust denial constitutes a conspiracy theory, and how the theory is distinctly American, it is important to understand what is meant by the term 'Holocaust denial.'" Mathis, Andrew E. {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210213171733/https://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/denial/abc-clio/ |date=February 13, 2021 }}, ], July 2, 2004. Retrieved December 18, 2006. | |||
*"Since its inception ... the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), a California-based Holocaust denial organization founded by Willis Carto of Liberty Lobby, has promoted the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jews fabricated tales of their own genocide to manipulate the sympathies of the non-Jewish world." {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110628184616/http://www.tau.ac.il/Anti-Semitism/asw2000-1/usa.htm |date=June 28, 2011 }}, ], 2000. Retrieved May 17, 2007.</ref> | |||
<ref name="post-Soviet">{{Cite journal |doi=10.1080/13501674.2012.730732 |quote=In general, post-Soviet Holocaust denial has differed from Holocaust denial in the style of David Irving or Ernst Zündel. In post-Soviet space, the Holocaust has not usually been denied as such and post-Soviet radical right activists did not question the existence of gas chambers in Auschwitz, or the anti-Jewish politics of Nazi Germany. Instead, nationalist post-Soviet discourses denied some of the national or regional elements of the Holocaust, like, for example, the contribution of different nationalist organizations or armies to it, or very frequently the participation of local populations in pogroms and other forms of anti-Jewish violence. |title=Debating, obfuscating and disciplining the Holocaust: Post-Soviet historical discourses on the OUN–UPA and other nationalist movements |journal=East European Jewish Affairs |volume=42 |issue=3 |pages=199–241 |year=2012 |last1=Rossoliński-Liebe |first1=Grzegorz |s2cid=154067506}}</ref> | |||
</references> | |||
{{Reflist}} | |||
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===Bibliography=== | |||
;About Holocaust denial | |||
{{refbegin}} | |||
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* {{cite book |last=Graf |first=Jürgen |author-link=Jürgen Graf |title=Der Holocaust auf dem Prüfstand |year=1992}} | |||
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* {{cite book |last1=Leuchter |first1=Fred A. |author1-link=Fred A. Leuchter |last2=Faurisson |first2=Robert |last3=Rudolf |first3=Germar |title=The Leuchter Reports: Critical Edition |location=Chicago |publisher=Theses & Dissertations Press |year=2005 |isbn=1-59148-015-9}} | |||
* {{cite news |last=Paz |first=Reuven |url=http://www.ict.org.il/articles/articledet.cfm?articleid=108 |title=Palestinian Holocaust Denial |work=Peacewatch |date=April 21, 2000 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20061023044146/http://www.ict.org.il/articles/articledet.cfm?articleid=108 |access-date=November 8, 2005 |archive-date=October 23, 2006}} | |||
* {{cite book |first=Germar |last=Rudolf |title=The Rudolf Report: Expert Report on Chemical and Technical Aspects of the 'Gas Chambers' of Auschwitz |location=Chicago |publisher=Theses & Dissertations Press |year=2001}} | |||
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Latest revision as of 07:31, 3 January 2025
Denial of the genocide of Jews in World War II
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Jews on selection ramp at Auschwitz, May 1944 | ||||||||||
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Ghettos
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Atrocities
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International responseJoint Declaration by Members of the United Nations |
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Aftermath
Reparations Agreement between Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany |
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Deportations of French Jews to death camps |
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The Destruction of the European Jews Functionalism versus intentionalism |
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Remembrance | ||||||||||
Denial of the Holocaust is an antisemitic conspiracy theory that asserts that the genocide of Jews by the Nazis is a fabrication or exaggeration. It includes making one or more of the following false claims:
- Nazi Germany's "Final Solution" was aimed only at deporting Jews from the territory of the Third Reich and did not include their extermination.
- Nazi authorities did not use extermination camps and gas chambers for the mass murder of Jews.
- The actual number of Jews murdered is significantly lower than the accepted figure of approximately six million.
- The Holocaust is a hoax perpetrated by the Allies, Jews, or the Soviet Union.
The methodologies of Holocaust deniers are based on a predetermined conclusion that ignores overwhelming historical evidence to the contrary. Scholars use the term denial to describe the views and methodology of Holocaust deniers in order to distinguish them from legitimate historical revisionists, who challenge orthodox interpretations of history using established historical methodologies. Holocaust deniers generally do not accept denial as an appropriate description of their activities and use the euphemism revisionism instead. In some former Eastern Bloc countries, Holocaust deniers do not deny the mass murder of Jews but deny the participation of their own nationals in the Holocaust.
Holocaust denial is considered a serious societal problem in many places where it occurs, and it is illegal in Canada, Israel, and many European countries.
Terminology and etymology
Holocaust deniers prefer to refer to their work as historical revisionism, and object to being referred to as "deniers". Emory University professor Deborah Lipstadt has written that: "The deniers' selection of the name revisionist to describe themselves is indicative of their basic strategy of deceit and distortion and of their attempt to portray themselves as legitimate historians engaged in the traditional practice of illuminating the past." Scholars consider this misleading since the methods of Holocaust denial differ from those of legitimate historical revision. Legitimate historical revisionism is explained in a resolution adopted by the Duke University History Department, November 8, 1991, and reprinted in Duke Chronicle, November 13, 1991, in response to an advertisement produced by Bradley R Smith's Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust:
That historians are constantly engaged in historical revision is certainly correct; however, what historians do is very different from this advertisement. Historical revision of major events ... is not concerned with the actuality of these events; rather, it concerns their historical interpretation – their causes and consequences generally.
Lipstadt writes that modern Holocaust denial draws its inspiration from various sources, including a school of thought which used an established method to question government policies.
In 1992, Donald L. Niewyk gave some examples of how legitimate historical revisionism—the re-examination of accepted history and its updating with newly discovered, more accurate, or less-biased information—may be applied to the study of the Holocaust as new facts emerge to change the historical understanding of it:
With the main features of the Holocaust clearly visible to all but the willfully blind, historians have turned their attention to aspects of the story for which the evidence is incomplete or ambiguous. These are not minor matters by any means, but turn on such issues as Hitler's role in the event, Jewish responses to persecution, and reactions by onlookers both inside and outside Nazi-controlled Europe.
In contrast, the Holocaust denial movement bases its approach on the predetermined idea that the Holocaust, as understood by mainstream historiography, did not occur. Sometimes referred to as "negationism", from the French term négationnisme introduced by Henry Rousso, Holocaust deniers attempt to rewrite history by minimizing, denying, or simply ignoring essential facts. Koenraad Elst writes:
Negationism means the denial of historical crimes against humanity. It is not a reinterpretation of known facts, but the denial of known facts. The term negationism has gained currency as the name of a movement to deny a specific crime against humanity, the Nazi genocide on the Jews in 1941–45, also known as the Holocaust (Greek: complete burning) or the Shoah (Hebrew: disaster). Negationism is mostly identified with the effort at re-writing history in such a way that the fact of the Holocaust is omitted.
In "Secondary Anti-Semitism: From Hard-Core to Soft-Core Denial of the Shoah", Clemens Heni [de] writes:
Contrary to the hard-core version, soft-core denial is often not easily identifiable. Often it is tolerated, or even encouraged and reproduced in the mainstream, not only in Germany. Scholars have only recently begun to unravel this disturbing phenomenon. Manfred Gerstenfeld discusses Holocaust trivialization in an article published in 2008. In Germany in 2007 two scholars, Thorsten Eitz and Georg Stötzel, published a voluminous dictionary of German language and discourse regarding National Socialism and the Holocaust. It includes chapters on Holocaust trivialization and contrived comparisons, such as the infamous "atomic Holocaust", "Babycaust", "Holocaust of abortion", "red Holocaust" or "biological Holocaust".
Background
Denial as a means of genocide
Lawrence Douglas argues that denial was invented by the perpetrators and employed as a means of genocide. For example, trucks of Zyklon B were labeled with Red Cross symbols and victims were told that they would be "resettled". Douglas also cites the Posen speeches as an example of denial while genocide was ongoing, with Himmler referring to the Holocaust as "an unnamed and never to be named page of glory". According to Douglas, the denial of mass murder using gas chambers recalls the Nazi efforts to persuade the victims that they were actually harmless showers.
Efforts to conceal the historical record
German efforts
See also: Sonderaktion 1005While the Second World War was still underway, the Nazis had already formed a contingency plan that if defeat was imminent they would carry out the total destruction of German records. Historians have documented evidence that as Germany's defeat became imminent and Nazi leaders realized they would most likely be captured and brought to trial, great effort was made to destroy all evidence of mass extermination. Heinrich Himmler instructed his camp commandants to destroy records, crematoria, and other signs of mass extermination. As one of many examples, the bodies of the 25,000 mostly Latvian Jews whom Friedrich Jeckeln and the soldiers under his command had shot at Rumbula (near Riga) in late 1941 were dug up and burned in 1943. Similar operations were undertaken at Belzec, Treblinka and other death camps.
French collaboration in archive destruction
In occupied France, the situation with respect to preserving war records was not much better, partly as a result of French state secrecy rules dating back to well before the war aimed at protecting the French government and the state from embarrassing revelations, and partly to avoid culpability. For example, at Liberation, the Prefecture of Police destroyed nearly all of the massive archive of Jewish arrest and deportation.
Efforts to preserve the historical record
During the war
One of the earliest efforts to save historical record of the Holocaust occurred during the war, in France, where Drancy internment camp records were carefully preserved and turned over to the new National Office for Veterans and Victims of War; however, the bureau then held them in secret, refusing to release copies later, even to the Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation (CDJC).
In 1943, Isaac Schneersohn, anticipating the need for a center to document and preserve the memory of the persecution for historical reasons and also support claims post-war, gathered together 40 representatives from Jewish organizations in Grenoble which was under Italian occupation at the time in order to form a center de documentation. Exposure meant the death penalty, and as a result little actually happened before liberation. Serious work began after the center moved to Paris in late 1944 and was renamed the CDJC.
Immediate post-war period
In 1945, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander, anticipated that someday an attempt would be made to recharacterize the documentation of Nazi crimes as propaganda and took steps against it. Eisenhower, upon finding the victims of Nazi concentration camps, ordered all possible photographs to be taken, and for the German people from surrounding villages to be ushered through the camps and made to bury the dead.
Nuremberg trials
The Nuremberg trials took place in Germany after the war in 1945–1946. The stated aim was to dispense justice in retribution for atrocities of the German government. This Allied intention to administer justice post-war was first announced in 1943 in the Declaration on German Atrocities in Occupied Europe and reiterated at the Yalta Conference and at Berlin in 1945. While the intention was not specifically to preserve the historical record of the Holocaust, some of the core documents required to prosecute the cases were provided to them by the CDJC, and much of the huge trove of archives were then transferred to the CDJC after the trials and became the core of future Holocaust historiography.
The Nuremberg trials were important historically, but the events were still very recent, television was in its infancy and not present, and there was little public impact. There were isolated moments of limited public awareness from Hollywood films such as The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) or the 1961 Judgment at Nuremberg which had some newsreel footage of actual scenes from liberated Nazi concentration camps including scenes of piles of naked corpses laid out in rows and bulldozed into large pits, which was considered exceptionally graphic for the time.
Public awareness changed when the Eichmann trial riveted the world's attention fifteen years after Nuremberg.
Trial of Adolf Eichmann
Main article: Eichmann trialIn 1961, the Israeli government captured Adolf Eichmann in Argentina and brought him to Israel to stand trial for war crimes. Chief prosecutor Gideon Hausner's intentions were not only to demonstrate Eichmann's guilt personally but to present material about the entire Holocaust, thus producing a comprehensive record.
The Israeli government arranged for the trial to have prominent media coverage. Many major newspapers from all over the globe sent reporters and published front-page coverage of the story. Israelis had the opportunity to watch live television broadcasts of the proceedings, and videotape was flown daily to the United States for broadcast the following day.
Significant individuals and organizations
See also: Category:Holocaust deniersIn the immediate aftermath of the war, prior to the extensive documentation efforts by the Allied forces, a sense of disbelief caused many to deny the initial reports of the Holocaust. Compounding this disbelief was the memory of forged newspaper accounts of the German Corpse Factory, an anti-German atrocity propaganda campaign during WWI, which was widely known to be false by 1945.
During the 1930s, the Nazi government used this propaganda against the British, claiming allegations of concentration camps were malicious lies put forward by the British government, and historians Joachim Neander and Randal Marlin note that this story "encouraged later disbelief when early reports circulated about the Holocaust under Hitler". Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, chairman of the British Joint Intelligence Committee, noted that these reports were similar to "stories of employment of human corpses during the last war for the manufacture of fat which was a grotesque lie"; likewise, The Christian Century commented that "The parallel between this story and the 'corpse factory' atrocity tale of the First World War is too striking to be overlooked." Neander notes that "There can be no doubt that the reported commercial use of the corpses of the murdered Jews undermined the credibility of the news coming from Poland and delayed action that might have rescued many Jewish lives."
The Neo-Nazi movement has been revitalized by Holocaust denial. Small but vocal numbers of neo-Nazis realized that recreation of a Hitlerite-style regime may be impossible, but a replica might be produced in the future; the rehabilitation of Nazism, they concluded, required the discrediting of the Holocaust. Neo-fascism has likewise relied upon Holocaust denial as a means of rehabilitation.
As a movement, modern Holocaust denial is associated with historical revisionism based on pseudoscientific evidence and fringe academic networks including intradiegetic pseudoscientific journals, conferences, and professional organizations (e.g. Journal of Historical Review, International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust, Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust).
Maurice Bardèche
The first person to openly write after the end of World War II that he doubted the reality of the Holocaust was French journalist Maurice Bardèche in his 1948 book Nuremberg ou la Terre promise ("Nuremberg or the Promised Land"). Viewed as "the father-figure of Holocaust denial", Bardèche introduced in his works many aspects of neo-fascist and Holocaust denial propaganda techniques and ideological structures; his work is deemed influential in regenerating post-war European far-right ideas at a time of identity crisis in the 1950–1960s. His arguments formed the basis of numerous works of Holocaust denial that followed: "testimonies are not reliable, essentially coming from the mouth of Jews and communists", "atrocities committed in camps were the work of deportees ", "disorganization occurred in Nazi camps following the first German defeats", "the high mortality is due to the 'weakening' of prisoners and epidemics", "only lice were gassed in Auschwitz", etc.
Harry Elmer Barnes
Harry Elmer Barnes, at one time a mainstream American historian, assumed a Holocaust-denial stance in his later years. Between World War I and World War II, Barnes was an anti-war writer and a leader of the historical revisionism movement. Starting in 1924, Barnes worked closely with the Centre for the Study of the Causes of the War, a German government-funded think tank whose sole purpose was to disseminate the official government position that Germany was the victim of Allied aggression in 1914 and that the Versailles Treaty was morally invalid. Headed by Major Alfred von Wegerer, a völkisch activist, the organization portrayed itself as a scholarly society, but historians later described it as "a clearinghouse for officially desirable views on the outbreak of the war."
Following World War II, Barnes became convinced that allegations made against Germany and Japan, including the Holocaust, were wartime propaganda that had been used to justify the United States' involvement in World War II. Barnes claimed that there were two false claims made about World War II, namely that Germany started the war in 1939, and the Holocaust, which Barnes claimed did not happen.
In his 1962 pamphlet, Revisionism and Brainwashing, Barnes claimed that there was a "lack of any serious opposition or concerted challenge to the atrocity stories and other modes of defamation of German national character and conduct". Barnes argued that there was "a failure to point out the atrocities of the Allies were more brutal, painful, mortal and numerous than the most extreme allegations made against the Germans". He claimed that in order to justify the "horrors and evils of the Second World War", the Allies made the Nazis the "scapegoat" for their own misdeeds.
Barnes cited the French Holocaust denier Paul Rassinier, whom Barnes called a "distinguished French historian" who had exposed the "exaggerations of the atrocity stories". In a 1964 article, "Zionist Fraud", published in the American Mercury, Barnes wrote: "The courageous author lays the chief blame for misrepresentation on those whom we must call the swindlers of the crematoria, the Israeli politicians who derive billions of marks from nonexistent, mythical and imaginary cadavers, whose numbers have been reckoned in an unusually distorted and dishonest manner." Using Rassinier as his source, Barnes claimed that Germany was the victim of aggression in both 1914 and 1939 and that reports of the Holocaust were propaganda to justify a war of aggression against Germany.
Beginnings of modern denialism
In 1961, a protégé of Barnes, David Hoggan, published Der erzwungene Krieg (The Forced War) in West Germany, which claimed that Germany had been the victim of an Anglo-Polish conspiracy in 1939. Though Der erzwungene Krieg was primarily concerned with the origins of World War II, it also down-played or justified the effects of Nazi antisemitic measures in the pre-1939 period. For example, Hoggan justified the huge one billion Reichsmark fine imposed on the entire Jewish community in Germany after the 1938 Kristallnacht as a reasonable measure to prevent what he called "Jewish profiteering" at the expense of German insurance companies and alleged that no Jews were killed in the Kristallnacht (in fact, 91 German Jews were murdered in the Kristallnacht). Subsequently, Hoggan explicitly denied the Holocaust in 1969 in a book entitled The Myth of the Six Million, which was published by the Noontide Press, a small Los Angeles publisher specializing in antisemitic literature.
In 1964, Paul Rassinier published The Drama of the European Jews. Rassinier was himself a concentration camp survivor (he was held in Buchenwald for having helped French Jews escape the Nazis), and modern-day deniers continue to cite his works as scholarly research that questions the accepted facts of the Holocaust. Critics argued that Rassinier did not cite evidence for his claims and ignored information that contradicted his assertions; he nevertheless remains influential in Holocaust denial circles for being one of the first deniers to propose that a vast Zionist/Allied/Soviet conspiracy faked the Holocaust, a theme that would be picked up in later years by other authors.
Austin App, a La Salle University medieval English literature professor, is considered the first major mainstream American holocaust denier. App defended the Germans and Nazi Germany during World War II. He published numerous articles, letters, and books on Holocaust denial, quickly building a loyal following. App's work inspired the Institute for Historical Review, a California center founded in 1978 whose sole task is the denial of the Holocaust.
The publication of Arthur Butz's The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The case against the presumed extermination of European Jewry in 1976; and David Irving's Hitler's War in 1977 brought other similarly inclined individuals into the fold. Butz was a tenured associate professor of electrical engineering at Northwestern University. In December 1978 and January 1979, Robert Faurisson, a French professor of literature at the University of Lyon, wrote two letters to Le Monde claiming that the gas chambers used by the Nazis to exterminate the Jews did not exist. A colleague of Faurisson, Jean-Claude Pressac, who initially shared Faurisson's views, later became convinced of the Holocaust's evidence while investigating documents at Auschwitz in 1979. He published his conclusions along with much of the underlying evidence in his 1989 book, Auschwitz: Technique and operation of the gas chambers.
Henry Bienen, the former president of Northwestern University, has described Arthur Butz's view of the Holocaust as an "embarrassment to Northwestern". In 2006, sixty of Butz's colleagues from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science faculty signed a censure describing Butz's Holocaust denial as "an affront to our humanity and our standards as scholars". The letter also called for Butz to "leave our Department and our University and stop trading on our reputation for academic excellence".
Institute for Historical Review
In 1978 the American far-right activist Willis Carto founded the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), an organization dedicated to publicly challenging the commonly accepted history of the Holocaust. The IHR's founding was inspired by Austin App, a La Salle professor of medieval English literature and considered the first major American holocaust denier. The IHR sought from the beginning to establish itself within the broad tradition of historical revisionism, by soliciting token supporters who were not from a neo-Nazi background such as James J. Martin and Samuel Edward Konkin III, and by promoting the writings of French socialist Paul Rassinier and American anti-war historian Harry Elmer Barnes, in an attempt to show that Holocaust denial had a base of support beyond neo-Nazis. The IHR republished most of Barnes's writings, which had been out of print since his death. While it included articles on other topics and sold books by mainstream historians, the majority of material published and distributed by IHR was devoted to questioning the facts surrounding the Holocaust.
In 1980, the IHR promised a $50,000 reward to anyone who could prove that Jews were gassed at Auschwitz. Mel Mermelstein wrote a letter to the editors of the Los Angeles Times and others including The Jerusalem Post. The IHR wrote back, offering him $50,000 for proof that Jews were, in fact, gassed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Mermelstein, in turn, submitted a notarized account of his internment at Auschwitz and how he witnessed Nazi guards ushering his mother and two sisters and others towards (as he learned later) gas chamber number five. Despite this, the IHR refused to pay the reward. Represented by public interest attorney William John Cox, Mermelstein subsequently sued the IHR in the Superior Court of Los Angeles County for breach of contract, anticipatory repudiation, libel, injurious denial of established fact, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and declaratory relief. On October 9, 1981, both parties in the Mermelstein case filed motions for summary judgment in consideration of which Judge Thomas T. Johnson of the Superior Court of Los Angeles County took "judicial notice of the fact that Jews were gassed to death at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Poland during the summer of 1944," judicial notice meaning that the court treated the gas chambers as common knowledge, and therefore did not require evidence that the gas chambers existed. On August 5, 1985, Judge Robert A. Wenke entered a judgment based upon the Stipulation for Entry of Judgment agreed upon by the parties on July 22, 1985. The judgment required IHR and other defendants to pay $90,000 to Mermelstein and to issue a letter of apology to "Mr. Mel Mermelstein, a survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Buchenwald, and all other survivors of Auschwitz" for "pain, anguish and suffering" caused to them.
In the "About the IHR" statement on their website, the IHR states, "The IHR does not 'deny' the Holocaust. Indeed, the IHR as such has no 'position' on any specific event...." British historian Richard J. Evans wrote that the Institute's acknowledgment "that a relatively small number of Jews were killed" was a means to draw attention away from its primary beliefs, i.e. that the number of victims was not in the millions and that Jews were not systematically murdered in gas chambers.
James Keegstra
Further information: R. v. KeegstraIn 1984, James Keegstra, a Canadian high-school teacher, was charged under the Canadian Criminal Code for "promoting hatred against an identifiable group by communicating anti-Semitic statements to his students". During class, he would describe Jews as a people of profound evil who had "created the Holocaust to gain sympathy." He also tested his students in exams on his theories and opinion of Jews.
Keegstra was charged under s 281.2(2) of the Criminal Code (now s 319(2)), which provides that "Every one who, by communicating statements, other than in private conversation, wilfully promotes hatred against any identifiable group" commits a criminal offense. He was convicted at trial before the Alberta Court of Queen's Bench. The court rejected the argument, advanced by Keegstra and his lawyer, Doug Christie, that promoting hatred is a constitutionally protected freedom of expression as per s 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Keegstra appealed to the Alberta Court of Appeal. That court agreed with Keegstra, and he was acquitted. The Crown then appealed the case to the Supreme Court of Canada, which ruled by a 4–3 majority that promoting hatred could be justifiably restricted under s 1 of the Charter. The Supreme Court restored Keegstra's conviction. He was fired from his teaching position shortly afterward.
Zündel trials
See also: Leuchter reportThe Toronto-based photo retoucher Ernst Zündel operated a small-press called Samisdat Publishers, which published and distributed Holocaust-denial material such as Did Six Million Really Die? by Richard Harwood (a pseudonym of Richard Verrall – a British neo-Nazi). In 1985, he was tried in R. v. Zundel and convicted under a "false news" law and sentenced to 15 months imprisonment by an Ontario court for "disseminating and publishing material denying the Holocaust". The Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg was a witness for the prosecution at the 1985 trial. Zündel's conviction was overturned in an appeal on a legal technicality, leading to a second trial in 1988, in which he was again convicted. The 1988 trial included, as witnesses for the defense, Fred A. Leuchter, David Irving and Robert Faurisson. The pseudo-scientific Leuchter report was presented as a defense document and was published in Canada in 1988 by Zundel's Samisdat Publishers, and in Britain in 1989 by Irving's Focal Point Publishing. In both of his trials, Zündel was defended by Douglas Christie and Barbara Kulaszka. His conviction was overturned in 1992 when the Supreme Court of Canada declared the "false news" law unconstitutional.
Zündel had a website, web-mastered by his wife Ingrid, which publicized his viewpoints. In January 2002, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal delivered a ruling in a complaint involving his website, in which it was found to be contravening the Canadian Human Rights Act. The court ordered Zündel to cease communicating hate messages. In February 2003, the American INS arrested him in Tennessee, US, on an immigration violations matter, and few days later, Zündel was sent back to Canada, where he tried to gain refugee status. Zündel remained in prison until March 1, 2005, when he was deported to Germany and prosecuted for disseminating hate propaganda. On February 15, 2007, Zündel was convicted on 14 counts of incitement under Germany's Volksverhetzung law, which bans the incitement of hatred against a portion of the population and given the maximum sentence of five years in prison.
Bradley Smith and the CODOH
In 1987, Bradley R. Smith, a former media director of the Institute for Historical Review, founded the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH). In the United States, CODOH has repeatedly attempted to place advertisements questioning whether the Holocaust happened, especially in college campus newspapers.
Bradley Smith took his message to college students—with little success. Smith referred to his tactics as the CODOH campus project. He said, "I don't want to spend time with adults anymore, I want to go to students. They are superficial. They are empty vessels to be filled." "What I wanted to do was I wanted to set forth three or four ideas that students might be interested in, that might cause them to think about things or to have questions about things. And I wanted to make it as simple as possible, and to set it up in a way that could not really be debated." Holocaust deniers have placed "Full page advertisements in college and university newspapers, including those of Brandeis University, Boston College, Pennsylvania State University, and Queens College. Some of these ads arguing that the Holocaust never happened ran without comment; others generated op-ed pieces by professors and students". On September 8, 2009, student newspaper The Harvard Crimson ran a paid ad from Bradley R Smith. It was quickly criticized, and the editor issued an apology, saying publishing the ad was a mistake.
Ernst Nolte
The German philosopher and historian Ernst Nolte, starting in the 1980s, advanced a set of theories, which though not denying the Holocaust appeared to flirt with an Italian Holocaust denier, Carlo Mattogno, as a serious historian. In a letter to the Israeli historian Otto Dov Kulka of December 8, 1986, Nolte criticized the work of the French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson on the ground that the Holocaust did occur, but went on to argue that Faurisson's work was motivated by what Nolte claimed were the admirable motives of sympathy towards the Palestinians and opposition to Israel. In his 1987 book Der europäische Bürgerkrieg (The European Civil War), Nolte claimed that the intentions of Holocaust deniers are "often honourable", and that some of their claims are "not obviously without foundation". Nolte himself, though he has never denied the occurrence of the Holocaust, has claimed that the Wannsee Conference of 1942 never happened and that the minutes of the conference were post-war forgeries done by "biased" Jewish historians designed to discredit Germany.
The British historian Ian Kershaw has argued that Nolte was operating on the borderlines of Holocaust denial with his implied claim that the "negative myth" of Nazi Germany was created by Jewish historians, his allegations of the domination of Holocaust scholarship by "biased" Jewish historians, and his statements that one should withhold judgment on Holocaust deniers, whom Nolte takes considerable pains to stress are not exclusively Germans or fascists. In Kershaw's opinion, Nolte is attempting to imply that perhaps Holocaust deniers are on to something.
In a 1990 interview, Nolte implied that there was something to the Leuchter report: "If the revisionists and Leuchter among them have made it clear to the public that even 'Auschwitz' must be an object of scientific inquiry and controversy then they should be given credit for this. Even if it finally turned out that the number of victims was even greater and the procedures were even more horrific than has been assumed until now." In his 1993 book Streitpunkte (Points of Contention), Nolte praised the work of Holocaust deniers as superior to "mainstream scholars". Nolte wrote that "radical revisionists have presented research which, if one is familiar with the source material and the critique of the sources, is probably superior to that of the established historians of Germany". In a 1994 interview with Der Spiegel magazine, Nolte stated "I cannot rule out the importance of the investigation of the gas chambers in which they looked for remnants of the ", and that "'Of course, I am against revisionists, but Fred Leuchter's 'study' of the Nazi gas ovens has to be given attention because one has to stay open to 'other' ideas."
The British historian Richard J. Evans in his 1989 book In Hitler's Shadow expressed the view that Nolte's reputation as a scholar was in ruins as a result of these and other controversial statements on his part. The American historian Deborah Lipstadt in a 2003 interview stated:
Historians such as the German Ernst Nolte are, in some ways, even more dangerous than the deniers. Nolte is an anti-Semite of the first order, who attempts to rehabilitate Hitler by saying that he was no worse than Stalin; but he is careful not to deny the Holocaust. Holocaust-deniers make Nolte's life more comfortable. They have, with their radical argumentation, pulled the center a little more to their side. Consequently, a less radical extremist, such as Nolte, finds himself closer to the middle ground, which makes him more dangerous.
Mayer controversy
In 1988, the American historian Arno J. Mayer published a book entitled Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?, which did not explicitly deny the Holocaust, but according to Lucy Dawidowicz lent support to Holocaust denial by stating that most people who died at Auschwitz were the victims of "natural causes" such as disease, not gassing. Dawidowicz argued that Mayer's statements about Auschwitz were "a breathtaking assertion". Holocaust historian Robert Jan van Pelt has written that Mayer's book is as close as a mainstream historian has ever come to supporting Holocaust denial. Holocaust deniers such as David Irving have often cited Mayer's book as one reason for embracing Holocaust denial. Though Mayer has been often condemned for his statement about the reasons for the Auschwitz death toll, his book does not deny the use of gas chambers at Auschwitz, as Holocaust deniers often claim.
Some mainstream Holocaust historians have labeled Mayer a denier. The Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer wrote that Mayer "popularizes the nonsense that the Nazis saw in Marxism and Bolshevism their main enemy, and the Jews unfortunately got caught up in this; when he links the destruction of the Jews to the ups and downs of German warfare in the Soviet Union, in a book that is so cocksure of itself that it does not need a proper scientific apparatus, he is really engaging in a much more subtle form of Holocaust denial".
Defenders of Mayer argue that his statement that "Sources for the study of the gas chambers are at once rare and unreliable" has been taken out of context, particularly by Holocaust deniers. Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman observe that the paragraph from which the statement is taken asserts that the SS destroyed the majority of the documentation relating to the operation of the gas chambers in the death camps, which is why Mayer feels that sources for the operation of the gas chambers are "rare" and "unreliable".
False equivalence and effect
Denialist focus on Allied war crimes
The focus on so-called Allied atrocities during the war has been a theme in Holocaust denial literature, particularly in countries where outright denial of the Holocaust is illegal. According to historian Deborah Lipstadt, the concept of "comparable Allied wrongs", such as the expulsion of Germans after World War II and the bombing of Dresden, is at the center of, and a continuously repeated theme of, contemporary Holocaust denial; she calls the phenomenon "immoral equivalencies". In 1977, historian Martin Broszat, in a review of David Irving's book Hitler's War, maintained that the picture of World War II drawn by Irving was done in a such way to imply moral equivalence between the actions of the Axis and Allied states with both sides equally guilty of terrible crimes, leading to Hitler's "fanatical, destructive will to annihilate" being downgraded to being "no longer an exceptional phenomenon".
Propaganda
According to James Najarian, Holocaust deniers working for the Institute for Historical Review are not trained in history and "put out sham scholarly articles in the mock-academic publication, the Journal of Historical Review". They appeal to "our objectivity, our sense of fair play, and our distrust of figurative language". Thus, they rely on facts to grab the readers' attention. These facts, however, are strung by what Najarian calls "fabricated decorum" and are re-interpreted for their use. For example, they pay particular attention to inconsistencies in numbers.
Holocaust denial propaganda in all forms has been shown to influence the audiences that it reaches. In fact, even the well-educated—that is, college graduates and current university students alike—are susceptible to such propaganda when it is presented before them. This stems from the growing disbelief that audiences feel after being exposed to such information, especially since Holocaust witnesses themselves are decreasing in number. Studies centered on the psychological effects of Holocaust denial propaganda confirm this assertion. Linda M. Yelland and William F. Stone, in particular, show that Denial essays decrease readers' belief in the Holocaust, regardless of their prior Holocaust awareness.
Middle East
General
Gamal Abdel Nasser, the President of Egypt, told a German newspaper in 1964 that "no person, not even the most simple one, takes seriously the lie of the six million Jews that were murdered ."
Denials of the Holocaust have been promoted by various Middle Eastern figures and media. Holocaust denial is sponsored by some Middle Eastern governments, including Iran and Syria. In 2006 Robert Satloff writing in The Washington Post, reported that "A respected Holocaust research institution recently reported that Egypt, Qatar and Saudi Arabia all promote Holocaust denial and protect Holocaust deniers."
Prominent figures from the Middle East have rarely made publicized visits to Auschwitz—Israel's Arab community being the exception. In 2010, Hadash MK Mohammed Barakeh visited, following a previous visit of two other Arab-Israeli lawmakers, and a group of about 100 Arab-Israeli writers and clerics in 2003.
Palestine
See also: Racism in the Palestinian territoriesIndividuals from the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, and a number of Palestinian groups have engaged in various aspects of Holocaust denial.
Hamas have promoted Holocaust denial; Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi held that the Holocaust never occurred, that Zionists were behind the action of Nazis, and that Zionists funded Nazism. A press release by Hamas in April 2000 decried "the so-called Holocaust, which is an alleged and invented story with no basis". In August 2009, Hamas' told UNRWA that it would "refuse" to allow Palestinian children to study the Holocaust, which it called "a lie invented by the Zionists" and referred to Holocaust education as a "war crime". Hamas continued to hold this position in 2011, when the organization's Ministry for Refugee Affairs said that Holocaust education was "intended to poison the minds of our children."
The thesis of the 1982 doctoral dissertation of Mahmoud Abbas, a co-founder of Fatah and president of the Palestinian National Authority, was "The Secret Connection between the Nazis and the Leaders of the Zionist Movement". In his 1983 book The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism based on the dissertation, Abbas denied that six million Jews had died in the Holocaust; dismissing it as a "myth" and a "fantastic lie". At most, he wrote, 890,000 Jews were murdered by the Germans. Abbas claimed that the number of deaths has been exaggerated for political purposes. "It seems that the interest of the Zionist movement, however, is to inflate this figure so that their gains will be greater. This led them to emphasize this figure in order to gain the solidarity of international public opinion with Zionism. Many scholars have debated the figure of six million and reached stunning conclusions—fixing the number of Jewish victims at only a few hundred thousand."
In his March 2006 interview with Haaretz, Abbas stated, "I wrote in detail about the Holocaust and said I did not want to discuss numbers. I quoted an argument between historians in which various numbers of casualties were mentioned. One wrote there were 12 million victims and another wrote there were 800,000. I have no desire to argue with the figures. The Holocaust was a terrible, unforgivable crime against the Jewish nation, a crime against humanity that cannot be accepted by humankind. The Holocaust was a terrible thing and nobody can claim I denied it." While acknowledging the existence of the Holocaust in 2006 and 2014, Abbas has defended the position that Zionists collaborated with the Nazis to perpetrate it. In 2012, Abbas told Al Mayadeen, a Beirut TV station affiliated with Iran and Hezbollah, that he "challenges anyone who can deny that the Zionist movement had ties with the Nazis before World War II".
Surveys conducted by Sammy Smooha of the University of Haifa found that the fraction of Israeli Arabs denying that millions of Jews were murdered by the Nazis increased from 28% in 2006 to 40% in 2008. Smooha commented:
In Arab eyes disbelief in the very happening of the Shoah is not hate of Jews (embedded in the denial of the Shoah in the West) but rather a form of protest. Arabs not believing in the event of Shoah intend to express strong objection to the portrayal of the Jews as the ultimate victim and to the underrating of the Palestinians as a victim. They deny Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state that the Shoah gives legitimacy to. Arab disbelief in the Shoah is a component of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, unlike the ideological and anti-Semitic denial of the Holocaust and the desire to escape guilt in the West.
Mohammed Dajani, a Palestinian professor of the Al-Quds University took his students to visit the Auschwitz concentration camps in Poland, but was later forced to resign over accusations of "promoting Zionist narrative to gain international support for Israel" from antisemitic administrators. Still, he defended Holocaust education as necessary for peace,
Holocaust denial and distortion are historically incorrect, and factually wrong, and constitute a significant threat to morality and human dignity...
Syria
In a speech delivered at the Arab Socialist Ba'ath party's central committee meeting in December 2023, the Ba'ath party secretary-general Bashar al-Assad claimed that there was "no evidence" of the killings of six million Jews during the Holocaust. Assad alleged that the Holocaust was "politicized" by Allied powers to facilitate the mass-deportation of European Jews to Palestine. Assad also accused the U.S. government of financially and militarily sponsoring the rise of Nazism during the inter-war period. Higlighting the deaths of 26 million Soviet citizens during the Second World War, Assad said: "there was no specific method of torture or killing specific to the Jews. The Nazis used the same methods everywhere."
Iran
Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad frequently denied the Holocaust, formally 'questioning' the reliability of the historical evidence, although he on occasion confirmed belief in it. In a December 2005 speech, Ahmadinejad said that a legend was fabricated and had been promoted to protect Israel. He said:
They have fabricated a legend, under the name of the Massacre of the Jews, and they hold it higher than God himself, religion itself and the prophets themselves.... If somebody in their country questions God, nobody says anything, but if somebody denies the myth of the massacre of Jews, the Zionist loudspeakers and the governments in the pay of Zionism will start to scream.
The remarks immediately provoked international controversy as well as swift condemnation from government officials in Israel, Europe, and the United States. All six political parties in the German parliament signed a joint resolution condemning Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denial. In contrast, Hamas political leader Khaled Mashal described Ahmadinejad's comments as "courageous" and stated, "Muslim people will defend Iran because it voices what they have in their hearts, in particular the Palestinian people." In the United States, the Muslim Public Affairs Council condemned Ahmadinejad's remarks. In 2005, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leader, Mohammed Mahdi Akef, denounced what he called "the myth of the Holocaust" in defending Ahmadinejad's denial of the Holocaust.
On December 11, 2006, the Iranian state-sponsored "International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust" began to widespread condemnation. The conference, called for and held at the behest of Ahmadinejad, was widely described as a "Holocaust denial conference" or a "meeting of Holocaust deniers", though Iran denied it was a Holocaust denial conference. A few months before it opened, the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi stated: "The Holocaust is not a sacred issue that one can't touch. I have visited the Nazi camps in Eastern Europe. I think it is exaggerated."
In 2013, in an interview with CNN, newly elected Iranian President Hassan Rouhani condemned the Holocaust, stating: "I can tell you that any crime that happens in history against humanity, including the crime the Nazis created towards the Jews as well as non-Jews is reprehensible and condemnable. Whatever criminality they committed against the Jews, we condemn." Iranian media later accused CNN of fabricating Rouhani's comments.
In his official 2013 Nowruz address, Supreme Leader of Iran Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei questioned the veracity of the Holocaust, remarking that "The Holocaust is an event whose reality is uncertain and if it has happened, it's uncertain how it has happened." This was consistent with Khamenei's previous comments regarding the Holocaust.
In 2015, the House of Cartoon and the Sarcheshmeh Cultural Complex in Iran organized the Second International Holocaust Cartoon Competition, a competition in which artists were encouraged to submit cartoons on the theme of Holocaust denial. The winner of the contest will receive $12,000. Hamshahri, a popular Iranian newspaper, held a similar contest in 2006.
Turkey
In Turkey, in 1996, the Islamic preacher Adnan Oktar under the pen name of Harun Yahya, distributed thousands of copies of a book which was originally published the previous year, entitled Soykırım Yalanı ("The Genocide Lie", referring to the Holocaust) and mailed unsolicited texts to American and European schools and colleges. The publication of Soykırım Yalanı sparked much public debate. This book claims, "what is presented as Holocaust is the death of some Jews due to the typhus plague during the war and the famine towards the end of the war caused by the defeat of the Germans." In March 1996, a Turkish painter and intellectual, Bedri Baykam, published a strongly worded critique of the book in the Ankara daily newspaper Siyah-Beyaz ("Black and White"). A legal suit for slander was brought against him. During the trial in September, Baykam exposed the real author of the book as Adnan Oktar. The suit was withdrawn in March 1997.
Eastern Europe
General
In some Eastern European countries, such as Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, and Romania, Holocaust deniers do not deny the very fact of mass murder of Jews but deny some national or regional elements of the Holocaust.
Soviet Union and Russia
According to Zvi Gitelman, Soviet writers tended either to ignore or downplay the Holocaust, treating it as one small part of a larger phenomenon of 20 million dead Soviet citizens during the Great Patriotic War. According to Gitelman, Soviet authorities were concerned about raising the consciousness of Soviet Jews and retarding their assimilation to the greater Soviet population. The Holocaust also raised the issue of collaboration with the Nazi occupiers, an uncomfortable topic for Soviet historiography. According to historian Yuri Pivovarov in modern Russia this trend has returned with the Russian invasion on Ukraine, culminating with July 19, 2023, article of Maria Zakharova who argued that it were the Soviet citizens who were the victims of Holocaust in the first place. In a number of popular history project sponsored by Russian state Jews were mentioned as one of many victim groups, or not mentioned at all. Holocaust denial literature is freely published in Russia, and one of the most prominent authors, Jürgen Graf, lives there since his escape from prosecution in Switzerland in the 2000s.
Ukraine
The post-Soviet radical right activists in Ukraine do not question the existence of Nazi death camps or Jewish ghettos. However, they deny the participation of local population in anti-Jewish pogroms or the contribution of national paramilitary organizations in capture and execution of Jews. Thus, denial of the antisemitic nature and participation in the Holocaust of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army has become a central component of the intellectual history of the Ukrainian diaspora and nationalists.
Croatia
In 2018, the United States Department of State warned about "the glorification of the Ustasha regime and denial of the Holocaust" in Croatia, citing the placement of a plaque with the Ustasha-era salute 'Za dom spremni' on the grounds of a concentration camp memorial site, far-right rallies and the concert of the controversial band Thompson among other events. Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center describes Croatia as a "cradle of Holocaust distortion". Holocaust denial in Croatia typically involves the downplaying or denial of the Holocaust carried out by the Ustasha regime, particularly against Serbs and Jews at the Jasenovac concentration camp and it is done by public figures, though the regime's victims also included Roma and anti-fascist Croats. The Society for Research of the Threefold Jasenovac Camp in Croatia, an NGO with authors and academics among its members, claims that Jasenovac was a labor camp during World War II and that it was later used by Yugoslav Communists to imprison Ustasha members and regular Croatian Home Guard army troops until 1948, then alleged Stalinists until 1951. Following a series of book publications denying the Ustashe regime's crimes, the Simon Wiesenthal Center urged Croatian authorities in 2019 to ban such works, noting that they "would immediately be banned in Germany and Austria and rightfully so".
Hungary
In Hungary, Holocaust distortion and denial take place in the form of downplaying the country's role in the killing and deportation of Jews. The Arrow Cross Party committed numerous crimes and killed or deported Jews. A total of 437,000 Jews were deported by Miklós Horthy's government in the Kingdom of Hungary, an Axis collaborator.
Serbia
In Serbia, Holocaust distortion and denial is manifested in the downplaying of Milan Nedić and Dimitrije Ljotić's roles in the extermination of Serbia's Jews in concentration camps in Nedić's Serbia, by a number of Serbian historians. Serb collaborationist armed forces, including the Chetniks, were involved, either directly or indirectly, in the mass killings of mainly Jews and Roma as well as Croats, Muslims and those Serbs who sided with any anti-German resistance. Since the end of the war, Serbian collaboration in the Holocaust has been the subject of historical revisionism by Serbian leaders.
Slovakia
In Slovakia, some anti-communist writers claim that Jozef Tiso was a savior of Jews or that the Slovak State was not responsible for the Holocaust in Slovakia.
Western Europe
France
In France, Holocaust denial became more prominent in the 1990s as négationnisme, though the movement has existed in ultra-left French politics since at least the 1960s, led by figures such as Pierre Guillaume (who was involved in the bookshop La Vieille Taupe during the 1960s). Elements of the extreme far-right in France have begun to build on each other's negationist arguments, which often span beyond the Holocaust to cover a range of antisemitic views, incorporating attempts to tie the Holocaust to the Biblical massacre of the Canaanites, critiques of Zionism, and other material fanning what has been called a "conspiratorial Judeo-phobia" designed to legitimize and "banalize" antisemitism.
Belgium
In Belgium in 2001, Roeland Raes, the ideologue and vice-president of one of the country's largest political parties, the Vlaams Blok, gave an interview on Dutch TV where he cast doubt over the number of Jews murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust. In the same interview, he questioned the scale of the Nazis' use of gas chambers and the authenticity of Anne Frank's diary. In response to the media assault following the interview, Raes was forced to resign his position but vowed to remain active within the party. Three years later, the Vlaams Blok was convicted of racism and chose to disband. Immediately afterwards, it legally reformed under the new name Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest) with the same leaders and the same membership.
In September 2024, the Belgian far-right Vlaams Belang party sparked controversy by putting a convicted Holocaust denier as one of its candidates in the upcoming municipal elections.
Germany
The trial of a Canadian woman, Monika Schaefer, and her German-Canadian brother, Alfred Schaefer started in Germany in early July 2018. They were charged with Volksverhetzung (literally 'incitement of the people', often phrased as 'incitement to hatred' in English-language media). The pair had published video clips on YouTube of their denial of the genocide of Jews. In the clips, Alfred Schaefer said that Jews wanted to destroy Germans, blamed them for starting both World Wars, and referred to the Holocaust as a "Jewish fantasy". Monika Schaefer was arrested in January 2018 in Germany while attending a court hearing of Sylvia Stolz. Schaefer had been the Green Party candidate in the Alberta riding of Yellowhead during the federal elections in 2006, 2008, and 2011, but was expelled from the party after news reports surfaced of a July 2016 video where she describes the Holocaust as "the most persistent lie in all of history" and insisted that those in concentration camps had been kept as healthy and as well-fed as possible. In late October 2018, Monika Schaefer was convicted of the charge of 'incitement of hatred'. She was sentenced to ten months while Alfred Schaefer, also convicted, received a sentence of three years and two months.
United Kingdom
In January 2019, a survey conducted by Opinion Matters, on behalf of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust found that 5% of UK adults did not believe the Holocaust took place and one in 12 (8%) believed its scale has been exaggerated. One in five respondents incorrectly answered that less than 2 million Jews were murdered, and 45% couldn't say how many people were murdered in the Holocaust. Speaking in light of the survey's findings, Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, said: "One person questioning the truth of the Holocaust is one too many, and so it is up to us to redouble our efforts to ensure future generations know that it did happen and become witnesses to one of the darkest episodes in our history." The BBC Radio 4 programme More or Less, specializing on statistics, investigated the survey finding it was unlikely to be accurate. Participants were incentivized to complete the online survey by shopping vouchers encouraging speedy answering, and the principal question was a "reverse question" with most participants having to give the reverse answer to surrounding questions requiring careful answering. Another question asked how many Jewish people had been murdered in the holocaust with only 0.2% of participants giving the answer zero, which was considered to be a closer estimate of the number of UK adults that did not believe the Holocaust took place.
Other
Japan
Japanese Holocaust denial first appeared in 1989 and reached its peak in 1995 with the publication in February 1995 by the Japanese magazine Marco Polo [ja], a 250,000-circulation monthly published by Bungei Shunju, of a Holocaust denial article by physician Masanori Nishioka which stated: "The 'Holocaust' is a fabrication. There were no execution gas chambers in Auschwitz or in any other concentration camp. Today, what is displayed as 'gas chambers' at the remains of the Auschwitz camp in Poland are a post-war fabrication by the Polish communist regime or by the Soviet Union, which controlled the country. Not once, neither at Auschwitz nor in any territory controlled by the Germans during the Second World War, was there 'mass murder of Jews' in 'gas chambers." The Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center instigated a boycott of Bungei Shunju advertisers, including Volkswagen, Mitsubishi, and Cartier. Within days, Bungei Shunju shut down Marco Polo and its editor, Kazuyoshi Hanada, quit, as did the president of Bungei Shunju, Kengo Tanaka.
Finland
Holocaust denial started in Finland almost immediately after the war, with many Finns who had been involved in the far-right and Nazi movements publishing articles questioning the Holocaust. Prominent early Finnish Holocaust deniers include professor C. A. J. Gadolin, CEO Carl-Gustaf Herlitz, architech Carl O. Nordling and ambassador Teo Snellman. Pekka Siitoin's Nazi group started distributing a Finnish translation of Richard Harwood’s Did Six Million Really Die? in 1976.
In 2013, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre asked President Niinistö to condemn a neo-Nazi newspaper circulated to some 660,000 households. The newspaper published articles denying the Holocaust and articles such as "Zionist terrorism" and "CNN, Goldman Sachs and Zionist Control" translated from David Duke. Popular Finnish alternative media sites MV-media, Verkkomedia and Magneettimedia are known for publishing articles denying the Holocaust. Prominent modern Finnish Holocaust deniers include the owner of KauppaSuomi newspaper and department store tycoon Juha Kärkkäinen. Members of the Nordic Resistance Movement have also distributed material denying the Holocaust.
American youth
According to a 2020 survey of American adult Millennials and Generation Z members, 24% said the Holocaust might be a myth or had been exaggerated.
Reactions to Holocaust denial
In 2022, the United Nations adopted a resolution aimed at combating Holocaust denial and antisemitism. The resolution was proposed by Germany and Israel.
Scholars
See also: Irving v Penguin Books and LipstadtScholarly response to Holocaust denial can be roughly divided into three categories. Some academics refuse to engage Holocaust deniers or their arguments at all, on grounds that doing so lends them unwarranted legitimacy. The second group of scholars, typified by the American historian Deborah Lipstadt, have tried to raise awareness of the methods and motivations of Holocaust denial without legitimizing the deniers themselves. "We need not waste time or effort answering the deniers' contentions," Lipstadt wrote. "It would be never-ending.... Their commitment is to an ideology and their 'findings' are shaped to support it." A third group, typified by the Nizkor Project, responds to arguments and claims made by Holocaust denial groups by pointing out inaccuracies and errors in their evidence.
In December 1991 the American Historical Association, the oldest and largest society of historians and teachers of history in the United States, issued the following statement: "The American Historical Association Council strongly deplores the publicly reported attempts to deny the fact of the Holocaust. No serious historian questions that the Holocaust took place." This followed a strong reaction by many of its members and commentary in the press against a near-unanimous decision that the AHA had made in May 1991 that studying the significance of the Holocaust should be encouraged. The association's May 1991 statement was in response to an incident where certain of its members had questioned the reality of the Holocaust. The December 1991 declaration is a reversal of the AHA's earlier stance that the association should not set a precedent by certifying historical facts. The AHA has also stated that Holocaust denial is "at best, a form of academic fraud".
Literary theorist Jean Baudrillard described Holocaust denial as "part of the extermination itself". Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel, during a 1999 discussion at the White House in Washington, D.C., called the Holocaust "the most documented tragedy in recorded history. Never before has a tragedy elicited so much witness from the killers, from the victims and even from the bystanders—millions of pieces here in the museum what you have, all other museums, archives in the thousands, in the millions."
Deborah Lipstadt's 1993 book, Denying the Holocaust, sharply criticized various Holocaust deniers, including British author David Irving, for deliberately misrepresenting evidence to justify their preconceived conclusions. In the book, Lipstadt named Irving as "one of the more dangerous" Holocaust deniers, because he was a published author, and was viewed by some as a legitimate military historian. He was "familiar with historical evidence", she wrote, and "bends it until it conforms with his ideological leanings and political agenda". In 1996, Irving filed a libel suit against Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin Books. Irving, who appeared as a defense witness in Ernst Zündel's trial in Canada, and once declared at a rally of Holocaust deniers that "more women died in the back seat of Edward Kennedy's car than ever died in a gas chamber at Auschwitz", claimed that Lipstadt's allegation damaged his reputation. American historian Christopher Browning, an expert witness for the defense, wrote a comprehensive essay for the court summarizing the voluminous evidence for the reality of the Holocaust, and under cross-examination, effectively countered all of Irving's principal arguments to the contrary. Cambridge historian Richard J. Evans, another defense expert witness, spent two years examining Irving's writings and confirmed his misrepresentations, including evidence that he had knowingly used forged documents as source material. After a two-month trial in London the trial judge, Justice Charles Gray, issued a 333-page ruling against Irving, which referred to him as a "Holocaust denier" and "right-wing pro-Nazi polemicist".
Ken McVay, an American resident in Canada, was disturbed by the efforts of organizations like the Simon Wiesenthal Center to suppress the speech of the Holocaust deniers, feeling that it was better to confront them openly than to try to censor them. On the Usenet newsgroup alt.revisionism he began a campaign of "truth, fact, and evidence", working with other participants on the newsgroup to uncover factual information about the Holocaust and counter the arguments of the deniers by proving them to be based upon misleading evidence, false statements, and outright lies. He founded the Nizkor Project to expose the activities of the Holocaust deniers, who responded to McVay with personal attacks, slander, and death threats.
Public figures
A number of public figures have spoken out against Holocaust denial. In 2006, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said: "Remembering is a necessary rebuke to those who say the Holocaust never happened or has been exaggerated. Holocaust denial is the work of bigots; we must reject their false claims whenever, wherever and by whomever they are made." In January 2007, the United Nations General Assembly condemned "without reservation any denial of the Holocaust", though Iran disassociated itself from the resolution.
In July 2013, Iran's then president-elect Hassan Rohani described Ahmadinejad's remarks about the Holocaust and Israel as "hate rhetoric" and in September 2013 Rohani stated that "The Nazis carried out a massacre that cannot be denied, especially against the Jewish people" and "The massacre by the Nazis was condemnable. We never want to sit by side with the Nazis...They committed a crime against Jews — which is a crime against ... all of humanity." While declining to give a specific number of Jewish victims, Iranian analysts suggested that "Rouhani pushed the envelope as far as it could go ... without infuriating the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and other conservatives back home."
Former Auschwitz SS personnel
Critics of Holocaust denial also include members of the Auschwitz SS. Camp physician and SS-Untersturmführer Hans Münch considered the facts of Auschwitz "so firmly determined that one cannot have any doubt at all", and described those who negate what happened at the camp as "malevolent" people who have "personal interest to want to bury in silence things that cannot be buried in silence". Zyklon B handler and SS-Oberscharführer Josef Klehr said that anyone who maintains that nobody was gassed at Auschwitz must be "crazy or in the wrong". SS-Unterscharführer Oswald Kaduk stated that he did not consider those who maintain such a thing as normal people. Hearing about Holocaust denial compelled former SS-Rottenführer Oskar Gröning to publicly speak about what he witnessed at Auschwitz, and denounce Holocaust deniers, stating:
I would like you to believe me. I saw the gas chambers. I saw the crematoria. I saw the open fires. I was on the ramp when the selections took place. I would like you to believe that these atrocities happened because I was there.
Holocaust denial and antisemitism
Holocaust denial is given as an example of antisemitism in the Working Definition of Antisemitism, adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance as well as the United Kingdom, Israel, Austria, Scotland, Romania, Germany and Bulgaria. The European Parliament voted in favor of a resolution calling for member states to adopt the definition on June 1, 2017.
The Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity defines Holocaust denial as "a new form of anti-Semitism, but one that hinges on age-old motifs". The Anti-Defamation League has stated that "Holocaust denial is a contemporary form of the classic anti-Semitic doctrine of the evil, manipulative and threatening world Jewish conspiracy" and French historian Valérie Igounet has written that "Holocaust denial is a convenient polemical substitute for anti-semitism."
According to Walter Reich, psychiatrist and then a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, one-time director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and now professor of international affairs at George Washington University:
The primary motivation for most deniers is anti-Semitism, and for them the Holocaust is an infuriatingly inconvenient fact of history. After all, the Holocaust has generally been recognized as one of the most terrible crimes that ever took place, and surely the very emblem of evil in the modern age. If that crime was a direct result of anti-Semitism taken to its logical end, then anti-Semitism itself, even when expressed in private conversation, is inevitably discredited among most people. What better way to rehabilitate anti-Semitism, make anti-Semitic arguments seem once again respectable in civilized discourse and even make it acceptable for governments to pursue anti-Semitic policies than by convincing the world that the great crime for which anti-Semitism was blamed simply never happened—indeed, that it was nothing more than a frame-up invented by the Jews, and propagated by them through their control of the media? What better way, in short, to make the world safe again for anti-Semitism than by denying the Holocaust?
The French historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet described the motivation of deniers more succinctly, explaining, "One revives the dead in order the better to strike the living." German political scientist Matthias Küntzel has argued, "Every denial of the Holocaust... contains an appeal to repeat it."
Examination of claims
Main article: Evidence and documentation for the HolocaustThe key claims which cause Holocaust denial to differ from established fact are:
- The Nazis had no official policy or intention of exterminating Jews.
- The Nazis did not use gas chambers to mass murder Jews.
- The figure of 5 to 6 million Jewish deaths is a gross exaggeration, and the actual number is an order of magnitude lower.
Other claims include the following:
- Stories of the Holocaust were a myth initially created by the Allies of World War II to demonize Germans, Jews having spread this myth as part of a grander plot intended to enable the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and now to garner continuing support for the state of Israel.
- Documentary evidence of the Holocaust, from photographs to The Diary of Anne Frank, is fabricated.
- Survivor testimonies are filled with errors and inconsistencies and are thus unreliable.
- Interrogators obtained Nazi prisoners' confessions of war crimes through the use of torture.
- The Nazi treatment of Jews was no different from what the Allies did to their enemies in World War II.
Holocaust denial is widely viewed as failing to adhere to principles for the treatment of evidence that mainstream historians (as well as scholars in other fields) regard as basic to rational inquiry.
The Holocaust was well documented by the bureaucracy of the Nazi government itself. It was further witnessed by the Allied forces who entered Germany and its associated Axis states towards the end of World War II. It was also witnessed from the inside by non-Jewish captives such as Catholic French Resistance member André Rogerie who wrote extensively and testified about his experiences in seven camps including Auschwitz-Birkenau and also produced the oldest contemporary sketch of a camp crematorium.
According to researchers Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman, there is a "convergence of evidence" that proves that the Holocaust happened. This evidence includes:
- Written documents—hundreds of thousands of letters, memos, blueprints, orders, bills, speeches, articles, memoirs, and confessions.
- Eyewitness testimony—accounts from survivors, Jewish Sonderkommandos (who helped load bodies from the gas chambers into the crematoria in exchange for a chance of survival), SS guards, commandants, local townspeople, and even high-ranking Nazis who spoke openly about the mass murder of the Jews.
- Photographs—including official military and press photographs, civilian photographs, secret photographs taken by survivors, aerial photographs, German and Allied film footage, and unofficial photographs taken by the German military.
- The camps themselves—concentration camps, work camps, and extermination camps that still exist in varying degrees of originality and reconstruction.
- Inferential evidence or argument from silence—population demographics, reconstructed from the pre–World War II era; if six million Jews were not murdered, what happened to them?
Much of the controversy surrounding the claims of Holocaust deniers' centers on the methods used to present arguments that the Holocaust allegedly never happened as commonly accepted. Numerous accounts have been given by Holocaust deniers (including evidence presented in court cases) of claimed facts and evidence; however, independent research has shown these claims to be based upon flawed research, biassed statements, or even deliberately falsified evidence. Opponents of Holocaust denial have documented numerous instances in which such evidence was altered or manufactured (see Nizkor Project and David Irving). According to Pierre Vidal-Naquet, "in our society of image and spectacle, extermination on paper leads to extermination in reality."
Laws against Holocaust denial
Main article: Legality of Holocaust denialHolocaust denial is explicitly or implicitly illegal in 18 countries: Austria, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, and Switzerland. Romania officially denied the Holocaust occurred on its territory up until the Wiesel Commission in 2004. The European Union's Framework decision on Racism and Xenophobia states that denying or grossly trivializing "crimes of genocide" should be made "punishable in all EU Member States".
Such legislation remains controversial. In October 2007, a tribunal declared Spain's genocide denial law unconstitutional. In 2007 Italy rejected a denial law proposing a prison sentence of up to four years. In 2006 the Netherlands rejected a draft law proposing a maximum sentence of one year on denial of genocidal acts in general, although specifically denying the Holocaust remains a criminal offense there. The United Kingdom has twice rejected Holocaust denial laws. Denmark and Sweden have also rejected such legislation.
A number of deniers have been prosecuted under various countries' denial laws. French literature professor Robert Faurisson, for example, was convicted and punished under the Gayssot Act in 1990. Some historians oppose such laws, among them Pierre Vidal-Naquet, an outspoken critic of Faurisson, on the grounds that denial legislation imposes "historical truth as legal truth". Other academics favor criminalization. Holocaust denial, they contend, is "the worst form of racism and its most respectable version because it pretends to be a research". Holocaust historian Deborah E. Lipstadt expressed her opposition to laws against expressing Holocaust denial, saying, "I don't think they work. I think they turn whatever is being outlawed into forbidden fruit." She also said that politicians should not be able to decide what can and cannot be said.
David Irving conviction
In February 2006, Irving was convicted in Austria, where Holocaust denial is illegal, for a speech he had made in 1989 in which he denied the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz. Irving was aware of the outstanding arrest warrant but chose to go to Austria anyway "to give a lecture to a far-right student fraternity". Although he pleaded guilty to the charge, Irving said he had been "mistaken", and had changed his opinions on the Holocaust. "I said that then, based on my knowledge at the time, but by 1991 when I came across the Eichmann papers, I wasn't saying that anymore and I wouldn't say that now. The Nazis did murder millions of Jews." Irving served 13 months of a 3-year sentence in an Austrian prison, including the period between his arrest and conviction, and was deported in early 2007. The episode sparked intense international debate over the limits of freedom of speech. Upon hearing of Irving's sentence, Lipstadt said:
I am not happy when censorship wins, and I don't believe in winning battles via censorship.... The way of fighting Holocaust deniers is with history and with truth.
According to CNN, upon Irving's return to the UK, he "vow to repeat views denying the Holocaust that led to his conviction" stating he felt "no need any longer to show remorse" for his Holocaust views.
Genocide denials
Main article: Genocide denialPart of a series on |
Denial of mass killings |
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Instances of denial |
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Other acts of genocide have met similar attempts to deny and minimize them. Gregory H. Stanton, formerly of the US State Department and the founder of Genocide Watch, lists denial as the final stage of a genocide development: "Denial is the eighth stage that always follows a genocide. It is among the surest indicators of further genocidal massacres. The perpetrators of genocide dig up the mass graves, burn the bodies, try to cover up the evidence and intimidate the witnesses. They deny that they committed any crimes, and often blame what happened on the victims."
Holocaust denial is often compared to Armenian genocide denial because of similar tactics of misrepresenting evidence, false equivalence, claiming that atrocities were invented by war propaganda and that powerful lobbies manufacture genocide allegations for their own profit, subsuming one-sided systematic extermination into war deaths, and shifting blame from the perpetrators to the victims of genocide. Both forms of negationism share the goal of rehabilitating the ideologies which brought genocide about.
See also
Holocaust:
Other sources:
References
Citations
- Antisemitic:
- "Contemporary examples of antisemitism in public life, the media, schools, the workplace, and in the religious sphere could, taking into account the overall context, include ... denying the fact, scope, mechanisms (e.g. gas chambers) or intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of National Socialist Germany and its supporters and accomplices during World War II (the Holocaust)." "Working Definition of Antisemitism" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on January 25, 2011. (33.8 KB), European Fundamental Rights Agency
- "It would elevate their antisemitic ideology – which is what Holocaust denial is – to the level of responsible historiography – which it is not." Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust, ISBN 0-14-024157-4, p. 11.
- "The denial of the Holocaust is among the most insidious forms of anti-Semitism...." Roth, Stephen J. "Denial of the Holocaust as an Issue of Law" in the Israel Yearbook on Human Rights, Volume 23, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1993, ISBN 0-7923-2581-8, p. 215.
- "Holocaust denial can be a particularly insidious form of antisemitism precisely because it often tries to disguise itself as something quite different: as genuine scholarly debate (in the pages, for example, of the innocuous-sounding Journal for Historical Review)." "The nature of Holocaust denial: What is Holocaust denial? Archived July 18, 2011, at the Wayback Machine", JPR report No. 3, 2000. Retrieved May 16, 2007.
- "This books treats several of the myths that have made antisemitism so lethal.... In addition to these historic myths, we also treat the new, maliciously manufactured myth of Holocaust denial, another groundless belief that is used to stir up Jew-hatred." Schweitzer, Frederick M. & Perry, Marvin. Anti-Semitism: myth and hate from antiquity to the present, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, ISBN 0-312-16561-7, p. 3.
- "One predictable strand of Arab Islamic antisemitism is Holocaust denial...." Schweitzer, Frederick M. & Perry, Marvin. Anti-Semitism: myth and hate from antiquity to the present, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, ISBN 0-312-16561-7, p. 10.
- "Anti-Semitism, in the form of Holocaust denial, had been experienced by just one teacher when working in a Catholic school with large numbers of Polish and Croatian students." Geoffrey Short, Carole Ann Reed. Issues in Holocaust Education, Ashgate Publishing, 2004, ISBN 0-7546-4211-9, p. 71.
- "Indeed, the task of organized antisemitism in the last decade of the century has been the establishment of Holocaust Revisionism – the denial that the Holocaust occurred." Stephen Trombley, "antisemitism", The Norton Dictionary of Modern Thought, W. W. Norton & Company, 1999, ISBN 0-393-04696-6, p. 40.
- "After the Yom Kippur War an apparent reappearance of antisemitism in France troubled the tranquility of the community; there were several notorious terrorist attacks on synagogues, Holocaust revisionism appeared, and a new antisemitic political right tried to achieve respectability." Howard K. Wettstein, Diasporas and Exiles: Varieties of Jewish Identity, University of California Press, 2002, ISBN 0-520-22864-2, p. 169.
- "Holocaust denial is a convenient polemical substitute for anti-semitism." Igounet, Valérie. "Holocaust denial is part of a strategy" Archived June 13, 2019, at the Wayback Machine, Le Monde diplomatique, May 1998.
- "Holocaust denial is a contemporary form of the classic anti-Semitic doctrine of the evil, manipulative and threatening world Jewish conspiracy." Introduction: Denial as Anti-Semitism Archived June 4, 2011, at the Wayback Machine, "Holocaust Denial: An Online Guide to Exposing and Combating Anti-Semitic Propaganda", Anti-Defamation League, 2001. Retrieved June 12, 2007.
- "In a number of countries, in Europe as well as in the United States, the negation or gross minimization of the Nazi genocide of Jews has been the subject of books, essay and articles. Should their authors be protected by freedom of speech? The European answer has been in the negative: such writings are not only a perverse form of anti-semitism but also an aggression against the dead, their families, the survivors and society at large." Roger Errera, "Freedom of speech in Europe", in Georg Nolte, European and US Constitutionalism, Cambridge University Press, 2005, ISBN 0-521-85401-6, pp. 39–40.
- "Particularly popular in Syria is Holocaust denial, another staple of Arab anti-Semitism that is sometimes coupled with overt sympathy for Nazi Germany." Efraim Karsh, Rethinking the Middle East, Routledge, 2003, ISBN 0-7146-5418-3, p. 104.
- "Holocaust denial is a new form of anti-Semitism, but one that hinges on age-old motifs." Dinah Shelton, Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity, Macmillan Reference, 2005, p. 45.
- "The stress on Holocaust revisionism underscored the new anti-Semitic agenda gaining ground within the Klan movement. Holocaust denial refurbished conspiratorial anti-Semitism. Who else but the Jews had the media power to hoodwink unsuspecting masses with one of the greatest hoaxes in history? And for what motive? To promote the claims of the illegitimate state of Israel by making non-Jews feel guilty, of course." Lawrence N. Powell, Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Duke's Louisiana, University of North Carolina Press, 2000, ISBN 0-8078-5374-7, p. 445.
- "Since its inception ... the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), a California-based Holocaust denial organization founded by Willis Carto of Liberty Lobby, has promoted the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jews fabricated tales of their own genocide to manipulate the sympathies of the non-Jewish world." Antisemitism and Racism Country Reports: United States Archived June 28, 2011, at the Wayback Machine, Stephen Roth Institute, 2000. Retrieved May 17, 2007.
- "The primary motivation for most deniers is anti-Semitism, and for them the Holocaust is an infuriatingly inconvenient fact of history. After all, the Holocaust has generally been recognized as one of the most terrible crimes that ever took place, and surely the very emblem of evil in the modern age. If that crime was a direct result of anti-Semitism taken to its logical end, then anti-Semitism itself, even when expressed in private conversation, is inevitably discredited among most people. What better way to rehabilitate anti-Semitism, make anti-Semitic arguments seem once again respectable in civilized discourse and even make it acceptable for governments to pursue anti-Semitic policies than by convincing the world that the great crime for which anti-Semitism was blamed simply never happened – indeed, that it was nothing more than a frame-up invented by the Jews, and propagated by them through their control of the media? What better way, in short, to make the world safe again for anti-Semitism than by denying the Holocaust?" Reich, Walter. "Erasing the Holocaust" Archived June 28, 2023, at the Wayback Machine, The New York Times, July 11, 1993.
- "There is now a creeping, nasty wave of anti-Semitism ... insinuating itself into our political thought and rhetoric.... The history of the Arab world ... is disfigured ... by a whole series of outmoded and discredited ideas, of which the notion that the Jews never suffered and that the Holocaust is an obfuscatory confection created by the elders of Zion is one that is acquiring too much, far too much, currency." Edward Said, "A Desolation, and They Called it Peace" in Those who forget the past, Ron Rosenbaum (ed), Random House 2004, p. 518.
- Conspiracy theory:
- "While appearing on the surface as a rather arcane pseudo-scholarly challenge to the well-established record of Nazi genocide during the Second World War, Holocaust denial serves as a powerful conspiracy theory uniting otherwise disparate fringe groups...." Introduction: Denial as Anti-Semitism Archived June 4, 2011, at the Wayback Machine, "Holocaust Denial: An Online Guide to Exposing and Combating Anti-Semitic Propaganda", Anti-Defamation League, 2001. Retrieved June 12, 2007.
- "Before discussing how Holocaust denial constitutes a conspiracy theory, and how the theory is distinctly American, it is important to understand what is meant by the term 'Holocaust denial.'" Mathis, Andrew E. Holocaust Denial, a Definition Archived February 13, 2021, at the Wayback Machine, The Holocaust History Project, July 2, 2004. Retrieved December 18, 2006.
- "Since its inception ... the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), a California-based Holocaust denial organization founded by Willis Carto of Liberty Lobby, has promoted the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jews fabricated tales of their own genocide to manipulate the sympathies of the non-Jewish world." Antisemitism and Racism Country Reports: United States Archived June 28, 2011, at the Wayback Machine, Stephen Roth Institute, 2000. Retrieved May 17, 2007.
- Coady, David (2019). "Conspiracy Theories and Official Stories *". Conspiracy Theories: The Philosophical Debate. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-315-25957-4.
Holocaust denial is one, unfortunately widespread, example of a conspiracy theory.
- ^ "Holocaust Deniers and Public Misinformation". encyclopedia.ushmm.org. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Archived from the original on May 19, 2021. Retrieved May 29, 2021.
- "Holocaust Denial and Distortion". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Archived from the original on September 29, 2023. Retrieved September 28, 2017.
Holocaust denial is an attempt to negate the established facts of the Nazi genocide of European Jewry. Holocaust denial and distortion are forms of antisemitism. They are generally motivated by hatred of Jews and build on the claim that the Holocaust was invented or exaggerated by Jews as part of a plot to advance Jewish interests.
- "How many Jews were murdered in the Holocaust? How do we know? Do we have their names? The Holocaust Resource Center Faqs". Yad Vashem. Archived from the original on July 31, 2020. See also appropriate section of the Holocaust article for the death toll.
- ^ Key elements of Holocaust denial:
- "Before discussing how Holocaust denial constitutes a conspiracy theory, and how the theory is distinctly American, it is important to understand what is meant by the term 'Holocaust denial'. Holocaust deniers, or 'revisionists', as they call themselves, question all three major points of definition of the Nazi Holocaust. First, they contend that, while mass murders of Jews did occur (although they dispute both the intentionality of such murders as well as the supposed deservedness of these killings), there was no official Nazi policy to murder Jews. Second, and perhaps most prominently, they contend that there were no homicidal gas chambers, particularly at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where mainstream historians believe over 1 million Jews were murdered, primarily in gas chambers. And third, Holocaust deniers contend that the death toll of European Jews during World War II was well below 6 million. Deniers float numbers anywhere between 300,000 and 1.5 million, as a general rule." Mathis, Andrew E. Holocaust Denial, a Definition Archived February 13, 2021, at the Wayback Machine, The Holocaust History Project, July 2, 2004. Retrieved December 18, 2006.
- "In part III we directly address the three major foundations upon which Holocaust denial rests, including ... the claim that gas chambers and crematoria were used not for mass extermination but rather for delousing clothing and disposing of people who died of disease and overwork; ... the claim that the six million figure is an exaggeration by an order of magnitude—that about six hundred thousand, not six million, died at the hands of the Nazis; ... the claim that there was no intention on the part of the Nazis to exterminate European Jewry and that the Holocaust was nothing more than the unfortunate by-product of the vicissitudes of war." Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman. Denying History: who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and why Do They Say It?, University of California Press, 2000, ISBN 0-520-23469-3, p. 3.
- "Holocaust Denial: Claims that the mass extermination of the Jews by the Nazis never happened; that the number of Jewish losses has been greatly exaggerated; that the Holocaust was not systematic nor a result of an official policy; or simply that the Holocaust never took place." What is Holocaust Denial Archived February 16, 2005, at archive.today, Yad Vashem website, 2004. Retrieved December 18, 2006.
- "Among the untruths routinely promoted are the claims that no gas chambers existed at Auschwitz, that only 600,000 Jews were killed rather than six million, and that Hitler had no murderous intentions toward Jews or other groups persecuted by his government." Holocaust Denial Archived April 4, 2007, at the Wayback Machine, Anti-Defamation League, 2001. Retrieved June 28, 2007.
- "In general, Holocaust denial consists of four central points: minimization of numbers killed, denial of use of gassing, denial of the systematic nature of the genocide, and claims that the evidence was fabricated, above all after the war." Mark M. Hull, Vera Moynes. Masquerade: Treason, the Holocaust, and an Irish Impostor, University of Oklahoma Press, 2017, p. 181. ISBN 978-0-80615836-5
- "According to the deniers, the Nazis did not murder six million Jews, the notion of homicidal gas chambers is a myth, and any deaths of Jews that did occur under the Nazis were the result of wartime privations, not of systematic persecution and state-organised mass murder." Deborah Lipstadt. "Denying the Holocaust", History, BBC Online. Retrieved June 7, 2018.
- ^ "The kinds of assertions made in Holocaust-denial material include the following:
- Several hundred thousand rather than approximately six million Jews died during the war.
- Scientific evidence proves that gas chambers could not have been used to kill large numbers of people.
- The Nazi command had a policy of deporting Jews, not exterminating them.
- Some deliberate killings of Jews did occur, but were carried out by the peoples of Eastern Europe rather than the Nazis.
- Jews died in camps of various kinds, but did so as the result of hunger and disease (most died to the unavailability of food due to allied bombings). The Holocaust is a myth created by the Allies for propaganda purposes, and subsequently nurtured by the Jews for their own ends.
- Errors and inconsistencies in survivors' testimonies point to their essential unreliability.
- Alleged documentary evidence of the Holocaust, from photographs of concentration camp victims to Anne Frank's diary, is fabricated.
- The confessions of former Nazis to war crimes were extracted through torture." The nature of Holocaust denial: What is Holocaust denial? Archived July 18, 2011, at the Wayback Machine, JPR report No. 3, 2000. Retrieved December 18, 2006.
- A hoax designed to advance the interests of Jews:
- "The title of App's major work on the Holocaust, The Six Million Swindle, is informative because it implies on its very own the existence of a conspiracy of Jews to perpetrate a hoax against non-Jews for monetary gain." Mathis, Andrew E. Holocaust Denial, a Definition Archived February 13, 2021, at the Wayback Machine, The Holocaust History Project, July 2, 2004. Retrieved May 16, 2007.
- Another belief of deniers is the death of the millions of Jews was caused by sickness and disease."Holocaust Denial and Distortion". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Archived from the original on December 10, 2019. Retrieved November 6, 2013.
- "Jews are thus depicted as manipulative and powerful conspirators who have fabricated myths of their own suffering for their own ends. According to the Holocaust deniers, by forging evidence and mounting a massive propaganda effort, the Jews have established their lies as 'truth' and reaped enormous rewards from doing so: for example, in making financial claims on Germany and acquiring international support for Israel." The nature of Holocaust denial: What is Holocaust denial? Archived July 18, 2011, at the Wayback Machine, JPR report No. 3, 2000. Retrieved May 16, 2007.
- "Why, we might ask the deniers, if the Holocaust did not happen would any group concoct such a horrific story? Because, some deniers claim, there was a conspiracy by Zionists to exaggerate the plight of Jews during the war in order to finance the state of Israel through war reparations." Michael Shermer & Alex Grobman. Denying History: who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and why Do They Say It?, University of California Press, 2000, ISBN 0-520-23469-3, p. 106.
- "Since its inception ... the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), a California-based Holocaust denial organization founded by Willis Carto of Liberty Lobby, has promoted the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jews fabricated tales of their own genocide to manipulate the sympathies of the non-Jewish world." Antisemitism and Racism Country Reports: United States Archived June 28, 2011, at the Wayback Machine, Stephen Roth Institute, 2000. Retrieved May 17, 2007.
- "The central assertion for the deniers is that Jews are not victims but victimizers. They 'stole' billions in reparations, destroyed Germany's good name by spreading the 'myth' of the Holocaust, and won international sympathy because of what they claimed had been done to them. In the paramount miscarriage of injustice, they used the world's sympathy to 'displace' another people so that the state of Israel could be established. This contention relating to the establishment of Israel is a linchpin of their argument." Deborah Lipstadt. Denying the Holocaust – The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, Penguin, 1993, ISBN 0-452-27274-2, p. 27.
- "They picture a vast shadowy conspiracy that controls and manipulates the institutions of education, culture, the media and government in order to disseminate a pernicious mythology. The purpose of this Holocaust mythology, they assert, is the inculcation of a sense of guilt in the white, Western Christian world. Those who can make others feel guilty have power over them and can make them do their bidding. This power is used to advance an international Jewish agenda centered in the Zionist enterprise of the State of Israel." Introduction: Denial as Anti-Semitism Archived June 4, 2011, at the Wayback Machine, "Holocaust Denial: An Online Guide to Exposing and Combating Anti-Semitic Propaganda", Anti-Defamation League, 2001. Retrieved June 12, 2007.
- "Deniers argue that the manufactured guilt and shame over a mythological Holocaust led to Western, specifically United States, support for the establishment and sustenance of the Israeli state – a sustenance that costs the American taxpayer over three billion dollars per year. They assert that American taxpayers have been and continue to be swindled...." Introduction: Denial as Anti-Semitism, "Holocaust Denial: An Online Guide to Exposing and Combating Anti-Semitic Propaganda", Anti-Defamation League, 2001. Retrieved June 12, 2007.
- "The stress on Holocaust revisionism underscored the new anti-Semitic agenda gaining ground within the Klan movement. Holocaust denial refurbished conspiratorial anti-Semitism. Who else but the Jews had the media power to hoodwink unsuspecting masses with one of the greatest hoaxes in history? And for what motive? To promote the claims of the illegitimate state of Israel by making non-Jews feel guilty, of course." Lawrence N. Powell, Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Duke's Louisiana, University of North Carolina Press, 2000, ISBN 0-8078-5374-7, p. 445
- ^ Predetermined conclusion:
- "'Revisionism' is obliged to deviate from the standard methodology of historical pursuit because it seeks to mold facts to fit a preconceived result, it denies events that have been objectively and empirically proved to have occurred, and because it works backward from the conclusion to the facts, thus necessitating the distortion and manipulation of those facts where they differ from the preordained conclusion (which they almost always do). In short, 'revisionism' denies something that demonstrably happened, through methodological dishonesty." McFee, Gordon. "Why 'Revisionism' Isn't" Archived June 29, 2018, at the Wayback Machine, The Holocaust History Project, May 15, 1999. Retrieved December 22, 2006.
- Alan L. Berger, "Holocaust Denial: Tempest in a Teapot, or Storm on the Horizon?", in Zev Garber and Richard Libowitz (eds), Peace, in Deed: Essays in Honor of Harry James Cargas, Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998, p. 154.
- Denial vs. "revisionism":
- "This is the phenomenon of what has come to be known as 'revisionism', 'negationism', or 'Holocaust denial,' whose main characteristic is either an outright rejection of the very veracity of the Nazi genocide of the Jews, or at least a concerted attempt to minimize both its scale and importance.... It is just as crucial, however, to distinguish between the wholly objectionable politics of denial and the fully legitimate scholarly revision of previously accepted conventional interpretations of any historical event, including the Holocaust." Bartov, Omer. The Holocaust: Origins, Implementation and Aftermath, Routledge, pp.11–12. Bartov is John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History at the Watson Institute, and is regarded as one of the world's leading authorities on genocide ("Omer Bartov" Archived December 16, 2008, at the Wayback Machine, The Watson Institute for International Studies).
- "The two leading critical exposés of Holocaust denial in the United States were written by historians Deborah Lipstadt (1993) and Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman (2000). These scholars make a distinction between historical revisionism and denial. Revisionism, in their view, entails a refinement of existing knowledge about an historical event, not a denial of the event itself, that comes through the examination of new empirical evidence or a reexamination or reinterpretation of existing evidence. Legitimate historical revisionism acknowledges a 'certain body of irrefutable evidence' or a 'convergence of evidence' that suggest that an event—like the black plague, American slavery, or the Holocaust—did in fact occur (Lipstadt 1993:21; Shermer & Grobman 200:34). Denial, on the other hand, rejects the entire foundation of historical evidence...." Ronald J. Berger. Fathoming the Holocaust: A Social Problems Approach, Aldine Transaction, 2002, ISBN 0-202-30670-4, p. 154.
- "At this time, in the mid-1970s, the specter of Holocaust Denial (masked as 'revisionism') had begun to raise its head in Australia...." Bartrop, Paul R. "A Little More Understanding: The Experience of a Holocaust Educator in Australia" in Samuel Totten, Steven Leonard Jacobs, Paul R Bartrop. Teaching about the Holocaust, Praeger/Greenwood, 2004, p. xix. ISBN 0-275-98232-7
- "Pierre Vidal-Naquet urges that denial of the Holocaust should not be called 'revisionism' because 'to deny history is not to revise it'. Les Assassins de la Memoire. Un Eichmann de papier et autres essays sur le revisionisme (The Assassins of Memory—A Paper-Eichmann and Other Essays on Revisionism) 15 (1987)." Cited in Roth, Stephen J. "Denial of the Holocaust as an Issue of Law" in the Israel Yearbook on Human Rights, Volume 23, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1993, ISBN 0-7923-2581-8, p. 215.
- "This essay describes, from a methodological perspective, some of the inherent flaws in the 'revisionist' approach to the history of the Holocaust. It is not intended as a polemic, nor does it attempt to ascribe motives. Rather, it seeks to explain the fundamental error in the 'revisionist' approach, as well as why that approach of necessity leaves no other choice. It concludes that 'revisionism' is a misnomer because the facts do not accord with the position it puts forward and, more importantly, its methodology reverses the appropriate approach to historical investigation.... 'Revisionism' is obliged to deviate from the standard methodology of historical pursuit, because it seeks to mold facts to fit a preconceived result; it denies events that have been objectively and empirically proved to have occurred; and because it works backward from the conclusion to the facts, thus necessitating the distortion and manipulation of those facts where they differ from the preordained conclusion (which they almost always do). In short, 'revisionism' denies something that demonstrably happened, through methodological dishonesty." McFee, Gordon. "Why 'Revisionism' Isn't" Archived June 29, 2018, at the Wayback Machine, The Holocaust History Project, May 15, 1999. Retrieved December 22, 2006.
- "Holocaust denial can be a particularly insidious form of antisemitism precisely because it often tries to disguise itself as something quite different: as genuine scholarly debate (in the pages, for example, of the innocuous-sounding Journal for Historical Review). Holocaust deniers often refer to themselves as 'revisionists', in an attempt to claim legitimacy for their activities. There are, of course, a great many scholars engaged in historical debates about the Holocaust whose work should not be confused with the output of the Holocaust deniers. Debate continues about such subjects as, for example, the extent and nature of ordinary Germans' involvement in and knowledge of the policy of genocide, and the timing of orders given for the extermination of the Jews. However, the valid endeavour of historical revisionism, which involves the re-interpretation of historical knowledge in the light of newly emerging evidence, is a very different task from that of claiming that the essential facts of the Holocaust, and the evidence for those facts, are fabrications." The nature of Holocaust denial: What is Holocaust denial? Archived July 18, 2011, at the Wayback Machine, JPR report No. 3, 2000. Retrieved May 16, 2007.
- "The deniers' selection of the name revisionist to describe themselves is indicative of their basic strategy of deceit and distortion and of their attempt to portray themselves as legitimate historians engaged in the traditional practice of illuminating the past. For historians, in fact, the name revisionism has a resonance that is perfectly legitimate – it recalls the controversial historical school known as World War I 'revisionists', who argued that the Germans were unjustly held responsible for the war and that consequently the Versailles treaty was a politically misguided document based on a false premise. Thus the deniers link themselves to a specific historiographic tradition of reevaluating the past. Claiming the mantle of the World War I revisionists and denying they have any objective other than the dissemination of the truth constitute a tactical attempt to acquire an intellectual credibility that would otherwise elude them." Deborah Lipstadt. Denying the Holocaust – The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, Penguin, 1993, ISBN 0-452-27274-2, p. 25.
- ^ Refer to themselves as revisionists:
- "The deniers' selection of the name revisionist to describe themselves is indicative of their basic strategy of deceit and distortion and of their attempt to portray themselves as legitimate historians engaged in the traditional practice of illuminating the past." Deborah Lipstadt. Denying the Holocaust—The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, Penguin, 1993, ISBN 0-452-27274-2, p. 25.
- "Dressing themselves in pseudo-academic garb, they have adopted the term 'revisionism' in order to mask and legitimate their enterprise." Introduction: Denial as Anti-Semitism Archived June 4, 2011, at the Wayback Machine, "Holocaust Denial: An Online Guide to Exposing and Combating Anti-Semitic Propaganda", Anti-Defamation League, 2001. Retrieved June 12, 2007.
- "Holocaust deniers often refer to themselves as 'revisionists', in an attempt to claim legitimacy for their activities. There are, of course, a great many scholars engaged in historical debates about the Holocaust whose work should not be confused with the output of the Holocaust deniers. Debate continues about such subjects as, for example, the extent and nature of ordinary Germans' involvement in and knowledge of the policy of genocide, and the timing of orders given for the extermination of the Jews. However, the valid endeavour of historical revisionism, which involves the re-interpretation of historical knowledge in the light of newly emerging evidence, is a very different task from that of claiming that the essential facts of the Holocaust, and the evidence for those facts, are fabrications." "The nature of Holocaust denial: What is Holocaust denial? Archived July 18, 2011, at the Wayback Machine", JPR report No. 3, 2000. Retrieved May 16, 2007.
- ^ Rossoliński-Liebe, Grzegorz (2012). "Debating, obfuscating and disciplining the Holocaust: Post-Soviet historical discourses on the OUN–UPA and other nationalist movements". East European Jewish Affairs. 42 (3): 199–241. doi:10.1080/13501674.2012.730732. S2CID 154067506.
In general, post-Soviet Holocaust denial has differed from Holocaust denial in the style of David Irving or Ernst Zündel. In post-Soviet space, the Holocaust has not usually been denied as such and post-Soviet radical right activists did not question the existence of gas chambers in Auschwitz, or the anti-Jewish politics of Nazi Germany. Instead, nationalist post-Soviet discourses denied some of the national or regional elements of the Holocaust, like, for example, the contribution of different nationalist organizations or armies to it, or very frequently the participation of local populations in pogroms and other forms of anti-Jewish violence.
- Lipstadt 1993, p. 25.
- "The two leading critical exposés of Holocaust denial in the United States were written by historians Deborah Lipstadt (1993) and Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman (2000). These scholars make a distinction between historical revisionism and denial. Revisionism, in their view, entails a refinement of existing knowledge about a historical event, not a denial of the event itself, that comes through the examination of new empirical evidence or a reexamination or reinterpretation of existing evidence. Legitimate historical revisionism acknowledges a 'certain body of irrefutable evidence' or a 'convergence of evidence' that suggest that an event—like the black plague, American slavery, or the Holocaust—did, in fact, occur (Lipstadt 1993:21; Shermer & Grobman 200:34). Denial, on the other hand, rejects the entire foundation of historical evidence...."
- Lipstadt, Deborah E. (1994). Denying the Holocaust: the growing assault on truth and memory (reprint ed.). Plume. ISBN 978-0-452-27274-3.
- Lipstadt, Deborah E. (December 18, 2012). Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-1-4767-2748-6.
Modern Holocaust denial draws inspiration from a variety of sources. Among them is a legitimate historical tradition that was highly critical of government policies and believed that history was being used to justify these policies. The deniers consider themselves heirs of a group of influential American historians who were deeply disturbed by American involvement in World War I. These respected scholars, who called themselves revisionists, would have been appalled to learn of the purposes to which their arguments were put.
- Niewyk, Donald L., ed. (1992). "1: Introduction". The Holocaust: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation. D. C. Heath and Company. p. 7. ISBN 9780618214624.
- See Alain Finkielkraut, Mary Byrd Kelly, Richard J. Golsan. The Future of a Negation: Reflections on the Question of Genocide. University of Nebraska Press, 1998.
- Koenraad Elst. Chapter One – Negationism in General Archived October 25, 2007, at the Wayback Machine, Negationism in India: Concealing the Record of Islam, The Voice of India, 2002.
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In the annals of public awareness of the Holocaust period, nothing rivals the Eichmann trial as a milestone and turning point, whose impact is evident to this day. The trial introduced the Holocaust into the historical, educational, legal and cultural discourse, not merely in Israel and the Jewish world, but on the consciousness of all peoples of the world. Sixteen years after the end of the Holocaust, it focused attention upon the account of the suffering and torment of the Jewish people, as recounted to the judges. Its powerful, and one could claim, revolutionary, consequences continue right up to the present day.
- Shandler, Jeffrey (February 4, 1999). "4. The Man in the Glass Box". While America Watches : Televising the Holocaust. New York: Oxford University Press, USA. p. 127. ISBN 978-0-19-518258-3. Retrieved June 26, 2015.
The Eichmann case is widely cited as a marking a threshold in American awareness of the Holocaust, generating a 'renewed engagement' and 'heightened historical consciousness' as well as serving as a catalyst for a spate of American Holocaust literature, television programs, and feature films.
- ^ Cesarani, David (2005) . Eichmann: His Life and Crimes. London: Vintage. pp. 252, 254–5, 325–7. ISBN 978-0-09-944844-0.
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- Shandler, Jeffrey (1999). While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. p. 93. ISBN 0-19-511935-5.
The trial and the surrounding media coverage sparked renewed interest in wartime events, and the resulting increase in publication of memoirs and scholarly works helped raise public awareness of the Holocaust.
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- Atkins, Stephen E. (2009). Holocaust Denial as an International Movement. ABC-CLIO. ISBN 978-0-313-34538-8.
Holocaust denial has played an important role in the revitalization of the Neo-Nazi movement. There was a smaller but nonetheless vocal number of supporters in other Western European countries and the United States. These neo-Nazis realized that a Hitlerite regime was impossible, but a reasonable facsimile was possible in the future. These neo-Nazis and their allies realized that any rehabilitation of Nazism could be accomplished only by discrediting the Holocaust.
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In the 1970s, Holocaust denial took up more sophisticated pseudoscientijfic methods and began to portray itself as a movement of historal revisionists...
- ^ Pigliucci, Massimo; Boudry, Maarten (2013). Philosophy of pseudoscience : reconsidering the demarcation problem. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 206. ISBN 9780226051826. Retrieved February 13, 2023.
- Brittingham, Matthew H. (September 2020). ""The Jews love numbers": Steven L. Anderson, Christian Conspiracists, and the Spiritual Dimensions of Holocaust Denial". Genocide Studies and Prevention. 14 (2): 44–64. doi:10.5038/1911-9933.14.2.1721. eISSN 1911-9933. ISSN 1911-0359. S2CID 225256338.
The preacher produced a nearly 40-minute video, "Did the Holocaust Really Happen?," in which he espoused what Deborah Lipstadt has called "hardcore" Holocaust denial, "den the facts of the Holocaust" in an "outright and forceful fashion." Though his "scientific" evidence for the "Holocaust hoax" or "Holocaust myth," as he often refers to the Holocaust, is mostly a regurgitation of the pseudoscientific arguments made by a more established group of Holocaust deniers, Anderson adds a spiritual dimension to Holocaust denial to make it attractive to Christian viewers.
- Hirvonen, Ilmari; Karisto, Janne (February 13, 2022). "Demarcation without Dogmas". Theoria. 88 (3): 701–720. doi:10.1111/theo.12395. eISSN 1755-2567. hdl:10138/345499. ISSN 0040-5825. S2CID 246834442.
On the one hand, there is science denialism, such as climate change scepticism, the anti-vaccination movement, and holocaust denial, which attacks well-established scientific theories and practices. On the other hand, there is the promotion of pseudotheory, the attempt to get doctrines like homoeopathy and intelligent design accepted as sciences even though they have no warrant for such merit (Hansson, 2017). Both types of pseudoscience have harmful effects on health, environment, education, and society...Paradigmatic pseudosciences can also be very different from one another. Think of, say, intelligent design, Holocaust denial, ancient astronaut hypothesis, homoeopathy, the anti-vaccine movement, astrology, or climate change scepticism. Because there are different forms of pseudoscience, one cannot rule out the possibility that different criteria are needed to distinguish them from science.
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Holocaust revisionism enlists a wide variety of strategies and assumes many different forms adapted to the history and political cultures in which it operates. It has nonetheless developed into an international movement with its own networks, gatherings, public forums, propaganda, and pseudo-scientific journal
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Those who deny that there ever was a Nazi genocide of Jews during World War II have used a similar style of arguing. Deniers have subjugated science, in this case historical science, to a political agenda, creating a pseudoscience called Holocaust Denial.... Inventing and promoting pseudoscience : Leuchter claims that the gas chamber was not really used against human beings.... Error #1: Leuchter estimates that a certain crematorium at Auschwitz could process only 156 bodies. He was apparently unaware of an SS report which confirms that the same building (which he describes) destroyed 4756 bodies in the course of a single 24 hour period. Error #2: He notes that the cyanide residue from one gas chamber wall is less than the residue from a wall inside a known delousing chamber. Leuchter claims that this is the most conclusive evidence that a "gas chamber" could not have been used for killing humans. His argument is based on the assumption that humans require much more cyanide than lice to die – an assumption that, as it happens, is wrong. In fact, lice require about a 50 times higher dose of cyanide gas than humans in order to die.
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Holocaust deniers, and the media they use, are changing as a consequence of international political developments... New forms of this propaganda encompassed pseudoscientific books and papers; crude denial material, usually published in leaflet form by small neo-Nazi groups; and what can be called political denial, which includes the most recent and increasingly potent source, namely, Islamists as well as Internet and television transmissions within some Muslim states. Many of the pseudoscientific publications available internationally were published under cover of fictitious academic publishing houses. These works included, for example, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century by Arthur Butz, Did Six Million Really Die? by Richard Harwood, and The Leuchter Report. Historians challenged these and rebutted their false theses.
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As far back as during the Cold War, the SWC had adapted its ideological history usage to fit its main goal – to fight for a 'Slovak Slovakia'.8 The Holocaust was used in the narrative, but to a small degree and without much attention from the surrounding world. The use of history was focused, above all, on defending the memory of Jozef Tiso. What was most important, it seemed, was not to question the Holocaust as such, but rather to present it as a German crime which in Slovakia was supported solely by a few German-friendly radicals whom Tiso, against his will, was forced to keep in the government so as not to enrage the Germans too much.
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Because of émigrés' attempts to whitewash history and degrade historical scholarship in order to sustain the reservoir of national mythologization, liberal historians denounce the émigrés as "misinformers" and "misinterpreters." The claims that fascism never occurred in Slovakia (František Vnuk), that the deportation of Jews was an "evacuation" (Milan S. Durica), that Tiso (whose anti-Semitic invectives fueled the radicalism against the Jewish minority) was a "martyr" and a "savior" of the Jews, and that the Holocaust should be omitted from the context of the Slovak national identity discourse are the key markers of the émigré historians' views. (p. 564)
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Holocaust denial is a new form of anti-Semitism, but one that hinges on age-old motifs.
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- A plot designed to garner support of Israel:
- "The central assertion for the deniers is that Jews are not victims but victimizers. They 'stole' billions in reparations, destroyed Germany's good name by spreading the 'myth' of the Holocaust, and won international sympathy because of what they claimed had been done to them. In the paramount miscarriage of injustice, they used the world's sympathy to 'displace' another people so that the state of Israel could be established. This contention relating to the establishment of Israel is a linchpin of their argument." Deborah Lipstadt. Denying the Holocaust – The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, Penguin Books, 1993, p. 27. ISBN 0-452-27274-2.
- "Jews are thus depicted as manipulative and powerful conspirators who have fabricated myths of their own suffering for their own ends. According to the Holocaust deniers, by forging evidence and mounting a massive propaganda effort, the Jews have established their lies as 'truth' and reaped enormous rewards from doing so: for example, in making financial claims on Germany and acquiring international support for Israel." The nature of Holocaust denial: What is Holocaust denial? Archived July 18, 2011, at the Wayback Machine, JPR report No. 3, 2000. Retrieved May 16, 2007.
- "Why, we might ask the deniers, if the Holocaust did not happen would any group concoct such a horrific story? Because, some deniers claim, there was a conspiracy by Zionists to exaggerate the plight of Jews during the war in order to finance the state of Israel through war reparations." Michael Shermer & Alex Grobman. Denying History: who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and why Do They Say It?, University of California Press, 2000, ISBN 0-520-23469-3, p. 106.
- "They picture a vast shadowy conspiracy that controls and manipulates the institutions of education, culture, the media and government in order to disseminate a pernicious mythology. The purpose of this Holocaust mythology, they assert, is the inculcation of a sense of guilt in the white, Western Christian world. Those who can make others feel guilty have power over them and can make them do their bidding. This power is used to advance an international Jewish agenda centered in the Zionist enterprise of the State of Israel." Introduction: Denial as Anti-Semitism Archived June 4, 2011, at the Wayback Machine, "Holocaust Denial: An Online Guide to Exposing and Combating Anti-Semitic Propaganda", Anti-Defamation League, 2001. Retrieved June 12, 2007.
- "The stress on Holocaust revisionism underscored the new anti-Semitic agenda gaining ground within the Klan movement. Holocaust denial refurbished conspiratorial anti-Semitism. Who else but the Jews had the media power to hoodwink unsuspecting masses with one of the greatest hoaxes in history? And for what motive? To promote the claims of the illegitimate state of Israel by making non-Jews feel guilty, of course." Lawrence N. Powell, Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Duke's Louisiana, University of North Carolina Press, 2000, ISBN 0-8078-5374-7, p. 445.
- Shermer & Grobman, 2002, pp. 103–14.
- "(H)istory is the attempt to describe events of the past and move from description to analysis, in accordance with certain agreed rules of evidence, of analysis of language, and of logic." "Yehuda Bauer, Historian of the Holocaust – Portrait of an Historian" – Online Dimensions, a Journal of Holocaust Studies, Fall, 2004
- "... the German bureaucrats' collective actions are relatively well-documented for the historian...." Christopher R. Browning, The Path to Genocide: essays on launching the final solution, Cambridge University Press, 1992, ISBN 0-521-55878-6, p. 125.
- "According to the historian Raul Hilberg, the United States alone captured forty thousand linear feet of documents on the murder of European Jews ... we can say that the Holocaust is a uniquely well-documented historical event." Deák, István. Essays on Hitler's Europe, University of Nebraska Press, 2001, ISBN 0-8032-1716-1, p. 67
- Holocaust: The events and their impact on real people, DK Publishing in conjunction with the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education, p. 146. "There our troops found sights, sounds, and stenches horrible beyond belief, cruelties so enormous as to be incomprehensible to the normal mind."
- Kelly Oliver. Witnessing: beyond recognition, University of Minnesota Press, 2001, ISBN 0-8166-3627-3, p. 90.
- Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz. Image and remembrance: representation and the Holocaust, 2003, Indiana University Press, ISBN 0-253-34188-4, pp. 205–206.
- INA, Major Interviews, General André Rogerie Archived June 29, 2017, at the Wayback Machine; audio recording
- Annette Wieviorka, Déportation et génocide. Entre la mémoire et l'oubli, Plon, 1992, p. 249.
- Shermer & Grobman, 2002, p. 33.
- Pierre Vidal-Naquet, French "une tentative d'extermination sur le papier qui relaie l'extermination réelle" in Les assassins de la mémoire, Un Eichmann de papier, Postface de Gisèle Sapiro, Nouvelle édition revue et augmentée, La Découverte, Paris, 2005, ISBN 2-7071-4545-9.
- Lechtholz-Zey, Jacqueline: Laws Banning Holocaust Denial. Genocide Prevention Now.. Retrieved October 4, 2020.
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- "See Luxembourg, April 19, 2007, 8665/07 (Presse 84)" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on November 11, 2020. Retrieved January 8, 2010.
- By way of judgment of November 7, 2007 Archived February 15, 2008, at the Wayback Machine of the Constitutional Court of Spain, which ruled the criminalization to be unconstitutional and void.
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To live with Faurisson? Any other attitude would imply that we were imposing historical truth as legal truth, which is a dangerous attitude available to other fields of application.
- François de Smet, Philosopher of the ULB: Le négationnisme est l'une des pires formes de racisme. Elle en est aussi sa version la plus « respectable », se parant des oripeaux de la science. C'est pour cela qu'il faut continuer à le sanctionner, in La Libre Belgique, on April 28, 2006
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Sources
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{{cite book}}
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- By Holocaust deniers
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- Faurisson, Robert (Spring 1989). "My Life As a Revisionist". The Journal of Historical Review. 9 (1): 5.
- Gauss, Ernst, ed. (2000). Dissecting the Holocaust: The Growing Critique of 'Truth' and 'Memory. Alabama: Theses & Dissertations Press. ISBN 0-9679856-0-9. — "Gauss" is a pseudonym for Germar Rudolf, the founder of "Theses & Dissertations Press."
- Graf, Jürgen (1992). Der Holocaust auf dem Prüfstand.
- Harwood, Richard E. Did Six Million Really Die?. Noontide Press.
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- Leuchter, Fred A.; Faurisson, Robert; Rudolf, Germar (2005). The Leuchter Reports: Critical Edition. Chicago: Theses & Dissertations Press. ISBN 1-59148-015-9.
- Paz, Reuven (April 21, 2000). "Palestinian Holocaust Denial". Peacewatch. Archived from the original on October 23, 2006. Retrieved November 8, 2005.
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External links
- An online lecture by Ephraim Kaye, of Yad Vashem
- When Denying History is Incitement to Violence, By Robert Rozett of Yad Vashem
- The Wiener Holocaust Library – The World's Oldest Holocaust Memorial Institution
- The Nizkor Project – responses to Holocaust denial
- 66 questions and answers on Holocaust denial—the Nizkor Project
- The Holocaust History Project – documents and essays on the Holocaust and its denial
- Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team (HEART)
- Holocaust Denial: An Online Guide to Exposing and Combating Anti-Semitic Propaganda Published by the Anti-Defamation League
- Holocaust Denial on Trial, Documents and resources relating to the David Irving vs. Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt trial
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- Absence of Humanity Exhibit – The Breman Museum
- Denial of the Holocaust and the genocide in Auschwitz from the online web site
- Holocaust Denial Laws and Other Legislation Criminalizing Promotion of Nazism by Prof. Michael J. Bazyler