Holocaust denial

Graffiti promoting Holocaust denialism. Note the dollar signs hinting at antisemitic conspiracy theories.

A lunatic Chaplin imitator and his greatest fans Nazism

First as tragedy

Heinrich Himmler Adolf Eichmann Ernst Kaltenbrunner Golden Dawn Willis Carto Quora

Then as farce

Mass immigration Kiwi Farms SIAN Makoto Sakurai Carolyn Emerick Brittany Venti v - t - e

“”A school of historians and polemicists has sprung up, which for political reasons is bent on denying the truth of the story of the Holocaust. Present day revisionists continue this tradition. They are the academic equivalent of the neo-Nazi thugs. […] Unfortunately, the fabrications of the "revisionists" have fallen on fertile ground in a Europe where the old lies of anti-Semitic propaganda and old forgeries are once again being circulated, and indeed were never wholly eradicated.

—Stuart Hood and professor Haim Bresheeth, Introducing The Holocaust: A Graphic Guide

“”It has been said that denial is the final stage of genocide … memory is all that is left and is targeted as the last victim. Complete annihilation of a people requires the banishment of recollection and suffocation of remembrance.

—Richard G. Hovannisian, American historian and professor, Remembrance and Denial: The Case of the Armenian Genocide

Holocaust denial (or Holocaust negationism; also sometimes mistakenly called "Holocaust revisionism") refers to the assertion that the Holocaust (often called the "Holohoax" or some similar derivative to the same effect by deniers) perpetrated by Nazi Germany, other Axis powers, and their collaborators in occupied Europe during the Second World War (1939-1945) never happened ("classical" denial), or happened vastly differently from the "official" story (distortion). Like most conspiracy theories, it takes many forms; however, the claims generally fall into a few categories:

1. The Nazi Holocaust was faked (Holocaust truther):
   • TLDR: The evidence is fabricated.
   • The Allies faked evidence for the Holocaust to gain the world's sympathy, and "history is written by the victors".
   • The world-controlling Jews faked evidence for the Holocaust to gain the world's sympathy (see Holocaust profit controversy) and to encourage Jewish migration to Eretz Israel.
   • Surviving death-camp witnesses are/were insane, liars, or shills. The Nuremberg testimonies were extracted via torture (and thus untrustworthy) or were otherwise faked.
2. The Nazi Holocaust didn't happen (Holocaust negationist):
   • TLDR: The evidence is wrong.
   • The Final Solution was not genocide, but merely the expulsion (As if those are mutually exclusive anyway: see Circassian genocide / Deportation of the Chechens and Ingush) of all Jews from Germany. (Repeat for all other races.) As such, concentration camps were pre-emigration camps, gas chambers were delousing stations, etc.
   • The Holocaust was not genocide, but merely a forced-labor program during wartime. As such, concentration camps were work camps, etc.
   • Hitler actually protected European Jews.
   • Other groups supposedly slaughtered by the Holocaust (such as Poles, Roma, or homosexuals) were not included, and in fact helped the Germans enact it.
3. The Nazi Holocaust wasn't that bad (Holocaust distortionist):
   • TLDR: The evidence is hyperbolic.
   • Reported death counts are grossly exaggerated, and the 6,000,000 dead Jews figure is especially wrong.
   • Other groups supposedly included in the Holocaust (such as disabled persons) were not included in the Holocaust.
   • The Holocaust wasn't as bad as other genocidal atrocities before or after it.
     • The Holocaust wasn't as bad as American slavery, the Armenian Genocide, etc.
     • Stalin killed millions in the Holodomor. (True, but so what?)
   • The Allies killed civilians too (e.g., bombing of Dresden). (Ditto)
4. Jews or other victims brought the Holocaust upon themselves (blaming the victim):
   • TLDR: They deserved it.
   • Jews tried to undermine Germany by inventing Bolshevism.
   • Jews sold Germany out in World War I.
   • Jews had declared war on Germany (the Jewish agenda).
   • Nazi victims actually helped perpetrate the Holocaust.

Deniers who believe 1 (fake) tend to believe 2 (didn't happen) and 3 (not bad). Deniers who believe 2 (didn't happen) tend to believe 3 (not bad). Moreover, people who believe 1 (faked) tend to be harder to discuss evidence with than 2 (didn't happen); the same for 2 (didn't happen) than 3 (not bad). It could thus be argued there are different "layers" of holocaust denial. In order of increasing distance from reality: (3) it wasn't bad, (2) it didn't happen, and (1) it was faked. Blaming the victim has been used with other genocides, and is not restricted to genocide as a fallacious argument. Notably, victim blaming has served both as a motivation for genocide as well as a post-facto denial tactic.

Particularly when it focuses on "how the Jews faked it all", Holocaust denial is a form of antisemitism often embraced by bigots who are too cowardly to admit that they wished that Hitler had finished the job.

Holocaust denial, as noted, has many variants. This article tries to briefly refute the most common claims.

Beginning with a note from Ike

“”I saw my first horror camp [on 12 April 1945]. It was near the town of Gotha. I have never been able to describe my emotional reactions when I first came face to face with indisputable evidence of Nazi brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of decency. Up to that time I had known about it only generally or through secondary sources. I am certain however, that I have never at any time experienced an equal sense of shock. I visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that "the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda." Some members of the visiting party were unable to go through with the ordeal. I not only did so but as soon as I returned to Patton's headquarters that evening I sent communications to both Washington and London, urging the two governments to send instantly to Germany a random group of newspaper editors and representative groups from the national legislatures. I felt that the evidence should be immediately placed before the American and the British publics in a fashion that would leave no room for cynical doubt.

—Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, 1948

Definitions and terminology

The Holocaust was, according to Wikipedia:

“”The genocide of approximately six million European Jews and millions of others during World War II, a programme of systematic state-sponsored murder by Nazi Germany, led by Adolf Hitler, throughout Nazi-occupied territory.

Beyond that, the water gets muddy. As a straw man argument, Holocaust deniers use academic discussion about the Holocaust's scope and purpose to cast doubt on the Holocaust itself (much akin to how young-Earth creationists use academic disagreements about the details of evolution to try to cast doubt on evolution as a whole). This does not address the Holocaust itself, instead choosing to focus on the discord of the details.

Functionalism/intentionalism versus Holocaust denial

Today, scholars of history are divided between two interpretations of the Holocaust: functionalism versus intentionalism. Both functionalists and intentionalists agree that the Holocaust occurred, but functionalists disagree with the claim that it was Hitler's intention from the beginning, either from the time of Mein Kampf, upon his ascension to power, or even at the beginning of World War II.

Intentionalists see the Holocaust as being primarily Hitler's idea, something he had planned even for years before coming to power. By contrast, functionalists see the Holocaust evolving bottom-up rather than being ordered from the top down. Of course, even if Hitler did not plan or order the Holocaust, that doesn't mean he escapes moral responsibility for it. He created the climate of extreme antisemitism that made it possible, created many of the policies which immediately contributed to it, provided the leadership that considered these measures both permissible and acceptable, and failed to stop or prevent it.

For example, both intentionalists and functionalists agree that Hitler ordered the deportation of Jews to Nazi-occupied Poland. However, intentionalists believe that "deportation" was, from the very beginning, a codeword for extermination (see explanation of Nazi euphemisms below), and functionalists see "deportation" at the beginning as being quite literally that, a plan to deport Jews, with little thought as to what would happen to them when they arrived in Poland.

Functionalists see the Holocaust as a bureaucratic solution among low-level Nazi officials in Poland to handle all these incoming Jews, by killing most of them. Functionalists such as Ian Kershaw also point to the highly chaotic nature of the Nazi state, where individuals vied with one another for power and Hitler's good favor (those often being the same thing). This process, referred to by historians (after Nazi civil servant Werner Willikins) as "working towards the Führer", aimed at satisfying Hitler's ever-increasing calls for "radicalism" in all matters of policy, naturally led various officials to propose more and more extreme solutions to the "Jewish question" (that there were multiple proposed solutions is evidenced by the term "the Final Solution").

Functionalists still believe that even if Hitler did not directly start the Holocaust, he became aware of it while it was in progress, and in all probability, signed off on the proposal; in no way does functionalism absolve Hitler of moral responsibility or downplay the atrocities themselves. Unlike Holocaust denial, functionalism is an academically respectable position in the field of history.

Revisionism versus denial

Many Holocaust deniers describe themselves as "revisionists". Does that mean they are not deniers? How do we define Holocaust denial?

Modern scholarship defines "The Holocaust" as:

• The murder of five to seven million Jews, plus millions of other victims — the number
• with gas chambers, forced labor, starvation, and firing squads, as well as other methods — the method

The Free Dictionary defines "denial" as "a refusal to grant the truth of a statement or allegation; a contradiction".

From this follows:

• The claim that significantly fewer than five to seven million Jews died is Holocaust denial, even while agreeing with a modern scholarship upon the method.
• The claim that gas chambers were not used for mass executions is Holocaust denial, even while agreeing with modern scholarship upon the number.

Most self-proclaimed "Holocaust revisionists" disagree with established scholarship on the number and the method. As such, they are clearly Holocaust distortionists, i.e. deniers.

In fact, the term "Holocaust revisionism" does not carry any meaning separate from Holocaust denial when used in this way. As History PhD student Tristan of Step Back History explains in his history of American hate groups:

Groups like the Institute for Historical Review have tried to deny the genocide of Jews and other groups in the Holocaust. They claim that the final solution was about deportation, that there were no extermination camps, or that the five-to-six million dead count is just exaggerated.

They are called "holocaust deniers" because revisionist history is something different. Revisionists try to upturn established histories using credible methodology. A holocaust denier, much like a climate change or evolution denier, has a pre-determined conclusion and ignores overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Most denialists claim some sort of vast Jewish conspiracy designed to advance Jews at the expense of everyone else. I think I speak for many by saying that this entire movement is based on anti-semitic conspiracy theories.

Actual proponents of historical revisionism strive for more clarity in the history, and are receptive to the overwhelming body of evidence. These revisionists, alienated from denialist cranks, don't argue whether or not the gassing took place, nor whether millions were in fact killed, but simply that much of the history has been lost and that the Holocaust was likely far worse than the histories currently state. In that sense, they seek to revise the accounts more accurately.

Chief among these revisionists is Franciszek Piper, manager of the historical department at Auschwitz. Piper's research, now accepted by Jewish historians, revised the reported death toll of Auschwitz from the previous four million killed to roughly 1.5 million. However, his work does not dispute the overall number of Holocaust victims, and he concluded that his revision of the death toll covered the discrepancies that could actually be found.

And indeed, in theory, that might be all the revisionism that evidence will ever guide us to undertake. That, however, is a conclusion that is a priori unacceptable to any genuine Holocaust denier, who would contend that "revisionism" can't be considered done (per definition) until the Holocaust is essentially demoted from one of history's most breathtakingly cruel and efficient genocides to some kind of minor inconvenience, if not an outright hoax. Franciszek Piper was no such denialist.

The term "Holocaust" itself

“”His eyes sparkling with faith and decision, he had proved that he could summon the holocaust.

—LIFE Magazine, September 1939, discussing Hitler's impending war

The Greek word holocaust means "burnt sacrifice" (holos + kaustos), a custom both in Judaism and Ancient Greek Religion. The phrase was used in the Greek Bible and has long been used in the English language as a figure of speech. The term Holocaust was occasionally used for the Nazis' mass murders from the 1940s, but it became firmly established through the 1978 television mini-series The Holocaust. Holocaust deniers might use the confusion around the term Holocaust to question whether it happened at all.

As said, the term Holocaust was not universally used until the 1970s. But how does this call the facts of the Nazis' deliberate murder of millions of people, including 6 million Jews, into question? What happened does not change simply because the most popular term to describe it changes.

The fact that our presently favored terminology for a historical event is newer than the event itself doesn't in any way call into question the historicity of the event; the Black Death wasn't known by that name until centuries after it swept through Europe, but it still happened, and obviously World War I wasn't so named until there was a World War II. Historical events often do not receive their current names until many years, sometimes even centuries or millennia, after they occur.

The Holocaust denial movement

Trendsetters.

Nearly all Holocaust deniers seem to belong, or be affiliated to, any of these four groups:

• White supremacists and the far right, including but not limited to neo-Nazis.
• Authoritarian pro-Palestine activists who oppose the very existence of Israel. These folks can be divided into two sub-categories: militant Islamists, and far left political activists.
• Antisemites in general.
• General conspiracy theorists, iconoclasts, or curmudgeons who don't necessarily pursue such denialism based on any political motives. In this category can be found some astonishing examples from either left-wing or libertarian politics: James J. Martin (1916–2004), Paul Rassinier (1906–1967), Harry Elmer Barnes (1889–1968), L. A. Rollins, and Samuel Edward Konkin III (1947–2004). Except for Rassinier and Barnes, they are better known for other things and only incidentally linked to Holocaust denial, but neo-Nazis and antisemites like to use them as cover by promoting their names and work to show that denial spans the political spectrum. It doesn't; these are freak occurrences. This category could also include Norman Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky; while neither of them denies the Holocaust, Finkelstein rails against what he sees as the "the Holocaust Industry", while Chomsky makes a point of defending deniers on free speech grounds.

Aims and techniques of deniers

This is manifested in some of the aims of Holocaust denial:

• Making National Socialism (or more broadly, fascism) an acceptable political alternative again, or to defend some of Hitler's antisemitic laws as being good for society.
• Questioning the United Nations' decision to claim land for Israel in 1948, or any recognition of the state of Israel.
• Using the story of a "staged" Holocaust as part of an antisemitic conspiracy theory.

Holocaust deniers almost never base their agenda on an alternate hypothesis. Finding "their story" can be very difficult. The bulk of their arguments contains many miscellaneous loose statements that question the credibility of the Holocaust. This article aims to provide universal proof but mainly deals with replying to deniers' objections.

Famous deniers

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2007

Savitri Devi

David Duke in 2008

Bobby Fischer in his conspiracy phase

Pierre Guillaume in 2003

David Irving in 2003

Revilo P. Oliver in 1963

George Lincoln Rockwell in 1951

Richard Williamson in 1991

Ernst Zündel in 1992

Some famous Holocaust deniers described in brief. See each entry for a case study.

• Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (1956–) — Former President of Iran. Hosted a 2006 conference, the "International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust," at which the panel of speakers included among others David Duke and Robert Faurisson. Ahmadinejad is proud of his achievement: “That was a taboo topic that no one in the West allowed to be heard,” Ahmadinejad said in a speech, according to the Iranian Fars News Agency, "We put it forward at the global level. That broke the spine of the Western capitalist regime."

• Steven Anderson (1981–) — Pastor of the Faithful World Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona. Producer of the "documentary" video Marching to Zion in which he rants about the "blasphemous teachings of the Talmud and Kabbalah" and "scriptural evidence that the Jews are no longer God's chosen people." According to the ADL, he "has a history of anti-Semitism through his sermons and a series of YouTube videos." On one of his videos, in which he denies the Holocaust, he openly says, "Frankly, I don't believe that the official version of the Holocaust is true, whatsoever."

• Maurice Bardèche (1907–1998) was a supporter of Vichy France, and a Neo-Nazi after World War II. He was sentenced to death for collaborationism, but subsequently pardoned. In 1948, he published the book Nuremberg ou la Terre Promise, a "revisionist" view of German activity in the war that was regarded as an apology for Nazi war crimes. Bardèche was sentenced to several years in prison for Holocaust denial because of this book, but only served two weeks because he was granted amnesty by President René Coty.

• Harry Elmer Barnes (1889–1968) — Originally, a mainstream writer and historian. After World War II, a marginal crank who brought his marginalization on himself because he insisted that all accusations against Germany and Japan were fabricated wartime propaganda. Revered and frequently name-dropped by today's Holocaust denial movement but their politics are likely far from Barnes' which were more along the lines of "I didn't leave liberalism, liberalism left me."

• David Brandt Berg ("Moses David") (1919–1994) — Founder of the Children of God cult. He peppered many of his group's tracts with antisemitic rants and occasional denials of the Holocaust, such as, "You hear all about Hitler & how he was supposed to have killed 6 million Jews! — Well, they've never been able to prove yet that he even killed 60,000!"

• Arthur Butz (1933–) — Professor of electrical engineering at Northwestern University; author of the 1976 book The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry. Accused of getting another professor removed from the department for incorporating the Holocaust into his lecture on ethics in engineering.

• Willis Carto (1926–2015) — Founder of the Institute for Historical Review (IHR) in 1979, the main Holocaust denial group in the United States. Founder of the Barnes Review, a "historical revisionist" magazine that mostly runs articles questioning the Holocaust but covers it up with other articles on serious historical topics. Previously founded the wingnut Liberty Lobby in 1955.

• David Dees — Former Sesame Street illustrator turned conspiracy theorist. His Photoshopped creations have been heavily used by like-minded conspiracy believers, and several of these include references to Holocaust revision.

• Francis E. Dec — Disbarred lawyer turned pamphleteer known for vehement and often incoherent screeds of a delusional and paranoid nature. Dec was a Polish supremacist and a raging antisemite who believed that the Jews were complicit in a "gangster government" persecuting Slavic people on behalf of a "Worldwide Mad Deadly Communist Gangster Computer God". However, Slavic people were one of the other groups the Nazis persecuted, preventing him from painting Hitler as a resistance leader against the "gangster government". Unable to reconcile the Nazis murdering both supposed minions and supposed victims of the Gangster Computer God, or comprehend the idea of Slavic people being persecuted by some entity or for some reason unrelated to the "gangster government", in one of his pamphlets, dated Spring 1984, he insisted that during World War II, the Jews lived in luxury while the concentration camps were run by both the Jews and the Nazis in order to exterminate Polish and Slovene people.

• Savitri Devi, née Maximiani Portas (1905–1982) — Greek-British ethnicity, French citizenship, Hindu-convert, spy for the Nazis, imprisoned in Germany after World War II for distributing Nazi propaganda. She convinced Ernst Zündel (below) to deny the Holocaust.

• David Duke (1950–) — Neo-Nazi and former-Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, well-known and despised in the United States. Notably came disturbingly close to being elected Governor of Louisiana in 1991.

• Robert Faurisson (1929–2018) — French writer, prosecuted for defamation in 1979 after writing letters to Le Monde claiming that there were no gas chambers. He was the author of a 1991 booklet claiming that the Diary of Anne Frank is a forgery.

• Bobby Fischer (1943–2008) — American world chess champion. Despite his openly antisemitic remarks and denial of the Holocaust from the 1980s until his death, he reportedly was on good terms with Jewish chess players. Fischer's mother and possibly his biological father were Jewish.

• Pierre Guillaume (1940–), an anarcho-Marxist, founded the first "revisionist" periodical, Annales d'Histoire Révisionniste in 1987, and subsequently published Holocaust deniers in the periodical La Guerre Sociale and with the Vielle Taupe publishing house. Guillaume has made false equivalency arguments of the Holocaust with, for example, Japanese American internment. The ideological reasoning for anarcho-Marxists to support Holocaust "revisionism" was that it was contrary to the 'logic' of the class struggle.

• Ursula Haverbeck" (1928–) — German writer, convicted in Germany.

• Michael Hoffman (1957–) — American writer and editor of the journal Revisionist History. Claims that he is being persecuted by anti-German Jewish "racists."

• David Irving (1938–) — A "historian and a neutral observer" who believes that the Jews asked for it.

• Milton L. Kapner a.k.a. Brother Nathanael Kapner — Born to Jewish parents, he converted to Russian Orthodox Christianity and joined a monastery. While he often wears the trappings of a monk, he no longer is one, and his actions have been denounced by the Synod of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia. Runs the "Brother Nathanael Foundation" (a tax-deductible 501(c)3 Non-Profit), and a website called "Real Jew News" where he has a page listing "Holocaust Hype Articles". He has also made a number of YouTube videos promoting his views.

• Charles Wing Krafft (1948–) — Pop artist noted for his "disasterware" (Delft plates depicting violent disasters or fascist themes) and funerary memorial porcelain artworks crafted from human remains, who was outed as an antisemite and holocaust denier. On a July 28, 2012, podcast on The White Network, a site that officially hosts the program "Whites Talking To Whites About White Interests", he openly stated, "I believe the Holocaust is a myth." In an e-mail to writer Jen Graves of The Stranger, regarding his thoughts on the Holocaust, he stated,

“”"I don't doubt that Hitler's regime killed a lot of Jews in WWII, but I don't believe they were ever frog marched into homicidal gas chambers and dispatched. I think between 700,000-1.2 million Jews died of disease, starvation, overwork, reprisals for partisan attacks, allied bombing, and natural causes during the war."

• Fred Leuchter (1943–) — Consultant to the lucrative capital punishment industry in the U.S. and manufacturer of electric chairs. In 1988, he was hired by Ernst Zündel to investigate whether the gas chambers in Nazi concentration camps could have been used for mass extermination. Leuchter claims he concluded they could not have been and published The Leuchter Report: An Engineering Report on the Alleged Execution Chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Majdanek Poland. Fred Leuchter has no scientific background to have made such a claim. He was the subject of the 1999 Errol Morris documentary Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.

• Laurent Louis (1980–), a member of the Debout Les Belges! party and of the Belgian parliament. He was convicted in 2015 of Holocaust denial.

• Texe Marrs (1944–2019) — Christian writer and conspiracy theorist. His ministry's website sells his own recordings entitled The Holocaust Controversy and the Falsification of History, and Holocaust Dogma Unmasked — A Grim Global Conspiracy Mocking Reality and Capitalizing on Death is Outed by Brave Truthtellers. They also peddle Victor Thorn's book The Holocaust Hoax Exposed: Debunking the 20th Century’s Biggest Lie, and Brian Alois Clèrauba's book A Greater "Miracle" Than The Lost Ten Tribes Discovered...—The Dead "Six Million" Uncovered...!, as well as the antisemitic screeds The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, and Martin Luther's On the Jews and Their Lies.

• Eustace Mullins (1923–2010) — Antisemitic writer and (until his demise) contributing editor to Barnes Review.

• Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) — His original claim to fame was as a JFK assassination conspiracy theorist. A founding member of the John Birch Society, he was kicked out of the JBS for public antisemitic statements (but more specifically for accusing the JBS of being controlled by Jews), went on to neo-Nazi activities in his later years.

• Ahmed Rami (1946–) — Moroccan-Swedish writer, and founder of Radio Islam. Sentenced by a Swedish court in 1990 to six months in prison for hate speech rising from the material including, but not limited to, Holocaust denial. Has co-written a Holocaust denial book, Tabubelagda tankar (Tabooed Thoughts), with Swedish Neo-Nazi leader Björn Björkqvist.

• Roeland Raes (1934–) is a Belgian politician, a former senator and vice president of the Vlaams Blok party. He was convicted of negationism under the Belgian Holocaust denial law in 2010.

• George Lincoln Rockwell (1918–1967) — US Navy veteran of both World War II and the Korean War, and one-time commercial illustrator, advertising agent, magazine publisher, and sign painter, later founder of the American Nazi Party (later known as National Socialist White People's Party), which was one of the first US organizations to promote Holocaust denial and distortion as part of its ideology. (It splintered off into numerous groups after his 1967 murder by a purged party member.) An outspoken white supremacist and antisemite, he was quoted in an April 1966 interview in Playboy:

“”"I don't believe for one minute that any 6,000,000 Jews were exterminated by Hitler. It never happened." … "I emphatically deny that there is any valid proof that innocent Jews were systematically murdered by the Nazis. The photographs you've seen that have been passed off as pictures of dead Jews have been identified as pictures of the corpses of German civilians — mostly women and children and refugees who were killed in the one-night Allied bombing of Dresden, which slaughtered 350,000 innocent people."

• Henri Roques (1920–2014), a disciple of Faurisson and with ties to far-right and fascist groups, wrote a doctoral thesis in 1985 at Université Jean-Moulin-Lyon-III. The thesis was based on the testimony of Kurt Gerstein, and was approved by several far-right or denialist faculty members (Jean Claude Rivière, Thierry Buron, Jean Paul Allard, Pierre Zind, and Paul Faurisson). The publication of the thesis resulted Roques being found guilty of defamation of Holocaust historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet. The Université Jean-Moulin-Lyon-III has been accused of being a center of Holocaust denialism within France.

• Germar Rudolf, a.k.a., Germar Scheerer (1964–) — German student who released a poorly researched report while interning at the Max Planck institute claiming that samples taken from gas chamber walls showed no more cyanide evidence than random farmhouses. He ignored the basic chemistry of cyanide by not discriminating against iron-based cyanide compounds. The study was subsequently falsified, and Rudolf was fired and imprisoned. Rudolf has since gone on to other impressive feats such as denying 9/11.

• Bradley Smith (1930–2016) — A crank who spent over 25 years of his life trying to place advertisements in newspapers calling for an "open debate" on whether the Holocaust happened. He seemed to crave the controversy that results and chanted the mantra of "free speech" a lot. He was especially fond of trying to place these ads in student newspapers on college campuses, which usually resulted in free publicity for him and his pet cause whether or not the ads were accepted for publication. In 1987 he left the Institute for Historical Review to found the "Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust" (CODOH). It is currently organized as the Bradley Smith Charitable Trust while they try to get tax-exempt status.

• David Stein a.k.a. David Cole (1968–) — Leader of Republican Party Animals, a Hollywood-based conservative political group. In 2013, he was exposed as being "David Cole," a Holocaust denier who made a splash in the media in the 1990s.

• Paul Topete — Lead vocalist of the "Patriot" rock band Poker Face. On the band's on-line forum, Topete, using the handle "Pokerkid", has made a number of antisemitic statements, including the following (reproduced verbatim):

“”"I am always amazed at how many roads lead back to one of the largest if not THEE [sic] largest scam ever played on humanity… Yes that [sic] right… the HOLOHAUX aka holocaust. 1985 and 1988 Ernst Zundel DESTROYED the Myth known as the cult of holohauzianity. In a canadien [sic] court of law, Ernst zundel took on the biggest frauds in the SHOAH Industry, and showed them to be the frauds that they were. Names like Raoul Hilberg and Vrba. And several other parasites known to infest this worldly sham. Wake up people, You are being played for fools for you LACK KNOWLEDGE."

• Hal Turner (1962–) — White supremacist, shortwave and internet talk show host, and FBI informant, now convicted felon. Quoting him directly:

“”"Jews love to complain about the 'Holocaust.' Let me tell you, there was no Holocaust in World War 2 — but rest assured, there most certainly IS GOING TO BE a holocaust. I look forward to participating with zeal."

• Richard Williamson (1940–) — British Roman Catholic Bishop and former member of the Catholic Traditionalist Society of St. Pius X, was fined by the German government for denying the Holocaust on Swedish TV while on German soil. During the interview, he stated, "I believe that the historical evidence is strongly against, is hugely against six million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler." and "I think that 200,000 to 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps, but none of them in gas chambers."

• Shaun Patrick Winkler — American White Supremacist and failed Sheriff candidate for Bonner County, Idaho who attempted to build an "Aryan compound" to replace the now defunct Aryan Nations Church. In an interview, he was quoted as saying, "The bad, evil, rotten Jew is behind a lot of things. We look at the media, we look at society in general. We look at even our public school systems. They paint this pretty little portrait for Jews, how they were such victims of the Holocaust or, as I like to refer to it, the ‘Holo-Hoax.’ We … deny that 6 million died."

• Francis Parker Yockey (1917–1960) — An American Hitler admirer who wrote an unreadable post-World War II tome called Imperium under the pen-name "Ulick Varange," a book which you can't make heads or tails of but vaguely has something to do with advocating European unification around a program of "total politics."

• Ernst Zündel (1939–2017) — German writer and neo-Nazi who, through his Canadian publishing company (he lived in Canada 1958-2000) and his website, has been a prolific promoter of Holocaust denial through. Was prosecuted in Germany and sentenced to five years in prison in 2007 for violating Germany's law against inciting hatred. Released in 2010, but seems to have been relatively inactive after.

Victim blaming

See the main article on this topic: Blaming the victim

“”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.

—Gregory H. Stanton

“”"Blaming the victim" is a tried and true method of genocide rationalization and denial, and has been used in case after case: "The Jews" were against Germany to undermine it (by supposedly creating "Bolshevism," for instance, they had traitorously sold Germany out in World War I, or had even declared “war” against Germany).

—Sara Elise Brown and Henry C. Theriault

Blaming the victim in Holocaust denial takes one of two basic types, alleging that Jews were to blame for events that led up to the Holocaust, or blaming specific Jews for collaborating with the Nazis. The former type was also used as justification for genocide by the perpetrators. Both types attempt to deny victimhood, implying that the victims do not deserve reparations or justice, and that the perpetrators should not be tried for their crimes. Both types rely on stereotypes (evil Jew) and conspiracy theories (Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Rothschild family).

Examples include:

• Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian National Authority, stated that usury and banking were the reason for pogroms in Europe, leading up to the Holocaust. Abbas later apologized for his statement under worldwide pressure. Abbas previously disputed the number of people killed in the Holocaust in the introduction to a 1984 book.
• The Institute for Historical Review, which has also engaged in more overt forms of Holocaust denial, has cited the work of Lenni Brenner (Zionism in the Age of the Dictators) regarding Zionist collaboration with Nazis, and Brenner (an anti-Zionist ethnic Jew) has strongly objected to this.
• Ken Livingstone, the former mayor of London, was forced to resign from the Labour Party for his antisemitism. He stated that Hitler supported Zionism because of the Haavara Agreement, which was the only means for German Jews to legally leave Germany from 1933-1939. The misinterpretation of the Haavara Agreement, which in actuality stripped German Jews of their wealth before allowing them to emigrate to Palestine, has been used by antisemites to claim that Jews collaborated en masse with the Nazis.
• William S. Lind, who has denied being an overt Holocaust denier, gave a speech on cultural Marxism at a Holocaust denial conference.
• Antoni Macierewicz, Polish Defense Minister since 2015 under President Andrzej Duda, has indicated that he believed that there was truth to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but he later stated that he "accepts with no doubts that the Protocols is false." The Duda government also criminalized claiming that Poland could have been complicit in the Holocaust.

Glenn Beck accused George Soros of collaborating with the Nazis as a teenager in Nazi-occupied Hungary, when he had been hidden with the Christian family of a government official at the ages of 13 to 14 to escape persecution.

Others who have falsely accused Soros of collaborating with the Nazis (or of being one) include:

• Rosanne Barr (actor), who later apologized to Soros
• Conservapedia
• Ann Coulter
• Dinesh D'Souza
• Alex Jones
• Ben Shapiro, who is himself Jewish
• Donald Trump Jr.
• James Woods (actor)

Reputable media sources are united in saying that the allegations about Soros's Nazi past are false. Even the very right-wing National Review, which has called Soros a "genuinely nasty guy", has dismissed the allegations and said they are part of a wider problem many on the right have with telling the truth.

A small number of Jews in ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe were forced to join a Judenrat, or Jewish council, and implement Nazi policy. However, they were not willing participants and they and their communities were threatened with summary executions and indiscriminate killings if they failed to comply. The role and culpability of these councils in the Holocaust remains controversial even among reputable scholars, but any actions they committed were done under extreme duress and members were forced to make choices nobody should have to make. The fact that a small number of Jews, under extreme duress, undertook actions that at worst slightly accelerated the pace of the Holocaust and at best made things slightly better for the Jews for a little while before they would have been killed anyway, does not mean that the Holocaust never happened or that it was the Jews' fault. According to Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum, "In the final analysis, the Judenraete had no influence on the frightful outcome of the Holocaust; the Nazi extermination machine was alone responsible for the tragedy, and the Jews in the occupied territories, most especially Poland, were far too powerless to prevent it." Additionally, even scholars who argue the Judenraete did play some role in the Holocaust agree that the impact the unwilling Jewish collaborators had was several orders of magnitude smaller than that of the much larger number of willing non-Jewish collaborators.

Evidence for the Holocaust

US Army clerks organize evidence for the Nuremberg Trials.

“”I made the visit [to the Gotha concentration camp] deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to "propaganda."

—General Dwight D. Eisenhower

Deniers might use the one single proof gambit to confuse the opponent, and request very specific evidence, such as

• a written order by Hitler to exterminate the Jews
• an autopsy record concluding that a Jewish prisoner died from gassing

or some other remnants. However, though the Nazi government tried massively to hide evidence for mass murder by tearing down buildings and burning documents, plenty of the remains have survived.

A refutation: such an event as the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, apparently connected to gangster Al Capone, has never been linked to any written order. Capone typically gave spoken orders, and Hitler could have given a verbal order without putting it in writing. Also, the Nazis typically did not perform autopsies on deceased persons who had been gassed.

Nazi documents, speeches etc.

This is just a sample of the wealth of documentary evidence from the Nazi government itself.

(Caveat: Holocaust deniers reason that, since the Holocaust did not happen, any evidence to the contrary is a forgery created by the Jews as part of their International Jewish Conspiracy™.)

“”They claim that forgers created these and other documents — complete with complex internal reference markings, on typewriters that perfectly matched those used by the various German units said to have written the documents — and then planted thousands of these perfect forgeries in numerous different archival collections (in exactly the right file and in precisely the right sequence) all over Europe. Not only is such a scenario fantastically improbable, it fails to explain why these supposedly incredibly talented forgers did not succeed in producing the one piece of paper that deniers demand as 'proof' that genocide took place under the Third Reich — an order from Hitler authorising the destruction of the Jews.

—Deborah Lipstadt

Indeed, a few counterfeit Nazi documents — notably The Hitler Diaries — have been exposed since the war. However, several of the documents mentioned here have been authenticated by forensics, or are accepted as genuine by Holocaust deniers such as David Irving.

Hitler in 1922

In 1922, Hitler told a journalist that:

“”Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews. As soon as I have the power to do so, I will have gallows built in rows — at the Marienplatz in Munich, for example — as many as traffic allows. Then the Jews will be hanged indiscriminately, and they will remain hanging until they stink; they will hang there as long as the principles of hygiene permit. As soon as they have been untied, the next batch will be strung up, and so on down the line, until the last Jew in Munich has been exterminated. Other cities will follow suit, precisely in this fashion, until all Germany has been completely cleansed of Jews.

— Adolf Hitler, 1922. (Josef Hell, "Aufzeichnung," 1922, ZS 640, p. 5, Institut fuer Zeitgeschichte.)

(Caveat #2: While some serious historians see this as evidence that Hitler had planned the Holocaust long before coming to power, other serious historians don't believe that any plan for the Holocaust existed so early, and see Hitler's words as simply an expression of his virulent antisemitism rather than a sign that he had any concrete plans at that date.)

In a speech to the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, he made his intentions clear with this quote, which was even used in the 1940 Nazi propaganda film "Der ewige Jude" (The Eternal Jew):

“”…if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevizing of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!

Note that this is one of the best examples of how whacked-out Hitler had become, as he was conflating international capitalism and Soviet Bolshevism as the exact same thing.

Hitler also gave The Obersalzberg Speech in August 1939, a week before the invasion of Poland, and expressed intentions of mass murdering the Polish population.

On 18 December 1941, Himmler asked Hitler, "What to do with the Jews of Russia?", to which Hitler replied, "als Partisanen auszurotten" ("exterminate them as partisans"). This remark is probably as close as historians will ever get to a definitive order from Hitler for the Holocaust.

Mein Kampf

Mein Kampf (1926 edition)

“”If at the beginning of the war and during the war twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the nation had been subjected to poison gas, such as had to be endured in the field by hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers of all classes and professions, then the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain.

—Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

Many historians, including Ian Kershaw (one of the world's leading experts on both Hitler and Nazi Germany), have pointed out that several passages in Mein Kampf are of an undeniably genocidal nature. Among these passages, Hitler also overtly suggested that:

“”The nationalization of our masses will succeed only when, aside from all the positive struggle for the soul of our people, their international poisoners are exterminated.

—Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

The suggestion that a future genocide was intended from day one by Hitler is also corroborated by excerpts from the first edition of Mein Kampf, in which Hitler emphasizes that the literal destruction of the "weak and sick" (terms meant by him to encapsulate his enemies, and not to objectively describe fragility) is, quote, "far more humane than their protection." while also having the intrinsic purpose of providing what he saw as the proper space and purity for the "strong".

Goebbels' diaries

Sample page from Goebbels' diary

German Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels' extensive diary notes contain several references to the ongoing mass murder of the Jews. Example:

“”"The intellectual does not have the natural means of resisting the Jewish peril because his instincts have been badly blunted. Because of this fact the nations with a high standard of civilization are exposed to this peril first and foremost. In nature life always takes measures against parasites; in the life of nations that is not always the case. From this fact the Jewish peril actually stems. There is therefore no other recourse left for modern nations except to exterminate the Jew…"

Considering David Irving had access to the entirety of Goebbels's diaries, using them as the basis for a book, he presumably accepts these accounts as true.

Jäger report and other Einsatzgruppen reports

Page 6 of the Jäger report

The Einsatzgruppen were four special task units (A, B, C, D) under the direction of Heinrich Himmler. Their stated task was securing the territories following the German advance into the Soviet Union, but their actual primary task was "the annihilation of Jews, Gypsies, communist officials and other who were considered enemies of the Nazi regime."

Karl Jäger was the leader of the Einsatzkommando subunit number 3 within Einsatzgruppe A. A report written in December 1941 by SS commander Jäger describing the killing of 137,346 people (mostly Jews) in the Baltic states. The literal descriptions in this document are unusual to the Nazis, who typically used euphemisms for mass killings (see below).

The report itself is 6 pages of dates, locations, and numbers. It begins:

Complete list of executions carried out in the EK 3 area up to 1 December 1941[.]

Security police duties in Lithuania taken over by Einsatzkommando 3 on 2 July 1941.

(The Wilna [Vilnius] area was taken over by EK 3 on 9 Aug. 1941, the Schaulen area on 2 Oct. 1941. Up until these dates EK 9 operated in Wilna and EK 2 in Schaulen.)

On my instructions and orders the following executions were conducted by Lithuanian partisans:

[....]

Following the formation of a raiding squad under the command of SS-Obersturmführer Hamman and 8-10 reliable men from the Einsatzkommando, the following actions were conducted in cooperation with Lithuanian partisans:

Not everyone killed was a Jew -- but the vast majority were. For example, from 22.8.41 to 29.8.41, those killed included:

1. In Algona: "Mentally sick: 269 men, 227 women, 48 children"
2. In Panevezys: "1,312 Jews, 4,602 Jewesses, 1,609 Jewish children"
3. In Kreis Rasainiai: "466 Jews, 440 Jewesses, 1,020 Jewish children"
4. In Obeliai: "112 Jews, 627 Jewesses, 421 Jewish children"
5. In Seduva: "230 Jews, 275 Jewesses, 159 Jewish children"
6. In Zarasai: "767 Jews, 1,113 Jewesses, 1 Lith[uanian] Comm[unist], 687 Jewish children, 1 Russ[ian] Comm[unist] (f[emale])"
7. In Pasvalys: "402 Jews, 738 Jewesses, 209 Jewish children"
8. In Kaisiadorys: "All Jews, Jewesses, and Jewish children" [1,911 people]
9. In Prienai: "All Jews, Jewesses, and Jewish Children" [1,078 people]
10. In Dagda and Kraslawa: "212 Jews, 4 Russ[ian] POW's"
11. In Joniskia: "47 Jews, 165 Jewesses, 143 Jewish children"
12. In Wilkia: "76 Jews, 192 Jewesses, 134 Jewish children"
13. In Kedainiai: "710 Jews, 767 Jewesses, 599 Jewish children"
14. In Rumsiskis and Ziezmariai: "20 Jews, 567 Jewesses, 197 Jewish children"
15. In Utena and Moletai: "582 Jews, 1,731 Jewesses, 1,469 Jewish children"

Jäger concludes:

Today I can confirm that our objective, to solve the Jewish problem for Lithuania, has been achieved by EK 3. In Lithuania there are no more Jews, apart from Jewish workers and their families.

The distance between from the assembly point to the graves was on average 4 to 5 Km.

I consider the Jewish action more or less terminated as far as Einsatzkommando 3 is concerned. Those working Jews and Jewesses still available are needed urgently and I can envisage that after the winter this workforce will be required even more urgently. I am of the view that the sterilization program of the male worker Jews should be started immediately so that reproduction is prevented. If despite sterilization a Jewess becomes pregnant she will be liquidated.

The Jäger report is the most important of the Einsatzgruppen reports because of its meticulous detail. The Jäger report was not discovered until after the Nuremberg trials, but other such reports served as evidence at the Einsatzkommando trial at Nuremberg. The Einsatzgruppen together with their collaborators killed more than 1 million people, mainly Jews.

Wannsee Conference

A March 1942 letter from Reinhard Heydrich, following up on the Wannsee Protocol regarding the Endlösung der Judenfrage (Final Solution of the Jewish Question)

A conference on 20 January 1942, documented by the Wannsee Protocol (Protokoll is the German word for "minutes"). As with most official Nazi records, the protocol uses euphemisms instead of literal orders to kill all Jews. However, Adolf Eichmann provided demographic data estimating the Jewish population in Europe to be around 11 million, consistent with the scholarship:

“”Under proper guidance, in the course of the final solution the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labor in the East. Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex, will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes. The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as a the seed of a new Jewish revival (see the experience of history.)

The minutes of the conference were the basis for two films: the 1984 West German made-for-TV film Die Wannseekonferenz (The Wannsee Conference), and the 2001 HBO/BBC co-production Conspiracy.

Himmler's 1942 report

The 29 December 1942 report from Himmler to Hitler

On 29 December 1942, Himmler presented Hitler with the Meldung an den Führer über Bandenbekämpfung ("Report to the Führer on fighting against gangs") Nr. 51. This report, which covered the period from August to November 1942, and which referred only to a part of the occupied Soviet area (southern Russia, Ukraine and the district of Bialystok); included the following numbers concerning persons imprisoned or executed:

1. Bandits

a) Established number of deaths after combat 1,337

b) Prisoners executed immediately 737

c) Prisoners executed after lengthy thorough interrogation 7,828

2. Gang helpers and suspects

a) Arrested 16,553

b) Executed 14,257

c) Jews executed 363,211

This is one of the few Nazi records that explicitly mentioned the killing of Jews, without euphemisms.

Himmler's speeches in Posen

In 1943, Heinrich Himmler, leader of the SS, spoke openly about the extermination of the Jewish people, as well as the equivocation used to cover it up, during a speech to SS Officers in the Posen (Polish: Poznań) town hall. An audio recording, as well as a transcription of the original German, is available.

I also want to mention a very difficult subject before you here, completely openly.

It should be discussed amongst us, and yet, nevertheless, we will never speak about it in public.

Just as we did not hesitate on June 30 to carry out our duty, as ordered, and stand comrades who had failed against the wall and shoot them.

About which we have never spoken, and never will speak.

That was, thank God, a kind of tact natural to us, a foregone conclusion of that tact, that we have never conversed about it amongst ourselves, never spoken about it, everyone shuddered, and everyone was clear that the next time, he would do the same thing again, if it were commanded and necessary.

I am talking about the "Jewish evacuation": the extermination of the Jewish people.

It is one of those things that is easily said. "The Jewish people is being exterminated," every Party member will tell you, "perfectly clear, it's part of our plans, we're eliminating the Jews, exterminating them, ha!, a small matter."

And then along they all come, all the 80 million upright Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. They say: all the others are swine, but here is a first-class Jew.

And none of them has seen it, has endured it. Most of you will know what it means when 100 bodies lie together, when there are 500, or when there are 1000. And to have seen this through, and — with the exception of human weaknesses -- to have remained decent, has made us hard and is a page of glory never mentioned and never to be mentioned.

Because we know how difficult things would be, if today in every city during the bomb attacks, the burdens of war and the privations, we still had Jews as secret saboteurs, agitators and instigators. We would probably be at the same stage as 1916-17, if the Jews still resided in the body of the German people.

We have taken away the riches that they had, and I have given a strict order, which Obergruppenführer Pohl has carried out, we have delivered these riches completely to the Reich, to the State. We have taken nothing from them for ourselves. A few, who have offended against this, will be [judged] in accordance with an order, that I gave at the beginning: He who takes even one Mark of this is a dead man.

A number of SS men have offended against this order. There are not very many, and they will be dead men — WITHOUT MERCY! We have the moral right, we had the duty to our people to do it, to kill this people who wanted to kill us. But we do not have the right to enrich ourselves with even one fur, with one Mark, with one cigarette, with one watch, with anything. That we do not have. Because at the end of this, we don't want, because we exterminated the bacillus, to become sick and die from the same bacillus.

I will never see it happen, that even one bit of putrefaction comes in contact with us, or takes root in us. On the contrary, where it might try to take root, we will burn it out together. But altogether we can say: We have carried out this most difficult task for the love of our people. And we have taken on no defect within us, in our soul, or in our character.

The National Archives explains why this speech was recorded: "The SS, for example, used recording equipment to obtain transcripts of Himmler's speeches. During the 1930s many of Himmler's speeches were taken down in shorthand by secretaries or SS aides who later typed texts from these shorthand notes. Then, beginning in 1940, efforts were made to replace the stenographers with sound recording equipment.

Though initial efforts were not very successful, by late 1942 the technique had been perfected and nearly all the extant typed and printed texts of Himmler speeches dating from 1943 and 1944 were derived from recordings made while Himmler was speaking. Goebbels also found speech recordings useful. After delivering an address, he could leisurely listen to the recording and make the changes that he felt would heighten the speech's propaganda effect. Then the propaganda ministry would issue a press release containing the edited text, or parts of it, which German newspapers would publish as if they were presenting the text of the original speech.

Though the recordings were chiefly just useful tools, Himmler, Goebbels, and other prominent Nazis were careful not to destroy the original discs. The Nazis' interest in preserving oral records matched their prodigious efforts to save written records of their rise to power and days of glory. The leaders of the Third Reich were convinced that they were participating in events of great historical magnitude, and, because of the importance they attached to the spoken word, it must have seemed obvious to them that the recordings should be preserved."

2 days later, Himmler said:

We came to the question: what to with the women and children? I decided to find a clear solution here as well. I did not consider myself justified to exterminate the men — that is, to kill them or have them killed — and allow the avengers of our sons and grandsons in the form of their children to grow up. The difficult decision had to be taken to make this people disappear from the earth. For the organisation which had to execute this task, it was the most difficult which we had ever had. But it was accomplished, and without — I believe I can say — our men and their leaders suffering any mental or spiritual damage.

Odilo Globocnik's reports

The Odilo Globocnik (1904–1945) reports describe Aktion Reinhard, with special mention of confiscated immobile and mobile property.

Korherr report

Written in March 1943, by Dr. Richard Korherr (1903–1989) of the SS. Describes that 2.5 million European Jews have been "evacuated" to "special treatment" (German: Evakuierung, Sonderbehandlung), and estimates that European Jewish population had declined by 1.5 million by emigration, uprisings and harsh living conditions in ghettos and camps, totalling a decline of 4 million European Jews (out of more than 10 million).

Höfle Telegram

The Höfle Telegram is in two parts and was sent on January 11, 1943 by SS Sturmbannführer Hermann Höfle. The first part was sent to Adolf Eichmann, and the second part to SS Obersturmbannführer Franz Heim. The document was discovered in England in 2000 among declassified World War II documents. It was originally decrypted from an intercepted Enigma Machine transmission, though its significance was not understood during the war. The telegram confirms the Korherr Report that 1,274,166 Jews were subject to Sonderbehandlung (special treatment) under Operation Reinhard by the end of 1942.

Other wartime documents

There is an abundance of documents from the concentration camps by guards and leaders describing the details of the death camps and even "death vans".

Kurt Gerstein

SS officer Kurt Gerstein (1905–1945) witnessed mass murders in Bełżec and Treblinka during 1942 and told foreigners, among them Swedish diplomat Göran von Otter, and officials of the Vatican, about what he had seen. He wrote a report in 1945. Gerstein's stories are unreliable but are significant as an early testimony from the Holocaust.

"Sonderbehandlung" and other euphemisms

As mentioned before, mass executions were rarely described literally (the Jäger Report being a notable exception). The Nazi documents used euphemisms instead; more than twenty different euphemisms were in frequent use, such as Umsiedlung (resettlement) and Endlösung (Final Solution).

Perhaps the most infamous one was Sonderbehandlung ("Special treatment"). Holocaust deniers might claim that Sonderbehandlung meant delousing and disinfection (e.g., denier Carlo Mattogno), introduced in the Nazi camps in Poland.

However, Sonderbehandlung was an established term for killing, confirmed by police documents from 1939, and reports from Action T4, a program for killing people with disabilities. Adolf Eichmann testified that Sonderbehandlung meant "killing."

Testimonies

A sketch from the 40-page 1944 Vrba-Wetzler report, written by two escapees from Auschwitz, Rudolf Vrba and Alfréd Wetzler

The truth of the Holocaust has been supported by many thousands of oral and written testimonies by several groups, including but not limited to (a few references are given to provide a general picture):

• Concentration camp prisoners (including but not limited to Jews, Poles, Roma and Sinti, homosexuals, and political opponents). Sonderkommandos (prisoners recruited for corpse disposal) witnessed the extermination campaign directly.
• Auschwitz guards.
• Railroad crews, civil servants, commanders and other off-site soldiers and civilians.
• Allied soldiers from various countries.
• Humanitarian expeditions from various countries.
• Secret wiretaps were made of German prisoners of war, where they freely discussed the war, including extermination of Jews. These recordings were transcribed and edited by Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer in the book Soldaten: Protokolle vom Kämpfen, Töten und Sterben

Soldiers and Nazi officials

This section is limited to soldiers, SS men and other members of the German armed forces, who testified about the Holocaust before the German surrender in 1945.

Gunnar Eklöf (1922–1991), a Swedish Waffen-SS volunteer in the Nordland Division. The 2014 book Hitlers svenska SS-soldater ("Hitler's Swedish SS Soldiers") by Bosse Schön describes his career extensively. During his 1943 furlough back home in Sweden, he bragged about murdering Jews on the Eastern front. His scandalous behaviour and his stories from the mass murders were noticed by the press and the police (which is confirmed by archives); however, he never faced investigation or trial.

Gösta Borg (1915–2000), a Swedish SS volunteer and Kriegsberichter (war correspondent) who reported from the Eastern Front; including summary executions of Communists and Jews. During the war, he shared his observations with the Swedish Legation in Berlin.

Max Täubner, an SS-Untersturmführer with the 1st SS Infantry Brigade. In May 1943, he and four other SS men were prosecuted for having participated in unauthorized and sadistic killings of Jews on the Eastern Front in a manner "unworthy of a German man" (i.e. showing a lack of discipline in his violence), and for threatening the security of the Reich by showing photos of the killings to his family and friends. In its judgement against him the court stated that Täubner "should have recognised that the extermination of the Jews was the duty of the Kommandos which were set up especially for this purpose", a clear admission that the Einsatzgruppen were committing genocidal actions against the Jews.

Walter Mattner, an Austrian police official who served in the SS and Police Division for Mogilev from 1941-42. In letters to his wife he described in detail participating in the massacre of hundreds of Jews in Mogilev and gloated that it would soon be "the turn of our local Jews".

Prisoners, Sonderkommandos, and Kapos

Sonderkommandos burning corpses in a pit at Auschwitz-Birkenau, August 1944

The guards intentionally tried to keep the extermination campaign secret from prisoners. Those who arrived at the eastern camps were either killed on arrival, or kept at a labour section, separate from the gas chambers.

Sonderkommandos were the only prisoners allowed to see anything of the mass murders. Still, Sonderkommandos were regularly killed and replaced by new prisoners, so very few of them survived the war.

Diary of Anne Frank

Pages 92–93 of the original Diary of Anne Frank

The Diary of Anne Frank is one of many written testimonies from Holocaust victims. Deniers such as Robert Faurisson have claimed that the text was forged, but the Dutch government has conducted a forensic investigation confirming the book's authenticity. The Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam has issued a press release entitled Ten questions on the authenticity of the diary of Anne Frank, refuting many of the claims against the diary. One of the most common arguments against the diary's legitimacy is the claim that it was written using a ballpoint pen, which wasn't commonly used in the Netherlands at the time the diary was written. However, this claim is simply false; analysis shows that ballpoint pen was only used to write a couple of looseleaf pages of annotations that were added years later.

The diary, the one that was originally published, was indeed edited; this was because it was the private diary of a girl going through puberty, and records things ranging from masturbation and homosexuality to various arguments amongst family members. Obviously, her father Otto Frank didn't want all of his daughter's (and family's) personal moments open to the public. This provides avenues of attacks from two different sets of crazies. The first, the aforementioned deniers who will latch on to any alteration being "proof" of a coverup, and when the unedited version became published, the moral guardians who didn't want kids learning about the little man in the boat.

Claims to dissenting testimonies

Holocaust deniers have made some really lame efforts to find a "second opinion".

Paul Rassinier (1906–67) — a French journalist, called "the father of Holocaust revisionism." Rassinier participated in the French Resistance and was therefore imprisoned at Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora. He claimed that the Nazi government had no plan for extermination of Jews and that the death toll was not more than roughly a million.

Richard Baer

Richard Baer (1911–1963) — the commander of Auschwitz I. After the war, he lived undercover in Hamburg, until he was seized in 1960 following the arrest of Adolf Eichmann. He refused to testify and died in detention in 1963. Deniers might claim that the government killed Baer behind locked doors because he supposedly told interrogators that there were no gas chambers in Auschwitz. This is, of course, a hypothesis without support and does not in any way qualify Baer as a dissenting witness. If Baer had something to tell the world, why didn't he make use of his 15 years as a fugitive? And anyway, Baer in fact told his interrogators that there were no gas chambers in Auschwitz I, which historians have never claimed, and went on to clarify that there were gas chambers in Auschwitz II-Birkenau.

Red Cross reports: The Red Cross famously visited Theresienstadt in the present-day Czech Republic, and reported relatively good conditions among the inmates. After the war, they could show that the Nazis had deceived the observers. Among the false evidence given to the Red Cross was the Nazi-staged propaganda film Theresienstadt: Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet (Terezin: A Documentary Film from the Jewish Settlement Area), also known as Der Führer Schenkt Den Juden Eine Stadt (The Führer Gives the Jews a City), supposedly showing the humane environment the Jews lived in. Deniers such as the Institute for Historical Review have also pointed to a 1944 Red Cross report on the conditions at Auschwitz which states that rumours of gas chambers could not be verified, which ignores the fact that the Red Cross delegates were not permitted to enter the part of the camp where the gassing facilities were housed.

Josef Kramer (1906–1945) — the commander of the Bergen-Belsen and Natzweiler-Struthof camps and sub-commander of Auschwitz, executed for war crimes after the Belsen trial of 1945. While under interrogation before his trial, Kramer initially denied that Auschwitz was an extermination camp or that he had witnessed any prisoners being mistreated. Arthur Butz argues in The Hoax of the Twentieth Century—The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry that this is proof that Auschwitz was not an extermination camp, which ignores not only all the evidence to the contrary but also the obvious fact that Kramer did not want to admit to crimes that would result in his execution. Butz also acknowledges that Kramer later admitted Auschwitz was an extermination camp once it became obvious no-one would believe him but speculates that he was lying to save himself by distancing himself from the murders, for which he provides no evidence.

Otto Ernst Remer (1912–1997) — a Wehrmacht General who fought in the Soviet Union during the war. After the war he became a leading figure in Holocaust denial and the Clean Wehrmacht myth, claiming that no major war crimes were committed by the Germans during the invasion of the Soviet Union. One of his main claims was that there was no widespread antisemitism in Germany and the murders of Jews in Poland and the Soviet Union were the result of pogroms by the locals due to war crimes perpetrated by the Soviet commissars, who he claimed were mostly Jews. There is no credible evidence to support this claim, which it should be kept in mind came from a former Wehrmacht general who would have a vested interest in sanitizing the German war effort he participated in.

Dr. Charles Larson — an American forensic pathologist who performed hundreds of autopsies on victims in around 20 Nazi concentration camps. Deniers have often quoted Larson as stating that none of his autopsies uncovered a person who had been killed by poison gas. However, this is a misquote: in the interview cited he stated that "only a few" of the bodies he examined were killed through gassing, which makes sense as he was referring to inmates from Dachau where only a few experimental gassings took place. Furthermore, the vast majority of the gassings took place at the extermination camps in the East, where the victims bodies were cremated after they were killed, thus preventing an autopsy from being performed.

Emil Lachout (1928–2018) — an Austrian civil servant who "discovered" a document from Allied Command in 1987 which stated that an Allied investigation had proved that there were no murders by poison gas in German concentration camps and all statements to the contrary were obtained through coercion. The document was quickly proven to be a clumsy fake (among other things, it referred to Allied organizations which did not exist and was written in German despite supposedly being by the Allies), which has not stopped Holocaust denial websites from citing it as fact.

Thies Christophersen (1918–1987) — Christophersen had lived near Auschwitz and claimed that there were no gas chambers or shootings of inmates there, or else he would have noticed. Even members of the Holocaust denying Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust have criticized Christophersen's claims, pointing out that they relied almost entirely on what he was told by Auschwitz staff and included ridiculous statements such as claiming that Auschwitz had no crematoria, which is disproved by photos taken of the camp from above while Christophersen was there. In the Holocaust documentary Wahrheit Macht Frei Christophersen was caught on camera admitting that he had lied about what he saw in Auschwitz.

Wilhelm Stäglich (1916–2006) — a German financial judge who had previously worked as an orderly officer stationed near Auschwitz, giving him unlimited access to the camp. He claimed that he had visited Auschwitz multiple times and had seen that there were no gas chambers. However, his unfamiliarity with the basic layout indicates that he never visited Birkenau, the part of the camp where the gas chambers were.

Walter Schreiber (1908–1999) — an Austrian civil engineer who supposedly built crematoria at Auschwitz. In 1998 he was allegedly questioned about his work at Auschwitz and claimed that no gas chambers had been in the crematoria when they were built and the layout of the crematoria was unsuitable for the construction of such installations. He claimed to have built the crematoria in 1943, by which time all five were already fully operational. His claim that the crematoria were unsuitable for gas chambers is also based on faulty assumptions, as in reality there are few technical prerequisites for a room to be used for homicidal gassing; technically speaking, any room where people can be locked in could be converted into a gas chamber. His "confession" was not published until after his death supposedly at his own request, conveniently rendering it impossible to question Schreiber about what actually happened.

Bruno Baum (1910–1971) — communist resistance fighter who spent time imprisoned in Auschwitz and Mauthausen and later served as an official in East Germany. He stated in a 1949 book about his time in the resistance that he and fellow Auschwitz prisoners had written "the majority of all Auschwitz propaganda" up until the last day before the camp was evacuated, which many have taken to mean that he admitted to making up lies about Auschwitz being an extermination camp. This is based on the fact that "propaganda" in modern terms carries negative connotations, but this was not the case in 1940s Germany, when the term merely referred to spreading information supportive of a certain cause. This is clear from the fact that the very next sentence in the book states that Baum and his associates were making public what was actually happening. At no point does Baum state or even imply that the rumours about Auschwitz being an extermination camp were made up.

Unreliable eyewitnesses

Many Holocaust survivors' testimony is not entirely consistent, and some impostors have been exposed. Holocaust deniers often cite the existence of fake Holocaust survivors in order to smear all survivors as lying or unreliable; for example, Metapedia has numerous articles on supposed "fake survivors". However, there are very few verifiable cases of fake survivors, and in most cases the impostors were exposed by the very same mainstream historical researchers who deniers claim are responsible for the "myth".

Not content with the small number of actual impostors, deniers often take witness statements out of context to make them appear dishonest or inconsistent with the historical record. For example, deniers often cite one obviously absurd statement from an unidentified Auschwitz survivor claiming that Jews were killed via some kind of trolley system which dumped them straight into the ovens (nicknamed the "Holocoaster", Holocaust rollercoaster, by deniers), which ignores the fact that the one (unsourced) account of this seems to be describing a rumour the survivor had heard rather than something that the supposed witness actually personally saw.

Another oft-cited witness, a Buchenwald survivor who stated that every day guards would have one prisoner mauled by a bear in the camp zoo, was likewise describing a rumour he heard rather than something that actually happened. Other absurd "witness statements" involving a "bendy shotgun", with which Jews were supposedly tricked into shooting themselves, have been exposed as Holocaust denier fabrications. Other unlikely claims of people supposedly surviving gas chambers can be attributed to survivors hearing about the gas chambers after being in actual showers and wrongly assuming that they had been in gas chambers, or alternatively to false memories, which could have come about under the circumstances. Even if this was not the case, the existence of a few lying or exaggerating survivors does not disprove the Holocaust any more than the existence of people who lie about surviving any disaster disproves that disaster.

Electrocution and steam chambers

Early in the war, witness accounts emerged of people in the Treblinka extermination camp being killed via electrocution or steam suffocation. Some survivors, such as Samuel Rajzman, also claimed this after the war despite proof that the killing was done through gas chambers. Holocaust deniers like to claim this as evidence of the "Holocaust myth" changing over time to get around the evidence.

However, a close look at the testimony proves this to be misleading. The claims were specifically made about the Treblinka camp, where the gassing was not done with Zyklon B but with motor exhaust, which could have been easily mistaken for smoke or steam by those not familiar with the process. The eyewitnesses who claimed that electrocution or steam chambers were being used were not aware of the process; they likely saw exhaust fumes billowing out of the chamber while the victims screamed, and assumed that they were being electrocuted, or else mistook it for steam and concluded it was being used to suffocate them. No witnesses familiar with the killing process, such as Sonderkommando or the engine operators themselves, repeated these stories, and accounts of the process from those familiar with it such as Kurt Gerstein bear a great similarity to descriptions given by these witnesses, making it obvious that they were simply mistaken.

Allies' knowledge during the war

On December 17, 1942, British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden read the Joint Declaration by Members of the United Nations on behalf of the Allies, where he condemned the ongoing mass murder of Jews. About this time, a document prepared by the Polish government-in-exile was also disseminated: The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland, which accurately identified the locations of a number of Nazi extermination camps (such as the one at Treblinka), as well as the fact that they were extermination camps. A private letter from Catholic resistance sources around this same time (dated December 14, 1942 and sent by a German Jesuit) notified the Vatican of similar happenings. It indicated that "up to 6,000 Jews and Poles were being gassed each day in German-occupied Poland."

Swedish journalists: Valentin and Fredborg

Arvid Fredborg in 1959

Swedish journalist and historian Hugo Valentin (1888–1963) wrote in newspaper Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning (GHT) during 1942, about an ongoing extermination of Jews. In October, he wrote that at least 700,000 Jews had been murdered in Poland. Many other Swedish newspapers quoted Valentin's articles.

Though neutral, the Swedish government was under pressure from Nazi Germany, at least until 1943. On behalf of Germany, the Swedish government censored anti-German propaganda and obstructed GHT at several occasions.

Arvid Fredborg (1915–1996) was a Swedish correspondent in Berlin from 1941 and 1943. His 1943 book Behind the Steel Wall estimates that 2 million Jews and 1 million Poles had been executed.

Death toll and census data

As mentioned before, Holocaust deniers claim that the Jewish death toll in the Holocaust is significantly less than the 5.7 million claimed by current scholarship. The exact number claimed varies — the IHR claims 300,000, while David Irving has raised his claim to 4 million, though he may have raised it to avoid a harsh prison sentence when on trial in Austria.

According to censuses, there were about six million more Jews in Europe in early 1942 (as the Holocaust began) than there were at the German surrender in 1945. The Wannsee Protocol from 1942 said that there were 11 million Jews in Europe, of which roughly 6 million were living in German-controlled territories (as the Third Reich was at its peak by 1942). Where did they go?

Deniers, such as the IHR, have claimed that the Jewish population within the Nazi-occupied area was just 4 to 6 million. This contradicts the Wannsee Protocol, as well as other demographics.

World Almanac gambit

Some deniers, such as the IHR, refer to World Almanac statistics which claim that there was no decline in the global number of Jews during the war. However, the Almanac data for Jews until 1948 were old estimates. The fresh estimate for 1948 shows a decline of 4.4 million. Updated estimates for 1949 show a total decline of 5.3 million.

Where did the Jews go?

Holocaust deniers claim that millions of Jews in the Nazi camps in Poland either were "deported to the east" or had survived captivity. In the end, they would have moved to foreign countries, with Palestine (including the areas that would form Israel), the United Kingdom, the United States and the Soviet Union mentioned. Some of them might have disguised as non-Jews. Several thousand Jews did indeed escape Axis territory during the war (such as 7,800 Danish Jews who fled to Sweden), but these are not included in scholarship's death toll.

The Korherr report provides statistics on Jewish emigration from Axis territories from 1933 until 1943, differing from "evacuation" (transport to Nazi camps in Poland). As much of this emigration took place before the war, the numbers are insufficient to explain the disappearance of the 11 million Jews mentioned in the 1942 Wannsee Protocol.

Israel had no more than 1,300,000 inhabitants (of whom 630,000 are Jewish) at its foundation in 1947, including non-Jews (Arabs, Druze etc.), Jews who arrived before 1939, and Jewish immigrants from non-Axis territories. The Jewish immigration to the United States around World War II was in a lesser order of magnitude. The United States upheld a harsh immigration policy throughout the war, preventing Jewish refugees from arriving. Soviet censuses are more uncertain, but could hardly hide millions of immigrants. Also, deniers have yet to suggest a Jewish migration path from the Nazi camps in Poland, across the Eastern Front (one of the deadliest fronts in history) into the Soviet Union. Another reason why jews couldn't have escaped from Europe is because Nazi Germany had an emmigration ban forbidding Jews from escaping the continent.

Scholars are aware that a large number of Jews (together with some civilian non-Jews) from the western Soviet Union did migrate eastwards before the German troops invaded the land and started rounding up Jews and opponents. However, this does not help revisionists explain what happened to Jews outside of the Soviet Union.

There is a $4,000 reward for anyone who can provide names of Jews who were transited from death camps in Poland to the Soviet Union.

Not quite six million Jews

According to current scholarship, around 5,700,000 Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Holocaust distortionists may point out that this number is less than six million — either claiming a "revisionist" success, or criticizing the well-known number of six million killed Jews. However, 6 million is a correct approximation of 5.7 million. (This is comparable to a YEC complaining that scientists say the universe is 13.7 billion years old, not 14 billion years old.)

Discrepancies in per-camp death toll estimates

Western historians have different estimates for the exact death toll for each individual camp. Deniers might claim that this makes established history self-contradicting, which is untrue given that the commonly cited figures are derived primarily from demographical evidence (specifically pre-war and post-war population comparisons) and not from a sum of all of the individual camps.

The Auschwitz gambit

Similarly, some Holocaust deniers have claimed that "revisionist" research has corrected the official death toll of Auschwitz from 4 million to 1.1 million. The number of 4 million originated with the first Soviet publications about the Holocaust. It has been used by the Auschwitz museum until the 1980s, in then-communist Poland, which exaggerated enemy atrocities for propaganda purposes. Western scholars have never claimed that 4 million people died at Auschwitz. Compare this with the controversy on the bombing of Dresden.

The Red Cross statistics

According to the 1965 book General Psychologus by pseudonym Alexander Scronn, the Red Cross estimated the death toll to be 230,000 to 270,000. This figure has never been verified. Further, in 1975 Red Cross delegate Françoise Perret attested that the organization never published information of the sort and that a similar claim made by Richard Verrall, attributing a figure of 300,000 victims to official Red Cross documents, was a fraud.

The document in question is from the International Tracing Service, an organization created during the war to track missing persons. The 300,000 number specifically (per the ITS itself) does not include the vast majority of those murdered in the camps, but rather those for whom the ITS was able to issue a death certificate at the request of family members. The ITS has never compiled a count of all those who died in the camps.

Physical evidence

Either these shoes were from the Holocaust victims or the Nazis were some serious shoe fetishists. Take your pick.

The preserved camps contain plenty of physical evidence for mass murder: remnants of human bodies (piles of ashes, bones, hair, etc.), belongings (clothes, prosthetics, bags, etc.) and equipment (gas chambers, etc.). Some of this material has undergone forensic examination.

The Red Army managed to recover 300,000 pairs of prisoners' shoes from Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek. 20,000 pairs were predicted to be collected each day, around the rate of gassings at Auschwitz II. Even at Chełmno, which had been successfully demolished by the SS, Soviet investigators uncovered thousands of half-burnt personal effects belonging to murdered Jews from a burn pit.

Denial tactics

Experienced Holocaust deniers might bring up technical details, such as the chemical properties of Zyklon B, the size of cremation ovens, or soap recipes.

A novice skeptic might be deceived that all these details are true and that they support the denier's arguments. Look closer and you'll see easily that they don't.

Among the public, there is some confusion about what happened, and what did not happen, during the Holocaust. Even academics argue about some details. Holocaust deniers try to use these spots of uncertainty to disprove the whole event.

Gas chamber denial

In the eastern camps, gas chambers were the primary murder weapon. As said before, denial of gassing is a cornerstone of Holocaust denial, and deniers have many claims to disprove the use of gas chambers. They might claim:

• Lack of Nazi documents on gas chambers (see above)
• Lack of testimonies about gassing (see above)
• That gas chambers were only used for delousing (see below)
• Lack of forensic examinations supporting the use of gas chambers (see below)
• Hydrogen cyanide (in the form of Zyklon B) being useless for extermination (see below)
• Hydrogen cyanide being dangerously explosive (see below)
• The lack of Prussian Blue on gas chamber walls (see below)
• Gas chambers being difficult to ventilate (see below)
• Gas chambers were not useful for execution at all (contradicted by use in the United States)
• Lack of red discolouration on victim's skin (see below)
• American autopsies found that no camp victims had been gassed (see above)

Zyklon B

Leftover Zyklon B with cans (note skull and crossbones).

Zyklon B was the trademark paper or cardboard pellets impregnated with hydrogen cyanide (HCN), which easily vaporizes at normal temperature.

As deniers point out, Zyklon B was purposed as a delousing agent. While it was indeed produced and marketed as an insecticide and rodenticide, that makes it no less harmful for humans. The cans were clearly marked as containing highly toxic substances. Zyklon B is about as unfit to kill humans as a machete, an axe or a carpet knife, none of which are produced or marketed for their killing ability. Just like any tool or substance, it can be abused to kill.

The concrete in a gas chamber at the extermination camp at Majdanek that the Nazis did not successfully destroy shows evidence of the use of cyanide through a strong blue coloring of a door from a reaction between iron within the concrete and cyanide fumes.

HCN is explosive in large concentrations, and deniers might say that this contradicts testimonies that guard smoked cigarettes in gas chambers between gassings. However, 300 parts per million of HCN in air kills a human within minutes, but the minimal concentration for an explosion is 56,000 ppm. These figures are even supported by Nazi documents.

Forensic examinations on gas chambers, crematoria etc.

Gas chamber showing Prussian blue staining

Some gas chambers remain (Majdanek), some have been rebuilt (Auschwitz) and others were destroyed (Treblinka, Sobibór).

Holocaust deniers might claim that there is no forensic proof of gassings. During R v. Zündel in 1985, Raul Hilberg, well-renowned Holocaust scholar, and author of The Destruction of the European Jews, was unable to mention any scientific report proving gassings. Though Hilberg mentioned that there were plenty of Nazi documents describing the Holocaust, this apparent absence of scientific proof has caught some deniers' attention.

However, since the trial, at least two scientific reports on the gas chambers have been published:

• Jean-Claude Pressac (1944–2003) — a French pharmacist who used to be a Holocaust denier, working in collaboration with Robert Faurisson, in 1979 undertook a forensic examination of the Auschwitz gas chambers. The result? He was shocked by the overwhelming evidence. In 1989 he published a book that confirmed the established view that the gas chambers were functional, killing between 631,000 and 711,000 prisoners.
• Deborah Lipstadt's book Denying the Holocaust won the UK libel case Irving v. Penguin Books and Lipstadt. The case contained forensic examination for the use of gas chambers.

One of the usual such claims involves the reconstructed gas chambers built by the Polish government after the Second World War at Auschwitz as a memorial to the victims. The Nazis destroyed the original gas chambers where mass murders were committed, and the simulated gas chambers at Auschwitz have never had Zyklon-B deployed in them. Holocaust deniers frequently exploit such confusion. At Majdanek, which the Nazis did not successfully destroy, evidence of the use of Zyklon-B appears in the bluing of the concrete. Hydrogen cyanide reacts with iron compounds to form the pigment Prussian blue, a strong and very stable dye.

The Leuchter Report

Holocaust denialists often point to the Armleuchter Leuchter Report as 'evidence' that the gas chambers were not gas chambers. Written by Fred A. Leuchter to defend Ernst Zündel in court, the report found that significantly fewer cyanide traces were found in the gas chambers than in the delousing chambers, and concluded that this somehow proves that the gas chambers never contained HCN. This conclusion is based on incorrect assumptions about the concentrations of HCN needed to kill lice and to kill humans. In delousing clothes, concentrations of up to 16,000 ppm are sometimes used, and exposure time can be up to 72 hours; while 300 ppm will kill people in 15 minutes or so. Not only were the concentrations themselves higher, but the length of contact was much greater. Thus, the walls of the delousing facility should have a much greater concentration of detectable cyanide today, which is what the original Leuchter report and the Polish report both confirm. The main problem with Leuchter's original report is a flaw in the major premise: that cyanide traces should be found in the homicidal gas chambers at a comparable rate as found in the delousing chambers. This is completely backward to reality, and it plays on a misunderstanding that people have about HCN. The average person would believe that it would take as much, if not more, HCN to kill a person than to kill a louse or flea. However, this is not the case. In fact, a much lower concentration of HCN is needed to kill any warm-blooded animal as opposed to cold-blooded. The team found significant HCN residue in delousing facility samples, while next to none in alleged "gas chamber" samples. If the gas chambers were used for something other than murder, no—as in zero—cyanide should have been found there. Not even the smallest trace amount. The fact that Leuchter did find trace amounts of cyanide in the gas chamber walls confirms, contrary to the Leuchter report's conclusions, that they were, in fact, gas chambers.

Much of Leuchter's claims are refuted in Errol Morris' 1999 documentary Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.

"Hitler didn't gas 6 million Jews!"

According to scholarship, the Axis powers killed millions of Jews through methods other than gassing such as 800,000 in Ghettos, or the 500,000-1,300,000 in mass shootings by death squads. These events are less known to the public than the Nazi camps in Poland, and they are still subject to research.

Deniers might point out that many laymen falsely claim that six million Jews were gassed, but that has never been claimed by scholars. Though the Jewish death toll of gas chambers is far below the total six million, it still does not contradict the mass gassings.

Skin colour

Holocaust deniers often claim that no witnesses mentioned victims' skin displaying cherry red discolouration, which usually results from poisoning by Zyklon B or carbon monoxide. First of all, the fact that witnesses did not mention skin discolouration doesn't mean it was not present; most witnesses would have been more focused on the mass murder occurring in front of them than on memorizing the victim's skin colour, not to mention that many of the corpse unloadings would have taken place in sub-optimal lighting. Secondly, many witnesses who saw the bodies of gas chamber victims actually did mention skin discolouration, including some of the most important gassing witnesses such as Henryk Tauber and Dr. Wilhelm Pfannenstiel. Thirdly, many of the victims actually died of suffocation after being pushed into an enclosed space with a limited air supply with hundreds of other people, so we would not expect their skin to be discoloured in this way. Fourthly, skin discolouration usually does not become visible to the untrained eye until around two hours after death, whereas the majority of gassing witnesses saw the bodies immediately after they were gassed.

Scratched gas chamber walls

From a Holocaust denier

One of the weirdest "debunkings" of gas chambers is that scratches are visible on the inner walls of the gas chambers in Auschwitz. Holocaust deniers have been known to point out that fingernails are too soft to leave scratch marks in concrete, which would make it impossible for Jews in the gas chamber to leave them; therefore, they must have been left by the Allies to make it appear that they were left by Jews being gassed.

The truth is that the marks are vandalism left by visitors. This is clear from the fact that parts of the wall not accessible to the public have no scratch marks on them. Even if this was not the case, it wouldn't make a difference since the Auschwitz gas chambers were destroyed at the end of the war; the ones currently in existence that have scratches on the walls are a postwar reconstruction for educational purposes.

Corpse disposal and cremation

Deniers might have objections against the capacity of corpse disposal and cremation. This is, by part, a consequence of miscalculation. Considering Auschwitz-Birkenau, the first crematory ovens were indeed overburdened, and additional ovens were constructed. The officers had to resort to burning corpses in pits.

Another objection deniers have put forth is that the amount of fuel necessary to cremate that many bodies would have been impractical. In 2000, David Irving sued an author in British high court for libel, for calling him a "Hitler partisan" who manipulated the historical record to deny the reality of the Holocaust. At the widely publicized trial, Irving (his own attorney) claimed that it would take mountains of coal to burn all the bodies. An expert witness for the defense countered by showing German patents, issued before the war, for a mass crematorium that could be run almost entirely off the body fat of the corpses disposed in it.

One common objection that deniers hold, is due in part to two facets of the crematoria which were found in Auschwitz. The first of these facets is the curious structure of the crematorium smokestack. They will often argue that it is fake because it is not directly connected to the ovens by any visible means. However, historical data from Topf and Sons (makers of the crematoria) proves that the design used in Auschwitz (and other camps) was one where the exhaust gasses from the retorts were fed down through the floor and outside to a free-standing chimney.

The second objection in regards to the ovens themselves is more arguing semantics. They often note that the designs used in the camps, in particular, Auschwitz, were not crematoriums as might be defined by modern standards; but instead were based off of a large-scale hospital incinerator design which Topf and Sons created prior to the war for industrial uses. In this, they are marginally correct that the crematoriums are in truth incinerators, but this does not remove from the discussion that the use of either would have the same results. Historians note that it is easier, both in explaining what Germany was doing during the Holocaust, as well as teaching younger people, to simply call the ovens crematoriums, as stating anything else would only confuse people.

Ash disposal

Deniers ask what happened to the ashes of the cremated corpses; the volume corresponds to a full shoebox for each body. The officers at Auschwitz and other camps had many opportunities to dump it — in rivers, on farm fields and in marshes, so ash disposal was not a problem. Much of it rained from the smokestacks. It was also used to grit icy road and paths around Auschwitz II (Birkenau), recalled Yehuda Bacon at the 1961 Adolf Eichmann trial, who had been 14 years old when he was sent to Auschwitz in December 1943.

"Auschwitz chimney not connected to anything"

Of all the arguments against the Holocaust, this is the worst. One of the crematoria at Auschwitz features a smokestack which doesn't appear attached to the furnaces themselves and thus appears fake. Problem is, the plans for the crematoria show that the crematoria in question used an under floor system to remove smoke and fumes, and featured a "free standing" chimney, which was connected underground to the furnaces.

Cremation time

Professional crematory operator Ivan Lagacé testified at the trial of Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel that cremation takes six to eight hours per body to complete, which would make it almost impossible that the crematories in Auschwitz would be able to cremate thousands of corpses in a day. However, Lagacé was basing his testimony on cremation practices in professional establishments, which use crematories that cannot hold as many corpses at the same time, cremate corpses as quickly or operate for as long as the crematories in Auschwitz. Calculations by the Nazi authorities themselves (in specific: SS-Sturmbannführer Karl Bischoff, who reported to the SS-WVHA) estimated that the five crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau could conceivably incinerate 340 (estimated of one crematorium), 768, or 1,440 (estimated of two crematoria each) corpses per day, depending on the particular facility considered.

Camp questions

Detention in Deutschland, death in Poland

Old Germany, within the borders of the Weimar Republic and annexed Austria, contained several detention camps (Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Mauthausen, etc.) set up before the war. Dachau was the first, set up in 1933 for political prisoners. Though some gassings and other executions took place there, for correctional and experimental purposes, they were not built for mass murder. Later, the Nazis built extermination camps; "camp" is, however, a misnomer, as the only residents were the guards, and prisoners were usually killed on arrival.

Most extermination camps were built in the territory that used to be Poland; Auschwitz and Chelmno were located in Ostgebiete (provinces which had been transferred from Germany to Poland in 1918, and re-annexed into Germany in 1939) or the eastern General Government (Treblinka, Sobibór, Majdanek, Bełżec), in essence, a colony run by a German military junta, planned to be annexed and settled by Germany. For the occupation, the Nazis abolished the name Poland. In this article, the camps in present-day Poland are described as "Nazi camps in Poland" to emphasize this difference, and avoid the presupposition that many of these were extermination camps. Some camps were also set up in Czechoslovakia and conquered parts of the Soviet Union.

It should be noted that none of the best-known camps were extermination camps. This is because the well-known camps are the ones that people survived. The name Auschwitz is more known than Birkenau (or Auschwitz II); the extermination department of the Auschwitz complex. Also, many parts of the Warsaw Pact (due to their own problems with collaboration and antisemitism) tried to erase the history of these extermination camps. However, this does not in any way disprove the existence of real extermination camps, such as Treblinka, Bełżec, and Sobibór.

Camp amenities: Auschwitz swimming pool, orchestras

Auschwitz I swimming pool in 2006

Auschwitz I, a detention area within the enormous Auschwitz complex, contained a firefighting water reservoir, later rebuilt into a swimming pool. Deniers might insinuate that the presence of a swimming pool is a sign of good living conditions for the prisoners. However, the pool, as most other recreational facilities, were restricted to guards, kapos, and privileged prisoners. The vast majority of the prisoners arriving at Birkenau (Auschwitz II) never got close to the swimming pool. Other deniers mistakenly present pictures of Slovak labor camp pools as Auschwitz. Extermination camps were extremely different to forced-labour camps. Peter Jašek, a historian at Ústav Pamäti Národa (UPN), said that having a swimming pool in concentration and forced-labor camps wasn't unusual and from 1943 "some measures were taken to improve it due to the improving of the work for prisoners”, but that doesn't mean the living conditions weren't disastrous.

Other Holocaust deniers have presented survivor testimonies about orchestras, theatres, and cinemas in Auschwitz and other camps. Just like the swimming pool, these amenities were a privilege for few prisoners. It is hard to argue that privileges granted to inmate collaborators disprove the existence of the Holocaust (or the prisons themselves)!

"Why didn't the Jews fight back?"

Holocaust deniers and other laymen might raise confusion about the claim that the Jews did not fight back when sent to certain death.

In fact, there were Jewish revolts with approximately 100 resistance groups in various ghettos. The most famous ghetto uprising was the Warsaw ghetto uprising where many Jews of that city decided to die fighting rather than be sent to the death camps. The camps in Sobibór and Treblinka both had uprisings that resulted in hundreds killed. Others escaped from Kruszyna, Minsk-Mazowiecki, and Janowska where they joined partisan units which fought against the Nazis. Even in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Jews resisted but were, ultimately, all executed.

Nuremberg Trials and subsequent trials

Nuremberg Trials. Defendants in their dock, circa 1945-1946

See the main article on this topic: Nuremberg trials

The Nuremberg trials and their subsequent followups represent a popular piece of evidence in support of the Holocaust. However, even if the trials had never taken place, the facts of the Holocaust would still remain. These claims do not disprove the Holocaust. On the contrary, the trials unearthed massive evidence for it.

"We knew nothing"

When the facts of the Holocaust were presented to the defendants of the Nuremberg Trials, as well as other German and Axis citizens, many of them replied "davon haben wir nichts gewusst", translated to "about that, we knew nothing". This statement might be read as if the common man was ignorant of the Holocaust until 1945. Holocaust deniers might exploit this perceived ignorance, to argue that evidence and testimonies have been fabricated.

The phrase davon haben wir nichts gewusst implies that the speaker knew that something was going on (davon is roughly translated "about that"), so the translation We knew nothing is incomplete.

In fact, the extermination campaign was known outside Germany as early as 1942. Whether the common man did believe the news or did bother about it, is another question.

Tortured testimony

Many thousands of German officers and guards were stationed at the camps in Poland and were suspected of carrying out or ordering the Holocaust (e.g., Franz Suchomel, Hans Stark). Many were sent to trial, and some of them confessed or testified about mass murder.

Holocaust deniers claim that these testimonies were given out of torture. In truth, some Nazis were mistreated during the Allied occupation, though The Nizkor Project comments "this is not a serious factor in the overall picture." But several German veterans testified about mass murder decades after the occupation.

Moreover, Holocaust deniers might claim that the Nuremberg trials coerced the defendants to make false statements about what happened to the Jews. This is contradicted by the fact that most defendants who were found guilty for detention and extermination (Kaltenbrunner, Frank, Jodl, etc.) were hanged, while the defendants not involved with the Jews (Dönitz, von Papen, Hess, etc.) got away with prison, or acquittal.

One bizarre claim, sometimes used to poison the well on the Nuremberg trials by association, says that many dozens ("137 out of 139") of the defendants in the Malmedy massacre trial had their testicles crushed. The purported source for this, Judge Edward L. Van Roden, explicitly denied under oath ever having made it; his endorsement of the claim in an article of the anti-war Progressive magazine occurred apparently as a result of his misunderstanding what a "byline" was. Van Roden attested there was "no general or systematic use of improper methods to secure prosecution evidence for the use at the trials." One familiar name, Senator Joseph McCarthy, was tricked into endorsing the ball-busting claim by Rudolf Aschenauer, one of the defense attorneys for the accused war criminals. Aschenauer contacted McCarthy and told him the story, then McCarthy testified about it and Aschenauer in turn used McCarthy's statements as proof for the story. The US Senate's Military Affairs Committee ultimately found no evidence for the claims. One sympathetic biographer for McCarthy, ever in character, accused Aschenauer of being a Communist agent trying to spread anti-Americanism.

Unfair trials

Holocaust deniers might claim that the Nuremberg trials were unfair. These claims do not disprove the Holocaust even if the trials were unfair. The purpose of a trial is to evaluate the defendants' guilt, not to decide whether the crime has happened.

One complaint is that the judges were recruited from Allied countries, enemies of Nazi Germany — and that the defendants could not expect a fair trial from their erstwhile enemies, and should be tried by peers from their own countries. This request is absurd — if a defendant could refuse a judge belonging to an enemy country, no one who committed a crime abroad or on international territory, or espionage or terrorism against a government, could ever be brought to justice. There is another good reason why the judges were not German — the German Reich had ceased to exist in May, 1945, and could therefore not provide any certified judges. West and East Germany were not founded until 1949. And if there are reasons for Allied judges to be biased against the defendants, the argument could be used that German judges would be biased for them. Moreover, West German courts (with German judges) have held subsequent trials, such as the Frankfurt trials.

Another complaint is that the the war crime trials were deliberately set up so that only war crimes commited by the Axis powers but were not commited by the Allied powers were considered worthy of trial and conviction. Freda Utley states:

“”Few Americans at home may be aware of it, but their representatives at Nuremberg have expressly stated that the victors are not bound by the same laws as the vanquished. When the German defense counsel argued that if it was a crime against international law for the Germans in occupied Poland and Russia to confiscate private property, use civilians and prisoners of war as forced laborers, and starve the people in the occupied territories, then why is it not also a crime for American, British, French or Russian Military Government to do the same thing, they were told: "The Allied Powers are not subject to the limitations of the Hague Convention and rules of land warfare."

An example of this is Karl Dönitz, who was found not guilty after demonstrating that the Allied force committed the same war crime he did:

“”"In view of all the facts proved and in particular of an order of the British Admiralty announced on the 8th May, 1940, according to which all vessels should be sunk at sight in the Skagerrak, and the answers to interrogatories by Admiral Nimitz stating that unrestricted submarine warfare was carried on in the Pacific Ocean by the United States from the first day that nation entered the war, the sentence of Doenitz is not assessed on the ground of his breaches of the international law of submarine warfare."

This inevitably means that it isn't that German war criminals were somehow not war criminals, but rather that many of them such were found not guilty. Thus, the unfairness of the trial does not serve to defend war criminals of Nazi Germany, but rather to show how many of them were not deemed guilty by the Tribunal despite them having committed atrocities, simply because the Allied force did the same. So this objection to the trial as a defense for Holocaust denial ends up being self-refuting for it only shows how many Nazi war criminals got away with their crimes, rather than demonstrating otherwise.

Subsequent trials

The Primary Nuremberg Trials were held in 1946 against 24 top-ranked German officers, politicians, and industrialists.

In the subsequent Nuremberg trials, from 1946 to 1949, the United States held trials against low- and medium-rank German officers, bureaucrats and industrialists. There was indeed some political pressure on the courts. However, the American military wanted the judges to be softer on the defendants, because the Cold War had begun, and the United States needed the Germans on their side against the Soviet Union. This dilemma (which is described by the feature film Judgment in Nuremberg), contradicts the Holocaust deniers' story.

The Einsatzgruppen trial was the 9^th of the 12 subsequent trials. There were 24 SS officers, known as Einsatzkommandos, who were tried. The Einsatzkommandos were ordered to operate behind the front lines in Eastern Europe with their units and to murder partisans, Roma, disabled persons, political leaders, Slavs, and others. The Einsatzkommandos' own documents were used as evidence in the trials, documents which showed that their units murdered more than 1 million people between 1941-1943.

Accused Germans, Auschwitz Trial Kraków, November 24-26, 1947

The Auschwitz Trials were held in Kraków in 1947, by Polish authorities, against SS members involved in the Holocaust. Though Poland was a dictatorship and a satellite state of the Soviet Union at the time and there are reasonable complaints about the rule of law, Holocaust deniers tend not to have objections about this trial, partly because it is largely unknown in the West.

The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials (also known as the "second Auschwitz trials") took place from 1963 to 1965. Judges and defending lawyers were appointed by the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany). Some defendants were imprisoned for life, some were sent to time-limited sentences, and others were acquitted. The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials were largely open to the public.

The last Holocaust trials, probably definitely, were held in the 2010s and 2020s, with prosecutors and judges working for the reunited Federal Republic of Germany.

Not once during any of these trials going on for more than 60 years has any of the defendants (or their lawyers) used a complete denial defense: a statement that the alleged crime did not happen at all. In contrast, the mostly used defense strategy has been the superior orders defense, which is technically an admission, or a confession. The "superior orders strategy" is so strongly associated with these trials that it is now called the Nuremberg defense.

Soap and lampshades: Holocaust-related myths prove that the Holocaust is a myth, right?

The Holocaust gave birth to many rumors about atrocities. Some of these turned out to be true while others were false. Examples include allegations that the Nazis manufactured soap and lampshades out of their victims' remains on an industrial scale. The fact that these allegations have been disproved is supposed to imply that Holocaust distortionists have been successful changing the minds of historians and that the main facts of the Holocaust are also in question. However, it has no relevance to the big picture of the Holocaust, just as misconceptions of science by the media or the public have no relevance to the validity of the science being misconceived, usually biology (evolution, natch), astronomy, or physics.

Professor Spanner from the Danzig Anatomical Institute freely confessed (not even in a court) that he used the fat of the corpses that underwent the process of maceration to make human soap (which, he claimed, was used to make joint preparations flexible, while some others claimed it was also used to clean up the lab). However, according to The Nizkor Project (an Internet project documenting and refuting Holocaust denial), serious historians of the Holocaust never believed the Nazis mass-produced soap from the corpses of Jews, so it was never a case of historians changing their minds to begin with.

In any event, soap is manufactured from fats, and the emaciated victims of the Holocaust and the mistreatment of Soviet POWs (other 'candidates' for such treatment due to sheer numbers and the frequency with which they were murdered) would rarely have had the sufficient fats for processing into soap. Nazi Germany had copious sources of fats from livestock butchered for meat.

There is a credible testimony from Buchenwald that at least 1 human lampshade was made (this was testified to by the inmate who made it himself on the orders from above), although the popular rumors of mass production are unproven.

Distortion tactics

Deniers (particularly distortionists) do not always deny the deportation of Jews from all of Europe and the detention in camps in Poland (which was semi-annexed by Greater Germany and abolished in name). They have several explanation models to motivate the Nazi deportation of Jews. None of them are bulletproof.

Deportation to Madagascar

Auschwitz, Sobibor, and other international concentration camps were located in Greater Germany. So — if the Nazis intend to expel the Jews out of Greater Germany, why did they take the effort to ship Jews into Greater Germany from distant occupied countries such as Norway, France and Greece (which were ruled by puppet governments and were not going to be annexed)? In other words: if the policy was to get Jews out, why bring them in?

The Nazis used several euphemisms for killing; one was "deportation", according to the Nazi policy to cleanse Germany from Jews. The Nazis indeed had ideas of a Jewish homeland in Madagascar. Madagascar was under Vichy French control (but practically isolated from Germany) until 1942, when it was occupied by the Allies.

Forced labor

Some deniers claim that Jews were rounded up for "mere" forced labor. This does not explain why small children and elderly people were deported, separated from their families. Since Poles and other Slavic peoples were used for forced labor, abducting more of these people would have been more economical than transporting Jews from distant occupied countries, such as Norway, France, and Greece.

Security risks

Some deniers, such as the IHR, claim that the internment of Jews was motivated since they posed a security risk. However, while most Jews were deported to Poland, Nazis did not routinely deport resistance fighters or non-Jewish civilians from occupied nations. In any case, this explanation is no good for the deportation of children as young as five, and old people in their eighties.

Slaughter of millions vs genocide

See the main article on this topic: Not as bad as

Some Holocaust deniers use this fact in the reasoning "the Jews were not exterminated, therefore, it was not a real genocide." The simplest response is that the UN's definition of genocide does not require the successful implementation of a plan. Why? Because killing every single member of a given race is nearly impossible. Some people can pass as other races, like many Jews did. Some members of every race will be dispersed all over the world. Some would hide, bunkered, for decades. There wouldn't be a single successful genocide in human history if perfection was required — and this would make the word "genocide" meaningless.

Moreover, even if the Holocaust wasn't a genocide, it was still an atrocious loss of human life that deserves condemnation.

It was the Muslims' fault

One particularly bizarre distortionist theory is that the Holocaust really did happen, and six million Jews really were killed, but it was somehow the Muslims' (and often Palestinians in particular) fault. Supporters of this theory claim that Hitler didn't really want to exterminate the Jews, but that the Mufti of Jerusalem made him do so. Hitler really did meet with the Mufti in November 1941 as proponents allege, but Hitler had spoken publicly of his desire to exterminate the Jews for over two years before that. Furthermore, death camps were already under construction for months before Hitler met with the Mufti. Even more bizarrely, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly supported this claim.

Red herrings tactics

Holocaust deniers might use red herrings, arguments without relevance to the reality of the Holocaust. Here is a brief description of red herrings in Holocaust denial:

Laws against Holocaust denial

If it's against the law, it must be right! In countries in red, Holocaust denial is prohibited by law, as of December 2022.

Denial of crimes against humanity is outlawed in eighteen European countries and Israel. In the Netherlands, courts have ruled that genocide denial is hate speech, and therefore implicitly illegal. While these laws are an affront to free speech and a terrifying precedent, deniers who claim that these laws are part of the conspiracy ignore that:

• These laws are much younger than Holocaust denial itself. Most of them were made in the late 1980s or 1990s, as a counter-measure against the rise of white supremacism in a European generation which had no experience of the war. During much of post-war history — more than 40 years — Holocaust denial has been legal in all countries of the world. It was only in 1990 that the French government enacted the Gayssot Law, which declares questioning the scale or existence of any crimes against humanity a crime. This was the first European statute explicitly outlawing denial of the Holocaust.

• Most of these laws outlaw denial of all crimes against humanity, not limited to the ones committed by the Axis of World War II, but also explicitly (as in Poland, Slovakia, or the Czech Republic) or implicitly including crimes by Communist regimes, and other crimes often emphasized by Holocaust deniers. Only in Romania is the law limited to Holocaust denial. The Israeli law is the only one of these laws actually mentioning Jews.

• Currently, there are 174 countries, and several autonomous territories, without any law or judicial precedent against Holocaust denial. This list includes all of South America, Africa, Oceania, Asia (except Israel; as if any Holocaust denier would want to go there in the first place), North America outside of Canada, and 33 of the 50 countries in Europe. On July 8 1986, the Israeli parliament passed a law criminalizing denial of the Holocaust. In 2007, The European Union approved legislation that makes Holocaust denial a crime punishable by jail time. The laws against Holocaust denial do not even cover the areas affected by the Holocaust; genocide denial is legal in the former Yugoslav states and several other countries where the Nazis abducted Jews during the war.

• The number of countries banning genocide denial has been largely constant since the 1990s. Spain repealed their law against genocide denial in 2007. Parliaments in United Kingdom and Sweden have rejected proposals for such laws. The European Parliament has also rejected a directive to criminalize genocide denial. Canada's Supreme Court sentenced James Keegstra (1934–2014) in R. v. Keegstra in 1990 for hate speech not limited to Holocaust denial, but in R. v. Zundel in 1992 they acquitted Zündel and declared Holocaust denial to be protected by the Canadian Constitution; although they passed a law criminalizing Holocaust denial in 2022, although the act leaves a defense that says one can't be convicted if they "establish that the statements communicated were true". The only recent law against genocide denial was made in Hungary in 2010. Previously, the trivialization of the Holocaust was illegal. The new law prohibits "denial of genocide committed by Communist or Nazi system", with no special mentioning of the Holocaust or Jews.

• Deniers may claim that these laws are a product of Jewish influence. In that case, why is Holocaust denial legal in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, which have significant Jewish populations, but is illegal in Poland, Romania and Lithuania, where hardly any Jews live today (and why do so few Jews live there)?

Currently Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czechia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Israel, Liechtenstein, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Slovakia and Switzerland have such laws. Note that in most of these countries, it's also just as illegal to deny crimes committed by the USSR.

Holocaust compared to other atrocities

See the main article on this topic: List of atrocities cited by Holocaust deniers

The Holocaust is not the largest mass murder in history. Deniers might, in a ruse of whataboutism, compare British and American atrocities (bombing of Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki etc.) to Nazi atrocities, but the millions of Axis civilian victims are still an order of magnitude more than the civilians killed by the Western allies. In terms of the international legal status of genocide, the primary issue is intent, not numbers of people killed. Mass murders that lack the provable element of intent are still considered crimes against humanity. So, from a legal perspective, arguing about whether one atrocity killed more people than another is moot.

• Holocaust deniers might claim that the Allied bombing of Dresden killed around 250,000 people, though the death toll was only 20,000-25,000 people—lower in fact than the death toll of the bombing of Hamburg in 1943.
• The Allied bombings and detentions were never censored or denied.
• Deniers might point out that Allied leaders were never tried or sentenced for war crimes. However, no defendant in Nuremberg was tried or sentenced only for war crimes.
• Though Japanese-American prison camps were shameful, this is a completely different case from the Holocaust because Japanese American prisoners did not suffer mass extermination, starvation, epidemics or forced labor, nor were they stripped of their citizenship.
• The IHR compares the Nazis' Nuremberg Laws to the Jim Crow laws or other segregation laws in some states of the USA at the same time. This has no relevance, and the Nazis were much, much worse. Jews were stripped of their citizenship, and violation usually led to a death sentence.
• Just as in the case of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union invaded neutral countries, used forced labor and murdered civilians. But that does not disprove the Holocaust.
• Israel's armed forces have killed potentially hundreds of thousands of people since 1948. This number is dwarfed by the Holocaust's death toll. The IHR also compares the Nuremberg Laws to present-day laws of Israel. While Israel's system of apartheid is despicable, the Nuremburg laws went much further.
• Based on the aftermath of these and other atrocities (the Armenian genocide, Rwandan genocide, etc.) Holocaust deniers might claim that the Holocaust gets too much attention. Holocaust deniers are welcome to commemorate these other atrocities, and be attentive to deniers.

What about white genocide?

See the main article on this topic: White genocide

Many holocaust deniers are also believers in the idea of an ongoing modern white genocide. Some Holocaust deniers will raise the question "What about the ongoing white genocide through immigration? If the Holocaust was so bad, why don't you fight against white genocide?" However, this is just a red herring and a distraction tactic. The existence (or not) of the Holocaust is independent of the existence (or not) of modern white genocide. This tactic is an attempt to DARV those who believe in the Holocaust and put them on the defensive.

Claimed bias against Holocaust denial

Holocaust deniers might claim that governments and (Jewish) mass media use the Holocaust as propaganda, and oppress "revisionist" views. First, this is irrelevant. Second, the Holocaust deniers also have had their endorsements. Iran held a conference dedicated to Holocaust denial, and deniers have spread their word in many countries through books, radio, and the Internet.

The Jewish agenda

See the main articles on this topic: Holocaust profit controversy and Holocaust envy

Onward, Jewish soldiers! (No, this war did not happen.)

Holocaust deniers might claim that the global Jewish community "declared war" on Germany in 1933, according to a headline in the London Daily Express on March 24, 1933, saying "Judea Declares War on Germany," describing a proposed Jewish boycott of German goods. That was not a literal war.

Holocaust deniers might assert the existence of a "Holocaust industry", claiming that the Holocaust was made up to "blackmail" Western governments and German corporations for economic compensation. This is irrelevant. Reparations have been paid to survivors, not to people who were killed.

Holocaust deniers might also complain about survivors' profiteering on books and lectures. This, too, is irrelevant, and many high-ranked Nazis earned royalties from books after the war — maybe the Nazi game all along was to kill a few million and make a killing in lecture fees? In all seriousness, the use of the Holocaust by any group for political capital (or gain of any sort) has no bearing whatever on its historical importance, nor should it in any way affect the general understanding of the events.

General conspiracy theory/pseudo-history components

Holocaust deniers might point out that many other people in history have falsely confessed crimes after torture or other pressure (such as witchcraft). However, the Holocaust is backed by technical evidence. Also, not a single one of the thousands of guards and officers has withdrawn their confessions, or provided a dissenting confession.

Holocaust deniers frequently repeat the cliché that victors write history. On a literal plane, this is false. Dönitz, Speer, and other high-ranked Nazis, wrote and published their memoirs. Re-telling the events of the war is a strong tradition in Germany.

Some history books might tell that Jews were deported to concentration camps, without mentioning the gas chambers or the death toll. Some do not use the term "Holocaust." However, a book is nothing more than the words of its author. If a textbook omits the Holocaust, we should go ask the author why. The most probable answer would be "lack of space." For example, there are claims that since Winston Churchill didn't mention the Holocaust in his autobiography, it didn't happen. However, the term "Holocaust" simply wasn't in common use when he wrote it, and there are indeed passages his writings and at least one in that very book that do mention the Nazis' slaughter of Jews.

Martin Glynn's "Holocaust" article from 1919

Martin H. Glynn, former Governor of New York State, wrote an article in October 1919 to encourage American Jews to send humanitarian aid to starving European Jews in the wake of World War I and the Spanish flu.

By coincidence, Glynn counted "six million" European Jews, and used the word "holocaust" (see above) to describe the threatening famine. This has led to some interesting interpretations.

Metapedia merely claims that the article was propaganda:

The American Hebrew on 31 October 1919 published a propaganda article under the headline "The Crucifixion of Jews Must Stop!" In the article, it was claimed that during the world war because of epidemics, starvation and "holocaust", six million Jews might have succumbed. Later everything turned out to be war propaganda.

Other Holocaust deniers have used this article to "prove" that the idea of staging the murder of six million Jews originated from at least 1919. This idea has several issues:

• Besides the phrases six million and holocaust, the article has nothing in common with the Holocaust which we know from World War II — although deniers might falsely claim it to mention murder, Germany or the war.
• Deniers claim that the article originated as a speech. This statement is not backed by evidence, nor does it matter.
• Deniers still have to explain exactly what this article proves. Was the claimed plan to stage a genocide already worked out in 1919? Was the "staged" holocaust just an a posteriori carbon copy of Mr. Glynn's article?

Questions to ask a Holocaust denier

• Did the Nazis exterminate Romani, gays, and political opponents?
  • If so, the gas chambers and crematories were functional, despite Holocaust deniers' "proof" that they were useless.
  • If not, these groups of people were also part of the conspiracy. How large can a conspiracy become?
• Temporarily set aside your objections to my evidence for the Holocaust. Other comparable mass killings have about the same amount of supporting evidence. If you can deny the Holocaust, then can't you also deny other mass violence — such as [select the most applicable] the Great Leap Forward, the Holodomor, or the Atlantic Slave Trade, the decimation of native populations of the Americas?
  • [If they are religious] Scholars agree that there is far better evidence for the Holocaust than [pivotal religious event]. Why put any faith in [event] but deny the Holocaust? Given how important [event] is to [religion], isn't there even more reason to think that historians and scholars would lie about [event] than about the Holocaust?
• If you were a Jew, would you kill 6 million of your own just to get sympathy?
• Nazi documents indicate that approximately 1.5 million Jews were sent during WWII to three camps in Eastern Poland: Sobibor, Belzec, and Treblinka. After these deportations, all trace of these people disappeared. If they weren't killed at these three camps, can you provide evidence for even 1% of them turning up someplace else?
• Documents showing evidence of personal culpability of Nazi leaders and ranking subordinates were discovered in huge numbers after the defeat of Nazi Germany. Such documents included architectural plans for the camps, engineering drafts, test results, accounting ledgers, railroad timetables, payroll records, commendations, orders, deportation lists, and death counts. The victorious Allies could not have forged so many documents so quickly, and Nazis who may have claimed that their signatures on incriminating documents were forgeries did not claim that the documents themselves were forgeries. If these incriminating documents were generated by the Nazis, then why would they create such evidence that would surely lead to their imprisonment or execution as war criminals?
• Have you seriously considered the possibility that you are a despicable human being, and you may, in fact, have lost your fucking mind and you just don't know it yet? And just about how low can you stoop when even former concentration camp personnel themselves lashed out at the likes of you who keep on denying about the Holocaust?

In popular culture

A critically-acclaimed 2016 theatrical film, Denial, told the story of Deborah Lipstadt's legal defense against a libel suit brought by Holocaust denier David Irving. The film was written by David Hare and Deborah Lipstadt, and directed by Mick Jackson. It was nominated in the year's BAFTA awards as outstanding British film, but lost to I, Daniel Blake.

See also

• Alt-right glossary
• Armenian genocide denial
• Gilad Atzmon — has been accused of denialism, but he denies this
• Himmler on the execution of Jews
• Holocaust envy
• Holodomor denial
• International Jewish conspiracy
• Category:Japanese war crimes denial (Comfort women, Rape of Nanjing, Unit 731, etc) — Modern Germany considers Holocaust denial illegal in criminal law, and the German government often apologizes on past war crimes due to Denazification, while modern Japan tends to deny or even glorify its war crimes; the Japanese government actively supports historical "revisionist" projects.
• Metapedia
• Nizkor Project
• Potemkin village for Theresienstadt
• Anna Rosmus, who exposed a few instances of Holocaust denial
• White extinction scenario

External links

• See the Wikipedia article on Holocaust deniers.
• See the Wikipedia article on Secondary antisemitism.

Holocaust-accepting sources:

• Rebutting the "Twitter denial": the most popular denier memes debunked by Sergey Romanov
• Nizkor project
• Remember.org — A People's History of the Holocaust and Genocide

• Auschwitz Paintings by Holocaust survivor Jan Komsk

• Holocaust denial at The Skeptic's Dictionary
• Rewriting History: Holocaust Revisionism Today, published by HOPE not Hate (PDF)
• Holocaust Denial on Trial: Using History to Confront Distortions
• Pratique de l’Histoire et Dévoiements Négationnistes (French)
• The Holocaust History Project (a sister project of PHDN)
• /r/AskHistorians: Monday Methods: Holocaust Denial and how to combat it

• Is there any factual basis for Holocaust denial?, on The Straight Dope

Holocaust-denying sources:

• /r/holocaust -- a Holocaust denial subreddit, to see the kinds of tactics used
• RationalWiki on Holocaust Denial, The Right Stuff (Archive)