Holocaust denial

Holocaust denial, or Holocaust distortion, is the false belief that the Holocaust did not happen, or was not as bad as it was. Holocaust deniers make false claims like these:

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

There is very strong and clear evidence that all these claims by Holocaust deniers are false.

Background

The Auschwitz concentration camps stand as a testament that antisemitism caused one of the worst genocides in human history.

A Holocaust memorial outside Auschwitz concentration camp I.

Countries with laws against Holocaust denial.

Further information: Vichy syndrome and Leon Rupnik § Trial

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

A trend of Holocaust denial, some state-sponsored, is seen in other European countries, including Austria, Croatia, Czechia, Hungary, Germany, Italy and Poland. In the book Decoding Antisemitism, co-author Hagen Troschke said that the common strategies of such denial consisted of:

1. Making some Holocaust perpetrators look better than they were
2. Reducing the Holocaust responsibility to a small group of perpetrators
3. Doubting the scientifically proven death toll
4. Blaming Jews for the Holocaust
5. Equating the Holocaust with other crimes against humanity

Some scholars said that Holocaust denial had gone mainstream amid the rise of nationalism across Europe, where Jews were sometimes equated with the disliked Soviet communists against whom the Holocaust was considered "a reaction".

Some described the phenomenon with the concept mnemonic politics, where nationalist governments distorted the Holocaust by painting their ethnic majority as the victims rather than the Jews or Roma. Such denial is sometimes rooted in the conspiracy theory that the focus on Jews is an EU plot to suppress national identity and promote "cosmopolitanism" and "multiculturalism".

Definition

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

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

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

Denialist claims

An example of vandalism promoting Holocaust denial on Wikipedia

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

Type	Rhetoric
Common	They say the Nazis "did not use death camps or gas chambers to kill Jews". Holocaust deniers say the Nazi regime was "only trying to deport Jews, not to kill all of them". They say there was "no official Nazi policy to kill Jews", and that "no Nazi leader ever gave an order to kill all of the Jews". History experts agree that the Nazis killed at least 6,000,000 Jews during the Holocaust. Holocaust deniers say that far fewer Jews actually died. They also claim that many of these victims died of diseases, like typhus, instead of being murdered by the Nazis. They say that evidence about the Holocaust is fake. They say there are errors and differences in stories told by Holocaust survivors and so the stories cannot be believed.
Other	They say the allies treated enemy prisoners of war just as badly as the Nazis treated the Jews. They say that after being taken prisoner, many Nazis gave confessions about having committed war crimes. Holocaust deniers say these people said things that were not true because they were tortured. They say that during World War II, "the Allies made up fake stories about the Holocaust to make Germans look evil" Jews and the Allies "spread these fake stories as part of a bigger plan" to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine Jews continue to spread these stories to get sympathy and to get support for the state of Israel.

Just Asking Questions

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

Sealioning

As a similar concept to JAQ, sealioning refers to the act of repeating the same questions that have already been answered while faking ignorance and politeness. It is also a common tactic among Holocaust deniers on online forums and social media.

Doubting Holocaust uniqueness

Main page: Holocaust uniqueness debate

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

Some of them also accuse Jews of "owning the Holocaust" or "extorting compensation from European governments", and rewrite the Holocaust's history to inflate Jewish collaboration with Nazi Germans so as to blame Jews for their own suffering. These false claims are common on social media, especially Reddit.

Rebuttal

Evidence of Jewish prisoners being forced to help the Sonderkommandos destroy other victims' bodies.

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

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

Holocaust deniers

Holocaust deniers usually call themselves Holocaust revisionists to make themselves look good. Their usual claim is that the Holocaust is "a hoax made up by Jewish people working together." It is a crime to deny the Holocaust in Israel and in many European countries, especially in Germany. Some Holocaust deniers, like Ernst Zündel, have been charged with crimes.

Prominent Holocaust deniers

Name	Birth	Death	Origin	Affiliations
Ali Khamenei	April 19, 1939		Mashhad, Iran	Supreme Leader of Iran
David Irving	March 24, 1938		Hutton, Essex, England	A "historian" who is an alumnus of the ICL and UCL
Ernst Zündel	April 24, 1939	August 5, 2017	A German graphic artist
Hutton Gibson	August 26, 1918	May 11, 2020	Peekskill, New York, United States	Opus Dei member
Jean-Marie Le Pen	June 20, 1928	January 7, 2025	La Trinité-sur-Mer, Morbihan, France	Founder of the National Front
Louis Farrakhan	May 11, 1933		The Bronx, New York	Leader of Black nationalist religious movement Nation of Islam (NOI)
Paul Rassinier	March 18, 1906	July 28, 1967	Bermont, France	A French Resistance fighter who survived a Nazi concentration camp
Pierre Guillaume	December 22, 1940	July 11, 2023	France	An anarcho-Marxist
Richard Williamson	March 8, 1940	January 29, 2025	Buckinghamshire, England, United Kingdom	Society of Saint Pius X
Robert Faurisson	January 25, 1929	October 21, 2018	Shepperton, England	University of Lyon professor of literature
Roger Garaudy	July 17, 1913	June 13, 2012	Marseille, France	A former French Communist Party member

Holocaust Denial Media

• 

  Members of a Sonderkommando 1005 unit pose next to a bone-crushing machine in the Janowska concentration camp (photo taken in August 1944, after camp's liberation).

• 

  April 12, 1945: Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower, Omar Bradley and George S. Patton inspect an improvised crematory pyre at Ohrdruf concentration camp.

• 

  United States Army clerks with evidence collected for the Nuremberg trials

• 

  Protest in Brazil against former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, criticizing his Holocaust denial

• The Supreme leader of Iran Khamenei has denied Holocaust on multiple occasions.

• 

  Jewish World Population without Holocaust (mln people) by Sergio Della Pergola

Related pages

• International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance
• Holodomor denial
• Deborah Lipstadt