Holocaust denial

Holocaust denial, or Holocaust distortion, refers to the false claim that the Holocaust did not happen or was not as bad as commonly believed. Historians agree that the Nazis killed at least 6,000,000 Jews (67% of pre-war European Jews) in the Holocaust, mostly in Nazi concentration camps within occupied territories across Europe back then.

Countries with laws against Holocaust denial.

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.

Background

Definition of the Holocaust

As per the Holocaust Encyclopedia, run by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM),

The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million European Jews by the Nazi German regime and its allies and collaborators.

According to Yad Vashem:

The Holocaust was unprecedented genocide, total and systematic, perpetrated by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, with the aim of annihilating the Jewish people.

As per the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust:

The Holocaust was the attempt by the Nazis and their collaborators to murder all the Jews in Europe.

According to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA):

[The Holocaust was] the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis and their accomplices during World War II, [also] known as [...] the Shoah.

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
Hutton Gibson	August 26, 1918	May 11, 2020	Peekskill, New York, United States	Opus Dei member
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

Definition

Contrary to public misconceptions, Holocaust denial does not simply mean denying that the Holocaust happened. Instead, it also includes 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. Whether like-minded people see the person as denying the Holocaust is irrelevant.

Denialist claims

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

Type	Rhetoric
Common	They say the Nazis "did not use death camps or gas chambers to kill Jews". Holocaust deniers say the Nazi regime was "only trying to deport Jews, not to kill all of them". They say there was "no official Nazi policy to kill Jews", and that "no Nazi leader ever gave an order to kill all of the Jews". 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.

Tactics

Just Asking Questions

Main article: 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. Holocaust deniers tend to claim that they are "only asking questions" about the Holocaust while rejecting the abundant amount of evidence that proves that the Holocaust happened.

Writing for the Slate magazine, Johannes Breit, a German historian, stated that JAQ used to be seen frequently in posts made by Holocaust deniers in Reddit's r/AskHistorian subreddit (2.2M subscribers), which prompted its moderators to ban them from participation in 2018, while Reddit has been long been criticized for uncontrolled antisemitism. American historian Deborah Lipstadt (1947 – ) commented on JAQ's potential impact:

Properly camouflaged, Holocaust denial has a good chance of finding a foothold among coming generations.

The Institute for Historical Review (IHR), a self-declared academic group that has been promoting Holocaust denial since 1978, uses JAQ in many of their publications. The Counter Extremism Project summarized IHR's activities as follows:

They do not deny history but seek to provide more in-depth investigations to ascertain the truth [. ... They claim] to have no position [... but] "encourage more objective investigation."

While lying about being neutral, the IHR advances the antisemitic trope that the Holocaust was "invented" by Jews to "further Jewish-Zionist interests." The IHR also pushed the myth that "Nazi Germany actively supported Zionism" by presenting relevant history without context.

IHR's Holocaust distortion has had a considerable impact across the political spectrum. Former London mayor Ken Livingstone (1945 – ), who was a British Labour Party member until 2018, promoted the myth. So did the Palestinian Authority's leader and American Trotskyist activist writer Lenni Brenner (1937 – ), who published a book endorsing the myth. Since then, Brenner has adamantly denied inspiring Holocaust distortion or encouraging antisemitism's global resurgence, even though the book's content has been exploited extensively by antisemites on the far right and far left to trivialize the Holocaust and demonize the vast majority of diaspora Jews who support Israel's right to exist.

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 article: 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 enable the rehabilitation of Nazi antisemitism and 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 and English Wikipedia.

Rebuttal to Holocaust denial

Evidence includes the word of Sonderkommandos like these.

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:

• 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 people who saw what the Nazis did. 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.
• The camps. Pieces of Nazi concentration camps, death camps, and work camps still exist.
• Other evidence, like population statistics.

Related pages

• Holodomor denial
• Bosnian genocide denial
• Rwandan genocide denial
• Cambodian genocide denial
• Holocaust uniqueness debate