Holocaust denial

Holocaust denial, or Holocaust distortion, refers to the false belief that the Holocaust did not happen, or was not as bad as it was.

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,^[1] Croatia,^[2] Czechia,^[1][3] Hungary,^[4] Germany,^[1] Italy^[1] and Poland.^[5][6] In the book Decoding Antisemitism, co-author Hagen Troschke said that the common strategies of such denial consisted of:

1. Making some Holocaust perpetrators^[a] look better than they were^[7][b]
2. Reducing the Holocaust responsibility to a small group of perpetrators^[7][c]
3. Doubting the scientifically proven death toll^[7][10]
4. Blaming Jews for the Holocaust^[7][d]
5. Equating the Holocaust with other crimes against humanity^[7][e]

Some scholars said that Holocaust denial had gone mainstream^[12] amid the rise of nationalism across Europe,^[13][7] where Jews were sometimes equated with the disliked Soviet communists against whom the Holocaust was considered "a reaction".^[7][8]

Some described the phenomenon with the concept mnemonic politics,^[3] where nationalist governments distorted the Holocaust by painting their ethnic majority as the victims rather than the Jews or Roma.^[3][14] Such denial is sometimes rooted in the conspiracy theory that the focus on Jews is an EU plot to suppress national identity^[3][15] and promote "cosmopolitanism" and "multiculturalism".^[3][16]

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".[17][18] 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".[17][19] History experts agree that the Nazis killed at least 6,000,000 Jews during the Holocaust.[18][17] 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.[18][17] They say that evidence about the Holocaust is fake.[18][17] They say there are errors and differences in stories told by Holocaust survivors and so the stories cannot be believed.[18][17]
Other	They say the allies treated enemy prisoners of war just as badly as the Nazis treated the Jews.[18][17] 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.[18][17] 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.[18][17]

Tactics

Just Asking Questions

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

Sealioning

As a similar concept to JAQ, sealioning refers to the act of repeating the same questions that have already been answered while faking ignorance and politeness.^[20] It is also a common tactic among Holocaust deniers on online forums and social media.^[21][22]

Doubting Holocaust uniqueness

Main article: Holocaust uniqueness debate

Some well-educated antisemites are more skillful at promoting Holocaust denial.^[23] They do not deny that the Holocaust happened,^[23] but they cast doubt on the Holocaust's nature,^[23] ignore the historical context leading up to the Holocaust,^[23] and abusively compare the Holocaust to other historical events.^[7][23] They do this to whitewash the Holocaust and dehumanize Holocaust victims so as to whitewash Nazi antisemitism and justify the mass murder of Jews.^[23] Such behavior is rejected by mainstream historians, including Emil Fackenheim, Yehuda Bauer, Deborah Lipstadt and Daniel Goldhagen.^[23][24]

Some of them also accuse Jews of "owning the Holocaust" or "extorting compensation from European governments",^[23] and rewrite the Holocaust's history to inflate Jewish collaboration with Nazi Germans so as to blame Jews for their own suffering.^[25] These false claims are common on social media, especially Reddit.^[26]

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.^[18][17] 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.^[27] Their usual claim is that the Holocaust is "a hoax made up by Jewish people working together."^[18][17] It is a crime to deny the Holocaust in Israel and in many European countries, especially in Germany.^[28] Some Holocaust deniers, like Ernst Zündel, have been charged with crimes.

Prominent Holocaust deniers

Name	Birth	Death	Origin	Affiliations
Ali Khamenei[29]	April 19, 1939		Mashhad, Iran	Supreme Leader of Iran[29]
David Irving[30]	March 24, 1938		Hutton, Essex, England	A "historian" who is an alumnus of the ICL and UCL[30]
Ernst Zündel[31]	April 24, 1939	August 5, 2017	A German graphic artist[31]
Hutton Gibson[32][33]	August 26, 1918	May 11, 2020	Peekskill, New York, United States	Opus Dei member[32][33]
Jean-Marie Le Pen[34][35]	June 20, 1928	January 7, 2025	La Trinité-sur-Mer, Morbihan, France	Founder of the National Front[34][35]
Louis Farrakhan[36][37]	May 11, 1933		The Bronx, New York	Leader of Black nationalist religious movement Nation of Islam (NOI)[36][37]
Paul Rassinier[38]	March 18, 1906	July 28, 1967	Bermont, France	A French Resistance fighter who survived a Nazi concentration camp[38]
Pierre Guillaume[39]	December 22, 1940	July 11, 2023	France	An anarcho-Marxist[39]
Richard Williamson[40]	March 8, 1940	January 29, 2025	Buckinghamshire, England, United Kingdom	Society of Saint Pius X[40]
Robert Faurisson[41]	January 25, 1929	October 21, 2018	Shepperton, England	University of Lyon professor of literature[41]
Roger Garaudy[42]	July 17, 1913	June 13, 2012	Marseille, France	A former French Communist Party member[42]

Related pages

• International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance
• Holodomor denial
• Deborah Lipstadt

Footnotes

1. A person who carries out a harmful, illegal, or immoral act. Oxford Languages.
2. This happened on English Wikipedia, which became a subject of media controversy.^[8]
3. Examples in Germany: Excusing the Wehrmacht, the police and the population, while blaming the SS, the Nazi leadership or Hitler alone.^[7][9]
4. This happened on English Wikipedia, which became a subject of media controversy.^[8]
5. An example is the Arab–Israeli conflict, which is often compared to the Holocaust by those accusing Israel of genocide.^[11]