The denier argument on the camps takes one of two forms. Either there were no death camps at all, only labour camps where conditions happened to be very bad, or the worst of what happened in the camps was the work of disease and the breakdown of supply lines at the end of the war rather than deliberate killing. Both forms of the argument require the reader to ignore most of what is now known about the camps from German records, prisoner testimony, perpetrator confessions, post-war forensic work, and the Allied liberators’ own accounts.
The argument matters to the deniers because the camps are the most visually documented part of the Holocaust. The newsreel footage from Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald and Dachau in April and May 1945 is the imagery that fixed the Holocaust in Western public memory. If the deniers can persuade the reader that the camps were not what they appeared to be, that the dead were typhus victims rather than starvation and gassing victims, that the conditions were no worse than at Allied prisoner-of-war camps, then they have removed the most arresting evidence from view.
The arguments addressed in this section
Prisoners Died of Typhus Not Systematic Murder deals with the most-cited variant of the argument. It rests on the genuine fact that typhus was endemic in the camps, particularly in the closing months of the war, and on the false inference that typhus was therefore the cause of the deaths.
The Camps Were Labour Camps Not Death Camps deals with the deniers’ attempt to collapse the distinction between the concentration camps and the six dedicated extermination camps (Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek, Auschwitz-Birkenau). The distinction is documented in the German records themselves and is well established in the historiography.
The Allies Starved Prisoners Too is the comparative form of the argument: that Allied prisoner-of-war camps had bad conditions and high mortality, and that the camps in Germany were therefore unexceptional. The comparison does not survive examination of the actual figures.
Camp Conditions Were No Worse Than Allied POW Camps is a related claim, narrower in scope, and addressed on its own page because the deniers cite specific Allied camps and figures that warrant a specific response.
Theresienstadt Was a Model Camp is the most cynical of the camp-related denier arguments. It rests on the regime’s own propaganda, particularly the 1944 Red Cross visit and the propaganda film made for it, and treats the staged conditions as the actual conditions.
The Auschwitz Swimming Pool Proves It Was Not a Death Camp is the kind of argument that sounds dispositive at first hearing and dissolves under five minutes of inspection. The pool was used by SS guards and a small number of privileged prisoners, was at the main camp not at Birkenau, and proves nothing about either.
Prisoners Received Food and Medical Care rests on the fact that there were SS-run camp hospitals (the Revier) and that there were food rations. Both facts are true. The argument depends on not knowing what the rations actually were and what the Revier actually did.
Bergen-Belsen Was a Humanitarian Disaster Not Murder is the most slippery of the arguments because it rests on a partial truth. Belsen by April 1945 was a humanitarian disaster, the conditions were the work of overcrowding and the collapse of the camp system in the closing weeks of the war, and the dead were largely typhus victims. What this picture leaves out is the prior history of Belsen, the population that had been pushed into it from the east, and the regime that had created the conditions.
Each of the pages below addresses one denier claim and the historians’ answer to it. Read together, they show that the argument that the camps were not what the historical record says they were can only be sustained by ignoring most of the historical record.