The denier argument on Jewish behaviour and complicity is the most morally repellent variant of denial, because it asks the victims to share responsibility for what was done to them. The Jews went passively to their deaths. The Judenrat, the Jewish councils set up by the Germans in the ghettos, were collaborators and therefore the Jews share responsibility for their own murder. Jewish kapos in the camps were as brutal as their SS overseers, and the SS therefore cannot be uniquely blamed. Rich Jews bought their way out, leaving the poor to die. Anne Frank died of typhus, not of murder, and her death is therefore not part of the death toll.
The arguments are familiar to anyone who has read the literature on victim-blaming as a rhetorical move. They take the genuine moral complexity of life in the ghettos and the camps, conditions under which people were forced to make impossible choices, and weaponise that complexity to redistribute responsibility from the regime that engineered the conditions to the people trapped inside them. The arguments do not engage with the historiography. They engage with the reader’s discomfort.
The arguments addressed in this section
Anne Frank Died of Typhus Not Murder is the technical form of the argument, applied to a specific case. Anne Frank did die of typhus at Bergen-Belsen in February or March 1945, having been deported from Westerbork to Auschwitz in September 1944 and transferred from Auschwitz to Belsen in October 1944. The deniers’ argument depends on isolating the immediate cause of her death from the regime that put her in the conditions in which she died.
Jews Went Passively to Their Deaths rests on a misreading of the photographic and documentary record and on a wilful neglect of the documented Jewish armed resistance: Warsaw, Treblinka, Sobibor, Auschwitz, the Bielski partisans, the Vilna underground, the Bialystok uprising. The argument also rests on a particular conception of resistance that the deniers do not apply to other populations under occupation.
The Judenrat Collaborated So Jews Share Responsibility takes the most morally complex institution of the ghettos and uses it to redistribute responsibility for the killing. The Judenrat, the Jewish councils set up by the Germans, were forced into impossible positions; some of their members collaborated, some resisted, many committed suicide rather than continue. Treating them as freely chosen collaborators is a category error.
Rich Jews Could Buy Their Way Out rests on a small number of cases, real, where wealthy Jews secured their own survival through bribery or through deals like the Kasztner train. The deniers generalise from a small number of cases to a structural claim about the population. The structural claim is false; the population that was killed was overwhelmingly the population that could not buy its way out, and most of those who tried to bribe their way out were killed in any case.
Jewish Kapos Were as Brutal as SS Guards takes the most degrading institution of the camps and uses it to launder the SS. The kapos were prisoners forced into supervisory roles, often at the cost of their own lives if they refused; some used the role brutally, some used it to protect their fellow prisoners, some used it to do both at different moments. The argument depends on collapsing the difference between the prisoners and their guards.
Each of the pages below addresses one denier claim and the historians’ answer to it. Read together, they show that the deniers’ use of the moral complexity of victim experience is not a contribution to understanding. It is an attempt to spread responsibility for the killing onto the people who were killed.