The denier argument from comparison and whataboutery does not directly contest the Holocaust. It contests the Holocaust’s standing. Other things were as bad. The Soviet Union killed more people than the Nazis. The bombing of Dresden was equivalent. The British concentration camps in South Africa during the Boer War were the same kind of institution. The American internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War was equivalent. The transatlantic slave trade killed more people. The Allies committed war crimes too. Each of these claims, taken on its own, has its own history and its own historiography. The denier use of them is not historiographical. It is rhetorical: to put the Holocaust into a series of comparable atrocities and thereby reduce it to one episode among many.
The argument is structurally different from most denial. It does not deny what happened. It denies that what happened was distinctive. The historians’ response is not that the Holocaust was the only mass killing in modern history; it was not. It is that the specific combination of features (the racial-ideological motive, the industrial method, the centrally directed scale across most of a continent, the targeting of an entire people for elimination as such) makes it a distinct historical event, and that comparing it loosely with other events is a way of not engaging with what those features were.
The arguments addressed in this section
The Bombing of Dresden Was as Bad as the Holocaust is the most-cited Allied-equivalence argument. It rests on a particular reading of the Dresden raid and on a misuse of casualty figures that have been substantially revised downward by subsequent historical work. The argument also depends on equating an act of war with a programme of racial extermination.
Zionists Collaborated Through the Haavara Agreement uses the 1933 transfer agreement between the German Ministry of Economics and the Zionist Federation of Germany to construct an equivalence between the Nazi regime and the Zionist movement. The Haavara Agreement is a real and uncomfortable historical episode and is documented elsewhere on this site; the denier use of it inflates a pre-war emigration arrangement into ongoing wartime collaboration.
Other Groups Suffered as Much as Jews is the most respectable-sounding form of the argument. Other groups did suffer, and many were murdered: the Roma and Sinti, Soviet prisoners of war, Polish civilians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexual men, the disabled. The historians’ position is that the suffering of these groups is part of the Nazi crimes and is documented on its own terms; the argument that their suffering displaces the specific case of the Jewish murder requires equating different programmes of killing that the regime itself treated as different.
The Soviet Union Killed More People Than the Nazis is the most rhetorically effective of the comparative arguments. Stalinist crimes were extensive and the historiography on them is substantial. The deniers’ use of the comparison rests on aggregating different categories of Soviet death (famine, gulag, executions) and presenting them as equivalent in kind to the racial extermination of European Jewry. The categories are not equivalent.
The Allies Committed War Crimes Too generalises from specific Allied actions (the bombing of German cities, mistreatment of prisoners, the early occupation in Germany) to an overall equivalence. Allied war crimes were real; some were prosecuted at the time and most of them have been documented since. The argument that they make the Holocaust unexceptional rests on equating their character and scale with the central programme of the regime they were fighting.
British Concentration Camps in South Africa Were Equivalent uses the British camps of the Boer War to construct a precedent. The camps killed many of the people in them through disease and malnutrition, the historiography on them is settled, and the British government has acknowledged the failure. The argument that they are equivalent to the Nazi camps requires equating institutions that differed in purpose, in operation, and in the regime that built them.
The Slave Trade Killed More People uses the transatlantic slave trade to construct a comparison. The deaths in the Middle Passage and across the four centuries of the trade are extensive and the historiography is now substantial. The argument as the deniers use it depends on aggregating four centuries of an institution into a figure that can be compared with twelve years of a regime, and on equating an economic system based on enslavement with a programme of racial extermination.
American Treatment of Japanese Americans Was Equivalent uses the wartime internment of Japanese Americans on the West Coast. The internment is now widely recognised as a civil-rights failure of the wartime United States and has been the subject of formal apology and reparation. The argument that it is equivalent to the Nazi camps requires equating an institution that killed almost no-one with one that killed millions.
Each of the pages below addresses one denier claim and the historians’ answer to it. Read together, they show that the comparisons the deniers reach for are not arguments. They are deflections.