Holocaust denial is the claim that the murder of approximately six million Jews by Nazi Germany did not happen, did not happen at the scale the historical record establishes, or was not carried out by deliberate plan. It is not a debate among historians. It is a political project, originating in postwar Nazi sympathisers and revisionist circles, and now finding new audiences online. The pages in this section examine the deniers, their methods, and the documented evidence they refuse to accept.
What this section covers
Holocaust Denial and Key Deniers covers the major individual deniers, from postwar pioneers such as Robert Faurisson and Ernst Zundel through the historian David Irving, defeated in his 2000 libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt, to contemporary political figures who deny or minimise the Holocaust. Denial Claims and Rebuttals works through the specific factual claims deniers make about the numbers, the gas chambers, the camps, and the orders, and presents the documented historical and forensic record that refutes them. Myths and Documented Evidence addresses some of the persistent rumours that surround the Holocaust, separating those that are documented (such as the medical experiments at Buchenwald) from those that are not (such as the soap-from-human-fat claim).
The Holocaust and Science covers the medical and scientific abuses of the Nazi regime, the Doctors’ Trial, and the Nuremberg Code that emerged from it. The Holocaust and the Middle East covers the relationship between the Holocaust, the founding of Israel, and the present-day Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including the Mufti of Jerusalem’s wartime collaboration with the Nazis and the misuse of the Holocaust in modern political argument from all sides.
Why this section exists
Denial is not always crude. The most effective deniers are not the ones who shout that the gas chambers never existed. They are the ones who chip at the edges, suggesting that the numbers were exaggerated, that the orders never came from the top, that the camps were primarily for forced labour, that everyone was doing dreadful things in wartime. This section gives the documented record needed to recognise these arguments and answer them.
The career and the postwar accounting
The substantive operational career of The Deniers, the substantive operational decisions taken during the wartime period, and the postwar accounting that followed are documented in the surviving administrative records of the Reich, in the trial transcripts of the postwar judicial proceedings, and in the postwar academic and biographical literature. The combined record establishes what the individual did, on whose orders, and with what consequences.
The postwar accounting for the senior figures of the wartime regime was conducted through the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg of 1945 to 1946, the Subsequent Proceedings at Nuremberg of 1946 to 1949, the various Allied-zone trials of the postwar German occupation period, the West German prosecutions of the subsequent decades, and the Israeli, Polish, Czech, and other national jurisdictions. The substantive academic engagement with the wartime conduct of the senior figures has continued through the postwar period and is the principal source for the assessment summarised here.
What the record shows
The substantive academic, documentary, and testimonial record on The Deniers has been comprehensively produced in the substantive postwar literature and has been sustained across the substantive body of subsequent academic and testimonial work. The substantive content of the substantive record stands as the primary source for the substantive understanding of the substantive subject in the substantive wider context of the wartime killing programme of European Jewry. The substantive content stands.
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
- Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards