The denier argument on the evidence is that the evidence was manufactured. The Nuremberg trials, on this account, were a victors’ court that produced its conclusions through fabricated documents and confessions extracted under torture. Survivor testimony is dismissed as unreliable, contaminated by trauma, suggestion, and the influence of subsequent representations of the Holocaust in books and film. The Einsatzgruppen reports are forgeries, the Anne Frank diary is a forgery, the Stroop report is a forgery, the Wannsee minutes are forged. Strip away the forgeries and the coerced confessions, the argument runs, and there is nothing left.
The argument has a problem of scale. The historical record on the Holocaust is built from German records, captured during the war and after; from the records of the camps themselves; from the records of the railways that ran the deportations; from the records of the SS economic offices that processed the property of the dead; from prisoner testimony given before, during, and after the war; from perpetrator testimony given at trial, in private, and in old age; from forensic work at the camp sites; from the Allied photographic and signals intelligence record; and from the demographic record of the European Jewish population. The deniers’ position requires that all of these be either fabricated or unreliable. The position can be stated. It cannot be sustained.
The arguments addressed in this section
Allied Prosecutors Fabricated Documents at Nuremberg is the headline form of the argument. The pages below address the specific document forgeries the deniers allege; the page on Nuremberg itself addresses the broader claim that the Allied prosecutors fabricated their case.
The Confessions of Rudolf Hoss Were Extracted Under Duress rests on the fact that Hoss was indeed beaten by his British captors in Flensburg in March 1946 before his first sworn statement. The argument requires the reader to ignore Hoss’s later, repeated, voluntary statements made in Polish custody, in court, in his autobiography written in the months before his execution, and in his replies to historians who interviewed him in prison. He never recanted.
The Nuremberg Evidence Was Obtained by Torture generalises from the Hoss case to the trial as a whole. The Nuremberg defendants were not tortured, complained at the time about other matters but not torture, and gave their testimony in conditions that have been examined in detail by historians of the trial. The detailed comparison shows that the documentary record overwhelmingly carries the case; the confessions are corroborative, not foundational.
Survivor Testimony is Unreliable is the rhetorical move the deniers reach for when the documentary record is conceded. It rests on a particular conception of testimony as memoir rather than evidence, on the genuine difficulty of testimony given decades after the fact, and on the deniers’ own selective attention to discrepancies in survivor accounts. Historians of the Holocaust treat survivor testimony with the care it requires; they do not dismiss it.
Each of the pages below addresses one denier claim and the historians’ answer to it. Read together, they show that the deniers’ assault on the evidence is not the work of a research programme. It is a list of dismissals.