One of the consistent themes of the Holocaust denial movement is the claim that historians who question the orthodox account of the Holocaust are persecuted by the historical profession, by the legal system, or by the wider culture. The claim casts the deniers as suppressed truth-tellers and the historical mainstream as a conspiracy of silence. The claim does not survive contact with the documentary record. The figures invoked as victims of persecution are, on examination, either deniers (who have lost civil and criminal proceedings on the merits) or revisionists (who continue to publish, hold academic posts, and engage in scholarly debate without difficulty).
The conflation of denial with revisionism
The claim relies on a deliberate confusion between two different kinds of activity. Historical revisionism, in the proper sense, is the normal work of the historical profession: each generation of historians revisits the work of the previous one, refines the figures where new evidence supports refinement, and adjusts the interpretation. The Holocaust scholarly literature is full of such revisions: the post-1989 archival access produced major revisions to the Auschwitz death toll (downward to approximately 1.1 million), to the Reinhard camp totals, and to the Einsatzgruppen counts. The functionalist-intentionalist debate of the 1980s and 1990s, with Christopher Browning, Peter Longerich, Ian Kershaw, Saul Friedländer and others as principal contributors, was a substantial revisionist debate within the discipline. Browning’s Ordinary Men revised the prior consensus on perpetrator psychology; Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners revised it again. None of the participants in any of these debates was persecuted; all of them held senior academic posts and continue to be published.
Holocaust denial is not historical revisionism. Denial is the rejection of the basic historical facts: that the Hitler regime had a programme of exterminating European Jewry, that the gas chambers functioned as the historical record describes, that approximately six million Jews were killed. These propositions are not contestable in the way the chronology or the precise totals are contestable; they are established by the convergence of the documentary, forensic, witness and perpetrator records.
The deniers’ claim that they are revisionists rather than deniers is part of the rhetorical operation. The framing allows them to claim the legitimacy of the proper revisionist tradition while engaging in something different.
The figures invoked
The denier literature typically invokes a small number of named individuals as evidence of “persecution”.
David Irving lost his 1996 libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt in the High Court in London in 2000. The 333-page judgment of Justice Charles Gray found, on detailed examination of his published work against the original German archives, that Irving had deliberately falsified the historical record. His subsequent loss of standing in the publishing industry was the consequence of a court ruling that he was not a trustworthy historian. He served thirteen months in Austrian prison in 2006 for two 1989 speeches in violation of the Austrian Verbotsgesetz. He had been on notice of the Austrian statute for sixteen years before the speeches and had returned to Austria to give them. The Austrian conviction is therefore not “persecution” but the application of a public statute to a man who had publicly violated it on Austrian soil.
Robert Faurisson lost his teaching duties at the University of Lyon 2 in 1991 after sustained pressure from his university. He retained his salary and his title until retirement in 1995. He was prosecuted under the Loi Gayssot in France on multiple occasions and convicted on each. The prosecutions were public proceedings under a public statute, conducted with full procedural protections.
Roger Garaudy was prosecuted under the Loi Gayssot in 1996 and convicted by the Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris in 1998 for the contents of Les Mythes fondateurs de la politique israélienne. The conviction was upheld by the Cour de cassation and the application to the European Court of Human Rights was rejected as inadmissible in 2003.
Ernst Zundel was prosecuted under Canada’s “false news” statute in 1985 and 1988, with both convictions ultimately overturned (the second on the substantive ground that the statute was unconstitutional). He was deported to Germany in 2005 and convicted under section 130 of the Strafgesetzbuch in 2007, serving the full five-year sentence.
None of these figures was persecuted by a conspiracy of silence. Each was the subject of public proceedings, brought under public statutes, with full procedural protections, in which the documentary evidence was examined and the deniers’ claims tested. They lost. The losses are part of the public record.
Genuine revisionists are not persecuted
The historical profession contains many figures who have published revisions of the orthodox account on specific points and who have not been persecuted in any way.
Christopher Browning revised the prior understanding of perpetrator behaviour in Ordinary Men (1992) and was widely praised for it. He held the Frank Porter Graham Chair at the University of North Carolina until retirement.
Daniel Goldhagen produced a sharply contested revision of the Browning thesis in Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996). The book was the subject of intense scholarly debate; Goldhagen received the Democracy Prize of the Journal for German and International Politics. He held a position at Harvard until 2000 and continues to publish.
Peter Longerich revised the chronology of the decision-making process for the Final Solution in The Unwritten Order (2001) and Heinrich Himmler: A Life (2008). He held the Chair in Modern German History at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Saul Friedländer revised the integration of the Jewish-experience perspective with the perpetrator-history perspective in The Years of Persecution (1997) and The Years of Extermination (2007), which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2008.
Götz Aly revised the economic-history understanding of the Holocaust in Hitler’s Beneficiaries (2005). Hans Mommsen revised the structuralist account of Nazi decision-making over a long career and held a chair at the Ruhr University Bochum. Ian Kershaw revised the understanding of Hitler’s leadership in his two-volume biography (1998 and 2000) and was knighted for services to history.
Each of these scholars has produced significant revisions of the orthodox account. None has been “persecuted”. The discipline is open to revision when revision is supported by the documentary evidence; it is closed only to assertions that are contradicted by the documentary evidence.
The actual structure of the claim
The denier claim that “historians who question the narrative are persecuted” works only if the audience accepts a definitional move in which “questioning the narrative” includes denying that the Holocaust happened. With the definitional move, every prosecution of a denier under a denial-prohibition statute, every academic dismissal for falsification of evidence, and every publishing-industry decision not to publish a deliberately falsified manuscript becomes “persecution”. Without the definitional move, the claim has no content: the actual revisionist scholarship on the Holocaust is published freely, the actual debates within the discipline are conducted in the academic journals and in the major monographs, and no participant in those debates has suffered any professional or legal consequence for their participation.
The deniers know this. The framing of denial as “questioning” is a rhetorical operation that depends on the audience not asking what is actually being questioned and what the basis for the question is.
Why the claim matters
The claim matters because it provides a generic defence against any specific refutation. Any document the deniers cannot answer can be reframed as part of a “narrative” that “cannot be questioned”; any conviction can be reframed as persecution; any expert testimony can be reframed as orthodoxy. The dedicated denial-claim leaves elsewhere in this section address the specific factual claims; the general claim of persecution is the meta-defence that protects the specific claims from being engaged with on their merits.
See also
- Adolf Hitler
- Ordinary People Who Became Killers, Reserve Police Battalion 101
- David Irving
- Heinrich Himmler
- Robert Faurisson
- Ernst Zundel
Sources
- Justice Charles Gray, Judgment in Irving v. Penguin Books and Lipstadt, Royal Courts of Justice, 11 April 2000, [2000] EWHC QB 115
- Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris, judgment of 27 February 1998 in Ministère public et autres c. Garaudy
- Garaudy v. France, European Court of Human Rights, Application No. 65831/01, decision of 24 June 2003
- Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, HarperCollins, 1992
- Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, Knopf, 1996
- Peter Longerich, The Unwritten Order: Hitler’s Role in the Final Solution, Tempus, 2001
- Saul Friedländer, The Years of Persecution 1933-1939, HarperCollins, 1997, and The Years of Extermination 1939-1945, HarperCollins, 2007
- Götz Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, Metropolitan Books, 2005
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris, W. W. Norton, 1998, and Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis, W. W. Norton, 2000
- Hans Mommsen, From Weimar to Auschwitz, Princeton University Press, 1991
- Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, Free Press, 1993
- USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Holocaust Denial: An Online Guide”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org