Holocaust Denial

Holocaust denial is the assertion that the Holocaust did not happen, or that the established historical account of it is significantly false. Its proponents claim that the documentary record has been falsified, that the witness testimony is unreliable, that the gas chambers did not function as the historical record describes, and that the figure of six million Jewish dead is a substantial exaggeration. None of the claims survives contact with the documentary, forensic, witness or perpetrator record. The deniers have nonetheless persisted with them across more than seventy years, and the question of why they persist, how they organise, and how they should be addressed is itself part of the history of the Holocaust.

What denial is and is not

Denial is not historical revisionism. Revisionism is a normal and necessary feature of historical scholarship: each generation of historians revisits the work of the previous one, adjusts the figures where new evidence supports adjustment, refines the interpretation, and corrects the record. The Auschwitz death toll has been revised over the post-war period in the light of new archival access; the death tolls at the Reinhard camps have been refined; the chronology of the decision-making process for the Final Solution has been the subject of sustained scholarly debate (the functionalist-intentionalist debate, with Christopher Browning, Peter Longerich, Ian Kershaw and Saul Friedländer as principal contributors). All of this is revisionism in the proper sense and is part of the ordinary work of the discipline.

Denial is something different. Denial is the rejection of the basic historical facts: that the Hitler regime had a policy of exterminating European Jewry; that the gas chambers at Auschwitz and the Reinhard camps were used for homicidal mass killing; that approximately six million Jews were murdered. 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 record, the forensic record, the witness testimony, the perpetrator confessions, and the contemporaneous Allied intelligence record. The denier rejection of them is not historical inquiry; it is the assertion of a contrary position for political reasons unconnected to the historical method.

What deniers actually claim

The denier movement has produced a recognisable repertoire of claims, each of which has its own dedicated rebuttal. The principal claims fall into several groups: that the figure of six million is an exaggeration; that the gas chambers did not function as the historical record describes; that the camps were labour camps in which deaths occurred from disease and overwork rather than systematic killing; that there was no plan or order from the Nazi leadership for the extermination of the Jews; that the documentary evidence was fabricated by the Allied prosecutors at Nuremberg; that the witness testimony is unreliable; that the Jewish behaviour during the period implicates Jews in their own fate; that comparable atrocities by other regimes (the Allied bombing campaigns, the Soviet camps, the slave trade) make the Holocaust unexceptional; that the contemporary State of Israel uses the Holocaust to silence criticism; that the laws against Holocaust denial in some European countries prove that the case for the Holocaust cannot withstand scrutiny; that the engineering and forensic evidence is implausible; and that the religious or theological framework of Jewish belief is itself incompatible with the Holocaust as described.

Each of these claims is addressed in detail in the dedicated denial-claim leaves elsewhere in this section. None of them survives the documentary engagement. The denier insistence on them is the persistent feature of the movement; the actual content of each claim, when examined, is uniformly defective.

How denial works rhetorically

The mechanism of denial has been the same across the seventy-five years of the movement’s existence. A denier identifies a specific document, a specific witness, a specific photograph, or a specific physical detail. A contestable point of interpretation is presented as if it were a definitive refutation. The wider documentary, forensic and witness record bearing on the same question is not engaged with. The case is presented to a public audience that has not read the source.

The technique works only as long as the audience does not check the source. Where the audience checks the source, or where a court of law forces the source to be checked under the rules of evidence, the denier case fails. The Mermelstein case in California in 1981, the second Zundel trial in Toronto in 1988, the 2000 Irving v. Lipstadt trial in London, and a long series of European criminal prosecutions under the various denial-prohibition statutes have all produced the same result: the denier loses when the documents are read against the claims.

Who the deniers are

The deniers have not all been the same kind of person. The first-generation French deniers (Bardèche, Rassinier) were former collaborators or former camp inmates with their own political and personal grievances. The American IHR circle of the 1970s and 1980s (Carto, App, Butz) were a mixture of antisemitic activists and academic eccentrics. The English-language popularisers (Verrall, Zundel) were political organisers building publishing infrastructure rather than producing intellectual content. David Irving was an unaccredited writer of histories of the Third Reich who slid into denial through Hitler-apologetics. Robert Faurisson was an academic literary critic with no historical training. Roger Garaudy was a former Communist intellectual who arrived at denial through anti-Zionist polemic. The Iranian state under Ahmadinejad was a sovereign government that adopted denial as foreign-policy rhetoric.

The unifying feature of the movement is not the kind of person involved but the kind of operation each conducts: the same rhetorical mechanism, the same defective engagement with the source material, the same failure under courtroom examination. The motivations vary. The output does not.

Why denial matters

Denial matters because it is, on every reading of the historical record, false. It also matters because it is, in most of its public expressions, antisemitic: the figure of the Jew as fabricator of the Holocaust, as profiteer from a non-existent catastrophe, as manipulator of the post-war moral order, is a recognisable instance of an older European antisemitism that pre-dates the Holocaust by several centuries. The denial of the Holocaust is, in this respect, a continuation of the political and rhetorical project that produced the Holocaust in the first place.

It also matters because the survivor generation is now almost gone. The witness testimony that gave the historical record its human voice is a generational asset that will be exhausted within the next decade. The denier project benefits from the loss of living memory: a population that has not heard a survivor’s voice is a population that may be more receptive to the proposition that the survivors were never there at all. The historical record is robust enough to defeat denial at the level of evidence; the question is whether the cultural memory remains robust enough to defeat denial at the level of public discourse.

The legal response

A number of European countries have made the public denial of the Holocaust a criminal offence. France did so in the Loi Gayssot of 1990. Germany has done so under section 130 of the Strafgesetzbuch since 1985. Austria has done so under the Verbotsgesetz of 1947 (originally enacted as a de-Nazification statute) since 1992. Belgium, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Switzerland have similar provisions. Israel has had a similar provision since 1986. The European Court of Human Rights ruled in Garaudy v. France (2003) that Holocaust denial fell outside the protection of Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights by operation of Article 17 (the abuse-of-rights clause).

The United States has no such law. The First Amendment protects denier speech as it protects all political speech, subject only to the established speech-act exceptions (incitement to imminent lawless action, true threats). The American academic and journalistic response to denial has been to engage with it through scholarly publication and public-press refutation rather than through criminal prohibition.

The state of the question

The historical case for the Holocaust is settled. The denier case has been examined in detail in courts of law and in the academic literature, and has uniformly failed under examination. The continuing persistence of denial is not a matter of unresolved historical questions; it is a matter of political and rhetorical persistence by people whose motivations are unconnected to the historical method. The dedicated denial-claim leaves elsewhere in this section address each of the principal denier claims in detail.

See also

Sources

  • Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, Free Press, 1993
  • Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?, University of California Press, 2000
  • Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Les Assassins de la mémoire, La Découverte, 1987; English translation as Assassins of Memory, Columbia University Press, 1992
  • Justice Charles Gray, Judgment in Irving v. Penguin Books and Lipstadt, Royal Courts of Justice, 11 April 2000, [2000] EWHC QB 115
  • Richard J. Evans, Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial, Basic Books, 2001
  • Robert Jan van Pelt, The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial, Indiana University Press, 2002
  • D. D. Guttenplan, The Holocaust on Trial, W. W. Norton, 2001
  • Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews 1933-1945, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975
  • Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press, 2004
  • Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
  • Garaudy v. France, European Court of Human Rights, Application No. 65831/01, decision of 24 June 2003
  • USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Combating Holocaust Denial: An Online Guide”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org