The History of Denial

Holocaust denial as an organised intellectual project began in France in the immediate post-war period, became established in the United States in the 1970s, took its modern form with the founding of the Institute for Historical Review in 1978, and adapted to the internet during the 1990s and 2000s. The history of the denial movement is documentable. The deniers themselves are people whose names, publications, organisations and convictions are part of the public record.

The first generation: France 1947 to 1964

The earliest sustained denier writings came from two French former collaborators. Maurice Bardèche was the brother-in-law of the executed fascist intellectual Robert Brasillach. He published Nuremberg ou la Terre promise in 1948, the first post-war book to argue that the figure of six million was an exaggeration and that the gas chambers had been wartime propaganda. He was prosecuted in France and convicted of “apology for war crimes” in 1952.

Paul Rassinier was a former French Resistance member and a survivor of Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora. He had been a Socialist deputy in the National Assembly until 1946. From the early 1950s onwards, in books beginning with Le Mensonge d’Ulysse (1950), he argued that the gas chambers had not existed at the camps he had himself been held in, and that the testimony of other survivors was unreliable. The Rassinier titles laid down most of the rhetorical moves the later denial movement used: the appeal to “scepticism” against survivor testimony, the claim that the death toll had been exaggerated for political purposes, the rhetorical use of the author’s own status as a former camp inmate to license claims that no other former inmate would make.

The second generation: the United States, the 1970s

The English-language denier output of the 1970s came from a small group of writers based in the United States and Britain. Austin App, an American academic of German extraction at La Salle College in Philadelphia, published The Six Million Swindle in 1973. Arthur Butz, an electrical engineering professor at Northwestern University, published The Hoax of the Twentieth Century in 1976; the book remains the longest single denier text and was the first to attempt an engineering-style debunking of the gas-chamber evidence. Richard Verrall, the deputy editor of the British National Front’s Spearhead magazine, published Did Six Million Really Die? under the pseudonym “Richard Harwood” in 1974; the pamphlet became the most widely circulated denier text in the English-speaking world.

The institutional turn: the IHR 1978 onwards

The Institute for Historical Review was founded in Torrance, California in 1978 by Willis Carto, the founder of the antisemitic Liberty Lobby. The IHR provided the denial movement with what it had previously lacked: an institutional address, a publishing imprint (the Noontide Press), an annual conference, and a journal (the Journal of Historical Review, founded 1980). The journal was modelled in style on the academic historical journals; the substance was unscholarly. The IHR’s annual conferences brought together the international denier circuit and provided the venue at which David Irving made his 1989 Chappaquiddick speech.

The IHR’s most public stunt was a $50,000 reward, offered in 1979, “to anyone who could prove that the Nazis operated gas chambers to exterminate Jews during World War II”. The Auschwitz survivor Mel Mermelstein submitted documentation including his own affidavit and was refused the reward. He sued the IHR in California Superior Court. The court took judicial notice of the Holocaust as historical fact in 1981 (Mermelstein v. Institute for Historical Review) and awarded Mermelstein the prize. The IHR paid.

The Faurisson affair: France 1978 to 1979

Robert Faurisson’s two articles in Le Monde in late 1978 and early 1979 produced the most significant collective response from the historical profession to the denial movement. The 21 February 1979 declaration by thirty-four French historians, including Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Léon Poliakov and François Furet, set out the standard documentary basis for the existence of the extermination camps and concluded that the question of how the killing had been technically possible was secondary to the documented fact that it had taken place. Vidal-Naquet’s Les Assassins de la mémoire (1987) is the principal French scholarly response and remains in print.

The Zundel trials: Toronto 1985 and 1988

Ernst Zundel’s trials in Toronto under Canada’s “false news” statute produced two consequences for the denial movement. First, they put senior Holocaust historians (Raul Hilberg, Christopher Browning and others) on the witness stand to defend the basic historical facts under cross-examination, an experience the historical profession found deeply uncomfortable but which produced detailed transcript evidence of what the basic case for the Holocaust looked like under hostile examination. Second, they produced the Leuchter Report, the engineering-pretence document that became the principal denier reference text on the gas chambers for the next two decades.

The Irving trial: London 2000

The 2000 libel trial of David Irving against Deborah Lipstadt was the most exhaustive forensic engagement between the historical profession and the denial movement ever conducted. The defence took Irving’s books apart against the original German archives and demonstrated, in 333 pages of judicial findings, that he had consistently and deliberately falsified the historical record. The Irving judgment ended the credibility of the most prominent English-language denier and, by extension, of the engineering and demographic claims he had relied on.

The internet era: 1995 onwards

The denial movement adapted to the internet earlier than most fringe political movements. Zundel’s Samisdat website was online by 1996. The IHR website was online by the late 1990s. The shift to online distribution meant that the criminal-law instruments many European countries had used against denier publications (the Loi Gayssot in France, section 130 of the German Strafgesetzbuch) became progressively harder to enforce, since servers could be relocated to permissive jurisdictions. The simultaneous shift to social-media platforms in the 2010s broadened the reach of denier content from a small, identifiable network of self-published sites to a fragmented and harder-to-track ecosystem of TikTok videos, YouTube channels, and Telegram groups. The major platforms tightened their content-moderation rules on Holocaust denial during the late 2010s and early 2020s, with mixed results.

The state-sponsored interlude: Iran 2005 to 2013

The Iranian presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from August 2005 to August 2013 produced the only state-sponsored Holocaust denial conference in the history of the period. The 2006 Tehran conference brought the international denier circuit together under official state auspices and gave them a platform from which to address the world’s media. The conference was condemned by the United Nations, the European Union, and every major Holocaust scholarly organisation. It was not repeated.

The constants

The deniers have not all been the same kind of person, but the operation has the same shape across all the cases. The mechanism is well-documented: a denier identifies a specific document, a specific witness, or a specific physical detail; a contestable point of interpretation is presented as if it were a definitive refutation; the broader documentary, forensic and witness record is not engaged with; the case is presented to a public audience that has not read the source. The operation works only as long as the audience does not check.

The historical profession’s response has been consistent across the seventy-five-year period: produce the documents, produce the witnesses, produce the engineering, produce the forensic record, and let the deniers present their case in courts of law where the rules of evidence apply. The result has been the same in every contested case: the deniers have lost.

See also

Sources

  • Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, Free Press, 1993, the standard English-language history of the denial movement
  • Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Les Assassins de la mémoire, La Découverte, 1987; English translation as Assassins of Memory, Columbia University Press, 1992
  • Maurice Bardèche, Nuremberg ou la Terre promise, Les Sept Couleurs, 1948 (cited for documentary purposes)
  • Paul Rassinier, Le Mensonge d’Ulysse, La Librairie Française, 1950 (cited for documentary purposes)
  • Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, Historical Review Press, 1976 (cited for documentary purposes)
  • Mermelstein v. Institute for Historical Review, Superior Court of California, County of Los Angeles, Case No. C 356542, 1981
  • 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
  • Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?, University of California Press, 2000
  • Robert S. Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, Random House, 2010
  • USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Holocaust Denial: An Online Guide to Combating Antisemitic Propaganda”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org