What is Holocaust Denial?

Holocaust Denial, also known as Holocaust Revisionism, is the attempt to deny or trivialize the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany against Jews and other groups during World War II.

For an internationally accepted definition, see the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Holocaust Denial and Distortion.

Most Holocaust deniers want to wash away the stain of Nazism to make it politically acceptable. Many deniers have present and past ties with hate groups. They are trying to masquerade themselves as seekers of historical truth, not merchants of bigotry.

Holocaust denial is an important tool for anti-Semites. On July 24, 1996, the leader of the National Socialist White People's Party, Harold Covington, explained why:

“Take away the Holocaust and what do you have left? Without their precious Holocaust, what are the Jews? Just a grubby little bunch of international bandits and assassins and squatters who have perpetrated the most massive, cynical fraud in human history..."

Holocaust denial is an updated version of an alleged Jewish conspiracy in which Jews use lies and extortion to gain advantage over all other people. The common denominator to all Holocaust deniers is antisemitism.

This lie is especially painful for Holocaust survivors and all those who lost loved ones to Nazi mass murder, as they are confronted by people who deny their suffering and loss.

No. The Allies actually ignored reports filtering out of Europe about the mass murder of Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators. Even when they were convinced the reports were true, the Allies tried to withhold the information from the public. On August 8, 1942, the representative of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva asked the U.S. delegation in Switzerland to provide information about Germany’s plan to exterminate European Jews to Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, who was a prominent American Jewish leader. Instead of relaying the information, the U.S. State Department withheld it, and ordered its Swiss delegation not to relay any such reports in the future.

During the same year, Jan Karski, a member of the Polish underground was smuggled into a German concentration camp in Poland. After he made his way out of the camp, Karski was sent to London to deliver his report on the horrors he witnessed. Karski spoke with both Roosevelt and Churchill, but his pleas were largely dismissed.

In addition, the major newspapers of the period paid little attention to Nazi atrocities. If the Holocaust was merely “propaganda,” why did the Allies go to such lengths to downplay it?

No crime in history has been as well-documented as the Holocaust. Proof includes a myriad of documents captured by Allied troops. Most of the documents were authored by the Nazis and include detailed reports of mass shootings and gassings. During the Nuremberg war crimes tribunals, the prosecution presented some 3,000 documents on the destruction of Europe’s Jewish community by the Nazis.

First-hand testimony of survivors who lived through the horrors of the death camps as well as the reports and confessions by the perpetrators leave little doubt as to the nature of Hitler's “Final Solution.” In addition, there are horrifying films and photos of killing operations and their aftermath, as well as reports, photos, and films that were taken when the camps were liberated. These sources can only begin to give us a picture of the extent of Nazi bestiality. Allied officers and troops were sickened by what they saw.

It is important to note that no Nazi war crimes suspect who stood trial in the post-war years ever claimed that the crimes of which they were accused were fictional. Instead, these suspects argued that they were “only following orders.”

In fact, evidence that the Holocaust did happen is so overwhelming that on October 9, 1981, Judge Thomas T. Johnson of the California Superior Court took judicial notice of the Holocaust. He ruled that “the Holocaust is not reasonably subject to dispute. It is capable of immediate and accurate determination by resort to resources of reasonable indisputable accuracy. It is simply a fact.”

It is true that Germany had fewer than 600,000 Jews when Hitler came to power in 1933. However, the majority of the Jews murdered by the Nazis did not live in Germany. They resided in the countries which Germany invaded during the war, especially Poland and areas of the former Soviet Union. In fact, the Protocol of the Wannsee Conference, a German document outlining the Nazi plan to annihilate European Jewry, lists over 11 million Jews throughout Europe.

The figure of 6,000,000 Jews can be demonstrated by comparing Europe’s Jewish population before and after the war. Even after considering those who fled Europe and others who might have died due to natural causes, there are nearly 6,000,000 people whose deaths cannot be accounted for.

Authentic German documents confirm the slaughter of millions of Jews. The famous “Korherr Report” – named after Richard Korherr, chief statistician for the SS – suggest that by the end of 1942 alone, Jewish losses were more than 2,454,000. The war in Europe would not end until May 1945.

A different source, a 1946 report by the Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry, puts the number of Jewish losses during the Holocaust at 5,721,500. Additional estimates of Jewish losses come from historians. For example, historian and international jurist Jacob Robinson arrived at a figure of 5,820,960 Jewish deaths. He based this figure on wartime statistical reports on ghettos, concentration camps, and mass murder operations carried out by the Nazis. The German historian Helmut Krausnick claim that Jewish losses were closer to 7,000,000. While the exact figure will never be known, scholars of the Holocaust find the figure of 6,000,000 to be in line with all the evidence.

From the beginning, the Nazis made no secret of their goal: creating not only a “Jew-free” Germany, but a “Jew-free” Europe. Indeed, one of the early methods they used was forced emigration. But on November 10, 1941, Berlin issued precise instructions to kill Jews in certain areas. These instructions were received by Higher SS and police leader Friedrich Jeckeln, stating that pursuant of the Fuehrer’s order, Jews would no longer be allowed “to emigrate.” Instead, they would be “evacuated.” In addition, SS Chief Heinrich Himmler made a speech to his general on October 4, 1943. In this speech, Himmler left no doubt as to what “evacuation” means: “I am now referring to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people,” he declared.

The Nazis used “evacuation” as codeword for murder even in earlier periods. In the spring of 1940, 1,558 mental patients had been transferred from sanitoriums in Eastern Prussia for “evacuation” near the Soldau concentration camp. They were never heard from again.

“Evacuation” was not the only codeword used by the Nazis to try and hide their true intentions. The “resettlement" was commonly used to describe the deportation of Jews to the gas chambers. For example, SS Major Francke-Gricksch remarked in his 1943 report on Auschwitz that the camp’s “resettlement furnaces” were capable of burning 10,000 bodies a day.

Despite the attempts at deception, one of the chief architects of Hitler's “euthanasia” experiments testified to the war crimes tribunal at Nuremberg that it was no secret that “the Jews were to be exterminated.”

This is true. Hitler was not about to repeat the mistake he had made earlier when he initialed his “euthanasia order,” condemning over 70,000 German mental patients to death at so-called “charitable care facilities.” After doing so, Hitler faced popular protest which forced him to abandon his euthanasia experiment or at least try to hide it. Hitler never wrote another document that could connect him to mass killings.

Still, historians convincingly established that the order to exterminate millions of Jews came directly from Hitler. On November 10, 1941, Higher SS and police leader, Friedrich Jeckeln, received orders to liquidate the Jewish population of Riga. He was informed by his superior, Hinrich Lohse, that it was “the Fuehrer's wish.”

A few months earlier, Gestapo Chief Heinrich Mueller sent a message to the commanders of the four Einsatzgruppen – the mobile killing squads active in Eastern Europe – advising them that "the Fuehrer was to be informed about the work of the Einsatzgruppen on a continual basis."

Discussing the liquidation of Jews in Eastern Europe, SS Chief Heinrich Himmler told SS Gruppenfuehrer Gottlob Berger: “the occupied East will be freed of Jews. The Fuehrer has placed the execution of this difficult order on my shoulders.”

Hitler was also involved in gassing operations as part of the “Final Solution.” On October 25, 1941, Hinrich Lohse received a directive regarding the use of special “gassing vans.” The directive came from German judge, Dr. Erhard Wetzel. Wetzel had been summoned to the Chancellery and informed that the directive he was to prepare was a “Fuehrer order.”

On February 4, 1943, Hitler equated the extermination of the Jews with having “exterminated a bacterium.” In a speech he made to the Reichstag 4 years earlier, Hitler warned that in the event of war, “the result will be… the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!”

Those who argue that Hitler did not order, approve, or even know about the wanton murder of millions of Jews and other groups during the Holocaust, do so in direct contradiction of all the evidence.

Ordinarily, Zyklon B was used as an insecticide. However, the hydrogen cyanide (HCN) it contains is actually more dangerous to humans than to insects. When the level of HCN reaches only 300 parts per million, it will kill a person within a few minutes. The amount of hydrogen cyanide required to kill a person of average weight is only 60 mg.

Because Zyklon was so toxic, its manufacturers warned personnel not to reenter a room fumigated with the gas for 20 hours after airing. In addition, a compound emitting intolerable odor was added to the gas, in order to warn people the gas was present. When purchasing Zyklon B for the death camps, the SS ordered the manufacturer to remove the warning compound, a clear indication of its intended use.

A wide array of evidence prove that the Nazis used gas chambers. Testimonies by the perpetrators themselves as well as the first-hand accounts of prisoners, especially members of the Sonderkommando – the groups of inmates forced to remove the dead from the gas chambers and dispose of their bodies – are only a part of that evidence.

Documents including blueprints of the killing installations and orders for construction materials and Zyklon B survived the war, as did some of the actual gassing facilities. Photos that were secretly taken by prisoners in Auschwitz-Birkenau even show corpses are being disposed of, after their removal from the gas chamber. The manufacturing, distribution, and use of the deadly gas was clearly demonstrated at the “Zyklon B Trial” in March 1946. Two of the defendants, the owner and a major executive of a company that manufactured the gas, were sentenced to death after notes of their trips to Auschwitz disproved their contention that they were unaware that the poison was used to kill inmates.

Jean-Claude Pressac, a one-time skeptic of the gas chambers, had undertaken a careful study of Auschwitz in which he analyzed a wide variety of camp documents, photos, reports, and blueprints. Pressac, who was once intrigued by the Holocaust-denying theories of Robert Faurisson, concluded that his original skepticism could no longer be supported in the face of the evidence. In 1989, the Klarsfeld Foundation published Pressac’s study, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers. In this study, Pressac demonstrates the use of the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau in the murders of hundreds of thousands of people.

Jews were not the first people gassed by the Nazis. The first victims of Nazi gassings were German mental patients who were condemned by Hitler’s “Euthanasia” order of 1939.

In 1988, Fred Leuchter of Malden, Massachusetts, was contacted by Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson. Leuchter was hired to prepare a report on the gas chambers of Auschwitz on behalf of Canadian neo-Nazi Ernst Zundel who was facing trial for distributing Holocaust revisionist literature. Leuchter visited the sites of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek death camps. Upon returning to the United States, he published a lengthy report which concluded that the facilities he examined “could not have then been… utilized or seriously considered to function as execution gas chambers.”

However, it became increasingly clear during Zundel’s trial that something was terribly wrong with the “Leuchter Report.” As it turned out, Mr. Leuchter had no credentials as an engineer, only a bachelor’s degree in history. Leuchter’s bizarre explanation that anyone who went to college knew enough mathematics and science to be an engineer raised even more eyebrows. Judge Ronald Thomas listened to excerpts from the “Leuchter Report.” Then, the judge castigated the author for his methodology, which he labeled “preposterous,” and ruled that “Leuchter has no expertise.”

Because of his lies, Leuchter was facing charges of practicing without a license since he presented himself as an engineer and execution expert to various government agencies. Given the possibility of serving time in prison, Leuchter reached a pre-trial agreement with the Court. He admitted that he “was not and had never been registered as a professional engineer,” although he had represented himself as “an engineer able to consult in areas of engineering concerning execution technology.” As part of the agreement, Leuchter also agreed to cease and desist from distributing engineering reports during his probationary period.

An analysis of the “Leuchter Report” by Professor George Wellers in Paris stated that Leuchter’s calculations were “an absurdity... One can see in many ways” how Leuchter was “operating outside the realities of the problem.” Concluding the analysis, Wellers characterized Leuchter's interpretation as “false and absurd from start to end.” Despite the exposure of Leuchter’s lies and the absurdity of his report, both the man and the document are still held in high esteem among Holocaust revisionists.

The Nazis classified their many hundreds of concentration camps on their basis of their primary function. In a very real sense, all were death camps because the death of the inmates, whether through overwork, starvation, disease, or outright murder, was ultimately expected.

However, there were sites that were supposed to function specifically as extermination centers. Each of the death camps Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Majdanek, Sobibor, Belzec, and Chelmno had special equipment for gassing of hundreds of thousands of people, reaching millions of victims altogether. All of these camps were located in Poland. Poland had far more Jews than Germany and the rest of Western Europe combined. The Nazis also felt that the relative remoteness of Poland’s rural areas would minimize reports of the mass murder taking place. The death camps were a Nazi establishment on occupied Polish soil.

The figure of 3,000,000 to 4,000,000 murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau was an invention of communist officials in Poland which sought to blur the uniqueness of Jewish suffering at Auschwitz.

These officials intentionally overstated the number of non-Jewish casualties at Auschwitz-Birkenau, far beyond what the actual number was. In a clever attempt to disguise the subterfuge, the figures for Jewish losses were inflated by nearly double, so they would still be larger than those of non-Jewish victims, but by a much smaller ratio. With the end of communism in Poland and the former Soviet Union, officials at the Auschwitz Museum finally lowered the casualty figures. This action was line with the estimates of historians who insisted for years that between 1,000,000 and 1,500,000 million people perished at Auschwitz-Birkenau, with Jews making up between 80 and 90 percent of the victims.

The figure of 6,000,000 Jewish losses during the Holocaust has always been in line with the lower Auschwitz figures.