In July 2015, Romania passed a law officially criminalizing holocaust denial.
16 other countries have also passed legislation effectively outlawing the practice.
But elsewhere, even heads of state are deniers, like Iran’s ex-President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
In fact, one survey showed that up to two thirds of the world hadn’t heard of or deny
facts about the Holocaust.
So, how is that possible?
What is Holocaust denial?
From 1941 to 1945, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Regime carried out the systematic genocide of about
six million Jews and millions of others considered “undesirable”.
Nearly all historians, survivors, and even ex-Nazis confirm that Jews, gypsies, homosexuals,
and others were murdered through the use of concentration camps and gas chambers.
Yet, Holocaust deniers, who prefer the term “revisionists”, argue that the Holocaust
either did not happen, or was significantly overblown.
Many deniers, like the former head of the Muslim Brotherhood, suggest that the “myth
of the Holocaust” is simply a Jewish conspiracy designed to subjugate non-Jewish people.
While they argue that their view is objective and unbiased, it is generally acknowledged
that in most cases Holocaust denial is a direct form of anti-Semitism.
Additionally, deniers rarely dispute the non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust, and even acknowledge
there WAS systematic mass murder by the Nazis.
Just not of Jews.
Generally, there is a focus on three primary arguments.
The first is that the Nazis did not have a specific policy of exterminating Jews.
This is predicated on the fact that no direct written order from Hitler exists.
However, there is significant evidence in the form of letters, testimony from the Nuremberg
Trials, and even passages from Hitler’s book Mein Kampf.
Two secretly recorded speeches were made in 1943 by the “architect of the Holocaust”,
Heinrich Himmler.
In them, he explicitly discusses the systematic extermination of the Jews.
Deniers often argue over the meaning of the word “extermination” within the speech.
Another assertion is that nowhere near 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust, often
citing numbers closer to 300,000 or 1 million.
Much of this is based on a single Red Cross publication, listing 300,000 registered deaths
of Germans and German Jews alone.
This figure is misrepresented by deniers as accounting for ALL Holocaust victims.
In 1979, the Red Cross responded to deniers, and disputed these false claims.
The final argument is that Nazis did not use gas chambers or extermination camps.
In one famous case, a leading Holocaust denial organization put out a challenge offering
$50,000 for proof that Jews were gassed at Auschwitz.
In response, a Holocaust survivor submitted his experience of seeing his mother and two
sisters led into gas chambers to be killed.
When the organization refused to pay up, the survivor sued and won.
During the trial, the Judge declared “Jews were gassed to death at Auschwitz Concentration
Camp in Poland during the summer of 1944.
It is not reasonably subject to dispute…
It is simply a fact.”
Despite Holocaust deniers being regularly discredited, they continue to be supported
by white supremacist, neo-nazi, and anti-semitic groups.
Although they claim proof of a Jewish agenda, there is almost no debate as to the real reason
that they attempt to deny the facts of the Holocaust.
The Holocaust may have been one of the worst genocides in modern history, but it is far
from the only one.
Most recently, the mass murder that occurred in Armenia during the early 20th century has
finally been acknowledged as a genocide.
To find out more, watch this video.
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