Holocaust Denial and the Response

Why this Chapter exists

A crime recorded so it could not be denied.

In the photograph above, a survivor is showing General Dwight Eisenhower how prisoners were treated at Ohrdruf, a camp in Germany that American soldiers reached on April 4, 1945. It was the first Nazi camp the U.S. Army liberated. Eisenhower came to see it himself eight days later, with Generals Patton and Bradley, and what he found shook him. He ordered the scene photographed and filmed, and he brought in members of Congress and the press to see it with their own eyes. He wrote that he had made the visit deliberately, so that he could give firsthand evidence himself if anyone ever tried to dismiss the reports as “propaganda.”

The footage and photographs taken at Ohrdruf and the other camps were later used as evidence at the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi leadership. Within a few years, people were already at work claiming they were faked.

In plain terms

Denial and distortion are two different tactics.

The standard definitions come from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), an intergovernmental body of more than thirty member countries. The IHRA adopted a working definition in Toronto on October 10, 2013.

Denial is the claim that the Holocaust did not happen at all, or that its central facts are invented. In practice this means denying that there was a coordinated Nazi plan to murder the Jews of Europe, or denying the methods of murder: the gas chambers, the mass shootings, the deliberate starvation. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum defines it as “any attempt to negate the established facts of the Nazi genocide of European Jews.”

Distortion is subtler and, today, more common. It does not deny that the Holocaust happened. It minimizes, excuses, or misuses it. The IHRA’s forms of distortion include gross minimization of the number of victims and efforts to excuse or minimize the role of Nazi Germany’s collaborators and allies. They also include attempts to blame the Jews for their own genocide, statements that cast the Holocaust as a positive event, and attempts to shift responsibility for the camps onto other nations or groups.

The IHRA’s separate working definition of antisemitism (2016) lists “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” among the examples of what antisemitism “could, taking into account the overall context, include.” How the three main frameworks differ on examples of this kind is set out in the Contemporary Antisemitism Chapter.

Lipstadt, who later served as U.S. Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, draws a further line. Hardcore denial is the flat claim that the genocide never occurred. Softcore denial accepts that a crime happened but chips away at the numbers, the methods, or the intent. The softcore version is harder to spot.

The core that gives it away

Every version carries the same accusation.

What makes Holocaust denial a form of antisemitism, rather than a mistaken reading of history, is the claim hidden inside it. To deny the Holocaust, a person has to explain why the entire documented record (German, Allied, and survivor) would tell the same lie. The denialist answer is a version of the same charge. In the words of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, denial and distortion “generally claim that the Holocaust was invented or exaggerated by Jews as part of a plot to advance Jewish interests.” Deniers have named money and the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 as those interests. The charge applies the old myth that Jews secretly manipulate the world to the crime committed against them. Lipstadt has said, “The only reason to deny the Holocaust is to inculcate and foster antisemitism.”

Two ideas run through denial, and both are old antisemitic charges in new dress. The first inverts the victim and the criminal: the Jews, in this telling, were not murdered but were themselves the schemers. The second declares the evidence itself a fraud: the photographs staged, the confessions coerced, the records forged. Together they turn the record of a crime against Jews into a claimed proof of a Jewish conspiracy.

The IHRA’s working definition names a further goal. It states that denial often aims to rehabilitate open antisemitism and to promote political ideas and conditions suited to a repeat of the very event it denies.

Where it came from

Built on purpose, almost from the start.

Denial began with the perpetrators. From 1942 to 1944, in an operation code-named Aktion 1005, Germans and their collaborators dug up and burned the bodies at Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, and many mass-shooting sites to destroy the evidence. In 1943 Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, told SS generals in Poznan that the murder of the European Jews would be kept secret and never recorded.

After the war, networks of deniers formed early, first in France. There the writers Maurice Bardèche and Paul Rassinier argued that the murders had not really happened. Rassinier, a former French Communist and Socialist who had himself been imprisoned by the Nazis, claimed in 1964 that the gas chambers were an invention. In Germany and Austria, authors with their own reasons to whitewash the Nazi period worked to rehabilitate its leaders. Small publishing houses appeared specifically to print and distribute this material.

In 1978 the effort took on the costume of scholarship. The American antisemitic publisher Willis Carto and William David McCalden founded the Institute for Historical Review (IHR) in California. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum describes the IHR as masking its message “under the guise of valid academic inquiry.” It held conferences, issued a journal, and used the vocabulary of research. Its methods were circular reasoning, quotations stripped of context, and claims that fell apart when checked against the record. The academic disguise let denial travel into places that would have rejected open antisemitism.

A French court convicted the literature professor Robert Faurisson in 1981 of inciting hatred and discrimination, and Canada prosecuted the publisher Ernst Zündel in 1985 for distributing information he knew to be false. He was convicted twice, and in 1992 the Supreme Court of Canada struck down that false-news law and acquitted him. For Zündel’s 1988 trial, Fred Leuchter, an American consultant on execution equipment with no formal professional qualifications, took samples from the ruins of the Auschwitz gas chambers and wrote a report claiming they had never been used for killing. The British writer David Irving published it and said it had converted him. At the London libel trial told below, Irving agreed under cross-examination that it was “fundamentally flawed.” The judge found that no objective historian would have regarded it as a sufficient reason for doubting the evidence of gas chambers at Auschwitz.

The Trial

The libel trial that checked Irving’s history against the documents.

One of the clearest answers to denial came from a courtroom. The British writer David Irving had spent years casting doubt on the scale and intent of the Holocaust. In 1996 he sued the American historian Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin Books, for libel (a lawsuit claiming a published statement is false and damaging). Lipstadt had called him a Holocaust denier who deliberately misrepresented evidence. Irving denied it, insisting he was an honest historian and that Hitler had neither ordered nor known about the extermination.

Because the case was brought in England, where the burden in a libel suit falls on the defendant, Lipstadt and her team had to prove that her description of Irving was true. That produced a rare kind of trial, in which Irving’s handling of the historical evidence was checked point by point against the documents in open court, with expert historians on the stand. The trial ran in 2000. The judge, Charles Gray, set a limit on his own role: “I do not regard it as being any part of my function as the trial judge to make findings of fact as to what did and what did not occur during the Nazi regime in Germany.” Having weighed the evidence on Auschwitz, he concluded that “no objective, fair-minded historian would have serious cause to doubt that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz and that they were operated on a substantial scale to kill hundreds of thousands of Jews.”

The court ruled against Irving. The judgment found that he had, in Justice Gray’s words, “persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence.” The judgment detailed misrepresented documents, mistranslations, and falsified figures that fit his conclusion. Lipstadt’s defense of justification, that what she had written about Irving was substantially true, succeeded, and the court gave judgment for her and her publisher, Penguin Books. The evidence presented in court was later published online through the Holocaust Denial on Trial archive, and the case reached a wide audience again in the 2016 film Denial. In 2006 an Austrian court sentenced Irving to three years in prison for Holocaust denial.

The state stage

Then a state took it up.

For its first decades, Holocaust denial was the work of private networks of writers, publishers, and institutes, though Iranian state media had been publishing it since the 1990s. Then, five years after the London judgment, in December 2005, it became the declared position of a head of state. Iran’s new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said in a televised speech that the Holocaust, the murder of six million Jews, was “a myth.” Unlike the writers and institutes before him, he led a country of nearly seventy million people, and the state followed his lead. In February 2006, a newspaper owned by the city of Tehran announced a contest for cartoons mocking the Holocaust. The paper called it a test of the West’s free speech, an answer to the cartoons of Muhammad a Danish newspaper had published in 2005, which had set off worldwide protests. The contest drew nearly 1,200 entries from more than 60 countries, and it ran again in 2016. In December 2006, Iran’s Foreign Ministry hosted a conference in Tehran called “Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision.” It drew sixty-seven participants from thirty countries. Among them were well-known deniers, including David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan in the United States. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which tracks Iran’s record of denial and distortion year by year, describes the meeting as a gathering of deniers “cloaked as an academic conference.” (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.)

The next autumn, the story reached New York. In September 2007, Columbia University invited Ahmadinejad to speak on its campus while he was in the city for the United Nations. The invitation drew protests before he said a word. Public figures demanded that it be canceled. Protesters crowded the university’s gates, and barricades and satellite trucks lined the streets for blocks. He spoke indoors, to a packed auditorium, while thousands of students stood on the lawn outside watching on giant screens. Columbia’s president, Lee Bollinger, opened the event by telling his guest, to his face, “Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator.” Bollinger answered the denial with the record itself: “The truth is that the Holocaust is the most documented event in human history.” Ahmadinejad said the Holocaust should be researched from “different perspectives.” The same appeal to “different perspectives” had been made by denial institutes for decades. There was applause in the hall for both men, and there was laughter and booing at some of the Iranian president’s answers. (PBS NewsHour. Columbia Magazine.)

How to recognize it

A small set of moves, used again and again.

Denial and distortion reuse a small set of techniques. Manufactured doubt: a single ambiguous detail is treated as if it overturns the whole, while the mountain of corroborating evidence is ignored. The closed loop: the documentation itself is recast as the forgery, so that every piece of proof becomes, circularly, more evidence of the supposed plot, the signature of a conspiracy theory rather than an argument. The pose of inquiry: denial dresses as “just asking questions,” borrowing the language of open research to smuggle a settled conclusion. Minimization by degree: the softcore move that concedes the event but shaves the numbers, the methods, or the intent until little is left. False equivalence: Lipstadt calls this the move of “immoral equivalencies.” A denier grants that the Nazis had camps, then adds that everyone committed atrocities in wartime, so why single out the Germans. The effect is to treat genocide as ordinary wartime cruelty.

None of this requires debating whether the Holocaust happened. The same techniques appear in other antisemitic propaganda, treated in The Hatred That Outlived the War and Contemporary Antisemitism Chapters.

The response

How the record is defended.

The main response to denial follows Eisenhower’s approach at Ohrdruf: document, preserve, and make the evidence public. In 1991 the American Historical Association, the oldest professional organization of historians in the United States, stated: “No serious historian questions that the Holocaust took place.” The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum maintains an extensive public record and education series on denial and distortion. The IHRA’s working definition gives governments and educators a shared tool for naming the problem, and underpins the international #ProtectTheFacts campaign. In 2022 the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution condemning denial and distortion of the Holocaust.

Laws differ from country to country. France made questioning the existence of crimes against humanity a criminal offense with the Gayssot Law of 1990. Germany and Austria also criminalize Holocaust denial, and Israel passed such a law in 1986. In the United States, denial is protected speech under the First Amendment unless it falls into a narrow exception, such as incitement to imminent lawless action or a true threat.

The Irving trial, the museum archives, the survivor testimonies, and the perpetrators’ own records can all be checked. Those records include the reports the mobile killing units sent to Berlin, which counted the people they shot by place and date. They also include the Höfle Telegram, an SS radio message of January 1943, intercepted by British intelligence, that totaled the arrivals at four killing camps through the end of 1942. Ohrdruf is part of the same record. The Signal Corps photographs taken there are preserved today in the collections of the Eisenhower Presidential Library.

Classroom Connections

Where this Chapter fits.

Teaching Connections

• World History. Holocaust denial and its refutation (the IHRA working definition, the 2022 UN resolution, and the documented record from liberation and Nuremberg that they defend) belong to the postwar history of how genocide is documented, contested, and protected.
• Classroom Applications. Students can:
  • distinguish historical revision from denial and distortion
  • evaluate documentary evidence
  • analyze propaganda techniques
  • compare primary sources with denialist claims
  • understand how courts, historians, archives, and museums establish the historical record
  • construct evidence-based historical arguments.
• International Classroom Relevance. Because this Chapter examines disinformation, evidence evaluation, and the defense of the historical record, it supports Holocaust education, media-literacy and civic education, genocide studies, and source-based historical inquiry.

Standards Alignment

• NYS Social Studies Framework: NY Global History 10.10 (Human Rights Violations).
• NYS Holocaust Education Mandate, Education Law §801. Supports Holocaust instruction by teaching how the documented record answers denial and distortion, the evidence skills the mandate’s purpose depends on.
• Common Core RH.11–12.6 & RH.11–12.9. Students analyze denialist texts, the documentary record, the findings of Irving v. Lipstadt, and historical scholarship while evaluating purpose, perspective, and the deliberate misrepresentation of sources.
• C3 Framework, D2.His.1 & D2.His.14. Students investigate chronology, causation, and evidence-based interpretation while examining how historians and courts establish and defend the historical record.