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 did something deliberate in response: he ordered the scene photographed and filmed, and he brought in members of Congress and the press to look at it with their own eyes. He wrote that he wanted the evidence gathered firsthand, because he could foresee a day when someone would try to call the whole record propaganda.

That instinct turned out to be exact. The footage and photographs taken at Ohrdruf and the other camps were later used as evidence at the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi leadership. They are among the most reproduced images of the twentieth century. And within a few years, people were already at work claiming they were faked. This Chapter is about that effort, what it is, where it came from, how it works, and how the historical record answers it.

How this Chapter is built

Naming the denial without repeating it.

There is a real risk in teaching this subject: explaining a lie in detail can spread it. The way to avoid that is simple: never lay out denialist arguments as though they were a side worth weighing, because they are not; every one has been examined and answered in open court and in the scholarly record. What follows describes the shape of denial instead, so that a reader meeting it later can recognize the move being made. The goal is the one the historian Deborah Lipstadt has urged: treat denial not as the other half of a debate but as a form of antisemitism with a documented purpose.

In plain terms

Denial and distortion are two different tactics.

The standard definitions come from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), an association of more than thirty member countries, which adopted a working definition in Toronto in 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 simply as any attempt to negate the established facts of the Nazi genocide.

Distortion is subtler and, today, more common. It does not deny that the Holocaust happened; it minimizes, excuses, or misuses it. The IHRA lists forms of distortion that include grossly understating the number of victims, excusing the collaborators and allies who helped the Nazis, blaming the Jewish victims for their own murder, or invoking the Holocaust to score an unrelated point. Distortion keeps the event and bends its meaning.

Lipstadt, the scholar later appointed U.S. Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, draws a further line between hardcore denial, the flat claim that the genocide never occurred, and softcore denial, which accepts that something happened but chips away at the numbers, the methods, or the intent. The softcore version is harder to spot, which is the point of it.

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 always a version of the same charge: that the Jews invented or inflated the genocide for money and to justify the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. That is not a neutral historical doubt. It is the old conspiracy myth that Jews secretly manipulate the world, applied to the very crime committed against them. Lipstadt has put the underlying motive plainly: there is, she argues, only one reason to deny or distort these facts, and that is to foster antisemitism.

Scholars who study denial describe two ideas at its core, 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. Hold the two together and the purpose is clear: not to correct the history, but to turn the most documented crime against the Jews into one more proof of a Jewish conspiracy.

There is a further purpose, and it is the reason denial keeps being manufactured rather than fading away. The bodies that study it, including the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, describe the goal plainly: denial works to rehabilitate open antisemitism and to clear the ground for the kind of politics that produced the genocide in the first place. If the Holocaust can be erased, then the ideology behind it loses its great warning label, and can be sold again as something ordinary. That is what the factory is for. It is also why denial rises alongside the movements that have the most to gain from a past with no lesson in it.

Where it came from

Built on purpose, almost from the start.

Denial has a history, and it is worth seeing how the machine was assembled. The older myths (the poisoner, the conspirator, the Christ-killer) were each built and put to work by people who wanted them. Denial is the same pattern, applied now to the genocide those myths helped cause.

Denial did not begin with the internet. Networks of deniers formed in the early postwar years, first in France, where writers such as Maurice Bardèche and Paul Rassinier set out to argue that the murders had not really happened, not because the evidence was thin, but because they wanted the conclusion. 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. A network of deniers around the American publisher Willis Carto founded the Institute for Historical Review in the United States, an organization built to look like an academic body. It held conferences, issued a journal, and used the vocabulary of research. Its methods were the opposite of research: circular reasoning, quotations stripped of context, and claims that fell apart the moment they were checked against the record. The disguise mattered, because it let denial travel into places that would have rejected open antisemitism. That was the intent all along: not to weigh the evidence, but to make an old hatred sound like new research.

The Trial

The day a court tested denial against the evidence.

The clearest answer to denial came not from a museum but from a courtroom. In 1996 the British writer David Irving, who had spent years casting doubt on the scale and intent of the Holocaust, 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 forced something rare: a trial in which the actual evidence of the Holocaust, and Irving's handling of it, was examined point by point in open court, with expert historians on the stand. The trial ran in 2000.

The court ruled against Irving. The judgment found that he had, in Justice Gray’s words, “persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence”, misrepresenting documents, mistranslating, and falsifying figures to fit his conclusion. The ruling did not merely clear Lipstadt of libel; it established, in a court of law and on the public record, that the leading English-language denier had falsified history on purpose. The trial became its own kind of documentation: a step-by-step demonstration of how denial is built, and how it fails when the evidence is put in front of it. The full evidence presented in court was later published online, in plain view, through the Holocaust Denial on Trial archive, and the case reached a wide audience again in the 2016 film Denial. The lesson the trial left: denial does not survive contact with the record, which is exactly why the record is kept.

The state stage

Then a state took it up.

For its first decades, Holocaust denial was mostly the work of individuals and small 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.” He was not a writer with a pamphlet or an institute with a mailing list. 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 organizers claimed more than a thousand entries from dozens of countries, and the contest 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 costume of scholarship, now wearing a state’s flag. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum tracks Iran’s record of denial and distortion year by year. (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 set off a storm 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.” He 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.” It was the answer the deniers’ institutes had been giving for thirty years. There was applause in the hall for both men, and there was laughter and booing at some of the Iranian president’s answers. The invitation became a national argument about what a university platform is for. The argument has never fully settled. (PBS NewsHour. Columbia Magazine.)

How to recognize it

The moves are repeatable, which is what makes them catchable.

Denial and distortion reuse a small set of techniques. Naming them is the practical skill. 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 point is to drain the murder of any particular meaning, because a genocide treated as ordinary wartime cruelty is one that no longer demands a reckoning.

None of this requires debating whether the Holocaust happened. These labels are tools for seeing the technique at work, the same recognition skill the site builds in the It Didn’t End and Contemporary Antisemitism Chapters, applied here to one specific lie.

The response

The record is defended, not assumed.

The answer to denial is the same instinct Eisenhower had at Ohrdruf: document, preserve, and make the evidence public. That work continues. 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. The Irving trial, the museum archives, the survivor testimonies, and the perpetrators' own records together form a defense that does not depend on belief: it can be checked.

This subject comes last for a reason. After the liberation, the trials, and the long work of memory, denial can be seen for what it is, not a competing account of the past, but an attack on the record itself, and the reason that record was built to last.

Classroom Connections

Where this Chapter fits.

Teaching Connections

The disciplines and courses this Chapter naturally supports, for any educator, anywhere.

• 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, Genocide, and the Postwar World).
• 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.