Resources

Information-

"Confronting Antisemitism." Holocaust Denial. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Mar. 2013. <http:// www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/focus/denial/>.

"Denying the Holocaust - The Week." The Week. N.p., 26 Feb. 2009. Web. 14 Mar. 2013. < http://theweek.com/article/index/93693/denying-the-holocausthttp:// www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/ideology/holocaust-denial>

"The History Place - Holocaust Timeline." The History Place - Holocaust Timeline. N.p., n.d. Web. 14 Mar. 2013. < http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/holocaust/ timeline.html>

"Holocaust Denial." Holocaust Denial. N.p., n.d. Web. 14 Mar. 2013. <http:// www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0009_0_09147.html>.

"Holocaust History." Concentration Camps, 1933–1939. N.p., 11 May 2012. Web. 14 Mar. 2013.  < http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005263>

"Holocaust History." "Final Solution": Overview. N.p., 11 May 2012. Web. 14 Mar. 2013.  < http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005151>

"Holocaust History." Holocaust Deniers and Public Misinformation. N.p., 11 May 2012. Web. 14 Mar. 2013. < http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007272>

"Holocaust History." Nazi Camps. N.p., 11 May 2012. Web. 14 Mar. 2013. < http:// www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005144>

"Holocaust History." Victims of the Nazi Era: Nazi Racial Ideology. N.p., 11 May 2012. Web. 14 Mar. 2013. <http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007457>

"Institute for Historical Review." A Brief Introduction to Holocaust Revisionism. N.p., n.d. Web. 14 Mar. 2013. <http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v11/v11p251_Butz.html>.

Lipstadt, Deborah E. "Denying the Holocaust." BBC News. BBC, 17 Feb. 2011. Web. 15 Mar. 2013. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/genocide/deniers_01.shtml>.

Lipstadt, Deborah E. Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. New York: Free, 1993. Print.

Lipstadt, Deborah E. History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. Print.

Mathis, Andrew E. "Holocaust Denial - Conspiracy Theories in American History." Holocaust Denial - Conspiracy Theories in American History. N.p., 2 July 2004. Web. 14 Mar. 2013.  < http://www.holocaust-history.org/denial/abc-clio/>

"Paul Rassinier." Meet. N.p., n.d. Web. 14 Mar. 2013. < http://www.revisionists.com/ revisionists/rassinier.html>

Photos-

history1900s.about.com

tiger.towson.edu

www.ushmm.org

www.revisionists.com

en.wikipedia.org

Is there any evidence against these conspiracy theories?

American troops sort through German documents needed as evidence in war crime cases.

Yes, the most important evidence is not anything that is written out, it is the verbal confessions of many Nazis and SS members that validate the facts historians have formulated over the years. Einstzgruppe commander Otto Ohlendorf admitted that he and his troupe killed about 90,000 people within 1941 and 1942. This kind of evidence is what deniers, such as Paul Rassiner, believed the Allies were creating by torturing people into being involved. Deniers did not believe people would so easily confess to committing a war crime since they knew the penalty was death. Rudolf Hoss, the Birkenau concentration camp Nazi Commandant, was given the death penalty and decided to write e a paper full of in-depth descriptions on the killings that took place under his command. Additionally, Adolf Eichmann, Hitler’s partner in planning the extermination of the Jews, admitted that the gas chambers were, in fact, meant to mass-murder large groups of people in the concentration camps.The documents that all deniers either disregard or claim to be forged include a multitude of facts that make it blatantly obvious the Holocaust happened. On April 11, 1942, SS-Major General Dr Harald Turner wrote to the head of Himmler’s personal staff, Karl Wolff, about a “‘delousing van’” and how in four weeks it has done really well at “clearing out the camp.” Other letters were found about the buses and how “loads of 97,000 had been processed.” Along with these documents, Auschwitz death camp’s architectural documentations draw more attention from deniers than almost any other source of evidence. For example, a written order was discovered from February 1943 about twelve gas-tight doors and windows, with handles only on the outside, being installed in the camp. Deniers are convinced that the Nazis are talking about delousing chambers, morgues, or air-raid shelters, not gas chambers. 

When did Holocaust denial arrive in America?

Paul Rassinier

It was not until the 1950s and 1960s that the Holocaust denial arrived in America, led by strong antisemitic and extremist groups. These early revisionists obtained their ideas from Rassinier’s opinion that the Holocaust was “created by Jewish leaders in order to control the world’s finances and increase support for Israel." American denier’s beliefs began to evolve, and in 1952 antisemite W. D. Herrstrom wrote Bible News Flashes all about how the five million illegal aliens in the United States were really the Jews that “supposedly” died in the Holocaust. “No use looking in Shickelgruber’s [Hitler’s] ovens for them. Walk down the streets of any American city. There they are,” said Herrstrom. This idea began as a small denial topic which confused many people who read Herrstrom’s book, but later evolved into a “mainstream” topic as author of Denying the Holocaust, Deborah E. Lipstadt would call it. Isolationist Harry Elmer Barnes is yet another American revisionist of the Holocaust. He began his revisionism during World War I, defending the Allies and blaming Germany for the start of the war. However, he had an unpredictable change in opinion and turned against the Allies right after WWI ended and sided with Germany for the remainder of his life.

When did Holocaust conspiracy theories begin?

 Some historians say that Holocaust conspiracy theories began during WWII, but most believe they rooted right after the war. The first “debunker,” or person who discredits and exposes claims as being false or exaggerated, was Maurice Bardéche in 1947.  Bardéche spread his ideology through writing the books Letter to Francois Mauriac, Nuremberg of the Promised Land, and What is Fascism?. In these books, Bardéche discussed his opinion that he felt the Jews were the ones responsible for the Holocaust because they basically started the war by agreeing with the Treaty of Versailles. Bardéche also saw the Nuremberg trails as wrong in many ways, and defended them by saying that the Nazis were just an extremely strong army which was needed to defeat Stalin. Paul Rassiner was the next man to step forward with his denial by writing Debunking the Genocide Myth, which contained his most controversial argument. Rassiner supported the idea that the Nazis and the National Socialists were forcing people into these camps as a “gesture of compassion”. He claimed the Nazis were only in the concentration camps to “rehabilitate the strayed sheep and to bring them back to a healthier concept of the German community, [and]...its destiny."

Who is Arthur Butz?

Arthur Butz

Northwestern University engineering professor and author of famous Holocaust denial book The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, Arthur Butz is known as the most academically opinionated revisionist in the world. Butz stands out above all his fellow deniers not only for his unique intellectual writing style, but also his straight-forward criticisms on other denier’s books. He is not afraid to admit that he believes the Nazi’s may have killed up to a million Jews. Instead, he believes the Einsatzgruppen, or German Mobile Killing Units, were responsible for killing citizens, but the Jews may have been personally singled out by the SS members as a result of racism. Butz does not directly attack the Jewish religion in his books, and claims Zionism, a Jewish anti-Semitism movement in the late nineteenth century, as a major contributor to the Holocaust hoax. Additionally, he is not the only denier to consider Zionists the creators of this myth. What he and others coincidentally seemed to overlook while researching, was the fact that this movement did not have nearly enough Jewish supporters to give it the power to carry out highly in depth plans. Meaning that there is no way that the Jewish people could have created the Holocaust myth as a way to achieve the State of Israel. 

Are there certain people more likely to deny the Holocaust?

All kinds of people deny the Holocaust, presidents, bishops, and even survivors, everyone has their reason. Typically people from the extreme Left and Right state that there were only about 200,000 Jewish deaths during the Holocaust. Most believe it was only a result of the prosecution that happens everywhere and everyday to groups such as: homosexuals, communists, and mentally disabled. British Bishop Richard Williamson expresses his beliefs that the Holocaust is “lies, lies, lies”. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, perhaps one of the more well-known deniers, calls the Holocaust a “myth” and explains that Jews were the ones to invent it. Frenchman Paul Rassinier was caught attempting to smuggle Jews to Switzerland during the Holocaust and taken to the Buchenwald and Dora concentration camp. He managed to survive the perils caused by the Nazis, and was freed when his camp was liberated. Even through his experience in a camp, he claims that the image created of the concentration camps was false, along with the witnesses and the documents. Defending the Nazis, Rassiner announced, “...never at any moment did the responsible authorities of the Third Reich intend to order — or, in fact, order — the extermination of the Jews in this or any other manner."

What is Revisionism?

Willis Carto

People who believe that the Holocaust occurred but that it was not designed to exterminate the Jewish population, prefer the label “revisionists” instead of “deniers." Revisionism was given its name by active antisemitic Willis Carto and his Institute for Historical Review, or IHR, which claimed denial as another “credible historical theory." However, the first known case of revisionism began after World War I in 1920. Smith College professor Sidney B. Fay claimed he was told a bunch of “silly propaganda” about the war. The IHR defined “revisionism” as an “acceptable historical approach which seeks new ways to understand historical events.” It defines the term “denier” as a person who “ignores or twists evidence in order to pervert history." They may have a different name, but many of the beliefs of  revisionists and deniers are strikingly similar. Many revisionists and deniers support their theories by saying that the evidence presented in the Nuremberg Trials, or war crime cases, and the people who presented it are fake. Both groups choose to ignore any uncovered written records such as notes and orders. They say that the information present on these is either “forged” or that the translator translated them the wrong way. 

Who are Holocaust Deniers?

Deniers gather to protest the truth of the Holocaust.

Holocaust deniers are people who have found ways to mutate Holocaust facts to make it seem as though the entire historical event was fabricated. So what exactly do these Holocaust deniers or “revisionists” believe and why do so many people believe them? The most common Holocaust deniers believe that six million Jews were not murdered and that the ones that were killed by Nazis were only killed as a necessity to the well-being of the country during wartime. Others believe that the Jews either died of natural deaths or for committing serious felonies against the German government. Some deniers even believe that the people who admitted to helping kill Jews during WWII and survivors were forced by the Allies to lie. Whatever the reason, deniers believe that the proven figure of six million deaths was extremely exaggerated. 

What is the Holocaust?

World War II started in 1933 after Hitler became Chancellor in January, and the first concentration camp opened on March 22 northwest of the city of Munich, Germany. Concentration camps are places where people are forced to stay, usually confined under the poor treatment of a specific group of people, and the people sent to them are unlikely to even have committed a crime worth this extent of cruel punishment. The Nazis created these camps to completely exterminate the entire Jewish race, not only in Germany, but the rest of Europe as well. This bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution was considered the Nazi’s “Final Solution.” The term was used as code instead of saying that they were annihilating the Jewish population. Surprisingly, not only Jewish people were targeted during this event. The Germans formulated their ideology of race based on Darwin’s theory of “survival of the fittest.” People with mental or physical disability were targeted, along with Gypsies,  the Polish, Russian war prisoners, and African-Germans. As the Germans conquer countries during WWII, they set up concentration camps and capture the Jewish civilians living in that country. There were about 20,000 Nazi-run concentration camps created during the years of 1933 and 1945. The German Protection Squadrons, also called the “SS,” was a group of Nazi elite guards, who took complete control over all of the concentration camps by December 1934. On July 24, 1944, the first concentration camp was discovered and liberated at Majadanek by the Russians. About 360,000 people had already been killed there. As the liberations continued, Nazis began to evacuate prisoners from their camps in attempt to move them further away from Allied troops, these transports were known as “death marches.” On January 27, 1945, the largest concentration camp, Auschwitz, was liberated. Over two million people were killed there, one and a half million of them Jews.