The Holocaust Denial Movement

Holocaust deniers argue that the genocide of Jews during World War II either did not occur or was much less horrific than historians say. But their work is much more than a simple re-interpretation of the historical evidence. Holocaust denial is a political movement that is inherently anti-Semitic, meant, for the most part, to make national socialism more palatable — how many people, after all, want to support an ideology responsible for the industrialized murder of several million Jews? Many deniers cloak their hatred in academic language, seeking to give the appearance that they are honest, if skeptical, students of history. They prefer to call themselves “Holocaust revisionists,” a phrase hijacked from “historical revisionism,” a school of credible historians who offered new interpretations for the origins of World War I.

Deniers usually argue that the number of Nazi victims is far smaller than the toll calculated by historians of the era and was the result of disease far more often than of deliberate murder on the part of the Nazis. In particular, they take issue with the commonly cited number of 6 million Jews killed during the Holocaust. Many deniers also assert that the ovens used by the Nazi regime in extermination camps in Poland were not capable of incinerating nearly as many bodies as the Allies said were destroyed in them. Some claim there were no gas chambers at all.

Some revisionists even extend their claims in an attempt to debunk Jews who seem sympathetic to most human beings. A case in point is the argument by certain deniers that the diary of teenager Anne Frank is a fraud because it had alterations made with a postwar ballpoint pen (they didn’t mention that the marks were made later by Frank’s father). They have lied about the qualities of the Zyklon B gas used to kill Jews, the operation of the Einsatzgruppen (the mobile killing squads that shot more than 1 million Jews on the Eastern Front), and hundreds of other facts.

Holocaust...