Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on January 22, 2022

What is Holocaust Denial?

The Holocaust is one of the best documented events in history. Holocaust denial describes attempts to negate the established facts of the Nazi genocide of European Jewry. Common denial assertions are that the murder of six million Jews during World War II never occurred; that the Nazis had no official policy or intention to exterminate the Jews; and that the poison gas chambers in the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center never existed.

A newer trend is the distortion of the facts of the Holocaust. Common distortions include assertions that the figure of six million Jewish deaths is an exaggeration; that deaths in the concentration camps were the results of disease or starvation but not policy; and that the diary of Anne Frank is a forgery.

Holocaust denial is generally motivated by hatred of Jews, and builds on an accusation that the Holocaust was invented or exaggerated by Jews as part of a plot to advance Jewish interests. This view perpetuates long-standing antisemitic stereotypes by accusing Jews of conspiracy and world domination, hateful charges that were instrumental in laying the groundwork for the Holocaust.

Holocaust distortion may be associated with antisemitism, but there are also forms that may result from a lack of respect or awareness of the subject. Regardless of the motivation, all forms of Holocaust distortion open the door to more dangerous forms of denial and antisemitism because they cast doubt on the reality of the Holocaust.

The United States Constitution ensures freedom of speech. Therefore, in the United States denying the Holocaust or engaging in antisemitic hate speech is not illegal, except when there is an imminent threat of violence. Many other countries, particularly in Europe where the Holocaust occurred, have laws criminalizing Holocaust denial and hate speech.

This timeline lists some key events in the evolution of Holocaust denial.

194244To conceal the evidence of their annihilation of Europe's Jews, Germans and their collaborators destroy evidence of mass graves at the Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka killing centers, and at thousands of sites of mass shooting operations throughout German-occupied Poland, the German-occupied Soviet Union, and Serbia, including Babi Yar, in an operation code named Aktion 1005.

1943In a speech to SS Generals at Poznan, Heinrich Himmler, Reich Leader (Reichsfhrer) of the SS (Schutzstaffel; Protection Squadrons), remarks that the mass murder of the European Jews will be kept secret, never to be recorded.

1955Willis Carto founds an influential, far right group based in Washington, DC, that eventually comes to be known as the Liberty Lobby. Led by Carto until its bankruptcy in 2001, the Liberty Lobby advocates a racially pure United States and blames Jews for problems facing the US and the world. The Liberty Lobby begins to publish Holocaust denial literature in 1969.

1959American clergyman Gerald L. K. Smith's antisemitic publication, Cross and the Flag, claims that six million Jews were not killed during the Holocaust but immigrated to the United States during World War II.

1964Paul Rassinier, a French Communist who had been interned by the Nazis, publishes The Drama of European Jewry, in which he claims that gas chambers were an invention of a Zionist establishment.

196667American historian Harry Elmer Barnes publishes articles in the Libertarian periodical Rampart Journal claiming that the Allies overstated the extent of Nazi atrocities in order to justify a war of aggression against the Axis powers.

1969Noontide Press, a subsidiary of the Liberty Lobby, publishes a book entitled The Myth of the Six Million.

1973Austin J. App, professor of English literature at LaSalle University in Philadelphia, publishes a pamphlet: The Six Million Swindle: Blackmailing the German People for Hard Marks with Fabricated Corpses. The pamphlet becomes a foundation for future claims by Holocaust deniers.

1976Northwestern University engineering professor Arthur R. Butz publishes The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry. Butz was the first Holocaust denier to use the pretense of academic rigor to disguise his falsehoods. Northwestern responds by declaring Butz's statements an embarrassment to the university.

1977Ernst Zndel, a German citizen living in Canada, establishes Samisdat Publishers, which issues neo-Nazi literature that includes Holocaust denial. In 1985 the Canadian government prosecuted Zndel for distributing information he knew to be false.

1977David Irving publishes Hitler's War, arguing that Hitler neither ordered nor condoned the Nazi policy of the genocide of the European Jews. Irving distorts historical evidence and scholarly methods to lend legitimacy to his thesis.

1978William David McCalden (also known as Lewis Brandon) and Willis Carto found the Institute for Historical Review (IHR) in California, which publishes material and sponsors conferences denying the Holocaust. The IHR masks its hateful, racist messages under the guise of valid academic inquiry.

1980The IHR promises a $50,000 reward to anyone who can prove that Jews were gassed at Auschwitz. Survivor Mel Mermelstein submits an affidavit of his internment at Auschwitz and brings suit against the IHR when the institute refuses to pay. In October 1981, Superior Court judge Thomas T. Johnson uses "judicial notice," which allows courts to recognize as fact matters that are common knowledge, to issue a ruling that the Holocaust was fact and that Jews were gassed at Auschwitz.

1981A French court convicts literature professor Robert Faurisson of inciting hatred and discrimination for calling the Holocaust a historical lie.

1984In a landmark case, a Canadian court convicts public school teacher James Keegstra of willfully promoting hatred against an identifiable group for espousing Holocaust denial and other antisemitic views to his social studies students.

1985The then-West German criminal code is updated to include provisions banning incitement to hatred including through forms associated with denial of the Holocaust. The German government updates and strengthens this law again in 1992, 1994, 2002, 2005 and 2015.

1986On July 8, the Israeli parliament passes a law criminalizing denial of the Holocaust.

1987California-based Bradley Smith founds the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust. During the early 1990s, Smith's organization places full-page advertisements or editorial pieces in more than a dozen American college newspapers under the headline The Holocaust Story: How Much is False? The Case for Open Debate. Smith's campaign helps to blur the line between hate mongering and freedom of speech.

1987Jean Marie Le Pen, leader of France's far right National Front party, suggests that gas chambers were merely a detail of World War II. Le Pen runs for president in France in 1988 and comes in fourth.

1987Moroccan-Swedish writer Ahmed Rami begins broadcasting on Radio Islam, based in Sweden. The station describes the Holocaust as a Zionist/Jewish claim. Radio Islam later posts The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Mein Kampf, and other antisemitic texts on its website.

1988At the request of Ernst Zndel, Fred Leuchter (a self-proclaimed specialist in execution methods) travels to the site of the Auschwitz killing center. He later issues the Leuchter Report : An Engineering Report on the Alleged Execution Gas Chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek, Poland, which is cited by Holocaust deniers to cast doubt on the use of gas chambers for mass murder.

1989David Duke, a white supremacist, wins a seat in the Louisiana State Legislature. Duke sells Holocaust denial literature from his legislative office.

1990The French government enacts the Gayssot Law which declares that questioning the scale or existence of crimes against humanity (as defined in the London Charter of 1945) is a criminal offense. This law serves as a stimulus to many other European countries that adopt similar laws in the 1990s and early 2000s.

1990In the course of criminal proceedings brought against Fred Leuchter by the State of Massachusetts, it is revealed that Leuchter never actually earned an engineering degree or license. Leuchter admits that he has no training in biology, toxicology, or chemistry, all of which are crucial to the claims of the 1988 Leuchter Report, which is often cited to support claims made by Holocaust deniers.

1990A Swedish court sentences Ahmed Rami to six months in jail for hate speech and revokes the broadcasting license of Radio Islam for one year.

1991The American Historical Association, the oldest professional organization of historians, issues a statement: No serious historian questions that the Holocaust took place.

1992The government of Austria amends its 1947 Prohibition Act to criminalize the denial and trivialization of the Holocaust.

1998The government of Poland adopts The Act on the Institute of National Remembrance - Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation. This is a significant piece of legislation that calls for the collection of data on crimes committed in Poland during the Nazi occupation and the years of communist rule. It also sets outprovisions that seek to redress forms of denial and distortion of Holocaust history.

1999A regional court in Opole, Poland, determines that a local professor, Dariusz Ratajczak, is guilty of self publishing Holocaust denial literature.

200046 governments affirm and agree to the wording of the Declaration of the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust (external link). Also known as the Stockholm Declaration, it is a commitment to ensure the permanence of Holocaust research, education, and remembrance and to uphold the terrible truth of the Holocaust against those who deny it.

2000A British court declares David Irving an active Holocaust denier. Irving had sued Emory University historian Deborah Lipstadt for libel following the publication of her 1993 book Denying the Holocaust The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory.

2002The Zayed Center for Coordination and Follow-Up, a think tank of the League of Arab States based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), organizes a symposium on "Semitism." At the symposium, the Holocaust is called a false fable. The government of the UAE closes the Zayed Center in August 2003 after external pressure about the Centers anti-American and antisemitic publications and lectures.

2002Romania (PDF) passes an Emergency Ordinance criminalizing Holocaust denial in response to a growing movement to publically rehabilitate General Ion Antonescu, a pro-Fascist dictator who oversaw the deaths of 280,000 Jews and 11,000 Roma(Gypsies) during World War II.

2002Under the terms of hate speech regulations, Swedish courts sentence neo-Nazi Fredrik Sandberg to six months in prison for re-publishing the Third Reich-era pamphlet, The Jewish Question.

2003In the case of Garaudy v. France, the European Court of Human Rights decides that Roger Garaudy had engaged in forms of Holocaust denial that are not protected by the European Convention on Human Rights.

2003Wolfgang Frlich is arrested in Vienna and sentenced to three years in jail following his 2001 publication of a book entitled Die Gaskammaer Luege (The gas chamber lie). He is released after one year. In the years following, Frlich is re-arrested or has his sentences extended a number of times for continued instances of Holocaust denial, including in 2015 for writing to the Austrian chancellor claiming that the Holocaust could not have occurred.

2003The Romanian government establishes an international commission on the Holocaust in Romania, headed by Elie Wiesel. It consists of 30 Romanian and foreign historians. The objective of the commission is to examine the history of the Holocaust in Romania to identify the facts that took place and to disseminate the research results in the country and abroad. The organization of the commission follows public statements made earlier in 2003 by then President Ion Iliescu who minimized the Holocaust in Romania, and by former Information Minister Vasile Dincu who denied the Holocaust in Romania.

2005The Austrian government arrests David Irving for Holocaust denial. He receives a three-year sentence in 2006 but is released that December, contingent on his leaving Austria.

2005The government of Canada deports Ernst Zndel to Germany to stand trial for Holocaust denial. German courts convict Zndel for 14 counts related to Holocaust denial in 2007, for which he receives a five-year prison sentence.

2005In a speech broadcast on live television on December 14, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad calls the Holocaust a myth.

2005The Japanese magazine Marco Polo features an article written by freelance author Masanori Nishioka entitled "There Were No Nazi Gas Chambers." In the article, Nishioka claims that the Holocaust never happened and that the gas chambers at Auschwitz were created by the Polish Communist government after the war.

2006Iran's government sponsors a meeting of Holocaust deniers in Tehran cloaked as an academic conference called Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision. In the same year, Farid Mortazavi, graphics editor of the Iranian newspaper Hamshahri, announces a Holocaust cartoon contest with gold and cash prizes for the winners. There are nearly 1,200 submissions from over 60 countries, including cartoons denying or minimizing the Holocaust. Later in the year, the Saba Art and Cultural Institute in Tehran opens an exhibition, sponsored by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, of a selection of 200 cartoons from the contest.

2007On January 26, the United Nations adopts a resolution condemning denial of the Holocaust. The General Assembly declares that denial is tantamount to approval of genocide in all its forms.

2008The European Union adopts a Framework Decision on combating racism and xenophobia (2008/913/JHA), which includes a call for EU member states to ensure that Holocaust denial is punishable by law.

2009English-born Roman Catholic Bishop Richard Williamson denies the existence of gas chambers and minimizes the extent of killing during the Holocaust. The Vatican orders Williamson to recant his statements. When he does not, the Vatican excommunicates Williamson from the Church.

2009David Duke, the former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, is arrested by Czech authorities for denying the Holocaust and inciting hate. He had been invited to speak at Charles University by the Nrodn odpor (National Resistance) group. The Czech government orders Duke to leave the country the following day. The State Prosecutors Office in Prague later dismisses the charges due to lack of evidence.

2010Bradley Smith places his first online Holocaust denial advertisement, which appears on the website of the University of Wisconsin's Badger Herald in February. The Internetbecause of its ease of access and dissemination, seeming anonymity, and perceived authorityis now the chief conduit of Holocaust denial.

2010The Dutch appeals court fines the Arab European League (AEL) 2,500 for publishing a cartoon on its website in 2006 that suggested the Holocaust was made up or exaggerated by Jews. According to the AEL, the organization published the cartoon to highlight double standards in free speech after a Danish newspaper published a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammad. The court also imposes a 2-year probation period on the AEL.

2010Lithuania updates its criminal code to include a law against denial and gross triviliazation of Nazi crimes and crimes perpetrated by Soviets in Lithuania.

2010Under its recently passed law on Holocaust denial, Lithuanian authorities investigate the Lithuanian magazine Veidas for publishing an article that called the Nuremberg Trials the greatest legal farce in history. The investigation closes in early 2011, after local investigators declare that the author did not intend to deny the Holocaust.

2011The vice chairman of Egypts Wafd Party tells the Washington Times in an interview that the September 11 terrorist attacks, the Holocaust, and Anne Franks diary are all historical fabrications. The Holocaust is a lie, says Ahmed Ezz El-Arab. He continues, the Jews under German occupation were 2.4 million. So if they were all exterminated, where does the remaining 3.6 million come from?

2012Nikolaos Michaloliakos, the head of Greeces far-right Golden Dawn party, denies the existence of gas chambers in Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust. There were no ovens, no gas chambers, its a lie, he states during an interview aired on television.

2012Saudi cleric Salman al-Odeh tells Rotana Khalijiya TV that The Holocaust has a historical basis. Many stories about it are documented and well-founded. The problem lies, first of all, in the exaggeration of the Holocaust. It has been turned into a myth of tremendous proportions.... For thousands of years, the Jews were subject to persecution, deportation, killings, and accusations. Maybe much of this stemmed from their moral values, their treacherous nature, their schemes, and the ploys, which made other nations be wary of them.

2012Corneliu Vadim Tudor, a Romanian member of the European Parliament and leader of the nationalist Greater Romania Party, denies the Holocaust on the talk show Romania a la Raport. Tudor states, In Romania there was never a Holocaust.... I will deny it till I die because I love my people.

2013On Holocaust Remembrance Day, Fathi Shihab-Eddim, an aide to Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, claims that the 6 million Jews who were killed by the Nazis actually relocated to the United States. U.S. intelligence agencies, in cooperation with their counterparts in Allied nations during World War II, created it [the Holocaust] to destroy the image of their opponents in Germany, and to justify war and massive destruction against military and civilian facilities of the Axis powers, and especially to hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the atomic bomb, states Shihab-Eddim.

2013Gyorgy Nagy becomes the first Hungarian to be convicted of Holocaust denial. Nagy carried a sign during a 2011 demonstration in Budapest which read the Holocaust never happened in Hebrew. The Court sentences him to 18 months in prison and probation. Part of his sentence is also to visit either Budapests Holocaust memorial museum, Auschwitz, or Yad Vashem.

2013The then-31 countries of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance pass a Working Definition of Holocaust Denial and Distortion, which outlines some of the ways that denial and distortion appear. Since 2013, several countries have adopted the definition at the national level to guide their approach to this problem.

2014Udo Voigt, the former leader of Germanys National Democratic Party (NDP) is appointed to the European Parliaments Civil Liberties, Justice, and Home Affairs Committee. While leader of the NDP, which espouses Neo-Nazi views, Voigt had praised Adolf Hitler and claimed that far fewer than six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. He was convicted of incitement of the people.

2014In his official 2014 Nowruz address, Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei remarks: The Holocaust is an event whose reality is uncertain and if it has happened, its uncertain how it has happened.

2014The Russian Federation updates its criminal code to include provisions that criminalize some forms of Holocaust denial and the dissemination of false data on the activities of the USSR during the Second World War.

2015Two government-sponsored Iranian cultural organizations, Owj Media & Art Institute and the Sarcheshmeh Cultural Complex, announce a second Holocaust cartoon contest, expecting to receive entries from cartoonists in dozens of countries.

2015A German court finds Ursula Haverbeck guilty of sedition after she wrote a letter to the Mayor of Detmold, stating that it was "clearly recognizable" that Auschwitz was nothing more than a labor camp. She sent her message when the Detmold court was trying Reinhold Hanning, a former guard at the Auschwitz camp. In 2014, she had been on trial for saying that the Holocaust was "the biggest and longest-lasting lie in history."

2015Romania supplements its existing law against Holocaust denial to include forms of distortion and denial that engage with the legacy of and images associated with the Romanian Iron Guard.

2015The government of Hungary provides funding to build a statue in honor of Balint Homan, a Hungarian government official who had sponsored antisemitic policies and espoused antisemitic views during the years of the war and the Holocaust. In late 2015, senior Hungarian officials declare that the project should not move forward due to Homans negative historical legacy.

2015The government of Ukraine passes several so-called decommunization laws. Although these laws ban the use of communist and Nazi symbols, certain provisions also prohibit criticism of certain national heroes of the anti-Soviet resistance, including some persons whose historical records include collaboration with the Nazis and crimes against Jews and ethnic Poles during the years of the Holocaust.

2016On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei releases a video entitled Holocaust: Are the Dark Ages Over?" on his website, which includes his 2014 comments questioning the Nazi mass slaughter of six million Jews during World War II.

2016An exhibition displaying 150 Holocaust cartoons (external link) from the 11th Tehran International Cartoon Biennial opens in Tehran in the art section of the Islamic Propaganda Organization. Two weeks later, an awards ceremony is held for the winners of the Holocaust cartoon contest. Majid Mollanoroozi, the director of Tehran's Museum of Contemporary Art and the Head of the Graphic Arts section of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, takes part in the awards ceremony. Prizes reportedly total $50,000.

2016The Polish cabinet approves a bill imposing prison terms on anyone convicted of referring to death camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland as Polish. Claiming that the Poles collaborated with the Nazis in exterminating the Jews would also be considered a criminal offense.

2016 The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance passes its Non-Legally Binding Working Definition of Antisemitism. This definition includes language that indicates how Holocaust denial is a form of antisemitism. Since 2016, more than 20 countries have adopted the definition for use at the national level.

2018In January, the government of Poland amends its Law on the Institute of National Remembrance to include claims that contrary to the facts attribute to the Polish nation or the Polish state responsibility or co-responsibility for Nazi crimes. The original amendment makes such acts criminal, but in June the government modifies the law making such claims civil offences.

2018The mayor of Rome orders that city streets no longer be named after Italian fascists or Italian citizens who were known fascists.

2020The German government allocates special funding for the creation of a Global Task Force against Holocaust Denial and Distortion.

Author(s): United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC

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Holocaust Denial: Key Dates | Holocaust Encyclopedia

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