Hadith studies (Arabic: علم الحديثʻilm al-ḥadīth "science of hadith", also science of hadith, or science of hadith criticism or hadith criticism)
consists of several religious scholarly disciplines used by Muslim scholars in the study and evaluation of the Islamichadith—i.e. the record of the words, actions, and the silent approval of the Islamic prophet, Muhammad.
Determining authenticity of hadith is enormously important in Islam because along with the Quran, the Sunnah of the Islamic prophet—his words, actions, and the silent approval—are considered the explanation of the divine revelation (wahy), and the record of them (i.e. hadith) provides the basis of Islamic law (Sharia).
In addition, while the number of verses pertaining to law in the Quran
is relatively few, hadith give direction on everything from details of
religious obligations (such as Ghusl or Wudu, ablutions for salat prayer), to the correct forms of salutations, and the importance of benevolence to slaves. Thus the "great bulk" of the rules of Islamic law are derived from hadith, along with the Quran as a primary source.
There are three primary ways to determine the authenticity (sihha)
of a hadith: by attempting to determine whether there are "other
identical reports from other transmitters"; determining the reliability
of the transmitters of the report; and "the continuity of the chain of
transmission" of the hadith.
Traditional hadith studies has been praised by some as "unrivaled, the ultimate in historical criticism", and heavily criticized for failing to filter out a massive amount of hadith "which cannot possibly be authentic".
Definition
It has been described by one hadith specialist, Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti (d. 911 A.H/ 1505 C.E), as the science of the principles by which the conditions of both the sanad, the chain of narration, and the matn, the text of the hadith, are known. This science is concerned with the sanad and the matn with its objective being distinguishing the sahih, authentic, from other than it. Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani
said the preferred definition is: knowledge of the principles by which
the condition of the narrator and the narrated are determined.
Types
Some of the disciplines in the science of hadith, according to scholar İsmail Lütfi Çakan, include:
the "study of the circumstances surrounding the genesis of each hadith", i.e. the reasons for why the hadith was uttered;
the study of the gharib al-hadith, whose works provide "a kind of hadith glossary" of uncommon words found in hadith;
the study of ilel al-hadith, which examines deficiencies in the text and/or the chain of a hadith;
study of al-hadith al-muhtelif, which attempts to reconcile the contradictions of hadith;
the study of naskh or nasikh and mansukh
in hadith, which also attempts to reconcile contradictions in hadiths,
but by determining which of the contradicting hadith abrogates the
other;
study of sharh al-hadith, which are commentary on hadith that attempt "to explain the intentions (of) Prophet Muhammad (in uttering it)";
study of ʿilm jarḥ wa taʿdīl (wounding and rectifying), which attempts to verify the reliability of transmitters of hadith, their deficiencies and virtues;
study of transmitters of hadith, ʿilm al-rijāl (science of men) which provides biographies of the narrators and the different categories they fall under.
After the death of Muhammad, his sayings were transmitted orally. According to Islamic tradition, Umar ibn al-Khattab, the second caliph,
started the process of collecting all the hadiths together into one
unified volume, but gave up the endeavor "for fear the Quran would be
neglected by the Muslims" (according to Muhammad Zubayr Siddiqi).
The Umayyad caliph, Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz
(aka Umar II, who reigned from 717-720 CE) also started an effort to
collect all the hadiths. Teaching and collecting hadiths was part of a
plan of his to renew the moral fiber of the Muslim community. He
supported teachers of fiqh, sent educators to Bedouin tribes, ordered
weekly hadith lectures in the Hejaz, and sent out scholars of hadith to Egypt and North Africa, (according to Muhammad Zubayr Siddiqi).
Umar also ordered the great scholar of Madinah, Abu Bakr ibn Hazm to write down all the hadiths of Muhammad and Umar ibn al-Khattab, particularly those narrated by Aisha.
He had these hadiths collected in books which were circulated around
the Umayyad Empire. Although these books are lost today, commentaries on
them by Ibn al-Nadim reveals that they are organized like books of fiqh, such as the Muwatta of Imam Malik,
the first large compilation of hadiths. Imam Malik himself probably
followed the general plan of the early books of hadith ordered by Umar.
Hadith studies developed in part because forgery "took place on a massive scale", with perhaps the most famous collector of hadith and practitioner of ʻilm al-ḥadīth—Muhammad al-Bukhari—sifting through nearly 600,000, over 16 years before eliminating all but approximately 7400 hadith.
Traditional accounts describe "the systematic study of hadith" as
being motivated by the altruism of "pious scholars" seeking to correct
this problem.
Some scholars (Daniel W. Brown,
A. Kevin Reinhart) shed doubt on this. Brown believes the theory
"fails" to adequately account "for the atmosphere of conflict" of at
least early hadith criticism. The "method of choice" of partisans
seeking to discredit opposing schools of Islamic law was to discredit
the authorities (transmitters) of their opponent's hadith—to "tear
apart" their isnads". (To do this required developing biographical
evaluations of hadith transmitters—ʿilm al-rijāl and ilm jarh wa ta’dil). Reinhart finds descriptions of famous companions of Muhammad in Ibn Sa'd's Kitāb aṭ-ṭabaqāt al-kabīr
"recording hadith and transmitting it, asking each other about
precedents, and reproaching those who disregarded this authentic
religious knowledge" in suspicious conformity to the "mythology of the
pristine early community".
As the criteria for judging authenticity grew into the six major collections of ṣaḥīḥ (sound) hadith (Kutub al-Sittah) in the third century, the science of hadith was described as having become a "mature system", or to have entered its "final stage".
was utilized early in hadith scholarship by Ali ibn al-Madini (161–234 AH). Later, al-Madini's student Muhammad al-Bukhari (810–870) authored a collection, now known as Sahih Bukhari, commonly accepted by Sunni scholars to be the most authentic collection of hadith, followed by that of his student Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj. Al-Bukhari's methods of testing hadiths and isnads are seen as exemplary of the developing methodology of hadith scholarship.
Evaluating authenticity
An elaborate system was developed by scholars of hadith to determine the authenticity of traditions based on "two premises":
that the authenticity of a hadith report is "best measured by the reliability of the transmitters" (known as rāwī pl. ruwāt) of the report;
consequently, "carefully scrutinizing" the "individual transmitters" of the hadith (ilm jarh wa ta’dil; ʿilm al-rijāl) and "the continuity of their chains of transmission" is the best way to measure hadith reliability.
A basic element of hadith studies consist of a careful examination of the chain of transmission (sanadسند, also isnādاسناد, or silsila سِلْسِلَة), relaying each hadith from the Prophet to the person who compiles the hadith. The isnād and the commentary are distinct from the matn (متن), which is the main body, or text, of the hadith, These two terms are the primary components of every hadith.
According to the person most responsible for elevation of the importance of hadith in Islamic law, Imam Al-Shafi‘i,
"In most cases the truthfulness or lack of truthfulness
of a tradition can only be known through the truthfulness or lack of
truthfulness of the transmitter, except in a few special cases when he
relates what cannot possibly be the case, or what is contradicted by
better-authenticated information."
The first people who received hadith were Muhammad's "Companions" (Sahaba),
who are believed to have understood and preserved it. They conveyed it
to those after them as they were commanded; then the generation
following them, the "Followers" (Tabi‘un),
received it and then conveyed it to those after them, and so on. Thus,
the Companion would say, “I heard the Prophet say such and such.” The
Follower would say, “I heard a Companion say, ‘I heard the Prophet say’”
The one after the Follower would say, “I heard a Follower say, ‘I heard
a Companion say, ‘I heard the Prophet say’” and so on.
Criteria to be a ṣaḥīḥ hadith
To be 'ṣaḥīḥ ("sound") hadith, an isolated hadith (Mutawatir hadith were exempt from these tests) "must pass five tests":
"continuity of transmission";
ʿadāla of transmitters, i.e. transmitters must be of good character;
"accuracy (ḍabṭ) of the process of transmission, i.e. narrators must not be prone to carelessness or known to have poor memories";
absence of "irregularities" (shadhūdh), i.e. hadith must not contradict a "more reliable source";
"absence of corrupting defects(ʿilla qādiḥa), i.e. inaccuracies in reporting the actual chain of transmission."
An important discipline within hadith studies is biographical evaluation, the study of transmitters of hadith, ʿilm al-rijāl, (literally "science of men") mentioned above. These are the narrators who make up the sanad. Ilm ar-rijal is based on certain verses of the Quran.
Transmitters are studied and rated for their "general capacity" (ḍābit; itqān) and their moral character (ʿadāla).
General capacity is measured by qualities such as memory,
linguistic ability. Transmitters that have good memories and
linguistic ability "might be considered competent (ḍābit)".
ʿadāla transmitters must be "adult Muslims, fully in control
of their mental faculties, aware of their moral responsibilities, free
from guilt for major sins, and not prone to minor sins". Examples of ratings of transmitters include "trustworthy" or thiqa for ones that possess both ʿadāla and ḍābit. Transmitters that are ʿadāla but show signs of carelessness are rated honest or ṣudūq. The result of this study were "vast biographical dictionaries" to check against the isnads of individual hadith.
Not all transmitters were evaluated for these characteristics and rated. Companions of the prophet (ṣaḥāba) were traditionally considered to possess collective moral turpitude or taʿdīl, by virtue of their exposure to the Prophet, so that they all possessed ʿadāla without needing to be evaluated. (This quality was similar to that of Prophetic infallibility (ʿiṣma) but of course lower in level.)
The sayings of the Sahaba and the status of each sahabi (companions of the prophet)
The sayings of the Tabieen (i.e., the Salaf-us Salaheen who met the Sahaba, but did not meet the Blessed Prophet). The level of each of the Tabieen. Who amongst them was reliable and who was unreliable
Knowledge of all the narrators who narrate hadith and their history
The history of the narrators must include four things:
Their Isma-ul-Rijjal (biographies)
Their kunniyaat (nicknames)
Their place of settlement
Their date of birth and date of death (to verify whether this person met the people whom he narrated from)
Traditional importance of the sanad
The
second criteria after judging the general ability and moral probity of
the transmitters, is the "continuity" of the chain of transmission of
the hadith. The transmitters must be shown to have received the accounts
of the prophet "in an acceptable manner from the preceding authority in the chain".
Transmitters must have lived during the same period, they
must have had the opportunity to meet, and they must have reached
sufficient age at the time of transmission to guarantee their capacity
to transmit.
Early religious scholars stressed the importance of the sanad. For example, according to an early Quranic exegete, Matr al-Warraq, the verse from the Quran, “Or a remnant of knowledge,” refers to the isnad of a hadith.
In addition, Abd Allah ibn al-Mubarak said, “The isnad is from the religion; were it not for the isnad anyone could say anything they wanted.” According to Ibn al-Salah, the sanad originated within the Muslim scholastic community and remains unique to it. Ibn Hazm said that the connected, continuous sanad is particular to the religion of Islam: the sanad was also used by the Jewish community, but they had a break of more than 30 generations between them and Moses, and the Christians limited their use of the sanad to the prohibition of divorce. Ibn Taymiyyah also said that the knowledge of isnad is particular to the followers of Prophet Muhammad.
The practice of paying particular attention to the sanad can be traced to the generation following that of the Companions, based upon the statement of Muhammad Ibn Sirin: “They did not previously inquire about the sanad. However, after the turmoil occurred they would say, ‘Name for us your narrators.’ So the people of the Sunnah would have their hadith accepted and the people of innovation would not.”
Those who were not given to require a sanad were, in the stronger of two opinions, the Companions of the Prophet, while others, such as al-Qurtubi, include the older of the Followers as well. This is due to the Companions all being considered upright, trustworthy transmitters of hadith, such that a mursal hadith narrated by a Companion is acceptable.
Al-Khatib al-Baghdadi,
stating likewise, cited various evidences for this, from them, the
Quranic verse, “And you were the best nation brought about to mankind.” The fitnah referred to is the conflicting ideologies of the Kharijites and the Ghulat that had emerged at the time of the third Caliph Uthman ibn Affan, his assassination and the social unrest of the Kharijites in opposition to the succeeding rulers, Ali and Muawiyah. The death of Uthman was in the year 35 after the migration.
The matn
According to scholar Daniel Brown, in traditional hadith studies, "the possibility" of criticizing the matn as well as the isnad "was recognized in theory, but the option was seldom systematically exercised".
Syrian hadith scholar Dr. Salah al-Din al-Idlibi is expert in the relatively new field of matn criticism. Whereas traditional criticism has focused on verifying the trustworthiness of the people transmitting the hadith, matn criticism studies the contents of the hadith and compares this with the contents of other hadiths and any other available historical evidence with the aim of arriving at an objective historical reality of the event described by the hadith.
Muhaddith: scholar of hadith
The term muḥaddith (plural muḥaddithūn often translated as "traditionist") refers to a specialist who profoundly knows and narrates hadith, the chains of their narration isnad, and the original and famous narrators.
According to the 8th century Imam, Sheikh Muhammad ibn Idris ash-Shafi`i, a muhaddith
is someone who has memorised at least 400,000 narrations along with
the chain of narrators for each narration can be a Mujtahid Mutlaq and
does not have to follow a Madhab. The female equivalent is a muhadditha.
In describing the muhaddith, Al-Dhahabi
raised the question, "Where is the knowledge of hadith, and where are
its people?" Answering his own question, he said, "I am on the verge of
not seeing them except engrossed in a book or under the soil."
Both men and women can serve as muhaddithin
(traditionists). The requirements for a muhaddith are the same
requirements that apply to the reception and transmission of reports
(riwayah) in the Islamic tradition more generally: truthfulness,
integrity, a competent and accurate memory, being free of prejudice or
compulsion that might be presumed to distort the reporting.
There are numerous women who have served as muhaddithat in the
history of Islam. Nadwi counts more than 8000 based on the biographical
dictionaries of the classical and medieval period.
Many of these women belonged to the most outstanding scholars and
traditionists of their time and men were proud to receive narration from
them. One must also note that muhaddithat transmitted the same body of
knowledge as their male counterparts – there were and are no
restrictions on what could be transmitted by women.
The pursuit of knowledge was held above all else and was given
even more importance if one travelled to seek that knowledge. Many
muhaddithats were born into a prominent family that had connection with
the upper class or had a male relative who had a vested interest and/or
connections that enhanced the career of these muhaddithats. In many
cases, muhaddithats were the last living link between older scholars and
the younger generations as they tended to live longer. Their isnads
were held with greater value due to this. Below are some of the most
prominent muhaddithats of their times.
Shuhda al-Katiba (482-574CE)
Shuhda al-Katiba was born in Baghdad during a time of turmoil.
There were refugees fleeing and the city was being attacked. Despite
this, Shuhda was able to find success. Her father played a big role in
her education and she has credited him to her success in the field. She
began her education at the age of eight when her father began
introducing her to some of the most prominent and sought after
muhaddiths and scholars of their time. Her husband also gave her access
to the upper class of Baghdad. She gained fame later in her career and
was known to be the last living link between prominent scholars and the
younger generations. This made her isnad a particularly sought after
one.
Fatimah Bint Sa’d al-Khayr (525-600CE)
Fatimah Bint Sa’d al-Khayr was born in China but later dwelled in
Isfahan and Baghdad. Her father was a scholar who felt it was very
important for his children to be immersed in religious studies,
particularly Hadith studies. He had traveled to many places in pursuit
of this knowledge and even taught some of his children himself. Fatimah
was brought up fully immersed in Hadith studies. Her sister also became a
prominent muhaddithat. Her husband was very wealthy, held a high
position in society, and a scholar himself, though not at the same level
as Fatimah. She lived in Damascus with him for some time then moved to
Cairo. Fatimah’s career prospered in these two cities towards the end of
her life. She had many students who traveled far and wide to recite to
her and learn from her. She died when she was 78 years old. There is
some mystery surrounding her life. When her husband died, he had not a
penny to his name despite being very wealthy in his life. No one is
aware of how this occurred.
Zaynab Bint al-Kamal (646-740CE)
Zaynab Bint al-Kamal started her career at the age of one in
Damascus. It is thought that the credit for that goes to her uncle
rather than her father, as seen with other muhaddithats, who took her to
prominent scholars at a very young age. Damascus was prospering during
her life which gave her career extra stability. She never married, which
could have contributed to her extensive education as she had more time
to devote to it. Her students went on to become very prominent scholars
with their impressive isnads thanks to her. As mentioned with the above
muhaddithats, since Zaynab started so young, she had hadiths from
scholars who had died when she was teaching which made her highly sought
after. People were willing to travel great distances to meet her. She
died in her late 90s which is an impressive age for her time period.
A’isha Bint Muhammad (723-816CE)
A’isha Bint Muhammad came from a very prominent religious family.
She started her career at four years old while Damascus was still
prospering. Similar to the scholars mentioned above, she was the last
link to many muhaddithats who had died which made her the last living
link. Her students became prominent scholars as well. She died at the
age of 93. By the time of her death, she had the reputation of a very
highly regarded muhadditha.
Reporting or narrating (riwayah) must be differentiated from
giving testimony (shahadah). While women are entirely equal in riwayah,
many Islamic jurists place restrictions on women in shahadah – thus in
several schools of law the testimony of two women is equal to that of a
man.
A muḥaddith or "traditionist" is not the same as one of the Ahl al-Hadith or a "traditionalist", a member of a movement of hadith scholars who considered the Quran and authentic hadith to be the only authority in matters of law and creed.
Sunni literature for hadith studies
As
in any Islamic discipline, there is a rich history of literature
describing the principles and fine points of hadith studies. Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani provides a summation of this development with the following: “Works authored in the terminology of the people of hadith have become plentiful from the Imaams both old and contemporary:
From the first of those who authored a work on this subject is the Judge, Abū Muḥammad al-Rāmahurmuzī in his book, ‘al-Muhaddith al-Faasil,’ however, it was not comprehensive.
And following him, Abu Nu’aym al-Asbahani, who wrote a mustakhraj upon the book of the later, (compiling the same narrations al-Hakim cited using his own sanads.) However, some things remain in need of correction.
And then came al-Khatib Abu Bakr al-Bagdadi, authoring works in the various disciplines of hadith studies a book entitled al-Kifaayah and in its etiquettes a book entitled al-Jami’ Li Adab ash-Sheikh wa as-Saami.
Scarce is the discipline from the disciplines of the science of hadeeth
that he has not written an individual book regarding, as al-Hafith Abu
Bakr ibn Nuqtah said: 'Every objective person knows that the scholars of
hadeeth coming after al-Khatib are indebted to his works.' After them
came others, following al-Khatib, taking their share from this science."
al-Qadi ‘Eyaad compiled a concise book naming it al-Ilmaa’.
Abu Hafs al-Mayanajiy a work giving it the title Ma Laa yasu al-Muhaddith Jahluhu or That Which a Hadith Scholar is Not Allowed Ignorance Of.
There are numerous examples of this which have gained popularity and
were expanded upon seeking to make plentiful the knowledge relating to
these books and others abridged making easy their understanding.
This was prior to the coming of the memorizer and jurist Taqiyy ad-Deen Aboo ‘Amrin ‘Uthmaan ibn al-Salah ‘Abd ar-Rahmaan ash-Shahruzuuree, who settled in Damascus. He gathered, at the time he had become a teacher of hadith at the Ashrafiyyah school, his well known book,
editing the various disciplines mentioned in it. He dictated it
piecemeal and, as a result, did not succeed in providing it with an
appropriate order. He occupied himself with the various works of
al-Khatib, gathering his assorted studies, adding to them from other
sources the essence of their benefits. So he combined in his book what
had been spread throughout books other than it. It is due to this that
people have focused their attention upon it, following its example.
Innumerable are those who rendered his book into poetry, abridged it,
sought to complete what had been left out of it or left out any
extraneous information; as well as those who opposed him in some aspect
of his work or supported him.
The science of hadith has not been without critics. According to Muhammad Husayn Haykal,
"despite the great care and precision of the Hadith scholars, much of
what they regarded as true was later proved to be spurious." He goes on to quote Al-Nawawi (1233–1277), who stated that "a number of scholars discovered many hadiths" in the two most authentic hadith collection Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim "which do not fulfill the conditions of verification assumed by these men" (i.e. by the hadith collectors Muhammad al-Bukhari and Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj).
Among the criticisms made (of non-sahih as well as sahih hadith)
of is that there was a suspiciously large growth in their number with
each generation in the early years of Islam;
that large numbers of hadith contradicted each other; and that the
genre's status as a primary source of Islamic law motivated the creation
of fraudulent hadith.
Modern Western scholars in particular have "seriously questioned the historicity and authenticity of the hadith", according to John Esposito,
maintaining that "the bulk of traditions attributed to the Prophet
Muhammad were actually written much later." According to Esposito, Schacht
"found no evidence of legal traditions before 722," from which Schacht
concluded that "the Sunna of the Prophet is not the words and deeds of
the Prophet, but apocryphal material" dating from later.
Henry Preserved Smith and Ignác Goldziher also challenged the reliability of the hadith,
Smith stating that "forgery or invention of traditions began very
early" and "many traditions, even if well authenticated to external
appearance, bear internal evidence of forgery."
Goldziher writes that "European critics hold that only a very small
part of the ḥadith can be regarded as an actual record of Islam during
the time of Mohammed and his immediate followers." In his Mohammedan Studies,
Goldziher states: "it is not surprising that, among the hotly debated
controversial issues of Islam, whether political or doctrinal, there is
not one in which the champions of the various views are unable to cite a
number of traditions, all equipped with imposing isnads".
Patricia Crone noted that early traditionalists were still developing conventions of examining the chain of narration (isnads)
that by later standards were sketchy/deficient, even though they were
closer to the historical material. Later though they possessed
impeccable chains, but were more likely to be fabricated.
Reza Aslan quotes Schacht's maxim: `the more perfect the isnad, the
later the tradition`, which he (Aslan) calls "whimsical but accurate".
Bernard Lewis
writes that
"the creation of new hadiths designed to serve some political purpose
has continued even to our own time." In the buildup to the first Gulf War a "tradition" was published in the Palestinian daily newspaper Al-Nahar
on December 15, 1990, "and described as `currently in wide
circulation`" It "quotes the Prophet as predicting that "the Greeks and
Franks will join with Egypt in the desert against a man named Sadim, and
not one of them will return".
Others have praised the tradition for its ingenuity:
Sheikh Ahmad Kutty, a Senior Lecturer and an Islamic Scholar at the Islamic Institute of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, clarifies what he feels supports the validity of hadith studies:
There is a basic distinction between Islam and other religions
in this regard: Islam is singularly unique among the world religions in
the fact that in order to preserve the sources of their religion, the
Muslims invented a scientific methodology based on precise rules for
gathering data and verifying them. As it has been said, 'Isnad or
documentation is part of Islamic religion, and if it had not been for
isnad, everybody would have said whatever he wanted.
The methodologies of Holocaust deniers are based on a predetermined conclusion that ignores overwhelming historical evidence to the contrary. Scholars use the term denial to describe the views and methodology of Holocaust deniers in order to distinguish them from legitimate historical revisionists, who challenge orthodox interpretations of history using established historical methodologies. Holocaust deniers generally do not accept denial as an appropriate description of their activities and use the euphemism revisionism instead. In some former Eastern Bloc
countries, Holocaust deniers do not deny the mass murder of Jews but
deny the participation of their own nationals in the Holocaust.
Holocaust deniers prefer to refer to their work as historical revisionism, and object to being referred to as "deniers". Emory University professor Deborah Lipstadt
has written that: "The deniers' selection of the name revisionist to
describe themselves is indicative of their basic strategy of deceit and
distortion and of their attempt to portray themselves as legitimate
historians engaged in the traditional practice of illuminating the
past." Scholars consider this misleading since the methods of Holocaust denial differ from those of legitimate historical revision. Legitimate historical revisionism is explained in a resolution adopted by the Duke University History Department, November 8, 1991, and reprinted in Duke Chronicle, November 13, 1991, in response to an advertisement produced by Bradley R Smith's Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust:
That historians are constantly
engaged in historical revision is certainly correct; however, what
historians do is very different from this advertisement. Historical
revision of major events ... is not concerned with the actuality of
these events; rather, it concerns their historical interpretation –
their causes and consequences generally.
Lipstadt writes that modern Holocaust denial draws its inspiration
from various sources, including a school of thought which used an
established method to question government policies.
In 1992, Donald L. Niewyk gave some examples of how legitimate
historical revisionism—the re-examination of accepted history and its
updating with newly discovered, more accurate, or less-biased
information—may be applied to the study of the Holocaust as new facts
emerge to change the historical understanding of it:
With the main features of the
Holocaust clearly visible to all but the willfully blind, historians
have turned their attention to aspects of the story for which the
evidence is incomplete or ambiguous. These are not minor matters by any
means, but turn on such issues as Hitler's role in the event, Jewish
responses to persecution, and reactions by onlookers both inside and
outside Nazi-controlled Europe.
In contrast, the Holocaust denial movement bases its approach on the
predetermined idea that the Holocaust, as understood by mainstream
historiography, did not occur. Sometimes referred to as "negationism", from the French term négationnisme introduced by Henry Rousso, Holocaust deniers attempt to rewrite history by minimizing, denying, or simply ignoring essential facts. Koenraad Elst writes:
Negationism means the denial of historical crimes against humanity.
It is not a reinterpretation of known facts, but the denial of known
facts. The term negationism has gained currency as the name of a
movement to deny a specific crime against humanity, the Nazi genocide on
the Jews in 1941–45, also known as the Holocaust (Greek: complete
burning) or the Shoah (Hebrew: disaster). Negationism is mostly
identified with the effort at re-writing history in such a way that the
fact of the Holocaust is omitted.
In "Secondary Anti-Semitism: From Hard-Core to Soft-Core Denial of the Shoah", Clemens Heni [de] writes:
Contrary to the hard-core version,
soft-core denial is often not easily identifiable. Often it is
tolerated, or even encouraged and reproduced in the mainstream, not only
in Germany. Scholars have only recently begun to unravel this
disturbing phenomenon. Manfred Gerstenfeld discusses Holocaust
trivialization in an article published in 2008. In Germany in 2007 two
scholars, Thorsten Eitz and Georg Stötzel, published a voluminous
dictionary of German language and discourse regarding National Socialism
and the Holocaust. It includes chapters on Holocaust trivialization and
contrived comparisons, such as the infamous "atomic Holocaust",
"Babycaust", "Holocaust of abortion", "red Holocaust" or "biological
Holocaust".
Background
Denial as a means of genocide
Lawrence Douglas argues that denial was invented by the perpetrators and employed as a means of genocide. For example, trucks of Zyklon B were labeled with Red Cross symbols and victims were told that they would be "resettled". Douglas also cites the Posen speeches
as an example of denial while genocide was ongoing, with Himmler
referring to the Holocaust as "an unnamed and never to be named page of
glory". According to Douglas, the denial of mass murder using gas
chambers recalls the Nazi efforts to persuade the victims that they were
actually harmless showers.
While the Second World War
was still underway, the Nazis had already formed a contingency plan
that if defeat was imminent they would carry out the total destruction
of German records. Historians have documented evidence that as Germany's
defeat became imminent and Nazi leaders realized they would most likely
be captured and brought to trial, great effort was made to destroy all
evidence of mass extermination. Heinrich Himmler instructed his camp commandants to destroy records, crematoria, and other signs of mass extermination. As one of many examples, the bodies of the 25,000 mostly Latvian Jews whom Friedrich Jeckeln and the soldiers under his command had shot at Rumbula (near Riga) in late 1941 were dug up and burned in 1943. Similar operations were undertaken at Belzec, Treblinka and other death camps.
French collaboration in archive destruction
In occupied France,
the situation with respect to preserving war records was not much
better, partly as a result of French state secrecy rules dating back to
well before the war aimed at protecting the French government and the
state from embarrassing revelations, and partly to avoid culpability.
For example, at Liberation, the Prefecture of Police destroyed nearly all of the massive archive of Jewish arrest and deportation.
In 1943, Isaac Schneersohn,
anticipating the need for a center to document and preserve the memory
of the persecution for historical reasons and also support claims
post-war, gathered together 40 representatives from Jewish organizations
in Grenoble which was under Italian occupation at the time in order to form a center de documentation. Exposure meant the death penalty, and as a result little actually happened before liberation. Serious work began after the center moved to Paris in late 1944 and was renamed the CDJC.
In 1945, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander, anticipated that someday an attempt would be made to recharacterize the documentation of Nazi crimes as propaganda and took steps against it.
Eisenhower, upon finding the victims of Nazi concentration camps,
ordered all possible photographs to be taken, and for the German people
from surrounding villages to be ushered through the camps and made to
bury the dead.
Nuremberg trials
United States Army clerks with evidence collected for the Nuremberg trials
The Nuremberg trials
took place in Germany after the war in 1945–1946. The stated aim was to
dispense justice in retribution for atrocities of the German
government. This Allied intention to administer justice post-war was
first announced in 1943 in the Declaration on German Atrocities in Occupied Europe and reiterated at the Yalta Conference and at Berlin in 1945.
While the intention was not specifically to preserve the historical
record of the Holocaust, some of the core documents required to
prosecute the cases were provided to them by the CDJC,
and much of the huge trove of archives were then transferred to the
CDJC after the trials and became the core of future Holocaust
historiography.
The Nuremberg trials were important historically, but the events
were still very recent, television was in its infancy and not present,
and there was little public impact. There were isolated moments of
limited public awareness from Hollywood films such as The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) or the 1961 Judgment at Nuremberg
which had some newsreel footage of actual scenes from liberated Nazi
concentration camps including scenes of piles of naked corpses laid out
in rows and bulldozed into large pits, which was considered
exceptionally graphic for the time.
Public awareness changed when the Eichmann trial riveted the world's attention fifteen years after Nuremberg.
In 1961, the Israeli government captured Adolf Eichmann in Argentina and brought him to Israel to stand trial for war crimes. Chief prosecutor Gideon Hausner's
intentions were not only to demonstrate Eichmann's guilt personally but
to present material about the entire Holocaust, thus producing a
comprehensive record.
The Israeli government arranged for the trial to have prominent media coverage. Many major newspapers from all over the globe sent reporters and published front-page coverage of the story.
Israelis had the opportunity to watch live television broadcasts of the
proceedings, and videotape was flown daily to the United States for
broadcast the following day.
In the immediate aftermath of the war, prior to the extensive
documentation efforts by the Allied forces, a sense of disbelief caused
many to deny the initial reports of the Holocaust.Compounding this disbelief was the memory of forged newspaper accounts of the German Corpse Factory, an anti-German atrocity propaganda campaign during WWI, which was widely known to be false by 1945.
During the 1930s, the Nazi government used this propaganda
against the British, claiming allegations of concentration camps were
malicious lies put forward by the British government, and historians
Joachim Neander and Randal Marlin note that this story "encouraged later disbelief when early reports circulated about the Holocaust under Hitler". Victor Cavendish-Bentinck,
chairman of the British Joint Intelligence Committee, noted that these
reports were similar to "stories of employment of human corpses during
the last war for the manufacture of fat which was a grotesque lie";
likewise, The Christian Century
commented that "The parallel between this story and the 'corpse
factory' atrocity tale of the First World War is too striking to be
overlooked."
Neander notes that "There can be no doubt that the reported commercial
use of the corpses of the murdered Jews undermined the credibility of
the news coming from Poland and delayed action that might have rescued
many Jewish lives."
The Neo-Nazi
movement has been revitalized by Holocaust denial. Small but vocal
numbers of Neo-Nazis realized that recreation of a Hitlerite-style
regime may be impossible, but a replica might be produced in the future;
the rehabilitation of Nazism, they concluded, required the discrediting
of the Holocaust.
The first person to openly write after the end of World War II that
he doubted the reality of the Holocaust was French journalist Maurice Bardèche in his 1948 book Nuremberg ou la Terre promise ("Nuremberg or the Promised Land"). Viewed as "the father-figure of Holocaust denial", Bardèche introduced in his works many aspects of neo-fascist and Holocaust denial propaganda techniques
and ideological structures; his work is deemed influential in
regenerating post-war European far-right ideas at a time of identity
crisis in the 1950–1960s. His arguments formed the basis of numerous works of Holocaust denial
that followed: "testimonies are not reliable, essentially coming from
the mouth of Jews and communists", "atrocities committed in camps were
the work of deportees [essentially the kapos]",
"disorganization occurred in Nazi camps following the first German
defeats", "the high mortality is due to the 'weakening' of prisoners and
epidemics", "only lice were gassed in Auschwitz", etc.
Harry Elmer Barnes
Harry Elmer Barnes, at one time a mainstream American historian, assumed a Holocaust-denial stance in his later years. Between World War I and World War II, Barnes was an anti-war writer and a leader of the historical revisionism movement. Starting in 1924, Barnes worked closely with the Centre for the Study of the Causes of the War,
a German government-funded think tank whose sole purpose was to
disseminate the official government position that Germany was the victim
of Allied aggression in 1914 and that the Versailles Treaty was morally invalid. Headed by Major Alfred von Wegerer, a völkisch
activist, the organization portrayed itself as a scholarly society, but
historians later described it as "a clearinghouse for officially
desirable views on the outbreak of the war."
Following World War II, Barnes became convinced that allegations made against Germany and Japan,
including the Holocaust, were wartime propaganda that had been used to
justify the United States' involvement in World War II. Barnes claimed
that there were two false claims made about World War II, namely that
Germany started the war in 1939, and the Holocaust, which Barnes claimed
did not happen.
In his 1962 pamphlet, Revisionism and Brainwashing, Barnes
claimed that there was a "lack of any serious opposition or concerted
challenge to the atrocity stories and other modes of defamation of
German national character and conduct".
Barnes argued that there was "a failure to point out the atrocities of
the Allies were more brutal, painful, mortal and numerous than the most
extreme allegations made against the Germans".
He claimed that in order to justify the "horrors and evils of the
Second World War", the Allies made the Nazis the "scapegoat" for their
own misdeeds.
Barnes cited the French Holocaust denier Paul Rassinier, whom Barnes called a "distinguished French historian" who had exposed the "exaggerations of the atrocity stories". In a 1964 article, "Zionist Fraud", published in the American Mercury,
Barnes wrote: "The courageous author [Rassinier] lays the chief blame
for misrepresentation on those whom we must call the swindlers of the
crematoria, the Israeli politicians who derive billions of marks from
nonexistent, mythical and imaginary cadavers, whose numbers have been
reckoned in an unusually distorted and dishonest manner."
Using Rassinier as his source, Barnes claimed that Germany was the
victim of aggression in both 1914 and 1939 and that reports of the
Holocaust were propaganda to justify a war of aggression against
Germany.
Beginnings of modern denialism
In 1961, a protégé of Barnes, David Hoggan, published Der erzwungene Krieg (The Forced War) in West Germany, which claimed that Germany had been the victim of an Anglo-Polish conspiracy in 1939. Though Der erzwungene Krieg was primarily concerned with the origins of World War II, it also down-played or justified the effects of Nazi antisemitic measures in the pre-1939 period. For example, Hoggan justified the huge one billion Reichsmark fine imposed on the entire Jewish community in Germany after the 1938 Kristallnacht
as a reasonable measure to prevent what he called "Jewish profiteering"
at the expense of German insurance companies and alleged that no Jews
were killed in the Kristallnacht (in fact, 91 German Jews were murdered in the Kristallnacht). Subsequently, Hoggan explicitly denied the Holocaust in 1969 in a book entitled The Myth of the Six Million, which was published by the Noontide Press, a small Los Angeles publisher specializing in antisemitic literature.
In 1964, Paul Rassinier published The Drama of the European Jews. Rassinier was himself a concentration camp survivor (he was held in Buchenwald
for having helped French Jews escape the Nazis), and modern-day deniers
continue to cite his works as scholarly research that questions the
accepted facts of the Holocaust. Critics argued that Rassinier did not
cite evidence for his claims and ignored information that contradicted
his assertions; he nevertheless remains influential in Holocaust denial
circles for being one of the first deniers to propose that a vast
Zionist/Allied/Soviet conspiracy faked the Holocaust, a theme that would
be picked up in later years by other authors.[
Austin App, a La Salle University medieval English literature professor, is considered the first major mainstream American holocaust denier. App defended the Germans and Nazi Germany during World War II. He
published numerous articles, letters, and books on Holocaust denial,
quickly building a loyal following. App's work inspired the Institute for Historical Review, a California center founded in 1978 whose sole task is the denial of the Holocaust.
The publication of Arthur Butz's The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The case against the presumed extermination of European Jewry in 1976; and David Irving's Hitler's War in 1977 brought other similarly inclined individuals into the fold. Butz was a tenured associate professor of electrical engineering at Northwestern University. In December 1978 and January 1979, Robert Faurisson, a French professor of literature at the University of Lyon, wrote two letters to Le Monde claiming that the gas chambers used by the Nazis to exterminate the Jews did not exist. A colleague of Faurisson, Jean-Claude Pressac, who initially shared Faurisson's views, later became convinced of the Holocaust's evidence while investigating documents at Auschwitz in 1979. He published his conclusions along with much of the underlying evidence in his 1989 book, Auschwitz: Technique and operation of the gas chambers.
Henry Bienen,
the former president of Northwestern University, has described Arthur
Butz's view of the Holocaust as an "embarrassment to Northwestern".
In 2006, sixty of Butz's colleagues from the Department of Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science faculty signed a censure describing
Butz's Holocaust denial as "an affront to our humanity and our standards
as scholars".
The letter also called for Butz to "leave our Department and our
University and stop trading on our reputation for academic excellence".
Institute for Historical Review
In 1978 the American far-right activist Willis Carto founded the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), an organization dedicated to publicly challenging the commonly accepted history of the Holocaust. The IHR's founding was inspired by Austin App, a La Salle professor of medieval English literature and considered the first major American holocaust denier.
The IHR sought from the beginning to establish itself within the broad
tradition of historical revisionism, by soliciting token supporters who
were not from a neo-Nazi background such as James J. Martin and Samuel Edward Konkin III,
and by promoting the writings of French socialist Paul Rassinier and
American anti-war historian Harry Elmer Barnes, in an attempt to show
that Holocaust denial had a base of support beyond neo-Nazis. The IHR
republished most of Barnes's writings, which had been out of print since
his death. While it included articles on other topics and sold books by
mainstream historians, the majority of material published and
distributed by IHR was devoted to questioning the facts surrounding the
Holocaust.
In 1980, the IHR promised a $50,000 reward to anyone who could prove that Jews were gassed at Auschwitz. Mel Mermelstein wrote a letter to the editors of the Los Angeles Times and others including The Jerusalem Post.
The IHR wrote back, offering him $50,000 for proof that Jews were, in
fact, gassed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Mermelstein, in turn,
submitted a notarized account of his internment at Auschwitz and how he
witnessed Nazi guards ushering his mother and two sisters and others
towards (as he learned later) gas chamber number five. Despite this, the
IHR refused to pay the reward. Represented by public interest attorney William John Cox, Mermelstein subsequently sued the IHR in the Superior Court of Los Angeles County for breach of contract, anticipatory repudiation, libel, injurious denial of established fact, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and declaratory relief. On October 9, 1981, both parties in the Mermelstein case filed motions for summary judgment in consideration of which Judge Thomas T. Johnson of the Superior Court of Los Angeles County took "judicial notice of the fact that Jews were gassed to death at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Poland during the summer of 1944
judicial notice meaning that the court treated the gas chambers as
common knowledge, and therefore did not require evidence that the gas
chambers existed. On August 5, 1985, Judge Robert A. Wenke entered a
judgment based upon the Stipulation
for Entry of Judgment agreed upon by the parties on July 22, 1985. The
judgment required IHR and other defendants to pay $90,000 to Mermelstein
and to issue a letter of apology to "Mr. Mel Mermelstein, a survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Buchenwald, and all other survivors of Auschwitz" for "pain, anguish and suffering" caused to them.
In the "About the IHR" statement on their website, the IHR
states, "The IHR does not 'deny' the Holocaust. Indeed, the IHR as such
has no 'position' on any specific event...." British historian Richard J. Evans
wrote that the Institute's acknowledgment "that a relatively small
number of Jews were killed" was a means to draw attention away from its
primary beliefs, i.e. that the number of victims was not in the millions
and that Jews were not systematically murdered in gas chambers.
In 1984, James Keegstra, a Canadian high-school teacher, was charged under the Canadian Criminal Code
for "promoting hatred against an identifiable group by communicating
anti-Semitic statements to his students". During class, he would
describe Jews as a people of profound evil who had "created the
Holocaust to gain sympathy." He also tested his students in exams on his
theories and opinion of Jews.
Keegstra was charged under s 281.2(2) of the Criminal Code
(now s 319(2)), which provides that "Every one who, by communicating
statements, other than in private conversation, wilfully promotes hatred
against any identifiable group" commits a criminal offense. He was convicted at trial before the Alberta Court of Queen's Bench. The court rejected the argument, advanced by Keegstra and his lawyer, Doug Christie, that promoting hatred is a constitutionally protected freedom of expression as per s 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Keegstra appealed to the Alberta Court of Appeal. That court agreed with Keegstra, and he was acquitted. The Crown then appealed the case to the Supreme Court of Canada, which ruled by a 4–3 majority that promoting hatred could be justifiably restricted under s 1 of the Charter. The Supreme Court restored Keegstra's conviction. He was fired from his teaching position shortly afterward.
The Toronto-based photo retoucher Ernst Zündel operated a small-press called Samisdat Publishers, which published and distributed Holocaust-denial material such as Did Six Million Really Die? by Richard Harwood (a pseudonym of Richard Verrall – a British neo-Nazi). In 1985, he was tried in R. v. Zundel and convicted under a "false news" law and sentenced to 15 months imprisonment by an Ontario court for "disseminating and publishing material denying the Holocaust". The Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg
was a witness for the prosecution at the 1985 trial. Zündel's
conviction was overturned in an appeal on a legal technicality, leading
to a second trial in 1988, in which he was again convicted. The 1988
trial included, as witnesses for the defense, Fred A. Leuchter, David Irving and Robert Faurisson. The pseudo-scientific Leuchter report
was presented as a defense document and was published in Canada in 1988
by Zundel's Samisdat Publishers, and in Britain in 1989 by Irving's
Focal Point Publishing. In both of his trials, Zündel was defended by Douglas Christie and Barbara Kulaszka. His conviction was overturned in 1992 when the Supreme Court of Canada declared the "false news" law unconstitutional.
Zündel had a website, web-mastered by his wife Ingrid, which publicizes his viewpoints. In January 2002, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal delivered a ruling in a complaint involving his website, in which it was found to be contravening the Canadian Human Rights Act. The court ordered Zündel to cease communicating hate messages. In February 2003, the American INS arrested him in Tennessee,
US, on an immigration violations matter, and few days later, Zündel was
sent back to Canada, where he tried to gain refugee status. Zündel
remained in prison until March 1, 2005, when he was deported to Germany
and prosecuted for disseminating hate propaganda. On February 15, 2007,
Zündel was convicted on 14 counts of incitement under Germany's Volksverhetzung
law, which bans the incitement of hatred against a portion of the
population and given the maximum sentence of five years in prison.
Bradley Smith and the CODOH
In 1987, Bradley R. Smith, a former media director of the Institute for Historical Review, founded the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH).
In the United States, CODOH has repeatedly attempted to place
advertisements questioning whether the Holocaust happened, especially in
college campus newspapers.
Bradley Smith took his message to college students—with little
success. Smith referred to his tactics as the CODOH campus project. He
said, "I don't want to spend time with adults anymore, I want to go to
students. They are superficial. They are empty vessels to be filled."
"What I wanted to do was I wanted to set forth three or four ideas that
students might be interested in, that might cause them to think about
things or to have questions about things. And I wanted to make it as
simple as possible, and to set it up in a way that could not really be
debated." Holocaust deniers have placed "Full page advertisements in college and university newspapers, including those of Brandeis University, Boston College, Pennsylvania State University, and Queens College.
Some of these ads arguing that the Holocaust never happened ran without
comment; others generated op-ed pieces by professors and students". On September 8, 2009, student newspaper The Harvard Crimson
ran a paid ad from Bradley R Smith. It was quickly criticized, and the
editor issued an apology, saying publishing the ad was a mistake.
Ernst Nolte
The German philosopher and historian Ernst Nolte,
starting in the 1980s, advanced a set of theories, which though not
denying the Holocaust appeared to flirt with an Italian Holocaust
denier, Carlo Mattogno, as a serious historian. In a letter to the Israeli historian Otto Dov Kulka of December 8, 1986, Nolte criticized the work of the French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson
on the ground that the Holocaust did occur, but went on to argue that
Faurisson's work was motivated by what Nolte claimed were the admirable
motives of sympathy towards the Palestinians and opposition to Israel. In his 1987 book Der europäische Bürgerkrieg (The European Civil War),
Nolte claimed that the intentions of Holocaust deniers are "often
honourable", and that some of their claims are "not obviously without
foundation. Nolte himself, though he has never denied the occurrence of the Holocaust, has claimed that the Wannsee Conference
of 1942 never happened and that the minutes of the conference were
post-war forgeries done by "biased" Jewish historians designed to
discredit Germany.
The British historian Ian Kershaw
has argued that Nolte was operating on the borderlines of Holocaust
denial with his implied claim that the "negative myth" of Nazi Germany
was created by Jewish historians, his allegations of the domination of
Holocaust scholarship by "biased" Jewish historians, and his statements
that one should withhold judgment on Holocaust deniers, whom Nolte takes
considerable pains to stress are not exclusively Germans or fascists. In Kershaw's opinion, Nolte is attempting to imply that perhaps Holocaust deniers are on to something.
In a 1990 interview, Nolte implied that there was something to the Leuchter report:
"If the revisionists [Holocaust deniers] and Leuchter among them have
made it clear to the public that even 'Auschwitz' must be an object of
scientific inquiry and controversy then they should be given credit for
this. Even if it finally turned out that the number of victims was even
greater and the procedures were even more horrific than has been assumed
until now." In his 1993 book Streitpunkte (Points of Contention), Nolte praised the work of Holocaust deniers as superior to "mainstream scholars".
Nolte wrote that "radical revisionists have presented research which,
if one is familiar with the source material and the critique of the
sources, is probably superior to that of the established historians of
Germany". In a 1994 interview with Der Spiegel
magazine, Nolte stated "I cannot rule out the importance of the
investigation of the gas chambers in which they looked for remnants of
the [chemical process engendered by Zyklon B]", and that "'Of course, I
am against revisionists, but Fred Leuchter's 'study' of the Nazi gas
ovens has to be given attention because one has to stay open to 'other'
ideas."
The British historian Richard J. Evans in his 1989 book In Hitler's Shadow
expressed the view that Nolte's reputation as a scholar was in ruins as
a result of these and other controversial statements on his part. The American historian Deborah Lipstadt in a 2003 interview stated:
Historians
such as the German Ernst Nolte are, in some ways, even more dangerous
than the deniers. Nolte is an anti-Semite of the first order, who
attempts to rehabilitate Hitler by saying that he was no worse than
Stalin; but he is careful not to deny the Holocaust. Holocaust-deniers
make Nolte's life more comfortable. They have, with their radical
argumentation, pulled the center a little more to their side.
Consequently, a less radical extremist, such as Nolte, finds himself
closer to the middle ground, which makes him more dangerous.
Mayer controversy
In 1988, the American historian Arno J. Mayer published a book entitled Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?, which did not explicitly deny the Holocaust, but according to Lucy Dawidowicz lent support to Holocaust denial by stating that most people who died at Auschwitz were the victims of "natural causes" such as disease, not gassing. Dawidowicz argued that Mayer's statements about Auschwitz were "a breathtaking assertion". Holocaust historian Robert Jan van Pelt has written that Mayer's book is as close as a mainstream historian has ever come to supporting Holocaust denial. Holocaust deniers such as David Irving have often cited Mayer's book as one reason for embracing Holocaust denial.
Though Mayer has been often condemned for his statement about the
reasons for the Auschwitz death toll, his book does not deny the use of
gas chambers at Auschwitz, as Holocaust deniers often claim.
Some mainstream Holocaust historians have labeled Mayer a denier. The Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer
wrote that Mayer "popularizes the nonsense that the Nazis saw in
Marxism and Bolshevism their main enemy, and the Jews unfortunately got
caught up in this; when he links the destruction of the Jews to the ups
and downs of German warfare in the Soviet Union, in a book that is so
cocksure of itself that it does not need a proper scientific apparatus,
he is really engaging in a much more subtle form of Holocaust denial".
Defenders of Mayer argue that his statement that "Sources for the
study of the gas chambers are at once rare and unreliable" has been
taken out of context, particularly by Holocaust deniers. Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman
observe that the paragraph from which the statement is taken asserts
that the SS destroyed the majority of the documentation relating to the
operation of the gas chambers in the death camps, which is why Mayer
feels that sources for the operation of the gas chambers are "rare" and
"unreliable".
False equivalence and effect
Denialist focus on Allied war crimes
The focus on so-called Allied atrocities
during the war has been a theme in Holocaust denial literature,
particularly in countries where outright denial of the Holocaust is
illegal. According to historian Deborah Lipstadt, the concept of "comparable Allied wrongs", such as the expulsion of Germans after World War II and the bombing of Dresden, is at the center of, and a continuously repeated theme of, contemporary Holocaust denial; she calls the phenomenon "immoral equivalencies". In 1977, historian Martin Broszat, in a review of David Irving's book Hitler's War,
maintained that the picture of World War II drawn by Irving was done in
a such way to imply moral equivalence between the actions of the Axis
and Allied states with both sides equally guilty of terrible crimes,
leading to Hitler's "fanatical, destructive will to annihilate" being
downgraded to being "no longer an exceptional phenomenon".
Propaganda
According to James Najarian, Holocaust deniers working for the Institute for Historical Review are not trained in history and "put out sham scholarly articles in the mock-academic publication, the Journal of Historical Review". They appeal to "our objectivity, our sense of fair play, and our distrust of figurative language".
Thus, they rely on facts to grab the readers' attention. These facts,
however, are strung by what Najarian calls "fabricated decorum" and are
re-interpreted for their use. For example, they pay particular attention
to inconsistencies in numbers.
Holocaust denial propaganda in all forms has been shown to
influence the audiences that it reaches. In fact, even the
well-educated—that is, college graduates and current university students
alike—are susceptible to such propaganda when it is presented before
them. This stems from the growing disbelief that audiences feel after
being exposed to such information, especially since Holocaust witnesses
themselves are decreasing in number.
Studies centered on the psychological effects of Holocaust denial
propaganda confirm this assertion. Linda M. Yelland and William F.
Stone, in particular, show that Denial essays decrease readers' belief
in the Holocaust, regardless of their prior Holocaust awareness.
Middle East
General
Gamal Abdel Nasser,
the President of Egypt, told a German newspaper in 1964 that "no
person, not even the most simple one, takes seriously the lie of the six
million Jews that were murdered [in the Holocaust]."
Denials of the Holocaust have been promoted by various Middle
Eastern figures and media. Holocaust denial is sponsored by some Middle
Eastern governments, including Iran and Syria. In 2006 Robert Satloff writing in The Washington Post,
reported that "A respected Holocaust research institution recently
reported that Egypt, Qatar and Saudi Arabia all promote Holocaust denial
and protect Holocaust deniers."
Prominent figures from the Middle East have rarely made publicized visits to Auschwitz—Israel's Arab community being the exception. In 2010, Hadash MK Mohammed Barakeh
visited, following a previous visit of two other Arab-Israeli
lawmakers, and a group of about 100 Arab-Israeli writers and clerics in
2003.
Individuals from the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, and a number of Palestinian groups have engaged in various aspects of Holocaust denial.
Hamas have promoted Holocaust denial; Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi held that the Holocaust never occurred, that Zionists were behind the action of Nazis, and that Zionists funded Nazism.
A press release by Hamas in April 2000 decried "the so-called Holocaust, which is an alleged and invented story with no basis". In August 2009, Hamas' told UNRWA
that it would "refuse" to allow Palestinian children to study the
Holocaust, which it called "a lie invented by the Zionists" and referred
to Holocaust education as a "war crime".
Hamas continued to hold this position in 2011, when the organization's
Ministry for Refugee Affairs said that Holocaust education was "intended
to poison the minds of our children."
The thesis of the 1982 doctoral dissertation of Mahmoud Abbas, a co-founder of Fatah and president of the Palestinian National Authority, was "The Secret Connection between the Nazis and the Leaders of the Zionist Movement". In his 1983 book The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism
based on the dissertation, Abbas denied that six million Jews had died
in the Holocaust; dismissing it as a "myth" and a "fantastic lie".
At most, he wrote, 890,000 Jews were murdered by the Germans. Abbas
claimed that the number of deaths has been exaggerated for political
purposes. "It seems that the interest of the Zionist movement, however,
is to inflate this figure [of Holocaust deaths] so that their gains will
be greater. This led them to emphasize this figure [six million] in
order to gain the solidarity of international public opinion with
Zionism. Many scholars have debated the figure of six million and
reached stunning conclusions—fixing the number of Jewish victims at only
a few hundred thousand."
In his March 2006 interview with Haaretz,
Abbas stated, "I wrote in detail about the Holocaust and said I did not
want to discuss numbers. I quoted an argument between historians in
which various numbers of casualties were mentioned. One wrote there were
12 million victims and another wrote there were 800,000. I have no
desire to argue with the figures. The Holocaust was a terrible,
unforgivable crime against the Jewish nation, a crime against humanity
that cannot be accepted by humankind. The Holocaust was a terrible thing
and nobody can claim I denied it." While acknowledging the existence of the Holocaust in 2006 and 2014, Abbas has defended the position that Zionists collaborated with the Nazis to perpetrate it. In 2012, Abbas told Al Mayadeen,
a Beirut TV station affiliated with Iran and Hezbollah, that he
"challenges anyone who can deny that the Zionist movement had ties with
the Nazis before World War II".
Surveys conducted by Sammy Smooha of the University of Haifa
found that the fraction of Israeli Arabs denying that millions of Jews
were murdered by the Nazis increased from 28% in 2006 to 40% in 2008. Smooha commented:
In Arab eyes disbelief in the very happening of the Shoah
is not hate of Jews (embedded in the denial of the Shoah in the West)
but rather a form of protest. Arabs not believing in the event of Shoah
intend to express strong objection to the portrayal of the Jews as the
ultimate victim and to the underrating of the Palestinians as a victim.
They deny Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state that the Shoah gives
legitimacy to. Arab disbelief in the Shoah is a component of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, unlike the ideological and anti-Semitic
denial of the Holocaust and the desire to escape guilt in the West.
Syria
In a speech delivered at the Arab Socialist Ba'ath party's central committee meeting in December 2023, the Ba'ath party secretary-general Bashar al-Assad claimed that there was "no evidence" of the killings of six million Jews during the Holocaust. Assad alleged that the Holocaust was "politicized" by Allied powers to facilitate the mass-deportation of European Jews to Palestine. Assad also accused the U.S. government of financially and militarily sponsoring the rise of Nazism during the inter-war period. Higlighting the deaths of 26 million Soviet citizens during the Second World War, Assad said: "there was no specific method of torture or killing specific to the Jews. The Nazis used the same methods everywhere."
Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad frequently denied the Holocaust, formally 'questioning' the reliability of the historical evidence, although he on occasion confirmed belief in it. In a December 2005 speech, Ahmadinejad said that a legend was fabricated and had been promoted to protect Israel. He said:
They have fabricated a legend,
under the name of the Massacre of the Jews, and they hold it higher than
God himself, religion itself and the prophets themselves.... If
somebody in their country questions God, nobody says anything, but if
somebody denies the myth of the massacre of Jews, the Zionist
loudspeakers and the governments in the pay of Zionism will start to
scream.
The remarks immediately provoked international controversy as well as
swift condemnation from government officials in Israel, Europe, and the
United States. All six political parties in the German parliament
signed a joint resolution condemning Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denial. In contrast, Hamas political leader Khaled Mashaal
described Ahmadinejad's comments as "courageous" and stated, "Muslim
people will defend Iran because it voices what they have in their
hearts, in particular the Palestinian people." In the United States, the Muslim Public Affairs Council condemned Ahmadinejad's remarks. In 2005, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leader, Mohammed Mahdi Akef, denounced what he called "the myth of the Holocaust" in defending Ahmadinejad's denial of the Holocaust.
On December 11, 2006, the Iranian state-sponsored "International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust" began to widespread condemnation. The conference, called for and held at the behest of Ahmadinejad, was widely described as a "Holocaust denial conference" or a "meeting of Holocaust deniers", though Iran denied it was a Holocaust denial conference.
A few months before it opened, the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman
Hamid Reza Asefi stated: "The Holocaust is not a sacred issue that one
can't touch. I have visited the Nazi camps in Eastern Europe. I think it
is exaggerated."
In 2013, in an interview with CNN, newly elected Iranian President Hassan Rouhani
condemned the Holocaust, stating: "I can tell you that any crime that
happens in history against humanity, including the crime the Nazis
created towards the Jews as well as non-Jews is reprehensible and
condemnable. Whatever criminality they committed against the Jews, we
condemn." Iranian media later accused CNN of fabricating Rouhani's comments.
In his official 2013 Nowruz address, Supreme Leader of Iran Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
questioned the veracity of the Holocaust, remarking that "The Holocaust
is an event whose reality is uncertain and if it has happened, it's
uncertain how it has happened." This was consistent with Khamenei's previous comments regarding the Holocaust.
In 2015, the House of Cartoon and the Sarcheshmeh Cultural Complex in Iran organized the Second International Holocaust Cartoon Competition, a competition in which artists were encouraged to submit cartoons on the theme of Holocaust denial. The winner of the contest will receive $12,000. Hamshahri, a popular Iranian newspaper, held a similar contest in 2006.
Turkey
In Turkey, in 1996, the Islamic preacher Adnan Oktar
under the pen name of Harun Yahya, distributed thousands of copies of a
book which was originally published the previous year, entitled Soykırım Yalanı ("The Genocide Lie", referring to the Holocaust) and mailed unsolicited texts to American and European schools and colleges. The publication of Soykırım Yalanı sparked much public debate.
This book claims, "what is presented as Holocaust is the death of some
Jews due to the typhus plague during the war and the famine towards the
end of the war caused by the defeat of the Germans." In March 1996, a Turkish painter and intellectual, Bedri Baykam, published a strongly worded critique of the book in the Ankara daily newspaper Siyah-Beyaz
("Black and White"). A legal suit for slander was brought against him.
During the trial in September, Baykam exposed the real author of the
book as Adnan Oktar. The suit was withdrawn in March 1997.
Eastern Europe
In some Eastern European countries, such as Ukraine, Lithuania,
Latvia, and Romania, Holocaust deniers do not deny the very fact of mass
murder of Jews but deny some national or regional elements of the
Holocaust.
According to Zvi Gitelman,
Soviet writers tended either to ignore or downplay the Holocaust,
treating it as one small part of a larger phenomenon of 20 million dead
Soviet citizens during the Great Patriotic War.
According to Gitelman, Soviet authorities were concerned about raising
the consciousness of Soviet Jews and retarding their assimilation to the
greater Soviet population. The Holocaust also raised the issue of
collaboration with the Nazi occupiers, an uncomfortable topic for Soviet
historiography. According to historian Yuri Pivovarov in modern Russia this trend has returned with the Russian invasion on Ukraine, culminating with July 19, 2023, article of Maria Zakharova
who argued that it were the Soviet citizens who were the victims of
Holocaust in the first place. In a number of popular history project
sponsored by Russian state Jews were mentioned as one of many victim
groups, or not mentioned at all. Holocaust denial literature is freely published in Russia, and one of the most prominent authors, Jürgen Graf, lives there since his escape from prosecution in Switzerland in the 2000s.
In 2018, the United States Department of State warned about "the glorification of the Ustasha regime and denial of the Holocaust" in Croatia, citing the placement of a plaque with the Ustasha-era salute 'Za dom spremni' on the grounds of a concentration camp memorial site, far-right rallies and the concert of the controversial band Thompson among other events. Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center describes Croatia as a "cradle of Holocaust distortion". Holocaust denial in Croatia typically involves the downplaying or denial of the Holocaust carried out by the Ustasha regime, particularly against Serbs and Jews at the Jasenovac concentration camp and it is done by public figures, though the regime's victims also included Roma and anti-fascist Croats.
The Society for Research of the Threefold Jasenovac Camp in Croatia, an
NGO with authors and academics among its members, claims that Jasenovac
was a labor camp during World War II and that it was later used by
Yugoslav Communists to imprison Ustasha members and regular Croatian
Home Guard army troops until 1948, then alleged Stalinists until 1951.
Following a series of book publications denying the Ustashe regime's
crimes, the Simon Wiesenthal Center urged Croatian authorities in 2019
to ban such works, noting that they "would immediately be banned in
Germany and Austria and rightfully so".
In Hungary, Holocaust distortion and denial take place in the
form of downplaying the country's role in the killing and deportation of
Jews. The Arrow Cross Party committed numerous crimes and killed or deported Jews. A total of 437,000 Jews were deported by Miklós Horthy's government in the Kingdom of Hungary, an Axis collaborator.
In Serbia, Holocaust distortion and denial is manifested in the downplaying of Milan Nedić and Dimitrije Ljotić's roles in the extermination of Serbia's Jews in concentration camps in Nedić's Serbia, by a number of Serbian historians. Serb collaborationist armed forces, including the Chetniks,
were involved, either directly or indirectly, in the mass killings of
mainly Jews and Roma as well as Croats, Muslims and those Serbs who
sided with any anti-German resistance.
Since the end of the war, Serbian collaboration in the Holocaust has
been the subject of historical revisionism by Serbian leaders.
The post-Soviet radical right activists do not question the
existence of Nazi death camps or Jewish ghettos. However, they deny the
participation of local population in anti-Jewish pogroms or the contribution of national paramilitary organizations in capture and execution of Jews. Thus, denial of the antisemitic nature and participation in the Holocaust of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army has become a central component of the intellectual history of the Ukrainian diaspora and nationalists.
Western Europe
In France, Holocaust denial became more prominent in the 1990s as négationnisme, though the movement has existed in ultra-left French politics since at least the 1960s, led by figures such as Pierre Guillaume (who was involved in the bookshop La Vieille Taupe
during the 1960s). Elements of the extreme far-right in France have
begun to build on each other's negationist arguments, which often span
beyond the Holocaust to cover a range of antisemitic views,
incorporating attempts to tie the Holocaust to the Biblical massacre of
the Canaanites,
critiques of Zionism, and other material fanning what has been called a
"conspiratorial Judeo-phobia" designed to legitimize and "banalize"
antisemitism.
In Belgium in 2001, Roeland Raes, the ideologue and vice-president of one of the country's largest political parties, the Vlaams Blok,
gave an interview on Dutch TV where he cast doubt over the number of
Jews murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust. In the same interview,
he questioned the scale of the Nazis' use of gas chambers and the
authenticity of Anne Frank's
diary. In response to the media assault following the interview, Raes
was forced to resign his position but vowed to remain active within the
party.
Three years later, the Vlaams Blok was convicted of racism and chose to
disband. Immediately afterwards, it legally reformed under the new name
Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest) with the same leaders and the same
membership.
The trial of a Canadian woman, Monika Schaefer, and her
German-Canadian brother, Alfred Schaefer started in Germany in early
July 2018. They were charged with Volksverhetzung
(literally 'incitement of the people', often phrased as 'incitement to
hatred' in English-language media). The pair had published video clips
on YouTube
of their denial of the genocide of Jews. In the clips, Alfred Schaefer
said that Jews wanted to destroy Germans, blamed them for starting both
World Wars, and referred to the Holocaust as a "Jewish fantasy". Monika Schaefer was arrested in January 2018 in Germany while attending a court hearing of Sylvia Stolz. Schaefer had been the Green Party candidate in the Alberta riding of Yellowhead
during the federal elections in 2006, 2008, and 2011, but was expelled
from the party after news reports surfaced of a July 2016 video
where she describes the Holocaust as "the most persistent lie in all of
history" and insisted that those in concentration camps had been kept
as healthy and as well-fed as possible. In late October 2018, Monika Schaefer was convicted of the charge of Volksverhetzung
('incitement of hatred', literally 'incitement of the people'). She was
sentenced to ten months while Alfred Schaefer, also convicted, received
a sentence of three years and two months.
In January 2019, a survey conducted by Opinion Matters, on behalf of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust
found that 5% of UK adults did not believe the Holocaust took place and
one in 12 (8%) believed its scale has been exaggerated. One in five
respondents incorrectly answered that less than 2 million Jews were
murdered, and 45% couldn't say how many people were murdered in the
Holocaust. Speaking in light of the survey's findings, Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust,
said: "One person questioning the truth of the Holocaust is one too
many, and so it is up to us to redouble our efforts to ensure future
generations know that it did happen and become witnesses to one of the
darkest episodes in our history." The BBC Radio 4 programme More or Less,
specializing on statistics, investigated the survey finding it was
unlikely to be accurate. Participants were incentivized to complete the
online survey by shopping vouchers encouraging speedy answering, and the
principal question was a "reverse question" with most participants
having to give the reverse answer to surrounding questions requiring
careful answering. Another question asked how many Jewish people had
been murdered in the holocaust with only 0.2% of participants giving the
answer zero, which was considered to be a closer estimate of the number
of UK adults that did not believe the Holocaust took place.
Other
Japanese Holocaust denial first appeared in 1989 and reached its peak
in 1995 with the publication in February 1995 by the Japanese magazine Marco Polo [ja], a 250,000-circulation monthly published by Bungei Shunju, of a Holocaust denial article by physician Masanori Nishioka which stated: "The 'Holocaust' is a fabrication. There were no execution gas chambers in Auschwitz or in any other concentration camp.
Today, what is displayed as 'gas chambers' at the remains of the
Auschwitz camp in Poland are a post-war fabrication by the Polish
communist regime or by the Soviet Union,
which controlled the country. Not once, neither at Auschwitz nor in any
territory controlled by the Germans during the Second World War, was
there 'mass murder of Jews' in 'gas chambers." The Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center instigated a boycott of Bungei Shunju advertisers, including Volkswagen, Mitsubishi, and Cartier. Within days, Bungei Shunju shut down Marco Polo and its editor, Kazuyoshi Hanada, quit, as did the president of Bungei Shunju, Kengo Tanaka.
According to a 2020 survey of American adult Millennials and
Generation Z members, 24% said the Holocaust might be a myth or had been
exaggerated.
Reactions to Holocaust denial
In 2022, the United Nations adopted a resolution aimed at combating Holocaust denial and antisemitism. The resolution was proposed by Germany and Israel.
Scholarly response to Holocaust denial can be roughly divided into
three categories. Some academics refuse to engage Holocaust deniers or
their arguments at all, on grounds that doing so lends them unwarranted
legitimacy. The second group of scholars, typified by the American historian Deborah Lipstadt,
have tried to raise awareness of the methods and motivations of
Holocaust denial without legitimizing the deniers themselves. "We need
not waste time or effort answering the deniers' contentions," Lipstadt
wrote. "It would be never-ending.... Their commitment is to an ideology
and their 'findings' are shaped to support it." A third group, typified by the Nizkor Project, responds to arguments and claims made by Holocaust denial groups by pointing out inaccuracies and errors in their evidence.
In December 1991 the American Historical Association,
the oldest and largest society of historians and teachers of history in
the United States, issued the following statement: "The American
Historical Association Council strongly deplores the publicly reported
attempts to deny the fact of the Holocaust. No serious historian
questions that the Holocaust took place."
This followed a strong reaction by many of its members and commentary
in the press against a near-unanimous decision that the AHA had made in
May 1991 that studying the significance of the Holocaust should
be encouraged. The association's May 1991 statement was in response to
an incident where certain of its members had questioned the reality of
the Holocaust. The December 1991 declaration is a reversal of the AHA's
earlier stance that the association should not set a precedent by
certifying historical facts. The AHA has also stated that Holocaust denial is "at best, a form of academic fraud".
Literary theorist Jean Baudrillard described Holocaust denial as "part of the extermination itself". Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel, during a 1999 discussion at the White House in Washington, D.C., called the Holocaust "the most documented tragedy in recorded history.
Never before has a tragedy elicited so much witness from the killers,
from the victims and even from the bystanders—millions of pieces here in
the museum what you have, all other museums, archives in the thousands,
in the millions."
Deborah Lipstadt's 1993 book, Denying the Holocaust, sharply criticized various Holocaust deniers, including British author David Irving,
for deliberately misrepresenting evidence to justify their preconceived
conclusions. In the book, Lipstadt named Irving as "one of the more
dangerous" Holocaust deniers, because he was a published author, and was
viewed by some as a legitimate military historian. He was "familiar
with historical evidence", she wrote, and "bends it until it conforms
with his ideological leanings and political agenda". In 1996, Irving
filed a libel suit against Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin Books. Irving, who appeared as a defense witness in Ernst Zündel's trial in Canada, and once declared at a rally of Holocaust deniers that "more women died in the back seat of Edward Kennedy's car than ever died in a gas chamber at Auschwitz," claimed that Lipstadt's allegation damaged his reputation. American historian Christopher Browning,
an expert witness for the defense, wrote a comprehensive essay for the
court summarizing the voluminous evidence for the reality of the
Holocaust, and under cross-examination, effectively countered all of
Irving's principal arguments to the contrary.[96] Cambridge historian Richard J. Evans,
another defense expert witness, spent two years examining Irving's
writings and confirmed his misrepresentations, including evidence that
he had knowingly used forged documents as source material. After a
two-month trial in London the trial judge, Justice Charles Gray, issued a 333-page ruling against Irving, which referred to him as a "Holocaust denier" and "right-wing pro-Nazi polemicist".
Ken McVay, an American resident in Canada, was disturbed by the efforts of organizations like the Simon Wiesenthal Center
to suppress the speech of the Holocaust deniers, feeling that it was
better to confront them openly than to try to censor them. On the Usenet newsgroup alt.revisionism
he began a campaign of "truth, fact, and evidence", working with other
participants on the newsgroup to uncover factual information about the
Holocaust and counter the arguments of the deniers by proving them to be
based upon misleading evidence, false statements, and outright lies. He
founded the Nizkor Project to expose the activities of the Holocaust deniers, who responded to McVay with personal attacks, slander, and death threats.
Public figures
A number of public figures have spoken out against Holocaust denial. In 2006, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan
said: "Remembering is a necessary rebuke to those who say the Holocaust
never happened or has been exaggerated. Holocaust denial is the work of
bigots; we must reject their false claims whenever, wherever and by
whomever they are made." In January 2007, the United Nations General Assembly condemned "without reservation any denial of the Holocaust", though Iran disassociated itself from the resolution.
In July 2013, Iran's then president-elect Hassan Rohani described Ahmadinejad's remarks about the Holocaust and Israel as "hate rhetoric" and in September 2013 Rohani
stated that "The Nazis carried out a massacre that cannot be denied,
especially against the Jewish people" and "The massacre by the Nazis was
condemnable. We never want to sit by side with the Nazis...They
committed a crime against Jews — which is a crime against ... all of
humanity."
While declining to give a specific number of Jewish victims, Iranian
analysts suggested that "Rouhani pushed the envelope as far as it could
go ... without infuriating the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,
and other conservatives back home."
Former Auschwitz SS personnel
Critics of Holocaust denial also include members of the Auschwitz SS. Camp physician and SS-UntersturmführerHans Münch
considered the facts of Auschwitz "so firmly determined that one cannot
have any doubt at all", and described those who negate what happened at
the camp as "malevolent" people who have "personal interest to want to
bury in silence things that cannot be buried in silence". Zyklon B handler and SS-OberscharführerJosef Klehr said that anyone who maintains that nobody was gassed at Auschwitz must be "crazy or in the wrong". SS-UnterscharführerOswald Kaduk stated that he did not consider those who maintain such a thing as normal people. Hearing about Holocaust denial compelled former SS-RottenführerOskar Gröning to publicly speak about what he witnessed at Auschwitz, and denounce Holocaust deniers, stating:
I would like you to believe me. I
saw the gas chambers. I saw the crematoria. I saw the open fires. I was
on the ramp when the selections took place. I would like you to believe
that these atrocities happened because I was there.
Holocaust denial and antisemitism
Holocaust denial is given as an example of antisemitism in the Working Definition of Antisemitism, adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance
as well as the United Kingdom, Israel, Austria, Scotland, Romania,
Germany and Bulgaria. The European Parliament voted in favor of a
resolution calling for member states to adopt the definition on June 1,
2017. The Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity defines Holocaust denial as "a new form of anti-Semitism, but one that hinges on age-old motifs". The Anti-Defamation League
has stated that "Holocaust denial is a contemporary form of the classic
anti-Semitic doctrine of the evil, manipulative and threatening world
Jewish conspiracy" and French historian Valérie Igounet has written that "Holocaust denial is a convenient polemical substitute for anti-semitism."
The primary motivation for most
deniers is anti-Semitism, and for them the Holocaust is an infuriatingly
inconvenient fact of history. After all, the Holocaust has generally
been recognized as one of the most terrible crimes that ever took place,
and surely the very emblem of evil in the modern age. If that crime was
a direct result of anti-Semitism taken to its logical end, then
anti-Semitism itself, even when expressed in private conversation, is
inevitably discredited among most people. What better way to
rehabilitate anti-Semitism, make anti-Semitic arguments seem once again
respectable in civilized discourse and even make it acceptable for
governments to pursue anti-Semitic policies than by convincing the world
that the great crime for which anti-Semitism was blamed simply never
happened—indeed, that it was nothing more than a frame-up invented by
the Jews, and propagated by them through their control of the media?
What better way, in short, to make the world safe again for
anti-Semitism than by denying the Holocaust?
The French historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet
described the motivation of deniers more succinctly, explaining, "One
revives the dead in order the better to strike the living." German political scientist Matthias Küntzel has argued, "Every denial of the Holocaust... contains an appeal to repeat it."
The key claims, which cause Holocaust denial to differ from established fact, are:
The Nazis had no official policy or intention of exterminating Jews.
The Nazis did not use gas chambers to mass murder Jews.
The figure of 5 to 6 million Jewish deaths is a gross exaggeration, and the actual number is an order of magnitude lower.
Other claims include the following:
Stories of the Holocaust were a myth initially created by the Allies of World War II to demonize Germans, Jews having spread this myth as part of a grander plot intended to enable the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and now to garner continuing support for the state of Israel.
Documentary evidence of the Holocaust, from photographs to The Diary of Anne Frank, is fabricated.
Survivor testimonies are filled with errors and inconsistencies and are thus unreliable.
Interrogators obtained Nazi prisoners' confessions of war crimes through the use of torture.
The Nazi treatment of Jews was no different from what the Allies did to their enemies in World War II.
The Holocaust was well documented by the bureaucracy of the Nazi government itself. It was further witnessed by the Allied forces who entered Germany and its associated Axis states towards the end of World War II. It was also witnessed from the inside by non-Jewish captives such as Catholic French Resistance member André Rogerie who wrote extensively and testified about his experiences in seven camps including Auschwitz-Birkenau and also produced the oldest contemporary sketch of a camp crematorium.
According to researchers Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman, there is a "convergence of evidence" that proves that the Holocaust happened. This evidence includes:
Written documents—hundreds of thousands of letters, memos, blueprints, orders, bills, speeches, articles, memoirs, and confessions.
Eyewitness testimony—accounts from survivors, Jewish Sonderkommandos (who helped load bodies from the gas chambers into the crematoria in exchange for a chance of survival), SS guards, commandants, local townspeople, and even high-ranking Nazis who spoke openly about the mass murder of the Jews.
Photographs—including official military and press
photographs, civilian photographs, secret photographs taken by
survivors, aerial photographs, German and Allied film footage, and
unofficial photographs taken by the German military.
The camps themselves—concentration camps, work camps, and extermination camps that still exist in varying degrees of originality and reconstruction.
Inferential evidence or argument from silence—population
demographics, reconstructed from the pre–World War II era; if six
million Jews were not murdered, what happened to them?
Much of the controversy surrounding the claims of Holocaust deniers'
centers on the methods used to present arguments that the Holocaust
allegedly never happened as commonly accepted. Numerous accounts
have been given by Holocaust deniers (including evidence presented in
court cases) of claimed facts and evidence; however, independent
research has shown these claims to be based upon flawed research,
biassed statements, or even deliberately falsified evidence. Opponents
of Holocaust denial have documented numerous instances in which such
evidence was altered or manufactured (see Nizkor Project and David Irving). According to Pierre Vidal-Naquet, "in our society of image and spectacle, extermination on paper leads to extermination in reality."
Such legislation remains controversial. In October 2007, a tribunal declared Spain's genocide denial law unconstitutional.
In 2007 Italy rejected a denial law proposing a prison sentence of up
to four years. In 2006 the Netherlands rejected a draft law proposing a
maximum sentence of one year on denial of genocidal acts in general,
although specifically denying the Holocaust remains a criminal offense
there. The United Kingdom has twice rejected Holocaust denial laws. Denmark and Sweden have also rejected such legislation.
A number of deniers have been prosecuted under various countries' denial laws. French literature professor Robert Faurisson, for example, was convicted and punished under the Gayssot Act in 1990. Some historians oppose such laws, among them Pierre Vidal-Naquet, an outspoken critic of Faurisson, on the grounds that denial legislation imposes "historical truth as legal truth". Other academics favor criminalization.
Holocaust denial, they contend, is "the worst form of racism and its
most respectable version because it pretends to be a research". Holocaust historian Deborah E. Lipstadt
expressed her opposition to laws against expressing Holocaust denial,
saying, "I don't think they work. I think they turn whatever is being
outlawed into forbidden fruit." She also said that politicians should
not be able to decide what can and cannot be said.
David Irving conviction
In February 2006, Irving was convicted in Austria, where Holocaust
denial is illegal, for a speech he had made in 1989 in which he denied
the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz.
Irving was aware of the outstanding arrest warrant but chose to go to
Austria anyway "to give a lecture to a far-right student fraternity".
Although he pleaded guilty to the charge, Irving said he had been
"mistaken", and had changed his opinions on the Holocaust. "I said that
then, based on my knowledge at the time, but by 1991 when I came across
the Eichmann papers, I wasn't saying that anymore and I wouldn't say
that now. The Nazis did murder millions of Jews."
Irving served 13 months of a 3-year sentence in an Austrian prison,
including the period between his arrest and conviction, and was deported
in early 2007.
The episode sparked intense international debate over the limits of
freedom of speech. Upon hearing of Irving's sentence, Lipstadt said:
I
am not happy when censorship wins, and I don't believe in winning
battles via censorship.... The way of fighting Holocaust deniers is with
history and with truth.
According to CNN,
upon Irving's return to the UK, he "vow[ed] to repeat views denying the
Holocaust that led to his conviction" stating he felt "no need any
longer to show remorse" for his Holocaust views.
Other acts of genocide have met similar attempts to deny and minimize them. Gregory H. Stanton, formerly of the US State Department and the founder of Genocide Watch,
lists denial as the final stage of a genocide development: "Denial is
the eighth stage that always follows a genocide. It is among the surest
indicators of further genocidal massacres.
The perpetrators of genocide dig up the mass graves, burn the bodies,
try to cover up the evidence and intimidate the witnesses. They deny
that they committed any crimes, and often blame what happened on the
victims."
Holocaust denial is often compared to Armenian genocide denial because of similar tactics of misrepresenting evidence, false equivalence, claiming that atrocities were invented by war propaganda
and that powerful lobbies manufacture genocide allegations for their
own profit, subsuming one-sided systematic extermination into war
deaths, and shifting blame from the perpetrators to the victims of
genocide. Both forms of negationism share the goal of rehabilitating the ideologies which brought genocide about.
