Holocaust denial is generally motivated by hatred of Jews, and builds on an accusation that the Holocaust was invented or exaggerated by Jews as part of a plot to advance Jewish interests. This view perpetuates long-standing antisemitic stereotypes by accusing Jews of conspiracy and world domination, hateful charges that were instrumental in laying the groundwork for the Holocaust.
Holocaust distortion may be associated with antisemitism, but there are also forms that may result from a lack of respect or awareness of the subject.
Regardless of the motivation, all forms of Holocaust distortion open the door to more dangerous forms of denial and antisemitism because they cast doubt on the reality of the Holocaust. The United States Constitution ensures freedom of speech. Therefore, in the United States denying the Holocaust or engaging in antisemitic hate speech is not illegal, except when there is an imminent threat of violence. Many other countries, particularly in Europe where the Holocaust occurred, have laws criminalizing Holocaust denial and hate speech.
The Liberty Lobby begins to publish Holocaust denial literature in The pamphlet becomes a foundation for future claims by Holocaust deniers. Butz was the first Holocaust denier to use the pretense of academic rigor to disguise his falsehoods.
Irving distorts historical evidence and scholarly methods to lend legitimacy to his thesis. The IHR masks its hateful, racist messages under the guise of valid academic inquiry. Survivor Mel Mermelstein submits an affidavit of his internment at Auschwitz and brings suit against the IHR when the institute refuses to pay.
Johnson uses "judicial notice," which allows courts to recognize as fact matters that are common knowledge, to issue a ruling that the Holocaust was fact and that Jews were gassed at Auschwitz. The German government updates and strengthens this law again in , , , and The Case for Open Debate. Le Pen runs for president in France in and comes in fourth.
Duke sells Holocaust denial literature from his legislative office. This law serves as a stimulus to many other European countries that adopt similar laws in the s and early s. Leuchter admits that he has no training in biology, toxicology, or chemistry, all of which are crucial to the claims of the Leuchter Report , which is often cited to support claims made by Holocaust deniers.
It also sets outprovisions that seek to redress forms of denial and distortion of Holocaust history. He is released after one year. It consists of 30 Romanian and foreign historians.
The objective of the commission is to examine the history of the Holocaust in Romania to identify the facts that took place and to disseminate the research results in the country and abroad.
But it was totally, but totally, absurd as a theory. The number , is significant in the context, both scholars explain. Some , ethnic Poles were indeed killed during the Polish uprising. Adding another , fictitious Polish deaths would raise the Polish death toll in the city to , — almost identical to the number of Jews who were murdered in the ghetto. There is some debate over the actual death toll at KL Warschau anywhere between 4, and 20, However, in Wikipedia, the number , thrived and in the article for the camp itself it even grew to , According to Icewhiz, simply the number , should have served as a red flag, for it would have meant that KL Warschau was a bigger death camp than the likes of Sobibor and Majdanek.
Fancy footnote work. Fancy footnote work with shady sources and a very liberal reading of real historical ones created the scaffolding to support the falsehoods on Wikipedia. While the new Polish narrative has failed to make headway in academia or the world media, on Wikipedia it has thrived. The centerpiece of the hoax — the one that supported the , claim — was the supposed existence of gas chambers in Warsaw during the war to systematically kill Poles.
Many of those caught were first transferred to the KL Warschau complex… Among those grouped in Warsaw, the majority was either shot to death or gassed in a provisional gas chamber situated in a railway tunnel near the Warszawa Zachodnia train station.
However, this joke has a rich history as a Polish conspiracy theory and shows how even debunked research can turn into seemingly legitimate sources by those seeking to sow disinformation.
There, he laid out how, riding on the coattails of the populist wind that swept the current government into power in Poland, the story has taken on a life of its own, assuming a key role in the Polocaust narrative and developing a cult-like following among nationalists. Not only that, her findings, which she published independently in , were completely debunked by two historians appointed by the IPN. For example, claims, attributed to eyewitnesses, that canisters of Zyklon B poison gas were found at the site, or that bodies were carried out of the tunnel, were found to be full of holes.
No evidence of Zyklon B was ever found at the site. Again, he found nothing to support her account. What he did find, instead, was clear proof her claims were baseless: for example, he found that the ventilation shafts that were key to the gas chamber story, were only installed in the s, decades after the war.
Anatomy of a number. Poles were victims of a horrible ethnic cleansing, but that was not the systematic annihilation that the Jews faced. The truth is that there was no systematized mass murder of the Polish population - and that is of course a good thing.
The Holocaust is not something one should envy. Dreifuss notes as a prime example the so-called Holocaust law from a year and a half ago that banned the attribution of responsibility for Nazi crimes to the Polish people of the nation. It also changed the formal role of the IPN and incorporated in it the obligation to protect the good name of the Polish nation.
Both Dreifuss and Grabowski say that they noticed the attempt to whitewash Wikipedia articles releated to Poland and the Holocaust in recent years.
Holocaust revisionism in Wikipedia deserves to be studied in its own right. A reader that is not well versed in history could think that it was a joint struggle by four equally important organizations - two Polish groups and two Jewish ones. There are other much more serious examples. Surprisingly, perhaps, while the myth of the gas chambers at KL Warschau succeeded in English Wikipedia, it met a very different fate in other languages.
For example, though the article was translated into 12 languages, it never made its way into Hebrew , where the camp is only noted in passing as part of the article for the Warsaw Ghetto. In German the error was quickly weeded out. They dominate the local narrative, but not the international narrative. Operation Poland. Icewhiz admits he can be a bit obsessive, and over the past year and a half he has documented almost fanatically what he claims is a systematic attempt by a handful of editors to rewrite the history of the Holocaust.
This group, he claims, is comprised of Polish expatriates who have embraced a nationalistic position that is far to the right of the Polish mainstream. In a sense, Holocaust denial is as old as the Holocaust itself. Nazi bureaucrats were careful to cover up the Final Solution in bureaucratic language. One notorious instance of Nazi falsification involves Theresienstadt, a transit camp in the former Czechoslovakia that the Nazis pretended was simply a resettlement community.
The Nazis even fabricated a promotional film of Theresienstadt, in which prisoners were coerced to perform cheerfulness for the cameras in exchange for food. In reality, more than 30, prisoners died in Theresienstadt and nearly 90, more were deported to death camps. Willis Carto, an American far-right political activist, career white supremacist and antisemite, founded the Institute for Historical Review IHR in Scholars, courts and academic institutions have condemned IHR as a clearinghouse for ahistorical, antisemitic propaganda with links to neo-Nazi organizations.
In addition, the Islamic Republic of Iran has long been a promoter and driver of Holocaust denial as well as Holocaust mockery, and has sponsored conferences and even cartoon contests on the subject and the regime has hosted and feted leading Holocaust deniers. In its most developed form, Holocaust denial is an antisemitic conspiracy theory that claims Jews around the world knowingly fabricated evidence of their own genocide in order to extract reparations from Germany, gain world sympathy and facilitate the alleged theft of Palestinian land for the creation of Israel.
It is founded on the belief that Jews somehow are able to force major institutions — governments, Hollywood, the media, academia — to promote a lie at the expense of non-Jews. There have been some important public victories against Holocaust denialism such as the successful defense in an English court by historian Deborah Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University, and Penguin Books against antisemitic writer David Irving and the charge of libel for exposing his willful distortion of the Holocaust.
Penguin Books Ltd.
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