Holocaust Deniers
“Truth exists. Only falsehood has to
be invented.”—Georges Braque
Who are the Deniers?
David Irving
• British Journalist and historian
• Defines himself as a “modern
fascist”
• Keeps a portrait of Adolf Hitler over
his desk
• He claims that Hitler had no
knowledge of the Final Solution or
the Holocaust
• In 1992, Irving said publicly that
“there were no gas chambers at
Auschwitz.” He was tried, convicted http://www.holocau
and fined in a court in Germany
stresearchproject.or
where Holocaust denial is a crime. g/essays&editorials
/freedom.html
David Irving
• "I don't see any reason to be tasteful about
Auschwitz. It's baloney, it's a legend. Once we
admit the fact that it was a brutal slave labour camp
and large numbers of people did die, as large
numbers of innocent people died elsewhere in the
war, why believe the rest of the baloney?" Irving
said. He added, "I say quite tastelessly, in fact, that
more women died on the back seat of Edward
Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in
a gas chamber in Auschwitz."
David Irving vs Deborah
Lipstadt
• David Irving brought a libel suit against Deborah
Lipstadt, the author of DENYING THE
HOLOCAUST: THE GROWING ASSAULT ON
TRUTH AND MEMORY because she attacked him
as “one of the most dangerous spokespersons for
Holocaust denial.
• Mr. Irving was denied his suit because, according
to the judge, he “deliberately misrepresented and
manipulated historical evidence.”
• Irving insisted that Nazi evidence should be
accepted and believed while the testimony of
Holocaust survivors should be dismissed as
worthless.
Ernst Zundel
• Born in Germany but immigrated to Canada where
he became a Neo-Nazi and established a
publishing house, Samisdat, which publishes
inflammatory books and pamphlets
• Published a 32 page pamphlet called Did Six
Million Really Die? He was put in jail for nine
months in Canada for printing lies.
• He is active in distributing a pamphlet soliciting
support for a worldwide campaign to ban Steven
Speilberg’s Schindler’s List.
http://www.holocau
stresearchproject.or
g/essays&editorials
/freedom.html
Dielieb Felderer
• Mails strands of hair to European Jews, some of
them Holocaust survivors, accompanied by notes
asking them if they can prove the hair comes from
a Jewish victim of the gas chambers.
http://www.holocau
stresearchproject.or
g/essays&editorials
/freedom.html
http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/essays&editorials/freedom.html
Willis Carto
• Founded the Institute for Historical Research,
based in California
• Formed a publishing company, Noontide Press,
which published The Myth of the Six Million, a
119 page book seeking to disprove eyewitness
testimony of Holocaust survivors
http://www.holocau
stresearchproject.or
g/essays&editorials
/freedom.html
What do they believe?
“They steal a page from Hitler’s book Mein Kampf, in
which the Nazi dictator declared that the bigger and
more outrageous the lie, the more likely it is to be
believed by most people. The deniers’ big lie is that
the Holocaust never happened.” (Gottfried 26)
Nazi War Criminal
Confessions are false
• They believe that any statements made by Nazi
War criminals before or during their trials were
the result of torture by Jews disguised in British
uniforms.
• The allegation is that the Jews secretly infiltrated
the postwar German government in order to
condemn the German people in the eyes of the
world.
• They believe that after the war, Jews rounded up
all the camp survivors and told them what to say
to prove that the Nazis had use poison gas to
exterminate the Jews.
There were no gas
chambers.
• They believe that all the pictures of piled up dead
bodies that had been gassed were faked.
• In 1979, the IHR offered to pay $50,000 to any
person who could prove that the Nazis operated
gas chambers to exterminate Jews during World
War II.
• When the media didn’t respond, they sent letters
to prominent Holocaust survivors to accept the
challenge. One survivor, Mel Mermelstein, took
the challenge and provided numerous
documents, testimonies, and scientific evidence.
He sued them for the $50,000 and actually won
$90,000 ($40,000 for pain and suffering).
There were no gas
chambers.
• They contend that the technology to release the
Hydrocyanic acid (HCN) in Zyklon B would not
have been available in the 1940s (The US had
been using Zyklon B in their gas chambers since
the 1920s)
• They contend that the gas is highly explosive and
would have been too dangerous to use near
furnaces (the concentration necessary for the gas
to explode would have been 200 times the
amount used in the gas chambers)
• They contend that it would have taken 20 hours
before a chamber could be safely entered, and
not the five to ten minutes described in survivor
accounts (the Nazis installed powerful ventilators
to get the gas out of the room)
There were no gas
chambers.
• They contend that the gas chambers were
actually morgues where Zyklon B was used to
disinfect corpses (Zyklon B is useless for this
purpose as it doesn’t kill anaerobic bacteria
found in dead tissue)
• They contend that the Nazis could not have
disposed of so much ash from so many bodies
killed by gas (The ashes of thousands of people
can fit onto a fair-sized truck. The Nazis scattered
ash over fields, buried it, and dumped it in rivers)
• They contend that the de-lousing chambers were
higher in Zyklon B concentration than gas
chambers (It takes 53 more times of HCN to kill
lice than human beings. The process of delousing
clothes took 72 hours)
There was no mass
conspiracy to kill the Jews
• They contend that the Jews were actually
prisoners of war, and that is why they were in
concentration camps.
• They contend that Jewish slave labor was too
valuable to kill them off through mass shootings
and gas chambers. They say that there is no
record of anyone dieing in a gas chamber (the
Nazis only kept records of those who were
selected to live)
• They contend that there were never six million
Jews who died, but that they simply couldn’t find
all of the Jews after the war because they moved
to other countries, like the US, and New York City
in particular.
Anne Frank’s Diary is a
fake.
• They contend that if she was in hiding, they never
would have used a vacuum cleaner (but Anne writes
that they only used the vacuum cleaner when the
warehouse was empty)
• They contend that when Anne wrote about her
romantic feelings for Peter, that indicated that she was
a sex fiend and they attacked the book as child
pornography. They contend that all Jews are obsessed
with sex.
• They contend that the diary was written in ballpoint
pen, which was not available in the Netherlands in the
1940’s and the paper for the diary wasn’t produced
until the 1950’s. (The Dutch State Forensic Science
Laboratory investigated these charges and found them
to be untrue)
“False words are not only evil
in themselves, but they infect
the soul with evil.”
-Plato