This article presents the main arguments used by mainstream historians against Holocaust denial. (See that article for a general overview of the subject.) The arguments are of two types: criticisms of the methods of Holocaust deniers, and documentary evidence of the Holocaust.
Methods used by Holocaust deniers
Much of the controversy surrounding the claims of deniers centers upon the methods used to present arguments that the Holocaust allegedly never happened. Numerous accounts have been given (including evidence presented in court cases) of claimed "facts" and "evidence"; however, independent research has shown these claims to be based upon flawed research, biased statements, and even deliberately falsified evidence. Opponents of Holocaust denial have compiled detailed accounts of numerous instances where this evidence has been altered or manufactured (see below, also see Nizkor Project and David Irving). Evidence presented by Holocaust deniers has also failed to stand up to scrutiny in courts of law (see Fred A. Leuchter), further questioning its veracity.
Ken McVay, an activist who works to counter such claims on the Internet, described the modus operandi of Holocaust deniers in a 1994 interview:
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"They'll cite a historical text: 'K.K. Campbell says on page 82 of his famous book that nobody died at Auschwitz.' Then you go to the Library of Congress and look up K.K. Campbell, page 82, and what you find he really said was, 'It was a nice day at Dachau.' They get away with this because they know goddamn well most people don't have time to rush off to the Library of Congress. But people read that and say to themselves, 'Who would lie about such a thing when it's so easy to prove them wrong? They must be telling the truth.'" -- Eye magazine (online Web-based magazine), November 10, 1994
In some cases, while some facts presented are sound, the application of those facts to specific arguments is meaningless, and are simply used to bolster other arguments (in spite of their irrelevance). For example, in the Leuchter report (see below), a lack of significant cyanide traces in some gas chambers is measured some 40 years later, after 40 years of open-air weathering. While it is indeed factual, it is meaningless as an indicator of whether or not cyanide gas was ever used there.
In other cases, conflation of facts is used to mislead. A frequently-used photo shows a fairly flimsy gas chamber door. The intent is to confuse the reader into believing that gas chambers could not be practically used for extermination, because the victims would break down the door rather than be executed. While the photo is a real gas chamber door, it is not a door that was known to be used on an extermination gas chamber; it is a door likely used on a de-lousing gas chamber.
Finally, many publications and statements by Holocaust deniers have been tainted by anti-Semitism. Critics of Holocaust denial have cited many examples where the arguments and proffered evidence have moved from neutral, scholarly presentations to blatant, biased personal attacks. As a brief search of the Internet for such terms will reveal, Holocaust deniers have frequently used terms such as "Zionist Collaborator" or "Jew-lover" to describe their opponents. While the term Zionist on its own can actually simply refer to those Jews who believe in returning to what they see as their homeland in Israel, some Jews and Jewish scholars believe such goals are unnecessary or even wrong.
The continuing, persistent efforts by Holocaust deniers to portray such a human disaster as a mere fiction in the face of overwhelming evidence has led scholars and authorities to question their motives. "Why," it has been asked, "do people deny the Holocaust?" On July 24, 1996, a missive by Harold Covington (the leader of the National Socialist White Peoples Party , formerly the American Nazi Party) was sent via email to a number of neo-Nazi supporters (many of whom were Holocaust deniers). In this message, Covington explained holocaust revisionism in a manner that has been used by its opponents and critics as a definitive answer to the question of why:
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"Take away the Holocaust and what do you have left? Without their precious Holocaust, what are the Jews? Just a grubby little bunch of international bandits and assassins and squatters who have perpetrated the most massive, cynical fraud in human history...I recall seeing a television program on revisionism a few years ago which closed with Deborah Lipstadt making some statement to the effect that: the real purpose of Holocaust revisionism is to make National Socialism an acceptable political alternative again. I normally don't agree with anything a Jew says, but I recall exclaiming, 'Bingo! Got it in one! Give that lady a cigar!'" -- "On Revisionism" by Harold Covington (writing under the pseudonym Winston Smith), NSNet Bulletin #5, July 24, 1996
Evidence of the Holocaust
Evidence of the existence of the Holocaust was well documented by the heavily bureaucratic German government itself. It was further well documented by the Allied forces who entered Germany and its associated Axis states towards the end of World War II. Among the evidence produced was film and stills of the existence of prisoner camps, as well as the testimony of those freed when the camps were entered.
The Holocaust was a massive undertaking that lasted for years across several countries, with its own command and control infrastructure. Although the Nazis made attempts to destroy the evidence of the Holocaust when they could see that their defeat was imminent, they left many tons of documents relating to the Holocaust. Due to the extremely rapid collapse of the Nazi forces at the end of the war, attempts to destroy evidence in Germany were for the most part unsuccessful.
After their defeat, many tons of documents were recovered, and many thousands of bodies were found not yet completely decomposed, in mass graves near many concentration camps. The physical evidence and the documentary proof included records of train shipments of Jews to the camps, orders for tons of cyanide and other poisons, and the remaining concentration camp structures. Interviews with survivors completed the picture.
As a result of the records produced, all mainstream historians agree that Holocaust denial is contrary to the facts of history.
Evidence for Hitler's complicity in the Holocaust
- Argument: There was no specific order by Adolf Hitler or other top Nazi officials to exterminate the Jews.
Report to Hitler detailing the executions of prisoners.
Holocaust deniers cite the fact that there was never a blatant, unquestionable order written or signed by Adolf Hitler that specifically ordered the death of the Jewish populations of Germany or Poland. Critics counter this argument by noting that very few Nazi documents used such obvious terms as "murder" or "death" when addressing their actions. Almost always, they spoke and wrote with suggestive phrases such as "the final solution to the Jewish question" rather than "the destruction of the Jewish people." The most often-cited quote from Hitler regarding the intention to eliminate the European Jewry comes from his January 30, 1939 speech to the Reichstag, where he is quoted as saying:
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"Today I want to be a prophet once more: If international Jewish financiers inside and outside Europe again succeed in plunging the nations into a world war, the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and with it the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe." (Source: [1])
Provided here is a photographic image of a report from Himmler to Hitler regarding the executions of prisoners in Nazi-occupied Bialystok, Poland. This was presented as evidence during the Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals, of Hitler's knowledge and approval of the executions of Jews and other targeted groups. A translation of the report can be found by clicking on the image.
Evidence that gas chambers were used for killing
- Argument: Nazis did not use gas chambers to mass murder Jews. Small chambers did exist for delousing and Zyklon-B was used in this process.
There have been claims by Holocaust deniers that the gas chambers built to massacre civilians never existed, and the structures identified as gas chambers actually served other purposes. However, the more common argument has been to claim that gas was not used to murder Jews and other victims, and that many gas chambers were also built after the war just for show. An often-quoted document advancing this theory is the "Leuchter Report" by Fred A. Leuchter, a paper stating that no traces of cyanide were found when he examined samples taken from one of the Auschwitz gas chambers in 1988. This paper is used to further a common debating tactic, namely the suggestion that because no traces of cyanide were found in 1988, then no cyanide was used at all in Auschwitz, over forty years earlier.
The cyanide used in Auschwitz and other extermination camps was created through activation of the pesticide Zyklon-B, which was used to exterminate prisoners by the thousands. Further investigation into the death camps revealed that the most difficult part of the operation was the disposal of thousands of corpses after the executions had taken place; this required the construction of huge ovens to cremate the corpses.
Another piece of evidence Holocaust deniers frequently cite is the question of what happened to the ash after the bodies were cremated. Some speculate that some ash could have been used in fertilization experiments in crop fields, by the Germans.
Furthermore, revisionists and deniers also claim:
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"At Birkenau (part of Auschwitz), on the site of the so-called gas chamber and incinerator, there is not nearly enough rubble to represent the remains of a building that size.".
Opponents counter that this argument is not valid. After liberation, they note, the local Polish farming population returned, and, needing materials to rebuild houses before winter, removed large amounts of re-usable bricks from the ruins. There is by the crematorium site a big pile of waste that the salvagers threw aside as they searched for usable bricks.
The Institute for Historical Review publicly offered a reward of $50,000 for verifiable "proof that gas chambers for the purpose of killing human beings existed at or in Auschwitz." Mel Mermelstein, a survivor of Auschwitz, submitted proof, which was then ignored. He then sued IHR and won the $50,000 reward, plus $40,000 in damages for personal suffering. Revisionists have subsequently claimed that the proof offered by Mermelstein was "never released to the public," implying that it had been sealed by the court or otherwise kept secret.
Nonetheless, holocaust deniers still question the use of gas chambers in spite of overwhelming evidence. Arno Mayer stated in Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?: "Sources for the study of the gas chambers are at once rare and unreliable."
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External Link: Gassing as a "remedy" for Jews
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External Link: A detailed refutation of the Leuchter-Report
Evidence for the death toll
- Argument: The figure of six million Jewish deaths is an irresponsible exaggeration, and many Jews who actually emigrated to Russia, Britain, Israel and the United States are included in the number.
Six million figure
The figure "six million" (which may actually be closer to eleven million, when counting the other ethnic, religious, and minority groups targeted for extinction) is often downgraded by claims to a figure of "only" one million deaths, or only three hundred thousand "casualties." Numerous documents archived and discovered after the war gave meticulous accounts of the exterminations that took place at the "death camps" (such as Auschwitz and Treblinka).
Complicating the matter is that various instances have been reported where the death tolls of particular death camps were claimed to be overstated. Any possible ambiguity in death toll figures has been seized upon by revisionists as evidence for their position. Nevertheless, the evidence for the large death figures quoted by mainstream sources is overwhelming.
A much-quoted instance of disputing the toll is the "Breitbard Document," (actually a paper by Aaron Brietbart) [2] which describes a commemorative plaque at Auschwitz to the victims that died there, which read, Four million people suffered and died here at the hands of the Nazi murderers between the years 1940 and 1945. In 1990, a new plaque replaced the old one. It now says, May this place where the Nazis assassinated 1,500,000 men, women and children, a majority of them Jews from diverse European countries, be forever for mankind a cry of despair and of warning. The lower numbers are due to the fact that the Soviets "purposely overstated the number of non-Jewish casualties at Auschwitz-Birkenau," according to the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Holocaust Deniers seize on this discrepancy and insist that the number of Jews killed must be immediately brought down at least 2.5 million. However, they ignore the facts that
- the 4 million figure of the Soviets included almost 2 million non-Jews, and
- historians in any event did not use the 4 million figure in calculating the total number of Jews killed.
Jewish population
Deniers consider one of their stronger arguments to be the population of Jews before and after the Holocaust. They claim that the 1940 World Almanac gives the world Jewish population as 15,319,359, while the 1949 World Almanac gives the world Jewish population as 15,713,638. In their view this makes it impossible that 6 million Jews died, even given an extremely high birth rate. They therefore claim that either the figures are wrong, or the Holocaust, meaning the deliberate extermination of millions of Jews, cannot have happened.
However, as is typically the case, the evidence given by Holocaust deniers does not stand up to closer scrutiny. In fact, the 1949 World Almanac gives the world Jewish population as 11,266,600. Moreover, it revises its estimate of the World Jewish population in 1939 upwards, to 16,643,120. Thus, according to the 1949 World Almanac the difference between the pre and post war populations is over 5.4 million.
In addition, rather than using more accurate census figures and other records, Holocaust deniers rely on a popular compendium whose methodology of assessment is unknown, and whose estimates have varied significantly. For example, the 1982 World Almanac gives the world Jewish population as 14,318,000, while the 1990 World Almanac gives the world Jewish population as 18,169,000, and the 1996 World Almanac gives the world Jewish population as 13,451,000. Either 3.7 million Jews appeared unnoticed between 1982 and 1990, and then 4.5 million Jews disappeared equally unnoticed between 1990 and 1996, or the World Almanac is not a particularly reliable source for accurate estimates of worldwide Jewish population.
Finally, the Holocaust deniers are very selective in the sources they choose; other sources give very different figures for the Jewish population before and after the war. For example, the 1932 American Jewish yearbook estimate the total number of Jews in the world at 15,192,218, of whom 9,418,248 resided in Europe. However, the 1947 yearbook states: "Estimates of the world Jewish population have been assembled by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (except for the United States and Canada) and are probably the most authentic available at the present time. The figures reveal that the total Jewish population of the world has decreased by one-third from about 16,600,000 in 1939 to about 11,000,000 in 1946 as the result of the annihilation by the Nazis of more than five and a half million European Jews. In Europe only an estimated 3,642,000 remain of the total Jewish pre-war population of approximately 9,740,000."
Testimonies
The most telling evidence is the testimony of thousands of survivors of the Holocaust, including the testimony of captured Nazi officers at the Nuremberg Trials. Holocaust deniers discount these testimonies claiming that these witnesses were tortured, or that Rudolf Hoess allegedly signed a "blood stained confession" (which they claim is the initial source of the 6 million figure) written in a language he did not understand (English). When asked to refute the numerous individual stories and official testimonies, Holocaust deniers claim that most of these officers were summarily put to death or committed suicide afterwards so no cross examination was possible. They have also constructed an elaborate conspiracy theory involving a massive "Jewish plan" to plant forged documents across the continent of Europe, aided by the torture and forced confession of every captured Nazi officer, soldier, and worker who testified at the war crimes tribunal.
