Hate Has No Place: Combatting Antisemitism

Introduction to Holocaust Denial

"Holocaust denial in its various forms is an expression of antisemitism."

Holocaust denial is discourse and propaganda that deny the historical reality and the extent of the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis and their accomplices during World War II, known as the Holocaust or the Shoah. Holocaust denial refers specifically to any attempt to claim that the Holocaust/Shoah did not take place. Holocaust denial may include publicly denying or calling into doubt the use of principal mechanisms of destruction (such as gas chambers, mass shooting, starvation and torture) or the intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people. Holocaust denial in its various forms is an expression of antisemitism. The attempt to deny the genocide of the Jews is an effort to exonerate National Socialism and antisemitism from guilt or responsibility in the genocide of the Jewish people. -- International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Working Definition of Holocaust Denial and Distortion

What is Holocaust Denial?

From the Simon Wiesenthal Center

1. What is Holocaust Denial?
2. Why do some people deny the Holocaust?
3. What are the basic views of Holocaust deniers?
4. How can Holocaust Revisionists deny Nazi atrocities given all the evidence?
5. Are Holocaust Deniers historians?
6. Don't Holocaust deniers present facts to back up their arguments?

Holocaust Denial, Explained

This three-minute video from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum explains Holocaust denial and the different forms it takes. 

What are some of the main claims of Holocaust revisionists. How are they rebutted?

From the Simon Wiesenthal Center

1. The Holocaust was merely Allied propaganda.
2. There is no proof that the Holocaust occurred.
3. The estimates of Jewish losses during the Holocaust are greatly exaggerated. There were never even 6 million Jews in Germany.
4. Didn't the International Committee for the Red Cross report that only 300,000 people had perished in the German concentration camps, not all of them Jews?
5. Nazi policy towards the Jews was emigration, not extermination.
6. Not a single document has been found with Hitler's signature ordering the extermination of the Jews.
7. Zyklon B was a fumigant. It wasn't a practical agent for mass murder.
8. If Zyklon B is so highly toxic, how could bodies have been removed from gas chambers only minutes after execution?
9. Zyklon B is so highly flammable that a single spark from the ventilation system or the immense heat created by the nearby furnaces would have resulted in an explosion.
10. There is no proof whatsoever that the Nazis ever murdered anyone in gas chambers.
11. American engineer and execution 'expert', Fred Leuchter, proved that the 'so-called' gas chambers at Auschwitz could not have been used for their 'alleged' purpose.
12. Didn't Simon Wiesenthal himself state that there were no extermination camps in Germany?
13. For years, the death statistics at Auschwitz-Birkenau had been put at well over 3 million. Recently, however, a memorial plaque at the former death camp estimates Jewish losses closer to 1 million. Shouldn't the new figures imply that Jewish losses for the Holocaust are much lower than previously thought?
14. The Diary of Anne Frank is a fraud. I t was written in ball point pen, which was not in common use until after her death.

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