Jump to content

Holocaust denial

Edit links
From Wikiquote
See also: Evidence and documentation for the Holocaust
Holocaust denial books, authors, publishers on the bookshelf: The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, Germar Rudolf, Ernst Zündel, Jürgen Graf, Robert Faurisson, Carlo Mattogno, Leuchter report, Institute for Historical Review, The Barnes Review (TBR).
Countries with laws against Holocaust denial

Holocaust denial, a form of genocide denial, is an antisemitic conspiracy theory that makes one or more of the following false claims: that Nazi Germany's "Final Solution" was aimed only at deporting Jews from the territory of the Third Reich and did not include their extermination; that Nazi authorities did not use extermination camps and gas chambers for the mass murder of Jews; that the actual number of Jews murdered is significantly lower than the accepted figure of approximately six million; and that the Holocaust is a myth, hoax and atrocity propaganda perpetrated by the Allies, Jews, and the Soviet Union.

Quotes by Holocaust deniers

[edit]
  • According to Appendix VII, "Statistics on Religious Affiliation," of The Immigration and Naturalization Systems of the United States (A Report of the Committee on the Judiciary of the United States Senate, 1950), the number of Jews in the world is 15,713,638. The World Almanac, 1949, p. 289, is cited as the source of the statistical table reproduced on p. 842 of the government document.
    The article in the World Almanac is headed "Religious Population of the World." A corresponding item, with the title, "Population, Worldwide, by Religious Beliefs" is found in the World Almanac for 1940 (p. 129), and in it the world Jewish population is given as 15,319,359.
    If the World Almanac figures are correct, the world's Jewish population did not decrease in the war decade, but showed a small increase.
    Thus the known facts on Jewish migration and Jewish power in Eastern Europe tend, like the World Almanac figures accepted by the Senate Judiciary Committee, to raise a question as to where Hitler got the 6,000,000 Jews he is said to have killed. This question should be settled once and for all before the United States backs any "Israeli" claims against Germany.
In order to put a stop to the [typhus] epidemics, we were forced to burn the bodies of incalculable numbers of people who were destroyed by disease, we were therefore forced to build crematoria, and on this they are knotting a noose for us. — Heinrich Himmler

In the final weeks of the War, thousands died of typhus at the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp (April 1945)
  • In order to put a stop to the [typhus] epidemics, we were forced to burn the bodies of incalculable numbers of people who were destroyed by disease, we were therefore forced to build crematoria, and on this they are knotting a noose for us.
Diorama of the gas chamber and crematoria at the Auschwitz museum; note the Zyklon B induction chimneys and columns, and the elevator (center, left, looks like a swing set) to bring corpses up to the crematorium.
How the gas chamber system worked in Auschwitz: In the undressing room, the victims must take off all clothing, ostensibly for a shower. The supposed shower room measures about 210 square meters. Over 1,600 [naked] people (~8 per m²) will be forced inside, little by little. — The gas chambers in Auschwitz-Birkenau, ZDF (2020)
  • Packing Density, inside Gas Chamber
    How many people can stand on a surface area of one square meter (some 10 square feet, or a square 3’3” on a side)? …
    The situation changes dramatically, if we consider a large crowd of naked strangers, who are told to take a shower together. …
    Take the case of the underground Morgue #1 of Crematoria II and III at Auschwitz Birkenau, for which we have blueprints showing their size: 7 meters wide and 30 meters long. If we assume the average person to be half a meter wide and a quarter meter deep (25 cm), then this amounts to 14 persons in a row, with 120 rows in total, resulting in 1,680 people, or 8 persons per square meter. … Many witnesses claim 2000 or more (≥9.5/m²) crammed into this gas chamber.
  • MR RAMPTON: Beginning in December 1941, [97,000] Jews from the Lodz ghetto and other towns in the Warthegau were deported to the small village of Chelmno. …
    A. MR IRVING: Shall we go straight to the bottom line and say yes, I fully accept the innuendo you are placing on that document.
    Q. [Mr Rampton]: Innuendo?
    A. [Mr Irving]: It is not stated clearly, but quite clearly 97,000 people have been liquidated in these [gas chamber]-trucks.
    Q. [Mr Rampton]: In three trucks?
    A. [Mr Irving]: Over the months concerned.
    Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, it is actually just about a month and a week. 97,000 people in three trucks in the course of five weeks?
    A. [Mr Irving]: It is a very substantial achievement when you work it out with a pocket calculator —
    Q. [Mr Rampton]: Clever SS!
    A. [Mr Irving]: — at 20 people per time, and they drove 20 kilometres [round trip] into the countryside. I have read all the reports on this.
    Q. [Mr Rampton]: Not if they are doing them in situ.
    A. [Mr Irving]: No. They drove them out into the country and did it.
    • David Irving & Richard Rampton, Holocaust Denial on Trial, Day 6 (19 January 2000) p. 48-49. See also: Irving v Penguin Books Ltd
    • According to witness statements and the Just document, “nine to ten” persons per square meter were crammed into the cargo box [of the gas vans]. If we assume a packing density of 10 persons per m² and when assuming an average body weight of 60 kg (with a density of roughly 1 kg/liter), then these 80 persons weighing 4.8 metric tons filled up 4.8 m³ of the total of 16 m³ of available space. Under these circumstances each person had (11.2 ÷ 80) 0.14 m³ (= 140 liters) of air volume at his or her disposal. Under these circumstances the victims would soon have been suffocated due to the lack of oxygen without the need of conducting exhaust gases into the interior. …
      Japanese traveling in Tokyo’s subways do not succeed to pack themselves more densely than just over seven people per m², although they all cooperate and try hard (Le Monde, 20/21 January 1985).
No huge columns of smoke have been seen on the air photographs? Does that not strike you as odd? … Can you show on these large photographs that we have here where they would have stored the tens of thousands of tonnes of coke? If they were to bury the bodies, have you any idea what size the pit would have been?
  • Q. [Mr Irving]: OK. Say 12 people per tonne if you want to cavil, you are still going to end up with 10,000 tonnes of bodies to dispose of. This brings home to you the absurdity of the document you are relying on. 10,000 tonnes of bodies. If you will take it from me that it takes 30 kilogrammes of coke to incinerate, as you say, one body, can you work out how many tonnes of coke we are going to put into those tiny coal bunkers that you can see on the aerial photographs to destroy, to incinerate, to cremate, 120,000 bodies? We are talking about train loads, if not ship loads of coke are going to have to go into Auschwitz, and there is no sign of the mountains of coke on the photographs, do you agree? There is no sign of the mountains … let me sum it up like this: there are severe logistics problems in handling the disposal of 120,000 bodies a month?
    A. [Professor Van Pelt]: We know there were severe logistic problems during the Hungarian action, yes. The month of May and the month of June in Auschwitz, June 1944, were very difficult months. The logistic problems in Auschwitz were so big that they had to start introducing incineration pits again. Yes, it is very difficult to incinerate so many bodies in any situation because it seems to be that, one way or another, these crematoria did do their job as well as they could.
    Q. [Mr Irving]: So you are saying because the story exists, therefore, these figures must be right? Is this the kind of logic you apply? You do not say to yourself, you have 120,000 bodies in that right-hand green column, does this not sound a bit odd, as 10,000 tonnes of bodies that these Nazis have managed to dispose of, and nothing has been seen of this on the air photographs, does that not strike you as odd? No huge columns of smoke have been seen on the air photographs? Does that not strike you as odd? … Can you show on these large photographs that we have here where they would have stored the tens of thousands of tonnes of coke? If they were to bury the bodies, have you any idea what size the pit would have been?
  • Q. [Mr Irving]: Do you really, sincerely believe that you can burn one corpse with enough coke that you could fit in one of these water bottles, is that what you are saying?
    A. [Professor Van Pelt]: I would like to point out there are two documents which support this.
    MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can you just pause for a second? Three-and-a-half kilos of coke per corpse, one has to put in?
    A. [Professor Van Pelt]: That is when the —
    Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: That is assuming a rate of incineration equivalent to that in the document of 28th June 1943 which Mr Irving challenges?
    A. [Professor Van Pelt]: Yes.
    MR IRVING: Can I ask, Professor van Pelt, has it ever crossed your mind that this document of 28th June 1943 might not be authentic or a document of integrity? Did you ever investigate that possibility? Did you check any details about it? Did you just accept it at face value?
  • Not that there's no Holocaust, lets say they exaggerated the Holocaust. … It's not the matter how many were killed, six million or one million, or half; killing is killing, I mean how many Soviets were killed? Eight million, so why didn't we talk about them? The problem is not how many were killed. How do they use it? What do the Palestinians have to do with the Holocaust to pay the price? This is one question we asked. … We know that there was a massacre against Jews and against others; what's going on in Palestine we see it the same way, but you don't see it the same way.

Quotes about Holocaust denial

[edit]
Deniers argue that the manufactured guilt and shame over a mythological Holocaust led to Western, specifically United States, support for the establishment and sustenance of the Israeli state – a sustenance that costs the American taxpayer over three billion dollars per year. — Anti-Defamation League

Map of the UN Partition Plan for Palestine adopted on 29th November 1947
  • Deniers argue that the manufactured guilt and shame over a mythological Holocaust led to Western, specifically United States, support for the establishment and sustenance of the Israeli state – a sustenance that costs the American taxpayer over three billion dollars per year. They assert that American taxpayers have been and continue to be swindled. ...
    They [Holocaust deniers] picture a vast shadowy conspiracy that controls and manipulates the institutions of education, culture, the media and government in order to disseminate a pernicious mythology. The purpose of this Holocaust mythology, they assert, is the inculcation of a sense of guilt in the white, Western Christian world. Those who can make others feel guilty have power over them and can make them do their bidding. This power is used to advance an international Jewish agenda centered in the Zionist enterprise of the State of Israel.
  • I see no anti-Semitic implications in denial of the existence of gas chambers, or even denial of the Holocaust. Nor would there be antiSemitic implications, per se, in the claim that the Holocaust (whether one believes it took place or not) is being exploited, viciously so, by apologists for Israeli repression and violence. I see no hint of antiSemitic implications in Faurisson's work.
  • 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] the act of denying this historical truth [of the Holocaust], the deniers denigrate the Jewish people and memories of historical occurrences, suggest that those who accept the truth of the Holocaust, lie; and relativize the suffering incurred. Thus, the act of Holocaust denial is not simply an expression of belief in what did or did not happen historically, given that the Holocaust has been historically verified. It is an act of vilification that denigrates and harms.
Goering had said he wanted to know how it was technically possible to murder 2.5 million Jews [at Auschwitz]. — Gustave Gilbert

Anti-Nazi banner: This was the new order of Europe. 4.5 million anti-fascists were brutally murdered in Auschwitz concentration camp alone! Therefore, eradicate Nazism with all its roots! Berlin (June 1945)

The official death toll at Auschwitz is 1.1 million.
  • Goering had said he wanted to know how it was technically possible to murder 2,500,000 Jews [at Auschwitz]. I explained it to him during the lunch hour, just as Höss [the former Commandant of Auschwitz] explained to me this morning: each of the gas chambers could accommodate up to 1500 or 2000 persons; the killing was easy but the burning of bodies took all the time and manpower. Goering felt extremely uncomfortable at the realization that it was no longer possible to deny the extent of the mass murders on the basis of the technical incredibility of the numbers. He wanted to know just how the order was given. I told him that Himmler had given it to him directly as a Führerbefehi (order from the Fuhrer).
  • In general, Holocaust denial consists of four central points: minimization of numbers killed, denial of use of gassing, denial of the systematic nature of the genocide, and claims that the evidence was fabricated, above all after the war.
    • Mark M. Hull, Vera Moynes. Masquerade: Treason, the Holocaust, and an Irish Impostor, University of Oklahoma Press (2017) p. 181. ISBN 978-0-80615836-5
  • The kinds of assertions made in Holocaust-denial material include the following:
    • Several hundred thousand rather than approximately six million Jews died during the war.
    • Scientific evidence proves that gas chambers could not have been used to kill large numbers of people.
    • The Nazi command had a policy of deporting Jews, not exterminating them.
    • Some deliberate killings of Jews did occur, but were carried out by the peoples of Eastern Europe rather than the Nazis.
    • Jews died in camps of various kinds, but did so as the result of hunger and disease (most died to the unavailability of food due to allied bombings).
    • The Holocaust is a myth created by the Allies for propaganda purposes, and subsequently nurtured by the Jews for their own ends.
    • Errors and inconsistencies in survivors' testimonies point to their essential unreliability.
    • Alleged documentary evidence of the Holocaust, from photographs of concentration camp victims to Anne Frank's diary, is fabricated.
    • The confessions of former Nazis to war crimes were extracted through torture.
  • Jews are thus depicted as manipulative and powerful conspirators who have fabricated myths of their own suffering for their own ends. According to the Holocaust deniers, by forging evidence and mounting a massive propaganda effort, the Jews have established their lies as 'truth' and reaped enormous rewards from doing so: for example, in making financial claims on Germany and acquiring international support for Israel.
They used the world's sympathy to 'displace' another people so that the state of Israel could be established. — Deborah Lipatadt

Arthur Balfour portrait and Declaration. The Balfour Declaration was a public statement issued by the British Government in 1917 during the First World War announcing its support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine.
  • The central assertion for the deniers is that Jews are not victims but victimizers. They 'stole' billions in reparations, destroyed Germany's good name by spreading the 'myth' of the Holocaust, and won international sympathy because of what they claimed had been done to them. In the paramount miscarriage of injustice, they used the world's sympathy to 'displace' another people so that the state of Israel could be established. This contention relating to the establishment of Israel is a linchpin of their argument.
  • Holocaust deniers, or 'revisionists', as they call themselves, contend that, while mass murders of Jews did occur (although they dispute both the intentionality of such murders as well as the supposed deservedness of these killings), there was no official Nazi policy to murder Jews. Second, and perhaps most prominently, they contend that there were no homicidal gas chambers, particularly at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where mainstream historians believe over 1 million Jews were murdered, primarily in gas chambers. And third, Holocaust deniers contend that the death toll of European Jews during World War II was well below 6 million. Deniers float numbers anywhere between 300,000 and 1.5 million, as a general rule.
Who else but the Jews had the media power to hoodwink unsuspecting masses with one of the greatest hoaxes in history? And for what motive? To promote the claims of the illegitimate state of Israel. — Lawrence N. Powell

Changes in Palestine-Israel borders over time.
  • Holocaust denial refurbished conspiratorial anti-Semitism. Who else but the Jews had the media power to hoodwink unsuspecting masses with one of the greatest hoaxes in history? And for what motive? To promote the claims of the illegitimate state of Israel by making non-Jews feel guilty, of course.
    • Lawrence N. Powell, Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Duke's Louisiana, University of North Carolina Press (2000) ISBN 0-8078-5374-7, p. 445
Zyklon B delousing chamber with DEGESCH air circulation device

  • The three major foundations upon which Holocaust denial rests: that gas chambers and crematoria were used not for mass extermination but rather for delousing clothing and disposing of people who died of disease and overwork; ... that the six million figure is an exaggeration by an order of magnitude—that about six hundred thousand, not six million, died at the hands of the Nazis; ... that there was no intention on the part of the Nazis to exterminate European Jewry and that the Holocaust was nothing more than the unfortunate by-product of the vicissitudes of war.
  • Why, we might ask the deniers, if the Holocaust did not happen would any group concoct such a horrific story? Because, some deniers claim, there was a conspiracy by Zionists to exaggerate the plight of Jews during the war in order to finance the state of Israel through war reparations.
    • Michael Shermer & Alex Grobman. Denying History: who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and why Do They Say It?, University of California Press (2000) ISBN 0-520-23469-3, p. 106.

See also

[edit]

[edit]
Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia has an article about:
Retrieved from "https://en.wikiquote.org/w/index.php?title=Holocaust_denial&oldid=3939841"