Extermination Camp - The Post-war Period - Holocaust Denial

Holocaust Denial

Holocaust deniers are people and organisations who assert that the Holocaust did not occur, or that it did not occur in the historically recognized manner and extent. Holocaust denial goes beyond respected practices of historical revisionism to distort and deny history along preconceived notions, in what is called negationism.

Extermination camp research is difficult because of extensive attempts by the SS and Nazi regime to conceal the existence of the extermination camps. As a result of Sonderaktion 1005, camps were dismantled, records destroyed, and mass graves were dug up. Furthermore, extermination camps that remained uncleared were liberated by Soviet troops, who had different standards of documentation and openness than the Western allies. The existence of the extermination camps is firmly established by testimonies of camp survivors and Final Solution perpetrators, material evidence (the remaining camps, etc.), Nazi photographs and films of the killings, and camp administration records.

Holocaust deniers often start by pointing out legitimate public misconceptions about the extermination camps. For example, widely published images in America were mostly of typhoid victims and Soviet POWs at the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps – the first to be liberated by American troops and the most available imagery in America. In early news reports and for years afterward, these images were often used by the news media somewhat inaccurately in conjunction with descriptions of extermination camps and Jewish suffering. Holocaust deniers, after pointing out such common errors, put it forward as "evidence" extermination camps did not exist and the limited evidence about them is mostly a hoax arising out of a deliberate Jewish conspiracy.

Holocaust denial is highly discredited by scholars and is a criminal offense in Austria, Belgium, The Netherlands, France, Germany, Lithuania, Poland, and Switzerland.