In the immediate aftermath of the war, before the Allied forces had fully documented the extent of the Holocaust, many people reacted with disbelief and even denied the first reports of what had happened. Compounding this disbelief was the memory of
forged newspaper accounts of the
German Corpse Factory, an anti-German
atrocity propaganda campaign during WWI, which was widely known to be false by 1945. During the 1930s, the Nazi government used this propaganda against the British, claiming allegations of concentration camps were malicious lies put forward by the British government, and historians Joachim Neander and
Randal Marlin note that this story "encouraged later disbelief when early reports circulated about the Holocaust under Hitler".
Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, chairman of the British Joint Intelligence Committee, noted that these reports were similar to "stories of employment of human corpses during the last war for the manufacture of fat which was a grotesque lie"; likewise,
The Christian Century commented that "The parallel between this story and the 'corpse factory' atrocity tale of the First World War is too striking to be overlooked." Neander notes that "There can be no doubt that the reported commercial use of the corpses of the murdered Jews undermined the credibility of the news coming from Poland and delayed action that might have rescued many Jewish lives."
Neo-fascism has likewise relied upon Holocaust denial as a means of rehabilitation. As a movement, modern Holocaust denial is associated with historical revisionism based on
pseudoscientific evidence and
fringe academic networks conferences, and professional organizations (e.g.
Journal of Historical Review,
International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust, Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust).
Maurice Bardèche The first person to openly write after the end of World War II that he doubted the reality of the Holocaust was French art critic
Maurice Bardèche in his 1948 book ("Nuremberg or the Promised Land"). In the 1950 book
Nuremberg II, ou les Faux-Monnayeurs, designed around the tale of
Paul Rassinier, a former deportee from
Nazi concentration camps (not to be confused with
extermination camps) turned into a Holocaust denier, Bardèche concluded that
kapos were in reality worse than
SS, and expressed his "doubts" about the existence of gas chambers. Viewed as "the father-figure of Holocaust denial", Bardèche introduced in his works many aspects of
neo-fascist and Holocaust denial
propaganda techniques and ideological structures; his work is deemed influential in regenerating post-war European far-right ideas at a time of identity crisis in the 1950–1960s. His arguments formed the basis of numerous works of Holocaust denial that followed: "testimonies are not reliable, essentially coming from the mouth of Jews and communists", "atrocities committed in camps were the work of deportees [essentially the
kapos]", "disorganization occurred in Nazi camps following the first German defeats", "the high mortality is due to the 'weakening' of prisoners and epidemics", "only lice were gassed in
Auschwitz", etc.
Harry Elmer Barnes Harry Elmer Barnes, at one time a mainstream American historian, assumed a Holocaust-denial stance in his later years. Between
World War I and
World War II, Barnes was an
anti-war writer and a leader of the
historical revisionism movement. Starting in 1924, Barnes worked closely with the
Centre for the Study of the Causes of the War, a German government-funded think tank whose sole purpose was to disseminate the official government position that Germany was the victim of Allied aggression in 1914 and that the
Versailles Treaty was morally invalid. Headed by Major Alfred von Wegerer, a activist, the organization portrayed itself as a scholarly society, but historians later described it as "a clearinghouse for officially desirable views on the outbreak of the war." Following World War II, Barnes became convinced that allegations made against Germany and
Japan, including the Holocaust, were wartime propaganda that had been used to justify the United States' involvement in World War II. Barnes claimed that there were two false claims made about World War II, namely that Germany started the war in 1939, and the Holocaust, which Barnes claimed did not happen. In his 1962 pamphlet,
Revisionism and Brainwashing, Barnes claimed that there was a "lack of any serious opposition or concerted challenge to the atrocity stories and other modes of defamation of German national character and conduct". Barnes argued that there was "a failure to point out the atrocities of the Allies were more brutal, painful, mortal and numerous than the most extreme allegations made against the Germans". He claimed that in order to justify the "horrors and evils of the Second World War", the Allies made the Nazis the "scapegoat" for their own misdeeds. Barnes cited the French Holocaust denier
Paul Rassinier, whom Barnes called a "distinguished French historian" who had exposed the "exaggerations of the atrocity stories". In a 1964 article, "Zionist Fraud", published in
The American Mercury, Barnes wrote: "The courageous author [Rassinier] lays the chief blame for misrepresentation on those whom we must call the swindlers of the crematoria, the Israeli politicians who derive billions of marks from nonexistent, mythical and imaginary cadavers, whose numbers have been reckoned in an unusually distorted and dishonest manner." Using Rassinier as his source, Barnes claimed that Germany was the victim of aggression in both 1914 and 1939 and that reports of the Holocaust were propaganda to justify a war of aggression against Germany.
Beginnings of modern denialism In 1961, a protégé of Barnes,
David L. Hoggan, published (
The Forced War) in West Germany, which claimed that Germany had been the victim of an Anglo-Polish conspiracy in 1939. Though
Der erzwungene Krieg was primarily concerned with the origins of World War II, it also down-played or justified the effects of Nazi
antisemitic measures in the pre-1939 period. For example, Hoggan justified the huge one billion
Reichsmark fine imposed on the entire Jewish community in Germany after the 1938 as a reasonable measure to prevent what he called "Jewish profiteering" at the expense of German insurance companies and alleged that no Jews were killed in the
Kristallnacht (in fact, 91 German Jews were murdered in the ). Subsequently, Hoggan explicitly denied the Holocaust in 1969 in a book entitled
The Myth of the Six Million, which was published by the
Noontide Press, a small Los Angeles publisher specializing in antisemitic literature. In 1964,
Paul Rassinier published
The Drama of the European Jews. Rassinier was himself a concentration camp survivor (he was held in
Buchenwald for having helped French Jews escape the Nazis), and modern-day deniers continue to cite his works as scholarly research that questions the accepted facts of the Holocaust. Critics argued that Rassinier did not cite evidence for his claims and ignored information that contradicted his assertions; he nevertheless remains influential in Holocaust denial circles for being one of the first deniers to propose that a vast Zionist/Allied/Soviet conspiracy faked the Holocaust, a theme that would be picked up in later years by other authors.
Austin App, a
La Salle University medieval English literature professor, is considered the first major mainstream American holocaust denier. App defended the Germans and Nazi Germany during World War II. He published numerous articles, letters, and books on Holocaust denial, quickly building a loyal following. App's work inspired the
Institute for Historical Review, a California center founded in 1978 whose sole task is the denial of the Holocaust. The publication of
Arthur Butz's
The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The case against the presumed extermination of European Jewry in 1976 brought other similarly inclined individuals into the fold. Butz was a tenured associate professor of electrical engineering at
Northwestern University. In December 1978 and January 1979,
Robert Faurisson, a French professor of literature at the
University of Lyon, wrote two letters to
Le Monde claiming that the
gas chambers used by the Nazis to exterminate the Jews did not exist. A colleague of Faurisson,
Jean-Claude Pressac, who initially shared Faurisson's views, later became convinced of the Holocaust's evidence while investigating documents at
Auschwitz in 1979. He published his conclusions along with much of the underlying evidence in his 1989 book,
Auschwitz: Technique and operation of the gas chambers.
Henry Bienen, the former president of Northwestern University, has described Arthur Butz's view of the Holocaust as an "embarrassment to Northwestern". In 2006, sixty of Butz's colleagues from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science faculty signed a censure describing Butz's Holocaust denial as "an affront to our humanity and our standards as scholars". The letter also called for Butz to "leave our Department and our University and stop trading on our reputation for academic excellence".
Institute for Historical Review In 1978, the American
far-right activist
Willis Carto founded the
Institute for Historical Review (IHR), an organization dedicated to publicly challenging the commonly accepted history of the Holocaust. The IHR's founding was inspired by
Austin App, a
La Salle professor of medieval English literature and considered the first major American holocaust denier. The IHR sought from the beginning to establish itself within the broad tradition of historical revisionism, by soliciting token supporters who were not from a
neo-Nazi background such as
James J. Martin and
Samuel Edward Konkin III, and by promoting the writings of French socialist Paul Rassinier and American anti-war historian Harry Elmer Barnes, in an attempt to show that Holocaust denial had a base of support beyond neo-Nazis. The IHR republished most of Barnes's writings, which had been out of print since his death. While it included articles on other topics and sold books by mainstream historians, the majority of material published and distributed by IHR was devoted to questioning the facts surrounding the Holocaust. In 1980, the IHR promised a $50,000 reward to anyone who could prove that Jews were gassed at Auschwitz.
Mel Mermelstein wrote a
letter to the editors of the
Los Angeles Times and others including
The Jerusalem Post. The IHR wrote back, offering him $50,000 for proof that Jews were, in fact, gassed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Mermelstein, in turn, submitted a notarized account of his internment at Auschwitz and how he witnessed Nazi guards ushering his mother and two sisters and others towards (as he learned later) gas chamber number five. Despite this, the IHR refused to pay the reward. Represented by public interest attorney
William John Cox, Mermelstein subsequently sued the IHR in the
Los Angeles County Superior Court for
breach of contract,
anticipatory repudiation,
libel,
injurious denial of established fact,
intentional infliction of emotional distress, and
declaratory relief. On October 9, 1981, both parties in the Mermelstein case filed motions for
summary judgment in consideration of which Judge Thomas T. Johnson of the Los Angeles County Superior Court took "
judicial notice of the fact that Jews were gassed to death at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Poland during the summer of 1944," judicial notice meaning that the court treated the gas chambers as common knowledge, and therefore did not require evidence that the gas chambers existed. On August 5, 1985, Judge Robert A. Wenke entered a judgment based upon the
Stipulation for Entry of Judgment agreed upon by the parties on July 22, 1985. The judgment required IHR and other defendants to pay $90,000 to Mermelstein and to issue a letter of apology to "Mr. Mel Mermelstein, a
survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Buchenwald, and all other survivors of Auschwitz" for "pain, anguish and suffering" caused to them. In the "About the IHR" statement on their website, the IHR states, "The IHR does not 'deny' the Holocaust. Indeed, the IHR as such has no 'position' on any specific event...." British historian
Richard J. Evans wrote that the Institute's acknowledgment "that a relatively small number of Jews were killed" was a means to draw attention away from its primary beliefs, i.e. that the number of victims was not in the millions and that Jews were not systematically murdered in gas chambers.
James Keegstra In 1984,
James Keegstra, a Canadian high-school teacher, was charged under the Canadian
Criminal Code for "promoting hatred against an identifiable group by communicating anti-Semitic statements to his students". During class, he would describe Jews as a people of profound evil who had "created the Holocaust to gain sympathy." He also tested his students in exams on his theories and opinion of Jews. Keegstra was charged under s 281.2(2) of the
Criminal Code (now s 319(2)), which provides that "Every one who, by communicating statements, other than in private conversation, wilfully promotes hatred against any identifiable group" commits a criminal offense. He was convicted at trial before the
Alberta Court of Queen's Bench. The court rejected the argument, advanced by Keegstra and his lawyer,
Doug Christie, that promoting hatred is a constitutionally protected freedom of expression as per
s 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Keegstra appealed to the
Alberta Court of Appeal. That court agreed with Keegstra, and he was acquitted. The Crown then appealed the case to the
Supreme Court of Canada, which ruled by a 4–3 majority that promoting hatred could be
justifiably restricted under
s 1 of the Charter. The Supreme Court restored Keegstra's conviction. He was fired from his teaching position shortly afterward.
Zündel trials The Toronto-based photo retoucher
Ernst Zündel operated a small-press called Samisdat Publishers, which published and distributed Holocaust-denial material such as
Did Six Million Really Die? by Richard Harwood (a pseudonym of
Richard Verrall – a British neo-Nazi). In 1985, he was tried in
R. v. Zundel and convicted under a "false news" law and sentenced to 15 months imprisonment by an
Ontario court for "disseminating and publishing material denying the Holocaust". The Holocaust historian
Raul Hilberg was a witness for the prosecution at the 1985 trial. Zündel's conviction was overturned in an appeal on a legal technicality, leading to a second trial in 1988, in which he was again convicted. The 1988 trial included, as witnesses for the defense,
Fred A. Leuchter,
David Irving and
Robert Faurisson. The pseudo-scientific
Leuchter report was presented as a defense document and was published in Canada in 1988 by Zundel's Samisdat Publishers, and in Britain in 1989 by Irving's Focal Point Publishing. In both of his trials, Zündel was defended by
Douglas Christie and
Barbara Kulaszka. His conviction was overturned in 1992 when the Supreme Court of Canada declared the "false news" law unconstitutional. Zündel had a website, web-mastered by his wife Ingrid, which publicized his viewpoints. In January 2002, the
Canadian Human Rights Tribunal delivered a ruling in a complaint involving his website, in which it was found to be contravening the
Canadian Human Rights Act. The court ordered Zündel to cease communicating hate messages. In February 2003, the American
INS arrested him in
Tennessee, US, on an immigration violations matter, and few days later, Zündel was sent back to Canada, where he tried to gain refugee status. Zündel remained in prison until March 1, 2005, when he was deported to Germany and prosecuted for disseminating hate propaganda. On February 15, 2007, Zündel was convicted on 14 counts of incitement under Germany's
Volksverhetzung law, which bans the incitement of hatred against a portion of the population and given the maximum sentence of five years in prison.
Ernst Nolte The German philosopher and historian
Ernst Nolte, starting in the 1980s, advanced a set of theories, which though not denying the Holocaust appeared to flirt with an Italian Holocaust denier,
Carlo Mattogno, as a serious historian. In a letter to the Israeli historian
Otto Dov Kulka of December 8, 1986, Nolte criticized the work of the French Holocaust denier
Robert Faurisson on the ground that the Holocaust did occur, but went on to argue that Faurisson's work was motivated by what Nolte claimed were the admirable motives of sympathy towards the Palestinians and opposition to Israel. In his 1987 book (
The European Civil War), Nolte claimed that the intentions of Holocaust deniers are "often honourable", and that some of their claims are "not obviously without foundation". Nolte himself, though he has never denied the occurrence of the Holocaust, has claimed that the
Wannsee Conference of 1942 never happened and that the minutes of the conference were post-war forgeries done by "biased" Jewish historians designed to discredit Germany. The British historian
Ian Kershaw has argued that Nolte was operating on the borderlines of Holocaust denial with his implied claim that the "negative myth" of Nazi Germany was created by Jewish historians, his allegations of the domination of Holocaust scholarship by "biased" Jewish historians, and his statements that one should withhold judgment on Holocaust deniers, whom Nolte takes considerable pains to stress are not exclusively Germans or fascists. In Kershaw's opinion, Nolte is attempting to imply that perhaps Holocaust deniers are on to something. In a 1990 interview, Nolte implied that there was something to the
Leuchter report: "If the revisionists [Holocaust deniers] and Leuchter among them have made it clear to the public that even 'Auschwitz' must be an object of scientific inquiry and controversy then they should be given credit for this. Even if it finally turned out that the number of victims was even greater and the procedures were even more horrific than has been assumed until now." In his 1993 book (
Points of Contention), Nolte praised the work of Holocaust deniers as superior to "mainstream scholars". Nolte wrote that "radical revisionists have presented research which, if one is familiar with the source material and the critique of the sources, is probably superior to that of the established historians of Germany". In a 1994 interview with magazine, Nolte stated "I cannot rule out the importance of the investigation of the gas chambers in which they looked for remnants of the [chemical process engendered by Zyklon B]", and that "'Of course, I am against revisionists, but Fred Leuchter's 'study' of the Nazi gas ovens has to be given attention because one has to stay open to 'other' ideas." The British historian
Richard J. Evans in his 1989 book ''In Hitler's Shadow'' expressed the view that Nolte's reputation as a scholar was in ruins as a result of these and other controversial statements on his part. The American historian
Deborah Lipstadt in a 2003 interview stated:
Mayer controversy In 1988, the American historian
Arno J. Mayer published a book entitled
Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?, which did not explicitly deny the Holocaust, but according to
Lucy Dawidowicz lent support to Holocaust denial by stating that most people who died at
Auschwitz were the victims of "natural causes" such as disease, not gassing. Dawidowicz argued that Mayer's statements about Auschwitz were "a breathtaking assertion". Holocaust historian
Robert Jan van Pelt has written that Mayer's book is as close as a mainstream historian has ever come to supporting Holocaust denial. Holocaust deniers such as
David Irving have often cited Mayer's book as one reason for embracing Holocaust denial. Though Mayer has been often condemned for his statement about the reasons for the Auschwitz death toll, his book does not deny the use of gas chambers at Auschwitz, as Holocaust deniers often claim. Some mainstream Holocaust historians have labeled Mayer a denier. The Israeli historian
Yehuda Bauer wrote that Mayer "popularizes the nonsense that the Nazis saw in Marxism and Bolshevism their main enemy, and the Jews unfortunately got caught up in this; when he links the destruction of the Jews to the ups and downs of German warfare in the Soviet Union, in a book that is so cocksure of itself that it does not need a proper scientific apparatus, he is really engaging in a much more subtle form of Holocaust denial". Defenders of Mayer argue that his statement that "Sources for the study of the gas chambers are at once rare and unreliable" has been taken out of context, particularly by Holocaust deniers.
Michael Shermer and
Alex Grobman observe that the paragraph from which the statement is taken asserts that the SS destroyed the majority of the documentation relating to the operation of the gas chambers in the death camps, which is why Mayer feels that sources for the operation of the gas chambers are "rare" and "unreliable". ==False equivalence and effect==