Holocaust denial

Holocaust denial is the denial or extensive trivialization of the National Socialist genocide of the European Jews. Holocaust deniers coined the term "Auschwitz lie", which became synonymous with their denial. Yet the name of the largest extermination camp, Auschwitz, stands for the entire Holocaust.

Contrary to the established historical facts, the deniers claim that the extermination of about six million Jews, planned and systematically carried out by the Nazi regime, did not take place. At most, they claim, a few hundred thousand Jews were killed in World War II as opponents of the war or died from accidental wartime circumstances, such as epidemics. At the same time, the deniers also deny or conceal the genocide of the Roma (Porajmos).

Holocaust denial has been an integral part of right-wing extremist ideologies since 1945 and is closely linked to contemporary anti-Semitism and historical revisionism related to the Nazi era. Some French representatives of negationism were originally left-wing. Like the Islamists, they represent a radical, anti-Semitic anti-Zionism. The deniers call themselves "revisionists" and pass off their texts as research articles, but present pseudo-scientific falsification of history in the service of hate propaganda against Holocaust victims and their descendants. They have increasingly networked since the 1970s and also engage in international propaganda campaigns.

The New Right is relativizing the Holocaust, using some of the methods and arguments of the deniers. Both sometimes support each other in order to gain an interpretative sovereignty over the Nazi past. New Right authors gain respect for right-wing extremist pseudo-rationality by blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction.

Holocaust research rejects open-ended debates with deniers about their evidently false claims in order not to upgrade them to research contributions. It counters them with clarification of the facts.

Some states tolerate Holocaust denial as part of their definition of freedom of expression. In other states, however, including all German-speaking ones, it is a punishable offence. For the respective state legal situation, see Laws against Holocaust denial; for individuals, see List of Holocaust deniers.

Motives and goals

Already during the Holocaust itself, the perpetrators began to hide the crime in order to be able to deny it later. Starting in 1942, the Nazi regime deliberately had the evidence destroyed in order to cover up for the perpetrators and to erase their memory along with the victims. It also ordered and used camouflage language, such as "evacuation" for deportation, "special treatment" for murder, and "Final Solution" for the extermination of all reachable European Jews. With the German Wehrmacht on the defensive in 1943, the Nazi regime had to fear that advancing Soviet troops would soon come across evidence of Nazi murderous actions. From June 1943, therefore, the large-scale "Special Action 1005" began. Bodies at mass murder sites in the Soviet Union were dug up, burned, and the ashes transported away. Mass murder orders were often only given verbally, and written documents were purposefully destroyed on the orders of the Nazi regime. Starting in November 1944, the crematoria and gas chambers in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp were destroyed. All this made the reconstruction of Nazi crimes and the punishment of the perpetrators after the war more difficult.

According to Primo Levi, perpetrators of the Waffen-SS mocked the prisoners of an extermination camp:

Most deniers did not experience the time of National Socialism, but hold similar or the same ideologies. Their common characteristic is anti-Semitism. According to historians and educators in the US, their main goals are: to reduce public sympathy for Jews, to give approval and legitimacy to their own extreme ideas, to rehabilitate racial theories of the "Aryan race", to destroy the state of Israel. Neo-Nazis openly profess to deny the Holocaust in order to make National Socialism politically acceptable again.

Holocaust denial is not necessarily extreme right-wing, but can only argue with classic anti-Semitic stereotypes and conspiracy theories. It is based on the fiction of a "world Jewry" that has orchestrated and perpetuates a worldwide historical hoax to implement its sinister agenda. Some deniers claim that Jews planned and directed the Holocaust themselves in order to extract reparations and increase Western support for Israel. Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, pseudo-science, historical revisionism, and extremism are part of every variant of denial. Many deniers refer to the 1918 anti-Semitic diatribe "Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion."

In the countries of origin of the perpetrators, such as Germany and Austria, Holocaust deniers are concerned with deflecting and reversing guilt. To this end, they claim that Jews brought about or invented their own destruction in order to morally blackmail and financially exploit the world. They used the Holocaust for political gain, made criticism of it taboo, and thus caused anti-Semitism itself. These stereotypes adapt old familiar images, such as that "the Jew" is a "rapacious parasite" and "cunning liar," to the current situation. German right-wing extremists in particular espouse a backward-looking, aggressive nationalism. They regard Nazi crimes as an obstacle to "German identity" and national pride, excusing their perpetrators, enablers and helpers. They deny the extent and specifics of the Holocaust in order to end reparations and claim former eastern territories of the German Reich.

Holocaust relativization equates the Holocaust with other mass crimes or mass deaths in order to claim moral equivalence. The Allies would have constructed the singularity of the Holocaust in order to divert attention from their own crimes and to make criticism of them taboo. Like Nazi propaganda, right-wing Holocaust relativists invent or exaggerate Allied war crimes and mass murders. In order to offset and reverse the blame, they refer to the air raids on Dresden as a "bombing holocaust" against the Germans and, to this end, adhere to historically disproven, greatly exaggerated numbers of victims. They speak of a "victors' justice" after 1945, deny the legitimacy of all Nazi trials and their own prosecution. They insinuate that their opponents represent a perpetual collective guilt of the Germans, which can only be shaken off by denying the Holocaust. They claim that the culture of remembrance of Nazi crimes is a "cult of guilt" that the Allies imposed on the Germans in order to permanently weaken their self-confidence, to make other states fear them and to be able to control them better. Whoever then recalls the Holocaust appears as a "fouler of the nest" with a disturbed relationship to his own people. Behind this is the "healthy popular feeling" propagated by the National Socialists, which does not feel for the victims, not even for the German Jews among them, and which does not maintain a critical distance from the perpetrators.

The repression of the Nazi era, the "closure" mentality, and memory defensiveness encourage this. The scope and execution of the Holocaust were so extraordinary that for many it remains inconceivable that humans were capable of it. This psychological motive follows on from protective claims made by many Germans after 1945, such as the phrase "We didn't know anything about that", and also determines later generations with little knowledge of the Nazi era. According to a global study conducted by the Anti-Defamation League in 2013 and 2014, only 54 percent of respondents knew the term Holocaust. Of those, just under a third doubted that it actually happened.

Many deniers follow an anti-Zionist pattern of argumentation: the victorious powers of the Second World War were directed by Jews and invented the Holocaust in order to create the state of Israel. The latter propagates the Holocaust in order to justify its (alleged) aims of conquest and destruction in the Middle East. They thus deny Israel's right to exist as a state founded to protect Holocaust survivors. Israel-related anti-Semitism is also widespread in Islamic and Arab states. The 2006 Holocaust denial conference in Iran provided the denialist scene with state backing and international attention. It showed that denial is intended to prepare new genocidal crimes, namely the extermination of Jews living in Israel. The denial, trivialization and relativization of the Holocaust is therefore no longer regarded as a relatively insignificant marginal phenomenon, but as a current threat to the same group of victims at which the Holocaust was aimed.

For Comparative Genocide Studies, denial, like the elimination of evidence, is integral to the genocidal process. It accompanies and perpetuates the crime, first by covering up and helping to prolong the ongoing genocide, then by denying the memory of the victims and survivors, thus denying them recognition and compensation. If it gains influence on the public image of history, then it destroys the sense of justice and future prospects of the living. It thus affects the long-term impact of the genocide. If it did not exist, the deniers calculate, then the absence of the murdered means that they, their culture, their social and economic influence never existed. Thus they want to deprive the survivors of any historical, cultural and social connection to the murdered and revise the outcry against anti-Semitism that the Holocaust brought about. They want to keep Jews in the social role assigned to them by the murderers, and attack them again by showing solidarity with their murderers. "Every denial of the Holocaust contains an invitation to repeat it".

Hitler's order to keep the Holocaust secret, July 11, 1943.

Rest of Europe

Belgium and the Netherlands

Nazi collaborator and Rexist leader Léon Degrelle and his partner Florentine Rost van Tonningen provided a meeting place in Velp, Netherlands, for deniers, alt-Nazis and neo-Nazis from all over Europe. Degrelle used Pope John Paul II's 1979 visit to Auschwitz to write an open letter denying the gas chamber murders: the pope should not support the "legend of massive exterminations." The Allied air war had claimed countless "terribly charred" victims. Israel's air force was committing "massacres" of Palestinians.

In 1985, Herbert and Siegfried Verbeke, a militant neo-Nazi (Vlaams Belang), established the "foundation" Vrij Historisch Onderzoek (VHO), based in Berchem (Antwerp), for the creation and international distribution of Holocaust-denying materials. Starting in 1995, Germar Rudolf joined the organization while on the run from German prosecutors and built the VHO website into one of the largest international denialist portals. From 1997, VHO distributed Udo Walendy's journal Historische Tatsachen and Rudolf's Vierteljahreshefte für freie Geschichtsforschung. In 1998 Rudolf founded Castle Hill Publishers in Hastings, England, to which he affiliated the German-language VHO website. The VHO was banned in 2002, its internet portal existed until 2005.

During the Goldhagen debate, the VHO distributed pamphlets such as Answering the Goldhagen and Spielberg Lies and Holocaust and Revisionism. 33 Questions and Answers about the Holocaust in Germany. This showed the problem of crimes from abroad.

France

In France, too, old Nazis and Nazi aides were the first Holocaust deniers. Maurice Bardèche, for example, claimed in 1947 (Nuremberg or the Promised Land) that some of the Holocaust evidence presented at the Nuremberg trial was forged. The gas chambers were disinfection chambers. Most Jewish concentration camp inmates died of starvation and disease. They had been imprisoned because they had supported the peace treaty of Versailles (1919) and had thus triggered the Second World War.

Former Resistance fighter and concentration camp survivor Paul Rassinier founded French negationism. From 1945 he disputed Jewish eyewitness accounts as exaggerated, from 1950 also the numbers of victims, and attacked Jews as fakers for "ill-gotten gains". From 1960 he spoke of the "Holocaust myth" invented by "Zionists," described Nazis as benefactors, and praised the SS as "humane." In 1964 (The Drama of the European Jews) he denied the existence of the gas chambers and then associated himself with France's neo-Nazi scene. Based on his impressions of Buchenwald concentration camp, which had no gas chambers, he concluded that all eyewitnesses had invented the gas chamber murders and deliberately lied about them. Thus, the total number of victims of the Holocaust was also greatly exaggerated. As early as 1948, he blamed "the Jews" for murders in the camps, exaggerated casualty figures, and rumors about gas chambers. In a paper published posthumously in 1978, he described the entire Holocaust as an invention "of the Zionists" in the interest of Israel.

Since 1955, the neo-Nazi Henry Coston in France and the former SS officer Karl-Heinz Priester in Germany published Rassinier's denialist texts. The National Socialist Johann von Leers, who lived in Egypt, had them translated into Arabic. Thus Rassinier was already bringing together Nazi, leftist and Arab anti-Semitism under the guise of anti-Zionism. After his death in 1967, the negationists gathered around the neo-fascist historian François Duprat. The latter transferred the Ordre Nouveau into the Front National party. In 1976 he translated Christopherson's "Auschwitz Lie" into French, and in 1978 Richard Harwood's work "Did Six Million Really Die?

Louis Darquier de Pellepoix had coordinated the transport of French Jews to the death camps for the Vichy regime until 1945 and had fled to Spain after 1945 to escape the death penalty. In 1978, he declared in the weekly L'Express, "At Auschwitz, only lice were gassed." The Holocaust, he said, was a "typically Jewish invention" to "make Jerusalem the capital of the world." The interview triggered a nationwide scandal.

Shortly afterwards, Robert Faurisson denied the existence of the gas chambers in the newspaper Le Monde. In 1981 he published a paper on the subject, for which Noam Chomsky wrote a foreword. Chomsky later declared that he had not read Faurisson's text before, but denied anti-Semitic and directly Holocaust-denying contents in it. Thus Faurisson's theses found their way into left-wing intellectual circles. He specialized in reinterpreting documents from the Nazi era, such as Wehrmacht orders from 1941 that punished "excesses" against civilians. In doing so, he concealed murder orders issued at the time to the "Einsatzgruppen".

Faurisson's student Henri Roques received his doctorate from the University of Nantes in 1985 with a thesis that presented the Gerstein Report as a forgery. Only after persistent protests and evidence of irregularities did the French Minister of Education cancel his doctorate in 1986. Faurisson's lawyer Éric Delcroix had called gas chambers and the extermination of Jews a "myth" in court and reiterated in his book "The Thought Police Against Revisionism" that the Nazis had used gas only for disinfection, not for murdering Jews. He was convicted of this in 1996 under the 1990 Loi Gayssot criminal law. What remained permissible was his statement that "revisionists" deny the Nazi regime's policy of extermination. That is why deniers went over to camouflaging their own theses as a mere reproduction of foreign views.

Beginning in 1980, the Trotskyist group La Vieille Taupe published texts by deniers, including Faurisson's essays and letters collected by Serge Thion. Its leader, Pierre Guillaume, called the anti-Semitic motives of the Nazi murder of Jews a hoax on leaflets against the film Shoah. This course was intended to destroy the anti-fascist consensus of the French left. It followed from the group's equation of Western and Soviet crimes with Nazi crimes, allowing only capitalist, not specifically anti-Semitic and racist, causes for the latter. Guillaume founded the website Association des anciens amateurs de récits de guerre et d'holocauste (AAARGH) in 1996. It was banned in France in 2000, but the Californian IHR took it over.

The former neo-Marxist Roger Garaudy published his work "The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics" through La Vielle Taupe in 1995, which advocates the perpetrator-victim reversal. He described biblical Judaism as the origin of genocidal ideology and condemned the Nazi regime, but denied its intent to exterminate Jews: "Final Solution" had meant only expulsion. For this he referred to David Irving and Robert Faurisson. He also claimed that Zionists and Nazis collaborated in Nazi crimes, linked them to expulsions of Palestinians by Israel, and equated Zionism with Nazism. He was given a suspended sentence under the Loi Gayssot criminal law in 1998. He traveled twice to Beirut and Cairo during the trial and used the wave of Arab solidarity to spread Holocaust denial in the Arab world. By systematically linking their theses to the rejection of Israel, the few negationists succeeded in making parts of the French left regard their view as legitimate and at least deny the singularity of the Holocaust.

Former Front National leader Jean-Marie Le Pen continually used anti-Semitic attacks as a provocative device. In 1987, in response to an interview question, he stated that he had not seen the gas chambers and could not judge whether they existed. However, he said they were only a "minor detail" in the course of World War II. He was fined for this in 1990. Two Front National representatives who had resigned testified: Holocaust denial had often been discussed in the leadership circle; Le Pen actually believed the Holocaust had not happened. In 2004, Front National vice-chairman Bruno Gollnisch said he did not question the German concentration camps, but that historians had yet to establish the existence of the gas chambers and the number of Holocaust victims. He was sentenced to three months probation for this and used his trial to attack the Loi Gayssot. In 2005, Le Pen insisted he had only referred to the gas chambers, not the Holocaust, as a "detail" to refer to other Nazi killing methods during the war. But in 2015, he repeated his 1987 statements in his daughter Marine Le Pen's presidential campaign, which sought to rid the Front National of its far-right image. Younger French right-wing extremists also deny the Vichy regime under Philippe Pétain's involvement in the Holocaust, citing its scale.

The comedian Dieudonné M'bala M'bala attracted attention with anti-Semitic statements in his stage shows since 2000 and moved closer to the Front National, which he had previously fought against. He was convicted several times under the Loi Gayssot, including for saying that the Shoah was a "pornography of memory". On December 26, 2008, he had Robert Faurisson appear on his show. On stage, a man dressed as a Jew in concentration camp garb with a Jewish star presented Faurisson with an award for "imperturbability and audacity." Then Dieudonné and Faurisson performed an anti-Semitic skit. Dieudonné passes off his polemics as anti-Zionism.

Italy

In Italy, Carlo Mattogno, a student of ancient languages and philosophy, became a Holocaust denier in the 1970s. Beginning in 1985, he published numerous pseudoscientific writings, including The Myth of the Extermination of the Jews and The Gerstein Report. Anatomy of a Forgery. He publishes in the neo-fascist publishing houses "Sentinella d'Italia" and "Edizioni di Ar", the VHO magazine, Germar Rudolf's publishing house Castle Hill, in the Grabert publishing house, on the websites AAARGH and "Radio Islam" by Ahmed Rami. With his brother, he writes a regular column for the far-right magazine "Orion", which presents "revisionism" as a "counter-history" to "exterminationism" (of Holocaust studies). He is a member of the advisory board of the IHR, co-edits its journal, and participated in its annual conferences in 1989 and 1994. With Jürgen Graf, he wrote "Studies" on Majdanek, Stutthof, Treblinka, and Auschwitz from 1998 to 2003. His book Holocaust: Dilettantes in Gefahr (1996) attempts to pseudo-scientifically refute researchers such as Deborah Lipstadt.

In October 2001, well-known deniers, Islamists and right-wing extremists met in Trieste on the topic of "Revisionism and the Dignity of the Vanquished". Neo-fascists from the Movimento Fascismo e Libertà (MSL) prepared the meeting. Speakers Fredrick Toben (Australia), Russ Granata, Robert Countess (USA) and Ahmed Rami (Sweden) used the terrorist attacks September 11, 2001 to make anti-Semitic attacks on Israel, saying it wanted "total war." Without US support for Israel, the attacks would not have happened. The "alleged Holocaust" is supposed to justify the pro-Israeli position of the USA. That is why the Islamic and Arab states must pay due attention to and promote "the research work of the revisionists". Western media paid little attention to the meeting.

In Italy, such denial meetings took place more often because the authorities tolerated them and, until 2016, prosecuted Holocaust denial only in cases of active incitement to racial hatred. A 2007 move by Justice Minister Clemente Mastella to introduce a separate offence for it was rejected. 200 Italian historians signed a petition against it. In June 2016, after further attempts, the Italian parliament passed a law by a two-thirds majority, according to which proven Holocaust-denying propaganda can be punished with up to six years in prison.

Croatia

The future first president of Croatia, Franjo Tuđman, published the book Wastelands - Historical Truth in 1988. In it he claimed that at most 900,000 Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. The Ustasha had killed at most 70,000 Serbs (historically it was around 400,000). In this way he also played down the mass murders of Croatian Jews and Roma in fascist Independent Croatia and justified state discrimination against the previously equal Serbs.

Croatia's Roman Catholic Church has participated in commemorations of the Bleiburg massacre since 1991, with some of its priests worshipping Nazis and denying the Holocaust with impunity. State authorities cover this up by ignoring legal bans on hate speech against minorities and genocide denial.

Croatian historical revisionists often deny the proven mass murders of at least 83,000 Serbs, Jews and Roma in the Jasenovac concentration camp. The government put the murders into perspective in 2017 with a plaque for veterans of the 1991-1995 Balkan wars, which it placed on a wall of the concentration camp. The plaque bore the inscription Za dom spremni ("Ready for the homeland"). This slogan had been used by Ustasha fascists in World War II as an analogy to the Hitler salute. After months of protests by Holocaust survivors and opposition from historians, the plaque was moved to a neighboring town.

Austria

In Austria, the former NSDAP representative Erich Kern (Die Tragödie der Juden. Schicksal zwischen Propaganda und Wahrheit) in 1979 and the neo-Nazi Gerd Honsik with his magazine "Halt" in 1980 emerged as deniers. In 1987 Honsik published the Lachout document to prove the non-existence of gas chambers in 13 German concentration camps. However, the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance (DÖW) quickly proved it to be a crude forgery. In 1988, Honsik published interviews with former Nazis who denied the gas chambers (Acquittal for Hitler? 36 unheard witnesses against the gas chambers). In 1992 he was sentenced to prison, fled to Spain and then worked closely with Spanish deniers around the group CEDADE. In 2007 he was extradited to Austria.

In 1991, 53 percent of Austrians polled in a Gallup poll thought the time had come to "put the Holocaust on record."

In 1992, the then president of the Austrian Federal Chamber of Engineers, Walter Lüftl, wrote a pseudo-scientific report (Holocaust, Belief and Facts), modelled on the Leuchter Report, which presented the gas chamber murders as technically impossible. He sent it to politicians, judicial officials and journalists, but only the neo-Nazi paper Halt printed it. The IHR translated the "Lüftl Report" into English and distributed it unauthorized on the Internet. German neo-Nazi papers then also printed it. Lüftl had to resign and received criminal charges, but was later reinstated in the engineers' association.

Because of these cases, Austria's parliament tightened the ban on Nazi re-enactment in force since 1945 in 1992. Since then, denial, trivialization, approval or justification of the Holocaust can be punished with one to ten years in prison. That is why Austrian deniers from then on mostly preferred to doubt, trivialize and indirectly whitewash Nazi crimes. Jörg Haider, leader of the FPÖ from 1986 to 2000, called the SS "decent comrades" and the extermination camps "punishment camps", as if their inmates had been rightly interned. He praised many policies of the Nazi regime and used Nazi vocabulary.

In 1994 Herwig Nachtmann praised Lüftl's pseudo-expertise in his magazine Die Aula as a "milestone on the way to the truth". He was convicted of Nazi reenactment for this in 1995. The magazine lost press subsidies, at times also some FPÖ staff, and, influenced by Jürgen Schwab, moved further towards right-wing extremism. FPÖ MP John Gudenus questioned the gas chambers in 1995, then resigned over criticism of them. In 2005 he again demanded that the existence of the gas chambers be "seriously debated". For this he received a suspended sentence.

The former Viennese district councillor Wolfgang Fröhlich, an FPÖ member until 1994, denied the Holocaust in 2001 with his pamphlet Der Gaskammer-Schwindel (The Gas Chamber Hoax). He repeated this publicly again and again and was sentenced to prison five times for it until 2018. Other active deniers in Austria are the neo-Nazis Walter Ochensberger, Benedikt Frings, Hans Gamlich and Herbert Schaller.

In the 2006 Gudenus case, FPÖ MP Barbara Rosenkranz had defended the denial of the gas chambers as free speech, and since her candidacy for the 2010 federal presidential election in Austria she has again demanded that the 1947 Prohibition Act be repealed. Asked whether she wanted to allow Holocaust denial, she implicitly answered in the affirmative, declaring laws against personal defamation sufficient. When asked if she believed in the existence of the extermination gas chambers, she replied that she had typical school knowledge on the subject from 1964 to 1976 and did not intend to change it. These statements are consistent with legal deniers' avoidance strategies and have therefore been interpreted as a coded message of solidarity. During the period in question, the Holocaust was rarely covered in school textbooks and was presented as the crime of others.

Poland

Despite traditional Catholic-Polish anti-Semitism, many Christian Poles provided assistance and solidarity to Poland's Jews during the Nazi era. Other Poles took advantage of the situation, denounced their Jewish fellow citizens or helped the German occupiers in the Holocaust. This part of the Nazi era had been suppressed by the communist regime under Władysław Gomułka since the 1950s through new anti-Semitic campaigns and a targeted nationalization of Holocaust memory: School textbooks spoke of the murder of six million Poles, not Jews. Although Polish historians publicly contradicted this historical falsification from 1981 onwards, the national Polish narrative remained present after 1989. In 1998, far-right Poles erected Christian crosses at the Auschwitz memorial. Since then, Tadeusz Rydzyk's anti-Semitic broadcaster Nasz Dziennik has portrayed Holocaust commemoration as an attack on the martyrdom of Christian Poles in the Nazi era, justifying Polish collaboration with the Nazis with alleged Jewish Bolshevism. In 1999, historian Dariusz Ratajczak denied a Nazi regime plan to exterminate Jews. He was condemned for this as a denier under Polish law, but was supported by right-wing extremists around Ryszard Bender and the Liga Polskich Rodzin. Their Radio Maryja covered the "Auschwitz lie" in January 2000. Polish Holocaust survivors countered this with informative films.

The 1998 Act on the Institute of National Remembrance prohibits Holocaust denial. It was amended in March 2018 to include a paragraph that made even suggesting the Polish nation shared responsibility for the Holocaust, explicitly the phrase "Polish death camps," punishable by up to three years in prison. Polish historian Jan T. Gross, Holocaust survivors, and the governments of Israel and the United States saw this as an attempt to end the ongoing debate about Polish complicity in the Holocaust and intimidate those who want to continue it. Gross's book Neighbors, about the Jedwabne massacre (July 1941), had intensified the debate, prompting Polish prosecutors to investigate him. Previously, lawsuits against media outlets (including German ones) had all failed because they had inadvertently or carelessly written about "Polish death camps." Constitutional lawyer Tomasz Tadeusz Koncewicz saw the amendment as resentment-laden historical politics that sought to enshrine a nationalist Polish victim identity by the state. In June 2018, the Polish government surprisingly defused the amendment and lifted the threat of imprisonment.

Switzerland

The Swiss fascist Gaston-Armand Amaudruz was one of the first and most active negationists in Europe. In 1946 he described the Nuremberg trial as a "victor's story" with allegedly falsified statements and evidence. He argued that one should not judge hastily what had happened to the Jews during the Nazi era. By 1949 he had expanded this polemic into a book. From then on, he disseminated many Holocaust-denying texts and tried to organize a neo-fascist international with the Nouvel Ordre europeen (NOE). German deniers like Thies Christopherson participated in their meetings. In his magazine Courrier du Continent and with his books, Amaudruz propagated a rebirth of the "white race". In 2000, he was sentenced to prison for Holocaust denial under the Swiss penal code on racism.

The former language teacher Jürgen Graf became the most active Swiss denier from 1991 on. His mentors were Arthur Vogt and Gerhard Förster. In 1993 Graf published with Robert Faurisson The Holocaust Hoax, in 1994 with Carlo Mattogno Auschwitz. Perpetrator Confessions and Eyewitnesses to the Holocaust. He translated writings by other deniers, including Ahmed Rami, and appeared several times at the IHR, where he gained contacts with all the prominent deniers. With Vogt and Andreas Studer he founded the Arbeitsgemeinschaft zur Enttabuisierung der Zeitgeschichte (AEZ) and edited its journal Aurora. He also headed the now-banned association Vérité et Justice (V&J), a Swiss counterpart to the IHR. In 1995 Graf was sentenced to imprisonment and fines in Germany, and in 1998 in Switzerland. He then fled first to Iran, later to Russia. From there, he was instrumental in organizing the international denial conference planned for March 2001 in Beirut, which, however, was cancelled after protests. In 2002, he was the keynote speaker at Oleg Platonov's two-day denialist conference in Moscow. Graf's book on Holocaust researcher Raul Hilberg was published by Germar Rudolf's Verlag in 2000, and other Graf texts were offered as downloads in several languages by relevant denialist websites (VHO, IHR, Zündel, Russ Granata). Graf's witness Wolfgang Fröhlich translated his first book into French and received a heavy fine in France in 1999 because of it.

A denier who is also active in Germany is Bernhard Schaub. He co-founded the VRBHV in Vlotho in 2003 and led it until 2008. In 2006 he spoke at the deniers' conference in Iran, in 2010 at Ivo Sasek's Anti-Censorship Coalition.

Slovakia

In the run-up to the separation from the Czech Republic, right-wing nationalist separatists declared the war criminal Jozef Tiso to be the model for an independent Slovakia. They also denied the Holocaust and the involvement of Slovaks in it.

Spain

As before the death of the dictator Francisco Franco († 1975), Spain served as a retreat for many prosecuted old and neo-Nazis (such as the former Wehrmacht officer Otto Ernst Remer). Beginning in 1978, Pedro Varela Geiss turned the neo-Nazi Círculo Español de Amigos de Europa (CEDADE) and its Centro de Estudios Historicos Revisionistas (CEHRE) division, with two publishing houses (Nothung, Libreria Europa), into an international propaganda center for Holocaust denial. In 1993, CEDADE was dissolved, but its members continued their activities in the Instituto de Estudios Sociales, Políticos y Económicos (IES) in Madrid.

Until November 2007, Holocaust denial in Spain was punishable by up to two years in prison. Then the Spanish Constitutional Court repealed the criminal law on this as incompatible with freedom of expression.

United Kingdom

The first non-German Holocaust denier was the Scotsman Alexander Ratcliffe, a Protestant anti-Semite. In his pamphlet The Truth about the Jews (1943), he speculated that the British government was controlled by Jews and needed a Hitler. The German concentration camps were invented by the "Jewish mind," he said, and piles of corpses at Bergen-Belsen and elsewhere were faked in Jewish cinemas. In late 1945 and 1946 he claimed in his newspaper Vanguard that "the Jews" had invented the Holocaust. British right-wing extremists spread Ratcliffe's quotes around the world. It was not until 1998 that the original texts were rediscovered.

The British journalist Douglas Reed believed Hitler was an agent of Zionism in the service of Wall Street and that the murder of the Jews was faked. Reed's thesis was often referred to by right-wing extremists who were critical of Hitler. In 1988, the far-right British National Party (BNP) sent over 30,000 copies of its newsletter Holocaust News to Jewish communities and celebrities: In it, the Holocaust was presented as a "myth" of Jews exploiting peoples.

Hitler biographer David Irving had denied Hitler's knowledge of and involvement in the Holocaust until 1988. As an expert witness for Ernst Zündel in his Canadian trial, he said when asked that at most 100,000 Jewish deaths in Nazi camps could be proven. He later published the Leuchter Report and wrote an approving foreword. Since then Irving and Leuchter often appeared together, for example in April 1990 at the "International Revisionist Congress" in Munich. There Irving declared that in Auschwitz there had "never been gas chambers", that the buildings shown to the "tourists" were "dummies", for which the German state had paid "16 billion marks in fines". Irving often took part in annual meetings of the DVU.

In the United Kingdom, Holocaust denial is not a criminal offence. After Deborah Lipstadt called Irving "one of the most dangerous Holocaust deniers," he charged her with libel in 1996, sparking a four-year trial. Court opinions by Richard J. Evans, Robert Jan van Pelt, Peter Longerich and others proved the Holocaust, Hitler's leading role in it and the extermination purpose of the gas chambers once again in court as irrefutable facts. The London High Court of Justice ruled Irving was not a historian at all, but a historical falsifier, liar, Holocaust denier and far-right Nazi polemicist who shared many of the racist and anti-Semitic views of neo-Nazis. Irving also lost his appeal in 2001. In February 2006, he was sentenced to three years in prison in Austria for an earlier denial, but was deported to Britain in December. He is banned from entering several countries, including Germany and Austria.

BNP chairman Nick Griffin is a far-right denier convicted of racial hatred. He presented himself as the better Holocaust expert to Irving in 2000, and in 2009 tried to shed the image of denier and anti-Semite, while admitting his views were punishable under EU law.

In London in 2000, Islamist hate preacher Omar Bakri Mohammed declared six million Holocaust victims a sham for Zionist interests. At most, he said, the Nazis killed 60,000 Jews in the war. The Holocaust narrative, he said, is full of myths and lies.

In a January 2019 poll, five percent of Britons surveyed (an extrapolated 2.6 million) said the Holocaust did not happen.

Pius Fraternity

The Priestly Fraternity of St. Pius X had separated from the Roman Catholic Church in 1970 mainly because of the recognition of Judaism in the Council Declaration Nostra aetate. Its founder Marcel Lefebvre stood in the tradition of anti-modernism and had often attracted attention with anti-Semitic statements. Philippe Laguérie, a high-ranking member of the group, was close to the right-wing extremist Jean-Marie Le Pen and in 1987 described the theses of the deniers Henri Roques and Robert Faurisson as "absolutely scientific".

In June 1988 Lefebvre ordained four clerics as bishops against papal authority, among them the Briton Richard Williamson. In a 1989 sermon in Canada, Williamson denied the Holocaust, saying that not a single Jew had died in gas chambers. These were all lies. The Jews had invented the Holocaust in order to extort the recognition of the State of Israel from the non-Jews. In 1991, he attributed the second Gulf War to Jews in the U.S., approvingly quoting the Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion: Jews incited hatred and rebellion against governments in all countries in order to subjugate the gentiles to their world domination of money. In 2005, in a seminar letter, he spoke of "scientific evidence" that "certain famous Holocaust gas chambers" could not have served this purpose. On 19 January 2009, in an interview in Zaitzkofen (Schierling), the headquarters of the German section of the Pius-Brothers, he said: "The historical evidence speaks against six million Jews being deliberately murdered. At most 200,000 to 300,000 Jews had perished in German concentration camps, but none in gas chambers. For this he referred to the Leuchter Report. A few days earlier he had visited its editor David Irving.

Although Williamson's statements were known on the Internet, Pope Benedict XVI readmitted the four Pius bishops to the Catholic Church on January 21, 2009. On the same day, Williamson's interview was broadcast in Sweden. In the face of strong international reaction, he regretted his statements without backing down from them. In May 2009, he affirmed that God had given the Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion to people so that they could know the truth. In doing so, he circumvented a ban by his superior, Bernard Fellay, on commenting on politics.

After strong protests, Pope Benedict recalled his earlier visits to Auschwitz on 28 January 2009. The Shoa must be a reminder to all against "forgetting, denial and reductionism". However, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on February 3, 2009, "If a decision by the Vatican creates the impression that the Holocaust can be denied, this must not remain in the room without consequences." In response, the Vatican clarified the next day that the Pius bishops had only been readmitted to the Church, not to office. Williamson, he said, must distance himself absolutely unequivocally from his denial. This had not been known to the Pope when the excommunication was lifted. As a gesture of reconciliation the Pope visited Yad Vashem on 12 May 2009, but kept his decision and took no position on possible omissions of the Vatican in the Nazi era.

In 2012 the Pius Brotherhood expelled Williamson, who retracted nothing, and the Italian priest Floriano Abrahamowicz. The latter had also doubted gas chambers and Holocaust victim numbers. Several German courts sentenced Williamson to a fine for incitement of the people. The sentence became final in 2014. The European Court of Human Rights rejected Williamson's complaint against it in January 2019 and declared the German sentences lawful.

A Catholic fundamentalist form of denial is also represented by the French sedisvacantist Vincent Reynouard in his magazine Sans Concession.

Forged Lachout Document from 1987