One of the first historians to deny the Holocaust was Harry Elmer Barnes, who was actually fairly prominent and taught at Columbia University for years.

Barnes views on the Holocaust were no doubt influenced by his time at the Centre for the Study of the Causes of the War, a think tank sponsored by the German government in the interwar period, responsible for pushing the German opinion that they had been treated unfairly by the Treaty of Versailles.

After World War 2 Barnes publicly denied two things: that Germany had started the War, and that the Holocaust had happened. Barnes utilized some of the same arguments as deniers today, arguing for example in his 1962 publication Revisionism and Brainwashing that the allies spent time focusing on the supposed genocide to detract from their own crimes, and that the allies had made the Germans scapegoats for the war's evils.

As to his motive I cannot speak. If I had to guess, beyond his time at the Centre, I think Barnes was influenced by the way propaganda shifted public opinion during World War 1, especially the Rape of Belgium which, while devastating, was not the orgy of sadism and bloodlust painted in allied propaganda. He also was likely influenced by the popular view that Germans had gotten a raw deal after Versailles (a debate I won't get into here).

Hope you found this interesting (and this is the last time I answer a question here on my phone)!

Mainstream holocaust denial started right after the war, with former Nazis denying that there was ever any sort of plan to systematically kill off the Jews. But that comes as no surprise. Major holocaust denial like you see today didn't really take off in the academic sphere until the 60's and 70's when droves of anti-semetic literature was published. Now the first major historians to being denying the holocaust were Paul Rassinier and Harry Barnes. Rassinier was a Frenchmen who had been put in Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora for anti Nazi activities in France. He was treated relatively well in the camp (given light work duty and wasn't systematically abused by the guards) because he was viewed as less dangerous than the radical communists that he was imprisoned with. This caused him to become a Nazi sympathizer and after the war he pushed for SS members to be given light sentences. He published works in favour of the SS and the Nazis. These published works also denied that the camps were as bad as other survivors made them out to be, he also denied that the Gas Chambers existed. They also spoke of a vast Jewish conspiracy and that the Jews had instigated WW2. Barnes was an anti war historian who had once been mainstream and credible, but eventually ended up publishing work that said that the Holocaust was allied propaganda, that allowed them to justify the war against Germany.

Other early holocaust deniers include Austin App, who in 1973 published the "Six Million Swindle" which asserted that the Nazis had killed less than half a million Jews and that all the Jews killed had deserved it because they were being subversive or were saboteurs. Other books from the period include Arthur Butz's "Hoax of the Twentieth Century" which attempted to present its self as a non-biased academic look at the holocaust. This book argued that the Bombing of Dresden was far more deadly and horrific than any of the camps had ever been. Of course there was David Irving's "Hitler's War" which put forth the argument (that I'm sure we've all heard from Neo Nazis before) that since there was not written order from Hitler, he didn't know about the holocaust, and that it clearly must not have been as bad as we think if Hitler didn't know about it.

Now holocaust denial is a vast topic, which tons of books have been written about. I've only scratched the surface, but I just wanted to give some major holocaust deniers, who have influenced other holocaust deniers. Pretty much every argument holocaust deniers pullout today, can be traced back to the arguments presented in these books. The book "Telling Lies About Hitler" by Richard J.Evans gives a good overview of holocaust denial and why people do it. In the book he sets forth the 4 common arguments used by holocaust deniers which I thought was very interesting:

(a) The number of Jews killed by the Nazis was far less than six million; it amounted to only a few hundred thousand, and was thus similar to, or less than, the number of German civilians killed in Allied bombing raids.

(b) Gas chambers were not used to kill large numbers of Jews at any time.

(c) Neither Hitler nor the Nazi leadership in general had a programme of exterminating Europe's Jews; all they wished to do was to deport them to Eastern Europe.

(d) 'The Holocaust' was a myth invented by Allied propaganda during the war and sustained since then by Jews who wished to use it to gain political and financial support for the state of Israel or for themselves. The supposed evidence for the Nazis' wartime mass murder of millions of Jews by gassing and other means was fabricated after the war.16

Not to be facetious, but right at the get go.

Leni Riefenstahl refused to acknowledge the truth during the war, but had been instrumental in propaganda development ( via film ) as early as 1935 with "Triumph of the Will".

http://www.hsc.csu.edu.au/modern_history/personalities/riefenstahl/3276/significance.htm

http://www.rense.com/general28/leni.htm

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/09/obituaries/09CND-RIEF.html

I have removed several comments in this thread, and I want to make our rules clear before anyone writes any further posts: Holocaust denial will not be tolerated on this sub and will result in an instant ban, with no warning. If you come to question the veracity of the Holocaust, don't expect a discussion, don't expect a debate because you will be banned on sight. AskHistorians will not offer any Holocaust denier with a platform to spread their disinformation.

Speculation is also against our rules, as are top-level, low-effort posts. Do not write a response if you aren't able to provide sources for your claims, if you aren't sure of your capacity to answer the question or if you have not done research about the topic.

To tack onto this, what kind of evidence do these people use? I don't know how or why you could make up something that huge.

A related question, if it's permissible or interesting enough to garner attention from the scholars here: is there any Holocaust denial that isn't, in some foundational way, antisemitic? I'm asking you to speculate about causes, because some of these answers hint at the possibility that the earliest Holocaust denial was fundamentally pro-German, not necessarily antisemitic.

As a follow on to that question, when did Holocaust Denial become illegal in certain places? I know certain countries outlaw it; was there an event that triggered such legislation?

Again, I'm late for the thread, but there are some misconceptions flying around here and even though most likely not many people will read it, I have to add some corrections, this being my Master's thesis topic.

The most interesting thing is that the Nazi elites didn't start the Holocaust denial. Everyone in Nuremberg tried to either shift the blame to others or claim they had no other choice but to follow orders, but nobody outright denied what had happened to the Jews.

Nevertheless, you may want to call the efforts to keep the Holocaust secret a kind of Holocaust denial - for example, Theresienstadt which was propagated internationally as a place for older Jews to live in peace.

My main thesis which I, in my opinion, successfully proved, is that Holocaust Denial started way earlier than the usual historical narrative tells it: Not only in the 60s and 70s, but right after the war. Paul Rassinier, who has been written on above in this thread, and Maurice Bardèche were the first to outright deny the genocide in its dimensions.

In Germany, Hans Grimm, who had coined the term Volk ohne Raum for the Nazis, was the first to start public Holocaust Denial. Others followed in rapid succession, which can be seen by the first efforts to implement laws against Holocaust denial that started as early as 1953. However, due to political differences (the conservative party in power wouldn't vote for a bill proposed by the social democrats, and the right-wing coalitionists wouldn't support a conservative proposal) it didn't become a law.

Yet, there was a way for state attorneys to persecute Holocaust deniers: They simply stated that denying the atrocities against the european Jews were a "collective defamation" of the Jews. However, defamation is a criminal offense that requires a complaint made by the victim. This led to the situation that state attorneys regularly wrote to the Central Council of Jews in Germany, stating a case of public Holocaust denial and asking if the Council wanted to file charges, which made the council an informal law inforcement agency somewhere between police and state attorney.

Also, this left open the question wether all Jews had the right to file charges which was in 1957 cleared up by one of the highest courts in Germany that said that everyone who, under Nazi jurisdiction, had been considered a Jew was eligible to file charges against Holocaust deniers. Born out of good will, this transported the racial categories of the Nazis into the democratic federal republic.

If anybody is interested and can read german, I'm happy to send my Master's thesis via private message.

Ignoring politically or racially motivated holocaust denial, people doubted that it was happening during the war simply because it sounded absurd. Maus by Art Spiegleman is a biographical account of how his father survived the Holocaust. The idea that Germany was rounding up all of the jews and killing them seemed too absurd to believe. Sadly, many jews did not realiize the truth until it was too late.

Back in 2000, CSPAN2's BookTV aired a multimedia lecture by Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman's Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? at the US Holocaust Museum. The lecture goes at length about the various arguments used by Holocaust deniers and speculation on the motivations of deniers (for example, they postulate David Irving has discovered a lucrative niche as a denialist superstar). It has been archived here: http://www.c-span.org/video/?159157-1/book-discussion-denying-history

How do Holocaust deniers explain the photographs that were taken at the camps? Artifacts from the camps? And - perhaps an odd one - presumably the birth certificates/proof of existence that were left behind by those that were killed? Though I recognize in the last case that a lot of evidence like that was systematically destroyed as well.