What is the psychology behind the Holocaust Denial? What are the factors that explain the resilience against any historical and archeological evidence that explain the existence of the Holocaust? Why is there such resilience against this infamous genocide versus other controversies that occurred?

by sammyjamez

Please, I want to highlight that I am not a denier here.

I like to look into different sides of the argument as people and I learned that how history is taught is also what it is written and interpreted.

Now the evidence that we have (from what I have gathered) of the existence of the Holocaust are plenty.

Firstly, Hitler's speeches and his Mein Kampf book show many hints of the hatred and scapegoating of Jews.

Next are the anti-Jewish acts that occurred in Germany before they are hunted and killed such as businesses that were owned by Jews were closed and declared illegal, homes and shops of Jewish people were vandalised, synapogues were closed, and Jewish people had to wear tags or labels or the Star of David as a clear indicator.

Then, there are the documents and the places that show the existence of the Holocaust. Auschwitz is the most obvious example and a powerful one. The conditions of the place show how the Jews were treated and the uniform that they wore, and the amount of shoes collected of the ones that were killed and gassed, numbers and tattoes in every one and so on.

The Nuremberg trials are also evidence of the existence of war criminals who used the war effort or had some influence in the Nazi party on the acts that were conducted against Jews and other people that were deemed inferior or the enemy of the Germans.

The sheer number, scale and intensity of it feels unbelievably unreal (I must admit, even I find it hard to swallow that people were and are go to such extreme lengths) but many evidence show that this genocide existed.

Now, I want to show a different side here.

When I hear a revisionists' argument or an argument of an Denialist who wants to question the evidence that was gathered, I also want to look into that argument as well.

Is the evidence actually valid and real? Do the Denialists' evidence and arguments also hold as much validity and merit? Can the science of psychology show that the human species is indeed capable of such extreme acts?

At the same time, I am also puzzled and curious as to why there is this level of confirmation bias about this topic, particularly towards the Holocaust.

What are the factors or the reasonings that explain why some people are inclined to deny the collected evidence or question the actuality of this era?

As there a common theme involved such as paranoia or a certain upbringing or anti-governmental attitudes or imperialistic values?

Why is there such focus on wanting to deny the actions that occurred that were made by those who took part of the Holocaust than for example in other genocides or controversial topics that existed, especially in recent memory such as the Armenian genocide or when Japanese-American citizens were put into concentration camps of their own by America when the latter entered the war?

(please correct me if I am wrong whether the concentration camps of the Japanese-Americans were of the same level of poor quality and poor conditions as those of Nazi Germany)

My Monday methods on Holocaust denial has already been posted but I also want to repost something I have written some time ag about holocaust denial, its history, prevalence and motive.

Part 1

The short version is that people adjust what they choos to believe in accordance with their political prejudices and opinions most of the time and people who advocate Holocaust denial are, in large parts, anti-Semites of some flavor or another.

What is the Holocaust? What is Holocaust Denial?

As a starting point, I'm going to define what is the Holocaust and subsequently, what is Holocaust Denial.

Within the relevant scholarly literature, the term Holocaust is defined as the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews and up to half a million Roma, Sinti, and other groups persecuted as "gypsies" by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. It took place at the same time as other atrocities and crimes such as the Nazis targeting other groups on grounds of their perceived "inferiority", like the disabled and Slavs, and on grounds of their religion, ideology or behavior among them Communists, Socialists, Jehovah's Witnesses and homosexuals. During their 12-year reign, the conservative estimate of victims of Nazi oppression and murder numbers 11 million people, though newer studies put that number at somewhere between 15 and 20 million people.

Holocaust Denial is the attempt and effort to negate, distort, and/or minimize and trivialize the established facts about the Nazi genocides against Jews, Roma, and others most often with the goal to rehabilitate Nazism as an ideology.

Because of the staggering numbers given above, the fact that the Nazi regime applied the tools at the disposal of the modern state to genocidal ends, their sheer brutality, and a variety of other factors, the ideology of Nazism and the broader historical phenomenon of Fascism in which Nazism is often placed, have become – rightfully so – politically tainted. As and ideology that is at its core racist, anti-Semitic, and genocidal, Nazism and Fascism have become politically discredited throughout most of the world.

Holocaust Deniers primarily seek to remove this taint from the ideology of Nazism by distorting, ignoring, and misrepresenting historical fact and thereby make Nazism and Fascism socially acceptable again. In other words, Holocaust Denial is a form of political agitation in the service of bigotry, racism, and anti-Semitism.

In his book Lying about Hitler Richard Evans summarizes the following points as the most frequently held beliefs of Holocaust Deniers:

(a) The number of Jews killed by the Nazis was far less than 6 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 leaderhsip in general had a program 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 for 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.

[Richard Evans: Lying about Hitler. History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial, New York 2001, p. 110]

A short history of Holocaust Denial and its methods in the West

Holocaust denialism has its roots in the Nazis' own efforts to hide their crimes from the world. I have gone into this before here. Especially the efforts of Sonderkommando 1005 and the destruction of records at the end of the war was intended to hide and deny these crimes and thus portray the regime in a more positive light.

This was , of course, used in Nuremberg and other various post war trials by the defendants, who either pushed a narrative of not having known, not having been involved, or all going back to Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich and others who were dead or otherwise not present at Nuremberg (Eichmann e.g., who was made out by Dieter Wisliceny to be sort of a master mind of the Holocaust). Similarly, several defendants at Nuremberg engage in what has developed to become a classical tactics of deniers, e.g. minimizing the numbers, taking code language out of context with phrases such as resettlement, chalking up deaths to disease etc.

Also, surrounding Nuremberg and the revelations of the Nazi crimes, several different strands of fascist, right-wing extremist, and Nazi political agendas started to deny the Holocaust for a variety for reasons. In Germany, you -- of course -- have all the former Nazis who in order present a clean image of the regime and to rehabilitate themselves and the Nazi regime started to write books where they claimed the Holocaust to have either not happened or be the result of a Jewish conspiracy. For example, Otto von dem Bach-Zelewski, former head of an Einsatzgruppe, who had freely given information at the Nuremberg trials and thus saved his skin started in the 1950s to once again reverse his stand and put out a wealth of denialist literature. Similarly, a plethora of former Wehrmacht generals and officers engaged in their own form of denial by either denying the crimes of the regime outright or by presenting the Wehrmacht as not involved in such crimes. Especially the latter, the myth of the clean Wehrmacht, was one of the most successful forms of Holocaust denial and was very popular in Germany until the 80s and can still be observed today.

Another political agenda that used Holocaust denialism as its tool right after the war, was a certain strand of proto-fascist and right-wing extremist thinkers who wanted to clean fascism and their ideology from the strain of being associated with Hitler and the Holocaust. Douglas Reed is such an example. Reed, who was a prominent journalist in Great Britain, was against Hitler but not against Nationalsocialism (he favored the Otto Strasser position). In the late 40s, early 50s he started publishing books which claimed Hitler had been a Zionist agent and his policy of killing the Jews was a Jewish plot to justify the creation of Israel and which was done against the wishes of many Nazis. At some point it became increasingly hard for him to find publishers, so he moved to South Africa and became involved in supporting apartheid politics in SA and Rhodesia.

Another -- and rather odd -- strand of denialism comes from a pacifists. Pacifism had been very popular during the time between the World Wars because of the effects of WWI and after World War Two, a couple of people of the radical pacifist movement saw their positions threatened because the crimes of the Nazis were a major reason why the war against Nazi Germany was portrayed as a moral and necessary war. In the United States, a former mainstream historian and pacifist activist, Harry Elmer Barnes, started publishing literature that claimed the Holocaust was an Allied invention to justify their war against German, which they had started in 1939.

Another example of this is the -- still cited by Holocaust deniers to this day -- work of Paul Rassinier, who in many a ways is the father of modern Holocaust denial. Rassinier, also a staunch pacifist, was a member of the French resistance, where he -- unsuccessfully -- tried to get the Resistance to engage the Nazi occupation peacefully rather than with violence. Arrested by the Nazis in 1943 and deported to the Buchenwald and later Dora-Mittelbau Concentration Camps, Rassinier did write several books and pamphlets after the war in which he denied the existence of gas chambers and of mass extermination - ostensibly because he had never experienced it.

Rassinier was an odd fellow, whose work could be engaged in its own journal article. He, for example, did not deny the brutality of the camps but instead of holding the SS responsible, he blamed his fellow prisoners. Something, which could and has been engaged in modern scholarship as the result of the perfidious Nazi camp system.

But aside from the reason of Rassinier denying the Holocaust because he never experienced it, he also started to engage in Holocaust denial because he was an anti-Semite and a lot of his writing is informed by his hatred for Jews and the state of Israel, which he saw as based on a Jewish lie and as a threat to peace. The fact that Rassinier was a survivor, an academically trained historian, and a Holocaust denying anti-Semite makes his works favorites in denialist circles to this day.

Holocaust denialism the way we know it today started in the 1960s/70s with the rise of neo-fascist and neo-extreme rightits political movements and causes. Not directly referencing Nazism and old-school fascism as their sources of inspiration but still viewing themselves in the same historical lineage, a lot of these people saw themselves as the right counter-movement to the New Left of 1968 and so on. From Arthur Butz to David Irving, it was this generation who had not themselves taken part in the war and in the Anglosphere rejected the narratives of their elders as the Second World War being just, which formed the most tropes, arguments and methods used by Holocaust deniers to this day. This ranges from the supposedly "scientific" denialism of Leuchter and Zündel to the more subtle relativism of Irving and Nolte to the outright denial of everything like Faurisson's.