In the context of “the Holocaust,” revisionists are those who have concluded that many of the commonly accepted Holocaust claims are false or materially exaggerated. While there are no formal rules on what all revisionists must believe, most believe 1) the "final solution to the Jewish question" was not a plan to kill all the Jews, 2) the Germans did not execute millions of people in gas chambers, 3) the total number of Jewish dead during the war years was far less than six million. In the very broadest sense, you might say that a Holocaust revisionist is someone who thinks the historicity of the Holocaust is debatable.
In theory, you might expect there to be a range of opinion on the Holocaust, but in practice it seems that most of those who end up venture even slightly along the path of doubt end up rejecting the story more or less completely, with only small pieces of it surviving scrutiny. This is because the nature of the evidence is highly interdependent and doubts in one area naturally carry over to everything else. For example, if you conclude that the Auschwitz gas chambers are fake, this will automatically raise questions about the gas chambers at Treblinka and elsewhere. If you conclude that the confession of Rudolf Hoess is false, it automatically raises questions about other supposed confessions. Thus compromise positions are rare among those who are well-studied on the topic.
Revisionism can also refer more broadly to a school of historical thought, founded by American historian Harry Elmer Barnes, which posits that history is often a narrative tool to serve the interests of establishment institutions and that "court historians" are especially unreliable in matters relating to war. The revisionist historian is then one who seeks to upend the myths and uncover "history as it actually happened."
The ideals of the revisionist school are not really so different from what is professed by most modern professional historians. And, credit where credit is due, many professional historians are broadly "revisionist" in many respects. However, we would argue that there remain major blind spots on certain sensitive topics.
Are revisionists "neo-Nazis"?
Holocaust revisionism is concerned with factual claims about history. The validity of our position depends on the strength of our reasoning and evidence, and it must sink or swim on that basis. Jewish activists like Deborah Lipstadt and the ADL typically refuse to engage with revisionist arguments and instead seek to discredit us out of hand for bias and lack of objectivity, ignoring completely their own obvious lack of objectivity.
There is not much reliable survey data on the characteristics of revisionists, political or otherwise. Anecdotally, it seems that revisionists skew heavily male. Revisionists tend to be from Europe, North America, and other European diaspora countries. Politically, it is a safe bet that revisionists are more willing than average to hold other "politically incorrect" or contrarian views, but revisionism does not imply any particular worldview, nor would the political views necessarily be causal.
Many early revisionists had libertarian and/or isolationist/anti-war views. Reason Magazine, a major libertarian periodical, devoted their entire February 1976 issue to historical revisionism. The issue did not focus on the Holocaust, but it broadly endorsed the revisionist school and several of the contributors were indeed Holocaust skeptics.
Holocaust revisionism seems relatively uncommon among liberals (it will be interesting to see if the current anti-Zionist mood ends up pushing any leftists toward Holocaust skepticism), but it has by no means been unknown. Paul Rassinier, the pioneer and father of Holocaust revisionism, was a left-wing socialist who had himself been a political prisoner in the concentration camps. Jewish left-wing intellectual Noam Chomsky never endorsed revisionism, but he famously defended Robert Faurisson on free speech grounds. Norman Finkelstein has attacked the Holocaust "industry" from the left for engaging in shakedown schemes and for using the Holocaust to justify radical Zionism.
Many top revisionists have been publicly apolitical.
Are revisionists "conspiracy theorists"?
"Conspiracy theorist" is a loaded term. It is a way of dismissing something without addressing the points that have been raised. It is also overbroad, including everything from wild speculations to major controversies like the Kennedy assassination that have generated sizable and detailed dissenting literatures. There are few "conspiracy theories" that have generated any literature as lengthy and well-sourced as what has been produced by Holocaust revisionists.
Many revisionist researchers on the Holocaust have largely limited themselves to the Holocaust. As a practical matter, becoming an expert on a topic takes time and trying to tackle several major topics simultaneously will mean sacrificing depth.
There are some who eagerly latch onto any controversial or sensational claim. Everything is fake! Everything is a lie! This group may endorse Holocaust revisionism as one of many exotic positions, but it will by definition command a small share of their attention. Germar Rudolf has a referred to this group of "harmless eccentrics" as having "oppositional defiance disorder."
Strictly speaking, revisionists do allege, at least implicitly, a conspiracy in the sense of multiple actors promoting falsehoods. "Conspiracy theories" have a bad reputation because highly intricate, organized plots are suggested on the basis of pure speculation or shoddy research. But as there surely are real conspiracies, it is invalid to assume that conspiracies per se must be false. Revisionists by and large have focused on fact-checking the Holocaust claims. If these claims can be shown to be factually incorrect of doubtful, then we have done most of our job. If it is false, this does raise the question of how such a thing could have become accepted as fact for so long. It is at this point where most revisionists do argue for some degree of conspiracy or dishonesty, although the explanations on this complex point are varied and nuanced, with some revisionists preferring to emphasize more spontaneous factors and incentives.
On this point of "conspiracies," it is fair to point out here that the traditional Holocaust story bears some similarity to conspiratorial thinking. One common feature of conspiratorial theorizing is that lack of evidence for the theory is incorporated into the story, conveniently making the claims unfalsifiable. The Holocaust story is notable in that the conclusions are very fixed (to the point of legal enforcement) while the path to get to those conclusions is remarkably flexible. Many aspects of the story such as "code language" or improvised policies and technical solutions seem constructed so as to excuse the lack of expected evidence. And this is especially true of the modern academic versions of the story which have had to be radically modified after older versions were falsified.
But don't professional historians and other experts accept the Holocaust?
In most of Europe, it is now illegal to do research on the Holocaust unless you respect certain predetermined conclusions. In the United States, free thought on the Holocaust is still allowed to a degree because of the First Amendment tradition, but Holocaust revisionism is still suppressed via corporate censorship and other forms of harassment and economic threats. Because the Holocaust is sacralized history, to challenge it is treated not just as an intellectual folly but a moral outrage. Thus it carries with it an especially strong opprobrium and moral censure that is not present in ordinary intellectual debates. This moral dimension makes "Holocaust denial" akin to heresy in a religious context and this explains why the Holocaust is especially hard to challenge.
Unthinking deference to expert opinion is an unreliable heuristic on third rail topics like "the Holocaust" where people cannot share their true views without suffering retaliation. If institutional powers decree that "Holocaust denial" is inherently not respectable, then by definition no one "respectable" can support Holocaust denial. Such circularities mean little.
An additional, less appreciated point is that Holocaust revisionism actually fares much better from a credentialist perspective than one might assume. And this is especially true when we consider the first few decades after the war, before "The Holocaust" became socially and politically dominant. Many early Holocaust skeptics in America were surprisingly well-credentialed. Harry Elmer Barnes, had a PhD in history from Columbia and published prolifically for decades and was a long-time editor at Foreign Affairs. Another early revisionist, David Hoggan, had a PhD in history from Harvard. They were in fact better credentialed than many of the early Holocaust historians who generally were not professional historians at elite universities. The two authors of the most notable early comprehensive histories on the Holocaust, Gerald Reitlinger and Raul Hilberg, did not have PhDs in history (Hilberg's field was political science) and neither of their books were published by prestigious academic presses. It was not until the late 1970s that "the Holocaust" began acquiring the academic prestige it now enjoys.
Despite all the pressures to the contrary, we do see some hints of revisionism even within mainstream academics. In the early 1990s, Joel Hayward, a grad student in history at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, submitted a master's thesis on Holocaust revisionism which in which Hayward largely endorsed the revisionist position. Not only was the thesis accepted, it was deemed the best thesis that year and Hayward was awarded special recognition for his efforts. The controversial thesis was submitted in 1993 but not made public until 1999, at which point Jewish activists predictably tried to get the degree revoked, prompting Hayward to begin the customary groveling. Such are the dynamics at play and such explains the artificial consensus on the Holocaust issue. Similarly, in France in 1985, Henri Roques submitted a doctoral dissertation which presented detailed and scholarly textual criticism of the statements of Kurt Gerstein, one of the most crucial and widely cited gas chamber witnesses. Roques's doctoral degree was cancelled in 1986 after intervention from a French government official.
Many major revisionists like Arthur Butz and Robert Faurisson have had PhDs in a variety of fields, and many such as Germar Rudolf and Fritz Berg have had technical backgrounds. What we find with revisionists is an eclectic group of individuals from a variety of nationalities, professional backgrounds, and political sensibilities who have all concluded, often at great personal cost and little personal benefit, that the Holocaust is not true.
There remain an unknown number of "closet" revisionists within academia and other fields. These are those who agree with us but who keep their heads down for professional and personal reasons. In recent decades, many revisionists have had to write under pseudonyms such as the late "Samuel Crowell" who had a master's degree in Eastern European history from Columbia and "Thomas Dalton" who has a PhD and "taught humanities at a prominent American university for several years." Carlo Mattogno, the most prolific revisionist researcher, has received anonymous assistance from sympathetic archival specialists in Europe.
What are your main reasons for rejecting the Holocaust?
In terms of the big picture most arguments and evidence for and against the Holocaust could be placed in the following categories: 1) demographics, 2) testimonies, 3) war-time documents, 4) forensic evidence.
Revisionists point out that the evidentiary basis for the Holocaust (to the extent there has even been any attempt to justify it in terms of evidence) largely consists testimonies collected after the war, a surprisingly weak and unreliable foundation for such extraordinary claims. These witnesses simply do not hold up under scrutiny as their stories are full of serious contradictions, errors, and absurdities.
The story falls apart even more when we consider physical evidence. The supposed "gas chambers" at camps like Auschwitz, Majdanek, Dachau, and Mauthausen lack the features necessary for mass gassings and the rooms in question had obvious mundane uses. After the war, the Allies presented these rooms as sinister mass murder facilities for purposes of propaganda. There are also no mass graves sufficient in size to corroborate the claimed millions of Jews who are said to have been executed at these "death camps." The claim is that almost all of these millions of bodies were burned which is highly implausible for technical reasons.
The documentary evidence is large and difficult to summarize. But at a very high level, revisionists argue that the German documents fail to support or even contradict the idea of a formal extermination program or mass gassing program.
The demographic evidence is more inconclusive due to uncertainties over Jewish population statistics. Revisionists are not persuaded by the supposed 5-6 million drop in the global Jewish population or by "missing Jews" arguments in general. Such circumstantial arguments amount to demanding proof of survival in lieu of providing proof of millions of executions.
In the addition to direct evaluation of the claims, there are also many indirect or "meta" arguments that may not be conclusive by themselves but which nonetheless bolster the revisionist view. The fact the Holocaust increased greatly in importance in the 1970s decades after the war is example of a point that does not disprove the Holocaust directly but which nonetheless should raise eyebrows. That many people during the war did not seem to take the atrocity stories very seriously is another indirect point. The way revisionism is suppressed is yet another hint that the orthodox case may not be a strong as they claim.
But didn’t a lot of Germans confess to doing the Holocaust? And doesn’t the German government admit that it happened?
There are indeed post-war statements from former SS men that refer to gas chambers and exterminations and whatnot that are commonly cited as proof for the Holocaust. However, if these statements are fact-checked carefully and the context in which the statements were extracted is considered, these statements start to fall apart. Moreover, if it can be shown that many of these statements were false, these "confessions" not only cease to be proof for the Holocaust, they then become strong evidence against it.
Revisionists have long argued that the Nuremberg trials were akin to witchcraft trials. The statements were collected by an enemy army while Germany was under occupation. In such circumstances, we must consider the incentives of the SS men. The tribunal generally did not attempt to investigate Auschwitz for example but rather relied on the reports of the Soviet Union who had control of the territory. Basic "facts" about these camps could be accepted under judicial notice. The objective was to settle individual culpability rather than general historiography. An individual defendant could not very well prove that Auschwitz was not an extermination camp, but he could say that he didn't know anything about it, or that he tried to stop it, or give some other story that might have some chance of mitigating the individual charges.
Several of the Nuremberg defendants such as Goering and Rosenberg in fact DID dispute the extermination claims. Goering in particular, being the most certain to be executed, was the feistiest and was not as "cooperative" with the occupation regime as many of the others. Goering disputed the prosecution's interpretation of the "final solution" and he did not believe the camps had the technical means to kill millions of people even if this had been the intention. Goering, after being months of gaslighting by the Jewish prison psychologist, seemed to come around eventually the view that perhaps Himmler had done something behind Hitler's back.
The main reason to discount these statements is the most obvious possible reason. They are often full of serious contradictions and errors. A false statement is false even if we can't determine in each instance how the false statement was extracted. The most cited Nuremberg confession for purposes of proving the Holocaust is that of Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz, who "confessed" to exterminating 3 million people there. Such big numbers were common in the early postwar period, but mainstream scholars now admit that such numbers are totally impossible. Hoess's figure is about three times the current orthodox figure. The inflated death toll is one of many major, inexcusable errors in Hoess's statements. And in the case of Hoess, today we do know how the confession was extracted. Some years after Hoess had been hanged it was revealed that Hoess's first confession was extracted by Jewish interrogators after three days of torture including beatings and sleep deprivation.
At later trials like those of the 1960s, overt torture like what happened to Hoess is generally not alleged. However, at none of these trials was it was feasible to dispute the extermination story directly. This was even more true at the later trials than at Nuremberg as the "facts" had long been settled. These statements must therefore be considered in the context of these legal incentives. If you are on trial for witchcraft, you do not attempt to convince your captors that witches are not real. You attempt to explain that you are not a witch. You may even accuse others of witchcraft or attempt to convince the court that you were a fervent opponent of witchcraft.
But isn't there a lot of documentary evidence for the Holocaust?
If you talk to the more informed anti-revisionists, they will have a handful of go-to "smoking gun" documents that may look convincing at a glance. But these selective smoking guns are much less impressive when you consider 1) that there were literally millions of pages of captured German documents to choose from, and 2) that there are documents we would expect to find but which AREN'T there. Not to mention the thorny question of document authenticity. An extermination program on the scale of millions cannot hinge on the presentation of a relatively tiny collection of stray documents.
In law, there is the concept of "probative" vs "prejudicial" evidence. Courts often exclude evidence that is deemed to be overly prejudicial because this can bias a jury toward a guilty verdict even with weak direct evidence. Many of the purported "smoking gun" documents could fairly be described as cherry-picked and prejudicial. For example, on occasion some will trot out a passage in Mein Kampf where Hitler remarks that it would have been good if a few thousands of "these Hebrew corrupters of the nation had been subjected to poison gas." Here we have Hitler in his own words talking about gassing Jews. This sounds damning, but only to people who don't know any better. Mein Kampf was written in 1925, some 16 years before the mass extermination is now said to have begun. Hitler was referring to the gas warfare of WWI. And while it was once common to assume Hitler had been planning the Holocaust for many years, over time that view has largely fallen out of favor in light of, for example, the fact that the Germans, as late as 1940, were seriously planning to establish a colony for Jews in Madagascar. The attempt to connect the Mein Kampf passage to the Holocaust is therefore highly strained and relies entirely on the prejudicial value of the term "poison gas," which is this case is completely misleading.
The documents that aren't there. Given the scale of the extermination program that is alleged and the fact that the Allies conquered Germany and captured a huge volume of documents, we should expect to find considerable documentary evidence for such a program. There are many German documents that speak about the "Jewish question" and the "final solution" to the same. But these final solution documents generally speak of a plan to move the Jews out of the Reich, not to kill all Jews en masse. Hitler, Goebbels and others at times referred to "exterminating" or "annihilating" or "liquidating" Jews or Jewry, but such language was used way too early for the overly literal interpretation to make sense. Furthermore, the fact that these things were sometimes done in public speeches does not square very well with the idea that the Holocaust was kept carefully secret.
The gas chambers present an additional documentary problem because once Hitler had decided to exterminate millions of Jews, you would think there would be discussion over the technical and logistical issues involved in such a large scale mass murder project. Because there was no organization on these points, the story is that the technical means were largely improvised with all the details being left to, for example, Rudolf Hoess, the camp commandant of Auschwitz, to work out on the fly.
But how could such a massive hoax be possible?
Today, it is quite clear how "the hoax" is maintained. In many countries, it is illegal to disbelieve it which is a very clear and explicit enforcement mechanism. We also see that Google, YouTube, Amazon and other tech companies aggressively prevent people from ever encountering revisionism. We need not even allege a secret conspiracy here as these are blatant and unsubtle enforcement mechanisms. The current situation however does not explain how the hoax might have originated to begin with. Revisionists are primarily focused on testing the factual claims. Sorting out exactly how it all took root and developed to begin with is an additional aspect of it which is sometimes avoided but which has been taken up by several authors in detail. We now have a fairly good idea of how this happened, at least in broad strokes.
Most revisionists do not believe that it was an elaborately organized hoax from the beginning. Rather, it seems to have started as war-time atrocity propaganda not so different from the "corpse factories" stories from WWI. These war-time legends were a mixture of some deliberate falsehoods along and misunderstandings or rumors. (Note that even in cases where the lies were deliberate, it does not necessarily follow that from early on there was any grand vision of "the Holocaust" as we know it today). Whereas such war-time horror tales as the WWI corpse factories gradually faded from memory, thanks to Nuremberg and the other war-crimes trials after WWII, this war-time atrocity propaganda, after considerable harmonization, became settled fact. The Allies found it useful to play up German barbarity as it turned the war into a battle of good versus evil. And Zionists found it useful as they were looking to establish a Jewish state. As "the Holocaust" became entrenched and became more and more central to Jewish identity, it became all but impossible to correct the record.
It is important to note that this would not require much if any elaborate planning. There is no reason to assume for example that the Zionists, the Americans, the British, and the Soviets all got together during the war to work this out. Rather all were simply enemies of Germany and hence had a mutual interest in playing up atrocity propaganda against the Germans. Much of the concentration camp footage from 1945 for example is from the Western camps and often do not mention Jews at all. Yet this same footage, though originally shot for more general propaganda purposes, today serves as one of the major proofs of "the Holocaust," at least among the general population.
The Holocaust increased greatly in importance in the 1960s and 1970s. Ordinarily, events would decline in social and political importance as you get further removed from the event. This is consistent with it being largely a Jewish special interest.
But where did the Jews go?
When Holocaust promoters try to defend the Holocaust directly, e.g., by defending the testimonies, this tends to go badly for them. So in lieu of this, their favorite argument BY FAR is to offer an argument from ignorance, usually in the form of the but-where-did-they-go argument. This is an attempt to shift the burden of proof over to revisionists who are expected to provide a complete accounting of Jewish population movements in order to prove that the Jews survived.
In approaching the question of whether six million Jews were really killed, the demographic approach is perhaps the most intuitive place to start. Before the war, the global Jewish population was commonly said to be around 15-17 million, with a majority, roughly 10 million, in Europe. After the war, the higher-end prewar estimates were favored, and the postwar population was said to be around 11 million, yielding a net population change of five to six million. The reader may well ask: Isn’t such a large decrease a good circumstantial case that many of them were killed? At a glance, sure; however, the matter cannot be settled so easily as that as there are reasons to take these statistics with a grain of salt.
- The six million number was already in use among Jews before any of the postwar statistics were compiled. Hence we should expect some pressure to have the numbers conform to the predetermined figure.
- Often Jewish population statistics come from Jewish groups themselves, not any objective accounting. This has long been the case in the United States where Jews have repeatedly lobbied against attempts to distinguish Jews in the census or in immigration data. In the case of Eastern Europe, for the all important statistics for Russia and Poland, we are asked to rely on Communist figures.
- Jewish demography presents a number of distinct challenges. The foremost of these is that there is no consistent definition of “Jew.” Depending on whether Jews are counted based on religious observance, ancestry, self-identification, or something else, it is possible to get quite different results and for Jews to “disappear” statistically within the much larger surrounding populations.
- Many countries had significant border changes, including Poland. Additionally, many Eastern European Jews were Yiddish speaking and the distinction between e.g., “Russian,” “Polish,” “Slovakian,” and “Hungarian” Jews was not as sharp as one might assume.
- Even many Jewish experts have acknowledged these difficulties. Gerald Reitlinger, one of the pioneer Holocaust historians, admits in his statistical appendix that the six million figure was not well-founded. He suggested the true was around 4.2-4.6M.
Why do you care so much? Let's say the real number is less than six million. Isn't that still a tragedy?
If the real number is far below six million then, yes, that does matter. The legendary version enjoys an exalted position among historical events precisely because the factual claims are so distinctive and extraordinary. In the United States, Holocaust education is mandatory by law in around 23 states, and there is a major Holocaust museum on the National Mall. If the factual basis for the Holocaust is dubious, then the exalted position it enjoys is illegitimate.
Plato in The Republic introduced the concept of the “noble lie.” A noble lie is a false but useful story that promotes social harmony. It could be argued that the Holocaust story discredits fascism, ultra-nationalism, and racialist ideologies and that if the Holocaust were debunked some people may begin to entertain these dangerous views. But if those ideologies are bad, it should be possible to make a case against them on their merits without appealing to fake history. Moreover, it is not even really true that the Holocaust story reduces nationalism and so forth, for the Holocaust has long been central to Zionism and has long served as the moral justification for Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. If the Holocaust is false, it is also a great libel against Germany and it is a form of psychological abuse to tell German youth that they bear collective guilt for the greatest evil in world history if that is not the case. In the realm of foreign policy, the Holocaust story is frequently invoked in support of war; anyone opposing war against the villain du jour is accused of the sin of “appeasement,” just as Chamberlain. Hence we see “the Holocaust” is a pernicious lie rather than a noble one, even from a liberal perspective.