When US troops discovered and occupied the Dachau concentration camp, they were horrified by what they found there. Informed, the commander of allied forces and future president of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, quickly moved to the place – also deeply shocked and horrified – documenting the conscience of those soldiers who were there, as well as forcing the residents of the neighboring city. to visit the countryside and see the horrors committed so far. Holocaust Denial
Why did Eisenhower want to witness and document all that barbarism? Well, as he rightly said, in the future there would be those who would try to deny all this. And in this way, there are still Holocaust deniers.
Holocaust denial is a current of thought that, as its name implies, denies the extermination of Jews in territories occupied by Axis forces in World War II
Normally, this current of thought , supported by historians who deserve little credibility for the vast majority of their community, links the Holocaust that, according to them, was invented to give a base to the Zionist movement and with this put pressure on the formation of the state of Israel. Holocaust Denial
It is true that the creation of this state, in 1948, is “owed” a lot to the Holocaust because of the shame felt by the victorious powers of the Second World War, and despite having some opposition, also with the world socio-political situation, in addition to other reasons.
In some cases, deniers discuss the death toll from prewar Jewish censuses.
In this case, the argument is: if we add the dead during the Shoah (name given to the Holocaust in Hebrew) to the survivors; one must take into account both those who stayed to live in Europe and those who immigrated to Israel. This number surpasses the Jews registered before the conflagration.
To understand this disparity, it is important to know that not all countries registered Jews, as there was no widespread prejudice against them (for example, Danish and Finnish societies were inclusive models at the time), in addition, laws and the racial criteria used by the Reich took into account “half-Jews” who in many places were not integrated into the Jewish community and therefore were not counted. Holocaust Denial
We can consider that the denial started at the same moment the war in Europe ended in 1945, and even before, when the Nazi hierarchical prisoners refused to know the facts, minimizing them
The revisionist thesis points to the fact that Germany’s Nazi government had no plans to carry out mass murder of the Jewish population within the European territory it occupied, and not developed, not even the means of communication.
Currently, the documents preserved at the Wannsee Interpretation Center (in the lake house of the same name that hosted the meeting of Nazi leaders who, in 1942, decided to carry out the extermination) make it clear that the Nazi regime was willing (to solve what they called the “Jewish problem”) and thus sought the means to systematize the extermination. Holocaust Denial
The difficulty of obtaining some proof of what the Holocaust was (although there are many) is due to the fact that, from the moment when the fate of the war began to be unfavorable to the Axis forces, the Reich hierarchs ordered the destruction of the whole documentation.
In 1958, Willis Carto founded the Liberty Lobby in the United states, a political group that denied the holocaust and thus produced several publications.
Furthermore, it was also an organization that attacked the rights of the African American population, being openly in favor of white supremacy.
Another famous denier was the British writer David Irving, a historian who did not study history (or even graduated in the discipline ), but who stood out for falsifying evidence and manipulating witness statements, which they misrepresented to strengthen their arguments. Holocaust Denial
Irving even made a film “Denial” (Denial) explaining his judgment against historian Deborah Lipstadt and publisher Penguin Books for libel, with Lipstadt and Penguin Books won as defendants.
And perhaps the best-known case of Holocaust denial was the phrase by far-right French politician and National Front founder Jean Marie Le Pen labeling the gas chambers the “anecdote of history.”
In 2006, Iran’s government organized a meeting of deniers in Tehran. Iran is one of the countries that neither recognizes nor maintains diplomatic relations with Israel.
Denial is a doctrine pursued in some countries and supported in others by freedom of expression
There are countries that criminally condemn Holocaust denial in one way or another and under one law or another. These include Germany and Austria, but also France, Belgium, Poland, Canada and Switzerland.
Among the countries that do not qualify Holocaust denial as a crime in their penal code, we can highlight Great Britain and the United State s.
Eisenhower knew that in the future there would be those who would try to disprove the concentration camps and the Holocaust. And it wasn’t wrong. For this reason, he personally visited the camps to see what he saw, as well as to preserve the testimonies of those who survived.
Today, denial theories just continue, although there are still many people who believe in it.
