Nearly 80 years after the Holocaust, now that the last witnesses have almost all died and history education is declining, we increasingly see how the Holocaust is being openly questioned. This can range from trivialization or distortion to outright denial of the industrial mass murder of Jews by Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1945.
What is it?
Holocaust denial is an expression of anti-Semitism. The reality and scale of the genocide against the Jewish people is thereby trivialized, distorted or even completely denied. People who do this often have different intentions. Some are trying to exonerate Nazi Germany from responsibility for this mass murder. Others, on the contrary, want to portray Jews in a bad light by accusing them of inventing, exaggerating or exploiting the Holocaust for financial gain or sympathy.
Forms of Holocaust Denial
Trivialization, distortion, or denial of the Holocaust can take various forms. Sometimes someone tries to minimize the role of the perpetrators by coming up with extenuating circumstances or blaming other countries/groups. We also often see that doubts are sown whether the number of victims was really six million. People then often put forward a much lower number, which would allegedly be proof. Sowing doubt about the methods of murder also occurs: it is then claimed that in practice it was not possible to gasify six million Jews in a few years — even though, of course, it has never been claimed at all that the six million victims were all killed by gasification. Abuse, illness, medical experiments, starvation and executions were also used as killing methods to exterminate as many Jews as possible, but that is omitted from the argument.
Fault de The Jews'
Nowadays, we see more and more anti-Semitism being given an anti-Zionist look. The Holocaust is also regularly used as a tool in this regard: the Jews are said to have caused the Holocaust themselves, in order to ensure that they got Israel. By the way, the same line of reasoning also often comes back when it comes to the horrors of the massacre perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, 2023: Israel itself would have staged that too in order to steal more land from the Palestinians. Over the years, the escalating conflicts in Gaza have also been regularly equated to the Holocaust by opponents. In doing so, Jewish Israelis are often put on the same page with the Nazis.
Punishable
Holocaust denial has been punishable in the Netherlands since 1997. As of July 2023, this was explicitly included in the law: it was explicitly stated that publicly condoning, denying or grossly trivializing genocide, war crimes and the Holocaust is punishable. There is a maximum prison sentence of 1 year. By the way, the Netherlands was relatively late with this measure: in all other EU countries, Holocaust denial had been made a legal offence years earlier.