The Grisly Return of Holocaust Denial

The old Holocaust deniers were crank historians. The new ones are something worse.

Edit (5/22/26). Previous versions of the article claimed that Mr. Hunt kidnapped Eli Wiesel. This is incorrect. He was charged with attempted kidnapping and other charges, but was acquitted of attempted kidnapping. He was, however, convicted of false imprisonment with a hate crime allegation, battery, and elder abuse. I apologize sincerely for the error.

Edit 6/8: The 5/22 edit said that he was acquitted of kidnapping. In fact, he was only charged with attempted kidnapping and acquitted of that.

That the Holocaust—the systematic mass murder of ~5-6 million Jews—occurred is beyond doubt. If you’re curious about the evidence for this, I recommend Michael Shermer’s book, History Speaks’ opening statement in his debate, and this essay by Eric Hunt, wherein he explains why he stopped denying the Holocaust. The blog Holocaust Controversies is a particularly good source for debunking random claims made by holocaust deniers, because the author is both overwhelmingly knowledgeable and has seemingly infinite patience to track down and rebut claims made by leading revisionists.

The evidence is quite overwhelming, so much so that the Nazis hanged at Nuremberg never denied that the Holocaust had taken place. One would expect that if large numbers of people were tried for a crime that hadn’t taken place, at least one of them would have denied the existence of the crime, rather than merely claimed to have been following the orders of others.

We have eyewitness testimony from victims, Nazi collaborators, diary entries, and many items of physical evidence, often converging to tell identical stories. Perhaps the most decisive evidence is the missing people—millions of Jews who vanished off the face of the Earth, often after being sent to concentration camps. Where, pray tell, did they go?

Generally, the revisionist explanation is that they were relocated somewhere else, despite there being no evidence of any relocation, no Nazi records describing relocation (despite meticulous Nazi record-keeping), and no plausible place they were relocated. Were they relocated to Eastern Europe—then why were Jewish populations in Eastern Europe almost entirely eradicated? Were they sent to the Soviet Union—why on God’s green earth would the Soviets continually take in German shipments of Jews midway through an active war? And why is there no record of this? To think this, you have to think the Nazis carted ~5 million people around the world without leaving even a shred of documentation.

Back in the day, the influential Holocaust deniers were people like Robert Faurisson and David Irving—men who spoke eloquently and wrote detailed footnote-filled documents, thus maintaining a thin veil of respectability. They wrote books, they went to work in suits, and sometimes were publishing historians, though, of course, on the Holocaust issue, they were completely and totally outside of the mainstream consensus. Because these people were cranks with a clear agenda, they never moved the needle on the Holocaust question.

Unfortunately, with the dawn of the internet, this has been replaced by an, if possible, even less reputable brand of Holocaust denialism. Internet holocaust denial increasingly claims to just be kidding and asking questions—it flirts with Holocaust denial without ever really stating it. It is part of the based ritual; in certain right-wing spaces, it has become fashionable to joke about the Holocaust and downplay it.

It’s unclear how seriously such people are in their denial—for most of them it’s just a joke or a meme. They uncritically repeat denialist talking points not because they’ve thought hard about them, but because they know that Holocaust denial is just about the most reviled view in modern society. You can get a bit of a rise out of liberals by making racist jokes, but vastly more rise by denying the Holocaust. Because much of the modern right has devolved to childish contrarianism—a desire to shock, rather than find the truth—denialism has taken off.

Nick Fuentes, a man who met with Trump, has repeatedly questioned Holocaust numbers. In one particularly amusing instance, Fuentes approvingly read out a chat question asking “If I take 1 hour to cook a batch of cookies and the cookie monster has 15 ovens working 24 hours a day how long does it take cookie monster to make 6 million cookies?” However, in fact, if the batches are twelve cookies, it would take just over four years! So even by Fuentes’s idiotic analogy—neglecting, for example, the number of Jews shot during the Holocaust and killed in other ways—the math still checks out! What a dunce!

A substacker called RFH (short for Rad-Fem Hitler), with tens of thousands of Twitter followers recently expressed support for a kind of Holocaust revisionism that is perhaps even dumber!

(The 5-6 million number comes from corroborating estimates of the number dead at each camp with the number of missing Jews).

This RFH comment is particularly demonstrative of the new breed of Holocaust revisionism in its sheer apathy and stupidity. She is not saying that she has investigated the numbers and concluded they’re wrong. Instead, she just sort of guessed the number and didn’t bother checking. The new breed of Holocaust revisionists are, more than anything else, monumentally lazy and apathetic.

Daryl Cooper, the man with the largest history substack, who Tucker praised as the most serious living historian, has similarly expressed support for Holocaust revisionism (Edit 8/6: Cooper it looks like was talking about something different, see Mark’s comment. Though Cooper has described himself as a big fan of David Irving chiefly known for holocaust revisionism, and he called Churchill the chief villain of world war two, so it still seems decently likely that he’s some sort of revisionist). Cooper has claimed that the Holocaust wasn’t a deliberate plan for extermination, but that Germans simply ran out of food and large numbers of Jews starved.

This contradicts explicit statements from Nazi officials demonstrating the pre-planned nature of the Holocaust. For example, in Goebbels’ diary, he wrote:

Beginning with Lublin, the Jews in the General Government are now being evacuated eastward. The procedure is a pretty barbaric one and not to be described here more definitely. Not much will remain of the Jews. On the whole it can be said that about 60 per cent of them will have to be liquidated whereas only about 40 per cent can be used for forced labor.

And in speeches, Goebbels said:

On the Jewish question, the Führer has decided to make a clean sweep. He prophesied to the Jews that, if they yet again brought about a world war, they would experience their own annihilation. That was not just a figure of speech. The world war is here, the destruction of the Jews must be the necessary consequence.

Hmm…I wonder what he was talking about.

Similar admissions come from Eichmann, Frank, Jager, Hoss, and various others. Jager admitted, for instance:

I confirm today that Einsatzkommando 3 has achieved the goal of solving the Jewish problem in Lithuania: There are no more Jewish in Lithuania, apart from working Jews and their families. I wanted to eliminate the working Jews and their families as well, but the Civil Administration and the Wehrmacht attacked me most sharply and issued a prohibition against having these Jews and their families shot.

And Höss went so far as to say:

I commanded Auschwitz until 1 December 1943, and estimate that at least
2,500,000 victims were executed and exterminated there by gassing and burning, and at least another half million succumbed to starvation and disease making a total dead of about 3,000,000.

(Note: Höss’s estimate far surpassed the real number of deaths which was nearer to 1.1 million).

But Cooper represents, in some sense, a dramatic departure from the new norm, a return to the old Holocaust revisionists who pretended to be serious historians. Most of the new breed are more like Fuentes, claiming that they’re just joking on the internet, just asking questions.

About 20% of young Americans deny the Holocaust. Edit: thanks for Dan Williams for pointing out that this is nonsense! Sorry to have fallen for it. The link also gives some reason to be skeptical of the other poll results. 46% of young people in France hadn’t heard of the Holocaust. 28% of Adults in Romania believe 2 million or fewer Jews were killed in the Holocaust. This is alarming. Remaining ignorant of history is bad in its own right, but remaining ignorant of the history of how a developed nation became engaged in targeted mass-murder is particularly dangerous. Those who dwell in developed nations ought to learn a thing or two about how developed nations carry out hideous crimes.

Of the dispiritingly sizeable chunk of the public who denies the Holocaust, most aren’t sophisticated revisionists. Most wouldn’t be able to describe in detail why they reject the arguments for the Holocaust. Rather than having fringe and kooky explanations of the data—whereby, for instance, they creatively reinterpret all the above statements—they’re just ignorant of the data. They just don’t know about the evidence for the Holocaust. For the modern right, the kinds of people who follow Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, and Andrew Tate, Holocaust denial is no longer a historical question to seriously evaluate, but a possible avenue for one to vice signal and demonstrate how little deference they give to the liberal establishment.

Anti-semitism is increasingly becoming mainstream on the American right. The DHS Twitter account recently Tweeted out a flagrant Nazi dog-whistle. Podcasts get millions of views peddling some combination of Holocaust denialism and—even worse—apologia, where people argue that though the Holocaust did occur, it was justified due to the threat from European Jews (occasionally one even gets the rather confusing combination of people who are skeptical that the Holocaust happened, but think it would have been alright if it had). Some of the most influential conservative commentators like Candace Owen are open anti-semites who peddle nonsense conspiracy theories about Jews.

This is an alarming trend. Anti-semitism is one of humankind’s most ancient evils, and though there was a long period during which it was in decline, it may be making a comeback. We should be alarmed at the spread of a murderous ideology that almost entirely annihilated European Jewry.

Millions of Jews were systematically murdered across Europe. We owe it to the victims of this unspeakable crime not to lie about them, treat them as a convenient political football, or use them as tools to vice signal our disregard for liberal norms. Millions of Jews across Europe are now ash because of the work of the Nazis, and those who downplay or defend their actions are complicit in a grotesque whitewashing of mass slaughter.