Trope: Details of the Holocaust Have Been Exaggerated

Some so-called Holocaust “revisionists” claim they don’t deny the Holocaust happened, but simply dispute some of the findings of mainstream historians. They use this rhetorical strategy to try to avoid the moral disgust that many people feel towards Holocaust deniers, but upon examining many of their claims it is clear that their goal is indeed to deny the essential fact of the Holocaust: that approximately six million Jews were killed by the viciously antisemitic Nazi regime, including many in gas chambers.

Pseudo-academic Holocaust deniers and white supremacist, antisemitic trolls alike dispute the fact that six million Jews were killed, often claiming that the actual death toll is much lower, and many deaths were due to diseases like typhus rather than large-scale systemic murder. They also dismiss or minimize the role of the gas chambers, arguing that it was scientifically and technically impossible for the Nazis to have killed that many Jews, and the gas chambers were not used for extermination.

Holocaust deniers often highlight false or misleading statistics about the Jewish population before and after the war to support their claims. White supremacist trolls also attempt to minimize the scale of the Holocaust; their frequent use of the nonsensical phrase “six gorillion,” a clearly made-up number, is meant to indicate they believe the six million deaths are fake as well.

Trope: Witness Testimony is Fabricated or Inaccurate

Holocaust deniers often dispute the authenticity of Holocaust survivors’ testimonies, dismissing them as unreliable and inaccurate. They also dispute eyewitness accounts left behind by those who were murdered, claiming Jewish survivors and victims manipulate public opinion about Nazi Germany and make non-Jews feel guilty. Examples include claims that Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night has no historical value or that Anne Frank’s diary is a forgery.

Trope: Jews Invented the Holocaust for Financial and Political Gain

Holocaust deniers argue that the “Holocaust hoax” is designed to elicit guilt from Western countries and populations, which Jews then use for financial and political gain, including by pressuring Germany for reparations to Holocaust survivors.

Deniers imagine a vast, shadowy Jewish conspiracy that controls entire institutions and industries in order to disseminate the Holocaust narrative. They allege that white, Western Christian nations have been swindled and extorted by the Jews through the perpetuation of so-called “Holocaust mythology,” including educational curricula and Holocaust museums and memorials.

These claims draw on longstanding antisemitic tropes about alleged Jewish control and greed and the conspiratorial notion that Jews are engaged in a nefarious plot to take over the world.

Trope: The Holocaust is a Zionist Political Tool

For decades, anti-Zionism has been an important element of Holocaust denial.  Many deniers, drawing on tropes about Jews being greedy and deceitful, claim that Jews invented the Holocaust “story” in order to manipulate global powers and gain support for the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. They also claim that Zionists have continued to exaggerate or fabricate the scale of the Holocaust to increase political and financial support for Israel during periods of conflict with other countries, to distract from Israel’s actions against Palestinians and to silence Israel’s critics.

Hardcore Holocaust denial organizations and ideologues also push the narrative that the collective stifling of Holocaust denial is an example of supposed global Zionist control and the power of the “Israel lobby.” These arguments lean toward broader conspiracy theories about alleged attempts by “globalists,” “elites,” Jews and Zionists to control discourse across the world.

Trope: Jews are Responsible for Their Own Persecution

Some Holocaust deniers choose to blame the victims while also denying the most heinous crimes of the Holocaust. This trope alleges that, to the extent that Jews were targeted, it was due to direct Jewish collaboration with Hitler’s regime, and that those Jews who did die during this period were causalities of a Zionist-led and financed effort to work with Nazis directly in order to establish the State of Israel and persuade Jews to emigrate there. These deniers see no contradiction between denying the existence of the gas chambers and the Final Solution, and blaming Zionists for whatever Jewish persecution they acknowledge actually occurred.

The promotion of this trope distorts historical facts by downplaying the responsibility of the Nazis in perpetrating the Holocaust and reframing specific events both prior to and during World War II to fit their narrative. It also serves to portray Zionists historically and today as callous, deceitful and evil people who will take any actions necessary to achieve their goals.