Nederlands Holocaust in Europe After 1945

Holocaust denial

The history of the holocaust is well documented. Countless documents, witness testimonies, archives, recollections of survivors, books, photos, films, and buildings all testify to the atrocities that took place during the Second World War. Yet there are always those who deny or play down the occurrence of the Holocaust. There is even a network of Holocaust deniers calling themselves revisionists, who use books, journals, and in recent years primarily the Internet, to sow seeds of doubts about whether the Holocaust actually happened. They claim that no Jews (or far less than 6 million) were murdered during WWII and that the National Socialists did not build gas chambers for murdering people, but rather for other purposes (e.g. baking bread).  Holocaust deniers have a political objective. By undermining the facts about the Holocaust, they try to show or convince the world that the National Socialistic system was not as wicked as everyone believes. They try to recruit new supporters for the nazi ideology. Denying, justifying, or playing down the Holocaust is punishable in a number of European countries. In the Netherlands for example, Holocaust denial falls under a discrimination ban and in Germany there is even a separate law that forbids the dissemination of the Auschwitz-lüge (the denial of Auschwitz).


32_Mahmoud_Ahmadinejad_2006 32_Irving_trial
  1. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, addressing the United Nations (2006), is one of the most well-known Holocaust deniers. UN Photo/Marco Castro
  2. The British writer David Irving, who specialises in books about the military history of the Second World War, was sentenced by British court for denying the Holocaust. He was imprisoned in Austria in 2006 for ‘glorifying the Nazi regime’. Unknown photographer.
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