Definition of Holocaust Denial
Miscellanea / / July 04, 2021
By Guillem Alsina González, on Feb. 2018
When US troops discovered and occupied the Dachau concentration camp, they were horrified by what they found there. Informed, quickly Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was then commander-in-chief of the allied forces and future president of the United States, traveled to the scene and, also deeply shocked and horrified, had the conscience what the American soldiers were seeing, including forcing the residents of the population neighbor to visit the field and see the horrors that had been committed there.
Why did Eisenhower want witnesses and all that barbarism to be documented? Well because, as he rightly said, in the future there would be those who would try to deny everything. And so it has been, Holocaust deniers exist.
Holocaust denial is a school of thought that, as the name suggests, denies the extermination of Jews in territories occupied by Axis forces in WWII World.
Normally, this current of thought, supported by historians who deserve little credibility to the vast majority of the community of historians, links the Holocaust, which they claim has been invented, to provide a basis for the
movement Zionist and thereby press for the formation of the state of Israel.It is true that the creation of this state in 1948 “owes” much to the Holocaust because of the shame felt by the women. own winning powers of World War II, and although it had some opposition, also to the conjuncture partner-politics worldwide, and other reasons.
In some cases, deniers dispute the death toll, working on pre-war Jewish censuses.
His argument in this case is that, if we add the dead during the Shoah (name given to the Holocaust in Hebrew) with the survivors, Both those who stayed to live in Europe and those who emigrated to Israel, this number exceeds that of the Jews registered before the conflagration.
To understand this disparity, one must be aware that not all countries were census of Jews, not all countries were generalized prejudices against them (Danish and Finnish societies, to give two examples, were exemplary integrative for the time), and the racial laws and criteria employed by the Reich took into account "half-Jews" who in many places were not integrated into the Jewish community and, therefore, it did not count them as part of they.
We can consider that denialism began just at the same moment after the end of the war in Europe, in 1945, or even earlier, as Nazi hierarchs who denied knowing the facts and the they minimized.
The denialist theses suggest that the government Nazi Germany had no plans to carry out the mass murder of the Jewish population of the territory European that he occupied, nor did he develop them, not even the media.
The documents now kept in the Wannsee Interpretation Center (in the house on the homonymous lake that hosted the meeting of hierarchs Nazis who, in 1942, decided to carry out the extermination), make it clear that the Nazi regime had the will (to solve what they they called "the jewish problem”) And he looked for the means to systematize the extermination.
The difficulty of obtaining some evidence of what the Holocaust was (although there are many) is due to the fact that from the moment in As the fate of the war began to be unfavorable to the forces of the axis, the Reich hierarchs ordered the destruction of the entire documentation.
In 1958, Willis Carto founded the Liberty Lobby in the United States, a political group that denies the Holocaust and that publishes several texts that deny it. In addition, it is also an organization that attacks the rights of the Afro-American population, and an openly white supremacist.
Another famous denier is the British writer David Irving, a historian who did not study history or have a degree in history. the matter, and that he is famous for falsifying evidence and manipulating the statements of witnesses, whom he misrepresents to reinforce his arguments.
About Irving, a movie has even been made, Denial (denial), which explains his lawsuit against historian Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books for defamation, and won by Lipstadt and Penguin Books as defendants.
And perhaps the best-known case of Holocaust denial today was the politician's phrase French extreme right and founder of the National Front, Jean Marie Le Pen, who crossed out the gas chambers from "anecdote of history”.
In 2006 the government of Iran organized a meeting of deniers in Tehran. Iran is one of the countries that does not recognize or maintain diplomatic relations with Israel.
Denialism is a doctrine persecuted in some countries and protected in others by freedom of expression.
There are countries that criminally condemn Holocaust denial, in one form or another and under one form or another. law. Among them are Germany and Austria, but also France, Belgium, Poland, Canada, or Switzerland.
Among the countries that do not criminalize Holocaust denial in their penal code, we have Great Britain and the United States.
Eisenhower knew that, in the future, there would be those who would try to disprove the concentration camps and the Holocaust. He was not wrong. For this reason, he wanted to personally tour the fields and give an account of what he had seen, as well as preserve the testimonies of those who survived.
Today, denialist theories barely stand, although many people still believe them.
Photos: Fotolia - Berchtesgaden / Manuela Manay
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