Date: 1933–1945
Location: Europe
The Conspirators: Zionists
The Victims: Students of history
Although history proves that Nazi Germany murdered millions of Jewish people during World War II, some believe that this is a story made up by Zionists (Jewish patriots who advocate for a strong Israel). Believers in this conspiracy theory sometimes say that all Germany did was relocate a large number of the Jewish population. They say that probably a few hundred thousand people were resettled, and they’ve just been missed in subsequent population counts. The ultimate goal of the Zionists who created the myth, according to the theorists, is to garner worldwide sympathy to help advance the political goals of Israel.
Some six million Jewish people were murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust. No serious evidence suggests otherwise.
When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, more than nine million Jewish people lived in Europe. Over the next twelve years, two-thirds of them were murdered by the Nazi regime, in what the Nazis called their Final Solution. Today we refer to it as the Holocaust, which is Greek for “sacrifice by fire.” In addition to the nearly six million Jews, some 200,000 Roma (or Gypsies) were killed, as were some 200,000 mentally and physically disabled Germans.
But from the very beginning, some anti-Semites and other Nazi sympathizers have denied that this took place. The campaign to deny or soften what was happening in Europe was successful enough that it wasn’t until the war’s end, when Allied troops physically walked into the concentration camps and saw the death with their own eyes, that its scope became fully understood.
This community of Holocaust deniers remains strong even today, two generations later. Most of them characterize the Holocaust stories as Zionist propaganda. Here are some of the most common claims:
• There is no record of any specific order by Hitler to exterminate Jews.
• Many of the most famous “death camps” (Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka) do not exist.
• There is no evidence of mass graves.
• The Zyklon-B gas the Nazis bought huge quantities of was used for delousing, not killing.
• Gassing someone with diesel engine exhaust wouldn’t be lethal.
• Wartime aerial reconnaissance photos of Auschwitz do not show mass graves or cremations.
• The death toll of six million has no evidentiary basis.
These would all sound pretty compelling—if any of them were true. Let’s take a look.
Anti-Semitism is, sadly, a cornerstone of many conspiracy theories. Some political scientists trace the reasons for this all the way back to the Bible story of Caiaphas and Judas who conspired to betray Jesus to the Romans. Ever since those times, many people have been mistrustful of Jewish people and some have held much harsher views, so we often find Jewish people to be the villains in modern conspiracy theories. The historical hatred toward Jewish people that drives today’s Holocaust deniers is the very same thing that made it easy for the Nazis to condemn them as the cause of their nation’s problems and launch the Holocaust.
Holocaust denial is often done by citing vast stores of trivial minutiae: factoids or extrapolations that are so many and varied as to give the impression of comprising an impregnable vault of proof. In their book Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? authors Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman discuss this strategy:
Most Holocaust deniers are very knowledgeable about very specific aspects of the Holocaust—a gas chamber door that cannot lock, the temperature at which Zyklon-B evaporates, or the lack of a metal grid over the peephole on a gas chamber door—so that anyone who is not versed in these specifics cannot properly question and answer their claims.
However, information to disprove the claims noted earlier is easy to come by. The only reason a researcher would look past that information is a desire to find only information that supports a desired viewpoint. What would drive such a desire? The only driver common to all Holocaust-denying authors is anti-Semitism. Here’s what a search intended to learn the true facts would reveal about each of the claims laid out in the Backstory section:
• It is true that there is no single order of the form “I order all Jews exterminated, signed Adolf Hitler.” But just because the order didn’t fit onto a single Post-it note doesn’t mean it didn’t exist. The evidence that the Holocaust was a fundamental of the Third Reich’s strategy is so manifold and vast that to claim otherwise is just plain absurd.
• The “missing death camps” in Poland that can’t be found on any maps were razed for a good reason, and that reason is not that they never existed. In 1943 as the Soviets advanced and pushed the Germans out of Poland, the Germans aggressively destroyed the evidence of their concentration camps. By the time the Russians arrived nothing remained but bulldozed fields, and by the end of the war, they looked just like more forest. Immense quantities of records exist for the camps, however, beyond the obvious eyewitness testimony.
• The claim that no evidence exists for mass graves is preposterous. Auschwitz alone employed 900 full-time Sonderkommandos, Jewish prisoners tasked with disposing of the dead. Many survived the war and their jobs became guiding the international excavation efforts, which lasted more than a decade.
• Zyklon B consisted of an adsorbent (basically kitty litter) infused with hydrogen cyanide and a warning irritant. It was indeed used widely for delousing clothing and fumigating buildings. Deniers claim it was not efficient for killing people, but mountains of evidence dispute this. It was widely used, primarily at Auschwitz, in the gas chambers.
• Gassing was also done with diesel trucks. By simply piping the truck’s exhaust into the cargo compartment, Jewish prisoners could be transported to a disposal camp and be dead upon arrival. The claim made by some deniers that this would not be lethal is easily disproven.
• The claim that aerial photographs of Auschwitz don’t show any evidence of mass burials or cremations can be disproven with a single Google image search. Just go online and try it.
• For the war crimes trials in Nuremberg, the bulk of the evidence presented proved that nearly 6 million Jewish civilians were murdered during the war (the actual number ranges between 5.5 and 5.9 million), and this number cannot be accounted for by “relocation.” For one thing, population censuses taken before and after the Holocaust showed that many Jewish civilians no longer existed. Anywhere. The rest of the evidence—which included documentation for all the points made earlier—consisted (in part) of 3,000 tons of documents seized from the Nazis: 3,000 tons! That’s a lot for even the most convinced conspiracy theorist to deny . . .