Holocaust Skepticism

Back in 2001, German mainstream organizations were raising funds for a huge Holocaust Memorial to be erected in Berlin. They kicked off their fund-raiser campaign with huge billboards plastered all over Germany stating in large letters: “The Holocaust never happened” – and then in small print underneath, unreadably small for people driving by: “There are still many who claim that. There will be even more in 20 years. Therefore, donate for the memorial for the murdered Jews of Europe.” Needless to say, this didn’t go down well with the politically correct chosenite-fawning crowds. A scandal erupted rarely seen before, and all billboard posters across the entire country were instantly pulped. We revisionists had a heyday.

I used that slogan to create stickers that people could stick to anything in Germany, with our web address given for people to learn more. And people were buying it… I also took that event as an incentive to create an advertisement brochure that could be handed out, giving answers to frequently asked questions about “Holocaust denial.” That brochure was then posted online, and became the FAQ page of our domain www.vho.org.

In 2005, after my deportation to Germany, this revisionist advertisement campaign came back to bite me. I was indicted and eventually sentenced to a prison term for this very brochure. Together with the book Lectures on the Holocaust, these two items ended up costing me 30 months of my freedom. (See my book Resistance Is Obligatory for details.)

In early 2018, seven years after my return to the U.S., one of the many projects I was pursuing was creating new editions – in German and English – of this FAQ brochure. As cover illustration, I couldn’t use the nice alpine background of the above reproduced German billboard of yore for copyright reasons, so I had to look for a more pertinent but similarly attractive image. And the winner is… shown here. (You can download the PDF file here.) Instead of giving just the brief advertisement text printed on the back cover of this brochure, I’ll have the entire text printed. [Editor’s remark 2024: we reproduced the text as it exists at the time this volume goes to print.]

Who in Their Right Mind Would Doubt the Holocaust Happened?

To ask that question means to have misunderstood the issue. The question is not whether “the Holocaust” happened, but rather what exactly happened during the events usually referred to as “the Holocaust.” After all, there is no such place or single event as “the Holocaust.” It consists of many individual events and locations spread out over an entire continent during a time span of some four years.

Let us take as one example the Majdanek Camp near the Polish city of Lublin. What happened there during its existence between the summer of 1941 and the summer of 1944? How many inmates died in that concentration camp for what reasons and in which ways?

If we consult mainstream sources, we get different answers, depending on when they were published.

Shortly after the capture of the camp, the Soviets claimed a death toll of some two million for that camp during a press conference in Lublin on August 25th, 1944. During the Polish trial in late 1944 against six former camp guards, the Maj­danek death toll was set to 1.7 million. Roughly a year later, during the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, the Soviets introduced an investigation report claiming that up to 1.5 million inmates had been killed in that camp using seven different gas chambers, among other methods.

This figure, however, was significantly reduced three years after the war, when Polish judge Zdzisław Łukaszkiewicz, a member of the Polish “Commission to Investigate German Crimes in Poland,” published the commission’s findings about Majdanek, which set that camp’s death toll at 360,000.

The next downgrading came after the collapse of the communist Eastern Bloc, when Polish historian Czesław Rajca reduced the death toll down to 235,000. But that was still not the end of the death-toll deflation, because in a detailed research paper of 2005, Tomasz Kranz, then head of the Majdanek Museum, decided to streamline the official narrative by reducing the death toll down to 78,000, and to ditch five of the seven initially claimed gas chambers.

We learn from this that for many decades the official narrative of that camp was filled with exaggerations and inventions caused by wartime propaganda and hysteria. Much of what was initially claimed “never happened,” so to say.

And how can we be sure that today’s narrative is accurate? We cannot, because “denying the Holocaust” is a crime in Poland, so there is a limit to what historians are allowed to say and write.

The question is: how can one get to the bottom of this, if relying on mainstream sources seems to be a bad idea? Well, why not start with research results published by non-governmental, independent historians? These “revisionist” historians are usually and wrongly vilified as “deniers,” but their thoroughly researched book on Maj­danek, first published in 1998, proves them right. In it, they meticulously documented a total of some 42,000 victims of the Majdanek Camp, and the absence of any execution gas chambers. Hence, today’s officially sanctioned Maj­danek narrative is much closer to what revisionists have found out than to the initial propaganda-infested version, see the chart.[1]

Anyone with a skeptical mind should rightfully ask: And what else did they get wrong?

This brochure introduces the novice to the concept of Holocaust revisionism, and answers some tough questions that may come to the reader’s mind, such as:

• What does Holocaust revisionism claim?
• Why should I take Holocaust revisio­nism more seriously than the claim that the earth is flat?
• What about the pictures of corpse piles in the camps?
• How about the testimonies by survivors and confessions by perpetrators?
• What does it matter whether prisoners died from disease or poison gas?
• Why does it matter how many Jews were killed by the Nazis, since even 1,000 would have been too many?
• Whatever the circumstances, don’t Jewish victims deserve respect and compensation?

Welcome to our Introduction to Holocaust Revisionism!

This pamphlet gives succinct answers to questions which are most frequently asked about Holocaust revisionism.

If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch: Academic Research Media Review Education Group LTD, 86-90 Paul Street, London, EC2A 4NE, UK, sales@armreg.co.uk; www.armreg.co.uk

20 Questions and Answers

1. What is revisionism?
2. Why is historical revisionism important?
3. Why is Holocaust revisionism necessary?
4. What is meant by “The Holocaust” or “Shoah”?
5. What does Holocaust revisionism claim?
6. Does Holocaust revisionism ignore important evidence?
7. Does Holocaust revisionism just deny what is said about what happened?
8. Is Holocaust revisionism an anti-Semitic ideology?
9. Why should I take Holocaust revisionism more seriously than the claim that the earth is flat?
10. Why should I take Holocaust revisionism seriously, if mainstream scholars don’t?
11. What about the pictures of corpse piles in the camps?
12. How about the testimonies by survivors and confessions by perpetrators?
13. What does it matter whether prisoners died from disease or poison gas?
14. Why does it matter how many Jews were killed, since even 1,000 would have been too many?
15. Whatever the circumstances, don’t Jewish victims deserve respect and compensation?
16. Who are the Holocaust revisionists?
17. Do Holocaust revisionists want to exonerate Hitler?
18. What do Holocaust revisionists want?
19. Is Holocaust revisionism illegal?
20. Where can I learn more about Holocaust revisionism?

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1. What is revisionism?

The word “revisionism” is derived from the Latin word “revidere,” which means to look at something again. The revision of long-held theories is entirely normal. It occurs in the natural sciences as well as the social sciences, to which the discipline of history belongs. Science is not a static condition. It is a process, specifically the creating of knowledge by searching for evidence. When ongoing research finds new evidence, or when critical researchers discover mistakes in old explanations, it often happens that old theories have to be changed or even abandoned. By “revisionism” we mean critically examining established theories and hypotheses in order to test their validity. Scientists need to know when new evidence modifies or contradicts old theories; indeed, one of their obligations is to test time-honored conceptions and attempt to refute them. Only in an open society in which individuals are free to challenge prevailing theories can we ascertain the validity of these theories, and be confident that we are approaching the truth.

The famous science philosopher Sir Karl Popper once expressed it as follows:[2]

“The demand for scientific objectivity makes it inevitable that every scientific statement must remain tentative forever. It may indeed be corroborated, but every corroboration is relative. […] it is not his possession of knowledge, of irrefutable truth, that makes the man a scientist, but his persistent and reckless critical quest for truth. […] Those among us who are unwilling to expose their ideas to the hazard of refutation do not take part in the scientific game.”

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2. Why is historical revisionism important?

Like other scientific concepts, our historical concepts deserve critical scrutiny, especially when new evidence is discovered. A re-examination of historical narratives is particularly due if:

1. We are dealing with events which occurred in the far distant past. In this case our problem is that we often have very little evidence on which to base our theories.
2. We are dealing with events which occurred in the recent past. In this case, our problem is that we must contend with political influence deriving from these events.

When we are dealing with the distant past, even a small piece of new evidence can profoundly change our view. As for the recent past, the truism “the victor writes the history” still holds; victors are hardly ever objective. Revising a victor’s narrative of history is usually not possible until the confrontation between victor and vanquished has ceased to exist. Sometimes these confrontations last for centuries. Since historical research is rarely a profitable enterprise, almost all historical institutes are financed by their respective governments. Free and independent historical institutes are practically nonexistent. In contemporary history, in which individual governments have huge political interests, we must be skeptical toward the official narrative. Another truism reminds us that “he who pays the piper, calls the tune.” These reasons explain why historical revisionism is important and why the rulers of the world tend to oppose it.

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3. Why is Holocaust revisionism necessary?

The Holocaust is – or should be – a historical event and not a matter of religion. As such, it is subject to the same kind of research and scrutiny as other past events, and so our conceptions of the Holocaust must be subjected to critical investigation. If new evidence necessitates a change of our view of the Holocaust, then a change must take place. The same holds true when old assumptions are proven false. There is nothing reprehensible about questioning the accuracy of scientific assertions and attempting to deny their validity. Therefore, it is not reprehensible to approach prevailing conceptions of the Holocaust with skepticism, as long as it is done objectively and we have valid reasons to be skeptical.

Most people know that the powers existing today, particularly in German-speaking countries, are opposed to any critical approach to the orthodox Holocaust narrative. In fact, many European governments prosecute such approaches. Here then is an answer to the question of why revisionism as such is important (Question 2): Governments outlawing Holocaust skepticism obviously intend to maintain the present narrative of the Holocaust with all the official power at their command. One reason for this is the massive political and financial interests of those religious groups so meticulously described by the political scientist Dr. Norman G. Finkelstein in his book The Holocaust Industry that we strongly recommend to everyone (t.ly/STZ5S). Because of common exaggerations, inventions and distortions of the Holocaust, Prof. Finkelstein laments the fact that there aren’t more Holocaust skeptics:

“Given the nonsense churned out daily by the Holocaust industry, the wonder is that there are so few skeptics.” (p. 68)

And the late Prof. Raul Hilberg, during his lifetime the leading Holocaust scholar, repeatedly stated that superficiality and inadequate quality control are the greatest problems in the field of Holocaust research.[3] Hence, Holocaust skeptics are badly needed.

When challenging the orthodox Holocaust narrative, we are inevitably forced to contend with the entire postwar order, which was created by the victorious Allies. The very credibility of the victors’ version of history is at risk, as the Holocaust is the moral cornerstone of their version of World-War-II history. But this is not just a matter of maintaining a worldwide pecking order of nations or spheres of political influence. For instance, if we look into the war propaganda put forth by the U.S. before and during the wars against Serbia in 1999 and against Iraq in 1991 and 2003, plus when we look into how certain lobby groups have been pushing for a war against Iran since 2005, we recognize a pattern: Slobodan Milosevic, in 1999 leader of tiny Serbia, as well as Saddam Hussein and now the various presidents of Iran (most notably Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) were compared with… Adolf Hitler. Milosevic and Hussein were even accused of having committed similar crimes of genocide – against the Kosovo Albanians here or the Kurds there. These claims, among others, were used to justify the wars. And there is no better justification for a war than to prevent a new Hitler – or a new threat to exterminate the Jewish people, an accusation later leveled against Ahmadinejad.

We know today that the claims about weapons of mass destruction raised against Hussein were false. But they served their purpose well, because the world is so conditioned to react with automatic, Pavlovian-style reflexes to such claims. One reason why these accusations work so well and why the world is so gullible as to believe them, no matter how often they have been revealed to be wrong in the past, is because of that giant bogeyman called Hitler. Once his name is dropped and successfully put into the “right” context, there seems to be no stopping. War is the only solution to stop Hitler, Slobo-Hitler, Saddam-Hitler, Mahmoud-Hitler, or whatever their names may be. It has come to the point where summoning the evil spirits of Adolf Hitler and “his” über-genocide – the Holocaust – is the trump card needed to start just about any war the Powers That Be want to wage.

Norman G. Finkelstein agreed with this when he stated in an interview in the 2009 documentary Defamation by Israeli documentary filmmaker Yoav Shamir:[4]

“The irony is that the Nazi holocaust has now become the main ideological weapon for launching wars of aggression. Every time you want to launch a war of aggression, drag in the Nazi holocaust.”

Wasn’t one of the primary lessons of the world wars supposed to be that wars are evil? And wasn’t another lesson that governments use propaganda tricks to drive people into discriminating against minorities, into ethnic cleansing, into genocide, and into wars? And yet, after World War II the Powers That Be have been very successful in driving their people into one war after another by referring to this “mother-of-all-wars.” Pacifists are dumbfounded at how good those warmongers are in using the horrors of this greatest war ever to instigate even more wars. And so have some of us been for the past decade or so. Holocaust revisionism throws a monkey wrench into this mechanism of “Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace.” It challenges the core of the dogma which serves today’s imperialists so well. Famous British Jewish musician and writer Gilad Atzmon wrapped it up nicely in a blog entry on March 13, 2010 (t.ly/pQUrO):

“What is the holocaust religion there to conceal? As long as we fail to ask questions, we will be subjected to Zionists and their Neocon agents’ plots. We will continue killing in the name of Jewish suffering. We will maintain our complicity in Western imperialist crimes against humanity. […] The holocaust became the new Western religion. Unfortunately, it is the most sinister religion known to man. It is a license to kill, to flatten, to nuke, to wipe [out], to rape, to loot and to ethnically cleanse. It made vengeance and revenge into a Western value. […] Holocaust religion robs humanity of its humanism. For the sake of peace and future generations, the holocaust must be stripped of its exceptional status immediately. It must be subjected to thorough historical scrutiny. Truth and truth seeking is an elementary human experience. It must prevail.”

Hence, critically verifying what our leaders claim is the key to peace. And this is what revisionism stands for: Be critical! Don’t take for granted what those militant Powers want you to believe in justification of their deeds! Instead, look again (Latin: revidere) into their claims! Review their evidence! Revise your opinion, if needed. This definition of revisionism is the opposite of what those warmongers want you to believe, isn’t it? And for a good reason: because they want to prevent by all means that we obtain and entertain a critical mind.

The Catholic priest Viktor R. Knirsch of Kahlenbergerdorf in Austria has given us some insightful remarks on this subject:[5]

“It is the right and the duty of everyone who seeks the truth to doubt, investigate and consider all available evidence. Wherever this doubting and investigating is forbidden; wherever authorities demand unquestioning belief – there is evidence of a profane arrogance, which arouses our suspicions. If those whose contentions are questioned had truth on their side, they would patiently answer all questions. Certainly they would not continue to conceal evidence and documents which pertain to the controversy. If those who demand belief are lying, however, they will call for a judge. By this ye shall know them. He who tells the truth is calm and composed, but he who lies demands worldly justice.”

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4. What is meant by “The Holocaust” or “Shoah”?

By “Holocaust” (the Greek word for sacrifice of a burnt offering) as well as “Shoah,” which is the Hebrew word for “Catastrophe,” we mean the near-total extermination of a distinct group of persons through violence. Here we are referring to Jews who lived in areas controlled by the Third Reich. Loss of citizenship, deportation, and incarceration with forced labor, things which have always existed and exist today, should not be included since they do not result in the physical destruction of these groups. In the public’s mind, the opinion is often created that simply depriving Jews of civil rights during the Third Reich was part of the Holocaust. But if this were true, then depriving blacks in South Africa until the end of last century, Palestinians in Israel and the territories occupied by it, or the (partial) deprivation of the civil rights of Blacks and Native Americans in the USA until the middle of the 20th century would also have to be described as part of a Holocaust. Hence, this cannot be correct.

The common historical narrative of the Holocaust against the Jews is postulated on the following specific points:

1. An intention on the part of the National Socialist government to physically exterminate Jews.
2. An actual plan of the National Socialist government to physically exterminate the Jews.
3. A governmental agency and a budget to carry out this plan.
4. Technically refined methods of mass killing to achieve this goal, whereby homicidal gas chambers as well as mass shootings behind the Russian front would play a major role.
5. Techniques for disposing of millions of bodies; that is, crematories or pyres with adequate capacity and fuel.

Such allegations of mass murder in fast-acting homicidal gas chambers followed by disposal of the bodies in adjoining crematoria, that is to say, expertly planned and efficiently functioning assembly lines for homicide, are described as having been “unique” in human history. They distinguish the Holocaust from all atrocities that have ever happened.

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5. What does Holocaust revisionism claim?

First of all, because of misrepresentations by the media, it is necessary that we first clarify what Holocaust revisionism does not maintain:

• it does not deny that Jews were persecuted by the Third Reich;
• it does not deny that Jews were deprived of civil rights;
• it does not deny that Jews were deported;
• it does not deny the existence of Jewish ghettos;
• it does not deny the existence of concentration camps;
• it does not deny the existence of crematoria in concentration camps;
• it does not deny that Jews died for a great number of reasons;
• it does not deny that other minorities were also persecuted such as gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and political dissidents;
• and finally, it does not deny that all the above mentioned things were unjust.

None of these crimes of the National Socialist regime is doubted by Holocaust revisionists. Revisionists maintain, however, that all these injustices have nothing to do with the Holocaust, which is defined as planned and organized mass murder, carried out specifically in homicidal gas chambers (see Question 4).

Holocaust revisionists believe the following to be correct:

1. There was no National Socialist order or plan for the physical extermination of Jews (t.ly/siDXC);
2. There was no German organization and no budget for carrying out the alleged extermination plan. Consider the statement by Professor Dr. Raul Hilberg:[6]

“But what began in 1941 was a process of destruction not planned in advance, not organized centrally by any agency. There was no blueprint and there was no budget for destructive measures [of the Jews]. They [the measures] were taken step by step. Thus came about not so much a plan being carried out but an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus mind-reading by a far-flung [German] bureaucracy.”

3. In detailed investigations of former German concentration camps, expert researchers have established: No documentation or physical evidence for the existence of homicidal gas chambers or other methods of mass murder exists, and material traces of the victims are lacking as well.[7] Furthermore, the reports of mass shootings were greatly exaggerated and taken out of context,[8] and the infamous “gas vans,” the so-called mobile gas chambers, are a product of wartime propaganda.[9]
4. There were neither adequate industrial facilities nor sufficient fuel to cremate such a huge number of corpses. In fact, the capacity of the crematoria was barely enough to cremate the bodies of those who died from starvation and epidemics.[10]
5. Mass-murder claims rely almost exclusively on eyewitness accounts, whose unreliability is legendary and widely acknowledged (see Question 12).[11]
6. Despite massive surveillance by spies and resistance groups active in the vicinity of, and inside German labor, concentration and alleged extermination camps, all of Germany’s wartime enemies and adversaries conducted themselves as if no exterminations of Jews were taking place. The charges of genocide were not seriously raised until after Germany’s defeat, when there was no German government to dispute them.[12]
7. Statistical investigations of living Jews worldwide show clearly that the losses of this ethnic group during the Second World War were nowhere near six million. Although attempts were made to establish a somewhat more accurate figure,[13] the truth is that we simply don’t know for certain, as a comparison of revisionist and mainstream research has shown.[14] In fact, the six-million figure, together with extermination and Holocaust claims, has been bandied about mainly by Jewish media outlets since the late 1800s![15]

To find out more, please read the answer to the last Question.

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6. Does Holocaust revisionism ignore important evidence?

This imputation is quite ironic, considering that revisionism is a reaction to orthodox historians ignoring vast amounts of evidence.

Take, for example, the infamous Auschwitz Camp. While orthodox and revisionist historians agree to a large degree about aspects of the camp’s history not related to mass murder, their views diverge drastically from each other in this latter regard. The best effort mainstream historians have mustered so far to document mass-murder claims is a 270-page volume.[16] Each mass-murder location and method is covered in it with only a few pages. On the other hand, revisionist scholar Carlo Mattogno and his colleagues have published seventeen studies of altogether more than 4,400 pages (see some in the illustration below), each one of which examines in detail these various aspects of extermination claims made about Auschwitz.[17] The evidence presented in these studies greatly surpasses that of the orthodoxy both in quantity and quality.

Or take the so-called “Aktion Rein­hardt” Camps (Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka), which are said to have been pure extermination centers. Mainstream books on them are mainly based on selected quotations from cherry-picked testimonie[18] that they never subject to any source criticism, which is the Alpha and Omega of any historical scholarship worthy of that term. Compare this with revisionist studies on these camps that critically verify what witnesses have testified in a broader context.[19] By so doing, these studies also determine the trustworthiness of these witnesses, a factor assiduously avoided by the orthodoxy.[20]

Hence, revisionist studies on the Holocaust are actually the only ones meeting scholarly standards. The others? They play to popular – and legally mandated – renditions of the subject matters. They may be reassuring to the many, but they are disquieting to the discerning few.

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7. Does Holocaust revisionism just deny what is said about what happened?

Mostly, it must be admitted, we contest and refute, or at least question on grounds which we disclose in exhaustive detail. If sheer effort, ingenuity and integrity could get The Past to give up her secrets, revisionists would win the day with a clear, complete and factual account of What Happened.

As it is, the past in its totality is vouchsafed to no one – each of us is at best one of the six blind men feeling merely parts of the elephant, as the ancient Indian parable goes – and this ironically applies to “eyewitnesses” even more than to others. All of us, as eyewitnesses, can barely understand what we see, to say nothing of what we hear from others who claim to have seen.

“War criminals” have been hanged, and a people (the Germans) condemned and even expelled from their ancestral homes on the strength of disprovable testimony by selected parties eager to wreak revenge and receive compensation for wrongs committed, or not committed, against them by a dictatorial German government that never told the German people what it was doing, let alone asked them to approve of it.

Revisionists are troubled by such developments, if only because anyone, after the next war, might find themselves on the receiving end of such a process themselves.

Thus, it is on the score of a concern for justice that we concentrate so on debunking unfounded and false claims of cruelty and murder leveled against the losers of the last world war.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls …

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8. Is Holocaust revisionism an anti-Semitic ideology?

Holocaust revisionism is a scholarly, fact-seeking method based on the critical review of evidence, not an ideology. It simply reviews the prevailing historical narrative that has been influenced mainly by Soviet, British and American wartime propaganda. We need to keep in mind that this propaganda was not the result of any ideology, but of the most-atrocious war ever fought among the nations of the world. The more atrocious a war, the more atrocious and distorted we can expect the accompanying propaganda to be. Critically reviewing these propaganda claims is neither anti-American, anti-democratic, anti-communist, anti-Russian, anti-Polish etc., nor is it anti-Jewish. It is simply directed against false claims made by all sides in the heat of this conflict.

These claims furthermore do not concern just the fate of Jews during the Third Reich but also that of Slavs, Sinti and Roma (Gypsies), Jehovah’s Witnesses and homosexuals.[21] Importantly, recent mainstream scholarship has confirmed that Revisionists are correct on several critical points of Holocaust history and probably correct on many more (see the back cover of this brochure on the Majdanek Camp).

Questioning what we are told by government authorities, orthodox scholars or mainstream media may be anti-establishment, but it is not directed against any ideology, religion or ethnic group. Presenting evidence from thorough archival studies and forensic research, however, is directed only against false and at times irrational beliefs.

In fact, the shoe is on the other foot. To explain this, here is a less-contested example: Just because some Christians detest certain research results on biological evolution doesn’t make the results anti-Christian; it only makes these Christians anti-scientific. And in the same vein: Just because certain people detest certain research results on the Holocaust doesn’t make the results anti-Semitic; it only makes these people anti-scientific. While belief in the Holocaust is understandably important to many Jewish groups, not believing in the impossible tales of human-soap factories or steam chambers of death is no more anti-Semitic than not believing in the transubstantiation of the flesh is anti-Catholic.

It is true that revisionist findings are sometimes cited by individuals or groups with certain religious or ideological agendas that many find contemptible. But the use (or abuse) of research results for political agendas happens potentially in every field of study that has any bearing on current issues. The problem then lies in those citing research results to support ideological or political agendas, not with the research results. The same, of course, holds for those opposing such results on any grounds other than scientific ones, because let’s face it: Most people opposing revisionism do it for political reasons, because they have the irrational fear that widespread acceptance of revisionist persuasions will have some demonic political repercussions.

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9. Why should I take Holocaust revisionism more seriously than the claim that the earth is flat?

There is no topic where dissent is taken more seriously than when it comes to the Holocaust. The United Nations have issued a number of resolutions against it,[22] and an increasing number of nations prosecute Holocaust revisionism as a crime, punished with up to 20 years in prison (see Question 19). The comparison is therefore wrong. In fact, the shoe is on the other foot. It was once a sin to proclaim the truth that the earth is a sphere and revolves around the sun, a crime punished by the Catholic Church with imprisonment or even death, as Giordano Bruno and Galileo Galilei found out the hard way. Today, flat-earthers may be laughed at, but they are not persecuted beyond that. Holocaust revisionism, however, is being taken very seriously, because if it were not suppressed, it would spread like a wildfire and threaten the Powers That Be, just as Bruno’s and Galilei’s theories did.

Whether an unusual claim ought to be looked into and maybe taken seriously should be judged by what is at stake. Let me give a few examples:

1. What would be the repercussions if it turned out the earth is flat? I cannot see any. So why bother? And why do millions of scientists, technicians and global logistics people, working daily with satellites, GPS technology, global(!) navigation techniques etc., successfully rely on the assumption that the earth is spherical, if that were not so?
2. Take, on the other hand, the events of 9/11/2001. What would be the repercussion if it wasn’t a Muslim terror act, but a false-flag operation by government authorities? (See www.ae911truth.org) It would have enormous effects, so it’s worth our time looking into the arguments of both sides.
3. Or take the claim that no man ever landed on the moon. Other than leaving the LB Johnson and Nixon administrations with egg in their faces, and a dent in the U.S.’s self-confidence and credibility, the issue is more academic than impactful. Although it is an admittedly interesting challenge.
4. Last but not least we have the climate-change debate. What if climate change is – rightly or wrongly – assumed real, and we implement drastic measures to counter it? Then worldwide carbon-emission limits might cause a major economic crisis at worst. On the other hand, what if climate change is erroneously assumed a hoax, and we keep spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere? Then a mass extinction event might happen on earth, wiping out most life as we know it, including all humans. Which brings up the issue of risk assessment. Any side in any debate can be wrong. The question then is: what is at stake? If the matter is merely academic in nature, there is no need to get involved, but when world peace or even the survival of humanity is at risk, one should get informed and get involved.

Coming back to the Holocaust, the question is what is at stake here. Some of it was touched upon in the answer to Question 3. This is not the place for a thorough political and sociological analysis of the Holocaust’s place in modern western society. Suffice it to say that the Powers That Be prove ultimately with their unparalleled and unprecedented persecution and suppression that this is THE MOST IMPORTANT TOPIC about which they are hell-bent on keeping an absolute control over our minds. That’s fishy enough to warrant a closer look.

In addition to this, here are a few observations highlighting the importance of this greatest of all taboos:

• The Holocaust was and is the justification for the creation of Israel, and the ethnic cleansing of Arab Palestinians from territories under its control.
• The Holocaust is the most important aspect of modern, predominantly secularized Jewish identity (t.ly/vTATq).
• The Holocaust is abused as a justification for human-rights violations and violations of international law by Israel.
• The Holocaust is the moral justification for the special relationship between the US and other western nations on the one hand and Israel on the other, resulting in almost unanimous and unconditional support for whatever Israel does.
• The Holocaust is in extension used to support and justify the “war on terror,” which is to a large degree a war of the West against the Arab and Muslim world as Israel’s potentially most-dangerous opponent and enemy.
• The Holocaust is by a great margin the most important aspect of modern, predominantly secularized German identity. It makes the German nation defenseless against many claims usually resisted by self-confident nations. Germany’s Holocaust cult is a suicidal death cult. This has become crystal clear with the 2015 refugee crisis.
• The Holocaust is abused to undermine any attempt at self-preservation by any European nation, or by Europe in general, thus jeopardizing European civilization as we know it and threatening all European countries to be turned into an assembly of failed third-world countries.

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10. Why should I take Holocaust revisionism seriously, if mainstream scholars don’t?

They do take it seriously. Some orthodox Holocaust scholars have dedicated entire books trying in vain to refute revisionist arguments (they usually avoid the core revisionist points and focus on straw-man arguments or side issues), while many other mainstream scholars are simply mortally afraid to address the issue, because they either have to lie (regurgitate the orthodox narrative uncritically), which most scholars refuse to do, or have their careers ruined and their social life upended, which is not a pleasant prospect either. So they stay out of trouble by not getting involved and paying lip service to the taboo.

Here are some of the attempts at refutation by orthodox scholars as discussed by revisionists (find out more about them at armreg.co.uk; some are available as free eBooks):

• Bungled: “The Destruction of the European Jews”: R. Hilberg’s Failure to Prove Nazi “Killing Centers”
• Auschwitz: Plain Facts. A Response to J.-C. Pressac
• Auschwitz Lies: Legends, Lies, and Prejudices on the
  Holocaust
• Inside the Gas Chambers: The Extermination of Mainstream Holocaust Historiography
• The Real Case for Auschwitz: R. van Pelt’s Evidence from the Irving Trial Critically Reviewed
• Bungled: “Denying the Holocaust.” How D. Lipstadt Botched Her Attempt to Demonstrate the Growing Assault on Truth and Memory
• Bungled: “Denying History.” How M. Shermer and A. Grobman Botched Their Attempt to Refute Those Who Say the Holocaust Never Happened.
• Bungled: “Debunking Holocaust Denial Theories.” How J. & L. Morcan Botched Their Attempt to Affirm the Historicity of the Nazi Genocide
• Mis-Chronicling Auschwitz: Danuta Czech’s Flawed Methods, Lies and Deceptions in Her “Ausch­witz Chronicle”

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11. What about the pictures of corpse piles in the camps?

To the right we see a photograph of victims of the typhus epidemic in a mass grave at the Bergen-Belsen Camp as taken by the British Army in May 1945.

This photo is typical of a large number of such photos often shown on Holocaust documentaries either without commentary or else with allegations that the dead are victims of the Holocaust. In fact, it is a photograph of victims of an epidemic which occurred at war’s end. The cause of death is evident from the condition of the corpses and was also demonstrated by thousands of autopsies performed after the camps’ liberation by Allied forensic experts.[23] If they had been gassed, they would not be emaciated, and if they had died of starvation, they would have swollen joints and stomachs.

All photographs of heaps of corpses were taken in camps located in west and central Germany around the end of the war, such as Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, and Buchenwald, where historians now agree no mass murders took place. Significantly, there are no such photographs taken at the camps in which mass murder is alleged to have occurred (such as Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmno, Majdanek.) These eastern camps were all in areas which came under Soviet control at war’s end. It is very telling that the Soviets released no pictures of mass graves or heaps of corpses, and allowed no journalists, medical professionals, or other experts to examine the camps.

Since the end of the 1980s, revisionists have been investigating these sites for evidence of mass murder, but government authorities have obstructed their efforts by all possible means.

In the absence of authentic photographs documenting mass murder, it frequently happens that photographs of those who died of malnutrition and typhus in the western camps at war’s end are presented as evidence of deliberate mass murder. To be sure, the hellish conditions in these camps at war’s end convinced many Allied observers that mass murder had taken place, as initial reports indicate.

In reality, however, these conditions resulted from a situation for which the German government was not solely responsible. Toward the end of the war, Himmler illogically ordered the evacuation of the eastern camps as the Red Army approached, which led to hopeless overcrowding in the western camps. By that time, Allied bombing had completely destroyed the German infrastructure, making it impossible to supply the camps with food, medical and sanitation supplies.

Misunderstandings about the causes of the subsequent massive die-off continue to this day, especially among Americans. The respected leftist historian Norbert Frei has given the following reason for misinterpretation, (t.ly/2f30K, p. 400):

“The shock of these discoveries [piles of corpses] often led to false conclusions which turned out to be enduring.”

There is no denying that a government which imprisons people in camps is responsible for them, and so those unjustly imprisoned were therefore victims of the Third Reich, even if they died “only” of disease.[24] However, one should not overlook the fact that by war’s end, mountains of corpses had become commonplace throughout Germany. In German cities there were 600,000 victims of Allied terror bombings. Millions more died of starvation and disease, which continued rampant through 1949. In Eastern Europe some two million Germans were murdered by Serbs, Czechs, Poles, and Russians in the course of history’s bloodiest ethnic cleansing. In the POW camps of the western Allies, a million young German men died and millions more vegetated. Hundreds of thousands more were shipped to the labor camps of the Soviet GULag never to be seen again. But the media show only one variety of corpse piles, those in the concentration camps. We should all ask ourselves why this is so. Should the dignity and respect, which we owe the victims of atrocities, depend on their nationality or religious affiliation?

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12. How about the testimonies by survivors and confessions by perpetrators?

Let’s talk about perpetrator confessions first, as they seem most compelling. After all, why would they lie? These testimonies can be divided into roughly three groups:

1. confessions under duress
2. tactical court room confessions
3. uncoerced, voluntary confessions

On 1: Right after World War II, the Soviet, British and US forces maintained torture centers where they systematically tortured and abused hundreds, if not thousands of German defendants (see for instance Ian Cobain’s book Cruel Britannia[25]). Some of the most “important” confessions resulted from this, for instance that of Rudolf Höss, former commandant of the Auschwitz camp, whose family was threatened on top of it.[26]

On 2: As the archives of the Holy Inquisition prove, tens of thousands of defendants confessed voluntarily during centuries of witch trials that they were witches and had intercourse with the devil. The vast majority of them were never put under duress. What has that to do with the Holocaust? Challenging the doctrines of the Catholic Church was as futile back then as challenging the doctrine of the Holocaust has been since the end of World War II. In both cases, any defendant put on trial could expect a mild sentence only if he confirmed the general story but tried to minimize his own involvement and responsibility. This is the exact pattern one finds with many modern defendants. Some, of course, didn’t get the message and stubbornly denied, and they were the ones who frequently were treated harshly.

On 3: These are similar to depositions by survivors, treated below. Uncoerced testimonies by survivors, bystanders or alleged perpetrators can be wrong for many reasons. When it comes to survivors, the obvious one is that some of them might exaggerate or lie resulting from a desire for revenge. But that can explain only some of the testimony. Other possible reasons are:

• Rumors – especially during times of war and unrest, any kind of prisoner camp is a hotbed for the creation and spreading of rumors.
• Misunderstandings – partial information about events are frequently misinterpreted to fit into preconceived notions, feeding on rumors and anxieties.
• Hearsay – information not experienced directly but imparted orally has the tendency of getting distorted quickly.
• Interpolation – the human brain abhors uncertainty. We all consciously and even more so subconsciously fill the lack of data by making assumptions and jumping to conclusions, which we then perceive as “data.”
• Manipulating the human memory – research has shown that many people tend to integrate information and disinformation they receive from others into their memory in such a way that they wrongly assume it stems from their own first-hand experience. That tendency increases with increased exposure to such information and with increased expectations by others to “remember.”
• Disease – typhus was a widespread epidemic raging in many German camps. One of its symptoms resembles meningitis in that the patient experiences nightmarish horror delusions expressing his deepest fears. Many inmates survived the disease but were unable to process the memories from their hallucinatory episodes.
• Pressure – almost everybody in the world expects survivors to “remember.” That pressure is huge, in particular for Jewish survivors, who are considered traitors if they don’t remember the “right” things.
• Fear and threats – anyone failing to remember the “right” things, or even contesting certain things, must fear negative social and sometimes even legal repercussions. After all, there is nothing viler in this world than to deny that “it” happened, whatever “it” means.
• Impunity – no matter what camp survivors say, they will be believed. The more fantastic their stories, the more riveted the audience, the more fame and money can be reaped. If they are ever caught lying, there is no repercussion. In fact, criticizing survivors is considered blasphemous and can lead to social persecution and in many countries even prosecution. There is simply no incentive to tell the truth, but lots of incentives to lie and exaggerate.

In the end, whether we think a witness tells the truth or not should not depend on how likable or trustworthy we think he is, but on whether his or her statement is plausible, physically possible, and supported by other, verifiable evidence. After all, the unreliability of testimonies by persons who are party to a crime (victims and perpetrators) is legendary.[27]

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13. What does it matter whether prisoners died from disease or poison gas?

From the point of view of each victim and their personal suffering, there is no difference. One could even make the point that it would be preferable to die quickly from poison than to die slowly from an epidemic disease.

However, in the present discussion we are not focusing on the intensity of the victims’ suffering, which no one questions. Here we are concerned with the historical accuracy of certain allegations and the moral guilt of the so-called German “nation of perpetrators” as well as the consequences which resulted from these allegations.

Considered from the historian’s as well as the perpetrators’ point of view, there is a tremendous difference between being victims of raging epidemics and victims of planned industrial mass murder in chemical slaughterhouses designed specifically for homicide. Epidemics, starvation and other catastrophes resulting from poor treatment, political mistakes and military defeats are recurrent in the history of mankind.

Here we are concerned with the historical and moral uniqueness of industrial mass annihilation of a specific subgroup of a population. The entire German nation has been held responsible for this unique crime, not just individual perpetrators. This is the source of occasional discrimination against Germans (“collective responsibility” and “hereditary guilt”), and of privileged treatment of Jews as the main targets of this claimed genocide.

We strongly suggest you read what Dr. Finkelstein had to say on this subject. (The Holocaust Industry, t.ly/STZ5S).

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14. Why does it matter how many Jews were killed, since even 1,000 would have been too many?

It is doubtlessly correct that even one is one too many, and really one must go even farther than that: even those measures of Third Reich persecution which did not result in outright deaths were in every respect unacceptable. But this is not a valid argument against the statistical investigation of the “whether” and “how” of the destruction of the Jews, and for three reasons.

First, this objection does not satisfy simply for the reason that it is precisely the number of victims that has been considered sacrosanct for decades. If the number of victims did not matter, it would not be necessary to protect it as a social and even criminal taboo. Evidently there really is more to the six-million figure than merely the fact that it includes a great many individual fates: What is at stake is a symbol not to be easily relinquished, since justified doubts about the number might quickly lead to further undesirable skepticism about further subsections of the Holocaust narrative. While not denying the tragedy of the victims’ individual fates in any way, science must nevertheless insist that numbers always be open to discussion. It is downright irrational that, on the one hand, those who doubt the six-million figure are socially persecuted or even subjected to criminal prosecution, while society and the justice system, on the other hand, react to valid arguments against this selfsame six-million figure by suddenly declaring it irrelevant and insisting instead on the dignity of even the very first victim. Is the six-million figure a standard deserving of protection by criminal law, or is it irrelevant? It cannot be both at once.

The second and also most important argument goes as follows: The ethically correct evaluation that even one victim would be too many must not be a pretext for prohibiting scientific research. This is intolerable for the simple reason that science must always be allowed to find precise answers. What would we think of an official who demanded that an engineer not be allowed to conduct thorough risk assessments of construction projects, because even a low risk value would be intolerable? An engineer subjected to such an absurd demand would quickly arrive at incorrect results and would be a threat to any company that hired him. The same is true for historians. If a historian is forbidden to conduct critical investigations because they are considered morally unacceptable, then we have to assume that the results of such skewed historiography are unreliable. And since our knowledge of contemporary history exerts a direct influence on politics, our public policies are mistaken and unreliable as well.

It is the key function and responsibility of every branch of science to provide accurate figures and values. The principles applying to engineering, physics, and chemistry cannot suddenly be abandoned in historiography for political reasons – unless one is intellectually prepared to retreat deep into the darkest middle ages.

Third, the morally correct view that even one victim is one too many cannot on principle be a barrier to the scientific investigation of a crime which is generally called so morally reprehensible as to be unique and unparalleled in the history of mankind. An allegedly uniquely reprehensible crime must be open to a procedure that is standard for any other crime as well, namely that it is – and must be – investigated in detail.

Further still: anyone who postulates a crime to be unique must be prepared for a uniquely thorough investigation of this alleged crime before its uniqueness is accepted as fact. If a person or group blocks investigation of an allegedly unique crime on grounds of moral outrage, then that person or group is guilty of a unique crime itself. This unique crime consists of first denying defense against preposterous allegations, then preventing criticism of such tyrannical methods on the pretext of unusual guilt. This was the precise fate of Germany following World War II, with the result that Germans were first brutalized, then slandered and denied opportunity to defend themselves. The treatment of vanquished Germany by the victorious Allies has been truly unique in modern times, since the same Allies otherwise give even the most notorious serial murderers an opportunity to defend themselves in court.

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15. Whatever the circumstances, don’t Jewish victims deserve respect and compensation?

Everyone who is treated unjustly is entitled to reparations, and every victim of crime deserves respect commensurate with human dignity. Revisionism is concerned solely with determination of objective historic fact and has no aim to deny either respect or restitution to anyone who has suffered injustice. In case the evidence shows that a particular historical event did not have anywhere near as many victims as was previously believed, this is simply a historical determination that has no effect on the fate of anyone. Objective evidence could even be of assistance to newly discovered victims.

As of end of 2022, the German government had paid some 82 billion Euros (some 90 billion U.S. dollars) in reparations to those “persecuted by the Nazi regime” (t.ly/eOlEr). But as large as these sums seem to be, the main issue isn’t even financial in nature, which can be demonstrated with just one example. According to Wikipedia, in just the year 2010, the Germans collectively spent 120 billion euros (almost 150 billion U.S. dollars) on their vacations![28] This makes Germany the world leader in per-capita tourism expenditures. It is therefore obvious that the Germans spend on their vacation every single year more than they have ever paid to victims of the Holocaust and other (alleged or real) persecution committed during World War II. This shows clearly that the burden on the Germans cannot be all that high, financially speaking. So this is not primarily a financial issue. The real issue is moral and legal in nature. Perhaps you remember a basic principle which is the law in every constitutional state: accountability does not extend to convicts’ relatives. There should therefore be a time limit for claims made against the German people, as the wartime generation is dying out. In addition, this is also a matter or fairness, as the Germans weren’t the only ones inflicting pain and suffering on others. For instance, wouldn’t it be interesting to know when the four million Germans who were exploited as slave laborers by France, the UK, Norway, the United States, the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia… for years and sometimes even decades after the end of WWII (goo.gl/tEBaFd) may finally be allowed to claim reparations? When will the 12 million eastern German victims of ethnic cleansing and the survivors of the two million who were murdered or died in the process (goo.gl/3Q98Z7), the six hundred thousand victims of Allied terror bombings (goo.gl/Yng7GA), the millions of Germans who died of starvation under Allied postwar blockade and de-industrialization and Eisenhower’s withholding of food to them, be given proper recompense?[29]

Do not all victims of injustice deserve the same respect and reparations? Or are some victims more equal than others?

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16. Who are the Holocaust revisionists?

Holocaust revisionists are not a homogenous group. They include Jews (defined by heritage: Josef G. Burg, Roger Guy Dommergue, David Cole, Joel Hayward, Gerard Menuhin, Paul Eisen, Gilad Atzmon, Henry Herskovitz); Christians (Michael A. Hoffman, Robert Countess); Muslims (Ibrahim Alloush, Ahmed Rami, Roger Garaudy) as well as agnostics and atheists (Germar Rudolf, Bradley Smith, Robert Faurisson)

Some revisionists suffered persecution by the National Socialist regime as well as internment in concentration camps (Paul Rassinier, Josef G. Burg). Others are veterans of World War II, from both the German and Allied armed forces (Willy Wallwey, Wilhelm Stäglich, Douglas Collins.). Some revisionists are professors (Prof. Robert Faurisson, Prof. Arthur R. Butz, Prof. Thomas Dalton, Prof. Costas Zaverdinos) and some have PhD degrees (Dr. Wilhelm Stäglich, Dr. Robert Countess, Dr. Herbert Tiedemann. Dr. Nicholas Kollerstrom). Some have masters degrees in chemistry, physics or engineering (Willy Wallwey, Walter Lüftl, Germar Rudolf, Arnulf Neumaier, Friedrich Berg); there are historians (Mark Weber, Robert Countess, Carlo Mattogno, Jean Plantin, Nicholas Kollerstrom) as well as teachers in other fields, such as Jürgen Graf.

The ranks of Holocaust revisionists include Communists and Socialists (Paul Rassinier, Roger Garaudy), moderate Leftists (Pierre Guillaume, Serge Thion), Libertarians (Andrew Allen, Germar Rudolf, David Cole, Bradley Smith, Richard Widmann), Conservatives (Carlo Mattogno, Willy Wallwey), Rightists (Udo Walendy, Mark Weber) and National Socialists (Ernst Zündel, Vincent Reynouard).

Since we don’t consider it important to classify revisionists according to political orientation, we cannot vouch for the correctness of these designations, though.

Among our ranks are Frenchmen (Robert Faurisson, Pierre Guillaume, Roger Garaudy, Paul Rassinier, Vincent Reynouard, Jean Plantin), Americans (Bradley Smith, Thomas Dalton, Mark Weber, Arthur Butz, Richard Widmann, Fred Leuchter), Germans (Germar Rudolf, Walter Lüftl, Willy Wallwey, Arnulf Neumaier, Wilhelm Stäglich), Swiss (Jürgen Graf, Arthur Vogt), Italians (Carlo Mattogno), Spaniards (Enrique Aynat), Jordanians (Ibrahim Alloush), Moroccans (Ahmed Rami), Swedes, Danes, Britons (Nicholas Kollerstrom), Poles, and Russians, to name just a few.[30]

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17. Do Holocaust revisionists want to exonerate Hitler?

Historians must not pay attention to what effect their research has on anyone’s reputation, even and especially their own. Hence, whatever the effects of revisionist findings are on Hitler’s or anyone else’s reputation, it simply is of no moment. Let’s quote Germar Rudolf on this point:[31]

“Revisionists are repeatedly accused of wanting to whitewash National Socialism, redeem it, or even resurrect nationalistic-authoritarian political systems, or assist in a breakthrough of nationalism. That may be true for some revisionists, but certainly not for all of them. But be that as it may, the fact is that political suspicions do not contribute anything to the factual debate, as they cannot refute factual arguments. When it comes to discussing facts, it is therefore irrelevant both what the revisionists want and what others accuse them of wanting.

While researching, our highest goal must at all times be to discover how historical events actually occurred – as the 19th-Century German historian Leopold Ranke maintained. For example, historians should not place research in the service of making criminal accusations against Genghis Khan and the Mongol hordes, nor to whitewash any of their wrong-doings. Anybody insisting that research be barred from exonerating Genghis Khan of criminal accusations would be the object of ridicule and would be subject to the suspicion that he was, in fact, acting out of political motives. If this were not so, why would anyone insist that our historical view of Genghis Khan forever be defined solely by Khan’s victims and enemies?

The same reasoning applies to Hitler and the Third Reich. Both revisionists and their adversaries are entitled to their political views. The accusation, however, that revisionists are only interested in exonerating National Socialism and that such an effort is reprehensible or even criminal, is a boomerang: This accusation implies that it is deemed unacceptable to partially exonerate National Socialism historically, and by so doing, always also morally. But by declaring any hypothetical exoneration based on possible facts as unacceptable, one admits openly not to be interested in the quest for the truth, but in incriminating National Socialism historically and morally under any circumstances and at all costs. And the motivation behind this can only be political. Hence, those accusing revisionists of misusing their research for political ends have themselves been proven guilty of exactly this offense. It is therefore not necessarily the revisionists who are guided by political motives – though quite a few of them certainly are – but with absolute certainty all those who accuse the revisionists of harboring reprehensible motives. Although many consider the anti-fascist motives of those combatting revisionism as morally worthwhile, they remain political motives that are hostile to discovering and evaluating the factual issues at hand.

In short, our research must never be concerned with the possible ‘moral’ spin-off effects of our findings in relation to politicians or regimes of the past or present, but solely with the facts. Anyone who argues otherwise is the enemy of knowledge.”

Again, it may be true that some individuals or groups sometimes cite revisionist findings to support their religious or ideological agendas. But let us be very clear here: We Holocaust revisionists depend more than anyone else on the protection of our inalienable rights to freedom of information and freedom of expression. Hence, we oppose any measure limiting these rights, be they in the past, the present or the future.

In the spring of 1933, the German government under Hitler decided to suspend and later effectively revoke most Germans’ civil rights as they were enshrined in the German constitution of the time. Anyone decrying similar acts happening today in many European countries (see Question 19) must also condemn Hitler’s acts as unacceptable. We can’t have it both ways.

Moreover, when Hitler decided in the summer of 1934 to execute without due process several leaders of the SA for allegedly planning a putsch, rather than handing them over to the court system for prosecution, they committed murder, plain and simple. Anyone decrying arsons, bomb attacks, physical assaults and murder perpetrated against revisionists as unacceptable acts of (attempted) murder[32] must also condemn Hitler’s acts as unacceptable. We can’t have it both ways.

Finally, after the infamous 1938 “Night of Broken Glass” pogroms against Jews in Germany, Hitler and his government decided to make matters worse by prohibiting insurance companies from paying indemnifications to Jews for damages incurred during these acts of vandalism, and by collectively punishing all the Jews in Germany with a fine of one billion Reichsmarks! Anyone decrying that we revisionists as victims of societal persecution get fined and imprisoned on top of this must also condemn Hitler’s acts of blaming and punishing the victims. We can’t have it both ways.

And we won’t even start with incarcerating people with or without due process merely because of their peacefully expressed views or religious and ethnic affiliations. Anyone decrying that we revisionists are incarcerated for our peacefully expressed views – and we are – must also condemn Hitler’s acts along the same lines. We can’t have it both ways.

We cannot stop certain people from applauding, condoning, justifying or defending these and other criminal acts of the Hitler government. But we can show that we condemn them wholeheartedly, on our own behalf, as peaceful dissidents.

Our guiding principle is that freedom of speech is unlimited, as long as it does not advocate, promote, justify or condone the violation of anyone’s civil rights in the past, present or future – because those who work to deny others their civil rights or justify it when it happened in the past cannot expect to have their own civil rights protected. But there is no civil right to a certain version of history.

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18. What do Holocaust revisionists want?

I would like to turn that question around: What do our detractors want who declare an irreproachable intention – the critical review of one chapter in history – to be taboo, and who ostracize, persecute and even incarcerate any offenders? These are frequently the same people who impute all sorts of evil intentions to us revisionists. But we are not the ones persecuting and incarcerating peaceful, innocent people! It is therefore much more conducive and important to ask about the motives of those who mercilessly persecute the revisionists with their worldwide power. Why do they do that?

And if you, dear reader, are unwilling to pursue the question about their motives, but keep wondering about ours, then maybe you should start questioning your own bias.

Since the revisionists comprise such a heterogeneous group (see Question 16), it is impossible to state what “the” revisionists hope to accomplish. Obviously, any cliché about revisionists must therefore be false and misleading. However, revisionists do have one thing in common: determination to expose the lack of evidence for the conventional Holocaust narrative and to convince others of it.

Revisionists would probably quarrel endlessly about everything else, particularly if they tried to seek common political ground. It is, therefore, false and misleading to ascribe a uniform political agenda to them. The political views of revisionists are indeed varied and incongruous. In contrast to that, the governments and media of most western societies spread the cliché that all revisionists are right-wing extremists who are attempting to rehabilitate the National Socialist regime in order to usher in a new authoritarian government of the right. This may be true for some revisionists, but they are a minority within revisionist ranks.

Perhaps a few prominent examples will illustrate the political variety of revisionists’ political leanings, which makes it inconceivable that they harbor the sinister intentions often ascribed to them:

Paul Rassinier: What would have motivated a French Communist, who was interned in a German concentration camp on account of his activities in the Resistance in helping Jews to escape the Nazis, to rehabilitate National Socialism?

Josef G. Burg: What would have motivated a Jew who suffered under the occupation of both the Germans and Russians during the Second World War?

Fred Leuchter: What would have motivated an entirely apolitical American expert in execution technology?

Pierre Guillaume, Serge Thion: What would have motivated leftist-anarchist Frenchmen to rehabilitate National Socialism in Germany?

Roger Garaudy: What would have motivated a longtime prominent French Communist?

Bradley Smith, Richard Widmann: What would have motivated American libertarians?

Jean Plantin, Germar Rudolf: What would motivate these liberal and conservative European professionals, born in the mid-1960s, to rehabilitate National Socialism?

Does it really matter what a revisionist is trying to achieve with his political or other ideas? After all, the proof for someone’s claim lies in the evidence adduced, not in their political agenda.

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19. Is Holocaust revisionism illegal?

In the United States, it is covered by the First Amendment, like a peaceful, scholarly speech, which means that it is perfectly legal to voice, write, publish revisionist views. Things are quite different, however, when we turn to Canada, Australia, or even many countries in Europe and to Israel (see goo.gl/8Tpbiq).

The reason for this persecution is the claim that revisionist theories insult Jews, and that it is illegitimate to heap insult upon those who have been injured during World War II. Although Holocaust revisionism does not address anything about Jews as such (although some supporters of revisionism might), the leaders of most Jewish communities feel heavily offended by it, because revisionism directly or indirectly comes to the conclusion that several Jewish personalities were not always truthful when testifying about their experiences in World War II.

Of course, it would be surprising if Jews were the only identifiable group of humanity who never lie, distort, exaggerate or are simply mistaken, but apparently leading Jewish representatives feel, and the authorities in numerous western countries agree, that nobody should ever be allowed to claim that certain Jews made untrue statements about the Holocaust.

However, if we look into the legal situation, we must insist that theoretically speaking Holocaust revisionism should be perfectly legal in all these countries. This is so because all these nations signed the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, which makes these Human Rights binding on all these nations. Freedom of speech can be limited only in cases of insult or incitement to criminal acts, but freedom of scientific research and peaceful speech can never be limited – theoretically.

For this reason, a comprehensive German PhD thesis on The Punishability of the Auschwitz Lie (Die Strafbarkeit des Auschwitz-Leugnens) came to the conclusion that Holocaust revisionism itself cannot be legally repressed, as this violates basic human rights.[33] The facts are different, however. So how is that discrepancy between ideal and reality justified?

As a justification for this blatant violation of civil rights, it is often claimed that revisionist views, even if presented soberly and without any inflammatory words, could instigate people to commit illegal acts against others (mainly Jews) or could even threaten “public peace.” Purely factual, soberly presented and substantiated claims, however, can never cause such acts, no matter how controversial and taboo-breaking they might be. If people overreact to such texts, the problem lies within those people – their upbringing or social conditioning – or within society itself for having created a taboo in the first place.

The claim that matter-of-factual views about the persecution of the Jews itself could be inflammatory is therefore a simple lie. If that method were to be applied universally, it could be misused for the prohibition of each and everything, if only some influential group can be found that feels sufficiently upset or unsettled by it. In fact, the concept of “public peace” is a perfect authoritarian tool to suppress any controversial view, no matter how legitimate.

The only rule needed for governing free speech is this: Everything is permitted, as long as one does not call for, promote, condone or justify the violation of the civil rights of others. Since all acts that really threaten the public peace, like calls for a violent revolution, insurrection, putsch, riot, pogrom, ethnic cleansing, etc., are at once calls for the violation of the civil rights of others, the concept of “public peace” becomes obsolete and can no longer be misused by the authorities to stifle legitimate peaceful yet controversial views.

Another justification for anti-revisionist oppressive laws, in particular in the German-speaking countries, goes roughly as follows:

In order to prevent that minorities will again be persecuted, dissidents imprisoned and books burned, as has happened in the [Nazi] past, we must for a change persecute some other minorities, imprison other kinds of dissidents and burn their books.

This perversion of logic does not require any further comment. Hence, we are dealing with “democratically” enacted, yet tyrannical laws permitting the majority to suppress a peaceful minority, plain and simple. It is therefore not Holocaust revisionism which is unlawful, but the laws that outlaw it. U.S. American Henry David Thoreau wrapped it up nicely when he wrote some 160 years ago (in opposition to war and slavery):[34]

“Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens to be on the alert to point out its faults, and do better than it would have them? Why does it always crucify Christ, and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels? […]

A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose. […]

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison.”

Or to put it as did Mahatma Gandhi, who was inspired by Thoreau’s essay some 70 years later:[35]

“So long as the superstition that men should obey unjust laws exists, so long will their slavery exist.”

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20. Where can I learn more about Holocaust revisionism?

The best, fastest, cheapest place for this is the Internet and, especially for English-language readers, the websites www.codoh.com and www.HolocaustHandbooks.com. If your service provider blocks these pages (obvious proof of censorship), you can circumvent Big Brother by getting a subscription to a Virtual Private Network, VPN, which hides your whereabouts, or with anonymizing services, which hide the content you are receiving from your Internet service provider.

Don’t Know Where to Start? Start with a Movie

To ease you into the subject, we recommend that you sit back, relax and watch an introductory documentary. There are several choices we recommend. You can find them all for watching and downloading free of charge at www.HolocaustHandbooks.com:

Holocaust, Hate Speech & Were the Germans So Stupid?

The late British video-journalist Anthony Lawson, a retired international-prize-winning commercials director, cameraman, ad agency creative director and voice-over artist, expertly introduces the viewer to the basic concepts and consequences of skepticism about the orthodox Holocaust narrative. (35 min.)

The First Holocaust: The Surprising Origin of the Six-Million Figure

This documentary reveals how the myth of six million persecuted Jews threatened by a holocaust was created in the late eighteen-hundreds (yes 1800s!), became a popular theme during and after the FIRST World War (not the Second), and has stayed with us ever since. (1 hr 10 min.)

Probing the Holocaust: The Horror Explained, Part 1

This documentary shows with a few pertinent, well-documen­ted examples – the cases of the Dachau, Nordhausen and Bergen-Belsen Camps – why it is important to distrust wartime propaganda about claimed Nazi atrocities, not least because much of this propaganda has been admitted by mainstream historians to have been mendacious. (1 hr 36 min.)

Read Our Books

If you’re hungry for more, you can browse any of our growing roster of documentaries, or, if you want to delve into the matter even deeper, you may want to start reading our books, whose information density is easily tenfold that of a documentary.

As introductory reads I recommend one of the following books, depending on how many pages you want to go through, and which level of immersion you are looking for (find out more about them at armreg.co.uk):

Thomas Dalton, The Holocaust: An Introduction

This book has only 115 pages of text in a handy, small paperback format of 5×8 inches, and it available at a very affordable price as a hard copy. Amazon customer E.J. Peterson, a verified buyer of the book, wrote the following brief review about it (on March 6, 2017, Amazon blocked all our books and deleted all associated book reviews, so you can’t find the reviews quoted here anymore – so much for freedom of speech…):

“Phenomenal. A fantastic starting point.

For a 115-page book, it is a truly shocking and eye-opening work. I cannot recommend this highly enough. Honestly, subject your accepted opinion on the matter to this 1-hour read and see where you sit after that.”

T. Dalton, Debating the Holocaust: A New Look at Both Sides

The above-mentioned brief introduction into the topic is a condensation of this more-encompassing study, in which Dalton studies the topic more thoroughly by juxtaposing the most important arguments of the two contending sides in the raging debate about the “Holocaust,” which, some say, should not be debated in the first place. The book has some 300 pages of text of a larger format (6×9 inches). Amazon customer “patito,” a verified buyer of the book, wrote this brief review about it:

“Most important Holocaust book in this moment

The updates to the 2015 edition are especially important as the author corrects and forwards a proposal towards the end. A very good compilation of the real state of affairs regarding the actual evidence for one argument or the other. The Epilogue is especially critical to understanding the whole picture.”

N. Kollerstrom, Breaking the Spell: The Holocaust – Myth & Reality

Science historian Dr. Kollerstrom explains the Holocaust issue for the common reader from a scientific, but also from a societal point of view. This paperback book has some 220 pages of text (6×9 inches). This has been our best-selling book ever since it was first published. Amazon customer “Giordano Bruno,” an Amazon-verified buyer of the book, wrote this brief review about it:

“Myth Busting

An interesting and informative book, particularly how it expresses that the “Holocaust” has basically become a sacred religion that cannot be challenged even by science. Anyone who dares to criticise or explain that certain narratives of the holocaust are physically impossible is instantly branded as a heretic and excommunicated. Would definitely recommend reading it!”

Germar Rudolf, Lectures on the Holocaust: Controversial Issues Cross-Examined

At 530 pages of text, this book has been characterized as encyclopedic in its coverage of the topic, yet at the same time as a truly riveting read. Written in an unusual dialogue form, it draws you right into the debate the author engages in. This is a brand-new edition issued in February 2023, which is greatly improved by new material. It can be downloaded as an eBook (PDF and ePub) free of charge at www.Holocausthandbooks.com. Amazon customer “HolocaustHistory channel,” a verified buyer of the book (he bought it from us, not from Amazon), wrote this brief review about it:

“Outstanding

This is without doubt one of the best treatments of the holocaust debate. Rudolf is judicious and moderate throughout, and packs in a great deal of information. By writing dialogues, he gives himself the opportunity to give clear answers to many questions that will occur to the reader. If you are at all interested in the holocaust, you have to read this book.”

…and more

If you want to have answers to even deeper-penetrating questions, we highly recommend you familiarize yourself with our prestigious series Holocaust Handbooks, which has many studies on highly specialized topics. Most of these books can be downloaded as eBooks (PDF and ePub formats) free of charge at www.HolocaustHandbooks.com.

For readers who are interested in papers on certain topics, the following revisionist periodicals are recommended:

• Inconvenient History (ongoing since 2009): InconvenientHistory.org
• The Revisionist (1999-2005; defunct since my arrest in Oct. 2005): t.ly/SXU5M
• The Journal of Historical Review (1980-2002; defunct): t.ly/6A5ch
• Vierteljahreshefte für freie Geschichtsforschung (1997-2006; defunct shortly after my arrest in Oct. 2005, German language): www.vho.org/​VffG

You can also visit our revisionist bookstores selling some of these items in hardcopy: armreg.co.uk

(Back to the list of questions)

Editor’s Note: Not included here are advertisements at brochure’s end for all volumes of the series Holocaust Handbooks, and for Armreg’s Holocaust Encyclopedia.

Endnotes