Deniers of the Holocaust — the systematic murder of around 6 million Jewish people in World War II — either deny that such a genocide took place or minimize its extent. These groups and individuals often cloak themselves in the sober language of serious scholarship, call themselves “historical revisionists” instead of deniers and accuse their critics of trying to squelch open-minded inquiries into historical truth.
Top Takeaways
Holocaust denier claims run the gamut. Some of these falsely say that most Jewish people were not killed in a World War II systematic genocide but instead were the victims of disease, starvation or other indiscriminate hardships. Other Holocaust-denial group members embrace claims that the gas chambers did not exist or were used only to delouse prisoners. Many deniers claim the gas chambers could not have killed as many victims as historical research shows, propping up their arguments by highlighting discrepancies in the number of recorded casualties. Others suggest that the gas chambers were built after the war as a way of extracting reparations from Germany and to justify the creation of Israel.
Holocaust deniers, including those who downplay and distort the reality of Nazi atrocities, also promote antisemitic tropes common within the broader white power movement, including conspiracies that Jewish people control the media and political systems through powerful behind-the-scenes networks. In all its forms, the antisemitism of these groups and individuals delegitimizes the suffering of Jewish people and exacerbates intergenerational traumas by denying Holocaust history and codifying antisemitic propaganda under the guise of academic research.
Key Moments
Several events in 2024 underscored the evolving tactics and growing visibility of Holocaust denialists. In June, the Jewish Problem Conference brought together many prominent antisemites. Keynote speakers like E. Michael Jones and Germar Rudolf used the event to propagate antisemitic ideologies under the guise of scholarly debate. Planning for the 2025 conference is already underway, signaling the movement’s intention to formalize and expand its platform.
The year also saw a major fallout between Rudolf and Michael Santomauro of the antisemitic publisher Clemens and Blair, leading to the collapse of their affiliated outlets Castle Hill Publications and the pseudo-academic journal An Inconvenient History. Other groups ramped up their efforts to distribute antisemitic material online. Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH) revamped its website to promote resources like the fraudulent Holocaust Encyclopedia, continuing to disseminate materials that attempt deny or rewrite the reality of the Holocaust. Such groups as CODOH and the Institute for Historical Review also expanded their activities on alt-tech platforms.
Active hate groups
The Antisemitism ideology file includes a list of Holocaust denial hate groups that were active in 2024.
What’s Ahead
Holocaust deniers mask antisemitism and racism under the guise of free speech and “asking questions.” Major denial organizations are producing online content, books and other publications to push the message that the current understanding of the Shoah has been drastically overblown because of Jewish control of media and academics.
As the generation of Holocaust survivors dwindles, their stories are increasingly confined to digital archives, videos and memoirs, making them more susceptible to manipulation and distortion. With fewer survivors to counter revisionist claims directly, these groups are likely to grow bolder, producing works similar to those of E. Michael Jones and Thomas Dalton. Their expanding presence on social media, combined with the erosion of robust Holocaust education and the continuation of book bans, creates fertile ground for antisemitic materials to infiltrate public discourse.
Background
Holocaust denial has long been an essential manifestation of antisemitism in the radical right. The Institute for Historical Review (IHR), formed by Willis Carto in 1978, became the first major Holocaust-denial group to develop a substantial membership base, though deniers had been active prior to its existence. As the founder of numerous far-right groups and a campaigner for several conservative political candidates, Carto had varied and far-reaching influence. Following his ouster from IHR for fraud and financial mismanagement, Carto went on to found The Barnes Review — a leading U.S.-based Holocaust-denial publication — and the American Free Press, a newspaper peddling Holocaust denial and other conspiracy theories.
Carto’s contemporary, German-born Ernst Zündel, remains a seminal figure in Holocaust denial even after his death in 2017. In 1977 he founded the now-defunct Samisdat Publishers in Toronto to print texts promoting Nazism and Holocaust denial. Most notably, Zundel sponsored and published The Leuchter Report, a biased study of the chemical contents of gas chamber walls in Auschwitz, as part of his defense for spreading Holocaust denial material in Canada. Author and self-described historian David Irving, himself a figurehead within the denial scene, testified on Zündel’s behalf. Irving’s writings devolved into open denialism in the 1980s with claims that Hitler was unaware of the systematic extermination of European Jewish people. His defense of Zündel’s views and The Leuchter Report further confirmed his antisemitic beliefs. Irving has been banned from entering Austria, Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, South Africa and most recently Lithuania.
Irving’s cohort, Mark Weber, also remains active in the movement as the director of IHR. While IHR no longer publishes The Journal of Historical Review, and Weber himself made waves with a 2009 essay in which he advocated shifting attention from denying the Holocaust toward the supposed structures of “Jewish-Zionist power,” his website continues to publish and sell denialist material. On April 28, 2015, Weber received notice that he had been banned from entering the U.K. due to “unacceptable behaviour.”
Another significant group that promotes Holocaust denial and revisionism is the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH). Founded by Bradley Smith in 1987, it became a more significant online platform at the end of the 20th century and into the 21st. Focusing on faux-academic publishing, speeches and interviews, CODOH has carved out a sphere of authority in far-right spaces. The organization disingenuously presents its antisemitism as “truth-seeking.”
In 2014, CODOH began publishing Holocaust handbooks and documentaries to support a purported “revisionist” view of the Holocaust that denied the true extent and character of German atrocities. In 2015, CODOH became the publisher of a quarterly online magazine titled Inconvenient History: A Quarterly Journal for Free Historical Inquiry.
With Smith’s death in 2016, Michael Santomauro has risen to be a prominent member of CODOH. Santomauro is CEO of Castle Hill Publications — CODOH’s online bookshop — and is a primary contact for another of its publishing affiliates, Clemens and Blair.
Holocaust Denial and the Radical Right
Despite many influential Holocaust deniers aging out of relevance, the tenets of denial have become embedded in other segments of the movement. On the Daily Stormer website, founder and editor Andrew Anglin has described the Holocaust as a “ridiculous fake shower room bug-spray death chamber hoax” that forms “the core of [Jewish people’s] identity.” His vitriolic antisemitism alleges that white people are being duped into complacency under a Zionist-controlled government — a trope antisemites refer to as “ZOG.”
Holocaust denial has also manifested within white nationalism and the Ku Klux Klan. Greg Johnson, the editor-in-chief of the white nationalist publishing company Counter-Currents, credits David Irving as instrumental in his conversion to white nationalism. Johnson is wary of Holocaust deniers’ bellicose and spurious claims in his publications, stating in a July 2012 article that “Holocaust revisionism is a legitimate field of historical research” but it “is simply not necessary to the white nationalist project.” However, he continues to support this segment of the far right by speaking alongside Holocaust deniers at exclusive forums in the United States and Europe.
Similarly, one of the longest lasting Klan groups, the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, questions the validity of the Holocaust. These unfounded claims about the Holocaust are residual ideological underpinnings from when former Grand Dragon David Duke founded the group in 1975. In his rise to leadership, Duke was influential in pushing antisemitism further to the fore of the Klan’s ideology.
Beyond organized white supremacy, Holocaust denial has recently been in the political spotlight. Eight-time failed U.S. House of Representatives candidate Arthur Jones of Illinois, whose membership in the American National Socialist Workers Party gained significant media attention, has belligerently dismissed the Holocaust as “the biggest, blackest lie in history.” Jones failed to make it into office in the November 2018 midterm elections, receiving 26.5% of the votes in the general election after running unopposed in the Republican primary.
However, others in the far right who have disputed the Holocaust have garnered attention in the halls of political power. Chuck C. Johnson denied the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz and greatly obscured the number of casualties in an early 2017 Reddit post. He has also been instrumental in raising legal defense fund for avowed neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin. Johnson has since recanted his denial of the Holocaust and dismissed these comments as simply trolling. Despite this antisemitic history, he has been embraced by several members of the GOP. On Jan. 16, 2019, Johnson met with then-U.S. Rep. Phil Roe of Tennessee and U.S. Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland. Previously, Johnson attended the 2018 State of the Union with then-U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida and was part of a meeting with then-U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of California.
Furthermore, in the debate regarding free speech in the era of social media, Meta Platforms Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg came under scrutiny in 2018 for stating that Holocaust-denying speech should be allowed to remain on the company’s Facebook platform, because he said he believed that deniers aren’t “intentionally getting it wrong.” While Zuckerberg initially failed to distinguish between inadvertently inaccurate information and bigotry aimed at degrading and vilifying Jewish people, he reconsidered his stance and banned Holocaust denial on the platform in October 2020.
On the social media platform Gab, however, distinctions between First Amendment rights and violent hate speech remain convoluted. Robert Bowers, a man radicalized on Gab, was indicted for federal hate crime indictments in the killing of 11 Jewish people in a Pittsburgh synagogue on Oct. 27, 2018. On Jan. 29, 2019, the Justice Department indicted Bowers for 13 violations of the federal Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. On June 16, 2023, a jury found Bowers guilty of 63 counts, including hate crimes. The jury recommended a death sentence.
In the wake of the attack, Gab founder and CEO Andrew Torba promised “to keep Gab online and defend free speech and individual liberty for all people.” While Bowers never explicitly refuted the Holocaust, his antisemitic posts were bolstered by a community where denying the Holocaust continues to excuse and diminish violence against Jewish people.
Most recently, some individuals have invoked the imagery and history of the Holocaust while seeking to build a narrative of victimization around COVID-19 vaccine campaigns and mask mandates. Numerous far-right figures have undermined the gravity and lasting impact of the Holocaust by comparing the genocide of 6 million Jewish people with efforts to increase vaccination rates in the country. These comparisons are intended to exaggerate the perceived threat of government regulation while dramatically downplaying the atrocities of the Holocaust for political gain.
Prominent figures such as U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson have compared mask mandates to the Holocaust and the COVID-19 vaccine to Nazi experiments. On Jan. 23, 2022, Robert Kennedy Jr., a former presidential candidate whom in 2024 Donald Trump nominated to run the Department of Health and Human Services, compared measures to contain the virus to Nazi-era restrictions instituted as part of a genocidal campaign. In response, the Auschwitz Memorial and Museum remarked that Kennedy’s exploitation of “the tragedy of people who suffered, were humiliated, tortured and murdered by the totalitarian regime of Nazi Germany” was a “sad symptom of moral and intellectual decay.”