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The Holocaust, Hebrew 'Shoʾah' (“Catastrophe”) was the systematic state-sponsored killing of six million Jewish men, women, and children and millions of others by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II. The Germans called this “the final solution to the Jewish question.”

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Behind the lies of Holocaust denial | Deborah Lipstadt

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David Irving, the discredited British historian and Nazi apologist, was this week starting a three-year prison sentence in Vienna for denying the Holocaust and the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

Irving, who appeared in court confidently on Monday carrying his book Hitler's War - "my flagship, 35 years of work" - and a PG Wodehouse paperback, immediately vowed to appeal against the sentence. "I'm very shocked," he said as he was led back to the cells where he has been held for the past three months.

Irving, 67, started the day affecting the image of an English gent arraigned before a foreign court. "Frankly, questions about the Holocaust bore me," he said, calling the trial "ridiculous" and claiming that the Austrian law under which he was being tried would be scrapped within a year.

On Tuesday Austrian state prosecutors declared they are to lodge an appeal to try to lengthen the jail term. They said he remained a beacon for the European neo-Nazi movement and had been treated too lightly. The prosecution and defence appeals are likely to go to Austria's supreme court and are unlikely to be heard until late this year. Austria has Europe's toughest law criminalising denial of the Holocaust. Irving went on trial for two speeches he delivered in the country almost 17 years ago. He was arrested in November last year after returning to Austria to deliver more speeches despite an arrest warrant against him and being barred from the country.

In the two 1989 speeches he termed the Auschwitz gas chambers a "fairytale" and insisted that Adolf Hitler had protected the Jews of Europe. He referred to surviving death camp witnesses as "psychiatric cases", and asserted that there were no extermination camps in the Third Reich.

The state prosecutor, Michael Klackl, said: "He's not a historian, he's a falsifier of history." Arguments over freedom of speech were entirely misplaced, he added: "This is about abuse of freedom of speech."

Irving's defence lawyer, Elmar Kresbach, appealed for mercy for an ageing man with a 12-year-old daughter and an ill wife. Even if he did voice views which were "horrible" or "repellent", he was no danger to Austria.

Irving pleaded guilty, but under Austrian law the trial went ahead. Judge Peter Liebtreu called Irving "a racist, an anti-semite, and a liar", citing the verdict delivered by Justice Charles Gray at the high court in London in 2000 when the historian lost a libel case against the US writer and academic Deborah Lipstadt and was bankrupted.

The judge repeatedly asked Irving if he still subscribed to the views articulated in the 1989 speeches. "I made a mistake saying there were no gas chambers in Auschwitz," he conceded. He claimed that the Holocaust figure of 6 million murdered Jews was "a symbolic number" and said his figures totalled 2.7 million.

He said he was not sure how many died at Auschwitz, but he mentioned a figure of 300,000, a fraction of the accepted total. And he still believed that Hitler protected the Jews and tried to put off the Final Solution - the systematic killing of all European Jews - at least until after the war.

This court appearance is the latest in a long line of legal battles in which the far-right historian has been involved stretching back 40 years. He has always portrayed himself as a victim of smear tactics who is seeking to bring to light historical truths. Born in Essex in March 1938, the son of a Royal Navy lieutenant commander, Irving studied physics at Imperial College, London. He did not graduate but won a reputation as a controversialist, going on to publish a string of books on German history. But it was Hitler's War, published in 1977, that was to gain him his greatest notoriety and in which he challenged the accepted historical version of the Holocaust.

· America and Germany are in dispute over the fate of a vast trove of Holocaust archives, including files on more than 17 million people. The documents are kept in Germany by the International Tracing Service (ITS), a branch of the international committee of the Red Cross. The German government and ITS insist the personal files cannot be released because of international agreements and German privacy law. But they are under pressure from the US government and Holocaust scholars to make them available.

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David Irving, the discredited British historian and Nazi apologist, was this week starting a three-year prison sentence in Vienna for denying the Holocaust and the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Irving, who appeared in court confidently on Monday carrying his book Hitler's War - "my flagship, 35 years of work" - and a PG Wodehouse paperback, immediately vowed to appeal against the sentence.

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Holocaust denial and minimization or distortion of the facts of the Holocaust is a form of antisemitism.

Holocaust deniers ignore the overwhelming evidence of the event and insist that the Holocaust is a myth, invented by the Allies, the Soviet communists, and the Jews for their own ends. According to the deniers' "logic" the Allies needed the "Holocaust myth" to justify their occupation of Germany in 1945 and the "harsh" persecution of Nazi defendants. Holocaust deniers also claim that Jews needed the "Holocaust myth" to extract huge payments in restitution from Germany and to justify the establishment of the State of Israel. Holocaust deniers claim that there is a vast conspiracy involving the victorious powers of World War II, Jews, and Israel to propagate the Holocaust for their own ends.

Holocaust deniers assert that if they can discredit one fact about the Holocaust, the whole history of the event can be discredited as well. They ignore the evidence of the historical event and make arguments that they say negate the reality of the Holocaust in its entirety.

Documenting the Holocaust: Examples of Documents Some Holocaust deniers argue that, since there is neither a single document that outlines the Holocaust nor a signed document from Hitler ordering the Holocaust, the Holocaust itself is a hoax. To make this argument, they reject all the evidence submitted at Nuremberg. They denounce as fabrications the genocidal intention of the Nazi state and the thousands of orders, memos, notes, and other records that document the process of destruction. When they cannot sustain arguments that documents are forged, they argue that the language in the documents has been deliberately misinterpreted. Furthermore, some Holocaust deniers insist that the Allies tortured the perpetrators into testifying about their role in the killing process and that the survivors who testified about Nazi crimes against Jews were all lying out of self-interest.

Some Holocaust deniers claim that those "few" Jews who perished died from natural causes or were legitimately executed by the Nazi state for actual criminal offenses. They assert that Jews and the Allied powers deliberately inflated the numbers of Jews killed during the war. Holocaust historians have placed the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust between 5.1 and 6 million, based on legitimate available historical sources and demographic methods. Holocaust deniers cite uncertainty about the exact number of deaths within this accepted range as proof that the whole history of the Holocaust has been fabricated and that the number of Jewish deaths during World War II has been grossly exaggerated.

Some Holocaust deniers assert that the Nazis did not use gas chambers to kill Jews. They deny the reality of the killing centers. Deniers have focused their attention on Auschwitz and believe if they could just disprove that the Nazis used gas chambers in Auschwitz to kill Jews, the whole history of the Holocaust would also be discredited.

Holocaust deniers often mimic the forms and practices of scholars in order to deceive the public about the nature of their views. They generally footnote their writings by citing the publications of other Holocaust deniers and hold pseudo-scholarly conventions.

Holocaust denial on the Internet is especially a problem because of the ease and speed with which such misinformation can be disseminated. In the United States, where the First Amendment to the Constitution ensures freedom of speech, it is not against the law to deny the Holocaust or to propagate Nazi and antisemitic hate speech. European countries such as Germany and France have criminalized denial of the Holocaust and have banned Nazi and neo-Nazi publications. The Internet is now the chief source of Holocaust denial and the chief means of recruiting for Holocaust denial organizations.

Author(s): United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC

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Holocaust Deniers and Public Misinformation

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Learn more about Holocaust deniers, public misinformation, and antisemitism.

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Alain Soral, one of France's most prominent far-right provocateurs, has been sentenced to one year in jail for denying the Holocaust.

The 60-year-old was also ordered to pay back €6,000 ($6,780) in legal fees to the four anti-racism NGOs that sued him on behalf of the government. Soral's lawyer, Damien Viguier, was also fined for a legal conclusion he authored in a separate case, which Soral published online, in which Viguier defended the theories of professor-turned-Holocaust-denier Robert Faurisson (paywall).

Soral did not appear in court for sentencing today, and a judge issued a warrant for his arrest.

Who is Alain Soral and what is he accused of?

Soral has had a long career as an anti-establishment activist and author (paywall). He made a name for himself defending both far-right and far-left causes, as well as infamous Holocaust deniers like Faurisson and comedian Dieudonné M'bala Bala (paywall). Soral achieved online fame in recent years via his website, Egalité et Réconciliation, a nationalist platform that describes itself as "leftwing on labor but rightwing on values."

In recent months, Soral has shown support for the Yellow Vests (video), the grassroots protest movement that mirrors his own political stance in many ways. The Yellow Vests are a populist, leaderless force that spans the political spectrum and unites over a set of grievances with some common themes: a distrust of government, globalization, and minorities.

In 2016, Soral published a cartoon of a fake front page of satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo bearing the caption "disoriented historians." The page was entitled "Chutzpah Hebdo" and featured Charlie Chaplin's face in front of a star of David, surrounded by a shoe, a wig, a bar of soap, and a lampshade, with the question "Shoah, where are you?" The drawing was a reference to the Stromae song "Papaoutai" (meaning "Dad, where are you?"), but was also a play on words meant to imply doubt about the existence of the Holocaust, or Shoah as it is known in Hebrew. The symbols around the cartoon are references to Faurisson's pseudo-scientific investigations claiming to show that the genocide of more than 6 million Jews during World War II never took place.

The criminal court of Paris had already sentenced Soral to three months in jail for questioning crimes against humanity, which is a crime in France under the Gayssot Act, and for injure raciale, or "racial insult."

"This is an important decision because it puts a stop to Alain Soral and his negationist and anti-Semitic writings," said Sacha Ghozlan, president of the French Union of Jewish Students, one of the plaintiffs in the case. "He is someone who has a political agenda, which is to arm anti-Semites intellectually against Jews. So, this victory is not a victory for Jewish people, but rather a victory for the Republic, because when Jews are threatened, the Republic is threatened."

This is not Soral's first run-in with the law, or his first prison sentence; and he has already announced his intention to appeal the verdict (link in French). If he does, Ghozlan says his organization will be prepared to return to court "as many times as is necessary for Alain Soral to get to the place that is most suitable for him, that is to say prison."

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One of France's most prominent far-right provocateurs is going to jail for denying the Holocaust

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Alain Soral, one of France's most prominent far-right provocateurs, has been sentenced to one year in jail for denying the Holocaust. The 60-year-old was also ordered to pay back €6,000 ($6,780) in legal fees to the four anti-racism NGOs that sued him on behalf of the government.

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8Given that individuals have access to the same facts, how is it possible that there can be disagreement between people about the Holocaust?

Some people believe what their families say, so if their family says that it didn’t happen they would believe them. It is also the same with the government, some people believe in the government and don’t question them so the can tell them what they want and they will believe them. RC

some may be ashamed or their past relatives or try defend hitler and or are anti-jewish. EL

Some people will want to believe whatever they were broughtq up with, and some people may simply not like the idea of a genocide and want to not believe it’s existence. Some may follow or have the same beliefs as the Nazis and co, or be descendants of people involved and not wanting to believe their relative did that. -FA

Some people are taught in school which is where you learn anything and everything that the Holocaust was fake so that's what they believe for the rest of their lives. Other people just want to make a lot of money and writing a controversial book is a very good way to do that. AJ

If the people around them are holocaust deniers then it might make people change their views, but also, people are using this as an excuse for anti-semitism and discriminating against minorities. CG

This might be because people do not actually have access to the same information. People have to believe what they are taught in school or by their parents or what they see from government propaganda because they will not know anything else. If all people did have access to the same information then it might be because they do not want to believe that one of their ancestors was part of this genocide or they do not want to believe something so bad happened. Some people may be well educated and know that the holocaust happened but they want to make money and one of the best ways to do that is by having a controversial opinion. NG

Some people may have been brought up by Holocaust deniers. They might also be relatives to people who took part in the Holocaust and are ashamed of what they did. CC

This could be due to a lack of information, in certain countries they do not talk about the Holocaust it other major events. It could also be due to parents not informing their children on what happened. However some people refuse to believe it happened as their family members could have been involved in the genocide and they don’t want to face the facts their ancestors did horrible things. - MS

If people had family in the holocaust, they would probably believe what their family member said. IM

People might be related to German soldiers who were part if tye holocaust and mught feel a need to protect them -  MM

The people might be embarrassed about what their families did if they were a part of the Holocaust. They couldve also been brought up by Holocaust deniers. BS

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Should Holocaust denial be considered a crime?

Yes, I believe it should, because people are denying the fact that millions were massacred is insulting and hurtful to the survivors and their relatives. Also; denial shows they may somehow be involved or connected to someone involved or connected to the Holocaust/Sho’ah. -FA

Yes I think that denial of any major event that changed human history or will change it (climate change) should be considered a crime because if it isn't communities of people that believe these things will just keep growing. AJ

I think denial should be a crime, because the survivors who suffered so much, had huge losses and lost families are being called out for "lying". -ic

I think that having that opinion should be a crime as in being fined because so many people have been killed and traumatised and denying that is terrible, but expressing that opinion to lots of people should be full out illegal. As people could use this as an excuse for anti-semitism and to commit hate-crimes to minorities. Holocaust deniers shouldn't have a platform. CG

I think that holocaust denial should be a crime because it is not an opinion. It is just lying and it is disrespectful for the many people affected by the holocaust. At first lies may not be a major problem but if they are told often enough, people start to think that is the truth and that is where the problems begin. If people think that this is the truth, they will pass it on and more people will think that it is the truth. NG

I think it should be a crime because they are denying the truth. Millions of people were affected by the Holocaust and denying it would be very hurtful to them. They can also pass their opinion on to others making more and more Holocaust deniers. CC

I think Holocaust denial should be a crime as they are trying to take away the experiences that the survivors went through and many of their family members. Many people were affected by the gas chambers and what Hitler did to different minority groups so by denying it they are taking away the pain it cause millions of people. - MS

Yes it should be a crime because you are disrespecting a lot of people and people who are survivors of the holocaust you are making them think the things they saw weren't real. - MM

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Denial is a 2016 biographical film directed by Mick Jackson and written by David Hare, based on Deborah Lipstadt's 2005 book History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier. It dramatises the Irving v Penguin Books Ltd case, in which Lipstadt, a Holocaust scholar, was sued by Holocaust denier David Irving for libel. It stars Rachel Weisz, Tom Wilkinson, Timothy Spall, Andrew Scott, Jack Lowden, Caren Pistorius and Alex Jennings.

Denial premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on 11 September 2016. It was theatrically released in the United States by Bleecker Street on 30 September 2016, and in the United Kingdom by StudioCanal and Entertainment One on 27 January 2017.

Deborah Lipstadt is an American professor of Holocaust studies whose speaking engagement is disrupted by David Irving, a writer on Nazi Germany. He files a libel lawsuit in the United Kingdom against Lipstadt and her publisher for declaring him a Holocaust denier in her books. As the burden of proof in UK libel cases lies with the accused, Lipstadt and her legal team, led by solicitor Anthony Julius and barrister Richard Rampton, must prove that Irving lied about the Holocaust.

To prepare their defence, Lipstadt and Rampton tour the site of the former Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland with a local scholar, while the research team subpoenas Irving's extensive personal diaries. Lipstadt is annoyed by Rampton's apparently disrespectful questions on the subject, and frustrated when the team minimises her involvement in the case, arguing that she harms its chances of success. Members of the British Jewish community plead with her to settle out of court to avoid creating publicity for Irving. However, her team has a promising start when they persuade Irving, by appealing to his ego, to agree to a trial by judge instead of a jury, which he could have manipulated to his advantage.

Irving conducts his own legal representation, facing Lipstadt's legal team. Irving endeavours to twist the presented evidence for the defence. Lipstadt is approached by a Holocaust survivor who pleads for the chance to testify, but Lipstadt's legal team insists on focusing the trial on Irving.

Irving tries to discredit evidence for the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz, claiming there were no holes on the roof for the Zyklon B gas crystals to be introduced. His soundbite "no holes, no holocaust" dominates the media coverage. Furious, Lipstadt demands that she and the Holocaust survivors be allowed to take the stand. Julius angrily counters that Irving would only humiliate and exploit a survivor on cross-examination, as he has in the past. Rampton visits Lipstadt at her home to explain his approach and earns her trust. In court, he subjects Irving to skilful cross-examination and exposes his claims as absurd, while expert testimony from respected scholars like Richard J. Evans expose the distortions in Irving's writings.

As the trial concludes, the judge, Charles Gray, worries the defence by suggesting that, if Irving honestly believes his own claims, then he cannot be lying as Lipstadt asserted. However, Gray eventually rules for the defence, convinced of the truth of Lipstadt's portrayal of Irving as deceitful. Lipstadt is hailed for her dignified demeanour, while her legal team reminds her that, despite her silence during the trial, it was her writing that countered Irving's lies and provided the basis for the victory. At a press conference, Lipstadt praises her lawyers for their strategy.

In April 2015, Hilary Swank and Tom Wilkinson were selected to star in the film, based on the book History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier by Deborah Lipstadt, with Mick Jackson directing, and Gary Foster and Russ Krasnoff producing under their Krasnoff/Foster Entertainment banner with Shoebox Films. Participant Media and BBC Films co-financed. In November 2015, Rachel Weisz replaced Swank, and Timothy Spall joined the cast, with Bleecker Street distributing the film. In December 2015, Andrew Scott, Jack Lowden, Caren Pistorius, Alex Jennings, and Harriet Walter joined the cast. Howard Shore composed the film's score.

Principal photography began in December 2015 and concluded by the end of January 2016. Denial was filmed in London and at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Poland.

The film had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on 11 September 2016. The film was released in the United States in a limited release on 30 September 2016, and in the United Kingdom on 27 January 2017.

Critical reception

Denial received positive reviews from critics. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 82%, based on 164 reviews, with an average grade of 6.79/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "If Denial doesn't quite do its incredible story complete justice, it comes close enough to offer a satisfying, impactful drama - and another powerful performance from Rachel Weisz." On Metacritic, the film has a score of 63 out of 100, based on 34 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".

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Denial is a 2016 biographical film directed by Mick Jackson and written by David Hare, based on Deborah Lipstadt's 2005 book History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier. It dramatises the Irving v Penguin Books Ltd case, in which Lipstadt, a Holocaust scholar, was sued by Holocaust denier David Irving for libel.