Nearly two-thirds of US young adults are unaware that six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust
“Reports of the Holocaust have been exaggerated or fabricated as part of a Jewish propaganda effort to create sympathy.”
It might seem bizarre that someone can seriously fall victim to Denialist lies, the sad reality is many Americans are not familiar with the Holocaust and can fall victim to Denialists.
According to The Guardian, “Nearly two-thirds of US young adults are unaware that six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.” According to a survey of American adults 18-39 years of age, 23% said they believed the Holocaust was a myth had been exaggerated or they weren’t sure. Because we know antisemitism inevitably leads to genocide when carried to its logical conclusions, antisemites need to downplay or deny the Holocaust as much as possible to make it more more palatable to those they try to corrupt. They show the same kind of casual dishonesty regarding the Holocaust as they do in the rest of their arguments but it is important we as Christians recognize the most common lies to better counter them.
Much as antisemites peddling lies about the Jewish people being Christ Killers claimed to simply be involved in the humble research of theology, antisemites involved in Holocaust denial claim to simply be involved in the historic debate on the Holocaust. Historians look at the facts and evidence of the Holocaust, the death camps, the records and so on, and ask how it was such an atrocity came about, as well as how the machinery of death functioned. Holocaust deniers will dress themselves up to be similar to the historians. Some emphasize their limited or unrelated academic backgrounds, they form organizations with names like “Institute for Historical Review” and label their gatherings with innocuous names such as “Media Mischief, Anti-Semitism, and Moral Clarity.”
It is important to remember however that this attempt at legitimacy is only a thin veneer on top of hate and dishonesty. Groups like the Institute for Historical Review are staffed by people sympathetic to Hitler and open Neo-Nazis like David Duke are routine guests at their meetings. The task Holocaust deniers have set out for themselves is not to explain the facts of history but simply to deny them.
A common tactic of Holocaust deniers is to make the claim that the physical evidence of the atrocities were falsified by the Jewish people after the war. For example, historians following the liberation of Auschwitz interviewed some of the SS guards assigned to the crematoria, according to the Jewish Virtual Library,