Denialism as a form of political propaganda has spread in recent years. There is now a real history of 21st-century denialisms, though it has yet to be written. But contrary to what is generally believed, denialism is not some dark residue of the past; rather, it is an unprecedented phenomenon that since its first appearance has grown and developed.

In my new book, If Auschwitz Is Nothing, I distinguish between six different phases of Shoah denialism.

The first had already taken shape by the end of the Second World War. As the conflict drew to a close, the Nazis destroyed the gas chambers at the main extermination camps. The first to deny the crime were therefore the criminals themselves. A pre-emptive erasure is inscribed within Hitler’s annihilation policy.

The Europe in which the so-called “Jewish question” found a “final solution” did not abandon its past hatred. But antisemitism seemed obsolete, being too closely linked to the genocide. So it instead persisted under a new guise, in order to get around the discredit into which it had fallen. That made it necessary to act as if nothing had happened. And denial provided the supreme means to this end.

From the outset, it was clear that denialism was a cover for antisemitism, a pseudo-scientific shield against all accusations. Mockery and sarcasm followed one after another, in a strategy aimed at downplaying and ultimately denying what happened. The clear intention was to rehabilitate the past by absolving Nazism of all blame, exonerating fascism of any complicity in the murder of Europe’s Jews. And the only way to make this possible was to erase all trace of the most shameful and abhorrent crime: the industrialised death in the extermination camps. Over the subsequent years and decades, the gas chambers continued to be at the heart of denialism. Once these places had been declared non-existent, it was then possible to write the history of fascism and Nazism in a different way, concealing the crimes against humanity.

But who was really defeated? And who really won? The role-reversal soon became a fait accompli. In this mindset the Jews were Nazified, while the Germans were Hebraized, in an inversion that would successfully be repeated in other contexts. What slanders had the Jews invented to hurt Germany and cast a shadow over the whole of Europe, passing themselves off as victims? It was said that they exploited the “tall tales” about the gas chambers to their own advantage, in order to continue to weave the threads of their domination.

Denialism presents itself as an ideological hygiene operation, aimed at freeing the present-day horizon of a bogus past: “The Auschwitz lie.” Ever more epithets have built up over time, in a significant escalation from rumour to myth, from fable to fraud. The witnesses are accused of being forgers, the evidence dismissed as falsehoods and lies.

While the theme of the gas chambers is losing prominence, the question of “the number” becomes the linchpin of denialism. Did six million really die? With this mocking and insulting question, repeated in countless variants, the hyperbolic doubt of the deniers crept its way in, discrediting and minimising. Raul Hilberg spoke of about five million victims. No one will ever know the number who were murdered. But the fact that we do not know each and every one of the exterminated and do not possess the exact figure, does not change the scale of the crime in any way.

In its successive phases, denialism is built around the accusation of lying — in the Third Reich, the very word Lüge was the hallmark of the Jew. But why might the Jews have invented this “enormous historical lie?” In the second phase of denialism, whose beginning is today usually dated to 1967, the year of the Six-Day War, everything seemed to gain greater definition. Long sought-after answers finally became apparent. The denialist discourse widened its scope and sharpened its tools: the Jews devised the “lie” of the extermination not only to blame Europe, but also to profit from the “scam” that authorised the unwarranted creation of the state of Israel, in line with the Jews’ policy of global domination. Thus, the theme of the “world Jewish conspiracy” very soon made its return.

But this obscene and repugnant denialist propaganda would have remained confined to niche circles if it had not been for a rapid, unexpected wave of media attention at the end of the 1970s. The problem concerned the world of historians caught in a dilemma: to refute the falsifiers in open debate, but at the cost of recognising them as legitimate interlocutors — or to avoid any confrontation, at the cost of giving the charlatans free rein. The denier thus appeared as an innocuous critic who only sought to revise history but was forced to clash with the “State Truth”. Historians then responded to the attacks blow-by-blow, since they believed that the whole problem stems from ignorance or misinformation. They considered the phenomenon an archaic residue of the past.

But those who deny are not ignorant. And given recent developments, we can say that it was naive to believe that denialism could be debunked in this way. For the deniers make no effort to get to grips with any other reading of the events whose existence they dispute. Rather, they are attack-dogs of thought. They ravenously latch onto details in order to devour them; they pounce on evidence to tear it to shreds. This is how they insinuate their hyperbolic doubt, armed with certainties.

In this sense, denialism is not a critical revision to cherish but a political statement, which, by threatening the past, undermines the future. In attacking memory, it compromises that bond from which European democracies arose, on the ashes of Auschwitz.

Between 1990 and 1995, more books and studies on the persecution and extermination of the Jews were published than in all previous decades. Yet denialism did not stop in its tracks. Rather, it entered its fourth phase. Against all expectations, since the 1990s the cases of denialism have multiplied. Thanks to the internet, the propagandists of hatred crossed all borders — whether territorial or legislative — gaining new followers. As Iran shows, denialism has become a matter of state.

The weakness of anti-racist and anti-fascist legislation, unprepared to combat such an unexpected yet already entrenched phenomenon as denialism, soon becomes apparent. Despite that, the deniers are on trial. Yet as the number of trials increases, with a steady flow of convictions, the deniers’ field of action moves from conclaves of historians — where they had never belonged in the first place — to the courtrooms. They launch defamation suits against intellectuals and journalists who work on this phenomenon. The case of Deborah Lipstadt is not isolated.

“Who benefits from the Holocaust?”: the denialism of the fifth phase congeals around this question. In the firing line are both the “sacralisation of the Holocaust,” and the so-called “exploitation” of the extermination for political ends. The dispute over the rituals of commemoration — which also embroils the Jewish world — for the deniers becomes the pretext for an indictment of the entire remembrance culture. The Jews, those “guardians of memory”, are said to have decontextualized Auschwitz and raised it to the fulcrum and alibi of the new secularised religion: the “Expiatory Cult of the Shoah”.

The conspiratorial matrix re-emerges in the aftermath of 9/11, heralding the sixth phase of denialism (2000-2023). Those who sneered at the “extermination fraud” were the same people who believed that they can see a Mossad hand behind the attacks on the Twin Towers. From the latest generation of Hitlerites to the fascists of the third millennium, from ill-concealed racists to Catholic fundamentalists, from Islamist militants to the adepts of Red-Brownism — at the beginning of the 20th century, deniers explicitly refer to the “global conspiracy”.

The leitmotif of anti-Jewish propaganda is thus taken up in new forms. This proves that denialism is not at all reducible to revisionism; rather, it can only be considered in its full complexity in light of the conspiracy matrix on which it is built. The interpretative schema can be adapted, denialism continues to be based on a conspiratorial framework. While the question “who benefits?” resonates, an accusing finger is pointed at those alleged to have invented the “Auschwitz lie” and exploited it to lay the foundations of the global order. The “global Jewish conspiracy” is the cornerstone of the new denialism, in its most recent version.

‘If Auschwitz is Nothing: Against Denialism’ is published by Polity Press