Eighty years ago, on a cold day in January, top-ranking Nazis gathered in a house by a lake on the outskirts of Berlin at Wannsee to discuss the exploitation and mass murder of the Jewish people. Under the polite euphemism of the Final Solution, children would die alongside their parents and grandparents; no one would be spared.

Today, across the globe, there are still malicious people who actively deny the historic reality of the Holocaust and seek to minimise the extent of the atrocities of committed by the Nazis and their accomplices during World War II.

They doubt the use of gas chambers, of mass shootings, of deliberate starvation, and the intended genocide of the whole Jewish people.

They even take this lunacy a step further into madness, blaming the Jewish people for exaggerating and manufacturing the Shoah for political or financial gain - even going as far as suggesting that the Shoah itself resulted from a conspiracy plotted by the Jews.

We see in some Middle Eastern countries state-sponsored Holocaust denial and the official peddling of antisemitic tropes. Of course, in the grand tradition of Wannsee, this is wrapped up in euphemisms. They say, “We are not antisemitic, we are anti-Zionist”. As if there is any real difference. Below the surface is the same hatred, the same intolerance and the same desire to hurt Jews.

We do Holocaust remembrance a disservice if we remember the dead and forget the present persecution of Jewish people across the world.

The eventual goal of Holocaust denial is to recast history to erase the legacy and reality of the mass murder of Jewish people. Deborah Lipstadt, a friend to many of us, put this succinctly: “For Holocaust deniers to be right, who would have to be wrong? The victims, the survivors, the bystanders (…) and above all, the perpetrators (…) who may say, ‘I did not have a choice, I was forced.’ But nonetheless, they say ‘I did it.’”

There is a new worry, of Holocaust distortion - more mainstream but just as pernicious. It doubts numbers; assigns different descriptions to places; death camps are redesignated as transit camps; contemporary events are compared to the Holocaust; collaborators of the Nazis are wiped from national memory.

Holocaust distortion can be found at all levels of society and is far from a fringe phenomenon. From facts twisted on the internet to opportunistic statements by politicians, misleading exhibitions at museums and, more recently, comparing measures to combat Covid-19 to the Holocaust. We have seen lockdown and restrictions likened to Nazi persecution of Jews. We have witnessed anti-vaxxers and others pinning yellow stars to their chests across Europe.

Nowhere is this clearer than online, where distortive memes and posts spread like wildfire, luring users down a rabbit hole of increasingly extremist content.

All distortion, intentional or not, feeds into antisemitic narratives and can lead to more violent forms of antisemitism. As the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Honorary Chairman Professor Yehuda Bauer notes, “a half-truth is worse than a full lie.”
Distortion of the Holocaust comes from various sources and is not unique to one particular worldview. It can be found on both the right and left of the political spectrum, across religious and ethnic lines, and is also informed, in part, by a broader culture of denialism in present-day discourse.

As the UK’s Special Envoy on Post-Holocaust Issues, I am particularly concerned by intentional efforts to excuse or minimise the Holocaust or its elements, including the roles of collaborators and allies of Nazi Germany.

I am also concerned with growing state-sponsored manipulation of Holocaust history to sow political discord within or outside a country's borders.

We should remember those who put their liberty or even their lives at risk; they should be honoured. But we must remember that they were a tiny minority that bravely stood up. Most occupied people did nothing, either out of fear, sympathy or greed.

Most of us can imagine being a victim of the Holocaust; few can imagine being a perpetrator. If we pretend that the potential violence of the Holocaust does not lurk within us all, we do a great disservice to the past. That is why the work undertaken by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance is so important.

We must promote fact-based knowledge about the history of the Holocaust and strengthen media and information literacy.

I am pleased to say that this has already started, and countries worldwide pledged at the recent Malmö Forum to take concrete steps to further Holocaust remembrance and combat antisemitism. This landmark event came twenty years after the Stockholm Forum on the Holocaust laid the foundation for contemporary action on Holocaust education, remembrance and research.

When Holocaust distortion poses the most significant contemporary threat to this legacy, we cannot stop our fight for the truth.

We must resolve that “never again” does not become the empty echo of past good intentions. As individuals, we will guard against indifference and learn to see ourselves in the faces of strangers. As a community, we will stand against ignorance and antisemitism; we will keep the remembrance flame shining bright against Holocaust distortion and denial.