The BBC has announced David Baddiel will be presenting a programme where he will come face to face with Holocaust deniers.
The programme, which has the working title of Holocaust Denial: A History with David Baddiel and will air next year, will see the Jewish comedian and author talking to academics and historians to trace how denial has evolved over the decades, as he seeks to learn why so many deny the Shoah.
The BBC said Mr Baddiel, whose mother was a child refugee from Nazi Germany, would “broach taboos and find himself in often uncomfortable situations”.
The broadcaster said the programme would try to address why a desire to deny the events of the Holocaust exists, why it is growing and what it tells us about antisemitism.
It would also lask whether there was a version of Holocaust denial that has become respectable and how best to counter these ideas.
The 55-year-old said he had “always had a dark fascination with Holocaust denial".
He said: “The fact that since it happened (indeed whilst it was happening) forces have tried to undermine one of the most well-documented truths of history seems to me a key battleground in the fight between truth and lies, a battle made more complex by the emergence of new technology, a post-truth world and more insidious, ‘soft core’ forms of denial.
“As the last survivors, including those in my own family, begin to pass away, and with them, living memory of The Holocaust, I’m grateful to the BBC for allowing me to explore this complex subject, in all its difficulty and darkness.”
Last year, while appearing on the BBC Radio Four’s Desert Island Discs, Mr Baddiel said his mother, Sarah, was brought out of Germany by her parents when she was just five months old in 1939.
Her family had been wealthy but their possessions were seized by the Nazis.
There were, in his words “a swastika stamped on her birth certificate”. Soon after their arrival in Britain, Mr Baddiel’s grandfather, Ernst, was interned on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien for a year.
Abigail Priddle, the BBC’s commissioning editor for the programme, said Mr Baddiel would look at an issue that “goes beyond the events of the Holocaust – and sheds light on a very 21st century malaise - the denial of historical fact.
“For many, even to explore the phenomenon of Holocaust denial is to unlock a box marked ‘do not open’.
"But this film will suggest that exploring this archetype of lies, conspiracy theory and fake news could deepen our understanding of our post truth world.”
