THE greatest barrier to a fascist revival after the second world war was the public revelation of its crimes.

While these events remained in living memory, the stark facts and evidence made it nearly impossible for anyone outside the extremist fringes to rehabilitate Nazism. The liberation of the camps provided a moral shock — particularly in Europe — that sustained the post-war anti-fascist consensus for decades.

However, we are now entering a perilous era. As the survivors — the witnesses — pass away, the shadow of the Holocaust no longer holds the political significance it once did. The living connection to the atrocities is being severed. Consequently, Holocaust denial has morphed from a discredited fringe pursuit into just another internet conspiracy theory, readily available to those susceptible to far-right propaganda and the “alternative facts” of the digital age.

The Wannsee protocol: denial in real time

The denial of the Holocaust did not begin years after the war; it began with the perpetrators themselves. The Nazis became masters of conducting industrial-scale murder while simultaneously engineering a cover-up designed to deceive the world.

The Wannsee Conference of January 20 1942 provided the blueprint for both the Holocaust and its denial. In a secret meeting in an upmarket villa near Berlin, 15 high-ranking officials co-ordinated the “final solution to the Jewish question.”

The minutes, known as the Wannsee Protocol, contain chilling evidence of this deception. Explicit terms like “gas chambers” or “extermination” were removed and replaced by bureaucratic euphemisms:

• “Evacuation to the east” (Aussiedlung): This meant forced deportation to the killing centres in occupied Poland.
• “Resettlement” (Umsiedlung): The movement of victims to their deaths.
• “Natural diminution”: The expectation that many victims would die from starvation and forced labour before the systematic killing of the “final remnant” even began.

This language not only masked murder from the outside world but also insulated state administrators — and the private corporations profiting from forced labour — from moral and legal accountability.

The attempted cover-up

In the final phase of the Third Reich, in the face of defeat, the Nazis began a systematic effort to destroy the most incriminating evidence. They demolished documents and the mass-killing apparatus at Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec and Majdanek.

In October 1944, on the orders of Heinrich Himmler, the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau were blown up to hide the scale of the industrial slaughter from the advancing Red Army.

The final chapter involved the “death marches” — forced evacuations of camp inmates into the German interior. Their purpose was simple: to prevent the witnesses from being liberated. Despite these efforts, a single copy of the Wannsee Protocol escaped destruction, discovered by the Allies in German Foreign Office files.

It provided undeniable proof that genocide was a state-sponsored plan established at the highest levels.

In stark contrast to the coded language of Wannsee, the Allies also discovered transcripts of audio recordings of Himmler delivering speeches in Posen (Poznan) in 1943. These are critical because they are the rare instances where a senior Nazi official spoke openly to the SS leadership about “the extermination of the Jewish people,” dispensing with euphemisms and describing the slaughter as a “never written and never to be written page of glory.”

From wartime lie to modern revisionism

Over time the denial movement sought to undermine the historical record through pseudo-science. In the 1980s, deniers moved from simply ignoring facts to trying to “disprove” them technically. The most notorious example was the 1988 “Leuchter Report.”

Fred Leuchter, a self-styled execution expert, clandestinely gouged chunks of plaster from the ruins of the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau and claimed that chemical analysis showed no significant presence of hydrogen cyanide.

While his “findings” were long ago debunked by legitimate forensic scientists, they remain a staple of revisionist literature today.

The global focal point of this propaganda has been the Institute for Historical Review (IHR) in California. The United States remains a vital base for these groups because the lack of hate speech or Holocaust denial laws allows them to publish and distribute material that would be illegal in many European countries.

Another significant hub was Samizdat Publishers in Toronto, led by Ernst Zundel. Zundel was a tireless propagandist who was eventually convicted in Canada for publishing hate literature. Following his extradition to Germany in 2005, he was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment.

The best known Holocaust denier in Britain is the aging David Irving. He denies that the Nazis murdered Jews in gas chambers, maintains close ties with the IHR, and testified in Zundel’s defence. He has been fined in Germany for publicly denying the Holocaust and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment in Austria.

The ‘double genocide’ theory

Perhaps the most insidious modern development is Holocaust relativism. This has gained currency since the collapse of the Soviet Union where previously in the West its main source had been the far-right narrative of anti-communist and anti-semitic activists in east European emigre communities.

This narrative argues that because millions of people died in the second world war, the Jews suffered no more or less than any other group. This is the foundation of the “double genocide” theory, which seeks to establish a moral equivalence between crimes committed by the Nazis and repression under communist rule.

The massacre of European Jewry is often portrayed as equivalent to the Holodomor (the Ukrainian famine). Jewish communists are accused of playing a leading role in Soviet repressions, thereby portraying Jews as perpetrators who became “understandable” victims of Nazi and nationalist “retaliation.”

By focusing on Soviet crimes, they deflect from the fact that many of their “national heroes” were active participants in the Holocaust.

This equivalence was codified in the 2008 Prague Declaration, which implies the two regimes had common cause as “totalitarian” states.

This narrative ignores the fundamental truth that the Soviet Union bore the brunt of Nazism, losing over 20 million lives in the struggle to liberate Europe. The declaration led the EU to establish August 23 — the anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact — as a “European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism.”

This move has been widely condemned by Jewish organisations, communist parties, and anti-fascists for blurring essential historical distinctions and rehabilitating those who wore the uniform of the SS.

Fighting the denial

The crime of the Holocaust and the crime of its denial are two sides of the same historical process. The core deceit — that the mass murder was never explicitly ordered — is the very lie modern “revisionists” exploit to rehabilitate fascist ideology.

Holocaust denial is not an intellectual error or a debate over nuances; it is a conscious act of ideological warfare. It serves as a primary mechanism for modern antisemitism, used to fuel conspiracy theories, delegitimise Jewish people and Israel’s right to exist, and attack the historical basis for the post-war anti-fascist order.

Today on Holocaust Memorial Day — the anniversary of when the Red Army liberated Auschwitz — our task is clear. Anti-fascists need to recognise and confront every instance of revisionism — whether it is the blatant propaganda of the far right or the “soft” denial of relativism.

We must wield historical truth as our primary weapon, recognising that our fight against the lie is inseparable from the fight against the ideology that produced this kind of barbarism.

Steve Silver is an anti-fascist writer whose work can be found at Leaden Skies: leadenskies.substack.com.