Transcript

I've seen lots of people online saying Adolf Hitler wasn't really so bad, or that the Holocaust was just a myth.

This has been spurred on by interviews from people who downplay what the Nazis did during World War II. So, in today's episode, I'll talk about what's wrong with Holocaust denial and why Christians should reject this malicious form of pseudo-history.

But first, we need to define our terms.

Holocaust denial occurs when someone actively or by conspicuous omission denies that the Nazi regime systematically and intentionally murdered, along with other people, approximately six million Jews in an attempt to wipe out the Jewish race, and that they used instruments like gas chambers to do this.

Now, some deniers boldly proclaim the Holocaust as a myth, but others are more subtle.

For example, when Tucker Carlson interviewed podcaster Darrell Cooper on World War II, Cooper claimed that Churchill was the chief villain of World War II, and only describes the Nazis humanely killing prisoners they couldn't feed allegedly because of low supplies.

They launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners and so forth that they were gonna have to handle.

They went in with no plan for that, and they just threw these people into camps and millions of people ended up dead there.

We don't have the food to feed these people.

And one of them actually says, Rather than wait for them all to slowly starve this winter, wouldn't it be more humane to just finish them off quickly now?

Of course, one could only reach that conclusion about Winston Churchill and the Nazis if you denied the Nazis intentionally tried to exterminate the Jews, which makes Cooper a Holocaust denier by omission, and Tucker Carlson an odd interviewer for not asking an obvious follow-up question, like, What about the evidence for gas chambers or the Nazis' plan to exterminate the Jews?

More overt Holocaust deniers say only a few hundred thousand Jews died of disease and starvation brought on by the bombing of German supply lines, and they explicitly say there were no gas chambers and there was no plan to eliminate the Jews.

Here's a classic articulation of active Holocaust denial by former SSPX bishop Richard Williamson in a 2009 interview.

The bishop said he believed only 300,000 Jews died in World War II and not as part of a deliberate policy.

I believe that the historical evidence is hugely against six million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of, uh, Adolf Hitler.

The interview aired the same day Pope Benedict XVI lifted Williamson's excommunication for having been illicitly consecrated a bishop back in 1988.

This ignited a media backlash which prompted the Pope to demand Williamson publicly recant his views on the Holocaust before he could serve as a bishop again.

He didn't, and after being expelled from the SSPX, Williamson was excommunicated again in 2015 for illicitly consecrated bishops without papal approval.

Pope Benedict XVI said in response to the controversy involving Williamson, The hatred and contempt for men, women, and children that was manifested in the Shoah, the Holocaust, was a crime against God and against humanity.

This should be clear to everyone, especially to those standing in the tradition of the Holy Scriptures, according to which every human being is created in the image and likeness of God.

It is beyond question that any denial or minimization of this terrible crime is intolerable and altogether unacceptable.

And Pope Francis has likewise said, The remembrance of that extermination of millions of Jews and people of other faiths can neither be forgotten nor denied.

Now, what the Popes say about Holocaust denial is not an article of faith, but it is prudential advice about something that relates to basic human decency.

And Christians should, at the very least, be decent people.

Denying the suffering of millions of people and their surviving families is an indecent thing to do.

Holocaust denial is wrong for the same reason all genocide denial is wrong.

Denial further victimizes the people group who risked extermination, it raises the perpetrators to a sinful, idolatrous status, and it makes future genocidal acts more likely by downplaying the reality of how dehumanizing language contributes to atrocity.

And that applies to all genocides.

For example, Dan Bilzerian, a social media influencer with over a million followers who believes the Jews are behind 9/11, has criticized the nation of Israel for denying the Armenian genocide that involved Turkish Muslims forcing Armenian Christians into things like death marches that killed over a million people between 1915 and 1917.

They, like, constantly refer to the Holocaust when they're the biggest Holocaust deniers on the planet.

They deny the Armenian Holocaust, which, you know, like half my people got wiped out, half your people got wiped out.

They deny that.

Bilzerian is correct that the Israeli national government refuses to acknowledge the Armenian genocide.

They do this to maintain diplomatic relations with Turkey, a nation that was founded on the effects of that genocide.

However, more centrist Israeli politicians like Yair Lapid of the minority Yesh Atid party do recognize the genocide and want Israel to change its policy on the matter.

But if it's wrong for Israel to deny the Armenian genocide, then it's wrong to deny the Jewish genocide during the Holocaust.

Just because Israel does something bad doesn't justify doing something bad to Jewish people in general.

And as I said, almost all genocides and mass killings involve denial, which is why denial is so wrong.

It's an accomplice to an unspeakable evil that hurts past victims and threatens future victims.

For example, historians agree that the Japanese military committed unspeakable atrocities, including rape, torture, and mass murder, during the 1937 massacre of Nanjing in China that resulted in 200,000 civilian deaths in six weeks.

But the Japanese government has downplayed the event in textbooks, and some radical Japanese authors say the Nanjing massacre never happened at all.The reason this is so evil is because it's motivated by an either idolatrous love of Japan, a malicious hatred of the Chinese, or many cases, both.

And the same is true of Holocaust denial.

It's often motivated by an idolatrous love of Germany or the Nazis, which was condemned in Pope Pius XI's 1937 encyclical, Mit Brennender Sorge, or it's motivated by a malicious antipathy towards Jewish people.

This antipathy is often evident in the person being willing to believe Jews committed things like organized ritual murder in the Middle Ages based on flimsy or no historical evidence, but that same person being unwilling to believe that Jews were the victims of organized murder in spite of massive evidence for that proposition.

So now that we've seen why Holocaust denial is morally wrong, let's talk about why it's factually wrong.

It's wrong because the evidence overwhelmingly supports the view that approximately six million Jews, along with other ethnic groups, were systematically killed by the Nazis using methods like gas chambers.

And the strongest evidence for this claim comes from the Nazis themselves, who kept meticulous records of their plans and actions.

Here's just some of the evidence.

Hitler's 1925 manifesto, Mein Kampf, painted the Jews as a danger to the social order and he wrote, The nationalization of the masses can be successfully achieved only if, in the positive struggle to win the soul of the people, those who spread the international poison among them are exterminated.

In January of 1939, Hitler addressed the German National Parliament saying if Jews started another world war, the result would be, quote, The annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.

After the invasion of Poland in September of that year, Hitler signed a note personally authorizing Geste des Todes, mercy death for incurable hospital patients.

Nazi doctors used rooms filled with carbon monoxide to kill mass numbers of sick patients.

This program was called Action T4 and Nazi scientists like August Brecker in secret memos detailed how to operate gas vans that would suffocate victims in the cargo area.

Part of the memo said, During the gassing, all the men were to be kept as far away from the vans as possible so they should not suffer damage to their health by any escaping gases.

The Action T4 doctors were later transferred to use their gassing methods in the concentration camps.

Mark Weber is director of the Institute of Historical Review, the world's most famous Holocaust denial organization.

But even he admits, quote, No informed person disputes that Europe's Jews did in fact suffer a great catastrophe during the Second World War.

Millions were forced from their homes and deported to brutal internment in crowded ghettos and camps.

Jewish communities across Central and Eastern Europe, large and small, were wiped out.

Millions lost their lives.

When the war ended in 1945, most of the Jews of Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, and other countries were gone.

He continues, A major reason for the lack of success in persuading people that conventional Holocaust accounts are fraudulent or exaggerated is that, as revisionists acknowledge, Jews in Europe were in fact singled out during the war years for especially severe treatment.

This was confirmed, for example, by German propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels in these confidential entries in his wartime diary.

Weber then quotes from Goebbels' diary.

February 14th, 1942: The Führer once again expresses his resolve ruthlessly to clear the Jews out of Europe.

There must be no squeamish sentimentalism about it.

The Jews have deserved the catastrophe that they are now experiencing.

Their destruction will go hand-in-hand with the destruction of our enemies.

We must hasten this process with cold ruthlessness.

March 27th, 1942: The Jews are now being deported to the east from the General Government Poland, starting around Lublin.

The procedure is a pretty barbaric one and not to be described here more definitely, and there's not much left of the Jews.

April 29th, 1942: Short shrift is being made of the Jews in all eastern occupied territories.

Tens of thousands of them are being wiped out.

And in spite of denying the Holocaust, Weber does not deny Joseph Goebbels' diary being authentic.

He does not consider it a forgery.

But we have even more evidence than this because the Nazis also made these kinds of declarations in public venues.

In October of 1943, SS commander Heinrich Himmler gave speeches in Posen, Poland where he admitted to the Holocaust.

He said, I am now referring to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people.

It's one of those things that is easily said.

The Jewish people are being exterminated says every party member.

This is very obvious.

It's in our program.

Elimination of the Jews, extermination, we're doing it.

Ha!

A small matter.

Himmler also said the Holocaust has made us tough and is a glorious chapter that has not and will not be spoken of, end-quote, which shows how the Nazis intended on keeping this program a secret.

However, a recording of Himmler giving this speech has been found and Holocaust deniers agree it is authentic.

Here he says-

German.

Which in English means, The Jewish people are being exterminated.

And in a speech given in 1944, Himmler said, This concerns especially the Jewish women and children.

To allow the children to grow into the avengers who will then murder our children and our grandchildren, that would have been cowardly.There were also aerial photographs of open pits burning thousands of bodies and secret photographs of corpse burning taken inside the camps, and original blueprints designating the use of gas chambers at Auschwitz.

Nazi memos detailed that the crematory at Auschwitz could incinerate 4,756 people a day.

Crematoria and mass disposal of bodies in pits would only be needed for mass exterminations, not disposing of people who die naturally from things like disease.

There were also Nazi memos ordering steel mesh protected thick glass peepholes for gas chamber doors, which wouldn't be needed if the chambers were just for delousing clothes.

Instead, peepholes were for seeing if the victims were dead and steel mesh inside kept the victims from breaking the glass.

Finally, there are hundreds of eyewitness testimonies.

In trials from 1945 well into the 1960s, Nazi officials admitted to their crimes and did not later say they were tortured into giving false confessions.

Some admitted to the Holocaust as witnesses at trial even when they weren't charged with any crimes.

There are also the testimonies of survivors of concentration camps, including the Sonderkommandos.

These were the Jewish prisoners who were charged with removing corpses from the gas chambers.

And the number of approximately six million Jews being killed has been reached by numerous scholars who consulted pre- and post-war population records.

Works like Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews, Lucy Dawidowicz's The War Against the Jews, and Wolfgang Benz's The Holocaust: A German Historian Examines the Genocide all independently arrived at similar death toll figures.

And keep in mind, this is just a fraction of the evidence.

Mountains of evidence were presented at the Nuremberg trials, leading US prosecutor Justice Robert Jackson to tell President Harry Truman, We must establish incredible events by credible evidence.

So in light of all this evidence, how can people deny the Holocaust?

The same way people deny other obvious things, like that the Earth is a globe or that we landed on the moon.

Deniers run a similar playbook.

Instead of analyzing all the data and coming up with a theory that explains all the data, which they cannot do, they just ignore the data.

They just say everyone's lying or it's a forgery, and then they point out curious facts laypeople don't quite know how to explain, and they use those curious facts to cast doubt on the whole enterprise that they deny.

For example, flat-Earthers and moon-landing deniers will say everyone at NASA is lying, they're part of a conspiracy for big globe, and then they point to curious facts laypeople have a hard time explaining.

For flat-Earthers, they point to things like the Chicago skyline being visible 40 miles across Lake Michigan, which they say would be impossible on a round Earth because the horizon is only three miles away from any observer.

Or moon-landing deniers who say lunar pictures are fake because there are no stars in the background.

But when you know all the facts, the ignorance on display is obvious.

The picture of Chicago was taken on a high sand dune, and the mirage effect bends light over Lake Michigan due to temperature differences, which makes the skyline visible.

And we'd expect a starless moon photo because the cameras the astronauts used were optimized to shoot in harsh daylight conditions on the moon and would not have had a long enough shutter speed to capture fainter starlight.

If you didn't know these other facts, it could be easy to be taken in by the deniers' use of pseudoscience, which is the same way that Holocaust deniers use pseudo-history.

For example, here's Sniehko and Myran from Fresh & Fit talking about the Holocaust using well-worn denier talking points.

All right, everyone starved and died at that time.

Germans died-

Oh, I know starvation, yeah.

Yeah, starvation, starvation, dying from, uh, from typhus, et cetera.

Except when you look at footage of the townspeople who lived around the camps, like here in Buchenwald, they aren't malnourished and the SS guards look pretty well-fed.

Food insecurity was an issue in urban areas, but not where the camps were located.

Instead, the inmates were indeed starved, but as part of a murder protocol.

Why were there pools in these concentration camps?

They had soccer teams.

They had recreational activities.

Well, even murderers enjoy leisure time.

Auschwitz did not have a swimming pool.

It had a retention pond that was used for firefighting that was later used for swimming because it wasn't drinking water, and some inmates were forced to play soccer against the guards or perform in orchestras for the officers.

Well, they did that until they were no longer useful and then they could be disposed of.

Hannah Arendt's book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil helped show that the Nazis did not act or look like wild-eyed fanatics hellbent on murder.

Instead, they were banal, boringly normal people who killed other human beings in a bureaucratic way before enjoying leisure time with one another.

And that's what's so scary about the Holocaust and every mass killing since then.

Regular people are capable of carrying out these extreme atrocities.

This was later confirmed in experiments like the Milgram experiments, which show how average people, when told to follow orders, would be willing to kill someone by administering what they thought were electric shocks over an intercom system to a test subject for giving the wrong answers.

This is why the motto of the US Holocaust Museum is Never Again.

And then here's the other thing, too.

They couldn't find a shred of evidence that showed that Hitler said, We need to kill these people.

Hitler never gave a written order to invade Poland either, but it still happened.

In fact, Hitler received severe backlash from the public, including from Catholic bishops, for publicly authorizing the T4 euthanasia program.

One of the men was German Bishop Clemens von Galen, who led protests against the Nazis and was someone Hitler planned to kill after he won the war.

These protests are probably why Hitler did not put his other murder plans into writing.

Let's just use common sense.

If they wanted them dead so badly, why would they feed them, shave their heads, and give them housing?

The camps were for extermination and labor, including extermination by simply working people to death.

People weren't fed, they were slowly starved to death with minimal calories, just enough to keep working.

For example, Auschwitz had a factory that made synthetic rubber for the war efforts.

Goebbels wrote in his diary, March 27th, 1942, Not much will remain of the Jews .

on the whole, it can be said that about 60% of them will have to be liquidated, whereas only about 40% can be used for forced labor.

And there's lots of other memes and posts online that use similar arguments.

There are memes that say, for example, it would have been impossible to gas six million Jews at Auschwitz in a few years.

But not every Jew was gassed or killed at Auschwitz.

There are other camps, though many were killed there given that thousands of bodies could be cremated every day.

Many Jews were shot in mass killings.

This took place, for example, by the Nazi Special Action Group that spoke about shooting 33,000 Jews in a ravine called Babyn Yar outside the city of Kyiv.

Or people will say Winston Churchill didn't mention the Holocaust in his six-volume history of World War II. But so what?

Ulysses S. Grant doesn't mention the Emancipation Proclamation in his Memoirs of the Civil War, but it still happened.

Besides, Churchill wrote a letter in 1944 saying of the massacre of Hungarian Jews, There is no doubt in my mind that we are in the presence of one of the greatest and most horrible crimes ever committed.

Deniers will also bring up irrelevant points that sideline the discussion away from their indefensible denial.

For example, they'll complain about laws that criminalize denying the Holocaust, but you can be against the Holocaust and be against hate speech laws.

You can say Holocaust denial is immoral, but it's not so immoral that it ought to be illegal, or even that it ought to be banned from social media platforms, especially if these kinds of bans just drive people further into denial.

Or deniers will say that they are just tired of hearing about the Holocaust.

Well, so am I. But these are like liberals who say they are tired of hearing the Church talk about sex.

But the Catholic Church only talks about sex a lot because it has to respond to a culture that is obsessed with sexual perversion.

Likewise, the only time I think about the Holocaust is when I come across a fair number of people online who seem to be obsessed with Jews being an enemy of humanity and their subsequent denial of the Holocaust.

And when you criticize these people and point out that this kind of rhetoric is what led to millions of human beings being killed, they'll whine and complain and say they're not allowed to talk about the Holocaust, or no one's allowed to talk about it.

But that's not true.

You can talk about it, and it's not censorship in talking about it to tell the other person he is being ignorant or dishonest with history, and so he shouldn't be taken seriously.

The right to free speech does not include a right to be taken seriously.

As I said before, though, not all Holocaust denial is overt.

Some of it is done by omission, by not bringing up the Holocaust when it should be brought up.

For example, Candace Owens said on Piers Morgan that she is not a Holocaust denier.

To be clear, you accept the Nazis murdered six million Jews in the Holocaust?

Yeah, I have never once in any of my appearances-

No, I'm just asking you to clarify.

ever denied the Holocaust atrocities.

Okay.

Ever.

And it may be true she has never said the Holocaust did not happen, but in some of her shows, she acts like it didn't happen.

She commits denial by omission.

For example, in her episode on Adolf Hitler, she claims the Allies and the Axis powers were morally equivalent.

So why do we keep making the Nazis out to be the bad guys?

she asks.

She also claims that each side in World War II engaged in ethnic cleansing.

Because when you say to people, Okay, what is it about Hitler?

How, why is he the most evil?

Well, the first thing people would say is, Well, ethnic cleansing almost took place.

And then I offer back, You mean like we actually did to the Germans?

Owens is referring to the Germans who were expelled from territories that Germany captured during the war.

The Soviets did this partially out of security reasons, given that SS commander Heinrich Himmler approached the Western Allies with an offer to surrender and work together to fight the Soviets when it looked like the Nazis were going to lose the war.

And I firmly agree, the Soviet Union engaged in horrible crimes against humanity.

In 1933, they starved six million Ukrainians to death in a mass murder called the Holodomor.

It's not surprising the Soviets would engage in similar war crimes against innocent Germans who had lived in these areas for generations, or to engage in cruel revenge murder.

But to be clear, this act displaced 12 million Germans, because ethnic cleansing can refer to displacement.

According to the German Historical Museum, the death toll of the forced expulsions was around 600,000.

But two things can be true at once.

The Soviets were evil, and the Nazis were evil.

This fact does not justify Candace Owens saying the Allies, including England and the United States, engaged in ethnic cleansing just like the Nazis.

The Allied Forces in West Germany did not round up millions of Germans and lie to them about free showers that turned out to be gas chambers in order to exterminate the German people.

But the Nazis did do that to the Jews and many other innocent people that they murdered through systematic acts of genocide.

And the failure to point out these differences between the two groups constitutes Holocaust denial by omission.

Owens also uses the bombings in World War II to say both sides of the conflict were equally unjust.

Of course, if we do it, it's different.

It's different 'cause we're not literally Hitler, where, I mean, we drop bombs on entire populations.

We firebomb Christians.

We drop a nuke on praying Catholics.

And if you know about it, you get screamed at by the propagandists in the West.

Knowing about it is the crime.

The crime is not actually dropping a bomb on praying civilians, um, in Nagasaki.

But lots of people say the atomic bombings of Japan were immoral.

I've made that argument here on this channel.

All the major powers in World War II indiscriminately bombed civilian areas, including the Nazi blitz of London that killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians.

But only one group in the war attempted genocide by trying to wipe out an entire people group from Europe, and if they could have, from the face of the Earth.

And those were the Nazis.

Claiming that the US, the British, and the Nazis were morally equivalent to one another in every way is a form of Holocaust denial by omitting the Nazis' unique plan and execution of the act of genocide.I also want to point out that some Holocaust deniers have so much hatred towards anything Jewish that they will even attack the Old Testament itself.

For example, Lukas Gage is a well-known white nationalist who grew up Catholic but is now a pantheist.

He says the following.

You know Yahweh is a demon, right?

Did you know that?

Look into the, the Old Testament.

I was just watching a video the other day.

The Old Testament God is not the same as the other testament God.

It's not even close.

So the Jew worships Satan, the literally the devil, literally satanic.

They are literally demon worshipers.

And Darryl Cooper, the guy interviewed on Tucker Carlson's show says, No god in any religious tradition is as consistently brutal and bloodthirsty as Yahweh of the Old Testament.

But this is the Marcionite heresy, a complete rejection of our Lord who said in John 4:22 that salvation is from the Jews, and a rejection of Saint Paul who said in Romans 11:28-29 that the Jews oppose the gospel but they are still, quote, beloved by God for the sake of their forefathers, for the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable.

Finally, we should reject Holocaust denial because it's a slap in the face to heroic Christians of the past who risked and gave their lives to save Jews and other people from being exterminated.

James White, someone I've had a fair amount of disagreement with over the years, makes this point and I firmly agree with him.

He discusses how absurd it is for online Christians, and I've also seen them do this, to like and spread memes that openly mock Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

This would be like mocking babies who are torn apart in the womb and thinking it's funny.

Same thing.

Same thing.

There were so many Christians who gave their lives to try to rescue Jews from the Nazi Holocaust, and if you laugh at that meme you are mocking them.

You're mocking the Ten Booms.

You're mocking all the fa- the people in that family that died to rescue people.

You're mocking them.

And if you can't see that, what spirit of deception has taken you over?

Protestants and Catholics gave their lives to save Jews and others from extermination.

These are people like Father Bernhard Lichtenberg who was killed by the Gestapo, Father Giuseppe Garaudi who used false documents to rescue Jews until he was taken to Dachau where he still lies in a mass grave, Father Maximilian Kolbe who sheltered Jews in his friary until he was arrested and taken to Auschwitz where he died a martyr of charity.

And then there were the unnamed people within the Vatican who, according to Jewish historian Pinchas Lapide, saved hundreds of thousands of Jews from being murdered.

If you deny the Holocaust, you are spitting on the graves not just of the victims but on the graves of those who risked and even gave their lives to save those victims.

I'll close by noting that Edmund Burke is alleged to have said, The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

Mass murder doesn't just happen one day.

It begins slowly with a gradual dehumanization of the targeted victims.

So if you see racial hatred and genocide denial, no matter who it's against, say something.

I pray if the time arises each of us will have the courage to do the heroic good that must be done in the face of unspeakable evil.

Thank you all so much for watching, and be sure to check out more resources in the description below if you want to learn about how to debunk Holocaust denial.

And I hope you have a very blessed day.