… 2025 / … On 19 January 1942, Szlama Ber Winer, a Polish Jew, arrived in the heavily guarded Warsaw Ghetto. He had managed to escape the Chelmno extermination camp, one of the six major Nazi death camps. He told his story to Emanuel Ringelblum, a Jewish historian who made it the goal of his life to leave evidence of the Nazi crime unfolding against his community. Ringelblum and his team managed to collect almost 35.000 pages of documentation, essays, diaries, and posters from the Ghetto with horrific stories like the one told by Ber Winer. But for some, their dedication to collecting such evidence under the harshest conditions means nothing. Today, in A Day in History, we talk about Holocaust denial, the incredible effort to deny one of the most well-documented and carefully proven dark events in the history of mankind. What is the Holocaust Denial The Holocaust denial is a conspiracy theory that started right after the end of WWII and was gradually canonized with a set of arguments. The theory rose significantly alongside the rise of Holocaust historiography in general after the 1970s and 1980s. There are two main currents of Holocaust denial theories: the first claims that the Holocaust never happened and is just a Jewish lie. The second is more subtle and compromising, and maybe for this reason more dangerous. It does not deny the event as such but diminishes its extent, either by questioning the number of victims or making similar supposedly scrutinizing claims. In what follows, we will discuss six Holocaust denial theories and check their validity. We will start with the first category, arguments that deny that the Holocaust happened at all.
