There are extreme individuals around the world today that harbor delusional, immoral, and often dangerous views. Some of these people are laughable in their assertions such as those who believe that John F. Kennedy and Elvis Presley never died and that the 9/11 terror attacks were committed by the Masons, of which several notable United States Presidents were once members. Other individuals are abhorrent and arouse anger and indignation in their narrow and unfounded views. These people could be extreme racists, anti-Semites, atheists, satanists, anarchists, and, yes, holocaust deniers. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, this very minute percentage of individuals believe that the Holocaust was a hoax and a Jewish conspiracy. A few of these individuals have asserted their views in public and are seeking attention to their apparent ‘movement’. Whether that attention is negative or positive does not matter, because they are looking to be acknowledged as the ‘other side’, which they are not.

Has Freedom of Speech Gone Too Far?

Everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion, but where does humanity (as a collective whole) stand up and say enough is enough? Recently, Germany opened its massive Holocaust archives in Bad Arolsen to the public that holds the records of at least 17.5 million victims of the Nazis (both Jews and non-Jews). This archive holds an estimated 47 million records related to the Holocaust including arrest, camp, prison, deportation, and manner of death documents. The Nazis were meticulous record-keepers and while a lot of their documentation was destroyed by their own hands when defeat became imminent in 1945, a lot more of it survived. One of Hitler’s last orders was for his people to burn what was left of their nation. He also wanted all of those interred in concentration/death/labor camps executed immediately to cover up all evidence of their crimes, because he knew the world would show them no mercy once they knew the extent of the terrible atrocities they had committed.

The Victims of the Holocaust

Sometime in January of 1945 Heinrich Himmler gave an order to all concentration camp commanders in the ‘east’. He ordered them to evacuate all of their prisoners and not to let a single one fall into the hands of the enemy alive. Thankfully, some of them did survive against all odds. They lived to hold the Nazis accountable for the worst crime in human history and to keep alive the memory of all the millions of people who did not live to tell the tale. The Holocaust was so much more than an awful crime against European Jewry. The Nazis executed millions of people deemed ‘racially inferior’. They targeted professors, intellectuals, political officials, physically and mentally handicapped adults and children, alcoholics, homeless people, agitators, prostitutes, those with venereal diseases, anyone who did not wholeheartedly swallow Nazi ideology and praise Adolf Hitler (at least the ones the Gestapo found out about), anyone who believed the war was lost, and all those who did not follow the Nazi-approved form of Christianity, but that is not all. Any German guilty of ‘friendly contact’, whether sexual or otherwise, with people of Eastern European or Russian nationality were often sent to concentration camps where most of them did not survive. Also, anyone guilty of helping or hiding the Jews in any way ended up either immediately executed or sent to a camp. The Nazis viewed those of Polish and Russian nationality with nearly as much vehement hatred as the Jews. Millions of Russian prisoners-of-war were executed or allowed to die under the most horrid conditions imaginable inside of a concentration camp. Millions more Russian Jews perished as the Nazis (namely the Einsatzgruppen unites) invaded the Soviet Union and slaughtered innocent people en masse (the death toll estimates in Russia range in the tens of millions).

Fighting Holocaust Deniers

Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of Jewish studies, stood up against ignorance in the early 1990s when she published Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. As the years go slowly by and 1945 fades ever more into obscurity, it becomes easier to deny even the most indisputable facts. However, Lipstadt offered some very good advice on how to counter this growing outrageous assertion that all those untold millions who perished somehow did not exist. Simply put, she said to ignore them. She said to give them no audience, no publicity, and never debate them. As wrong and as vile as their views may be, do not strike out against them. They are looking to make their far-fetched ‘theories’ (if they can be labeled as such) a legitimate ‘other side’ and, in doing so, they can cast considerable doubt and turn attention away from the victims of the Holocaust and how to prevent such a reoccurrence in the future to whether it even happened. Hatred and extreme racism and anti-Semitism is an ugly thing. Humanity must not give it a stage and a willing audience.