AAP FACTCHECK – The trial of an elderly German Holocaust denier has sparked claims on social media the genocide of Jews during World War II was a “hoax”.
This is false. The Holocaust was a well-documented and forensically established genocide with eyewitness testimonies, physical evidence and Nazi documentation.
Evidence of the six million murdered Jewish victims is outlined by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum through Nazi documents, resistance group recordings, and demographic studies.
On June 26, 95-year-old Ursula Haverbeck was sentenced to 16 months in prison for two statements she made in 2015 that denied the Auschwitz concentration camp was used to kill Jewish people.
Holocaust denial is a crime under German law.
Facebook posts featuring images of Haverbeck have claimed the Holocaust is a “lie”, warned “Don’t question the Hollow Hoax” and described her as a “dangerous little lady for speaking the truth“.
More than 1000 eyewitness accounts detailing Nazi persecutions and acts of genocide against Jews during World War II are available online from the Weiner Holocaust Library, and these include survivors of Auschwitz.
Auschwitz was the largest Nazi-operated death camp. The US Holocaust museum estimates more than 1.1 million people were murdered there, one million of whom were Jewish.
Physical evidence of the killings is also exhibited at the Auschwitz Museum, including used gas canisters, camp records and human hair.
Darren O’Brien, an honorary senior research fellow in history at the University of Queensland, says that figures like Haverbeck have been used by neo-Nazi groups and sympathisers to “foster legitimacy for [their] extremist ideology”.
He says claims denying the mass killing of Jews in World War II contradict overwhelming evidence detailing the systematic executions by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party.
“[See] the literally hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, [including] survivor, bystander and perpetrator testimonies housed in national and court archive repositories across Europe and the United States,” Dr O’Brien told AAP FactCheck.
He points out that Holocaust deniers from the 1970s and ’80s, such as David Irving, have been thoroughly debunked in literature and law.
The US Holocaust museum explains that denying and distorting the mass murder of Jews was a Nazi strategy that began when the genocide was being carried out in German-occupied Europe.
The museum says Nazis considered the killing “top secret”, and facilitated denial through minimal documentation, coded language and destruction of evidence.
A photo of Haverback’s first day on trial was shared in a June 7 post on X (formerly Twitter) with text repeating her false claim that the Holocaust is “the biggest and most persistent lie in history” without questioning its veracity.
The X post also claims she was in her 20s during the war, even though she was 16 when the conflict ended in 1945.
Screenshots of the X post with her false claim have been shared in many Facebook posts sympathising with Haverbeck.
The Nazi regime also targeted other groups of victims deemed inferior, including Romani, black, disabled and gay people.
Following the defeat of the Nazis and the end of WWII, the UN recognised genocide as a crime under international law in 1948.
The Verdict
The claim that the Holocaust was a hoax is false.
The Holocaust was a well-documented and forensically established genocide with many eyewitness testimonies, physical evidence and Nazi documentation.
False – The claim is inaccurate.
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