Holocaust trivialization

Inappropriate comparisons or analogies that trivialize the Holocaust

Trivialization of the Holocaust is the act of making comparisons that diminish the scale and severity of the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany.[1] The Wiesel Commission defined trivialization as the abusive use of comparisons with the aim of minimizing the Holocaust and banalizing its atrocities.[2]

Manfred Gerstenfeld identifies trivialization of the Holocaust as one of the eleven forms of Holocaust distortion; he defines Holocaust trivialization as the application of language that is specific to describing the Holocaust to events and purposes that are unrelated to it.[3] According to Gerstenfeld, such unrelated issues include environmental problems, abortion, killing of animals, tobacco consumption, and human rights abuses.[4] According to David Rudrum, examples of Holocaust trivialization include Lord Wigley invoking Auschwitz to oppose nuclear weapons and Al Gore citing Kristallnacht in defence of the environment.[5]

German political scientist Clemens Heni [de] writes: "Contrary to the hard-core version, soft-core denial is often not easily identifiable. Often it is tolerated, or even encouraged and reproduced in the mainstream, not only in Germany. Scholars have only recently begun to unravel this disturbing phenomenon. Manfred Gerstenfeld discusses Holocaust trivialization in an article published in 2008. In Germany in 2007 two scholars, Thorsten Eitz and Georg Stötzel, published a voluminous dictionary of German language and discourse regarding National Socialism and the Holocaust. It includes chapters on Holocaust trivialization and contrived comparisons, such as the infamous 'atomic Holocaust', 'Babycaust,' 'Holocaust of abortion', 'red Holocaust' or 'biological Holocaust.'"[6]

The Holocaust survivor and memoirist Elie Wiesel wrote, "I cannot use [the word 'Holocaust'] anymore. First, because there are no words, and also because it has become so trivialized that I cannot use it anymore. Whatever mishap occurs now, they call it 'holocaust.' I have seen it myself in television in the country in which I live. A commentator describing the defeat of a sports team, somewhere, called it a 'holocaust.' I have read in a very prestigious newspaper published in California, a description of the murder of six people, and the author called it a holocaust. So, I have no words anymore."[7]

## Notable cases

[edit]

### Historikerstreit

[edit]

See also: Historikerstreit

During the Historikerstreit, many scholars believed the position taken in the Holocaust uniqueness debate by conservative intellectuals led by Ernst Nolte – namely that the Holocaust was not unique, Germans should not bear any special burden of guilt for the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question", there was no moral difference between the crimes of the Soviet Union and those of Nazi Germany, as the Nazis acted as they did out of fear of what the Soviet Union might do to Germany, or that the Holocaust itself was a reaction to the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet Union—trivialized the Holocaust, and echoed Nazi propaganda.[8]

The German historian Thomas Kühne writes that "[t]he more provocative historians were in doing so and the more they thereby questioned the uniqueness, or the peculiarity, of the Holocaust, the more their work was met with resistance or even disgust, most prominently and controversially the German Ernst Nolte in the 1980s."[9]

### Israeli–Palestinian conflict

[edit]

Main articles: Gaza genocide, Palestinian genocide accusation, Comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany, and Nazi analogies § Israel

Comparing the State of Israel to Nazis, or the plight of Palestinians to that of Jews under Nazi occupation, has been criticized as trivializing the Holocaust or as antisemitic. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) accused Gilad Atzmon of trivializing and distorting the Holocaust specifically in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. According to the ADL, Atzmon invoked the word Shoah to describe Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, among other abuses.[10]

The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) condemned the United Church of Canada for trivializing the Holocaust. According to the CIJA, the United Church of Canada published a document[11][12] in which they placed a statement decrying the "loss of dignity" on the part of the Palestinians, attributed to Israel, promptly after a similar statement acknowledging "the denial of human dignity to Jews" in the Holocaust.[13]

During a visit to Berlin, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas told Olaf Scholz that "Israel [had] committed….50 massacres, 50 slaughters, 50 holocausts" after he was inquired if he would apologize for the Munich massacre by Palestinian terrorists. Scholz stated in a message to the Bild newspaper that "for us Germans, any relativization of the Holocaust is unbearable and unacceptable."[14][15]

After Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva compared Israeli actions during the Gaza war to the Holocaust, Dani Dayan, the chairman of Yad Vashem museum, said the comments represented blatant antisemitism and "an outrageous combination of hatred and ignorance," further stating that "comparing a country fighting against a murderous terror organization to the actions of the Nazis in the Holocaust is worthy of all condemnation." Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded to Lula's comments by saying "The words of the President of Brazil are shameful and alarming. This is a trivialization of the Holocaust and an attempt to harm the Jewish people and Israel's right to defend itself."[16]

### The Black Book of Communism

[edit]

See also: The Black Book of Communism

A report by the Wiesel Commission criticized the comparison of Gulag victims with Jewish Holocaust victims, as was done in The Black Book of Communism, as an attempt at Holocaust trivialization.[2]

### Double genocide theory

[edit]

See also: Double genocide theory

The double genocide narrative holds that there were two contemporary genocides of equal weight, a Nazi one and a Stalinist one. Michael Shafir calls the double genocide theory a form of Holocaust obfuscation,[17] while Carole Lemée sees it as a symptom of persistent antisemitism.[18]

In The Holocaust/Genocide Template in Eastern Europe, Ljiljana Radonić writes that the double genocide theory proposes the existence of an equivalency between communism and Nazism. Radonić posits that this theory and charges of Communist genocide both come from "a stable of anti-communist émigré lexicon since the 1950s and more recently revisionist politicians and scholars" as well as the "comparative trivialization" of the Holocaust that "results from tossing postwar killings of suspected Axis collaborators and opponents of Tito's regime into the same conceptual framework as the Nazi murder of six million of Jews", describing this as "an effort to demonize communism more broadly as an ideology akin to Nazism".[19]

### Red Holocaust

[edit]

The term red Holocaust was coined by the Institute of Contemporary History (Munich Institut für Zeitgeschichte) at Munich.[20][21] According to the German historian Jörg Hackmann [de], this term is not popular among scholars in Germany or internationally.[21] Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine writes that usage of this term "allows the reality it describes to immediately attain, in the Western mind, a status equal to that of the extermination of the Jews by the Nazi regime."[22] Michael Shafir says that the use of the term supports the "competitive martyrdom component" of the double genocide theory.[17] George Voicu states that Leon Volovici has "rightfully condemned the abusive use of this concept as an attempt to 'usurp' and undermine a symbol specific to the history of European Jews."[23]

### Social media

[edit]

Some trends on social media platforms have trivialized the Holocaust. In 2020, teenagers posted on TikTok videos of themselves dressed in Holocaust-themed fancy dress, and TikTok banned the hashtag Holocaustchallenge.[5]

### Russian invasion of Ukraine

[edit]

Further information: Disinformation in the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine § Allegations of Nazism, and Fascist (insult)

Yad Vashem (Israel's official memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust) criticized the Kremlin's claim that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was aimed at the "denazification" of Ukraine, as false and a trivialization of Holocaust history.[24][25] According to the philosopher Jason Stanley, this reflects an antisemitic conspiracy theory which casts Russian Christians, rather than Jews, as the true victims of Nazi Germany.[26] The Fortunoff Archive for Holocaust Testimonies also condemned the invasion and described Putin's rhetoric as Holocaust trivialization,[27] and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum denounced Putin's characterization of Holocaust history.[28][29]

On 21 March 2022, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky was criticized by Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Center for creating a false equivalence between the Russian invasion and the Holocaust, while Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett found the comparison of the two events to be inappropriate.[30]

## See also

[edit]

* History portal

* AIDS–Holocaust metaphor
* Armenian genocide and the Holocaust
* Fascist (insult)
* Comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany
* Genocide denial
* Genocide recognition politics
* Genocide studies
* Genocides in history
* Godwin's law
* Historical negationism
* Historical revisionism
* History of the Jews during World War II
* Holocaust denial
* The Holocaust Industry
* Holocaust inversion
* Holocaust studies
* Israel and apartheid
* Is the Holocaust Unique?
* Holocaust uniqueness debate
* Link between the Herero genocide and the Holocaust
* The Holocaust and the Nakba

## References

[edit]

1. ^ Foxman, Abraham H. (27 January 2014). "Inappropriate Comparisons Trivialize the Holocaust". Anti-Defamation League. Retrieved 9 January 2022.
2. ^ a b Friling, Tuvia; Ioanid, Radu; Ionescu, Mihail E.; Benjamin, Lya (2004). Distortion, negationism and minimization of the Holocaust in postwar Romania (PDF). International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania. pp. 47, 59 – via United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
3. ^ Gerstenfeld, Manfred (28 October 2007). "The Multiple Distortions of Holocaust Memory". Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Archived from the original on 4 March 2024. Retrieved 2 December 2020.
4. ^ Gerstenfeld, Manfred (14 March 2018). "The Ongoing Major Distortion of the Holocaust". Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Retrieved 16 July 2025.
5. ^ a b Rudrum, David (16 March 2021). "Why Holocaust Trivialisation Isn't Trivial". The Holocaust Exhibition and Learning Centre. Archived from the original on 13 March 2023. Retrieved 10 January 2022.
6. ^ Heni, Clemens (Fall 2008). "Secondary Anti-Semitism: From Hard-Core to Soft-Core Denial of the Shoah". Jewish Political Studies Review. 20 (3/4). Jerusalem: 73–92\. JSTOR 25834800.
7. ^ Cohen, Asher; Gelber, Joav; Wardi, Charlotte, eds. (1988). Comprehending the Holocaust: Historical and Literary Research. Bern: Peter Lang. p. 13\. ISBN 978-3-63-140428-7. Retrieved 2 December 2020 – via Google Books.
8. ^ Caplan, Jane, ed. (2008). "Introduction". Nazi Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 8–12\. ISBN 978-0-19-164774-1. Retrieved 2 December 2020 – via Google Books.
9. ^ Kühne, Thomas (May 2012). "Great Men and Large Numbers: Undertheorising a History of Mass Killing". Contemporary European History. 21 (2): 133–143\. doi:10.1017/S0960777312000070. ISSN 0960-7773. JSTOR 41485456. S2CID 143701601.
10. ^ "Backgrounder: Gilad Atzmon". Anti-Defamation League. 30 January 2012. Archived from the original on 12 May 2012. Retrieved 2 December 2020.
11. ^ "Government Advocacy Around Palestine and Israel". United Church of Canada. Archived from the original on 13 March 2023. Retrieved 2 December 2020.
12. ^ The Working Group on Israel/Palestine Policy. 41st General Council. United Church of Canada. 1 August 2012. Archived from the original (DOCX (Microsoft Word)) on 13 March 2023. Retrieved 2 December 2020.
13. ^ Lungen, Paul (7 May 2012). "CIJA slams United Church stance on Mideast". The Canadian Jewish News. Archived from the original on 11 September 2024. Retrieved 2 December 2020.
14. ^ "In Berlin, Abbas says Israel committed 'holocausts' against the Palestinians; Scholz grimaces silently, later condemns remarks". The Times of Israel. 16 August 2022. Archived from the original on 15 July 2024. Retrieved 16 August 2022.
15. ^ "Palestinian President Abbas skirts apology for Munich attack". AP News. 16 August 2022. Archived from the original on 12 May 2024. Retrieved 16 August 2022.
16. ^ Berman, Lazar (18 February 2024). "Israel livid as Brazil's Lula says Israel like 'Hitler,' committing genocide in Gaza". The Times of Israel.
17. ^ a b Shafir, Michael (Summer 2016). "Ideology, Memory and Religion in Post-Communist East Central Europe: A Comparative Study Focused on Post-Holocaust". Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies. 15 (44): 52–110. Quote at pp. 64 and 74.
18. ^ Lemée, Carole (2018). "History-memory of Litvak Yiddish spaces after the Holocaust. Between worlds of life and worlds of assassination". Ethnologie française. 170 (2): 225–242\. doi:10.3917/ethn.182.0225.
19. ^ Radonić, Ljiljana (2020). The Holocaust/Genocide Template in Eastern Europe. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-000-71212-4.
20. ^ Möller, Horst (1999). Der rote Holocaust und die Deutschen: die Debatte um das "Schwarzbuch des Kommunismus" [The Red Holocaust and the Germans: The Debates on the "Black Book of Communism"] (in German). Munich: Piper Verlag. ISBN 978-3-492-04119-5.
21. ^ a b Hackmann, Jörg (March 2009). "From National Victims to Transnational Bystanders? The Changing Commemoration of World War II in Central and Eastern Europe". Constellations. 16 (1): 167–181\. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8675.2009.00526.x. "A coining of communism as 'red Holocaust,' as had been suggested by the Munich Institut fur Zeitgeschichte, did not find much ground, neither in Germany nor elsewhere in international discussions."
22. ^ Goslan, Richard Joseph; Rousso, Henry, eds. (2004). Stalinism and Nazism: History and Memory Compared. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 978-0-803-29000-6. Retrieved 2 December 2020 – via Google Books.
23. ^ Voicu, George (2018). "Postcommunist Romania's Leading Public Intellectuals and the Holocaust". In Florian, Alexandru (ed.). Holocaust Public Memory in Postcommunist Romania, Studies in Antisemitism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. pp. 41–71\. ISBN 978-0-253-03274-4. Retrieved 2 December 2020 – via Google Books. Quote at p. 46.
24. ^ Gross, Judah Ari. "Yad Vashem chief: Russia trivializing Holocaust with false 'denazification' claim". The Times of Israel. Retrieved 7 March 2022.
25. ^ "Yad Vashem Statement Regarding the Russian Invasion of Ukraine". Yad Vashem. Retrieved 7 March 2022.
26. ^ Stanley, Jason (26 February 2022). "The antisemitism animating Putin's claim to 'denazify' Ukraine". The Guardian.
27. ^ "On the Russian Invasion of Ukraine and Vladimir Putin's Abuse of Language". Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. 2 March 2022. Retrieved 7 March 2022.
28. ^ Snyder, Timothy. "Putin's Hitler-like tricks and tactics in Ukraine". The Boston Globe.
29. ^ "Museum concerned about loss of life". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 24 February 2022. Archived from the original on 25 February 2022. Retrieved 25 February 2022.
30. ^ "Israelis Reject Zelenskyy's Holocaust Comparisons". VOA. 21 March 2022.

## Further reading

[edit]

* Blutinger, Jeffrey (Fall 2010). "An Inconvenient Past: Post-Communist Holocaust Memorialization". Shofar. Purdue University Press. 29 (1): 73–94. JSTOR 10.5703/shofar.29.1.73.
* Gerstenfeld, Manfred (9 April 2008). "Holocaust Trivialization". Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
* Katz, Steven (1994). The Holocaust in Historical Context. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195072204.
* Shafir, Michael (2002). "Between Denial and 'Comparative Trivialization' – Holocaust Negationism in Post-Communist East Central Europe". Acta – Analysis of Current Trends in Antisemitism. Jerusalem: Hebrew University, Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism. 19. p. 23.
* Stannard, David E. (2 August 1996). "The dangers of calling the Holocaust unique". The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved 10 January 2022.
* Sullam Calimani, Anna-Vera (October 1999). "A Name for Extermination". The Modern Language Review. 94 (4): 978–999. doi:10.2307/3737232. JSTOR 3737232.

## External links

[edit]

* "Addressing Anti-Semitism through Education: Addressing Holocaust Denial, Distortion and Trivialization, Teaching Aid 6" (PDF). OSCE. 4 December 2019.
* "Antisemitism and Hate in Canada". League for Human Rights of Canada. March 2000. Archived 27 September 2007 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 2 December 2020.

* v
* t
* e

Historical negationism

* Denialism
* Disinformation
* Knowledge falsification
* Pseudohistory
* school textbook controversies
* Rationalization
* Victim blaming

Genocide denial /
denial of mass killings
and atrocities|

* Armenian genocide
* Atrocities against Indigenous peoples
* Bosnian genocide
* Cambodian genocide
* Genocide of Serbs during WWII
* Croatian Wikipedia
* Holodomor
* Katyn massacre
* Khojaly massacre
* Nanjing Massacre
* U.S. cover-up of Japanese war crimes
* Rohingya genocide
* Rwandan genocide
* Denial of the 7 October attacks

| Holocaust|

* Austria victim theory
* Clean Wehrmacht
* Rommel / Speer myth
* Italians, the good people
* Trivialization
* Double genocide theory
* Vichy syndrome
* Sonderaktion 1005

|

Other whitewashing
of governments
or time periods|

* Cuba de ayer
* Czechoslovak myth
* Denial of state terrorism in Argentina
* Driftwood theory
* Ferdinand Marcos apologism
* Lost Cause of the Confederacy
* Dunning School
* Negationism of the military dictatorship of Brazil [pt] / Chile
* Merry England
* Neo-Stalinism
* Operation Legacy (UK)

Other manifestations|

* Allah as a lunar deity
* Ancient astronauts
* Ancient Egyptian race controversy
* Antiquization
* Book burnings
* list
* Censorship of Great Zimbabwe
* Christ myth theory
* Dacianism
* Damnatio memoriae
* Destruction of cultural heritage
* Islamic State
* Saudi Arabia
* Gaza Strip
* Lebanon
* Sudan
* Myth of English aid [es]
* Izbrisani
* Khazar hypothesis
* LGBT erasure
* Like sheep to the slaughter
* Myth of the golden exile
* Phantom time hypothesis / New chronology
* Western Pseudohistory Theory
* Shakespeare authorship question
* Territorial losses of Thailand

| Azerbaijan|

* Destruction of Armenian heritage
* Cemetery in Julfa
* Nakhchivan [ru]
* Nizami Ganjavi
* Western Azerbaijan

|

Germany|

* Borussian myth
* Myth of Langemarck [de]
* Stab-in-the-back myth

Israel / Palestine|

* Denial of the 7 October attacks
* Nakba denial
* Temple denial
* There was no such thing as Palestinians

Russia|

* Allegations of genocide in Donbas
* All-Russian nation
* On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians
* Soviet Union
* Censorship of images
* Denial of Crimean Tatars

Turkey|

* Denial of Kurds
* History Thesis
* Sun Language Theory

United States|

* 1776 Commission
* Irish slaves myth
* Vietnam stab-in-the-back myth

Organizations|

* Adelaide Institute
* ASİMKK
* Centre for the Study of the Causes of the War
* CODOH
* Dalit Voice
* FactCheckArmenia.com
* Gesellschaft zur Rechtlichen und Humanitären Unterstützung
* HIAG
* Iğdır Genocide Memorial and Museum
* Institute for Armenian Research
* Institute for Historical Review
* Nippon Kaigi
* Turkish Historical Society
* United Daughters of the Confederacy
* Zeitgeschichtliche Forschungsstelle Ingolstadt

Publications|

* A Town Betrayed
* A Verdade Sufocada
* The Birth of a Nation
* Coverage of the Hillsborough disaster by The Sun
* Did Six Million Really Die?
* Falsifiers of History
* Flatline
* Folk og Land
* A History of the Palestinian People (2017)
* Hitler Diaries
* The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
* I Am More Than a Wolf Whistle
* Jasenovac – istina
* Journal of Historical Review
* Leuchter report
* The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism
* The Ottoman Lieutenant
* Report about Case Srebrenica

Conferences|

* International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust

Publishing houses|

* Arndt Verlag
* J.J. Fedorowicz Publishing
* Munin Verlag
* Nation Europa Verlag

Legal status|

| Statute law|

* Austria
* Belgium
* France
* Germany

|

Case law|

* R v Zundel (1992)
* Lehideux and Isorni v France (1998)
* Irving v Penguin Books Ltd (2000)
* Perinçek v. Switzerland (2013)

International law|

* Additional Protocol to the Convention on Cybercrime
* Right to truth

Related|

* Historical fiction
* Historical revisionism
* Historical misconceptions

* * *

* Accusation in a mirror
* Ash heap of history
* Censorship
* Cherry picking
* Conspiracy theories
* False attribution
* Furtive fallacy
* Genocide justification
* Propaganda

* Category

*[v]: View this template
*[t]: Discuss this template
*[e]: Edit this template