The Holocaust Denial Quotes

To permit this gross new revelation to fade, or be forgiven, would be to devalue our most essential standard of what constitutes the unpardonable. And for what? For the reputation of a man who turns out to be not even a Holocaust denier but a Holocaust affirmer. There has to be a moral limit, and either this has to be it or we must cease pretending to ourselves that we observe one. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Despite its veneer of impartial scholarship, Butz's book is replete with the same expressions of traditional anti-Semitism, philo-Germanism and conspiracy theory as the Holocaust denial pamphlets printed by the most scurrilous neo-Nazi groups.

-- Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, page 126 ~ Deborah E. Lipstadt

I was born in Israel, to Canadian parents. My father immigrated in 1948, part of a wave of young men and women who came as pioneers, to fight for a Jewish homeland. Their motive was in large part a reaction to the Holocaust, and their slogan was 'Never Again.' ~ Ayelet Waldman

One summer at the fag end of the nineties, I had to go out of London to talk to a literary society, of the sort that must have been old-fashioned when the previous century closed. When the day came, I wondered why I'd agreed to it; but yes is easier than no, and of course when you make a promise you think the time will never arrive: that there will be a nuclear holocaust, or something else diverting. ~ Hilary Mantel

In the knowing, there was peace. ~ Jennifer A. Nielsen

The destructive impact of psychiatry upon our civilization has been given far too little attention, and the role of psychiatry in Nazi Germany almost no attention. It is entirely possible that without psychiatry the holocaust could never have taken place. ~ Peter Breggin

To me, the Holocaust stands alone as the most horrible human event in modern civilization. ~ Robert Shapiro

I was brought up in the shadow of the Holocaust. My mother lost most of her family, and I didn't realize how much the guilt of survivorship weighed on her until I was an adult. ~ Naomi Benaron

Luz Castro "And then i explain that the world did know and remained silent. and that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. NEUTRALITY HELPS THE OPPRESSOR, NEVER THE VICTIM. SILENCE ENCOURAGES THE TORMENTOR, NEVER THE TORMENTED. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must- at that moment- become the center of the universe." Elie Wiesel (from his speech when given the Nobel Peace Prize.) ~ Elie Wiesel

My siblings had already instilled the notion of black pride in me. I would have preferred that Mommy were black. Now, as a grown man, I feel privileged to have come from two worlds. My view of the world is not merely that of a black man but that of a black man with something of a Jewish soul. I don't consider myself Jewish, but when I look at Holocaust photographs of Jewish women whose children have been wrenched from them by Nazi soldiers, the women look like my own mother and I think to myself, There but for the grace of God goes my own mother - and by extension, myself. ~ James McBride

Anyone who grew up with Holocaust survivors knows what they had to overcome to tell their stories. For decades after the war they treated their experiences as shameful secrets. On top of the ignominy of victimhood, the desperate straits to which they were reduced could remove the last traces of their humanity in ways they could be forgiven for wanting to forget. ~ Steven Pinker

In fact, this figure [five million "murdered" Gentiles] is too high if one is counting victims who were targeted exclusively for racial reasons, but too low if one counts the total number of victims the Nazi regime killed outside military operations.
(...)
Wiesenthal's aggrandizement of his role in the Eichmann capture is far less disturbing and historiographically significant than another of his inventions. In an attempt to elicit non-Jewish interest in the Holocaust, Wiesenthal decided to broaden the population of victims - even though it meant falsifying history. He began to speak of eleven million victims: six million Jews and five million non-Jews. Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer immediately recognized that this number made no historical sense. Who, Bauer wondered, constituted Wiesenthal's five million.

--The Eichmann Trial, page 8 ~ Deborah E. Lipstadt

Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions. ~ Primo Levi

It [the Holocaust] is something like a religion ... The Intellectual Adventure is that we are reversing this entire trend within the space of one generation - that in a few years time no one will believe this particular legend anymore. They will say, as I do, that atrocities were committed. Yes, hundreds of thousands of people were killed, but there were no factories of death. All that is a blood libel against the German people. ~ David Irving

The sea of excited people, the flood of colored lights, and the unending stream of cars were proof that the days of the Holocaust were now part of the history books. I awakened from my horrible memories and almost agreed with the opinion voiced by many that the ghetto was a dead issue and the whole period surrounding it too far-fetched, too cruelly-sadistic, to be believable today, assuming it really existed.... The reign of man-eating furnaces is hard for a reasonable mind to grasp, even that of someone who was a victim himself. ~ Joseph Bau

One of the most often asked questions posed after America was attacked on 9/11 was, 'What has the United States done to arouse so much Muslim hatred?' The question, however, is on the same moral level as asking what German and other European Jews did to cause the Holocaust, or what blacks did to arouse the hatred among the American whites who lynched them. ~ Dennis Prager

Indeed, the field of Holocaust studies is replete with nonsense if not sheer fraud. ~ Norman Finkelstein

Commemorating the Holocaust is not, not not not not not, the same thing as fighting to prevent future holocausts. Most of the commemorationists are just whiners. They think that if everyone feels bad about past holocausts, human nature will magically transform, and no one will want to commit genocide in the future. ~ Neal Stephenson

I've always tried to stay away from playing Jews. I get like 20 Holocaust scripts a month, but I hate the genre. ~ Natalie Portman

For the animal kingdom, the Holocaust never ended. ~ Philip Wollen

In Germany, no child finishes high school without learning about the Holocaust. Not just the facts of it but the how and the why and the gravity of it - what it means. As a result, Germans grow up appropriately aware and apologetic. British schools treat colonialism the same way, to an extent. Their children are taught the history of the Empire with a kind of disclaimer hanging over the whole thing. "Well, that was shameful, now wasn't it?"
In South Africa, the atrocities of apartheid have never been taught that way. We weren't taught judgment or shame. We were taught history the way it's taught in America. In America, the history of racism is taught like this: "There was slavery and then there was Jim Crow and then there was Martin Luther King Jr. and now it's done." It was the same for us. "Apartheid was bad. Nelson Mandela was freed. Let's move on." Facts, but not many, and never the emotional or moral dimension. It was as if the teachers, many of whom were white, had been given a mandate. "Whatever you do, don't make the kids angry. ~ Trevor Noah

Being Jewish and having lost relatives in the Holocaust, I've always been aware of the meaning of prejudice. These are things that have remained with me throughout my political career. ~ Bernie Sanders

We have only one task, to stand firm and carry on the racial struggle without mercy. ~ Heinrich Himmler

We always see the Holocaust in terms of black-and-white images, barking Germans, cowering Jews. We know very well-known fixed places like Auschwitz, Birkenau, Treblinka, and Beltzec. Instead, war can live in a couple having a spat, when we say, "That was a real war." We very rarely have the Holocaust live in the terms of today. And I think that's a problem, because it becomes ancient history. ~ Yann Martel

As the Christian world is celebrating the Nativity once again, the roar of the guns, the cries of the dying and the wails of innocent people are heard on the battlefields. And an even greater holocaust threatens. Twice before in our time we have seen tyranny and lust for power thwarted by those who believe in the freedom of all mankind, only to see them circumvented in a brief few years. In America, we have only one thought at this Christmastime, to pray that the world again be restored to a sanity that will insure all peoples the right to think and live as they choose, to respect the beliefs of all and to help humanity live a better life in the short span allotted to us on this earth. In this aim we feel we are joined by all peoples who believe in the Divine Spirit. It is my sincere wish, in which I know I am joined by 150,000,000 other Americans, that we will be guided by the Supreme Being in restoring peace to the world, that all may live in hope and happiness.To all peoples of good will, I extend greetings of the Season. ~ Walt Disney Company

Remembering is a necessary rebuke to those who say the Holocaust never happened or has been exaggerated. ~ Kofi Annan

I believe that at the beginning of the life of every artist there is some kind of trauma. We have a problem and all of our life we try to speak about this problem. My trauma was historical. When I was three or four, all the friends of my parents were survivors of the Holocaust; they spoke a lot about that. My father was hiding during the war, it was something totally present when I was a boy. It is sure that it has made me. ~ Christian Boltanski

The Holocaust story has been told and retold so many times. ~ Israel Horovitz

All science is a two-edged sword. It is pure only in the mind, at conception, as an idea, an equation, or just some new way of looking at things. But once it's out there in the world, it becomes whatever the world wants it to be. Germ warfare, nuclear holocaust, or a cure for cancer. ~ David Ambrose

Alls I'm - or think about the Holocaust. Was the Holocaust a good thing? No way. Does anybody think it was good it happened? No way. But did you ever read Victor Frankl? Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning? It's a great, great book. Frankl was in a camp in the Holocaust and the book comes out of that experience, it's about his experience in the human Dark Side and preserving his human identity in the face of the camp's degradation and violence and suffering total ripping away his identity. It's a totally great book and now think about it, if there wasn't a Holocaust there wouldn't be a Man's Search for Meaning. ~ David Foster Wallace

For us, terrorism remains the great evil of our time, and the war against this evil, our generation's great cause ... There is no middle way for Americans: it is victory or holocaust. ~ Richard Perle

For many people, that war [WWII] is called the "good war" because it was fought against a regime guilty of unspeakable atrocities. But the Allies did not enter the war to save Jews from extermination. The United States entered the war after it was attacked by Japan at Pearl Harbor and, as a nation, we certainly did not do as much as we should have to save the Jewish population of Europe. The basic question is still with us: Is it right, justifiable, to intervene in a nation's internal activities when those activities include genocide, ethnic cleansing, or some other demonstrable harm to a subset of its people? ~ Nel Noddings

Finally, and even more seriously, I fear a return to the international climate that prevailed in the 1920s and 30s, when the United States withdrew from the global stage and countries everywhere pursued what they perceived to be their own interests without regard to larger and more enduring goals. When arguing that every age has its own Fascism, the Italian writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi added that the critical point can be reached "not just through the terror of police intimidation, but by denying and distorting information, by undermining systems of justice, by paralysing the education system, and by spreading in a myriad subtle ways nostalgia for a world where order reigned." If he is right (and I think he is), we have reason to be concerned by the gathering array of political and social currents buffeting us today - currents propelled by the dark underside of the technological revolution, the corroding effects of power, the American president's disrespect for truth and the widening acceptance of dehumanising insults, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism as being within the bounds of normal public debate. We are not there yet, but these feel like signposts on the road back to an era when Fascism found nourishment and individual tragedies were multiplied millions-fold. ~ Madeleine K. Albright

Surely it is foolish to hate facts. The struggle against the past is a futile struggle. Acceptance seems so much more like wisdom. I know all this. And yet there are some facts that one must never, never accept. This is not merely an emotional matter. The reason that one must hate certain facts is that one must prepare for the possibility of their return. If the past were really past, then one might permit oneself an attitude of acceptance, and come away from the study of history with a feeling of serenity. But the past is often only an earlier instantiation of the evil in our hearts. It is not precisely the case that history repeats itself. We repeat history - or we do not repeat it, if we choose to stand in the way of its repetition. For this reason, it is one of the purposes of the study of history that we learn to oppose it. ~ Leon Wieseltier

Stalin's mental journey, by 1943, proceeded in the opposite direction to that of Hitler. One moved toward reality; the other moved away from it. They crossed paths at Stalingrad. And as the war turned on the hinge of that battle (and on the new psychological opposition), Stalin might have concerned himself with a "counterfactual": if, instead of decapitating his army, he had intelligently prepared it for war, Russia might have defeated Germany in a matter of weeks. Such a course of action, while no doubt entailing grave consequences of its own, would have saved about 40 million lives, including the vast majority of the victims of the Holocaust. ~ Martin Amis

There is no articulate resonance. The common problem, I suppose, is to have more to say than vocabulary and syntax can bear. That is why I am hunting in these desiccated streets. The smoke hides the sky's variety, stains consciousness, covers the holocaust with something safe and insubstantial. It protects from greater flame. It indicates fire, but obscures the source. This is not a useful city. Very little here approaches any eidolon of the beautiful. ~ Samuel R. Delany

My father's family was mostly obliterated in the Holocaust, and I grew up very much with the sense that the central moral and political question is how do we prevent these things from happening again. ~ Joshua Oppenheimer

Our guns do not strip the foe of life with surgical strokes. They take them in a holocaust. ~ Steven Pressfield

And you just said 'yes'?"
"We could use the money."
"Did you take money for saving the Jews?"

Conversation between 'BB' and his wife Grete
The Informer by Steen Langstrup ~ Steen Langstrup

The mere fact that you belong to a certain ethnic group makes you eternally guilty, according to the twisted logic of Zionism. If Germans who were not even born before 1945 must pay reparations to the State of Israel, which did not exist until 1948, then you can be included in the Zionist racket of reparations and revenge. ~ Ernst Zundel

This man kept us standing and waiting for a good while, while a group of eight to ten Capos gathered round us and looked us up and down… They were on the lookout for a possible lover among the new arrivals. Because I still did not have a full beard, even though nearly twenty-three, so looked younger than my years, and because I had filled out a bit again thanks to the supplementary rations from my Sachsenhausen Capo, I was obviously very much at the center of these Capos' considerations… The situation in which the five of us found ourselves seemed to me very much like a slave-boy market in ancient Rome. ~ Heinz Heger

Majeed was a self-confessed Holocaust denier. I had witnessed his indignant nihilism about the six million condemned to be extinguished infinitely in countless narrow minds like his. Despite his intelligence, he possessed capacities I had never previously encountered. I ~ Qanta A. Ahmed