Steinhauer: Lies and distortions about the Holocaust – Russian disinformation strategy to justify crimes

Lies and distortions about the Holocaust are pernicious forms of disinformation that have become resurgent in recent years. While Holocaust distortion and denial have been used in information warfare for several decades, they have inundated social media since the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and the Hamas attack against Israel on October 7, 2023.

To understand why Holocaust denial and distortion are such potent weapons in information warfare, it is important to first restate the historical facts about the Holocaust. Prior to the Second World War, the Nazi regime began a systematic persecution of Jewish individuals living in Germany, as well as Catholics, Communists, Roma and political opponents. Laws were passed—called the Nuremberg Laws—that purposefully discriminated against German Jews by declaring that they could no longer be equal citizens.

Soon, concentration camps were constructed where Jews and others were rounded up and interned. Adolf Hitler and his leadership determined that the “Final Solution” to a so-called “Jewish problem” would be to mass murder the Jewish population of Europe. Initially, the Germans sent mobile killing squads across Eastern Europe, called Einsatzgruppen, to round up innocent people, march them to secluded areas, dig their own graves, and execute them with machine guns. Eventually, the Einsatzgruppen also suffocated their victims in poison gas vans. It is estimated that 1.5 million innocent people were murdered by the Einsatzgruppen, predominantly Jews, but also Roma, Soviets and political opponents.

 The horrors did not stop there. Next, the Nazi regime created extermination camps, most notably Auschwitz-Birkenau, a killing center in southwest Poland. It is estimated that 1.1 million innocent people were murdered at Auschwitz alone, including more than 900,00 Jews; more than 70,000 non-Jewish Poles; more than 20,000 Roma; and tens of thousands of Soviet POW’s. Approximately 6 million Jews were murdered overall. Only the defeat of Germany and the Axis by the Allies prevented the complete annihilation of Europe’s Jewish and Roma populations.

The Holocaust was one of the most well-documented crimes in human history. The Nazis kept meticulous records of their evil deeds; liberators of concentration camps took hundreds-of-thousands of photographs and movie reels; and survivors have given tens-of-thousands of oral histories about what they experienced. Yet, there remain radical and extremist groups, as well as malicious state actors, who deny or minimize these atrocities. How can that be?

Holocaust denial and distortion are, without a doubt, forms of antisemitism, meant to hurt and offend the Jewish people. It is an effective form of hate speech, and has also been an effective form of disinformation. Throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union engaged in deliberate propaganda and disinformation campaigns in the U.S., Europe and the Middle East centered around antisemitism and Holocaust distortion, with the intent of instigating hatred against Jews and destabilizing American and European societies.

Today, the Russian government and security services are enacting a similar playbook. Particularly in the context of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia has:

• Hurled antisemitic attacks against Ukrainian Jewish President Volodymyr Zelenskyy;
• Equated contemporary Ukrainians defending their homeland to “Nazis” of WWII;
• Stated that international condemnations of Russia for its actions are equivalent to the persecution experienced by Jews during the Second World War.

Russia is not the only actor participating in antisemitic disinformation and Holocaust denial today. Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran frequently deny the Holocaust occurred, or minimize the suffering that Jewish people experienced. For them, these lies are meant to undermine international support for the State of Israel. The rationalization is that if Jews did not really suffer during the Second World War, the moral basis for the State of Israel disappears. These hate groups and extremists’ traffic in conspiracy theories and fake history in order to justify their genocidal intentions of wiping Israel off the map.

Holocaust denial, antisemitism and disinformation are closely linked. The motives often are the same: to breed hatred, sew division, pit ethnicities or religions against each other, and to justify political or military actions that are otherwise unjustifiable. Having a sound working knowledge of the Holocaust, and the facts of the historical record, then, become powerful tools in our toolkit to defend against these lies and distortions./The Geopost/