Holocaust denial is a set of ideas that question whether the Holocaust – the historical fact that the German Nazis systematically exterminated about six million Jews in Europe during the 1940s – ever actually happened.

For many years after the end of the Second World War in 1945, Holocaust denial was an ideology espoused only by diehard Nazis and a handful of their sympathisers. Since the 1970s, however, it has become more common, mainly due to the resurgence of small groups of neo-Nazi extremists. It can be divided into two types:

1. Vulgar racism and vicious antisemitic propaganda, usually based on fantasies and completely unfounded statements;
   
   
2. Academic publications, often called revisionist, which use the language, methods and intellectual apparatus (footnotes, sources and systematic arguments) of scholarly debate to make statements that are patently untrue.

What are the arguments?

Typically, Holocaust denial involves claiming:

1. That the Holocaust never actually happened, that it is simply a myth propagated by Zionist Jews to legitimise the state of Israel and is supported by Jewish survivors of the Second World War whose testimony cannot be trusted because they are claiming compensation from the German state;
   
   
2. That Hitler did not order the extermination of the Jews;
   
   
3. That most of the millions of Jews who died during the Second World War did so through neglect rather than because of an official policy of murder.

In his 1977 book, Hitler's War, David Irving argued that Hitler was not a demon but instead a weak politician swept up by events he couldn't control, and that he didn't have a masterplan to wipe out European Jews. In the 1980s, Irving went much further, arguing that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz concentration camp. From being sceptical about the causes of the Holocaust, he turned into being an outright denier.

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