Holocaust documentary evidence

Holocaust documentary evidence constitutes various forms of documents from or near the time period when the Holocaust allegedly occurred and that are argued to provide evidence against or for the politically correct view on the Holocaust. Holocaust revisionists argue that it is a more important form of evidence than Holocaust testimonial evidence, but less so than Holocaust material evidence.

The Holocaust is sometimes claimed to be the most (or one of the most) well-documented genocide(s) in history. However, Holocaust revisionists argue that even the by non-revisionists claimed amount of German WWII documents on genocidal killing is extremely limited. This especially considering the enormous amount of German documents on other issues, including issues such as the deportation of Jews to the Holocaust camps, which are not disputed by Holocaust revisionists. Regarding the argued few German WWII documents claimed to describe genocidal killings, Holocaust revisionists argue that these documents are misinterpreted/mistranslated (see, for example, the article on meanings and translations of German words and Holocaust revisionism‎) or forged/edited (see, for example, the article on Allied psychological warfare).

Holocaust revisionists also argue that there are many WWII documents that are evidence against the claimed genocidal killings.

The missing Holocaust documents

In 1951 the Jew Léon Poliakov, who had been part of the French delegation at the Nuremberg trial (1945-1946), stated his conclusion that we had at our disposal an overabundance of documents for all points of the history of the Third Reich, with the exception of one point alone: the “campaign to exterminate the Jews”. For this, he wrote, “No document remains, perhaps none has ever existed”... Remark: There is, here, an extraordinary concession to the revisionist case. In effect, such a formidable criminal undertaking supposedly conceived, ordered, organized and perpetrated by the Germans would have necessitated an order, a plan, instructions, a budget, … Such an undertaking, carried out over several years on a whole continent and generating the death of millions of victims, would have left a flood of documentary evidence. Consequently, if we are told that there perhaps has never existed any such documentary evidence, it is because the crime in question was not perpetrated.

—Robert Faurisson, The Victories of Revisionism.

The archives torn from the bowels of the Third Reich, the depostions and accounts of its chiefs permit us to reconstruct in their least detail the birth and the development of its plans for aggression, its military campaigns, and the whole range of processes by which the Nazis intended to reshape the world to their pattern. Only the campaign to exterminate the Jews, as concerns its completion, as well as in many other essential aspects, remains steeped in fog. Psychological inferences and considerations, third- or fourth-hand accounts, allow us to reconstruct the developments with a considerable verisimilitude. Certain details, nevertheless, will remain unknown forever. As concerns the concept proper of the plan for total extermination, the three or four principal actors are dead. No document remains, and has perhaps never existed.

—Leon Poliakov, Breviaire de la haine (Breviary of Hate).

Despite the great harvest of Nazi documents captured by the Allies at the end of the war, it is precisely the documents concerning the process of the formation of the idea of the final solution of the Jewish question that are missing, to the point that up until the present it is difficult to say how, when, and exactly by whom the order to exterminate the Jews was given.

—Lilliano Picciotto Fargion, La congiura del silenzio (The Conspiracy of Silence), La Rassegna mensile d'Israel.

For in the table talk, the speeches, the documents or the recollections of participants from all those years not a single concrete reference of [Hitler's] to the practice of annihilation has come down to us. No one can say how Hitler reacted to the reports of the Einsatzgruppen, whether he asked for or saw films or photos of their work, and whether he intervened with suggestions, praise, or blame. When we consider that he ordinarily transformed everything that preoccupied him into rampant speechmaking, that he never concealed his radicalism, his vulgarity, his readiness to go to extremes, this silence about the central concern of his life- involving, as it did in his mind, the salvation of the world - seems all the stranger.

—Joachim C. Fest, Hitler.

At the end of writing the Adolf Hitler biography in draft, I was aware of the fact that having written it from primary, original Hitler sources, I, as the author, didn't know about the Holocaust. I had found no documents showing any involvement between Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust which was very disturbing for me. So I re-investigated. I sent a researcher back into the archives where, with a specific job, the researcher, who was a trained historical scientist at the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich, I said to her, 'Go back to the archives in Freiburg, Munich and Berlin, and see if I have missed anything'. I couldn't believe what I was seeing, the fact there were no documents whatsoever showing that a Holocaust had ever happened. I'm using the word 'Holocaust' in the modern sense that the newspapers tell us to use it. And certainly there was no evidence that Hitler had ever known such a thing was going on, whatever it was. This was very disturbing for me and it was even more disturbing for my literary agent who warned me of the consequences of producing the Hitler book in this fashion.

—David Irving in The 'False News' Trial of Ernst Zündel -- 1988.

In your research as a historian, asked Christie, do you consider it likely that an enterprise of the magnitude of the extermination of the Jews of Europe could be accomplished by the people [Germans] knowing the way they conducted their business from their documents without the existence of explicit orders and plans?

"Not only without existence of orders," said Irving, "but also without the existence of any written reference to it. I have to say that the German wartime civil servant was basically a -- a cowardly animal and he would not do something that he considered to be criminal without getting a document clearing himself. He would get his superior to write a letter saying, 'On the Führer's orders, we are doing the following', which is why there are letters showing Himmler saying, 'On the Führer's orders, we are deporting the Jews.' Which was the extent of the Führer's orders and which was the extent, to my mind, of the final solution. So the documents don't exist where you would expect to find them. [...] I think there would definitely have had to be orders and these orders would have been referred to in countless files of different ministerial bodies. So, it would have been impossible for these documents to have been destroyed at the end of the war. There would always be carbon copies somewhere."

—David Irving in The 'False News' Trial of Ernst Zündel -- 1988.

But why should Hitler have become so circumspect in [regard to issuing a written order for the extermination of European Jewry], since in contrast he had shown no compunction about personally signing a blanket order for the liquidation of tens of thousands of fellow Germans (the Euthanasia Programme); and his comparable orders for the liquidation of enemy prisoners (the Commando Order), of Allied airmen (the Lynch Order) and Russian functionaries (the Commissar Order) are documented all the way from Fuhrer’s headquarters right down the line to the executioners?"

—David Irving in The War Path: Hitler's Germany: 1933-1939.

There is no disagreement that, until the middle of 1941, the terms “emigration,” “evacuation,” “transfers,” and “deportation” meant what they say. How, then, could it have been made clear to the recipients of official orders after mid-1941 that these same terms had suddenly become code words meaning something altogether different from what they say, namely mass murder? We must keep in mind that during the Third Reich, government officials are considered to have been obedient and subservient. They were expected to carry out orders literally and unquestioningly. Whether that was really the case is a different matter. It is a fact that disobedient conduct was severely punished. This would have been all the more true if the orders had been to transport and force prisoners to labor at vital wartime production, and the recipients of these orders had murdered them instead.

The point is: how could the people giving orders have made it clear to those receiving orders that they suddenly, at a specific instant, had to reinterpret their orders and do something entirely different from what the orders instructed? Furthermore, how could those giving orders have hindered those receiving them from re-interpreting them when they were not meant to be re-interpreted? [...] Wouldn’t this have meant that the thousands of people who were involved in the final solution actually participated in mass murder without asking questions, simply because some superior gave an oral order that was diametrically opposed to the written orders? [...] And consider this: in those days, the punishment for unauthorized killings, like the punishment for sabotaging the war effort, was always death. In view of the extremely harsh penalties exacted during the Third Reich, one could only have expected that such offenses would be severely punished. [...] Telepathy is precisely what would have been required for the implementation of such monstrous orders that were never written down, contradict all the documents that were written, and were allegedly disseminated without leaving a bureaucratic trail.

—Germar Rudolf, Lectures on the Holocaust.

Nazi Germany was a top-down bureaucracy where paperwork was needed to do nearly everything. When anyone wanted to do something out of the ordinary, permission would have to be requested from the proper authorities who would then issue the proper papers granting permission. Yet this pattern is broken with the extermination of the Jews and no viable explanation as to why this is the case has ever been offered.

Written orders to kill Jews under Nazi control would have to have been issued. There is no way around it since issuing an oral command would have created its own consequences. Such consequences would have been as obvious in the historical record as any written order. For example, any time someone with any authority passed through Auschwitz or Treblinka or any of the "extermination camps" he would have asked what the meaning of the pyres piled high with dead bodies was. Such a visitor would ask to see the order which granted the camp administration the power and authority to wantonly kill camp inmates. When those in charge could not produce such documentation, because the order was oral, the requester would naturally have written to Berlin to request confirmation. Berlin would have to respond. One would expect to find hundreds of such letters if the extermination camps were operating on oral authorization. These queries and requests for verification would have produced a paper trail which would have survived the war since copies of this correspondence would have proliferated as they made their way through the Nazi bureaucracy in duplicate and triplicate.

One line of argument used to explain the void in documents relating to the Holocaust is that the order to kill the Jews along with other documents relating to the extermination program were destroyed by the Nazis in order to hide their crimes. This too is unlikely since it would have been nearly impossible to keep track of all of these documents. In addition, Allied intelligence agents had infiltrated the Nazi government and were intercepting coded German communications. The enemies of the Nazi Germany would have leaked these to the Allies long before the end of the war. Those implementing the orders would have had a strong incentive not to destroy these orders since these could be used in their defense in the event of their prosecution for war crimes.

—John Weir, The Plum Cake.

Orders, plans, organizations, and budgets

Revisionists argue that there is no documentation of National Socialist orders, plans, organizations, and budgets for the physical extermination of Jews. This in contrast to abundant documentation of deportations, use of Jews for labor, extensive health care and hygiene measures in the camps, deaths of registered Jews in the camps, and so on. Sometimes this is represented as that what is argued to be missing is just a central order signed by Hitler (which do is missing), but the absences are argued to involve all aspects and levels of the hierarchy of National Socialist Germany. Critics of this counter that the Germans used secret "code words" (such as the word "deportation" after mid-1941 not anymore meaning deportation, but now suddenly being a secret "code word" for mass murder), used only verbal orders, and/or destroyed almost all of the relevant documents and other forms of evidence. However, there are a few documents that are argued to do provide relatively "uncoded" evidence. Revisionists argue that the authenticity and/or conventional interpretation of these are highly questionable and have written detailed responses regarding these documents.

The supposed massive use of verbal orders or "code words", contradicting what was actually written, is argued to be implausible, for reasons such as implying that numerous people supposedly ignored what their written orders stated and instead committed mass murders based only on hearsay, despite that the punishment for unauthorized killings or sabotaging the war effort (such as by killing able workers or enabling anti-German propaganda) included the death penalty.

The absence of evidence for orders, plans, organizations, and budgets, despite the need for inform and organize countless authorities, decision makers, executors, and helpers have troubled also mainstream historians. Raul Hilberg, possibly the most respected mainstream historian, once explained this absence with what critics argue is in effect telepathy: "But what began in 1941 was a process of destruction [of the Jews] not planned in advance, not organized centrally by any agency. There was no blueprint and there was no budget for destructive measures. They [these measures] were taken step by step, one step at a time. Thus came about not so much a plan being carried out, but an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus mind reading by a far-flung [German] bureaucracy."

See also World War II statements argued to support Holocaust revisionism on German documents and plans.

"Code words", ambiguous words, and unambiguous German words in National Socialist documents

See Meanings and translations of German words and Holocaust revisionism on various controversial words and phrases appearing in German documents, including the phrase the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question".

Forgeries and famous documents at the Nuremberg trials

The revisionist Germar Rudolf has written that "The German amateur historian Gerd Schultz-Rhonhöf, a retired major general of the German army, pointed out in 2014 that the files given back by the Allies to the Germans are riddled with forgeries. These can be recognized, he stated by the fact that these forgeries were not written on original paper which, quite in contrast to authentic German documents, do not turn yellow as they age (Schultz-Rhonhof 2014). But he has only analyzed documents regarding the guilt question of the war". Criticizing Holocaust documents in Germany may cause severe punishments for the crime of "Holocaust denial". Rudolf has written that there may also be "forgeries on original paper among the German files. These could not so easily be recognized as such. After all, at war's end the Allies had all the official German stationary at their disposal."

In addition to now admitted to be false Katyn massacre and Western Holocaust camps evidence (see sections of photographs and movies below), revisionists argue that several previously important documents introduced at the Nuremberg Trials are now generally admitted to be fraudulent. Revisionists argue that forgers had access to genuine German typewriters, stationary, stamps, and so on, making it no great achievement to fabricate “original” documents looking similar to genuine documents based on only these aspects.

Well-known Nuremberg documents that are still cited as evidence include the 4 October 1943 Posen Speech, the Wannsee protocol, the Gerstein Report, the Hossbach Memorandum, Generalplan Ost, and the Einsatzgruppen reports. They have been criticized by revisionists, who have argued that they are incorrectly interpreted, are partly edited, and/or are complete fabrications. See the articles discussing these documents.

The contents of a document may in some places in the document have been interpreted incorrectly and may in other places have been fabricated/edited. This could occur if the editor/fabricator used an original document as a template and made relatively minor changes when creating the new false document, but with these changes creating an overall misleading impression also regarding the parts that were not edited/fabricated. The motivations for only making relatively minor changes include that it is often very difficult and risky to forge a convincing completely new document, while making relatively minor changes to an already existing document is much easier and quicker.

The revisionist Carlos Porter has stated that "I think this is the way most of the Nuremberg documents were produced: by altering a single word or inserting a paragraph or page or occasionally an entire text, retaining the headings, if any. Faking an entire document is far from easy, but alteration is child's play; note the second paragraph above. That way, if necessary, you have the references, everything, so it fits into an entire file of authentic documents, if necessary, and may never be noticed, especially if the originals are never examined. As I have said, I consider the Himmler secret speech an altered speech on the military situation. That's just one example."

See also the article on Sefton Delmer, a British propagandist involved in black propaganda, on Delmar stated to have admitted in an autobiographical book that he and his staff forged a large amount of German documents, including documents having Germans committing a large number of war crimes and used in the Nuremberg trials and history books.

The Jewish YIVO organization was involved in stealing documents from German archives, "processing" them, and then submitting claimed authentic documents as evidence at the Nuremberg trials.

The Jewish Holocaust revisionist Joseph G. Burg and others have stated the existence of sometimes huge forgery workshops at several camps for displaced persons in the postwar period. These produced forgeries for purposes such as gaining compensations for people already dead, for non-existing people, for people not entitled to receive any, and so on. It was possible to obtain any document or certificate needed, in any language. Large scale fabrications of seals and signatures occurred. It has been suggested that, for example, the controversial Jewish Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Kempner may have obtained claimed authentic documents used as evidence from such forgery workshops.

See also the article on the Nuremberg trials on various other argued documentary issues.

Photographs of heaps of corpses and emaciation

Photograph claimed to be of corpses waiting to be burned in an outdoor fire pit at Auschwitz and supposedly photographed by the Communist influenced Auschwitz resistance. Revisionists have argued that the photograph is likely a forgery or edited as demonstrated by the individual in the center (who appears to be throwing something into the "pit") having a too long left arm with two elbows, argued impossible shadows such as the very dark ones on the individual to the left (who appears to be looking into the "pit"), and the type of fence posts shown in background are argued to not have existed at Auschwitz. Much of what is on the ground is argued to be unclear and the allegedly visible corpses on the ground are argued to sometimes have impossible, non-human anatomies, particularly the corpse at the feet of the man with the argued two left elbows. Also, the photograph shows no pit or pyre, but only smoke in the background.

The politically correct explanation is that the quality of the picture has been reduced through multiple copying, which as been criticized as implausible (this applies more generally, often the important claimed documents supporting the politically correct version are argued to be copies, sometimes copies of copies, or second-hand accounts of original documents, while the claimed original documents are supposedly lost, making it difficult to do forensic analyses or to know if the original documents were altered during the "copying").

Finally, revisionists have argued that even if the photograph does depict burning of corpses at Auschwitz (or somewhere else), then this may be burning of corpses due to non-gas causes, such as deaths due to a typhus epidemic.

Other examples of revisionist criticisms of photographs: External link.

Revisionists argue that at the end of WWII, largely due to the general destruction of German society, there was large scale malnutrition and epidemics of typhus and other diseases in the camps, causing many deaths. Also contributing was overcrowding in the remaining camps under German control, due to compliance with an Allied request that prisoners should be moved from the front lines where fighting occurred. When the western Allied forces reached some of the western Holocaust camps, they found and photographed heaps of dead bodies and emaciation. The emaciation seen in the photographs was partially caused by typhus and other diseases, which caused uncontrollable defecation and diarrhea. At the same time, there are photographs of many relatively healthy individuals in the camps, that are much less often being shown. The suffering and the many deaths among the German civilian population during the time period is often not mentioned. Some claimed photos are also argued to have been manipulated for greater effect or be forgeries.

The heaps of corpses discovered and photographed at the end of the war in the western camps convinced many that genocidal mass murder had occurred and were not just wartime propaganda. Also non-revisionists now agree that no genocidal mass murder occurred in these western camps. The eastern camps, where genocidal mass murder is still claimed to have occurred, were all in areas that came under Soviet control at the end of the war. The Soviet Union released no pictures of mass graves or heaps of corpses and allowed no journalists, medical professionals, or other experts to examine the camps. Groups such as the Communist influenced Auschwitz resistance are argued to have provided a few such pictures from the eastern camps, but these been criticized by revisionists (see the photograph to the right).

Movies

Also very influential were several "documentary" movies made by the Allies. One example was the American movie Death Mills ("Todesmühlen"), which was shown to the German civilian population as "reeducation" as well as to the many hundreds of thousands of German POWs. It allegedly shows camp atrocities, but revisionists argue that it instead depicts the conditions in the western camps at the end of the war, as described above in the section "Photographs of heaps of corpses and emaciation". In addition, the moviemakers are stated to have had trouble finding enough material to put the movie together, which may be related to disturbances during screening, caused by individuals in the public claiming that they recognized some scenes as actually showing the mountains of dead Germans in bombed German cities, as well emaciated German prisoners in Allied camps.

Similar movies were also shown at the Nuremberg trials and are reported to have had a large psychological impact. In addition to showing heaps of corpses and falsely claiming that prisoners were gassed in western camps, they also showed various now discredited atrocities, such as claimed artifacts made from human skin and shrunken human heads. Another movie allegedly showed the discovery of gold teeth from murdered Jews in the Reichsbank in Frankfurt. "During the trial and in the course of the later investigations, however, it turned out that the Americans had staged this scene from beginning to end."

A famous director who produced wartime propaganda was Alfred Hitchcock, as discussed in the article on him.

See also Allied psychological warfare: Hollywood and Holocaust fictional descriptions.

Air photos

Air photos taken by the Allies of the camps during the time of the alleged mass murders are argued to support the revisionists, due to factors such as the absence of thick clouds of smoke and cremation trenches. Similarly, air photos from this time of the alleged sites of Einsatzgruppen mass killings/mass burials are argued to support the revisionists. See also Holocaust material evidence: Argued implausibly poor choices of alleged killing methods.

Non-revisionists have instead cited certain small marks on a set of photos of Auschwitz as evidence for mass killings. Revisionists have criticized this interpretation for several reasons and argued that the marks either depict something unrelated to mass killings or were added by a forger.

Death records/reports

Another kind of documents are death records/reports or claimed death records/reports. One example is the official Auschwitz death records, which however state a much lower death count than the politically correct one and do not mention gassings. See Holocaust material evidence: General conditions of the camps and the fate of those unable to work. Another example is the alleged reports by the Einsatzgruppen and that are discussed in the Einsatzgruppen article.

Spies, cracking of all German message codes, and other intelligence gathering activities

Revisionists argue that despite massive observation by spies, resistance groups, and others in areas in the near vicinity of the camps, as well as the cracking of all German radio codes, all of Germany’s wartime enemies and others in practice conducted themselves as if no exterminations of Jews were taking place, thus in effect demonstrating that they did not take seriously the atrocity allegations. If the mass murders had actually occurred, then it is argued that the Red Cross, the Catholic Church (with in principle the whole Catholic Church in Poland being part of the opposition against Germany), humanitarian agencies, neutral governments, and many others would have known about it and would have often and unambiguously mentioned it, and condemned it. Even promoters admit that only a tiny group of individuals believed the story at that time—many of whom were connected either with Jewish or with Communist propaganda agencies. The rise of the Holocaust story is argued to read more like the success story of a PR campaign than anything else.

Despite their own propaganda, the actual behaviors of the Allied governments have been similarly criticized: "In connection with the actions of Allied governments and their officials we can say that (a) the declarations of the governments in relation to “extermination” were inconsistent, equivocal, and unconvincingly timed, (b) no concrete measures were taken to interfere with deportations of Jews or with whatever was happening in the camps, and (c) incidents involving leading officials show that they did not believe the claims."

Allied intelligence

Mr. Allen and myself have both followed German atrocities quite closely. [...] As regards putting Poles to death in gas chambers, I do not believe that there is any evidence that this has been done. There have been many stories to this effect, and we have played them up in P.W.E. [Political Warfare Executive] rumours without believing that they had any foundation. [...] I think that we weaken our case against the Germans by publicly giving credence to atrocity stories for which we have no evidence.

—Stated on 27 August 1943 by Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee of the War Cabinet, with automatic access to all Intelligence input including the highest grades such as ULTRA intercepts.

What we have from intelligence sources militates strongly against the legend. For example, on August 27, 1943, “William Cavendish-Bentinck, Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (Britain), whose task it was to evaluate the truth or falsehood of all such reports from Nazi Europe,” declared confidentially that the stories being circulated “tend to exaggerate German atrocities in order to stoke us up." A U.S. counterpart, John Beaty, one of the two editors of the daily secret “G-2 Report,” which was issued each noon to give persons in high places the world picture as it existed four hours earlier, ridiculed the six million legend in a book published in the Fifties.

—Arthur R. Butz. The Hoax of the Twentieth Century—The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry. 4th, corrected and expanded edition. Holocaust Handbooks.

The small office of the Coordinator of Information (COI), and its successor, the new Office of Strategic Services (OSS), both headed by General William J. Donovan, attempted to capture as much information as possible about Nazi Germany, particularly about its military, economic, or sociopolitical weaknesses. As a by-product, the COI and OSS accumulated substantial intelligence about Nazi measures against Jews. In memoirs and other retrospective accounts, however, a number of former OSS officials have disclaimed recognition of the Holocaust at the time.

—OSS knowledge of the Holocaust, by [exterminationist historians] Richard Breitman, Norman J. W. Goda, Timothy Naftali, Robert Wolfe, 2005.

I'll never understand how, with all we knew about Germany and its military machine, we knew so little about the concentration camps and the magnitude of the holocaust. We knew in a general way that Jews were being persecuted, that they were being rounded up in occupied countries, and deported to Germany, that they were brought to camps, and that brutality and murder took place at these camps. But few if any comprehended the appalling magnitude of it. It wasn't sufficiently real to stand out from the general brutality and slaughter which is war. There was little talk in London about the concentration camps except as places to which captured agents and resistants were deported if they were not executed on the spot.

—William Casey (in the OSS London office from October 1943, director of the CIA in the Reagan administration), book The Secret War Against Hitler (1986) by William J. Casey.

We remained ignorant of the Holocaust. Yes, I saw our maps of Nazi concentration camps, but none was identified as a death camp. We received no real information on the "final solution." I'm surprised that I did not give it any thought as I had early on always believed that the Nazis were out to do away with the Jews.

—Arnold Price (who fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s and landed in the Research and Analysis (R&A) branch of the OSS in 1942), Book My Twentieth Century: Recollections of a Public historian (2003) by Arnold H. Price.

I have asked myself and I have asked R&A colleagues when any of us first became aware of a policy of mass murder as something qualitatively different from the well-recognized viciousness of the concentration camps. OSS presumably received the best possible intelligence, and German-Jewish refugees would have been the last people inclined to ignore or discount reports of a Final Solution. Yet my recollection is that, even in the summer of 1944 when we received with horror the mounting flow of information about the camps, most of us were still thinking of an increase of persecution rather than a new and barbaric policy of genocide. [...] I cannot find R&A colleagues who recall a moment of blazing revelation about the Final Solution.

—Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (OSS R&A agent during WW2), Book A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950 (2000) by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr..

Top-secret radio messages from, for example, Auschwitz (including daily prisoner statistics), and deciphered by the British during the war are argued to mention illness as the main cause of death. There were no references in the decrypts to gassings. These statistics are argued to fit well with the low numbers stated in the Auschwitz death records. One attempted non-revisionist explanation for this is that the real Holocaust statistics were transmitted only by couriers. This has been criticized by pointing out that the Germans entrusted their encrypted radio messages with information on mass shootings by the Einsatzgruppen and with crucial, even decisive, military information, such as the current position of German U-boats and exact information on future German air attacks. Another attempted non-revisionist explanation is that those allegedly gassed immediately on arrival to camps were never registered. This has been criticized by arguing that the German bureaucracy kept very detailed prisoner statistics and statistics on events in the camps, that the central administration would have needed to know how the alleged genocide was progressing, and that such statistics were also needed for purposes such as planning delivery of Zyklon B and coke for cremation purposes to the camps. See also Holocaust demographics: Argued inconsistencies and absurdities regarding treatment and registration on arrivals to the camps on other criticisms of the alleged immediate gassings without this being registered.

A particularly large mistranslation of German is of the Höfle Telegram, which is sometimes incorrectly described as stating that large numbers of Jews were exterminated/eliminated/killed in four camps. The telegram only lists arrivals to the camps.

"Despite all of the authoritative declarations Churchill made or supported during the war with regard to the “reality” of the Nazi extermination of the Jews, when the war ended he made an astonishing statement that casts doubt on the sincerity of all of these wartime pronouncements. In a speech before the House of Commons on 1 August 1946, he emphatically declared that he knew nothing of the alleged Nazi mass murder of Jews while the Second World War was taking place. We quote him verbatim: “I must say that I had no idea, when the war came to an end, of the horrible massacres which had occurred; the millions and millions that have been slaughtered. That dawned on us gradually after the struggle was over. [...] The reader should take careful note of the implications of Churchill’s words. If Sir Winston was not aware during the war of the alleged mass killings of Jews, and if he and his associates realized only after the war ended that these supposed mass murders took place, then all of his “authoritative” declarations we listed above about the mass murder of Jews taking place during the war were just unconfirmed and baseless allegations in his estimation."

Catholic Church

It is not possible for an extermination program of the type claimed to have transpired without the Vatican learning of it. The slaughters are supposed to have taken place mainly in Catholic Poland, where the Church had its agents, Catholic priests, in every village, situated in such a way (hearing gossip, confessionals, etc.) that no such thing as the exterminations could possibly have happened without the entire Polish Catholic clergy knowing about then. It is true that the Germans imposed a censorship on communications to or from Poland, so that the Polish clergy and the Vatican could not communicate with customary freedom, as explained in the Introduction to volume three of Acteset documents, but as also there explained, there were many ways of circumventing the censorship, notably through Italians, who had business of various sorts in Poland and points east, and through messages carried by private persons from Poland to the office of the Papal Nuncio in Berlin, who communicated with the Vatican through privileged diplomatic channels.

—Arthur Buyz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century.

See the article on The Catholic Church and the Holocaust regarding the absence of support from the Catholic Church for the Allied Holocaust allegations during and even after the war.

German resistance

Holocaust revisionists argue that there is no evidence that the German resistance to National Socialist Germany, including the important part of it that had infiltrated the German military intelligence (the Abwehr), such as its head Wilhelm Canaris, was in any way aware of a program of exterminating Jews, and no such information was passed on to the Allies despite contacts.

"Erwin von Lahousen, a high ranking Abwehr (intelligence service) official testified at the International Military Tribunal: “We were currently informed of all happenings by our officials at the front or in the camps. Offices of the Abwehr Division III were active in these camps, and in this way, that is, through the normal service channels, we were informed by reports and oral presentation of all these measures and of their effects.”"

The revisionist Wilfried Heink stated on the German resistance that many, very high-ranking officers were involved and that "The conspirators tried hard to get rid of Hitler, but were at the end afraid of the reaction from the German people, they knew that Hitler was very popular right to the end. Why not then, to discredit Hitler, provide evidence of the alleged mass murder of Jews? Something like that could not have been kept secret with some 400 000 participating (“Der Spiegel”, 10.3.08). Stauffenberg, when talking to other traitors, spoke of the so-called commissar order, the starving of Russian POW’s and the forced labor program as crimes committed by Hitler (Zweite Front, p.422), but not one word was uttered about what has become known as “The Holocaust”. In 1944, the conspirators planned to inform the German people about the hopeless state German forces were in and also about the crimes committed by Hitler, stating them as reason for his removal, but “The Holocaust” is not mentioned (Zweite Front, p.428). There are many more examples. In the end, the people were not informed of anything. Why not? What were those non-specified crimes that were mentioned? Why not refer to the single most horrific alleged crime, “The Holocaust”, if it then happened? Himmler, the arch villain, or so we are ordered to believe, was used as contact person, even though the allies were allegedly informed about “The Holocaust”! At Nürnberg, not one of the high ranking officers knew anything about “The Holocaust”. This is being interpreted as self defense, but when looking at how many of those Officers were traitors who were looking for an excuse to justify the removal of Hitler to the German people, this excuse falls flat on its face.

If “The Holocaust” really happened, German army brass would have known about it and would have used this knowledge to topple Hitler. The German people would not have supported Hitler any longer if such a horrendous crime had become known. But since this was not done, and since details about "The Holocaust" only emerged following the war, we can surmise that "The Holocaust" never happened."

Jewish organizations

Even Jewish organizations outside German controlled areas, but with close contacts and information exchanges with the Jews inside (such as the World Jewish Congress and Jewish newspapers), have been argued to (despite occasionally publishing massacre claims) until at least 1944 in practice behave as they did not believe the accusations or considered them greatly exaggerated.

Red Cross

See the article on the Red Cross.

Letters and postcards from supposedly killed Jews

Revisionists argue that many letters and postcards were sent by Jews during the war, from locations where they could not have been if they had been killed in the "extermination camps". Thus, Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto received letters from locations in the occupied Soviet Union, despite these Jews supposedly having been killed. Non-revisionists claim that such letters were forged under duress at Treblinka, but revisionists argue that not a single one of the self-described survivors of Treblinka has made claims of this kind.

See also Alleged German conspiracy to hide the Holocaust.

Speeches, diaries, and private conversations by the National Socialist leaders

Revisionists argue that an often mentioned argument is that the National Socialist leaders supposedly confessed the Holocaust in, for example, recorded public speeches. This has been argued to be a surprising claim, considering that National Socialist Germany is argued to have made enormous efforts to hide and destroy all evidence of the Holocaust. Revisionists have argued that such statements are cherry picked, sometimes are misleading English translations of German, ignore that the possible meanings of a German word today are not necessarily the possible meanings of the same German word in the 1930s and 1940s, exclude contradictory statements (sometimes in the very same source), that a more comprehensive survey shows that the National Socialist leaders generally used very strong language for rhetoric effect (not just regarding the Jews), that this language should not be interpreted literally, and that what was referred to was an extinction/extirpation/annihilation of the very large Jewish influence and/or deportation of Jews from Europe. Non-cherry picked examinations of, for example, diaries and private conversations by the National Socialist leaders are argued to further support this.

Also non-revisionists state that until shortly before the invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, the Jewish policy of National Socialist Germany was not directed toward extermination at all. Rather, it was mainly to encourage as many Jews as possible to emigrate from the German sphere of influence. This makes it dubious that National Socialist document and speeches should state that the Jews should be killed before the policy had allegedly changed. See also World War II statements argued to support Holocaust revisionism.

Regarding the "mainstream" view on this time period, ""At the Irving-Lipstadt libel trial it was conceded by Lipstadt’s team of anti-revisionist Holocaust experts that prior to 1941 there was no Nazi policy to exterminate Jewry. Justice Gray noted: “It is common ground between the parties [Irving and Lipstadt’s team of Holocaust experts] that, until the latter part of 1941, the solution to the Jewish question which Hitler preferred was their mass deportation.” The anti-revisionist experts at the Irving-Lipstadt libel trial further admitted: “…that in the 1930s Hitler should not be understood to have been speaking in a genocidal terms.”"

After the alleged policy change, there is claimed to have been an extreme secrecy regarding the Holocaust (such as by using "code words") and somewhat later large scale efforts to destroy the evidence, such as by destroying all the corpses ("Aktion 1005"). This makes it dubious that any speeches or documents would openly state that the Jews should be killed and if doing so that they would not have been destroyed.

• See the article on Alleged statements by Hitler on the Holocaust on this topic.

• See the article on other individuals regarding statements by these individuals on the Holocaust.

• See Meanings and translations of German words and Holocaust revisionism regarding translations and meanings of words such as "Ausrottung" and "Vernichtung" which are often translated as "extermination" by non-revisionists. Some revisionists have questioned the authenticity of some of these statements, such as some of the statements in the Posen speeches and Goebbels's diary.

• See World War II statements argued to support Holocaust revisionism regarding this subject.

Other forms of documentary evidence

One example of another form of documentary evidence is the Auschwitz construction documents as described in the "Camps" section.

See also

• Holocaust intentionalism and Holocaust functionalism