Abstract: Reflecting on the months since the recent October 7 attack, rarely has the theme of Holocaust Memorial Day 2024, ‘The Fragility of Freedom’, felt so poignant. Communities globally experienced the shattering of presumed security, and antisemitic incidents responsively spiked.
Antisemitism rose across both mainstream and fringe social media platforms, and communities resultantly reported a rise in insecurity and fear. CCOA constituent countries have recorded significant rises in antisemitic incidents, including an immediate 240% increase in Germany, a three-fold rise in France, and a marked increase in Italy.
The antisemitism landscape, including Holocaust denial and distortion, had shifted so drastically since October 7 that previous assumptions and understands now demand re-examination. In the run up to Holocaust Memorial Day 2024, this research compilation by members of the Coalition to Counter Online Antisemitism offers a vital contemporary examination of the current and emergent issues facing Holocaust denial and distortion online. As unique forms of antisemitism, denial and distortion are a tool of historical revisionism which specifically targets Jews, eroding Jewish experience and threatening democracy.
Across different geographies and knowledge fields, this compilation unites experts around the central and sustained proliferation of Holocaust denial and distortion on social media.
Abstract: At the “zero hour” of 1945, as they emerged from the ruins of World War II, the ruling élites of what would become Austria's Second Republic were preoccupied with how to cope with the frequently contradictory demands they faced. This included Allied forces that demanded a comprehensive denazification process, a war-weary population that had survived the bombings, displaced persons and survivors of camps returning to their homes and expecting compensation, former Nazis expecting integration, and former Wehrmacht soldiers who also expected to have their sacrifices recognised. Continuities with National Socialism or Austrian fascism (between 1934 and 1938) were (officially) renounced, and the “new” Austrian government announced the rebirth of an Austrian Republic that was morally unburdened by past events or experiences (see Reisigl 2007; Wodak & De Cillia 2007). The first part of the so-called Moscow Declaration of 1943, in which the Allied forces had declared Austria to have been the “first victim of Nazi aggression,” supported this hegemonic narrative (Rathkolb 2009). This definition remained essentially unchallenged until the election of Kurt Wald-heim, a former SA officer, to the Austrian presidency in 1986 (see Wodak et al. 1990; Mitten 1992). The second part of the Moscow Declaration—namely that Austrians were also responsible for Nazi war crimes—was usually swept under the carpet.
Abstract: The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference), commissioned Schoen Cooperman Research to conduct a comprehensive national study of Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness in the United Kingdom
(England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland). Schoen Cooperman Research conducted 2,000 interviews in the United Kingdom with adults aged 18 and over between September 29 – October 17, 2021. The margin of error is two percent.
The United Kingdom study finds that 89 percent say they have definitely heard about the Holocaust, and three quarters (75 percent) know that the Holocaust refers to the extermination of Jewish people. That being said, there are significant gaps in Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness in the United Kingdom.
The majority of UK respondents surveyed (52 percent) do not know that six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Further, a majority of UK citizens (57 percent) believe that fewer people seem to care about the Holocaust today than they used to, and 56 percent believe that something like the Holocaust could happen again today.
Abstract: The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) commissioned Schoen Cooperman Research to conduct a comprehensive national study of Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness in the Netherlands.
Schoen Cooperman Research conducted 2,000 interviews across the Netherlands. The margin of error for the study is 2 percent. This memo presents our key research findings and compares these findings with prior Claims Conference studies, which were conducted in five other countries.
Our latest study finds significant gaps in Holocaust knowledge and awareness in the Netherlands, as well as widespread concern that Holocaust denial and Holocaust distortion are problems in the Netherlands today.
We found that 23 percent of Dutch Millennials and Gen Z respondents believe the Holocaust is a myth, or that it occurred but the number of Jews who died has been greatly exaggerated – the highest percentage among Millennials and Gen Z respondents in all six countries the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against
Germany has previously studied.
Further, 29 percent of Dutch respondents, including 37 percent of Dutch Millennials and Gen Z respondents believe that two million or fewer Jews were killed during the Holocaust. Moreover, despite the fact that more than 70 percent of the Netherlands’ Jewish population perished during the Holocaust, a majority of Dutch respondents (53
percent), including 60 percent of Dutch Millennials and Gen Z, do not cite the Netherlands as a country where the Holocaust took place. Finally, 53 percent of Dutch respondents believe that something like the Holocaust
could happen again today.
Abstract: The historiography and the memory of the Holocaust, of the Romanians, and of Romanian Jews can be understood only through knowledge of the peculiarities of the Holocaust in Romania within the wider context of Holocaust Studies. Certain characteristic features of the history of the modernization of Romania in the twentieth century turned the “Jewish problem” into an ideologically active element, present on a large scale in the public sphere. Unquestionably, the tragedy of the Romanian Jewry was bound up with the European context, but it also had its own manifestations because of the political regime in Romania from 1938 to 1944. Six decades ago, Lucretiu Pătrăşcanu accurately remarked that “anti-Semitism in Romania still remains a Romanian phenomenon, which should be examined in its specific nature, and not only in what it imitates” (1944, 171). Romanians never embraced this research project; instead, they explained the Romanian Holocaust by blaming it on imported Fascism. One of the most frequently invoked reasons for this neglect is the ideology of national Communism; in this view, everything Romanian was good, while the origin of evil was always from outside. According to this preconception, risen to the rank of a “theory” of history, atrocities either did not occur in Romania from 1938 to 1944 or, if they happened, were caused by external forces.
Abstract: In den meisten islamischen Ländern fanden - anders als in Europa - keine gezielten Ermordungen von Jüdinnen und Juden oder Deportationen in Todeslager statt. Dieser Band geht der Frage nach, wie Musliminnen und Muslime als scheinbar "Unbeteiligte" zum Holocaust stehen. Behandelt werden unter anderem die Teilnahme von Muslimen am Holocaustgedenken, die Wahrnehmung der Schoah im arabischen und türkischen Raum sowie unter muslimischen Jugendlichen und die wachsende Verwendung antisemitischer Parolen.
Die Einstellungen von Muslimen zum Holocaust reichen von Mitgefühl und Anteilnahme über Gleichgültigkeit und die Frage "Was hat das mit uns zu tun?" bis zu Verharmlosung oder List es, so das Fazit, in der schulischen und außerschulischen Bildung umfassend über die Geschichte aufzuklären und dabei Perspektiven von Migrantinnen und Migranten stärker zu berücksichtigen.
Mit Beiträgen von Joëlle Allouche-Benayoun, Rifat Bali, Georges Bensoussan, Mehmet Can, Monique Eckmann, Remco Ensel, Evelien Gans, Karoline Georg, Ruth Hatlapa, Günther Jikeli, Philip Spencer, Kim Robin Stoller, Annemarike Stremmelaar, Sara Valentina di Palma, Esther Webman, Juliane Wetzel und Michael Whine
Abstract: This article addresses the persistence of anti-Semitism in Romania, placed in the context of some recent debates concerning the memory of the Holocaust in the country, as well as in the area of Central and Eastern Europe more broadly. It argues that, despite significant improvements in terms of legislation, the memory of the Holocaust remains a highly contested issue in contemporary Romania, torn between the attempts to join in the European memory of the Holocaust and local legacies that on the one hand focus primarily on the suffering of Romanians under the communist regime, and on the other perform a symbolic “denationalisation” of the Jewish minority in the country, whose own suffering is thus excised from national memory. It does so by focusing in particular on the debates surrounding the adoption of Law 217/2015, meant to clarify earlier legislation on Holocaust denial, and comparing them with those prompted by the Ukrainian “memory laws” passed in the same year. Taking into account both the national and international reactions to these very different pieces of legislation, the article shows the still-persisting discrepancy between a (mostly Western) “European” memory of the legacy of the twentieth century and local memory topoi characteristic of the countries that were part of the former socialist bloc.
Abstract: The paper argues that the recent history of Holocaust Studies in Lithuania is characterized by major provision (for research, teaching and publishing) coming from state-sponsored agencies, particularly a state commission on both Nazi and Soviet crimes. Problematically, the commission is itself simultaneously active in revising the narrative per se of the Holocaust, principally according to the ‘Double Genocide’ theories of the 2008 Prague Declaration that insists on ‘equalization’ of Nazi and Soviet crimes. Lithuanian agencies have played a disproportionate role in that declaration, in attempts at legislating some of its components in the European Parliament and other EU bodies, and ‘export’ of the revisionist model to the West. Much international support for solid independent Lithuanian Holocaust researchers and NGOs was cut off as the state commission set out determinedly to dominate the field, which is perceived to have increasing political implications in East-West politics. But this history must not obscure an
impressive list of local accomplishments. A tenaciously devoted group of Holocaust survivors themselves, trained as academics or professionals in other fields, educated themselves to publish books, build a mini-museum (that has defied the revisionists) within the larger state-sponsored Jewish museum, and worked to educate both pupils and the wider public. Second, a continuing stream of non-Jewish Lithuanian scholars, educators, documentary
film makers and others have at various points valiantly defied state pressures and contributed significantly and selflessly. The wider picture is that Holocaust Studies has been built most successfully by older Holocaust survivors and younger non-Jews, in both groups often by those coming to work in it from other specialties out of a passion for justice and truth in history, while lavishly financed state initiatives have been anchored in the inertia of nationalist regional politics.
Abstract: The successful incorporation of Eastern European states into the European Union, NATO and the Western pro-democratic family of nations usually focuses on the import of ideas, governmental and societal structures, and products, from West to East, and of large movements of East European populations westward. Often overlooked in the export of ideas has been the intensive, expensive and industrial-scale effort to rewrite the history of the Holocaust and World War II in the direction of Double Genocide and Holocaust Obfuscation, a trend spurred on dramatically by the decline in East-West relations and the increasingly frightening movement of Russia toward revanchist authoritarianism that threatens its neighbors. The paper argues that no good can or will come from the adaptation of models of bogus nationalist history rooted in far-right, ultranationalist thought in the liberated states of Eastern Europe. Double Genocide and its corollaries as currently practiced and underwritten by state budgets, represent a threat to history, freedom of thought and speech, equal rights and ultimately, a ruse to insert far-right academic revisionism disguised as anti-Russian activity into Western discourse.
Topics: Antisemitism, Antisemitism: Muslim, Antisemitism: Far right, Anti-Zionism, Holocaust Denial, Holocaust Memorials, Holocaust Education, Holocaust Commemoration, Holocaust, Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial, Jewish - Muslim Relations
Abstract: This article analyzes contemporary antisemitism and Holocaust distortion in Eastern Europe. The main argument is that Brown and Red, Nazism and Communism, respectively are not at all equal. In Eastern Europe, in particular, antisemitic ideology is grounded on the rehabilitation of anticommunist national “heroes.” The history of the Holocaust is thereby distorted. Based on Maurice Halbwachs’s theory of “social frameworks,” the author shows how “competitive martyrdom,” the “Double Genocide” ideology, and “Holocaust obfuscation” are intertwined. Empirically, the paper examines these concepts in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Hungary, Serbia and Croatia, and Romania.
Abstract: After 1989, post-communist countries such as Poland and Moldova have been faced with the challenge of
reinventing their national identity and rewriting their master narratives, shifting from a communist one to an
ethnic-patriotic one. In this context, the fate of local Jews and the actions of Poles and Moldovans during the
Holocaust have repeatedly proven difficult or even impossible to incorporate into the new national narrative. As
a result, Holocaust denial in various forms initially gained ground in post-communist countries, since denying
the Holocaust, or blaming it on someone else, even on the Jews themselves, was the easiest way to strengthen
national identities. In later years, however, Polish and Moldovan paths towards re-definition of self have taken
different paths. At least in part, this can be explained as a product of Poland's incorporation in the European
unification project, while Moldova remains in limbo, both in terms of identity and politics – between the Soviet
Union and Europe, between the past and the future.
