Denial of the Holocaust

The insistence on documentary proof discounts the emotional testimony of survivors and legitimizes the arguments of revisionists who then become the point of reference for future debate on the matter.

No objective, fair-minded historian would have serious cause to doubt that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz and that they were operated on a substantial scale to kill hundreds of thousands of Jews (extract from libel trial verdict of Irving vs. Lipstadt and Penguin).

There are pictures of the Wenceslas Square, Prague, in 1942 with 200,000 people giving the Nazi salute. We can't say they were all Germans. Like every nation, the Czechs have to face their history, good and bad. There were 220 labour camps during the war established by law, some of them before the Nazi occupation of the Czech lands. Many of the camps, such as Lety, were staffed exclusively with Czech personnel who received only occasional visits from German officers.

Since the end of World War II, the story of the Holocaust has been presented numerous times in courtrooms in many countries. In the Nuremberg trials, the subject was raised as a war crime, crime against humanity and genocide. The Holocaust was brought up again in trials of individual war criminals such as Hans Frank in Poland and Dieter Wisliceny in Czechoslovakia. The Jewish tragedy emerged in each of these trials as part of a larger story and in the context of the narrative of the Second World War and the German occupation of the countries in which the trials took place. It was during the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961, however, that a much fuller account of the Jewish catastrophe was revealed. Indeed, one of the goals of the trial was to present a comprehensive recounting of the Holocaust in the context of Jewish history, Nazi antisemitism and the war. Following the Eichmann trial, and in many respects under its impact, many trials of Nazi perpetrators took place in Germany, such as the Auschwitz trials in the 1960s, the Einsatzgruppen trials and others.

Detailed documentary evidence has been supplied and supplemented by the testimonies of eye witnesses. In 1993, on the basis of previously inaccessible records seized by the Soviet Army at Auschwitz, very precise documentary evidence of the construction and operation of the gas chambers has been provided.