Motives | Holocaust Encyclopedia

Regarding the Holocaust, we may identify four separate groups, each with a distinguished attitude toward the Holocaust, and propelled by different sets of motives:

Holocaust dogmatism
Holocaust skepticism
Holocaust denial; and
National-Socialist anti-Judaism.

1. Motives for Holocaust Dogmatism

War Propaganda

Leaders of a warring nation need to override the natural inhibition of their soldiers to kill, murder, even slaughter members of their own species. This is best accomplished by portraying the enemy as barbaric, savage, subhuman, inhuman, bestial. Therefore, it has been common practice in war to do exactly this. Modern media have intensified this kind of propaganda, while modern total warfare that lays waste to entire countries and kills not only soldiers but also systematically butchers civilians has intensified the need to dehumanize the enemy.

World War Two was the most atrocious war fought so far in the history of mankind. Therefore, the need for atrocity propaganda has never been as great, and its use never been as widespread and intense as in this war. Each allied nation fighting against Germany had their own motives for the propaganda they spread and sustained, ultimately leading to the orthodox Holocaust narrative as it coalesced in the first few years after the war. Each country’s contribution to this, and its reasons to maintain the propaganda narrative to this day, is discussed in more detail in their respective section of the entry on propaganda.

Ideological Fanaticism

The strongest motive among the orthodoxy not to tolerate any doubt, let alone revision, of their narrative is ideological in nature. For secular and reformed Jews, who are the majority among Jews, the Holocaust has become the most-important aspect of their identity. Anything undermining the Holocaust dogma is seen as an attack on their identity, if not on their existence. Drastic revisions to the Holocaust narrative are portrayed as an assassination of memory. The attempt to destroy the commemoration of what (allegedly) happened is seen as a first step to repeating the Holocaust. Hence, many if not most Jews perceive Holocaust skepticism as an existential threat. The more radical among them consider it even justified to murder Holocaust skeptics as an act of preventing that “it” happens again.

National Socialism, with its ultimate crime, the Holocaust, is generally perceived as the ultimate evil emanation of right-wing extremism – although strictly speaking, Hitler’s Germany was a socialist welfare state, with the benefits reserved to ethnic, non-Jewish Germans not opposing the regime. However, with its mass incarceration of communists, socialists and social democrats during its reign, as well as its war against the communist Soviet Union, Hitler’s Germany is seen as a mortal enemy of everything on the political left. National Socialism is a convenient historical example that presumably demonstrates what right-wing politics leads to if left unopposed. Therefore, the historical horror image of National Socialism is the ultimate ideological weapon for everyone on the political left to fight and destroy anything considered right-wing. Revising this horror image will arouse fierce resistance from the left.

Internationalist and globalist movements – including international finance, globally acting corporations and NGOs – strive to dissolve ethnic, cultural and religious identities. Ultimately, one common, worldwide market with only one type of consumer maximizes profits for corporations and high finance, and results in maximum power and influence by globalist NGOs and politicians. Any movement that opposes this by trying to preserve and protect ethnic, cultural and religious identities may find itself attacked for allegedly harboring exclusivist, right-wing, even racist ideas. If the ethnic and cultural identities at stake are European in nature, or worse still, German, then the attacks become greatly facilitated by linking these movements to Hitler’s attempt to preserve and protect the German, European, or Aryan ethnic, cultural and religious identities. Here again, the historical horror image of National Socialism is the ultimate ideological weapon of internationalist and globalist movements to undermine, weaken and ultimately destroy any identity movement. Contesting this image meets their utmost opposition.

Moral absolutism – setting something as morally absolute, and deriving everything else from it – is another ideological fanaticism that motivates people to treat the Holocaust as an immutable dogma. To a large degree, because of the commonly accepted orthodox Holocaust narrative, Hitler and National Socialism are seen as evil incarnate, the absolute moral evil, by which everything else must be judged morally. If there has ever been a historical figure commonly portrayed as the devil incarnate, it is Adolf Hitler. What the devil was to the Church and the Christian masses during the medieval witch hunts, Hitler is to modern-day, “enlightened” people. Already during the medieval witch trials, one of the worst offenses possible was to disbelieve in the evil machinations of the devil: “Haeresis est maxima, opera maleficorum non credere.” (“The worst heresy is disbelief in the evil deeds.”) Consequently, any doubt or revision of these evil deeds claimed within the Holocaust is met with reflexive moral outrage by many – and with the call for the police and prosecutors in several countries. Social conditioning with Holocaust propaganda has reached such intense, subconscious levels that many react to violations of this ultimate taboo with mere Pavlovian reflexes. Their moral outrage completely incapacitates their critical thinking. (See the entry on witch trials.)

Self-Preservation

The Holocaust is the ultimate “third-rail” topic.[1] Even in countries with free-speech absolutism such as the United States, doubting the veracity of the orthodox Holocaust narrative leads to social ostracism and career destruction, and consequently often to financial ruin. The more people have to lose, the more they will think twice whether they should step into the quagmire of Holocaust skepticism. Hence, the more influential people are, the less likely they are to violate the taboo. It is better to pay lip service to the beast than to become a free-speech martyr, sacrificed on the altar of political correctness. In many countries, breaking the West’s last taboo will even get you indicted for “denial,” against which there is no defense, as “truth” and accuracy are irrelevant in the ensuing trials. All that matters is that you have “denied.”

As a result of this situation, most of those who harbor private doubts about certain aspects of the orthodox narrative will publicly prop up the dogma for mere reasons of self-preservation, just as everyone during the medieval witch trials happily confessed to believe in the devil and his evil machinations.

The Holocaust has become a profitable business, not just for “survivors,” for Jews in general, for their country and for their multitude of organizations, but also as a safe career path for historians and academicians, as a morally profitable reporting venue for journalists, and as a power tool for politicians. All these people have backed themselves into a corner with their dogmatism. If they admitted having supported and profited from a grotesque historical misrepresentation, this would badly undermine their self-image. Which Holocaust historian would ever admit having built a career on a pack of lies? Which journalist could confess to have bamboozled their audience for decades? Which politician could still be elected who has climbed the ladder by kowtowing to a false mammon? Who of them could still face themselves in the mirror each morning? Therefore, they are stuck; they cannot back out. They need to keep pushing the envelope and do everything possible to suppress any information that might reveal them as frauds.

Political and Social Pragmatism

Trust in the integrity of politicians and mainstream media is low in most countries. If Holocaust skepticism were to become acceptable, if not to say widely accepted, not only would trust in mainstream politicians and media collapse, but also trust in the judiciary, which has largely created the current orthodox Holocaust narrative with hundreds of evidently rigged trials.

Furthermore, any ideological movement disadvantaged or suppressed by the repercussions of the orthodox Holocaust narrative inevitably will surge to one degree or another. Hence, the social and political situation in countries affected by this – mostly within the Western world – could become unstable, or at least start to move in a direction undesirable to currently dominating societal groups. Hence, even if these groups had to concede behind closed doors that Holocaust skepticism has its merits, they would not, and could not, give it free reign for fear of serious societal changes.

The post-World-War-Two world order rests to no small degree on the psychological power derived from the “lessons” learned from the Holocaust: The influence of Jewish power lobbies in politics, academia and media; the international pecking order of countries in the world; the power to wage unconditional and, if need be, eternal war against any new “Hitler” that allegedly shows up at the horizon; and the rule of political correctness in many Western societies, usually running parallel to leftists and globalist ideologies. Holocaust skepticism threatens to unsettle this world order of “eternal war for eternal peace” by destroying the very pseudo-moral foundation it is erected on. At this juncture, all relevant power players worldwide have a mutual interest in not letting that happen, no matter whether the skeptics have a point or not. (See Grubach 2010.)

2. Motives for Holocaust Skepticism

Truthfulness, Scholarly Ethics

The orthodoxy had to admit in the past repeatedly that they were wrong. See in this regard particularly the dramatic revisions of the orthodoxy’s narrative on the Majdanek Camp. There are many other areas of Holocaust studies where similar corrections are due, if evidence matters. Truth and accuracy should be the primary ethical guidelines of all scholars. However, anyone deviating from the orthodox narrative will experience some form of political and societal pressure, up to threats of criminal persecution. This knowledge injects motives of self-preservation into Holocaust historians which collide head-on with the demand to be truthful and accurate. No historian in the world can openly voice his dissent in this field without severe repercussions. Therefore, it must be expected that they all, to one degree or another, “adjust” their research results, or at least the published versions of it, in order to stay out of trouble. Hence, we ought to be skeptical whether historians feel encouraged by their social environment to lie and twist the facts in cases where those don’t confirm the orthodox narrative. That should make any person skeptical about the accuracy and truthfulness of their public statements.

Civil-Rights Idealism

The suppression of Holocaust skepticism and the persecution and prosecution of skeptics is one of the biggest hypocrisies of Western societies. While they declare freedom of speech to be one of their highest values, they systematically strive to deny this civil right to anyone who voices skeptic remarks about the Holocaust, in many countries even with the help of penal law. (See the subsection “Penal Law” in the entry on censorship.) This goes against the very grain of our humanity. In fact, the ability to doubt our senses, to search for the truth, and to communicate to others what we have found, is the only thing that sets us apart from animals. Whoever denies us the right to doubt, to search, and to communicate is denying us the core of our humanity. These human-rights deniers must be opposed by every true humanitarian.

A long series of resolutions by the United Nations General Assembly against Holocaust skepticism demonstrates that, regarding the Holocaust, almost all governments of the world agree to dictate the writing of history by all means at their disposal, and to suppress peaceful dissidents wherever they can. In that sense, the United Nations is an assembly of dictatorial governments inimical to free speech. These resolutions squarely pit the world’s governments against humanity itself.

As described in the section on the Motives for Holocaust Dogmatism (above), Holocaust dogmatists use the Holocaust as a tool to deny ethnic, cultural or religious identity movements a level playing field, particularly those of European background. In many cases, the Holocaust is even used, directly or indirectly, to deny such movements and their adherents certain civil rights. Even to those who do not agree with such identity movements, such discrimination obviously violates the ideal of an open market of ideas, where arguments count rather than political and moral blackmailing.

There may be some who delude themselves that a society is better off when the political “right” (whatever that means) is permanently suppressed by Holocaust guilt trips. But careful consideration should make them realize that, just as no airplane can fly with just a left wing, no society can prevail with just a left wing. Where one ideology forces absolute hegemony over all others by moral blackmail and penal laws, it creates a sterile atmosphere of an incestuous monopoly where alternatives do not exist, and societal deformations and fateful mis-developments remain unchecked, ultimately leading to catastrophe. It does not matter whether you enforce a dictatorship by physical or by mental concentration camps. Where the human mind is not free, societies will ultimately fail.

It is wrong to discriminate against Jews, just because they are Jews. That is true for any other group of people as well. But it is also wrong to discriminate to the advantage of Jews, just because they are Jews. That statement is also true for any other group of people. The fact is, however, that Jews, as an ethnic or religious group, are in a privileged position in many regards. Belonging to the group that was the target and the victim of the Holocaust conveys a special status in today’s society. As understandable as this reaction is, it is neither just nor justifiable. Every person ought to be judged by his or her personal merits, not by the group to which he or she belongs.

Some are motivated by taking away that special victim status which Jews enjoy today, by reducing the National-Socialist persecution of the Jews to its actual historical dimension, thus depriving it the special status of uniqueness. Without that unique status, other victims of human catastrophes in history ascend to the same moral level as the Jews, and the Jews’ privileged position in society becomes untenable. They become as human as everyone else.

Last but not least, many Holocaust skeptics are motivated by the outrageous treatment of the Palestinians and other Arabs by many Israelis in particular and Jews in general. This oppression is ultimately justified to a large degree by the orthodox Holocaust narrative. This narrative allegedly justified the creation of the State of Israel, and it is used as a justification for the oppression and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homeland. Particularly in the Arab world, many see Holocaust skepticism not as an honest research effort, but as a means to subvert Jewish power or even to discriminate against Jews. While the former is understandable, the latter is wrong. Holocaust skepticism is an attitude, not a political tool. While the results of historical research will ultimately have an impact on affected societies, they should never become a tool to curtail anyone’s civil rights.

Pacifism

World War II is often called the “good war,” as it was fought against the absolute evil of Adolf Hitler, National Socialism and the Holocaust. This black-and-white image has been used ever since to justify more wars. Leaders portray their enemies as Nazis and their enemies’ leaders as a new “Hitler,” out to commit a new holocaust. Once this comparison sticks, tanks roll, and bombs are dropped. This pattern of psychological warfare against the public at large has worked for eight decades now.

Pacifists with deep insights into history understand that the orthodox Holocaust narrative plays a key role not only in justifying the horrors of World War II in retrospect, but also in justifying new wars to prevent new “holocausts.” The U.S. war against Iraq is a striking example. Saddam Hussein was turned into a new Hitler, out to mass murder his Kurdish minority, and to use weapons of mass destruction allegedly at his disposal to wipe the Jews off the middle-eastern map in a new Holocaust. It was all a lie.

Holocaust skepticism is teaching a historic lesson about being skeptical of our governments’ historical and political lies, which are conceived for ulterior motives. A profound skeptical, critical attitude toward government-sponsored narratives is key to understanding that governments have lied, are lying, and will always lie to us, particularly when they want to justify wars and the mass atrocities resulting from them. Holocaust skepticism is also key to understanding what power elites in modern “democratic” governments are willing to do in order to suppress ideas which threaten their nefarious ways.

Ultimately, Holocaust skepticism, if embedded in a general skepticism toward any kind of government-sponsored narrative, is one key to world peace, albeit of course not the only one.

(For more on this, see Mattogno 2019, pp. 9-14.)

Anger

Most people get angry when they find out that they have been lied to by their teachers, and by countless historians, politicians and journalists – in fact, by entire societies. Such emotions can be a powerful motivator for an initial boost of involvement in Holocaust skepticism. The initial anger usually tapers off with time, although it can be rekindled with every new lie that is encountered in media, politics or academia. This motivation is potentially dangerous, as it can lead to destructive overreactions by individuals with anger-management issues. Being righteously angry is fine, but this anger needs to be managed and channeled to constructive acts of finding and revealing the truth, rather than lashing out against perceived liars – who may simply be misguided fools, as all skeptics were before their own conversion.

If anger is not managed, it can overreact: “If they were wrong in these cases, then they must be wrong with everything.” This conclusion is untenable. If that step is taken, skepticism turns into outright denial (see the next entry), which then often gets associated with dangerous hostile emotions. But we need to always keep in mind: Just because some aspects of the orthodox narrative are wrong, doesn’t change the immutable fact that Jews were victims during World War II who suffered terrible fates, no matter the details of that fate.

3. Motives for Holocaust Denial

Denying aspects of the Holocaust narrative, even when they are solidly confirmed by documental and forensic evidence, is usually motivated by hostile feelings (see the previous entry) or ideological fanaticism. The ideological motives involved are commonly a mirror image of the ideological motives for Holocaust dogmatism. While the dogmatists use and abuse the Holocaust narrative to suppress certain ideological movements – mainly those of the “right” – Holocaust deniers are motivated by the prospect that a broader acceptance of Holocaust skepticism or even denial may reduce the suppression of their favorite ideology, or may even lead to the suppression of what they consider to be hostile ideologies. Facts matter little in this concept, hence skepticism toward the orthodox narrative is often replaced with outright rejection of all aspects of it, irrespective of the evidentiary situation.

In reality, however, any association with Holocaust skepticism unfailingly leads to more persecution for these ideology-driven deniers than what they already experience due to their controversial ideological views. Hence, emotional denial does not mix well with intellectual skepticism.

4. Motives for National-Socialist Anti-Judaism

Philo-Gentilism

Conflicts between ethnocentric Jews and the new globalist Jewish sect called Christianity arose right from the start, as one can read in the New Testament. Initially, ethnocentric Jews persecuted what they perceived as heretics. Once Christianity had been made the state religion of the Roman Empire in the 4th Century, those heretics returned the favor. In subsequent centuries, organized Christianity itself turned into a persecutorial ideology, step by step converting, subjugating and terrorizing many areas of Europe and later also the Americas. Simultaneously, the Vatican found moral offense in certain passages of the Jewish law book called Talmud, because it showed hostility toward gentiles in general and Christians in particular. Therefore, the Talmud was on Rome’s list of banned books for centuries.

Specifically German criticism of Jewish anti-Gentilism started with Martin Luther’s 1543 polemic booklet On the Jews and Their Lies (Von den Jüden und iren Lügen). This started a controversy in Germany which erupted into a major exchange of polemics during the second half of the 19th century. During this so-called “Quarrel about anti-Semitism” (Antisemitismusstreit), critics of the Jewish religion attacked immoral passages in Talmud and the Shulchan Aruch, which is a condensed version of the Talmud. On the other side, defenders of Judaism denied the existence or relevance of these immoral passages.

One late-comer to this quarrel, Theodor Fritsch, took what he believed to be the essentials of this quarrel, spiced it up with pseudo-Darwinian racial claims about the evil nature of Jews as a race, and published it all in the late 19th Century in a Handbook on the Jewish Question (Handbuch zur Judenfrage). Over the following decades, this book was printed in hundreds of thousands of copies. It became somewhat of a bible for all German opponents of Jews and the Jewish religion, National Socialists included.

The “Quarrel about anti-Semitism” was settled in the late 1920s, when Dr. Erich Bischoff, a German expert on Jewish religious texts, wrote an expert report with a focus on how non-Jews are portrayed in the Shulchan Aruch. It was a resounding intellectual victory for the philo-Gentiles, which exposed the defenders of Talmudic Judaism either as immoral perverts or as mendacious anti-Gentiles. Fritsch incorporated references to Bischoff’s treatise in new editions of his Handbook. Once National Socialism took power in Germany, many German intellectuals were swayed by Bischoff’s type of arguments to view Judaism as an immoral anti-Gentile ideology worthy of opposition.

During the wave of the Allies’ postwar book burnings in Germany, they tried to ban and burn all the books ever published in Germany about this controversy, among many other books. Ever since the end of World War Two, philo-Gentile arguments against anti-Gentile attitudes in Jewish religion were seen as outrageous at best in almost all countries around the globe. In Germany and Austria, they were even made a criminal offense.

In 1994, Prof. Dr. Israel Shahak, an Israeli Jew and Holocaust survivor, followed in Bischoff’s intellectual footsteps by pointing out the same kind of anti-Gentile laws in Talmudic Judaism. He exposed the devastating impact of this Jewish anti-Gentilism throughout 3,000 years of Jewish history in his book Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of 3,000 Years. Four years later, he followed up on this topic with another book, Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (co-authored with Norton Mezvinsky). In this book, he demonstrates how fundamentalist Jews in Israel are practicing the same immoral anti-Gentilism as their Jewish ancestors in their pursuit of an Israel ethnically cleansed of all non-Jews.

This is the rational, perfectly justifiable moral core of National-Socialist anti-Judaism, which is why, in the eyes of anti-Gentiles, this ideology had to be portrayed as absolute evil, lest anyone touch this topic ever again.

Racism

After the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, evolutionary and hereditary explanations for differences in human behavior became popular. Many opponents of the Jewish religion sought to explain the persistent anti-Gentile attitude of Talmudic Jewish religion with racial (meaning genetic) differences. National Socialism eventually incorporated these ideas.

DNA, the carrier of genetic information within all terrestrial life forms, was discovered only after the Second World War. Serious studies of identical twins, which can point at genetic causes of human behavior, were only just beginning. Therefore, during the 1930s and 1940s, any theory trying to explain behavioral differences of various human subgroups as genetic in nature could only be speculative.

The results of decade-long studies of identical twins conducted after the Second World War indicate that much of our individual behavior is indeed driven by genetics. However, despite mass sequencing of millions of human genomes, science has made little progress, if any, with attempts at linking complex social behaviors to genetic causes. It is therefore still undecided whether behavioral differences of human subgroups are caused by genetic differences between that subgroup and other subgroups.

For that reason, giving the impression that something which is mere speculation is a proven fact is wrong. Using this speculation as a basis for policy decisions with far-reaching consequences seems, moreover, irresponsible. Nevertheless, some feel that the persistent Jewish hostility toward non-Jews stretching over thousands of years can only have genetic causes. The National Socialists were among them.

Anti-Bolshevism

Czarist Russia (1547 to 1917) was an autocratic regime that oppressed most of its population, both Christian and Jewish, but it had a specific anti-Jewish aspect to it. While the Christian rural masses, many of them trapped in servitude, had little education and put up little resistance, Jews were more urban, more educated, better organized, and for many decades spearheaded reform as well as revolutionary movements. They were supported in this by their Jewish brethren abroad, particularly in the United States, as can be seen from many supportive articles in The New York Times starting in the mid-1800s.

When the communist/Bolshevist revolution broke out in Russia in 1917/18, Jews dominated the movement, and U.S.-American Jewish groups were not only verbally supportive, but openly organized huge fund drives to finance it with millions of dollars. Since the bloody, atrocious Bolshevist revolution was visibly a Jewish revolution, Jewish voices in the West trembled that, if Soviet Russia were to collapse, bloody anti-Jewish purges throughout Russia, of hitherto unheard-of proportions, would be inevitable. Jews also dominated communist parties of other countries, trying to conduct similar revolutions there. The Soviet Union’s publicly voiced plans for world revolution, which many feared would be accompanied by massacres against any opposing force, therefore gave the impression of being an entirely Jewish affair.

In hindsight, as an American Jew expressed it, the revolutionary Jews spearheaded Bolshevist massacres between the world wars, and Jews in general consequently paid the price in anti-Jewish massacres during the Second World War.

It should be mentioned, however, that Stalin himself carried out a hidden anti-Jewish cleansing during the “Great Purge” of 1937 and 1938. During those years, the percentage of Jews employed in the upper echelons of the Soviet terror apparatus NKVD dropped from some 40% down to 4%. That percentage rose again during the war, when Stalin used the Jews’ fear of National Socialist anti-Judaism to entangle them in the Soviet war and propaganda machine, only to ditch them again after the war.

Throughout the existence of National Socialism as a movement, it insisted that the root cause of communism and the inevitably accompanying horrors of Bolshevist reign were Judaism and its teachings. They could not know what the non-Jews Mao Zedong and Pol Pot had in store for the world.

(For more details on this, see Heddesheimer 2017, pp. 17-26; Rudolf 2023, pp. 39f., 333-336.)

Anti-Usury

Throughout medieval times until well into the 19th century, legislation and rules in many countries prevented Jews from joining certain professional trades. On the other hand, Christian and Muslim laws forbade the taking of interest on financial loans. In contrast to this, Jewish law only forbids taking interests from fellow Jews, but permits taking interest from non-Jews. With such a system in place for centuries, it was inevitable that some Jews became very successful in the West’s finance world, and amassed huge wealth and influence.

Modern times have seen an almost-global legalization of interest, and even of usury. (2% monthly interest rates on credit-card loans is normal, which amounts to almost 27% annual interest, which is usury by any standard.) Hence, the financial playing field for plundering the masses has been level for quite a while. Jews, however, are still massively overrepresented in that field in many Western countries.

National Socialists saw this overrepresentation, with its accompanying wealth and political leverage, as a hallmark of Jewish malice toward the general non-Jewish masses.

[1] The “third rail” refers to the high-voltage rail used in some urban electric-railway systems to power the trains’ electric systems. Touching that rail and simultaneously one of the two traction rails leads to instant death by electrocution.