For an internationally accepted definition see the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Holocaust Denial and Distortion.
Denial is a common feature of genocide. Perpetrators themselves often become the first deniers as they attempt to whitewash their own crimes. The founder of ‘Genocide Watch’, Gregory H. Stanton included ‘denial’ in his 10 stages of genocide. He writes: ‘DENIAL is the final stage that lasts throughout and always follows genocide. It is among the surest indicators of further genocidal massacres. The perpetrators of genocide dig up the mass graves, burn the bodies, try to cover up the evidence and intimidate the witnesses. They deny that they committed any crimes, and often blame what happened on the victims. They block investigations of the crimes, and continue to govern until driven from power by force, when they flee into exile. There they remain with impunity, like Pol Pot or Idi Amin, unless they are captured and a tribunal is established to try them.’[1] In the same way, the origins of Holocaust denial can be found among the perpetrators - the Nazis. They had already attempted to whitewash the evidence of their crimes during the Holocaust. No written orders existed from Hitler to murder the Jews; instead, the perpetrators used code words and euphemisms to conceal the extermination, such as ‘Aussiedlung’(‘evacuation’), ‘Abschiebung’ (‘deportation’), and ‘Endloesung’ (‘the Final Solution’). The Nazis organised the secret Unit Action 1005 campaign from June 1942 until late 1944 to destroy evidence of the mass murder that had occurred under ‘Operation Reinhard’, which aimed to exterminate all Jews in occupied Eastern Europe. They exhumed mass graves and burned bodies, as well as destroying the death camps, which had been constructed in a way that allowed them to be demolished easily. Soon after the Second World War, the popularity of Holocaust denial grew - particularly among former supporters and participants of the Nazi regime and among European collaborationist movements that refused to accept responsibility for genocide. Holocaust denial was a set of historical claims that presented the Nazi regime favourably and was born as a result of the political needs of neo-Nazi movements.
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