When I learned that Holocaust deniers had infiltrated a New Hampshire legislative meeting and tried to insert their view into the state’s Holocaust education efforts, I was personally outraged.
My grandparents, my mother’s first husband and their 5-and-½-year-old son were murdered by Zyklon-B gas in a Birkenau gas chamber in August 1943 – dying cruelly in exactly the way that Germar Rudolf, who was invited by a state lawmaker to testify before a legislative committee, says no Jews were killed.
Rudolf is a prominent figure among Holocaust deniers. For more than 39 years, his “Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust” has sought to delegitimize and undermine the historical record of the mass murder of 6 million European Jews during World War II by promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories and characterizing the Holocaust as a myth.
Holocaust denial cloaked in ‘truth-seeking’
Historian Deborah Lipstadt describes Rudolf as “a hardcore denialist. He says no gas chambers, no plan to kill the Jews. It’s all a myth.” In the course of a 2007 trial in Germany, in which he was convicted of inciting racial hatred, he dismissed the Holocaust as “a gigantic fraud.”
Holocaust denial is not merely the manifestation of an insidious and dangerous antisemitic conspiracy theory. It constitutes a moral clear and present danger motivated by a perverse determination to radically downplay if not expunge altogether the annihilation of 6 million Jews during World War II from the historical narrative.
The alarming reality, however, is that because Holocaust denial is generally considered to be less harmful than other variants of antisemitism, it is far too often allowed to fester and foment under a spurious guise of freedom of speech.
By failing to prevent Rudolf from testifying and not striking his testimony from the official record when he questioned whether and how my grandparents and my brother were murdered, the chairperson of this New Hampshire state House committee lent credence to Rudolf’s nefarious agenda. Sadly, this is anything but an isolated incident.
Confronting and refuting Holocaust deniers has come to resemble the classic Whac-a-Mole arcade game except that unlike trying to hit inoffensive plastic facsimiles of burrowing mammals with a mallet, exposing, ostracizing and utterly discrediting Holocaust deniers is both urgent and deadly serious.
Professional charlatans such as Rudolf, David Irving, Frank Leuchter, and Ernst Zündel have made Holocaust denial a career and can be dismissed as such. But I am increasingly unnerved by mainstream or quasi-mainstream figures who spout or otherwise provide a veneer of credibility to Holocaust denial claptrap.
From fringe conspiracy to mainstream discourse
This isn’t new. Patrick Buchanan, the Nixon and Reagan White House official and reactionary populist candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, wrote in a March 1990 syndicated column that it would have been impossible for Jews to perish in the gas chambers of the Treblinka death camp. Until I outed him and it in a 2009 New York Daily News op-ed, his official website, Buchanan.org, featured a Holocaust denial forum that included such comments as “there simply were not gas chambers or mass crematoriums at any of the German internment camps” and “We have known for some time that the Auschwitz myth is of an exclusively Jewish origin.”
Also in 2009, Bishop Richard Williamson, the excommunicated member of an ultra-right-wing splinter group of the Roman Catholic Church whom Pope Benedict XVI briefly brought back into the fold, declared on Swedish television in 2009 that “I believe there were no gas chambers” and that no more than 200,000 or 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps, “but none of them by gas chambers.”
And more recently, Tucker Carlson has given Holocaust deniers a platform on his shows. First, in 2024, it was the Nazi apologist Daryl Cooper who propounded the conspiracy theory that the Third Reich never intentionally annihilated 6 million Jews, insisting instead that as the German army swept through Eastern Europe, “they went in with no plan for that and they just threw these people into camps. And millions of people ended up dead there.” Then, this past October, Carlson’s guest was the white supremacist Nick Fuentes, who had previously brayed that “I don’t believe there were gas chambers. I don’t believe it was 6 million. I also don’t believe that there was ever an order given out that said, OK, you know, we’re gonna kill ’em all.”
Others in the MAGA world peddle similar Holocaust-rooted conspiracy theories to millions on social media, which is what makes debunking them especially urgent in this time of surging antisemitism. Podcaster Candace Owens, for example, has dismissed the lethal medical experiments performed by the notorious SS doctor Josef Mengele at Auschwitz as “bizarre propaganda.”
New Hampshire Rep. Matt Sabourin dit Choinière, who invited Rudolf and his acolytes to the legislative meeting, fits right in with this unsavory lot. At first blush, he may appear to be just another far-right MAGA activist, indistinguishable from a slew of others like him around the country who were elected to public office in the 2024 electoral wave that returned Donald Trump to the White House.
We now know that not only is he a Holocaust denier, but that he is also in bed with like-minded groups and individuals whose goal is to sleaze their lies and conspiracy theories into the political, educational, and social mainstream. By exposing him to scrutiny and notoriety, NPR and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency have performed an important public service.
The New Hampshire case required investigative reporting in part because Sabourin dit Choinière and Rudolf offered a twist on the old formula at the hearing by cloaking their denial in palatable language.
They spoke about a quest for truth and, in the case of the lawmaker, averred that he believed that terrible atrocities had been visited upon Jews during the Holocaust, but that there were nevertheless mitigating facts that had to be told. That left one of his colleagues so confused, JTA has reported, that she seemed to indicate agreement with their testimony. In fact, she did not understand that what she was hearing constituted Holocaust denial.
The two questions we must ask ourselves are (a) how many others like Sabourin dit Choinière are there around the country, and (b) how do we unmask and defang them? The one thing we know for certain is that we cannot afford to ignore them in an illusory hope that they will somehow slither back into the ideological swamp from whence they came. To this extent, the New Hampshire House committee meeting fiasco may actually have been a much-needed wakeup call as well as a teachable moment.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.
