The boy in Buchenwald: Background
This story is my way of trying to write a constructive fact-check of Holocaust denialism, concealed in the gripping story of what Nikolaus Grüner went through. My hopes are that most who read the story won’t even realize it is a fact-check.
The background is as follows:
A couple of weeks ago, before Facebooks Mark Zuckerberg started talking loosely on whether Holocaust deniers were actually honest or not, Swedish public service television SVT — under the umbrella of the Faktiskt.se fact-checking cooperation — published a fact-check of a few well-known Swedish Neo-Nazi activists in the Nordic Resistance Movement (often abbreviated to NMR in Swedish).
They did so because NMR had been present during the Almedalen political forum, a well-known annual political meet-up on Gotland, causing a lot of alarm and debate. However, SVT’s fact-checks were sort of backwards — they seem to have just contacted the Neo-Nazis to ask them what they think about the Holocaust, resulting in the ordinary conspiracy claims about Zyklon-B and the likes. SVT then went on to fact-check these statements, and when they published their articles, they were roundly criticized for giving the Neo-Nazi claims a much bigger audience and reporting on the denialism on the Neo-Nazis terms.
I wrote a blog post about this, saying in summary that fact-checking a Holocaust denier probably isn’t best done by angling on what the Neo-Nazis themselves think is true and then disproving it, and also pointing out that the headline SVT used — ”NMR is wrong about Zyklon B — it was really used for mass murder” — made the mistake of repeating the false statement.
I don’t, however, think you should avoid fact-checking Holocaust deniers altogether. A part of their strategy is to make things up faster than fact-checkers can debunk them, and in that way, they have a constant advantage. If you’re just some kid who’ve found these explosive claims about the Holocaust and want to find some qualitative information about them, getting a hold of debunks is sometimes hard, bordering on impossible. So my issue was more or less just with the form of how SVT fact-checked them.
When I was writing the blog post, almost by chance, I found out that one of the men in a very well-known picture of survivors of Buchenwald is still alive – not only that, he actually lives in Sweden. I have seen that image thousands of times in my life, but I never knew one of them was living so close to me, and that was baffling to me. That picture had itself been accused of being a hoax, and using that story, I wanted to try how you could fact-check Holocaust denialism using a different set of more thought-through tactics. I used those outlined in a paper called “Denialism: what is it and how should scientists respond?” by Pascal Diethelm and Martin McKee:
“The normal academic response to an opposing argument is to engage with it, testing the strengths and weaknesses of the differing views, in the expectations that the truth will emerge through a process of debate. However, this requires that both parties obey certain ground rules, such as a willingness to look at the evidence as a whole, to reject deliberate distortions and to accept principles of logic. A meaningful discourse is impossible when one party rejects these rules. Yet it would be wrong to prevent the denialists having a voice. Instead, we argue, it is necessary to shift the debate from the subject under consideration, instead exposing to public scrutiny the tactics they employ and identifying them publicly for what they are.”
Diethelm and McKee are focusing on the propaganda of the tobacco industries in their paper, and they list five recurring tactics they’re often using. The idea is not primarily to take on the deniers head-on, but rather to describe to a larger audience how they are framing their false accusations to make them seem trustworthy. I have condensed the tactics as laid out by Diethelm and McKee below, because I think they are applicable to Holocaust deniers as well:
The first is the identification of conspiracies. When the overwhelming body of scientific opinion believes that something is true, it is argued that this is not because those scientists have independently studied the evidence and reached the same conclusion. It is because they have engaged in a complex and secretive conspiracy.
The second is the use of fake experts. These are individuals who purport to be experts in a particular area but whose views are entirely inconsistent with established knowledge. (…) The use of fake experts is often complemented by denigration of established experts and researchers, with accusations and innuendo that seek to discredit their work and cast doubt on their motivations.
The third characteristic is selectivity, drawing on isolated papers that challenge the dominant consensus or highlighting the flaws in the weakest papers among those that support it as a means of discrediting the entire field. (…) Denialists are usually not deterred by the extreme isolation of their theories, but rather see it as the indication of their intellectual courage against the dominant orthodoxy and the accompanying political correctness, often comparing themselves to Galileo.
The fourth is the creation of impossible expectations of what research can deliver. For example, those denying the reality of climate change point to the absence of accurate temperature records from before the invention of the thermometer.
The fifth is the use of misrepresentation and logical fallacies.
In the headline of my fact-check of the Holocaust deniers idea that the picture from Buchenwald is a hoax, I have chosen not to focus on the fact-checking aspect of the article but rather on the story that presumable will make people actually interested in reading it. In discussing the conspiracy idea, I make sure to mention several of the tactics mentioned above, to point them out to the reader. I’m careful to always stay with Nikolaus and his story through the whole article, so that the reader always has a human face to the suffering of the victims of the Holocaust. My hopes are that it proves effective.
