Deborah Lipstadt: ‘It begins with words’ – the dangers of Holocaust denial

The historian and former US antisemitism envoy Deborah Lipstadt spoke about the power and danger of words at an event on 20th-century German history, held at the Cliveden literary festival. 

“Whether you’re talking about the Holocaust, Rwanda, the [propaganda] radio [broadcasts] from the Congo, no one wakes up in the morning and says, ‘I’m going to get a machete and go kill people. I’m going to go build the gas chamber’. It begins with words.  

“So if you hear something… even if it’s a little thing, you’re at the gym on the treadmill and someone makes a crack, say something.” 

The event last weekend, titled From Weimar to Nuremberg, covered topics including the rise of Nazism, the lessons of the Holocaust, and the threats posed by artificial intelligence-fuelled Holocaust denial. 

Among the speakers was the journalist Victor Sebestyen, author of several books on European history, who warned of the danger of “reading history backwards”. 

He said: “I hate that word ‘inevitable’. Things [in Germany] were really booming in the Golden Twenties, and the Nazis and the far right were absolutely nowhere in the polls.” Had the former chancellor and moderate Gustav Stresemann, who helped to stabilise the German economy, not died in 1929, or had bullets fired by government forces that killed 16 of the Munich Putsch accomplices also struck Hitler, the course of history would have been very different, he said. 

The historian and journalist James McAuley considered what the lessons of the Holocaust were. “Is it the failure of assimilation? Is it the imperative of Zionism? Is it the urgency to commit to and to protect human rights and human dignity? … I think we’re living in a moment when some of those lessons that we have had for so long are in increasing conflict.” 

In a recent essay, The Death of History, the historian Niall Ferguson had charted the rise of Holocaust denial on social media, or as he put it the “algorithmic media”. The panel was challenged about whether the truth could survive into the 21st century. 

Natalie Livingstone, author of The Nuremberg Women, an acclaimed account of the reporters, translators and lawyers who played a role in the trials, said it was “very unhelpful”, as Ferguson had done, to speak of a failure of history.

“What we’ve all got to do is to keep trying, to keep researching, to keep writing … and doing our best to fight for the truth,” Livingstone said. “To throw in the towel and say that history’s failed is a self-fulfilling prophecy.” That was why it was so important to have forums such as the panel, and why books were so important. “That’s why it’s so important to delve into the past.”

Lipstadt, who successfully defended a libel action brought by the denier David Irving, said: “The Holocaust was an inconvenient truth, to borrow a phrase from Al Gore. It was something that rattled too many assumptions. And it’s been denied.”

We had to keep fighting denial, she insisted, describing the internet and social media as being like a knife. “A knife in the hands of a killer can take a life. But if you’re choking and the emergency medical technician has a knife, they can save a life. It’s what you do with it.”