OPINION – Holocaust Denial Went Viral After October 7. Europe Must Take the Lead in Defeating the Global Virus
Since October 7, 2023, Jews have found themselves facing a wave of hatred unlike anything seen since the fall of Nazi Germany. Across Europe, the world’s oldest hatred has gathered force, on city streets, in universities, at cultural gatherings, and across the digital landscape. What unsettles most is not only the resurgence of Holocaust denial and distortion, but the desecration of memorials and the targeting of survivors’ homes, acts that feel less like isolated provocations than a coordinated assault on memory itself.
These are not marginal provocations. Such attacks are eroding the moral foundations of postwar Europe. Online Holocaust denial also rewards antisemites: It recruits impressionable young people, it thrusts lurid conspiracies into the mainstream, and yes, even makes money. Jew-hatred is packaged as “content,” history is gamified—factual history be damned.
Survivors warned that as they and their contemporaries faded from the world, the memory of the Holocaust would become vulnerable, open to erasure, distortion, or outright denial. That erosion began almost as soon as the war ended. Yet few could have imagined the velocity and reach of today’s distortions. A generation now turns to their screens for meaning, where lies masquerade as wisdom and fantasies once confined to the margins are broadcast to millions, amplified by algorithms and stripped of context.
Holocaust denial is not a matter of opinion. It is a calculated strategy, one that seeks to justify the unimaginable, to glorify the murderers of Jews, and to keep alive the hope of finishing what Hitler began. To distort the memory of Anne Frank and six million others is to hollow out the meaning of the Holocaust itself, turning its symbols against the very people it sought to destroy. In this inversion, antisemitism is no longer seen as hatred but is recast as a form of moral virtue.
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The Holocaust did not start with the machinery of death. It began with words, with myths and stereotypes, with the slow normalization of exclusion and the failure of institutions to stand firm. It began when hatred was codified, and Jews were cast as a singular threat. Simon Wiesenthal reminded us that Jews are often the first victims, but rarely the last. The devastation unleashed by Nazi Germany is now a distant memory for many. Antisemitism is not a Jewish problem alone; it is a signal of a society in decline.
This is why education is more urgent than ever, not just about what happened, but about why it happened. Not just the facts and figures, but the ways in which people are taught to accept the intolerable. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism must be more than a statement; it must be a standard, adopted and enforced by governments and institutions alike. The fight against antisemitism is not a threat to free expression, but a safeguard for the future we share.
This year, those who are able should walk the grounds of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, or Treblinka. Go with your family, your community, your students. There is no argument to be made in the presence of a gas chamber. No theory can explain away the piles of children’s shoes. No one can pass by mass graves and remain untouched. These places root truth in the world, beyond denial or distortion.
Nearly 50 years ago, Simon Wiesenthal was asked by a university student: Could the Holocaust happen again?
“If you have organized hate, a crisis in society, and technology, anything is possible,” he replied. And then the famed Nazi hunter added, “In 1492, if Europe had access to the Nazis’ technology, no Jews would have survived in Spain, no Catholic in England, no Protestant in France.”
The tools of the last century seem primitive beside the technologies that shape our lives now. Advances that promised connection have also given new reach to those who would do harm. Social media has become a weapon in the hands of those who seek to threaten and divide. Europe must insist that technology companies stop profiting from hatred and ensure that their innovations do not lay the groundwork for the next catastrophe.
Daniel Schuster, Simon Wiesenthal Center senior European representative, contributed to this opinion piece.
