MEMRI reports that during the recent conflict between the United States, Israel, and Iran, Egypt’s state-controlled media adopted an aggressively hostile posture toward Israel and the Jewish people. The rhetoric did not stop at criticism of Israeli policy. It escalated into familiar antisemitic terrain: Holocaust denial, Nazi comparisons, incitement, and the grotesque inversion of history in which Jews are cast as Nazis and Israel as the embodiment of evil.
This is not an isolated media spasm. It reflects a broader political environment in which Cairo has opposed military action against Iran, stressed diplomacy with Tehran, and created friction with Gulf states that have themselves been targets of Iranian aggression. Egypt’s establishment press has gone even further, warning against the fall of the Iranian regime and presenting U.S. influence in the region as the real threat.
Result is Instructive
The result is revealing. At the very moment Iran threatens Israel, destabilizes Arab states, and arms proxies across the region, Egyptian media chose to revive one of the oldest weapons in the antisemitic arsenal: the denial, distortion, and relativization of the Holocaust.
That transition matters. It marks a strategic escalation. The goal is no longer merely to condemn Israeli policy. It is to undermine Jewish moral legitimacy itself. If the Holocaust can be minimized, mocked, denied, or inverted, then the Jewish people can be portrayed not as survivors of history’s most documented and unprecedented genocide, but as cynical manipulators of it.
Holocaust denial was never a search for truth. It has always been an ideological project: to erase Jewish suffering, whitewash German guilt, rehabilitate Jew-hatred, and confuse those who do not know the historical record well enough to fight back.
Deniers use many arguments, but one of their favorites is this: if the Holocaust had really happened, everyone would have known about it during World War II. It would have been obvious, they claim, just as D-Day-the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944-was obvious.
The argument collapses under even minimal scrutiny.
D-Day itself was not “commonly known" before it was underway. It was one of the most closely guarded military secrets of the war. The same principle applied, even more forcefully, to the Nazi machinery of annihilation. The camps, killing centers, mass shootings, deportations, and crematoria were wrapped in secrecy because they concealed horrors the regime did not want openly exposed: systematic beatings, starvation, disease, slave labor, and industrial-scale mass murder.
These were not matters casually discussed over dinner by Nazi officials.
Albert Speer, Hitler’s armaments minister and one of the regime’s most senior figures, later wrote in his “Spandau Diary" that it was naïve to imagine the Nazi leadership openly boasting to one another about their crimes. He rejected the cinematic fantasy of gangsters in evening dress sitting around discussing murder and conspiracy. That, he explained, was not how the regime functioned. In personal dealings, such matters were not openly discussed.
That silence was not accidental. It was enforced.
SS guard Theodor Malzmueller recalled arriving at the Kulmhof, (Chelmno), extermination camp and being told by the commandant that Jews were being exterminated there. He and the other guards were warned to remain silent about everything they saw and heard. If they did not, they were told, their families could face imprisonment and they themselves could face death.
Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, provided additional confirmation. He noted that Germans who spoke carelessly during the war about the concentration camps were warned that they might “go up the chimney"-a chilling phrase understood to refer to the crematoria. Höss also pointed out the obvious: civilians, technicians, factory foremen, guards, and executioners were all exposed in different ways to what was happening. Some went home at night. Some talked. Some hinted. Some bragged.
So the real issue is not whether information existed. It did. The issue is how much was known, by whom, and under what conditions.
Historian David Bankier concluded, based on wartime and postwar testimony as well as contemporary diaries, that large sections of the German population-Jews and non-Jews alike-either knew or suspected what was happening in Poland and the Soviet Union. Walter Laqueur reached a similar conclusion: while only a small number may have known every operational detail of the “Final Solution," very few knew nothing.
That is the basic historical reality Holocaust deniers try to evade. Millions of Jews could not be deported, imprisoned, starved, shot, gassed, burned, and buried without perpetrators, guards, clerks, railway workers, engineers, factory owners, local collaborators, neighbors, witnesses, and bystanders. A genocide of this scale does not happen in total darkness.
At the same time, fear mattered. The severity of punishment for discussing what was happening ensured that rumors, suspicions, and fragmentary knowledge did not easily become open public discourse. A regime built on terror does not require universal ignorance. It requires enough fear to suppress honest speech.
The Nazis also worked methodically to erase the evidence of their crimes.
Historian Shmuel Spector documented Aktion 1005, the German effort to destroy the physical traces of mass murder. Beginning in 1942 and continuing through the end of the war, the Nazis exhumed bodies from extermination camps and mass graves in the East and attempted to burn them. This was not the behavior of men with nothing to hide. It was the behavior of criminals trying to eliminate evidence.
But they were too late. There were too many graves, too many bodies, too many witnesses, and too many survivors. Even German efficiency could not fully erase a crime of such scale.
Nor is it true that the Allies knew nothing.
Historian Richard Breitman demonstrated that British intelligence had evidence of mass murder as early as the summer of 1941. Soon after Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, British intelligence intercepted and decoded radio messages sent by German Order Police units and their SS superiors. These units were heavily involved in the mass shooting of Jews in the East. NSA historical material similarly notes that by September 1941 British codebreakers had enough intercepted evidence to recognize that German police units were killing Jews on a vast scale.
The reason British intelligence could intercept some of this material is significant. The Order Police often did not use the sophisticated Enigma machine for these transmissions. Instead, they relied on less secure systems. That gave the British what Breitman described as unimpeachable evidence of wholesale Nazi killings of Jews.
One intercepted message from August 7, 1941, was especially revealing. Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, Higher SS and Police Leader for Russia Center, reported on the actions of the SS Cavalry Brigade and noted that thousands more had been executed, bringing the total in his area beyond 30,000. This was not rumor. It was documentary evidence from the perpetrators themselves.
So why did Britain not immediately publicize everything it knew?
Because war imposes brutal choices. Had Britain revealed the full extent of what it had intercepted, the Germans would have realized their codes were compromised. That could have damaged Allied intelligence capabilities, prolonged the war, and enabled even more killing. Silence was not proof that the murders were unknown. It was part of the strategic calculus of total war.
This is precisely where Holocaust denial does its damage. It exploits the difference between secrecy and nonexistence. It takes the fog of war, the terror of dictatorship, the limits of public information, and the intelligence constraints of wartime governments, then twists them into the obscene claim that the crime itself did not happen.
But the historical record is vast, convergent, and devastating. The Nazis and their collaborators murdered six million Jews. The evidence comes from German documents, Allied intelligence, survivor testimony, perpetrator testimony, railway records, camp records, demographic studies, mass graves, photographs, films, forensic evidence, and the ruins of the killing centers themselves.
Holocaust denial is not merely false. It is morally obscene. It is an assault not only on the dead, but on truth itself.
And today, denial has evolved. Sometimes it appears in crude, old-fashioned form: the claim that the gas chambers were a hoax, that the number six million was invented, or that Jews fabricated their suffering for political gain. Sometimes it appears in more sophisticated dress: “revisionism," selective skepticism, malicious equivalence, or Nazi analogies designed to relativize the genocide of European Jewry.
But the objective remains the same: to strip the Holocaust of its historical reality and, with it, to strip the Jewish people of their memory, dignity, and moral standing.
That is why the recent eruption of Holocaust denial and Holocaust inversion in Egyptian media must be taken seriously. It is not just offensive language. It is not merely bad journalism. It is part of a wider ideological campaign that seeks to turn history upside down: Iran becomes the victim, Israel becomes the aggressor, Nazis become a rhetorical weapon against Jews, and the Holocaust becomes either a lie, an exaggeration, or a political inconvenience.
This is how antisemitism adapts. It does not always deny the Jew’s humanity in the same vocabulary. It updates its language for the moment. Yesterday it claimed Jews were poisoning wells. Then it claimed Jews controlled capitalism, communism, banks, wars, and governments. Today it claims Jews invented or exploit the Holocaust while accusing the Jewish state of Nazism.
The costume changes. The hatred does not.
The answer must therefore be firm, factual, and unambiguous:
- The Holocaust happened.
- Nazi Germany and its collaborators murdered six million Jews.
- They tried to hide their crimes while committing them and erase the evidence afterward. They failed on both counts.
Truth survived the murderers. It survived the crematoria. It survived the mass graves. It survived the silence of witnesses and the evasions of defeated perpetrators.
It will survive the deniers too-but only if it is defended without apology.
Because Holocaust denial is not a debate over the past. It is a weapon aimed at the future.
Note: Parts of this essay are adapted from Denying History : Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? by Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman. Dr.
Alex Grobman is the senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society and a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East. He has an MA and PhD in contemporary Jewish history from The Hebrew university of Jerusalem