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If 'WWII revisionism' means the idea that the Nazis weren't all that bad, or even Holocaust denial, then no. No, it is not.
I think it would help to avoid woolly euphemisms like 'WWII revisionism' and clearly state the thesis that is being considered. I do not think the public consensus that Nazi Germany was bad, that it committed hideous atrocities, and that it was right to destroy it is likely to change.
Holocaust Denial is receiving the most engagement at this moment than it ever has since it was formulated in the 1970s. By far. Yes it is going mainstream too.
Some of the keystone claims of the Holocaust narrative are plainly absurd and will be Revised as well. Many already have been Revised. It was claimed 4 million were killed in Auschwitz until the 1990s, when the death toll dropped to 1.1 million. It was claimed 2 million were killed in Majdanek at the Nuremberg Trial and the most recent estimates by the Majdanek Museum estimate the death toll from all prisoners from all causes was about 70,000. It was claimed 5 million Gentiles were killed in the Holocaust, but that has been Revised and acknowledged to have been a deceptive lie. The Holocaust has already been revised a lot and it has a long way to go.
One of the most infamous claims, that the Nazis manufactured bars of soap out of the fat of Jewish Holocaust victims, was Revised not too long ago and admitted to not have been true. The other salacious claim involving shower rooms stands today but it won't for that much longer. Holocaust Revisionism has entailed a steady stream of victories but it hasn't penetrated the public consciousness although it is clearly beginning to do so now.
I think when you're as fringe as Holocaust denial, even tiny increases in salience will be perceived, from the inside as significant. A jump from 0.01% to 0.02% is tiny, but still a doubling of interest.
Are we anywhere near the point where someone who isn't a conspiracy theorist or historical obsessive asks questions about the Holocaust? No. You mention a claim about the Nazis making soap out of victims - I've never heard of the idea that Nazis made soap from the bodies of murdered Jews, and I am, by normie standards, a WWII history nerd. (Simple test: I know what the Wannsee conference was. Most people do not.) I do not think that anyone near to what we might reasonably call the mainstream has heard of or cares about whether or not the bodies of Jews were turned into soap. As such, even if that's something widely believed and if there's been a change of mainstream academic opinion on it, I don't think it tells us anything about whether or not Holocaust denial is going mainstream.
Wait, really? They took us to one of the Holocaust museums as kids and the soap and lampshade stuff was front and center, right next to the pile o'shoes display and gold fillings. It's 100% in "top ten things everyone knows about the Holocaust."
Looking at the wiki article, five years after our trip there were still published arguments going "we've gotta stop claiming this because it gives the denierists ammunition!", suggesting that team soap was still firmly in control in the early 00s.
The more this stuff happens, the more I Nootice Signal's point about the revisionists forcing revisions that are never, ever acknowledged to have happened. The narrative just smoothly changes from one second to the next.
Nope. I remember going to a Holocaust museum at primary school and that never came up. This is the first I've ever heard of anything involving lampshades either. The focus was much more on the history of intolerance, hostility, and repression that led up to the Nazis deciding to just kill all the Jews. The gruesome details of how they were killed at the camps were not gone into, I would guess partly because it's not child-appropriate and partly because it's not actually a useful thing to know in terms of what they were trying to teach us.
I don't have much experience talking to Holocaust deniers outside of the Motte, since, well, this is the only place I've ever met any, but one of the things that surprises me about them is their obsession with quibbling what seem to me like trifling details. I don't particularly care about the exact methods by which the Nazis murdered millions of Jews. I care that they murdered millions of Jews. That's the morally significant part.
Insofar as I find other questions about the Holocaust historically or philosophically interesting, I think for me it's mostly causal stuff? The intentionalist/functionalist debates, for instance, strike me as both interesting and instructive, in terms of how atrocities come to occur. But details about ovens or showers or what have you strike me as being mostly of niche academic interest.
As a non-holocaust denier, I find it hard to believe both that the focus on the story surprises you, or that you parse it as a "trifling detail". It shouldn't be hard to understand how being told a tall tale by authority figures, designed to make you hate and fear someone, back when you were too young to question it, only for it to turn out to be a fabrication.
I mean, I don't think I'd ever heard the word 'zyklon' in my life before I visited the Motte. I just wasn't told a specific story about how the Nazis murdered the Jews, beyond maybe a vague "they gassed them".
So I guess I'm completely unmoved by the idea that there might be a valid historical debate about the exact methods. Heck, the Nazis weren't the most scrupulously organised group in the world and the camps were mostly destroyed, so I would not be surprised if a range of techniques were used in different places. So I have no sense of there even being a tall tale.
What I remember from my childhood is that Hitler was bad, basically. I did units in school on the lead-up to WWI and then on the rise of fascism, but ironically I never actually did the wars. They weren't offered - we skipped from the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand to the Treaty of Versailles, and then spent a semester on Weimar Germany and Hitler's rise to power, and then we skipped the war itself and came back the next year with the WWII peace settlement and the beginning of the Cold War. Presumably it was felt that there was no particular need for kids to understand all the military maneuvers; and interested kids (like me) would just go to the library and read all the military history books and pore over the maps (which I did).
I don't remember ever doing anything about Stalin, since he leaves the picture fairly early in the Cold War. There was a very common unit in Australian high school history about the Russian Revolution, though, which I didn't do (I had a different course), but presumably would have covered that. So most of what I got was that Hitler is bad and Nazis are bad, and they came to power in such-and-such way, and these are the sorts of things we should look out for in case it happens again, but the blow-by-blow of the war itself was not covered. That also meant that the logistics of the Holocaust were skipped entirely.
It's not as though we did nothing about the Nazis and the Jews - I read The Diary of Anne Frank, and I remember watching and writing about the film Au revoir les enfants, though those were in English class and French class respectively, not history per se. But the emphasis in works like that is much more about the breakdown in social trust and solidarity, people informing on their neighbours, and so on. I don't mind that particularly, because I think that is in fact the most important lesson to take from the Holocaust.
Anyway, I suppose it's possible that if you were taught very specific details about the death camps and sacralised those details, then learning that they might be incorrect or debatable would be challenging? But that sounds like a very different form of education to the one I received, and to be honest one that seems to me to have quite strange priorities.
Again, I'm having trouble believing that this is how you are parsing what was said in the conversation. No one is focused on, or sacrilises, the specific details about death camps, it's that people recognize they were told a story to elicit a very specific reaction, and are now reacting to being deceived in a particularly underhanded way.
You can claim that he details of what happened in the death camps don't matter, but that's refuted by the simple fact that if they didn't matter, they wouldn't be taught.
That's a funny juxtaposition. I doubt I'd ever hear her name, if it wasn't for the exposure to American media.
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