Auschwitz Memorial fights disinformation with new online lesson
The memorial museum at the former German concentration camp Auschwitz wants to counter the disinformation of Holocaust deniers with a new online educational resource.
The development of the internet favours the spread of false ideologies such as Holocaust denial, memorial spokesman Pawel Sawicki to the PAP news agency.
"Holocaust denial is nothing more than a conspiracy theory based on lies and hatred," Sawicki said.
The online lesson, which is also available as a podcast on the streaming service Spotify, is divided into different chapters. They take a look at the strategies of Holocaust denial and its ideological background, but above all analyse the specific myths and lies spread by the deniers.
One of the falsehoods, for example, is a claim that a delegation from the International Red Cross visited the concentration and extermination camp at Auschwitz in Nazi-occupied Poland. They allegedly found no cause for complaint regarding the conditions of the prisoners there.
The online lesson clarifies that IRC representative Maurice Rossel did want to visit the camp on September 27, 1944, but was not allowed in. An officer merely told him that the mail for the prisoners had been handed over in full.
The online lesson makes it clear Rossel was not in the part of the camp where the prisoners were, let alone in Auschwitz-Birkenau where the gas chambers were, and therefore had no knowledge of the living conditions of the prisoners or the mass murder of people in Auschwitz.
The extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau is symbolic of the Holocaust and the horrors of Nazism. Around 1.1 million people died there between 1940 and 1945, most of them Jews. They were shot, murdered in gas chambers or died of hunger and disease.
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