Holocaust denial is the belief that the Nazi German government and their collaborators did not kill, murder, or commit genocide against millions of Jews or other civilian groups during World War II. In denying the existence of the Holocaust entirely, it is generally regarded as the most extreme form of Holocaust revisionism.
Historians generally agree that Holocaust denial is contrary to the known facts of history. Despite this the idea has gained much currency in several Arab countries and is a factor in the debates over Middle East policy. It has also played a role in the Balkans at the beginning of 1990s, where denial of the Ustasha genocide in Croatia has sparked fears of the Serbian population who rebelled against the new pro-independence government of Franjo Tudjman.
Due to the extremely rapid collapse of the Nazi forces at the end of the war, attempts to destroy evidence in Germany were for the most part unsuccessful. After their defeat, many tons of documents were recovered, and many thousands of bodies were found not yet completely decomposed, in mass graves near many concentration camps. The physical evidence and the documentary proof included records of train shipments of Jews to the camps, orders for tons of cyanide and other poisons, and the remaining concentration camp structures. Interviews with survivors completed the picture. As a result, these extreme revisionist views are almost universally rejected by all historians.
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