For David Baddiel, comedian and author, the Holocaust is as much a part of his identity as the single word ‘Jew’ in his Twitter biography.
His mother Sarah escaped Germany for England as a tiny baby with her parents in 1939 — just before war broke out. She lost uncles on both sides while her parents, who’d led a privileged life Germany, became struggling refugees in England.
So there’s a reason why his latest documentary may be both the most important but also physically discomfiting, for both him and the viewer, of his career.
Confronting Holocaust Denial on BBC2 involves not only the history of those who claim the Shoah was either made up or exaggerated, but also sees Baddiel meet a man who spreads his conspiracy theory lies across the internet.
“Holocaust deniers are a very extreme example of trolls and ignoring them has not worked,” says Baddiel, as he recalls his meeting with Holocaust denier Dermot Mulqueen, a man who was jailed for smashing a television in his local town square in Ireland to launch “International Holocaust Hoax Day”.
‘But meeting one touched a very deep part of me. My mother and her parents only just got out of Nazi Germany; I am here by the skin of my teeth. So, I feel a great sadness but also a great rage in me at the people who say it didn’t happen.
“I felt, to be honest, a little out of control meeting this Holocaust denier. I was nervous, even though I don’t normally get nervous.
“I didn’t want to shake his hand but then I knew that if I didn’t shake his hand that would be a whole thing and I didn’t know what to do. When you are making a television programme you don’t normally feel those emotions."
In the most astonishing moment of the film, Mulqueen insists on singing a song about how the Holocaust could not have happened because there are so many Mercedes cars parked outside synagogues.
“I knew I wouldn’t change his mind but I wanted to get into the psychology of why he believes this. The strange thing is that Dermot said he felt ‘relief’ once he started believing the Holocaust wasn’t real.”
Baddiel’s distress at meeting this conspiracy theorist was compounded by the knowledge that renowned Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt, and Anthony Julius, the British lawyer who defended her when she was sued for libel by Holocaust denier David Irving, had told him not to do it.
Whether to confront or ignore is the question that many of us are having to face in an age of social media where we come nose to nose with people who want to deny the Holocaust and tell other lies about Jews. Baddiel admits he was torn about whether he would make martyrs out of deniers. Was it better to ignore them?
“I felt conflicted but I think it’s OK to be conflicted,” he says. “There is a theory that you shouldn’t feed the trolls.
“But I don’t agree because our culture is being shaped by trolls. Holocaust deniers are an extreme example of trolls and ignoring them has not worked. Unfortunately, we live in a time when untruths have a lot of power and Holocaust denial is the archetypal central lie. It’s like the lie all the other lies fan out from.
“It’s my personal feeling that you have to try and take the trolls on. But sometimes it can feel overwhelming. When we were doing the research into this film there were lots of times where I thought, ‘I don’t want to do it anymore’.
"There was stuff we haven’t included in the documentary from other trolls from various antisemitic websites that was unbelievably horrible. They said horrific things about survivors. Hideous.”
Despite the reams of testimony and evidence, the stories from Holocaust survivors and all the education on it, Holocaust denial has only grown, says Baddiel, 55.
“When I grew up there was a certainty about the Holocaust; it was taken seriously. But now you have people gathering in conspiracy chatrooms, on Facebook, and they are motivated by this macho need to say I am not going to be reverent about this reverent thing.’
The film is only 60 minutes but packs a lot in; starting with the origins of Holocaust denial — from the very people who were doing it. He goes to the Chelmno extermination camp in Poland where 200,000 Jews were killed, most of them within an hour of arriving. To ensure there was no evidence left, the Nazis milled their bones and used it as fertiliser.
"The fact that the Nazis wanted to conceal what they were doing has always puzzled me," says David. "Why are they covering it up? There is a clue, Himmler wrote of ‘a page of glory never to be written.’ Is it, at some level, they knew what they were doing was deeply shameful or was it this strange double think that they could do all this, consider it glorious and yet still think, ‘and now we have to pretend it never happened’?”
At the National Archives at Kew and finds an astonishing memo written by the Ministry of Information to British propagandists writing material to get the continued support of the public for war in 1941.
They should not mention the concentration camp “horror stuff” the memo said, because it could “repel the minds” of the British people.
Instead they should concentrate on the “indisputably innocent people” signalling out that they should not mention, ‘violent political opponents’ nor Jews.
“There was this deep-rooted sense of, yes the Jews are being killed, but we can’t go to town in saying it’s about the Jews because they are in some way responsible,’ says Baddiel.
"Even when the camps were liberated and there were news reels showing what had gone on, the reports took out the fact most of the people in the camps were Jews. The truth continued to be obscured.” Richard Dimbleby’s famous broadcast from a liberated Belsen concentration camp was cut to ensure the word Jews was removed.
“It’s not me knocking the British but I just wanted to make the point that from the word go people didn’t believe what had happened because it was being covered up including here, in this country.”
Denial continued after the war, but it took the internet to make sure that Holocaust denial went mainstream.
Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg caused controversy in July 2018 when he defended the rights of the site’s users — and in particular Far Right conspiracy theory website Info Wars — to publish Holocaust denial posts saying he didn’t “think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong”. Baddiel is scathing, about this.
“Their attitude that it is OK, because these people are simply mistaken, is wrong. They’ve recently said they don’t accept hate speech but they allow Holocaust denial which makes me think it is a commercial decision — because it means people are going onto Facebook."
He admits that he’s worried about fall out from the documentary and has spoken to security advisors. “This programme will certainly lead to a lot of online abuse; I just hope it doesn’t lead to anyone actually threatening me in real life,” he says.
This week he embarked on his new UK tour entitled Trolls: Not the Dolls which examines the online hate and what happens when you interact with them, as he does, frequently.
“I spend a lot of time making comedy out of the abuse I get but sometimes I think:‘What am I doing here? Am I normalising terrible, terrible things?’ We live in an age where age and abuse has become very normalised. One in six people don’t believe the Holocaust happened or that it was exaggerated. I hope that, if nothing else, this film helps spread an awareness of the truth.”
Confronting Holocaust Denial with David Baddiel will be on BBC2 on Monday February 17 at 9pm. Visit www.davidbaddiel.com for tour details
