Twenty-five-year-old Rehman lives with his parents and siblings in Lahore, Pakistan. He’s the youngest of the family and works remotely for a British marketing firm. “I don’t usually go outside,” he says; he spends his leisure hours online. “Porn is my cardio.” But that’s not all he does on the internet. He recently commented on Instagram that only 271,000 Jews died in the Holocaust – and that was “not enough”.
Rehman’s not alone. Not in this sense at least. Click on posts about the Holocaust and you’ll likely see “271k” in the comments. This internet shorthand for the fallacy stems from a document attributed to the Red Cross about death certificates for 13 camps when it administered what is now called the Arolsen Archives, which holds records of victims and survivors of Nazi persecution. Both organisations vociferously protest the misuse, yet “271,000” continues to proliferate in podcasts and social media reels.
The oldest hatred has taken on the newest forms: Holocaust denial is thriving online. Some users claim that it never happened, that the evidence was fake, or that six million deaths is impossible. Users seek to absolve the Nazis by saying that victims mostly died from typhus. Clips of David Irving contesting the gas chambers have received tens of thousands of likes, alongside theories about wooden doors not being airtight. A frequent assertion is that Auschwitz was not so bad because of the “swimming pool”. Another trope is alleging that 271,000 died but wishing it was six million, while AI-generated reels try to depict a world in which that number really perished. “I wish it was all of them,” reads one comment.
Some motives for denial remain unchanged. Disputes about the numbers are an attempt to distract. As Günther Jikeli, associate professor in Germanic and Jewish studies at Indiana University, explains: “In some contemporary ideological frameworks, victims are assumed to be morally good. For people who believe Jews are somehow malevolent in principle, this creates cognitive dissonance when confronted with Jews as victims of genocide. Conspiracy theories and denial narratives become a way to resolve that tension.”
Below a comment complaining sarcastically that there is “nothing funnier than the organised slaughter of six million” is a comment arguing that denial “is about rejecting cultural shame”. Commenters call Jews “expired victim card holders”, and demand that we focus on larger quantities of other wartime dead.
The digital age offers fresh catalysts, not least for rampant misinformation. Twenty-year-old Michael, an American, tells me that fewer than 271,000 perished, adding: “Hitler never wanted a war and was practically forced into it by Jewish Zionists in 1933. There are multiple articles on Google.” Stereotypes are reworked, and content creators relate a “duty” to use their platforms against Jewish media and financial “control”. An American YouTuber told me: “Hitler was right about them. They own all the media, social media platforms too. If you step out of line and go against the narrative, they freeze your bank accounts.” Another complained of algorithms pumping “Israeli propaganda”. Then there are the financial motives: outrage or agreement drives clicks, subscribers and revenue. With his new followers from denialist content, Rehman is hoping to launch a fitness channel.
Before Piers Morgan interviewed the far-right commentator Nick Fuentes on his YouTube channel, the columnist and peer Daniel Finkelstein contacted Morgan about how his family’s experiences contradicted Fuentes’s claims of Hitler being “cool”. The broadcaster suggested he prepare a video to show on-air. “I did appreciate there’d be kickback,” Finkelstein tells me, “it was hardly likely that if he played that to Nick Fuentes, he would say ‘you’re completely right and I’m sorry that I ever held a contrary view and I must go on an anti-Semitism training course.’ The point was to try to expose people to this quite dangerous growth of anti-Semitism on the young American right and the danger that it’ll come here.”
Fuentes’s mocking response – “me mum died in the Holly” in an exaggerated English accent – became a meme and the subject of songs. Now it is a refrain not only for Fuentes himself but a broader catchphrase, and users repeat the lines from the songs to Finkelstein.
“People like to join in the fun of pushing someone else around,” Finkelstein says. “They’re trying to make a statement: ‘I can be even more shocking than somebody else. We’ll share the big in-joke of baiting the Jew.’ People often use exactly the same joke Fuentes made. They were not adding an original piece of wit, most of them were just distributing it – a statement of ‘I’m part of the gang’.”
Despite their rhetoric, however, deniers in private protest being called anti-Semitic and frequently back down when challenged. Approaching deniers (under a pseudonym for safety), I found they were willing to speak only after confirming I was not Jewish and knew about “271k”. The memes function as a password for bonding (one post suggests “271,000 or six million?” as a “crucial first date question”). Rehman says he “never really cared” but content “just showed up in [his] feed lol” and offered to delete his comment. Tahsin tried to defend posting “271k” on Instagram by saying, “I’m not against Jews or Judaism but I oppose Zionism and Zionist propaganda.” He claims 271,000 “was actually proven by many historians” while “the six million figure comes from a very complicated and inaccessible source that can’t be explained broadly”. He then backtracked that the “number can go up from 271,000 but not so big as six million”.
Fuentes said his generation is done with “pearl-clutching”. Arguably, people have become desensitised to the horrors of the Holocaust. The number of survivors with first-hand experiences is dwindling. And images that once horrified the world are easily available and, adding to the desensitisation, anyone can livestream mass killings – including those in Gaza.
One Instagram user told me he believes that the number of dead Jews in the Holocaust compares with Palestinians killed during the recent Israeli campaign (Gaza health authorities say the violent death toll exceeded 75,200 people as of January). Memes equate the Nazis with Israel. Rehman insists he does not hate all Jews, despite wishing more perished under Hitler. He met a European one he liked. “Real Jews are good people,” he insists, “these Israelis ain’t.” When I point out that Israel did not exist until 1948, he responds that Holocaust survivors “are the same settlers who came to Palestine”.
Do memes remain confined to the online sphere or are they actually impacting on Holocaust education? Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, says: “Since 7 October 2023, anti-Semitism across the globe, including in online spaces, has risen sharply. With young people increasingly exposed to misinformation online, this feeds into the assumptions students hold when they enter the classroom. Meanwhile, teachers are increasingly navigating heightened sensitivities in the classroom, including concerns about how discussions may be received by pupils, parents and the wider community.
“The vast majority of students are respectful, engaged and keen to learn and reflect. However, we also come across examples of misconceptions and see the effects of distorted narratives. Students raise questions shaped by conspiracy theories and tropes, for instance assumptions about the perceived wealth of Jewish people or notions of Jewish people holding undue influence. These comments are not necessarily ill-meaning, but a by-product of a lack of awareness and exposure to misleading or false information.”
Attribution – and accountability – for online comments prove difficult. Matthias Becker, senior researcher at the AddressHate think tank, notes that “creators remain anonymous and content circulates in highly networked environments where memes are copied, remixed, translated and reposted across platforms”. The internet moves fast. Searching “Holohoax” on Instagram provokes warnings, but slang words such as “joos”, the juicebox emoji, “holly” or “cookies” (they go in ovens) don’t.
How to combat this? Finkelstein states: “This is ultimately about all of us, not just Jews. A civilised, law-abiding society in which everybody is treated with respect and equality, whatever their racial background, is something that protects everybody. Because people respond best to things that are in their own interests, it’s really important to explain that.”
Marc Neugröschel, fellow at the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism, urges that subtler forms of prejudice, such as 271k, “provoke condemnation from the societal mainstream” and that education be strengthened, with 21 per cent of respondents from the US and 20 per cent from the UK believing that two million or fewer Jews were killed.
This is a broader digital literacy problem. Alex Maws, head of education and heritage at the Association of Jewish Refugees, urges integrating Holocaust education “with a school’s wider commitment to media and digital literacy”. Facts alone are insufficient. “A more pressing concern than those young people who don’t believe the Holocaust happened is those young people who know it happened, but don’t particularly care.”
As an experiment when speaking to online Holocaust deniers, I pretended I was Jewish once. Messaging an influencer, I stressed my eagerness to engage and my criticism of Israel. It didn’t matter. He immediately sent me a torrent of abuse, listing “a shitty little state in the Middle East that doesn’t deserve to exist”, Jeffrey Epstein, the war in Gaza, the Nazis constituting “a perfect representation of the IDF”, and how I must “find Christ”. I stopped replying. But then this Holocaust denier hit on the crux of the matter. “Really,” he added, “I don’t know what you’re trying to prove.”
[Further reading: St George’s Day can’t contain the new English nationalism]
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