The Faulty Heuristics of Holocaust Denial

A disturbing number of people either reject the Holocaust as historical fact or doubt that it was so extreme. As mentioned here previously, one national study in the U.S. found that nearly two-thirds of adults ages 18-39 did not know that the Third Reich murdered six million Jews, a quarter believed reports of the Holocaust to be inaccurate, and one in ten even believed that the victims caused the Holocaust themselves (Schoen Consulting, 2018). In Europe, as noted by the Holocaust Remembrance Project, it is common in some countries to acknowledge these murders by Nazis while downplaying their own nations' participation (Echikson, 2019).

Holocaust deniers take a motivated position that ignores the overwhelming historical evidence that remains despite the Nazis' efforts to erase their own evidence as they went along. Himmler, for example, directed camp commandants to destroy their records, crematoria, and any other vestiges of their deeds (Arad, 1984). The greatest destruction of evidence took place in the crimes themselves, in the elimination of those whose lives were the living reports.

Memorial at the Jewish cemetery of Kazimierz Dolny in memory of the city's Jews killed by the Nazis.

Source: Vadim Akopyan, all rights waived.

We must learn from those who survived the atrocities (e.g., Clary, 2001/2008; Frankl, 1946; Lengyel, 1947/1995; Pitch, 2015; Robbins, 2011; Wiesel, 1972/2006). Alas, attention to their stories can mislead us if we focus on the fact that they survived—because the vast majority did not. Most who were sent to the extermination camps lie silent either in the periphery outside our focus, even though the spotty and unfocused periphery fills most of what we see, or entirely outside any range we can ever even glimpse. Everything they might have done was simply lost, extinguished.

The availability heuristic, the tendency to form judgments based on information most readily available to us, causes people to overestimate the frequency or magnitude of events we know about (such as survival) and underestimate the likelihood of others (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973). The availability heuristic influences perceptions and recollections of consequences. The more readily available information is regarding consequences, the greater people tend to perceive the severity of those consequences to be (Schwartz et al., 1991). Joseph Stalin supposedly said that “a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic," which would reflect this heuristic (among other things such as sheer inability to comprehend a million). We can know of a million deaths but we are incapable of knowing about each one, and so people may underestimate the unseen dead.

One reason that The Diary of Anne Frank (a.k.a. The Diary of a Young Girl, originally Het Achterhuis in 1947) made such an impact is that it personalizes the history of one individual along with her family as they tried to survive. For two years, they hid away during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, only to get reported and apprehended in 1944. Anne Frank died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp mere months before the war's end.

Without being able to continue her diary into her time in a concentration camp, her posthumously-published account nevertheless personalizes one death. The book shares her hopes, dreams, musings, and efforts to persevere, which feel all the more tragic when we know how her story ends. Anne Frank becomes a name, a face, and a literary voice from among the millions of invisible and voiceless victims.

The world must remember. More precisely, we need for the world to remember. There are strong reasons why people often quote this aphorism in connection with the Holocaust: During a 1948 speech to the House of Commons, Winston Churchill paraphrased Spanish philosopher George Santayana, saying, "Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it." Often paraphrased or misquoted, Santayana (1905) said it a little differently, perhaps more ominously, in a volume of The Life of Reason:

Those who cannot remember the past
are condemned to repeat it.

We cannot remember that which we never knew, any information that has never been available to us, and so we must endeavor to maintain whichever details we do know and to keep them available for others.

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