Twenty years of HC blog

Happy birthday to us: exactly twenty years ago, the Holocaust Controversies blog was kicked off with the first of over 1,500 posts. It's a strange anniversary given how much time has elapsed and how different the world now is. 

Back then, the HC team met online at the original Real Open Debate on the Holocaust forum, an old-fashioned bulletin board, before any of today's social media platforms existed. While Holocaust 'revisionism' had been dealt a huge blow in 2000 with the defeat of David Irving's libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt in London, it seemed to be surging online, largely ignored by the mainstream media. Many of the HC team had been arguing with Holocaust deniers online for years. I myself stumbled across it when googling for materials on Auschwitz, and could scarcely avoid what seemed like a barrage of revisionist propaganda materials. Thus the decision to found the blog.

Twenty years on, the landscape is entirely different. Holocaust denial in 2026 presents an even more paradoxical picture: it has surged once again on various social media platforms, but in a largely headless form, part of a wider upsurge in antisemitism online in the past two to three years. And with that surge, HC's views have as well, passing six million since May 2010 in July 2015 and seven million in February 2026. 

Organised revisionism, meanwhile, has come closer than ever to dying a death entirely. In 2009, Mark Weber, the director of the Institute for Historical Review, announced that he no longer saw a point in 'revisionist' activities; in those years also David Irving and David Cole, two of the bigger names from the early 1990s heyday, publicly rejected most of the key tenets of 'revisionism'. Nearly all of the promoters, publishers, authors and activists who stuck to hardcore negationism despite these declarations of apostasy then proceeded to drop like flies: Willis Carto, Bradley Smith, Ernst Zündel, Robert Faurisson, Serge Thion, Samuel Crowell, Fredrick Töben, and Jürgen Graf all passed away, alongside lesser figures who had made names for themselves without really publishing anything, such as Richard Williamson and Ursula Haverbeck. Many of the revisionists we've sparred with online at RODOH and elsewhere have likewise passed away: Fabian 'Sailor' Eschen, Wilfried 'neugierig' Heink, Charles Wing Krafft, Friedrich Paul Berg, and likely others - Carlos Porter's website went offline several years ago, being archived elsewhere, for example.

This near-death experience for organised revisionism hasn't silenced them entirely: Germar Rudolf has kept the lights on at CODOH, despite an attempted coup by Michael Santomauro in December 2023. Rudolf even recently organised 'the first revisionist conference in twenty years' at the start of February 2026. The catch being, there are now only a handful of living revisionists associated with the core enterprise who can contribute to the flagship 'Holocaust Handbooks' series. When HC blog started, this ran to twenty brochures; a further 34 have been published since 2006. Of those, three have recycled older books by now-dead or missing authors (Henri Roques, Walter Sanning, John Ball), two were revisions of earlier books also by now-dead authors (Pierre Marais and Jürgen Graf), and a whopping 22 of the new 34 titles were authored by our old friend Carlo Mattogno, now a venerable 75 years of age. With 21 titles from Mattogno just on Auschwitz across 54 volumes in the series, prolixity becomes self-refuting: who has the time to wade through that much verbiage? Why can't he sum up his arguments concisely? 

Chances are, if you've come across HC in the past few years, it's because we've been linked to for our resources, especially Sergey Romanov's Rebutting the Twitter Denial round-up (337K views since May 2017), Roberto Mühlenkamp's Photographic documentation of Nazi crimes (151K views since 2009), and Hans Metzner's index of published evidence on Auschwitz (107K views since 2012). Or downloaded our 2011 white paper on Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka (26K views on archive.org many thousands more on academia.edu and on other online libraries). Numerous Substackers, Redditors, tweeters and others have pointed to HC's resources over the years - we thank everyone for making use of the work we've done. 

Other anti-denial websites, especially Gilles Karmasyn's phdn.org, have provided similar resources, archiving the Holocaust History Project website (still a going concern when HC began in 2006) and many others.

The biggest change since 2006, however, has been in the possibilities of digitisation across archives and libraries. Consider this: in 2004, the archives in Washington, DC area, USHMM and the US National Archives at College Park, MD, were relying on microfilm reader-printers; by 2007 these had become reader-scanners. When HC began twenty years ago, digital cameras were only just becoming cheap enough to be used by researchers, so twenty-five years ago, one would take notes in pencil or on laptops. Archives had yet to invest in scanners to digitise their holdings; by the start of the 2010s that had started to change.

While HC blog has regularly posted transcriptions and scans of key sources, our own Hans Metzner has recently set up the Holocaust History Site to post scans, transcriptions *and* translations of key sources in especially German. Both sets of materials see use in classrooms. On HC blog, I have been maintaining a directory of open access sources since 2016, with 59.9K views since then - a resource which has been appreciated by researchers into WWII and the Holocaust with otherwise zero interest in Holocaust denial. Since 2020, with systematic digitisation at the Bundesarchiv, US National Archives and other European archives, from Switzerland to Poland and Ukraine, the volume of historical sources from the 1930s and 1940s has increased exponentially. The oldest and largest Holocaust archives - the Wiener Library, Ghetto Fighters' House, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem - have been either early adopters of digitisation or have embraced it wholeheartedly when they took the plunge. This has supported yet more reference sites such as Yad Vashem's Untold Stories project, documenting over 1,200 localities within the borders of the wartime Soviet Union where Jews were murdered, with translated sources for all of them. 

In 2006, HC blogged about the then brand new agreement to open up the archives of the International Tracing Service at Arolsen, Germany. The following summer in 2007, I watched as a procession of hard drives arrived at USHMM with the digital copies of the archive being shared around the world. By the end of the 2010s, much of the Arolsen Archives were made open access online.

The range of open access literature and published sources has likewise exploded, to the point where it's difficult to keep fully on top of what is and isn't on an open access library, or has been uploaded to a historian's academia.edu page. The first four volumes of USHMM's Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos are now fully open access both on JSTOR as well as a convenient subsite at Project Muse. All West and East German trial judgements - 63 volumes worth - have been open access at Justiz und NS-Verbrechen for over three years now. All sixteen volumes of the Persecution and Murder of European Jews series are open access in German, the English translations are following behind with only a short moving wall; the full published edition of the Goebbels diaries is likewise now open access. Hundreds of yizkor books, memorial books to destroyed Jewish communities in Eastern Europe, have been translated to English and can be found on JewishGen. 

So, what to do with all of this material? This anniversary post goes up almost exactly eight months since we last made a new post on HC. While none of the regular HC bloggers have been scythed down in the way that revisionist authors have been in the past twenty years, it's nonetheless true that the core team has largely moved on. Roberto Mühlenkamp and Jonathan Harrison are both inactive; Hans Metzner is concentrating on the aforementioned Holocaust History Site, while Sergey Romanov is focused on his research on the Katyn and Vinnytsia Soviet killing sites and debunking of Russian Katyn deniers; you can read his work at the Katyn Files (and browser translators mean you don't need to know Russian to do so). Andrew Mathis is around, but less active. Our guest bloggers and white paper contributors - Jason Willis Myers, Joachim Neander, Statistical Mechanic - have likewise moved on or retired. I myself devote most of my time to teaching history at university level, on themes far broader than the Holocaust, having devised courses on comparative histories of violence, on the German occupation of Poland and the Soviet Union in WWII - thus concerned 50:50 with the fates of Jews and non-Jews, and now also contributing to a course on the Second World War as a global war. 

Sustaining interest in 'debunking' is a long-term impossibility, and we have never monetised the blog or sought to profit from the work on display here. There just isn't as much 'activity' from Holocaust deniers as there is from pseudoarchaeologists, pseudohistorians and ancient aliens enthusiasts, which has kept a debunker/researcher like Jason Colavito busy for decades.

Passing the twenty year anniversary, at a time when Holocaust denial has surged in some parts of social media, despite the near-death of 'organised revisionism', does however make me resolved to revive HC. That could be posting more often about the new digital resources, or exploring older denial texts that remain inexplicably popular. Arthur Butz's The Hoax of the Twentieth Century is about to, or has just had, its fiftieth anniversary. 

As the founder of HC blog, I'd also like to open up the possibility of recruiting new contributors, who might pick up the baton and who can respond to denial as it currently is, in its vague, diffuse form. Voicing denier sentiments might well be simply a form of vice signalling, or just another tool in the antisemitic repertoire and another way of attacking and trying to hurt Jews, 'libtards', and the other enemies of the terminally online contrarians. Perhaps pop over to Skeptics Society Forum, where Hans and I still post, and where other veterans of anti-denier arguments online still post, to introduce yourself if you might be interested in helping out.

In the meantime, a huge thank you once again to all our readers and everyone who's ever made use of the Holocaust Controversies blog.