Secondary Anti-Semitism: From Hard-Core to Soft-Core Denial of the Shoah

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The core principle of secondary anti-Semitism is the refusal or rejection of remembrance of the unprecedented crime which Germans committed during the Second World War, namely the Shoah. This has a specific dimension in Germany which basically reflects the country's unique political culture. The cruelest version of secondary anti-Semitism is Holocaust denial. Three categories of soft-core denial are proposed: distortion, universalization and projection of guilt/relativization/trivialization. People who generate such a soft-core denial do not often refer to the Holocaust as a lie or fabrication by Jews or their sympathizers. It is much more subtle. Disguising history by talking about …