Prominent Holocaust survivors, including Germany's Charlotte Knobloch, have joined a global campaign to pressure Facebook to crack down on content that denies the Nazi genocide of Jews.
Image: picture-alliance/AP Photo/J. C. Hong
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Holocaust survivors on Wednesday launched an online campaign calling on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to remove posts from his social media platform that deny the Nazi extermination of 6 million Jews.
The #NoDenyingIt campaign said it would upload a video featuring a survivor's account every day to Facebook to lobby for denial posts to be classed as hate speech and banned.
Coordinated by the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, the videos will also be posted to Twitter and Facebook-owned Instagram.
Zuckerberg later issued a clarification following the backlash, saying: "I absolutely didn't intend to defend the intent of people who deny [the Holocaust]."
Under its policy, Facebook takes down such posts in countries such as Germany, France and Poland where Holocaust denial is illegal. Elsewhere, content is monitored and only removed if it breaches the platform's standards, for example by straying into hate speech or incitement to violence.
"We take down any post that celebrates, defends, or attempts to justify the Holocaust," Facebook told the Associated Press.
"The same goes for content that mocks Holocaust victims, accuses victims of lying about the atrocities, spews hate, or advocates for violence against Jewish people in any way. Posts and articles that deny the Holocaust often violate one or more of these standards and are removed from Facebook."
The Claims Conference, an association of Jewish organizations which negotiates compensation claims from Germany for Holocaust victims, said the #NoDenyingIt project aimed to show that denial of the genocide violates Facebook's guidelines.
"In Germany or in Austria people go to prison if they deny the Holocaust because they know it's a lie, it's libel," survivor Eva Schloss told The Associated Press. The 91-year-old's video message for Zuckerberg was posted to the campaign's pages on Wednesday.
Schloss fled her home city Vienna for the Netherlands before the war — growing up in the same building as Anne Frank; her mother would marry the famed diarist's father, Otto Frank, after the war — but her family was eventually rounded up and sent to Auschwitz in 1944. While Schloss and her mother survived the death camp, her father and brother were killed.
"How can somebody really doubt it? Where are the 6 million people? There are tens of thousands of photos taken by the Nazis themselves. They were proud of what they were doing," she said.
Facebook has also come under fire from US civil rights groups, which organized an advertising boycott of the platform earlier this month. More than 400 brands signed up to the campaign to push for more concrete steps to block racist posts and hate speech from the site.
Prominent German Jewish leader Charlotte Knobloch, who survived the Holocaust by going into hiding as a young girl, said she was participating in the #NoDenyingIt campaign because many younger generations rely on social media platforms to get their information. Therefore, social media companies "have a particular responsibility," she told AP.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day is January 27. Numerous memorials across Germany ensure the millions of victims are not forgotten.
Image: picture-alliance/AP Photo/M. Schreiber
Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site
A large sculpture stands in front of Dachau. Located just outside Munich, it was the first concentration camp opened by the Nazi regime. Just a few weeks after Adolf Hitler came to power, it was used by the paramilitary SS Schutzstaffel to imprison, torture and kill political opponents of the regime. Dachau also served as a prototype and model for the other Nazi camps that followed.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
Wannsee House
The villa on Berlin's Wannsee lake was pivotal in the planning of the Holocaust. Fifteen members of the Nazi government and the SS Schutzstaffel met here on January 20, 1942 to devise what became known as the "Final Solution," the deportation and extermination of all Jews in German-occupied territory. In 1992, the villa where the Wannsee Conference was held was turned into a memorial and museum.
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Holocaust Memorial in Berlin
Located next to the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was inaugurated 60 years after the end of World War II on May 10, 2005, and opened to the public two days later. Architect Peter Eisenman created a field with 2,711 concrete slabs. An attached underground "Place of Information" holds the names of all known Jewish Holocaust victims.
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Memorial to Persecuted Homosexuals
Not too far from the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, another concrete memorial honors the thousands of homosexuals persecuted by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945. The 4-meter high (13-foot) monument, which has a window showing alternately a film of two men or two women kissing, was inaugurated in Berlin's Tiergarten on May 27, 2008.
Image: picture alliance/Markus C. Hurek
Documentation center on Nazi Party rally grounds
Nuremberg hosted the biggest Nazi party propaganda rallies from 1933 until the start of World War II. The annual Nazi Party congress, as well as rallies with as many as 200,000 participants, took place on the 11-square-kilometer (4.25-square-mile) area. Today, the unfinished Congress Hall building serves as a documentation center and a museum.
Image: picture-alliance/Daniel Karmann
German Resistance Memorial Center
The Bendlerblock building in Berlin was the headquarters of a military resistance group. On July 20, 1944, a group of Wehrmacht officers around Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg carried out an assassination attempt on Hitler that ultimately failed. The leaders of the conspiracy were summarily shot the same night in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock. Today, it's the German Resistance Memorial Center.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
Bergen-Belsen Memorial
The Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Lower Saxony was initially established as a prisoner of war camp before becoming a concentration camp. Prisoners too sick to work were brought here from other concentration camps, and many also died of disease. One of the 50,000 people killed here was Anne Frank, a Jewish girl who gained international fame after her diary was published posthumously.
Image: picture alliance/Klaus Nowottnick
Buchenwald Memorial
Located near the Thuringian town of Weimar, Buchenwald was one of the largest concentration camps in Germany. From 1937 to April 1945, the National Socialists deported about 270,000 people from all over Europe to the camp and murdered 64,000 of them before the camp was liberated by US soldiers in 1945. The site now serves as a memorial to the victims.
Image: Getty Images/J. Schlueter
Memorial to the Sinti and Roma Victims
Opposite the Reichstag parliament building in Berlin, a park inaugurated in 2012 serves as a memorial to the 500,000 Sinti and Roma people killed by the Nazi regime. Around a memorial pool, the poem "Auschwitz" by Roma poet Santino Spinelli is written in English, Germany and Romani. "Gaunt face, dead eyes, cold lips, quiet, a broken heart, out of breath, without words, no tears," it reads.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
'Stolpersteine' — stumbling blocks as memorials
In the 1990s, artist Gunter Demnig began the project to confront Germany's Nazi past. The brass-covered concrete cubes placed in front of the former homes of Nazi victims show their names, details about their deportation, and murder, if known. As of early 2022, some 100,000 "Stolpersteine" have been laid in over 25 countries across Europe. It's the world's largest decentralized Holocaust memorial.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
Brown House in Munich
Right next to the "Führerbau," where Adolf Hitler had his office in Munich, was the headquarters of the Nazi Party, called the Brown House. A white cube now occupies the place where it once stood. In it, the "Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism" opened on April 30, 2015, 70 years after the defeat of the Nazi regime.
