Case Studies
- The #holocaustchallenge on TikTok
In 2020 teenagers pretended to be Holocaust victims, sharing clips of themselves with, for example, fake bruises, wearing clothes that Jews were ordered to wear by the Nazis. The teens pretended to be Holocaust victims in heaven and explained in the videos how they “died”, how they were killed in gas chambers. The videos were very popular, some with more than a hundred thousand likes.
Though it not be immediately clear what motivates such behavior and representations, this form of trivialization of history and it is deeply disrespectful. “For some young people, this could be a form of transgressive ‘humor’ that mocks the Holocaust to gain reposts or likes from other users. For others, however, it could be a way of processing their own responses to learning about such emotionally challenging events. For some, it might be a creative, aesthetic way to inform others of their own generation by using a new medium where the ethics of representation have still not been fully developed”*.
When the trend became apparent, TikTok blocked users’ ability to search for #holocaustchallenge and redirected any searches for this hashtag first to the Community Guidelines and later to a short guide on assessing challenges. Moreover, TikTok community members seeking Holocaust-related information are now be directed to the website AboutHolocaust.org, a comprehensive resource developed by the World Jewish Congress and UNESCO to provide basic information about the Holocaust.
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- Use of the yellow star for protests related to the COVID-19 pandemic
When several countries introduced restrictive measures to control the spread of COVID-19 during the pandemic as a way to incentivize vaccination and prevent future viral surges, protestors accused governments of creating new ‘classes’ of citizens, namely: the “vaccinated” and “unvaccinated”, and compared the measures with the segregationist and genocidal policies of the Nazi regime and their collaborators. Protestors in several countries created altered versions of the yellow star – which Jewish people throughout Europe were forced to wear by the Nazis and their collaborators – on which they added ‘No vaccine’ or ‘Unvaccinated’. Moreover, some protestors created signs that equated quarantine to concentration camps and compared themselves with well-known victims of the Holocaust, like Anne Frank.
“People compare contemporary events to the Holocaust to draw attention to their own cause, which has nothing do to with the history of the Holocaust,” says Dr. Juliane Wetzel13.
Such comparisons trivialize this history and insults the victims, as “vaccination requirements bear no resemblance to the experience and reality of persecuted Jews in Nazi Germany or during the Holocaust and reveal a deep lack of empathy towards victims of the Holocaust, or the incapacity to conceive of Jews as victims”.** Moreover, such manifestations make way for the expression of antisemitic stereotypes in the mainstream. They are more than inappropriate: they are harmful.
Yad Vashem issued a statement urging people not to draw such misguided and offensive parallels as they trivialize the horrific atrocities that were perpetrated and denigrate the memory of victims and survivors.
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- Mocking the Holocaust
‘Humour’ and mocking of the Holocaust are used to spread holocaust distortion on social media. The reasons that motivate people to propagate this form of Holocaust distortion can range from an attempt to gain acceptability and legitimacy among the wider public; to propagate racist, white supremacist ideology; to recruit and radicalize new members; and the use of shared, covert language and signals strengthen a sense of group identity****.
But such manifestations are not restricted to the online world. For example, in 2015, an art exhibition at Estonia’s Tartu Art Museum was dedicated to “remembering” the Holocaust in various ways, including “through the prism of humor”. The show was advertised with a poster resembling a photo taken after the liberation of Auschwitz, except that “Jewish prisoners” looked well-fed and dressed, and grinned menacingly at the camera. One film in the exhibition portrayed naked actors playing tag in what is supposed to represent a gas chamber. A painting depicted the icon sign on Hollywood hills replaced by the word Holocaust. A shameful parody of the fate of millions of Jews who were murdered in death camps, the exhibition played on conspiracy theories.
The show has sparked outrage in Estonia and beyond and the exhibition was eventually removed.
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- “The Holocaust on your plate”
In 2003, PETA – People for Ethical Treatment of Animals organized an exhibition called “The Holocaust on your plate” juxtaposing images of the Holocaust with images of factory farming such as images of children behind barbed wire with images of pigs behind bars; emaciated people with emaciated animals; people crammed into bunks, with chickens in a battery farm.
The intended aim of the exhibition was to raise awareness the inhumane treatment of animals in factory farming.
Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League and a Holocaust survivor, said that while the abuse of animals should be opposed, “the effort by PETA to compare the deliberate systematic murder of millions of Jews to the issue of animal rights is abhorrent”. Germany’s highest court banned the exhibition stating that it would have made “the fate of the victims of the Holocaust appear banal and trivial.”
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- Glorifying the Roma Genocide
In various countries, people praise the Nazis and their collaborators for their actions against the Roma, instigating and alluding to such actions in the present. Comments like “too bad [Hitler] did not clean them up”, “the Roma deserve to have been sent to concentration camps because they are thieves and lazy and because they do not pay their electricity and live on the back of the state” have been identified in different countries, in a study published in 2022.*****
Glorification of the Roma Genocide is sometimes disguised as humor. For example, comedian Jimmy Carr said on his Netflix show that “[w]hen people talk about the Holocaust, they talk about the tragedy of 6 million Jewish lives being lost to the Nazi war machine. But they never mention the thousands of Gypsies that were killed by the Nazis. (…) No one ever wants to talk about that, because no one ever wants to talk about the positives”. When asked if he regretted his joke, the comedian remained silent.
*History under attack: Holocaust denial and distortion on social media (2022), UN and UNESCO, p.39
**Protect the Facts Global Campaign: https://www.againstholocaustdistortion.org/news/debunking-inappropriate holocaust-comparisons-the-covid-19-yellow-star
***History under attack: Holocaust denial and distortion on social media (2022), UN and UNESCO, p.45
****History under attack: Holocaust denial and distortion on social media, published by the UN and UNESCO in 2022, p. 38
*****The Roma Holocaust/Roma Genocide in Southeastern Europe – Between Oblivion, Acknowledgment and Distortion, published by The Auschwitz Institute for the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities and the Roma Program at the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights, Harvard University: https://eriac.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/MATACH1.pdf