and distorting the history of the Holocaust allows governments today to construct a new, positive and usable narrative.

People and institutions engaging in Holocaust distortion tend to spotlight the Jewish police or the role played by the Jewish councils ( Judenräte), inflating the scale of Jewish complicity. We will soon revisit this issue. Stressing the importance of the alleged Jewish collaboration with the communists is another technique often used by Holocaust distortionists. “The Jews had it coming,” they claim, discussing the wave of anti-­Jewish violence and pogroms in Eastern Europe, which started in the summer and autumn of 1941, after the German attack against the Soviet Union. This assertion not only relies on antisemitic stereotypes but also overlooks the reality that Jews were targeted irrespective of their political beliefs, and the perpetrators were drawn from diverse strata of society, including even those who earlier cooperated with the communists. Last, the negationists strive to elevate the wartime suffering of their own national group to the desired “Jewish” level, a phenomenon known as Holocaust envy. All of these symptoms of Holocaust distortion and denial will be at the heart of this essay.

The negationists strive to elevate the wartime suffering of their own national group to the desired “Jewish” level whitewash

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