There are many documents proving Nazi Germany had an extermination policy during WWII

Context

A video containing holocaust denial claims has been circulating on TikTok, reaching 15,000 views. The footage is an edited segment of an episode of The Montel Williams Show from 1992 discussing whether the Holocaust happened. In the video, available on several online platforms, Mark Weber claims that there was no official Nazi documentation on the extermination of Jews either before or during World War II. Instead, Mark Weber claims the "Final Solution" policy was about forced deportation and expulsion, not extermination.

In fact

The claim is false. The Holocaust has been dubbed "the most well-documented genocide in history" due to the large amount of documented evidence proving the systematic and bureaucratic efforts by Nazi Germany to implement the Holocaust. This was defined not by a single official document, as Weber wants to assert, but by many documents showing an extermination policy. Weber is attempting to claim that parts of the "Final Solution" are not parts of the Holocaust, which is false. 

In a 2000 trial in which David Irving sued Deborah E Lipstedt for libel after she called him a Holocaust denier, expert witness Professor Christopher Browning presented extensive documentation detailing how the Holocaust was enacted. Documents included the Wansee protocol and letter exchanges between Nazi officials and officers.   

During the trial, Browning stated, "No 'comprehensive draft' for a Final Solution is among the surviving German documents found after the war. But other documents have survived that indicate a series of changes in Nazi Jewish policy in the fall of 1941 that, taken together, constituted a program for the systematic mass murder of European Jewry." 

Logically Facts contacted Stéphane Bruchfeld, a historian at Uppsala University who has studied Holocaust denial. Bruchfelds told Logically Facts that no historian would question the fact that Nazi Germany pursued a systematic policy of extermination. He also told Logically Facts that the type of claims made by Weber are standard props for Holocaust denialists and have existed long before the 1992 talk show episode and will exist long after.

(Map of Jewish executions carried out by Einsatzgruppe A by late 1941. Number killings symbolized by coffins. Second figure shows estimates of remaining Jews. One of many documents proving systematic extermination policy and genocide by Nazi Germany. Source: Wikimedia & USHMM.) 

The Final Solution and Holocaust were not planned from conception but escalated over time. This was emphasized by Heinz Peter Longerich, who also appeared as an expert witness in the Irving vs Lipstedt case in 2000. He stated the escalation reached the full extent in July 1942 when regional extermination programs were turned into overarching programs of deportation and extermination across all areas controlled by Nazi Germany. He also states, "The systematic nature of the murder of the Jewish victims is not merely characteristic of this last phase, but also of phases I and II. This means that the mass murders followed a standardised pattern, were centrally directed and expressed the policy of the National Socialist regime."

The Holocaust was a state secret in Nazi Germany. Orders were given verbally, and detailed planning was avoided of killing operations. Euphemisms were also used frequently, with words such as "killing" being replaced with "special treatment" (Sonderbehandlung). During the war, the Nazis began digging up mass graves and cremate the bodies to destroy forensic evidence of mass murder, and towards the end of the war, large amounts of documentation and evidence was destroyed. Despite this, tens of thousands of German documents were presented at the Nuremberg Trial. It is estimated that 6 million Jews plus 11 million people from other groups died due to the Holocaust and Nazi persecution. 

Verdict

Considering the number of documents that prove genocide performed by Nazi Germany despite the widespread destruction of other evidence, we have marked this claim as false. 

This article was amended on 18 August 2023, to rectify that “officials attempted to document as little as possible”, as we stated originally, and to reflect that the Nazis destroyed large amounts of evidence over the course of the war and not only at the end.