The BNP and Holocaust denial

The BNP denies the Holocaust ever took place. It claims the "Holohoax", as the party refers to it, is a clever trip by Jewish people to gain sympathy and justify the State of Israel.

Under the current leader, Nick Griffin, the BNP has attempted to repackage its image and politics in order to remove the unpalatable label of 'Nazis' that inevitably follows it wherever it goes. The imagery of the Holocaust is seen by many to dampen any chance of success for far-right parties, showing, as it does, the horrific but logical culmination of their ideology in graphic terms. As such, the BNP has seen that questioning the past is the best tactic for advancement in the future.

In 1998, Griffin was tried and found guilty of distributing material likely to incite racial hatred. The incident related to his publication, The Rune, which, in the issue in question, denied that the Holocaust ever took place. At the time of the trial, Griffin wrote:

"I am well aware that the orthodox opinion is that 6 million Jews were gassed and cremated or turned into lampshades. Orthodox opinion also once held that the earth is flat... I have reached the conclusion that the 'extermination' tale is a mixture of Allied wartime propaganda, extremely profitable lie, and latter witch-hysteria." (Carlile Two Defence Fund Bulletin.)

Issue 11 of The Rune, the basis of the race hate trial, launched a vicious attack on David Irving, the leading British Holocaust denier, for daring to admit that some people might have died in the Holocaust. Griffin wrote, "True revisionists will not be fooled by this new twist to the sorry tale of the Hoax of the Twentieth Century.

"Back in the 1960s the Jews quietly shifted the alleged sites of the mass gassings from the no longer believable German camps such as Dachau and Belsen to the sites in Communist Poland such as Auschwitz and Treblinka. Now that the very idea of Zyklon-B extermination has been exposed as unscientific nonsense, they are once again re-writing bogus history, playing down gas chambers and talking instead of 'hundreds of hitherto unknown sites in the East where more than a million Jews were exterminated by shooting." (The Rune issue 11.)

Griffin received a two-year suspended jail sentence for his part in the distribution of The Rune, and for inciting racial hatred under the Public Order Act:

"Imagine you are a Jew. Not just any ordinary Stamford Hill diamond dealer or Crown Heights tailor, not even a Hollywood media mogul, but a staunchly Zionist member of the Defence Committee of the Board of Deputies of British Jews or a leading light in the even more powerful Anti-Defamation League... You and your colleagues know better than anyone else in the world how important the holocaust story is to your Cause - and salaries, not to mention keeping enormous subsidies from Germany and the USA flooding into Israel... As your Hollywood friend is fond of remarking, (provided he is safely in select company) 'there's no business like Shoah business'." (The Rune, issue 10.)

The very same issue of The Rune advertises revisionism on the Internet: "It's really very simple and kills ignorant faith in the Holocaust Hoax as effectively as Zyklon-B killed lice and bedbugs".

The notorious Holocaust denial pamphlet Did Six Million Really Die?, written by Griffin's colleague Richard Harwood, aka Richard Verrall, has won much praise from Griffin: "It was a shattering book, it was a superb booklet or magazine. I've done an update of that, which is not only all the material which has come out since, it also a much more modern style."

The star witness testifying at Harrow Crown Court on Griffin's behalf was Robert Faurisson, the French Holocaust denier.

The BNP was also responsible for distributing Holocaust News in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The headline on one edition proclaimed, "'Holocaust' Story an Evil Hoax". At the David Irving libel trial at the beginning of 2000, a number of BNP members attended regularly, voicing support for Irving and his beliefs with regard to the Holocaust.

In the 1990s the BNP hosted a number of revisionism seminars that were addressed by some of the world's most infamous Holocaust deniers. They included David Irving.