Listen here:
I wish I didn’t have to release this episode.
But Holocaust denial is no longer fringe. It’s moving through Discord servers, group chats, influential podcasts, and the pulpits of pastors who are supposed to know better.
The arguments are sophisticated, they’re organized, and they’re aimed at young Christian men.
I’ve seen it work. In 2022, I watched a good friend—a husband and a father—lose his mind on Instagram, ranting in his shed with dark circles under his eyes about Hitler and Jews and the Holocaust. He wasn’t the only one I watched go through that arc. To this day, I still get emails from fathers, pastors, mothers, wives, and friends about men they love being on this path today.
My guest, who goes by Hitler Hated Christ aka NOT_OUR_GUY has spent nearly a decade documenting where this material comes from, how it spreads, and why it’s false. He saw it earlier than most. This conversation is what he has to say.
About This Episode
We walk through Mein Kampf in Hitler’s own words. We walk through the Goebbels diaries. We walk through the Wannsee Conference, the Einsatzgruppen reports, and the photographs the killers took themselves.
We build an affirmative case for the historical reality of the Holocaust. Not to score points or to call everyone a Nazi. Our goal is to assemble the evidence into a picture so clear that the memes can’t survive contact with it.
The memes are everywhere now, too. You might have seen them. Your sons have almost definitely seen them.
“Hitler was a misunderstood Christian leader! The Holocaust was a Jewish exaggeration! Nazi Germany was the last truly Christian society, and has been slandered for eighty years!”
Hard as it may be to believe, men in positions of mainstream power and influence are saying exactly these things. And pastors like Joel Webbon, Brian Sauve, and Eric Conn are laundering this material into Reformed-adjacent spaces.
If you find that hard to believe too, just watch the video.
Why We're Vulnerable
Why is this material finding so much purchase right now? I have a theory.
For most of my adult life, the Holocaust has been discussed in the West through survivor stories. Elie Wiesel, Viktor Frankl, the Diary of Anne Frank, Schindler’s List, the Shoah Foundation’s testimony archive, etc.
This work has been essential, and I have no intention to criticize it. The survivors had to speak while they could, and the testimony tradition that grew up around them is a great moral achievement.
But there’s a key feature of the survivor story: it ends with the survivor surviving. We know going in that the person telling us made it out. The horror is real, but it’s softened by the fact that the person describing it lived to tell the tale.
That tale isn’t the whole picture. The whole picture is that the overwhelming majority of the people who entered the concentration camps never came out. And the documents Hitler Hated Christ walks through in this episode describe a project of extermination so total and so deliberate that no survivor story could fully convey it.
My theory is that, as chilling as they are, survivor stories are what we have because the perpetrator story is too frightening to examine.
That’s the gap the deniers walked into. They didn’t try to win the argument; they exploited an opening that a well-intentioned education system left for them. By mastering a handful of historical facts, the deniers have been able to cast doubt upon the entirety this event, aided by men’s minds that have been warped by too much screen time.
For example, most Christian men cannot tell you what the Wannsee Conference was, what the Einsatzgruppen did, what the Aktion Reinhardt camps were, or what Hitler wrote about Jews and poison gas in 1924.
Instead, they were taught about Anne Frank, which is great. But they also needed to be taught the “means, motive, and opportunity” reasoning necessary to convict the perpetrators of the greatest crime of the 20th century.
This is work my generation will have to do, which our parents and grandparents weren’t asked to do. We have to master the historical realities directly, in our own words, with our own sources, and be able to say what happened and how we know.
Defeating Holocaust Denialism - UPDATED
“Nothing is more estimable than knowledge, for knowledge is the light of the rational soul. The opposite, which is ignorance, is darkness. Just as the absence of light is darkness, so is the absence of knowledge a darkness of reason. Now, ignorance is proper to irrational beings, while knowledge is proper to those who are rational.”
As a Man, As a Father
I’m asking you to do this work as a man and as a father.
As a man, because the historical illiteracy in our circles is a real vulnerability, and the people exploiting it aren’t stopping. The arguments your son is encountering on his phone right now are sophisticated, organized, and aimed directly at him. The men he’s hearing from have read the documents and know how to lie about them effectively. You haven’t done the work to refute the lies, because you have an actual life outside the basement. But that asymmetry is going to cost us if we don’t fix it.
I’m also asking you to do this work as a father, because there’s a deeper reason to engage this material.
The men who built the camps were baptized. Many came out of nominally Christian homes a few generations removed from the Reformation, and they participated in industrial-scale evil while continuing to attend church on Sunday. The depravity that drove the Holocaust was the depravity of men who looked, on paper, very much like us.
A doctrine of total depravity that can’t account for that is too small. A faith that imagines this could not happen here, in our churches, with men reciting the same creeds we do, is not Christian faith.
I don’t want my son to inherit a faith that’s been softened to the point that it cannot see and criticize what is happening in our discourse, and that’s unwilling to recognize where our silence could lead. I doubt you want that for yours either.
Don’t Stop Here
This conversation is just one entry point of many into this conversation. In the show notes I’ve linked additional resources, including HHC’s three-hour Holocaust documentary, his one-hour response to Cory Mahler on Hitler’s theology, and several books and archives worth your time.
Please don’t stop here. The deniers haven’t, and won’t.
If this episode lands with you, the most useful thing you can do is share it where the men who need it actually are. The group chat. The Discord. The IRC. Or even the text message thread with the brother-in-law who’s gotten weird.
The algorithm won’t help us. We have to move this person-to-person, and man to man. That’s where the work happens.
WATCH ON YOUTUBE:
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SHOW NOTES
TIMESTAMPS
00:00 — Cold open
00:41 — Introduction
03:01 — When pastors laugh at the Holocaust
03:45 — Welcome and guest introduction
11:00 — “Hate is a virtue”: the Deus Vult hype video
18:00 — Watching it consume men in real time
19:00 — My doorway in: New Age conspiracy culture
24:00 — The enemy who won’t come to the table
27:15 — “At least we’re not speaking German”
29:30 — Means, motive, and opportunity
47:00 — Hitler’s pantheism and worship of nature
52:30 — Mein Kampf, 1924: poison gas in Hitler’s own words
1:11:40 — A 1927 Nazi cartoon, fifteen years before the camps
1:13:00 — Race-mixing as “sin” in Mein Kampf
1:18:30 — 1933: forced sterilization becomes law
1:43:00 — The Warsaw Ghetto and the Einsatzgruppen
1:45:00 — The “extermination ghetto” document
1:50:00 — The Wannsee Conference
1:53:30 — Goebbels’ diary: “60% will have to be liquidated”
2:03:00 — “Special action”: bathing installations and cremation ovens
2:12:00 — Why a deficient doctrine of evil makes this impossible to see
2:25:00 — Joel Webbon’s claim that Hitler “didn’t know”
2:31:00 — A Wehrmacht soldier’s letter
2:34:00 — Staying grounded doing this work
2:40:00 — Where to start
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
⭐️ Videos Mentioned In Monologue ⭐️
From Hitler Hated Christ
Substack: hitlerhatedchrist.com
YouTube: @NotOurGuy
X: @Not_Our_Guy
Primary sources
Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler. Read it cursorily and you miss it. Read it carefully and the entire denialist edifice collapses.
The Goebbels Diaries, particularly the entries discussing “liquidation” of European Jewry.
The Wannsee Protocol, the administrative document that organized the Final Solution.
Secondary sources
Nazi Ecology by Mark Musser, on the pantheistic and pagan roots of Nazi ideology, written from a Christian perspective. Watch my podcast with Dr. Musser here.
Black Sun by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, on the post-war esoteric Nazi underground that produced much of the denialist material now circulating. Watch my Book Club Series on YouTube here.
Holocaust Controversies blog at holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com, granular refutations of specific denialist claims.
“Denying History” on X (@denying_history), real-time documentation of the contemporary denialist movement.
If this episode is useful to you, please subscribe and share it. On X, on your own Substack, in the group chats. The men working to spread this material are well-organized and tireless. The men working to refute it have to be the same.
Thank you for being here.
