Eighty years after Murrow’s Buchenwald report, Holocaust misinformation grows

WEIMAR, GERMANY – When American journalist Edward R. Murrow reported from the liberated Buchenwald concentration camp 80 years ago today, he prayed the world would believe the horrors he had witnessed.

The world did.

Today, as misinformation and Holocaust denial spreads, the truth Murrow helped expose faces new challenges, with many people now questioning the very history documented by Murrow and many others.

“I see misinformation circulating on the internet every day,” said Hannah Lina Haas, a volunteer at Buchenwald Memorial. “Misinformation in the media unsettles people and contributes to the spread of conspiracy theories and extremist opinions. This can also be seen in the context of misinformation about National Socialism, the Holocaust and concentration camps.”

Journalists like Moritz Honert, an editor at the German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel, said managing the surge of misinformation that floods social media platforms every day is overwhelming, especially in comment threads. “If somebody posts something that is unlawful, we’re going to take it down, but usually our issue is that it keeps coming and we can’t control that,” Honert said.

More than 80 percent of German-language content about the Holocaust on the popular social media platform Telegram contains denial or distortion, according to a 2022 United Nations report. The report found such content on all social media platforms, often “camouflaged” to evade content moderators. 

A survey conducted by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) estimated 2.2 billion people – or 46% of the world’s population – hold deeply antisemitic views, a number which has doubled over the past decade, according to a recent ADL survey. Fewer than half those surveyed (48%) recognize the Holocaust’s historical accuracy.

Holger Obbarius, head of education at the Buchenwald Memorial, has spent a decade combating misinformation, primarily when people misuse the site for political or ideological purposes.

“The solution we found is to explain the historical narratives surrounding the concentration camp,” Obbarius said. “We look at what we can learn from the sources about the camp’s actual history and how that contradicts what was told later, especially during East German times.”

The power of visual evidence remains crucial in countering denial.

 “Many people say they don’t believe in something unless they’ve seen it with their own eyes, that’s why the photographs by people like Margaret Bourke-White or Lee Miller were so important,” Obbarius explained. “Their images appeared in Time, Life, and other major publications reaching millions of people and those pictures showed the world the true scale of the atrocities.”

The April 15 report by Murrow – then one of the world’s most famous journalists – raised the public conscience about Nazi war crimes. The late CBS News president Fred Friendly called Murrow “an American conscience” for his harrowing report about Buchenwald. 

The camp operated from 1937 until its liberation in 1945, and 56,000 people died there, according to the memorial. 

Today, the memorial grounds are home to a dedicated effort to ensure the truth of the past thrives, despite the ongoing challenges. Educators work to combat misinformation by informing visitors about the true history of the former concentration camp by correcting false narratives that were created by East Germany and now the right-wing political party, Alternative for Germany. 

In this era of heightened misinformation, the memorial highlights these past false narratives to ensure that the accurate history is preserved and to set the record straight. Obbarius and his team welcome more than a half million visitors annually, providing free admittance for people to view the former prison camp.

After World War II, East Germany shaped Buchenwald’s history. The government, under Soviet influence, emphasized the Soviet Union’s role in defeating the Nazis while downplaying that thousands of Germans were sent to Soviet internment camps. This selective narrative distorted how Buchenwald’s history was interpreted for decades, Obbarius said.

“[East Germans] tried to establish a narrative that contradicted historical events and our approach is to explain what can truly be presented about history while taking as many sources into account as possible,” Obbarius said. “We also highlight how East German authorities were either selectively ignorant or outright manipulative, sometimes even lying about certain things.” 

Julia Landau, a curator for a Soviet exhibit at Buchenwald, explained that East Germany’s distortion of Buchenwald’s history created opportunities for the people to weaponize misinformation for political gain.

In Germany’s recent election in February, the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) gained significant support, garnering 20 percent of the vote.

Founded as an anti-European Union party in 2013, AfD has evolved into an extremist, anti-immigrant group that the Anti-Defamation League says aims to undermine Germany’s democratic foundations. The party has shifted from outright Holocaust denial to a narrative that Germans should not be ashamed of their history.

“Right wings in Germany revitalized a narrative that was popular in the 1950s among the Germans and which was not against the Soviet occupation only, but also against American occupation and British occupation,” Landau said. “So, they’re telling the story as if the main war crimes were committed by the liberators.”

To address this, the memorial focuses on education of its history, offering visitors the chance to explore its museum exhibits and to walk its open grounds where historical buildings still stand. The memorial also hosts international educational programs featuring multi-day seminars, tours, and workshops.

Obbarius said he tries to find new, innovative ways to educate the visitors and student groups who visit Buchenwald from all over the world.

By confronting past false narratives and misinformation, Obbarius and others hope the memorial ensures future generations understand the real events that occurred and the importance of remembering them accurately.