AI Is Giving Holocaust Deniers Their Most Dangerous Tool Yet
- Gary Toyn
- Apr 13
- 7 min read
Today is Yom HaShoah. Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day.
Around the world, communities pause to remember six million Jewish lives extinguished by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. Candles are lit. Names are read aloud. Survivors, or the memory of survivors, are honored. But this year, on this day, I find myself thinking not only about what we remember, but about whether future generations will be able to trust what they are told to remember at all.
Let me begin with a man named Kazimierz Sakowicz.
Between 1941 and 1943, Sakowicz lived near the Ponary forest outside Vilnius, Lithuania, where Nazi Einsatzgruppen and Lithuanian collaborators executed more than 100,000 people, the vast majority of them Jews. From his attic, he could see the columns of men, women, and children marched into the trees, and he could hear them being sytematically shot. And so he did the only thing he could: he wrote it down. Every detail. Every date. Every transport. And because he understood that someone would eventually try to destroy the record, he buried his notes in glass bottles in the ground.
Sakowicz was killed in 1944. His bottles were recovered. His diary became one of the most important primary documents of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe, eventually published in English as The Ponary Diary. It is the foundation on which I built my novel, The Malice of Silence.
Sakowicz buried the truth because he knew it would be contested. He was right. And the contest is not over.
Denial Has Always Evolved
Holocaust denial has never been a single, static argument. It is a strategy that adapts to whatever tools the culture makes available. In the decades following the war, denial operated through forged documents and twisted statistics. Later it migrated to pseudo-academic journals and revisionist websites. Today, in Lithuania and across the Baltic states, one of the most sophisticated forms of denial does not deny the Holocaust at all.
It repositions it.
It's called the “double genocide” theory, and it's promoted by certain nationalist historians and enshrined in legislation in some Baltic countries, argues that Soviet crimes against Lithuanians and Nazi crimes against Jews are morally equivalent. But the equivalence collapses under the slightest examination, and that collapse is the point.
Soviet repression was brutal, systematic, and criminal. It targeted people perceived as political threats: intellectuals, landowners, clergy, independence activists, anyone the regime identified as a potential obstacle to control. It was the violence of an authoritarian state protecting its power. Victims could, in theory, have avoided death by posing no threat, by conforming, by disappearing into silence.
Nazi genocide operated on an entirely different logic. There was no behavior that could save you. There was no conformity available, no silence sufficient, no disappearance possible. Jews were not targeted because of what they did or believed or said. They were targeted because of what they were. Nazi ideology did not merely dehumanize Jews as enemies of the state. It defined them as a biological contamination, a racial poison, a category of human being whose total elimination was framed as a service to civilization. The murder of children was not incidental. It was the point. A child could not grow up to oppose the regime politically. A child could only grow up to be Jewish.
To equate these two systems of violence is not a historical argument.
It is a moral sleight of hand.
It takes the specific, race-based, ideologically total character of the Holocaust and dissolves it into a general category of wartime suffering in which Lithuanians and Jews become interchangeable victims of interchangeable regimes.
And once that equivalence is established, the role of Lithuanian collaborators at Ponary becomes, in this framework, merely one chapter in a story of mutual victimhood. But the historical record makes that framing very difficult to sustain.
When Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, Lithuanian nationalist fighters known as the LAF, the Lithuanian Activist Front, did not wait for Nazi administrators to arrive and issue orders.
Wearing white armbands to identify themselves, they began rounding up and killing Jews within days of the German invasion, in some cases before German forces had even established full administrative control over Lithuanian territory. These were not reluctant collaborators operating under duress. They were acting on their own initiative, animated by a nationalism that had identified Jews as enemies of the Lithuanian nation. Fewer than 1,000 German military personnel were present in Lithuania during the height of the killing — a fact Lithuanian nationalist historiography has worked for decades to obscure.
The machinery of killing at Ponary was not hidden from the surrounding population. Sakowicz documented that Jewish victims were forced to remove their clothing before they were shot. Those clothes were then sold to local civilians, who understood perfectly well where the items had come from and bought them anyway. The killing was not a secret kept by a narrow circle of perpetrators. It was an open fact around which an entire community organized its indifference.
Sakowicz documented all of it at Ponary in precise, dated, eyewitness detail: the transports, the shooters, the numbers. He recorded the willing participation of neighbors in the annihilation of an entire people.
Lithuanian nationalist historiography has worked for decades to rehabilitate the LAF and to absorb their actions into a narrative of national resistance against Soviet occupation. The double genocide framework serves that project directly. It does not deny that Jews died. It insists that everyone was a victim, that blame is too widely distributed to assign clearly, and that Lithuania itself was the primary sufferer of the era. Scholars have described it as Holocaust obfuscation, Holocaust trivialization, and as a false moral equivalence that hinges on the erasure of Lithuanian participation in the Holocaust. It is a form of denial as consequential as any outright lie.
This is denial with scholarly credentials. And it has been effective.
Now Comes the Technology
Dr. Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler, a Senior Fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute and one of Israel’s foremost experts on technology law and AI policy, writing today on Yom HaShoah, opens her essay with the story of her grandmother, a Holocaust survivor who died in 2021. She reflects on how AI now makes it possible to take an old photograph, generate a living video, reconstruct a voice, and fill in the gaps of a story that was never fully told. The temptation, she writes, is not to lie but to draw nearer, not to distort but to repair what is missing.
But she names the danger clearly. If a story can be filled in, it can also be rewritten. If AI can generate a survivor’s voice speaking truth, it can generate that same voice speaking something else entirely. And on social media, the fabricated version might travel further than the real one.
This is not a theoretical concern. In 2024, UNESCO published a report in partnership with the World Jewish Congress warning that AI could result in false and misleading claims about the Holocaust spreading online, either through flaws in AI systems trained on denial websites, or through deliberate use by hate groups generating fabricated testimonies and altered historical records. The Auschwitz museum has already sounded the alarm over Facebook pages using AI to generate fictional victim bios and photographs indistinguishable from authentic documentation.
And in early 2026, French prosecutors raided the offices of X after its AI chatbot Grok generated posts in French describing Auschwitz gas chambers in language drawn directly from Holocaust denial literature, before retracting under pressure.
This is the next evolution of denial. It does not require argument. It does not require scholarly apparatus. It requires only a sufficiently convincing generated image, video, or voice, and a platform willing to carry it.
The double genocide theorists spent decades constructing an alternative narrative through legitimate-looking historical methods. Generative AI makes that same narrative substitution available to anyone, at scale, in minutes, without a single footnote.
Sakowicz did not just record what happened. He recorded who did it, when, and how many. That specificity is what makes The Ponary Diary so irreplaceable and so threatening to those who wish the record were different. In the AI era, the answer to an inconvenient document is no longer to argue against it. The answer is to generate a competing one that looks just as real.
What This Means for Remembrance
Dr. Shwartz Altshuler writes that the fate of Holocaust memory is no longer decided in memorial halls or living rooms. It is decided in the headquarters of technology companies, in the design choices of platform builders, and in regulatory debates about what rights we have to factual security, cognitive security, and perceptual security. The right to a reality that cannot be edited.
She ends with this haunting phrase: instead of “Never forget,” we may be left with “Never know.”
I‘ve spent the last five years researching my latest novels about the Lithuanian Holocaust. I've traveled to Lithuania, sat with historical records, interviewed historians, and tried to carry Kazimierz Sakowicz’s testimony forward in a form that a new generation might receive. Every serious historian and author who works with Holocaust testimony is part of the same chain: document to scholarship to narrative to memory.
That chain is only as strong as our ability to distinguish a real link from a fabricated one.
Sakowicz buried his eye-witness account of the Ponary Massacre in bottles, so the truth would outlast the men who wanted to destroy it. The bottles survived.
On this Yom HaShoah, the question is whether we are building the digital equivalent of those bottles, or whether we are handing the shovels to the people who would bury them again.
Sources
Shwartz Altshuler, Tehilla. “The Coming Holocaust AI Reboot.” The Times of Israel Blogs, April 13, 2026. https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-coming-holocaust-ai-reboot/
“New UNESCO Report Warns Generative AI Threatens Holocaust Memory.” UNESCO, July 2024. https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/new-unesco-report-warns-generative-ai-threatens-holocaust-memory
“Auschwitz Museum Sounds Alar#86C6E5m over ‘Harmful’ AI Images of Holocaust Victims.” The Times of Israel, May 2025. https://www.timesofisrael.com/auschwitz-museum-sounds-alarm-over-harmful-ai-images-of-holocaust-victims/
“Double Genocide Theory.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_genocide_theory
Katz, Dovid. “The Double Genocide Theory.” Jewish Currents, September 2021. https://jewishcurrents.org/the-double-genocide-theory
“Paneriai.” Defending History. https://defendinghistory.com/tag/paneriai
Zuroff, Efraim. “The Lithuanians Still Deny Their Participation in the Holocaust.” Jewish News Syndicate, October 2022. https://www.jns.org/the-lithuanians-still-deny-their-participation-in-the-holocaust/
“Musk’s X and Grok AI Hit with Raids, Fines, and Multinational Investigations.” Scripps News, February 2026. https://www.scrippsnews.com/science-and-tech/social-media/musks-x-and-grok-ai-hit-with-raids-fines-and-multinational-investigations
Shwartz Altshuler, Tehilla. “Jews Are the Canary in the AI Coalmine.” The Times of Israel Blogs, April 2025. https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/jews-are-the-canary-in-the-ai-coalmine/
“Dr. Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler — Senior Fellow.” The Israel Democracy Institute. https://en.idi.org.il/experts/1363
Comments