On J.K. Rowling’s ‘Holocaust Denial’

J.K. Rowling, the famous author of the Harry Potter series, has been accused of Holocaust denial.

I am confident that she is not a Holocaust denier in the sense most people would use the term. I am 99.99 percent sure that if someone asked her whether the Nazis killed roughly six million European Jews and millions of homosexuals, Roma (Gypsies), disabled people, prisoners of war, political dissidents, and others, she would affirm that they did.

No, the controversy arose when Rowling objected to a Tweet saying she upheld Nazi “ideology around gender” because they “burnt books on trans healthcare and research”. This refers to an incident early in the Nazis’ rule where they raided the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin and burned its library. There’s some dispute over whether their target was transgenderism; Magnus Hirschfeld, who ran the institute, was gay and Jewish, so therefore already a target of the Nazis. German courts have been ambivalent about the issue.

J.K. Rowling is not denying the Holocaust as it actually happened, but the Holocaust as used by today’s left. She’s contradicting one of their main projects, the effort to cast the main crime of the Nazis as opposition to transgenderism instead of the wars of conquest, the totalitarian governance, or the hatred of the Jews. (That last one is a particular problem, as it’s becoming a core principle of the far Left.) Redefining Nazis as anyone who doesn’t want to castrate his kids is much more useful. For them, Rowling denying this is a greater sin than actual Holocaust denial would be.