Holocaust Denial in New Zealand

In almost every other Western democracy, ipso facto Holocaust denial is a crime, but not in New Zealand. There are two particular cases I want to discuss briefly and then speculate on why these matters reveal something very odd about the New Zealand collective psyche. The first case concerns the way in which a student is being protected by the institution and the real issues are misunderstood or repressed. The second case has to do with a professional historian whose master’s thesis argued that there were no gas chambers in Nazi-occupied lands and that less than a million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust. In each instance, the important point is not the denial itself but the failure of most New Zealanders, as individuals and as a collectivity, to comprehend the ethical, moral, and emotional implications involved.