‘Anonymous Bulgaria’ site has posts denying Holocaust, claiming Jews carried out ‘genocide’ of 15M Germans
A post claiming – contrary to historical fact – that Jews carried out a “genocide of 15 million Germans” is among antisemitic items on the website Anonymous Bulgaria.
The text refers to the 1994/50 expulsion of ethnic Germans and German citizens from several Central and Eastern European countries which, with no proof whatsoever, it blames on Jews.
It describes the expulsions as a “crime so enormous, so cruel and so disgusting that nothing can clash it it throughout the whole of human history” – an assertion not impossible on a site that has posts dismissing the Holocaust as never having happened.
“This is the terrible truth of Jewish robberies, mass rapes, mass murders and enslavement of the German people in the last days and after the end of the Second World War, which continue to this day,” according to the post, which is accompanied by photographs, the captions to which allege – again falsely – that they are of Germans being expelled but have been used to depict scenes from the Holocaust.
A sample of other unquestionably antisemitic (and ahistorical) material on the site includes items titled “How did the Jewish bankers create and finance the Third Reich?” and “Six Million – Lost and Found”, as well as “How to falsify a Holocaust”. This sample of the posts stretches back from 2018 to 2015.
The site links to a Facebook page – one in particular, given that on Facebook, there are several pages in the name of Anonymous Bulgaria, or variations on that name – which contains posts with antisemitic material, attacks on US policy on Venezuela, conspiracy theories, attacks on Boiko Borissov and his government, as well as various reposts of material such as one “proving” that Jews recognise that Roma people originate from the 12 Tribes of Israel.
In the past week, the European Commission released a report on its latest exercise in checking compliance by major social networks in responding to complaints about offensive material, including hate speech against migrants, Muslims, Jews, LGBTI people and other groups.
The report showed that in the case of Bulgaria, 100 per cent of the posts referred by an NGO that acted as a monitoring partner in the country were removed. This led Bulgarian media to run misleading headlines that Bulgaria had 100 per cent compliance in social networks removing offensive material referred to them, although the exercise in fact only covered posts referred by a specific partner as part of the exercise.
In turn, while there is an EU-level agreement with social networks against hate speech and other offensive posts – and the EU report did find that the effectiveness of the co-operation was improving, action against individual sites containing hate speech is more difficult.