Yad Vashem chairman says Tucker Carlson and guest Darryl Cooper engaged in 'Holocaust denial' in recent interview

In an interview with Tucker Carlson, podcaster Darryl Cooper said the Nazi party invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 with “no plan” for dealing with the millions of civilians that they subsequently put in concentration camps, thus indicating that the mass murder of Jews and others was not their initial intention.

In response, the chairman of Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, Dani Dayan condemned Cooper and Carlson for “engaging in one of the most repugnant forms of Holocaust denial of recent years.”

During the interview, Cooper told Carlson that just as this purported poor planning in 1941 led to the deaths of millions of civilians at the hands of the Nazis, Israel’s poor planning in the war against Hamas is similarly contributing to mass civilian casualties.

Cooper, also known as Martyr Made, was praised by Carlson at the beginning of the podcast as “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.”

Boasting a substantial online audience, Cooper covers various historical subjects on his podcast and the Substack app, in addition to co-hosting "The Unraveling" podcast with retired U.S. Navy Seal "Jocko" Willink.

While the Carlson interview covered various historical events, World War II was discussed at length, and it was in this segment that Cooper made his controversial remarks.

“Germany, look, they put themselves into a position…” Cooper told Carlson. “Adolph Hitler was chiefly responsible for this, but his whole regime is responsible for it, that when they went into the east in 1941, they launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners, and so forth, that they were going to have to handle. They went in with no plan for that.”

Cooper went on to say that “they just threw these people into camps, and millions of people ended up dead there.”

Referencing letters from Nazi officials in charge of the concentration camps, Cooper argued that the mass extermination which took place was not the Nazis’ original intention.

“You know, you have…letters, as early as July, August 1941, from commandants of these makeshift camps that they’re setting up for these millions of people who are surrendering…so it’s two months after – a month or two after – Barbarossa was launched, and they’re writing back to the high command in Berlin, saying ‘We can’t feed these people. We don’t have the food to feed these people.’ And one of them actually says, ‘Rather than wait for them all to slowly starve this winter, wouldn’t it be more humane to just finish them off quickly now?’”

Yad Vashem issued a public statement denouncing Cooper’s comments, arguing they “grossly misrepresent the German Nazi regime’s actions during Operation Barbarossa in 1941.”

“Cooper claimed that the Nazis were ‘unprepared’ to handle millions of prisoners of war and political dissidents, suggesting their brutality was a result of poor planning,” Yad Vashem said. “This statement is patently false. The German invasion of the Soviet Union was long-planned and included genocidal strategies of dealing with the local Jewish population not as a response to logistical challenges, but as an ideological one.”

“Tucker Carlson and his guest Darryl Cooper engaged in one of the most repugnant forms of Holocaust denial of recent years,” Dayan said. “These far-fetched conspiracy theories are not only dangerous and malevolent, they are antisemitic.”

During the interview, Cooper stated: “My view on this—you know, I argue with my Zionist interlocutors about this all the time with regard to the current war in Gaza,” he said. “Look man, like maybe you, as the Germans, you felt like you had to invade to the east…whatever it was, like maybe you thought that you had to do that, but at the end of the day you launched that war, with no plan to care for the millions and millions of civilians and prisoners of war that were going to come under your control, and millions of people died because of that, right?”

He also said even though it might be “a bit hyperbolic,” he once told his podcast co-host Willink that “Churchill was the chief villain of the Second World War.”

While acknowledging that Winston Churchill “didn’t kill the most people,” and “didn’t commit the most atrocities,” he claimed that Churchill “was primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did, becoming something other than an invasion of Poland.”

Responding to the public backlash against his various comments, Cooper said in a post on 𝕏 that “my intention here is not to defend the actions of the Third Reich or any of its leaders, but only to support a narrow claim: that of all the belligerent leaders, Churchill was the one most intent on prolonging and escalating the conflict into a world war of annihilation.”

He also said that “the atrocities that took place in the east – for which the German perpetrators are responsible, make no mistake – could not have happened except in the chaos of a world war in which millions were already being killed.”

Cooper’s past “provocative” comments on Hitler

Besides his comments during the interview with Carlson, Cooper has posted what he has called “provocative” comments and jokes on 𝕏, some in reference to Hitler, the Independent reported.

Two days after the attempted assassination of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, Cooper posted the following: “If you’re having a bad day, just remember that the Trump shooter is currently wandering around Hell looking for Hitler while the two guys Kyle Rittenhouse dropped figure out how to break the news to him.”

Furthermore, in an 𝕏 post that he later deleted, Cooper posted a picture of Hitler in Nazi-occupied Paris on the left, and a photo of the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics' opening ceremony, in which the Last Supper was mocked and imitated by drag queens, on the right. The caption read: “This may be putting it too crudely for some but the picture on the left was infinitely preferable in virtually every way than the one on the right.”

In an apparent reference to the deleted post, Cooper posted: “I like posting provocative s***, seeing how close I can step up to various lines with[out] going over them. But there are a few people who, even though they often disagree w/me, try to give me the benefit of the doubt, and when they tell me I’ve crossed over, I check myself. Simple.”

The Nazi letter Cooper referenced

In its public statement on Cooper’s comments, Yad Vashem noted that Cooper was referencing a letter sent by SS Officer Rolf-Heinz Höppner to Adolph Eichmann on July 16, 1941, nearly a month after the invasion began.

Yad Vashem stated that Cooper mischaracterized the letter, and that “misrepresenting this as anything but intentional mass murder distorts history and downplays the Nazis responsibility for the Holocaust and for their other crimes.”

The letter summarized the conclusions of meetings by local Nazi officials concerning concentration camps in Nazi-occupied Poland. Höppner prefaced the letter by writing that the plans “sound fantastic, but in my opinion, they are entirely feasible.”

“All Jews of the Warthegau will be taken to a camp for 300,000 Jews,” the letter stated, adding that “able-bodied Jews can be assembled into work units as needed and pulled out of the camp.”

It goes on to say there will likely not be enough food to sustain the camp’s population, and suggests that those unable to work should be killed.

“There is a danger this winter that the Jews may not all be able to be fed. It is seriously worth considering whether the most humane solution is not to eliminate the Jews, as far as they are not capable of working, by some quick-acting agent. In any case, this would be more pleasant than letting them starve.”

The letter also states that “the proposal was made to sterilize all Jewish women in this camp who are still expecting children, so that with this generation, the Jewish problem is indeed completely solved.”

An article on Yad Vashem’s website noted that “there is no document in our possession that indicates specifically by whom, at what time, and in what way it was decided to embark on the total extermination of the Jews,” but that “immediately following the [June 22nd, 1941] invasion, the mass murder of men, women and children began.”

It further explained that “On July 31, 1941, shortly after the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Nazi Reichsmarschall Herman Göring ordered Reinhard Heydrich, head of the RSHA, ‘to make all the necessary preparations… for the Final Solution of the Jewish problem in the German sphere of influence in Europe.’”

The article concluded by noting it was at the Wannsee Conference on Jan. 20, 1942, that “the Reich Security Main Office coordinated the extermination plans vis-à-vis the relevant ministries and authorities.”