David Baddiel says he fears for his life after taking on Holocaust deniers in a new BBC documentary.
The Jewish broadcaster meets fanatics who claim the atrocity is a hoax, as he looks at how their beliefs have evolved in the years since the end of the Second World War.
And he tells how their extremism can turn violent – and even murderous.
He said: “Someone was killed. A security guard at the Holocaust museum in Washington was killed by an 88-year-old man.
“The guard was trying to help him inside, but then the old man just shot him.
"He was a Holocaust denier. It’s so extraordinary. He was so furious that there was a museum to the Holocaust.”
Baddiel, 55, said he has consulted security experts before the show goes out later this month.
He said: “This programme will certainly lead to a lot of online abuse. One can only hope it won’t lead to anyone actually threatening me in real life. The programme is an exploratory essay about where we are – it doesn’t offer actual answers. I very much hope that no one kills me as a result of it.”
In the show, Baddiel – whose grandparents fled the Nazis in 1939 – travels to former Nazi death camps and to meet a survivor.
He also meets a Holocaust denier who lives in Ireland and has 7,000 online followers.
Baddiel said: “I was very angry at bits of that interview and very exhausted after talking to him for a long time, with him saying unbelievably offensive things. I was like: ‘What the f*** am I doing here?’.”
But he was driven to explore the issue because it is “a key battleground in the fight between truth and lies”, he said.
- Confronting Holocaust Denial With David Baddiel, BBC2, later this month
