In Germany the Auschwitzlüge, or "Auschwitz-Lie" Law, makes it a crime to "defame the memory of the dead." This statute was the result of a judgment by the Federal German Supreme Court on September 18, 1979, when a student whose Jewish grandfather was killed in Auschwitz sued for an injunction against an individual who had posted signs on the fence of his house proclaiming that the Holocaust was a "Zionist swindle." The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the plaintiff:

"In calling the racist murders by the Nazis an invention, the statements complained of deny the Jews the inhuman fate which they have suffered on account of their origin.... This means an attack on the personality of the people who have been singled out by the anti-Jewish persecutions in the Third Reich.... Whoever tried to deny the truth of past events, denies to every Jew the respect to which he is entitled."

 Switzerland, Belgium, Israel, Italy, New Zealand, Sweden, and Australia have similar laws on the books. These laws are all ambiguous enough to allow courts to interpret various Holocaust deniers' activities as illegal. In December 1982, for example, Sweden arrested Dietlieb Culver Felderer, an associate of a leading Holocaust denier, Willis Carto, when Felderer accused Mel Mermelstein, a Holocaust survivor, of "peddling the extermination hoax." Specifically, Felderer was tried because, as the Swedish prosecutor explained, his "obscene propaganda against Jews abroad and in Sweden is so large that he must have huge financial backing." This was the first time such a prosecution had been undertaken in Sweden.

In conflict with more laws of this nature than probably any other historian today, and arguably the most widely known Holocaust denier, David Irving was told by Polish authorities in July 1998 that he would not be allowed to film a documentary at Auschwitz. "They have written refusing even to allow me—an historian of worldwide reputation—at the site," he wrote in an Internet posting. "It is an unprecedented ban." This kind of censure is nothing new to David Irving, who has been banned from numerous countries around the world. While he cannot be legally prohibited from speaking in America, he can be so loudly shouted down that he is, essentially, banned.