- In early 2025, the U.S. Department of Defense removed at least three webpages related to the persecution and murder of Jews by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust
- In a March 20, 2025, statement, a Pentagon spokesperson said: "Every now and then, because of the realities of AI tools and other software, some important content was incorrectly pulled offline to be reviewed. We want to be very, very clear. History is not DEI. When content is mistakenly removed, or if it's maliciously removed, we continue to work quickly to restore it."
- As of March 21, at least one of the DOD pages about the Holocaust, a World War II cadet's interview about walking into concentration camps at the end of the war, was back online.
Two months into U.S. President Donald Trump's second mandate, a rumor began to circulate that in an effort to scrub any and all references to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), the Department of Defense had removed content about the Holocaust from its website.
For example, a post on X suggested that the removal of the pages on the Holocaust was "deliberate" and that the DOD had "erased history" (archived):
As of this writing, the post had garnered nearly 5,000 views and 120 likes. The claim spread on X, but also on Reddit, Instagram and Facebook. Further, several Snopes readers search the site for confirmation, or emailed us to inquire about the veracity of the rumor.
On March 19, 2025, CNN said it had obtained a database of 24,000 webpages flagged for removal, and added that several pages had already disappeared from all the DOD websites, including pages about the Holocaust. This report sparked claims that this had been done to "erase history."
Snopes was able to confirm that in that effort to scrub the site of DEI content, those responsible had removed pages related to the Holocaust. For this reason, we deemed the claim true.
However, the DOD recognized that some pages had been removed by mistake, adding that it would endeavor to restore them. "We are currently culling through and restoring the pages erroneously taken down," a spokesperson for the Pentagon said in an email, without providing details about which pages would be pulled back from the archive and which would not.
While Snopes could not review the database directly, a review of missing pages confirmed CNN's assertion that content about the genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany during World War II had been taken down from the U.S. Air Force website, which the DOD hosts. For example, as of this writing, one page on Holocaust Remembrance Week remained inaccessible, though it had been saved on the internet Archive. The link to another report from 2017 on Kitty Saks (archived), a Holocaust survivor, also led to a "page not found" error page.
However, a third article that had been reported as removed (preserved here) — a World War II cadet's interview about walking into concentration camps at the end of the war — — was restored.
Sean Parnell, a spokesman for the Pentagon, posted a video statement on March 20, 2025, saying that those responsible for scrubbing the site of DEI references had used a blunt artificial intelligence tool to achieve this. He acknowledged that some pages may have been removed by mistake or deliberately, and that pages related to historical events would be restored:
Every now and then, because of the realities of AI tools and other software, some important content was incorrectly pulled offline to be reviewed. We want to be very, very clear. History is not DEI. When content is mistakenly removed, or if it's maliciously removed, we continue to work quickly to restore it.
Snopes reported on other claims that the Trump administration had removed, then restored, other content from its websites.