Holocaust Denial Movement

Representatives of the Holocaust denial movement responded to the condemnatory Times’ editorial that they were shocked--shocked!--by the editorial tone; they claim that they were simply calling for “evenhandedness,” and an “open debate” with those whose “point of view” holds that the Nazis tried to exterminate European Jewry during World War II (letters, Jan. 3).

One of the best documented events in human history is hardly a “point of view”; and those who deny the Holocaust do so to advance their own agenda.

The Holocaust revisionist movement is composed almost wholly of anti-Semitic extremists who have mainstreamed their animus toward Jews and attempted to give it a veneer of academic respectability.

The letter writers represent the two premier organizations in the Holocaust denial industry. The Institute for Historical Review was spawned by the Liberty Lobby, the nation’s most prolific and best-financed anti-Semitic organization. The Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust was co-directed by former IHR operatives.

The movement employs pseudoscience, pseudo-history and plain old lies to mislead those who find the enormity of the Final Solution almost impossible to believe.

Jan. 20 marks the 50th anniversary of the Wannsee Conference, at which the foundations for the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews were laid. Today, within memory of the destruction, a small band of pseudo-scholars distort and deny the record. The Times was right to expose their malevolence.

SELENE BRUK

Chair, Holocaust Committee

Anti-Defamation League, Los Angeles