Institute Has No Credibility

Mark Weber, director of the Institute for Historical Review, asserts in his March 15 letter that Benjamin Hubbard has unfairly characterized the institute and its work in his column March 7.

He argues that Hubbard must be wrong or the institute would not have gained the support of university professors.

But who are those professors?

Arthur Butz teaches computer science and wrote a book called “The Hoax of the Twentieth Century,” which clearly denies that there was a Holocaust. No reputable historian accepts his arguments as having any merit.

Robert Faurisson, a professor of French literature, another “expert” whose work is rejected by professional historians, denied that gas chambers were used to kill people.

H.E. Barnes and David Irving, both historians, are less extreme in their arguments, but both wrote pieces exculpating Hitler.

Paul Rassinier, a former socialist and member of the resistance during World War II, was arrested and spent time in Buchenwald and Dora.

Supposedly writing as a witness to what went on in the camps, Rassinier refused to acknowledge that he was treated differently from other prisoners and never abandoned his vitriolic anti-Semitism, which predated the outbreak of World War II.

Accepting the arguments of individuals with little historical credibility, the IHR repeatedly refuses to acknowledge the countless works by professional historians which have demolished the arguments of its so-called experts.

Weber wants readers to believe that because the French magazine L’Express is prestigious that everything printed in it is the truth.

But in 1978, the magazine published an interview with one of France’s most notorious collaborators and anti-Semites, Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, a Nazi sympathizer and head of Vichy France’s Office for Jewish Affairs.

In that interview Darquier de Pellepoix claimed that “at Auschwitz only the lice were gassed.” In other interviews, he called the Holocaust “a Jewish invention.”

With all of these examples, it is difficult to accept the conclusion that the IHR has “steadfastly opposed bigotry of all kinds.”

NANCY FITCH

Professor of modern

European history

Cal State Fullerton