Institute For Historical Review - Holocaust Denial

Holocaust Denial

Although the Institute for Historical Review comments on a variety of subjects, it is most noted (and criticized) for its Holocaust denial. Critics have accused the Institute of antisemitism and having links to neo-Nazi organizations, and assert that its primary focus is denying key facts of Nazism and the genocide of Jews and others.

The United Kingdom's Channel 4 describes the IHR as a "pseudo-academic body based in the United States which is dedicated to denying that the Holocaust happened," while the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette called the IHR a "blatantly anti-Semitic assortment of pseudo-scholars". The Daily Star, the leading English language paper in Lebanon, in response to a planned IHR meeting in the country called the IHR "loathsome pseudo-historians" and an "international hate group," and reported "as one former PLO official has put it, 'with friends like that, we don't need enemies'."

The IHR has insisted that they do not deny the Holocaust, claiming that, "The Institute does not 'deny the Holocaust.' Every responsible scholar of twentieth century history acknowledges the great catastrophe that befell European Jewry during World War II. All the same, the IHR has over the years published detailed books and numerous probing essays that call into question aspects of the orthodox Holocaust extermination story, and highlight specific Holocaust exaggerations and falsehoods." On the IHR website Barbara Kulaszka defends the distinction between denial and revisionism by arguing that considerable revisions have been made over the years by historians and concludes:

For purposes of their own, powerful special interest groups desperately seek to keep substantive discussion of the Holocaust story taboo. One of the ways they do this is by purposely mischaracterizing revisionist scholars as 'deniers.'

Commentators have argued, however, that the avowals by the IHR that they do not deny the Holocaust are misleading. Paul Rauber writes that:

The question appears to turn on IHR's Humpty-Dumpty word game with the word Holocaust. According to Mark Weber, associate editor of the IHR's Journal of Historical Review, "If by the 'Holocaust' you mean the political persecution of Jews, some scattered killings, if you mean a cruel thing that happened, no one denies that. But if one says that the 'Holocaust' means the systematic extermination of six to eight million Jews in concentration camps, that's what we think there's not evidence for." That is, IHR doesn't deny that the Holocaust happened; they just deny that the word 'Holocaust' means what people customarily use it for.

According to British historian of Germany Richard J. Evans:

Like many individual Holocaust deniers, the Institute as a body denied that it was involved in Holocaust denial. It called this a 'smear' which was 'completely at variance with the facts' because 'revisionist scholars' such as Faurisson, Butz 'and bestselling British historian David Irving acknowledge that hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed and otherwise perished during the Second World War as a direct and indirect result of the harsh anti-Jewish policies of Germany and its allies'. But the concession that a relatively small number of Jews were killed was routinely used by Holocaust deniers to distract attention from the far more important fact of their refusal to admit that the figure ran into the millions, and that a large proportion of these victims were systematically murdered by gassing as well as by shooting.