World Parliaments Will Be Asked to Declare Denial of Holocaust a Crime

Britain and other West European countries will be urged to strengthen their legislation to combat the resurgence of neo-Nazism.

The Institute of Jewish Affairs, research arm of the World Jewish Congress, said this week that it would press parliaments to introduce special legal provisions against the denial and whitewashing of Nazi crimes, especially the murder of six million Jews.

Ivan Lawrence, a Jewish Conservative member of Parliament and a member of the Institute’s policy planning group, said denial of the Holocaust had recently become one of the main weapons of neo-Nazi propaganda.

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“The radical right wing elements, who threaten not just the ethnic minorities but the democratic order as a whole, realize that the strongest motive of resistance to them is the memory of the Nazi horrors and therefore these must be wiped off the state of history by distortion or falsification,” he said. Books and pamphlets attempting to “revise” recent history had appeared in growing numbers, according to Lawrence.

Dr. Stephen Roth, the institute’s director and author of a report “Making the Denial of the Holocaust a Crime in History,” said parliaments should follow the initiative taken by West Germany. The Bonn government had proposed making it a criminal offense to deny the facts of the crime of genocide. “Those who care for justice and the dignity of the victims and are concerned about the growing amount of neo-Nazi propoganda should certainly a## vocate such a measure,” Roth said.