ADL Says Two Scholarly Groups Mistakenly Allowed Use of Their Mailing Lists by Organization Claiming

The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith today disclosed that two scholarly associations of historians mistakenly allowed use of their entire mailing lists to promote the propaganda theme that the Holocaust against European Jews never occurred.

According to Justin Finger, director of ADL’s Civil Rights Division, the lists of the American Historical Association (AHA) and Central European History, an Emory University journal, were used by the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), an organization founded by Willis Carto, “a notorious anti-Semite.”

Finger said that the IHR acquired the two mailing lists as part of its ongoing attempt to deceive reputable scholars into supporting so-called revisionist Holocaust theories.

He noted that the IHR will hold a conference in Los Angeles September 3-5 where it will be addressed by the British historian David Irving whose attempts to absolve Hitler of responsibility for “the Final Solution of the Jewish problem ” have been discredited by respectable historians. Irving recently authenticated the so-called Hitler “diaries” before they were proved fraudulent.

According to Finger, Philip Curtin, AHA president, informed ADL that permission for the use of its mailing list had been granted as the result of a clerical error mistaking IHR for one of his organization’s affiliates. Had that not happened, he wrote the ADL, “I can assure you that we never would have given such permission, and that we will certainly not do so again.”

In a similar vein, Douglas Unfug, editor of Central European History, told ADL that: “We, of course, in no way associate ourselves with the view of the IHR, and would not knowingly have permitted it to use our list.”

Finger said that ever since IHR was founded in 1979, by Carto, the key figure in the far right, Washingtonbased Liberty Lobby, “the country’s largest and best financed anti-Semitic group,” the IHR has conducted a relentless propaganda campaign to cast doubt upon the Holocaust.

Also scheduled to speak at the Los Angeles Conference, Finger said, are: Dr. Robert Faurisson, a French revisionist author who, despite the evidence to the contrary, “claims” that there were no gas chambers in wartime Europe and that the “Diary of Anne Frank” is a hoax; Dr. Wilhelm Staeglish, a retired West German judge who has written a book claiming that the cruelties at Auschwitz were a myth; and Dr. James Martin, a long-time Liberty Lobby activist and contributor to its publications, who is called “the dean of modem Revisionism.”