An historical journal has been launched in California aimed at denying that the Holocaust took place, according to the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies at Yeshiva University of Los Angeles.
Efraim Zuroff, director of the Wiesenthal Center, said that the Journal of Historical Review is being published by the Institute for Historical Review in Torrance, California. The Institute’s “self-proclaimed goal is ‘to bring history into accord with the facts,’ but whose objective in reality is to deny the Holocaust and vilify the Jewish people,” Zuroff said.
“The Institute, for example, published the infamous book, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, by Arthur Butz, which seeks to prove that there were no mass murders in the gas chambers, ‘only’ a million Jews died during the war and that no plan existed for the ‘Final Solution’.”
Zuroff sent a letter to Stephen Horn, president of California State University, Long Beach, asking that Dr. Reinhard Buchner be dismissed or “censured by the academic authorities” for being listed on the editorial advisory board of the first issue of the Journal.
Zuroff’s letter, copies of which were sent to Gov. Edmund Brown and the California Board of Regents, declared: “The thought that a man who would support such ideas is allowed access to hundreds of students yearly and that he has invoked his academic credentials to lend credence to this hateful ideology is extremely distressing.”
SELLING BIASED HISTORY BOOKS
The Journal lists for sale by the Institute many books denying the Holocaust as well as the accepted analyses of World War II. In addition to Butz’s book, some others offered for sale are:
Debunking the Genocide Myth, by Paul Rassinier, which is described as “A French Socialist who was interned at Buchenwald tells of his fruitless search for concrete evidence of the ‘Holocaust'”; The Myth of the Six Million, by Anonymous, described as “the first-ever English language book to dispute the ‘Holocaust'”; and Hitler’s War, by David Irving, the book which claims that there was no evidence that Hitler ordered the extermination of the Jews.
Other members of the editorial advisory committee are: Dr. Austin App, who is retired from La Salle College, Philadelphia; Butz, who is a professor at Northwestern University, Evanston, ill.; James Egolf, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, and Dr. James Martin, of the Institute.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
