Founded in 1979 by Liberty Lobby leader Willis Carto, the Institute for Historical Review (IHR) has spearheaded the international movement to deny the reality of the Holocaust. Though it broke with Carto and the Liberty Lobby network in 1993, to its own financial detriment, IHR remains the world's single most important outlet for Holocaust-denial propaganda.

A contradiction lies at the core of IHR activities; though operating under a guise of scholarship and impartiality, and seeking to gain credibility within the academic community, IHR remains committed to an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory which accuses Jews of having fabricated tales of their own genocide to manipulate the non-Jewish world. In support of this belief, IHR distributes a variety of books and propaganda materials saturated with anti-Semitic innuendo. These include: The Zionist Factor, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, The Zionist Terror Network, Crying Wolf: A Study of Hate Crime Hoaxes, and Auschwitz: The End of a Legend.

Similarly, IHR professional staffers and Editorial Advisory Committee members, even those with academic degrees, have participated extensively in pro-Nazi and anti-Jewish activities.

One of IHR's early stalwarts urged supporters to "stand by the Third Reich" because, "if, in the end, the Holocaust did take place, then so much the better!"

For example, Mark Weber, who currently serves as director of the organization, was an activist in the neo-Nazi National Alliance during the 1970s, and an officer in the Cosmotheist Church, founded by National Alliance leader William Pierce, during the 1980s. Additionally, the late Revilo P. Oliver, a retired professor of Classics and an IHR editorial advisor, was a regular contributor to the neo-Nazi periodical, Liberty Bell. Robert Faurisson, an IHR editorial advisor who bills himself as a Professor of Literature at the University of Lyon-2 in France, was actually removed from his academic post as a result of his anti-Semitic activities, and has been convicted on three occasions of violating French hate-crime laws.

IHR conferences have been the scene of even less restrained appeals to bigotry. Attendees in recent years have included surviving representatives of the Nazi era, such as Florence Rest van Tonnigen, widow of the Dutch collaborator M.M. Rest van Tonnigen; Wolf Rudiger Hess, son of Rudolf Hess; and Major General Otto Ernst Remer, himself an officer under Hitler whose anti-Semitic activities resulted in his 1986 conviction under German hate-crime laws. Other attendees of these affairs have included Ernst Zündel, British Holocaust-denier David Irving, and German neo-Nazi Ewald Althans.

One typical example of the rhetoric encouraged by such gatherings occurred at the 1983 conference, one of the best-attended in the organization's history; concluding his address, Keith Thompson, one of IHR's early stalwarts, urged supporters to "stand by the Third Reich" because, "if, in the end, the Holocaust did take place, then so much the better!" Thunderous applause greeted these remarks. In keeping with its duplicitous efforts to conjure an innocuous impression before the outside world, this statement was deleted from recordings of the speech sold through the IHR catalog.

Next: Quotes from Deniers