_Chronicle of Higher Education_, January 8, 1998. P A6
HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION ISSUES STATEMENT DEPLORING EFFORTS TO DENY HOLOCAUST by Ellen K. Coughlin Chicago
The governing council of the American Historical Association, meeting at the group's annual conference here last week, unanimously approved a statement condemning recent claims that the Nazi extermination of Jews in WWII is a myth. "The AHA council strongly deplores the publicly reported attempts to deny the Holocaust," the statement said. "No serious historican questions that the Holocaust took place." Over the past year, efforts by neo-Nazis and others to deny the Holocaust--through such means as advertisements placed in student newspapers--alarmed scholars. Last fall, however, the 13-member AHA council declined to issue a statement explicitly asserting the truth of the Holocaust, largely because of the strong feeling of some of the that the association should not be in the business of certifying historical facts. Instead, the council called on historians to "encourage the study of the significance of the Holocaust."
Some 300 Signatures Collected
The councils latest action, taken on the closing day of the association's annual meeting, came in response to a groundswell of support among historians at the conference for a more forceful statement against the so-called "Holocaust revisionists." Approximately 300 signatures were collected on a petition, circulated informally at the conference, calling on the AHA council to take a public position against attempts to deny the fact of the Holocaust. "If we'd had the time and the personnel, I think we could have gotten 3,000 signatures." said John W. Chambers, associate professor of history at Rutgers University, who spearheaded the petition effort. Mr. Chambers said many who signed the petition were alarmed at the presence of people at the presence of people at the enterance of the convention hotel handing out pamphlets purporting to refute historical claims about the Nazi concentration camps. Others at the meeting expressed dismay at the AHA's council's earlier failure to take a stronger stand against the revisionist position.
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