Cincinnati, Ohio, Saturday, April 17, 2004
Professor addresses Holocaust
Says Nazi’s [sic] gassed victims with pellets
By Travis Gettys
Enquirer Contributor
CRESTVIEW HILLS – A conference held last year at a Northern Kentucky hotel featured T-shirts for sale reading, ‘No holes, No Holocaust,’ said a Canadian professor who helped defeat the event’s sponsor in British court.
 David Irving comments:
WE HAVE made clear in a letter to the newspaper that the academic who brought T-shirts with a slogan “No Holes, No Holocaust” to our 2002 function was told that he was contravening guidelines issued to delegates to our annual Real History Convention in Cincinnati, and he will not be welcome to attend in future.
We shall shortly begin posting details of this year’s event, the sixth annual Labor Day convention, at which I myself shall speak on the real history of the RAF air raid on Dresden in 1945.
Delegates registering before the end of April 2004 qualify for a 20% discount on the attendance fee.
Details | Ask for a leaflet |
The shirts refer to a theory that the Holocaust, responsible for the deaths of 6 million Jews, could not have happened because gas chambers were not outfitted with ventilation holes to deliver deadly cyanide gas.
 Robert Jan van Pelt, a professor of cultural history and architecture at University of Waterloo, Canada, said Friday that argument misses the point, because the gas used was in pellet form.
‘It’s not piped into the room, it’s thrown into a room,’ said van Pelt, who spoke to 100-150 people Friday at Thomas More College as part of Holocaust Awareness Weeks, an event sponsored by the Center for Holocaust & Humanity Education.
Van Pelt served as an expert witness in a libel trial brought by British historian David Irving, who has organized the ‘Real History’ conference at Cincinnati Airport Marriott in Hebron since 1999.
Irving sued American historian Deborah Lipstadt, whom [sic. who] he said damaged his reputation by labeling him a Holocaust denier. Under British law, Lipstadt had to prove that her accusations were accurate, and a judge agreed with her in a 2000 ruling.
‘(Irving says) it was more like a series of individual crimes instead of state-sponsored genocide, which makes quite a difference,’ van Pelt said.
The ‘Real History’ conference, which van Pelt said is one of only two such events held in North America, has featured a lecture on the origins of the African slave trade and a display of toy trains owned by Hermann Göring, head of the Nazis’ secret police.
Dr. Racelle Weiman, director of the Center for Holocaust & Humanity Education, said the location of the conference is troubling to her.
‘There must be enough supporters to welcome them,’ she said.
Weiman said Holocaust denial literature has flourished in the United States, which does not have laws against its publication, as most European nations and Canada do. ‘Holocaust denial is the newest form of anti-Semitism,’ she said.
Opponents have been reluctant to organize a protest for fear of giving the event publicity, but Weiman said she hopes area officials will urge the hotel to drop the event, scheduled this year for Sept. 3-6. A hotel spokesman did not return Enquirer phone calls.
‘This is not just idle intellectual discussion,’ Weiman said. ‘If you deny history and say it never happened, it makes it easier for it to happen again.’
Van Pelt speaks again today at 7:30 p.m. at Alter Hall, Xavier University, 3800 Victory Parkway, Cincinnati. In that lecture, he will examine the participation of architects, engineers and urban planners in the construction of the Nazi system of ghettos and death camps. 
Holocaust Awareness events
Today [Saturday, April 17, 2004] at 8:30 p.m. The Kentucky Symphony Orchestra pays homage to the souls and the survivors with the regional premiere of Symphony No. 3 by Gorecki, sung with prayers found written on a Nazi prison wall, and Survivor from Warsaw by Schoenberg. Tickets: $20-$23. Cathedral Basilica of the Assumption, 1140 Madison Ave., Covington.Sunday at 2 p.m. Community wide Public Commemoration and Observance: Yom Hashanah: Day of Holocaust Remembrance. Yawned Day School Gymnasium, 8401 Montgomery Rd., Cincinnati.
Monday at 11 a.m. Yom Hashanah Interfaith Memorial Service. Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion, Schemer Chapel, 3101 Clifton Ave., Cincinnati.
Friday at 7 p.m. ‘Manipulating History: Nazi Racist Propaganda Films’ by Prof. David Culbert. Lecture and Film Presentation at Otto Budig Theater, Northern Kentucky University, Highland Heights.
 Cincinnati Real History annual convention
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write to David Irving