Reviewing the Historical Facts of WWII: Harvard School Newspaper Makes a Major Mistake

The Harvard student newspaper ran an advertisement in September 2009 that denied the Jewish holocaust of World War II. The printing of such blatantly inaccurate information on a major event is a tremendous blight on what was once a reputable university.

There are 2500 books at the Library of Congress that comprise a body of writings categorized under "Holocaust Denial". Essentially, this body of literature denies the generally accepted facts about the Holocaust that occurred during the World War II era in Europe. This literature is thinly veiled propaganda from the neo-Nazis and their sympathizers.

It is critical to maintain the accuracy of the historical record. Countless volumes have documented the truth: Some six millions Jews were murdered in Nazi camps. A total of about twelve million people, including political enemies of the Nazis, Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, disabled persons, and Jews were killed. The interested reader can visit any public or university library as well as the Library of Congress and confirm these facts, or simply search online for a reputable historical source. Numerous historians have correctly documented the Nazi atrocities, including Winston Churchill, who won a Nobel Prize for his efforts as a writer and historian.

General Ike Eisenhower, shown in a famous photo, visited a German concentration camp and documented the atrocities. In a letter to General George C. Marshall he wrote, "The things I saw beggar description. While I was touring the camp I encountered three men who had been inmates and by one ruse or another had made their escape. I interviewed them through an interpreter. The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they [there] were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to 'propaganda'." (April 15, 1945)

The old Santayana adage is that those who don't understand history are doomed to repeat it. The holocaust has been thoroughly documented with millions of books, films, pictures and eyewitness accounts.

In recent years, Harvard has given the world a succession of leaders who have been heavily criticized: Alberto Gonzalez, William Rhenquist, Barack Obama and George W. Bush. By contrast, Dwight Eisenhower was educated at West Point and was recognized as a war hero and an accurate historian.

The editor of the student newspaper claimed that the publication of the advertisement was a "logistical" error.