When I learned that Holocaust deniers had infiltrated a New Hampshire legislative meeting and tried to insert their view into the state’s Holocaust education efforts, I was personally outraged.

My grandparents, my mother’s first husband and their 5-and-½-year-old son were murdered by Zyklon-B gas in a Birkenau gas chamber in August 1943 — dying cruelly in exactly the way that Germar Rudolf, who was invited by a state lawmaker to testify before a legislative committee, says no Jews were killed.

Rudolf is a prominent figure among Holocaust deniers. For more than 39 years, his “Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust” has sought to delegitimize and undermine the historical record of the mass murder of 6 million European Jews during World War II by promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories and characterizing the Holocaust as a myth.

Historian Deborah Lipstadt describes Rudolf as “a hardcore denialist. He says no gas chambers, no plan to kill the Jews. It’s all a myth.” In the course of a 2007 trial in Germany, in which he was convicted of inciting racial hatred, he dismissed the Holocaust as “a gigantic fraud.”

Holocaust denial is not merely the manifestation of an insidious and dangerous antisemitic conspiracy theory. It constitutes a moral clear and present danger motivated by a perverse determination to radically downplay if not expunge altogether the annihilation of 6 million Jews during World War II from the historical narrative.

The alarming reality, however, is that because Holocaust denial is generally considered to be less harmful than other variants of antisemitism, it is far too often allowed to fester and foment under a spurious guise of freedom of speech.

By failing to prevent Rudolf from testifying and not........

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