Auckland, April 15-16, 2000

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Varsity leader defends historian

PALMERSTON NORTH -- Massey University in Palmerston North has leapt to the defence of military historian Joel Hayward after he was accused of being a Holocaust apologist.

Pro vice chancellor Barrie Macdonald said yesterday that Dr Hayward was "no longer involved in teaching, writing or research related to the Holocaust" and was a respected member of Massey's aca-demic staff.

The New Zealand Jewish Council this week condemned Canterbury University for condoning publication of a master's thesis by Dr Hayward which questioned the extent of the Holocaust.

The New Zealand Jewish Chronicle reported that the thesis, written in 1991 and 1992, claimed there were no gas chambers, far fewer than six million Jews were slain, and that there was no means to carry out a plan of mass murder. It reported that other revisionist historians who question the Holocaust, such as David Irving; tried to use the thesis.

The Chronicle published a letter from Dr Hayward saying that he had made mistakes in the thesis and had withdrawn its main conclusions, The university had refused his request to withdraw it from its library.

Professor Macdonald said Dr Hayward completed his master's thesis, on the historiography of Holocaust revisionism at Canterbury in 1993.

"He subsequently chose to change his academic focus to military history, in which he completed a Ph.D."

Dr Hayward is programme coordinator of Massey's defence and strategic studies.--NZPA.

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See his book, Joel S. A. Hayward, Stopped at Stalingrad: The Luftwaffe and Hitler's, Defeat in the East, 1942-1943 (University Press of Kansas). For his views on David Irving see http://www.uwm.edu/~jpipes/wwwboard/wwwmess2.html

Our opinion

SO THE Holocaust liars and their protectors win another round, and in consequence of this article anti-Semitism racks up another notch among all free speech-loving men. Dr Hayward -- who adopted the Jewish faith, though he has never relied on this fact to protect him from criticism -- is one of the most original historians in the southern hemisphere. His Master's thesis on the revisionists was a landmark in the turning of the tide in the favour of historical revisionism. He has now been forced to recant in a manner eerily reminiscent of David Cole. Only last year he was inviting David Irving to appear at a September 1999 conference of historians in New Zealand along with Gerhard Weinberg and other world famous names. Shortly after that, the pressure on him seems to have started. He stammered apologies, and withdrew the invitation. After agreeing in principal to testify in the London trial of Professor Deborah Lipstadt, he finally refused that too as the pressures on him mounted. (Her financial backers paid her "witnesses" over $200,000 each to testify as they did). He began sending urgent messages to webmasters pleading with them to take off links to his master's thesis, with its controversial (but well argued) claims. He has regretfully declined an invitation to attend this year's major Cincinnati "Real History" convention.