I am writing in response to an advertisement printed on the inside front cover of the Wednesday, Feb. 2 issue of The Daily Collegian. The ad was titled, "A Revisionist Challenge to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum." While reading the advertisement, I was not sure what made me more upset, the advertisement, or the fact the advertisement was run.

As I thought about it however I became less upset about the fact the advertisement was in the Collegian, because I remembered the Collegian is a business, and as a business its primary objective is to earn money. Personally, if I were an advertiser, and saw my advertisement in the same paper as the ad in question, I would discontinue my association with the paper as soon as possible. I wonder if this possible loss of income was considered when the ad was run?

It seemed to me even though on the surface the ad claims not to be questioning if the Holocaust ever happened, it is in fact the intent of the author to make people question the Holocaust. The fact the author puts the words "genocide" in quotations I think shows he is not only trying to make the reader question the use of poison gas in the Holocaust, but also the issue of whether genocide was committed at all during the Holocaust. I don't see why genocide would be in quotes unless the author somehow thought that it was the wrong word to use.

Let's pretend for a minute that gas was not used in the Holocaust to kill people -- then what about the hundreds of thousands of people who were shot to death. The author does not even discuss this. Certainly killing a specific people with guns is as much genocide as killing a specific people using poison gas. Therefore I don't think that the question of whether or not genocide occurred is truly valid. Now back to the posion gas. While the author may feel the Museum did not offer proof, I have no idea if this is true or not, I found plenty of evidence on my own.

To start with I found a picture of people in a van with a sealed rear compartment into which the exhaust was routed, thus the people in the sealed compartment would die of carbon monoxide poisoning. Also, in a series called The Holocaust, which contains documents, I found translations of Rudolf Hess's testimony at the Nuremberg Trials. In response to a question Hess answers, "I wanted to avoid, in any case, that the persons who came to Auschwitz should know ahead of time that they were going to be gassed."(The Holocaust, vol. 12, Garland Pub. 1982)

Unfortunately I do not have the time to locate and cite all the evidence that there is, showing the Holocaust did occur, it was genocide, and poison gas was in fact used to kill people. During the little research I did, I noticed there are hundreds of books in our library alone about the Holocaust. If nothing else the amount of information available seems to indicate that my preceding statements are true. For anyone who has any doubts about the Holocaust, I recommend that you don't listen to myself, or the author of the ad, but instead go to the library and find out for yourself.