SOURCE: "The Battle for the Campus," in Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, The Free Press, 1993, pp. 183-208.

In the following essay, Lipstadt investigates the controversy over the appearance of a Holocaust denial advertisement in various college newspapers in the United States.

In the early 1990s American college campuses became loci of intensive activity by a small group of Holocaust deniers. Relying on creative tactics and assisted by a fuzzy kind of reasoning often evident in academic circles, the deniers achieved millions of dollars of free publicity and significantly furthered their cause. Their strategy was profoundly simple. Bradley Smith, a Californian who has been involved in a variety of Holocaust denial activities since the early 1980s, attempted to place a full-page ad claiming that the Holocaust was a hoax in college newspapers throughout the United States. The ad was published by papers at some...