“No subject enrages the Thought Police on campus more than Holocaust revisionism. Students are encouraged to debate every other great historical question as a matter of course, but influential pressure groups with private agendas have made the Jewish Holocaust story and exception. I believe students should be encouraged to investigate the Holocaust controversy the same way they are encouraged to investigate every other historical controversy. This isn't a radical point of view. The premises for it were worked out a while back during a little something called the Enlightenment.”
Bradley R. Smith, Break His Bones: The Private Life of a Holocaust Revisionist, p. 99
Starting in the late 1980's, Bradley Smith began a campaign to publish advertisements in college newspapers. The intention was to foster open debate on the Holocaust story throughout the country. What follows is a partial list of those advertisements, reactions to them by students, professors, pressure groups and the media, as well as additional information which has been collected over the years. A few of the ads offered financial compensation for promoting the controversy in a national forum. The terms of these ads have expired and are presented here for historical and research purposes only.
What became known as the “Campus Campaign” was discussed in some detail, albeit a very biased account, in a chapter entitled “The Battle for the Campus” in Deborah Lipstadt's highly subjective book Denying the Holocaust. While Smith argued directly for intellectual freedom and open debate on campus, Lipstadt, a professor, took the opposing view — that ideas, especially dissident ideas regarding the Holocaust story, were not worthy of discussion in America's colleges and universities.
By Stewart Ain ∙ April 14, 1994
STAFF WRITER A Holocaust denier who insists he is merely pursuing intellectual freedom found himself suddenly confronted by a Holocaust survivor in the audience of the Phil Donahue show last month. It happened as Bradley Smith was telling Donahue and his national television audience that it was a “lie that Germans cooked Jews to make…
By Bradley R. Smith, David Cole ∙ March 14, 1994
Your browser does not support the video tag. The Phil Donahue Show of March 14, 1994, featuring Bradley Smith, David Cole and Michael Shermer(with comments by Mike Smith aka DenierBud)
By Bradley R. Smith ∙ January 1, 1996
1991 The Holocaust Story: How Much is False: The Case for Open Debate. Northwestern University. 1991 – 1992 The Holocaust Controversy: The Case for Open Debate University of Michigan Duke University Cornell University Northern Illinois University (DeKalb) Rutgers University Ohio State University Vanderbilt University Community College of Philadelphia Washington University (St. Louis) Howard University (W.D.C.)…
By Mark Weber ∙ January 7, 1991
After years of stonewalling, both the New York Times (December 21, 1991) and the Washington Post (January 15, 1992) now editorially acknowledge that it is both ethical and permissible to debate the historical issues surrounding the Holocaust story. The nation's two premier newspapers thus reject statements by officials of major Jewish organizations and of many…
By Bradley R. Smith ∙ January 1, 1993
Let’s agree that one ideal of the university is to promote intellectual freedom, and one ideal of the professorial class is to teach students to honor it. Yet this is not true in Holocaust Studies. There, if students express doubt about “eyewitness” testimony, for example, even if it is demonstrably false, dishonorable or both, they…
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