Professor Dismissed for Openness to Revisionism

Donald D. Hiner, an assistant professor of history at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis (IUPUI), was dismissed on March 1 for informing his students that here are two sides to the Holocaust story. Hiner, 51, had been suspended on February 14 after a student who had taped one of his lectures in a survey course on modern Western history went to the press and academic authorities at IUPUI with the terrible news that the instructor advocated a critical examination of various components of the the orthodox Holocaust story. Two weeks of press witch-hunting, and the intervention of professional thoughtpolice from the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, sealed Hiner's fate.

Hiner was exposing his students to standard revisionist arguments on the Holocaust as well as the more orthodox views. Hiner was accused of holding out the possibility that most concentration camp victims died of disease, and that the evidence adduced by proponents of the extermination theory was less than overwhelming.

Unfortunately for Professor Hiner, a doctoral candidate in European history at Indiana University who holds B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Iowa and has done two years post-graduate study at the University of Tuebingen in Germany, he was not tenured, and was thus an easy victim to the academic auto-da-fe staged by the press, the Wiesenthal Center, and IUPUI liberal arts dean John Barlow and history department chairman William Schneider.

After the tape was brought to Hiner's superiors, his lectures were subject to observation by the history department. Hiner was also advised to revise his course syllabus by decreasing coverage of World War II and its aftermath.

Wiesenthal Center director Gerald Margolis told the press that Hiner had “trivialized” the Holocaust, thereby committing “a sacrilege.” Hiner was first suspended and then fired for having presented material, “not relevant to the content of the course and which lacks scholarly substance.”

Adapted from IHR Newsletter #72, April 1990 – Institute for Historical Review, PO Box 2739, Newport Beach, CA 92659