Six events with a Holocaust denier pulled after pressure from anti-racism group

Hope Not Hate celebrate after venue pulls series of talks with Nick Kollerstrom, who published the article 'The Auschwitz Gas Chamber Illusion'

An anti-racism organisation has celebrated the cancellation of a series of six events in London in which a Holocaust denier was due to speak.

HOPE not hate said the organising group behind the aborted series is called Keep Talking, which it describes as hosting “conspiracy theorists of all types, ranging from Holocaust deniers, climate change deniers and 9/11 truthers”.

Run by Ian Fantom, the group had been due to hear from Nick Kollerstrom, a disgraced astronomer who has said: “Let us hope the schoolchildren visitors are properly taught about the elegant swimming pool at Auschwitz, built by the inmates, who would sunbathe there on Saturday and Sunday afternoons while watching the water polo matches” and “let’s hope they are shown postcards written from Auschwitz, where the postman would collect the mail twice weekly”.

Kollerstrom has called the 9/11 attack in New York “a constructed, fabricated event” perpetrated by Western spy agencies acting according to the wishes of their “Zionist masters”.

He has published an article titled ‘The Auschwitz Gas Chamber Illusion,’ arguing that there was “never a centrally-coordinated Nazi programme of exterminating Jews in Germany. Lethal gas chambers did not function in German labour-camps, that’s just an illusion”.

The cancelling venue – Conway Hall – said it was unaware of the nature of the event and withdrew when HOPE not hate highlighted this.