Holocaust denial: Recognised and removed from Guardian

On 3^rd December, the Guardian letters page printed a letter by John Mortl that appeared to allude to Holocaust denial.

CST discussed the letter with the Holocaust Educational Trust, following which HET’s Paul Evans wrote an excellent analysis of it for CST’s blog. This showed that our initial suspicions were entirely correct.

CST forwarded Evans article to the Guardian, where senior staff then took immediate action to remove Mortl’s letter from the Guardian website.

It is of course regrettable that the letter was ever published, and whilst CST blog was not the only website to mount criticism of the Guardian, we are very happy to have worked with both HET and the newspaper to help achieve a quick and constructive outcome.

The Guardian’s website now carries this statement, in place of the offensive letter:

Editor's statement: We published a letter by John Mortl in the Guardian of Thursday 3 December and on this site relating to the case of John Demjanjuk, who is accused of assisting in the murder of 27,900 people in Poland. Unfortunately, we misread the letter. The underlying meaning, we now realise, implied Holocaust denial. As soon as we realised our mistake, we removed the letter from the site. It should never have been published and we apologise unreservedly that it was.