[6] The IHR was founded in 1978 by David McCalden, also known as Lewis Brandon, a former member of the British National Front, and Willis Carto, the head of the now-defunct Liberty Lobby.

Austin App, a La Salle University professor credited with being the first major American Holocaust denier, inspired the creation of the IHR.

Based near Los Angeles in Torrance, California, the group pioneered organizing efforts among Holocaust deniers, who had heretofore labored mostly in isolation and obscurity.

The group's first "Revisionist Convention" in September 1979 featured speakers from the U.S., France, Germany, England and Sweden, many of whom subsequently contributed articles to the inaugural issue of IHR's Journal of Historical Review the following spring.

On October 9, 1981, both parties in the Mermelstein case filed motions for summary judgment in consideration of which Judge Thomas T. Johnson of the Superior Court of Los Angeles County took "judicial notice of the fact that Jews were gassed to death at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp in occupied Poland during the summer of 1944.

[14][15][16] In 2001, Eric Owens, a former employee, alleged that Mark Weber and Greg Raven from the IHR's staff had been planning to sell their mailing lists to either the Anti-Defamation League or the Church of Scientology.

All the same, the IHR has over the years published detailed books and numerous probing essays that call into question aspects of the orthodox, Holocaust-extermination story, and highlight specific Holocaust exaggerations and falsehoods.

[22]On the IHR website, Barbara Kulaszka defends the distinction between "denial" and "revisionism" by arguing that considerable revisions to history have been made over the years by historians and concludes: For purposes of their own, powerful, special-interest groups desperately seek to keep substantive discussion of the Holocaust story taboo.

It called this a 'smear' which was 'completely at variance with the facts' because 'revisionist scholars' such as Faurisson, Butz 'and bestselling British historian David Irving acknowledge that hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed and otherwise perished during the Second World War as a direct and indirect result of the harsh anti-Jewish policies of Germany and its allies'.

But the concession that a relatively small number of Jews were killed [has been] routinely used by Holocaust deniers to distract attention from the far more important fact of their refusal to admit that the figure ran into the millions, and that a large proportion of these victims were systematically murdered by gassing as well as by shooting.

[28] Issa Nakhleh, an attorney who has served as U.N. Observer of the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine, who already in 1972 openly denied the Holocaust,[30][31] and, "who, during the 1960s and early 1970s, was associated with Gerald L.K.

[35] In an article published in Hit List magazine in 2002, author Kevin Coogan claimed there had been attempts to forge ties between American and European Holocaust-denial groups such as the IHR and "radical Middle Eastern extremists."

According to Coogan, Ahmed Rami, a former Moroccan military officer "founded Radio Islam to disseminate antisemitic, Holocaust denying, and often pro-Nazi propaganda," and tried to organize, with the IHR, a conference in a Hezbollah-controlled section of Beirut, Lebanon.

[2] The Daily Star, the leading English-language paper in Lebanon, in response to a planned IHR meeting in the country, called its members "loathsome pseudo-historians" and the institute itself an "international hate group."

[40] The IHR published the Journal of Historical Review, which its critics – including the Anti-Defamation League, the Danish Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and other scholars, such as Robert Hanyok, a National Security Agency historian[41] – accused of being pseudo-scientific.

[43] Jonathan Petropoulos wrote on The History Teacher that the "[journal] is shockingly racist and antisemitic: articles on 'America's Failed Racial Policy' and anti-Israel pieces accompany those about gas chambers...