Dozens of Rialto eighth-graders questioned whether the Holocaust occurred in essays written for an in-class assignment this spring.

Rialto Unified School District administrators, besieged by criticism after the assignment became public in May, claimed at the time that none of the students who completed the assignment questioned or denied the Holocaust, but a survey of the students’ work by this news organization found numerous examples of students expressing doubt or flatly denying that the Holocaust occurred.

“I believe the event was fake, according to source 2 the event was exhaggerated,” one student wrote. (Students’ and teachers’ original spelling and grammar are retained throughout this story.) “I felt that was strong enogh evidence to persuade me the event was a hoax.”

In some cases, students earned high marks and praise for arguing the Holocaust never occurred, with teachers praising their well-reasoned arguments:

“you did well using the evidence to support your claim,” the above student’s teacher wrote on his assignment.

The student received a grade of 23 points out of 30, with points marked off for not addressing counterclaims, capitalization and punctuation errors.

Administrators have said the district’s roughly 2,000 eighth-grade students were assigned the essays in April as a critical thinking project. After the assignment became public, the district was roundly criticized by angry parents, Jewish advocacy groups and scholars and members of the state Legislature.

“Students got high praise and grades for writing that the Holocaust was a hoax. I’m sick about that, I’m sick about that,” said Rabbi Suzanne Singer of Temple Beth El in Riverside. “It’s worse than I thought it was.”

In May, Associate Superintendent for Educational Services Susan Levine said her office hadn’t found any student essays that denied the Holocaust: Director of Secondary Curriculum “Andres Luna hasn’t found any yet, but he still has hundreds to go,” she said on May 8.

On Friday, Rialto Unified’s attorney, William P. Curley III of the Los Angeles law firm Lozano Smith, said district officials have not done their own official accounting of how many students denied the Holocaust occurred.

“It hasn’t been tabulated that we know of,” he said.

The complete archive of the essays was provided to the Los Angeles News Group in the form of 45 PDF files, some of which contain hundreds of pages of student assignments. An examination of the essays by newsroom staff found that at least 50 essays denied or doubted the Holocaust occurred. Even many students who agreed the Holocaust occurred said there were good reasons to believe it had not or that elements of the historical record were actually hoaxes.

The argument-style writing assignment was developed by district English Language Arts teachers and was coordinated by staff at the district headquarters level. It was linked to students reading “The Diary of Anne Frank” this spring. After initially defending the assignment, district administrators later apologized and promised it would not be repeated. In response to the controversy, the district sent its eighth-graders to the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.

To write the in-class essay, students were given printouts from About.com, History.com and Holocaust denial site BibleBelievers.org.au.

The claims made in the Holocaust denial handout were not specifically addressed by the other materials provided, apparently leading some students to conclude “The Diary of Anne Frank” was a hoax and that there is no evidence any Jewish people were gassed to death in German concentration camps.

“According to Fred A. Leuchter (leading specialist on the design and fabrication of execution equipment) there is no significant cyanide traces in any of the alleged gas chambers,” one student wrote. “So any open minded person can easily be persuaded to believe that the gassings were a Hoax.”

All of the names of the minors whose essays were released this month were withheld to protect their privacy.

Students completed the assignment in class, with no access to a computer or the library to debunk the claims made by the site. Such debunking is easily achieved with Internet access:

According to the Anti-Defamation League, Leuchter, who has previously described himself as the chief engineer of a Boston firm specializing in gas chambers and executions, has no engineering degree. In 1991, Leuchter admitted he had misrepresented himself as an engineer: In documentarian Errol Morris’ 1999 film, “Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred. A. Leuchter, Jr.,” Leuchter says he has no formal training in toxicology, chemistry or biology.

Other students also believed Leuchter’s arguments: “if gassing would have occurred everyone (nearby) would have died, because the floors had cracks in the floor and holes in the wall.”

In fact, the concentration camps in Auschwitz and Majdanek had ventilation systems, according to blueprints of the buildings.

“I believe it’s a hoax because the government ran test and found nothing,” another essay reads in part, “ball point pens weren’t used when Anne Frank was alive, and it was impossible to kill so many people in that time period.”

According to the Anne Frank Museum, the “ballpoint myth” started with two pages of annotations made in 1960, in different handwriting than Frank’s.

Historians estimate 6 million Jews — about two of every three in Europe — were killed by the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945.

“What you’d want kids to do would be investigate these statements, especially with Google,” said Anthony Avina, an associate professor of education at Cal Poly Pomona. “Give them a chance to do some research; don’t just rely on the documents by themselves.”

District administrators have refused to identify the staffers responsible for crafting the assignment and have not been able to provide or point to any policies governing the development of lessons or curricula.

Curley said Friday that he was “unaware of any particular standards or protocols” for how Rialto Unified assignments are constructed.

He could not comment on what oversight was supposed to be exercised by district personnel and whether there had been or will be repercussions for those involved or those who were supposed to have been involved.

“The matter is being reviewed, and as it’s a personnel matter, plus it’s a matter in process, it would be premature and inappropriate to comment,” Curley said.

In addition to the Los Angeles News Group, the district released copies of the student essays to Sen. Marty Block, D-San Diego, the Museum of Tolerance and several private individuals.

Block, head of the state’s Jewish legislative caucus, called the assignment “disturbing” back in June. Last week, he applauded the release of the essays:

“I am glad to learn that the Rialto Unified School District is releasing the essays and cooperating with the public’s requests for information,” he said in a written statement. “Release of the information can only shed more light on the incident and assist in preventing a recurrence. Jewish Caucus staff will review the essays to assess the level of holocaust denial in the Rialto Unified School District.”

That openness is just what Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, called for back in June.

“Relatively speaking, a small number of students appeared to have drank the Kool-Aid,” he said Monday. “The rest of them appear to have sechel,” the Yiddish word for “common sense.”

But this past week’s release of the documents just raises more questions for Cooper.

“When you read the assignment, it’s so over the top as to raise the question as to whether anybody in this group had an ideological (intent),” he said. “There isn’t anyone who’s never made a mistake, but when you have people put in charge of kids, to teach them critical thinking, should they still be able to continue to do this as though nothing happened?”

Pasadena attorney Neal Fialkow, who also received a copy of the essays, is similarly concerned:

“When you took a look at the way the assignment is created and written, it causes all of these impressionable children to start their essays with ‘in my opinion, the Holocaust did exist,’” he said. “So it puts in the seed of doubt.”

In May, a report released by the Anti-Defamation League said that 54 percent of people worldwide have heard of the Holocaust, and 32 percent of them believe it’s a myth or greatly exaggerated.

“We’re all citizens of the world. At what point to do you say, ‘my god, where do we draw the line?’” Fialkow said. “I choose to draw the line here.”

Staff Writer Grace Wong contributed to this story.