California public transit company, Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), has decided to allow advertisements from a group that promotes Holocaust denial and anti-Semitic rhetoric.

The Institute for Historical Review (IHR), an independent publisher, features various conspiracies aimed at denying historical facts on the genocide of 6m Jewish people.

BART has decided to allow advertisements from IHR, citing the group’s compliance with free speech laws.

Anna Duckworth, a spokeswoman for the transit company, released the following statement to The Independent: “BART does not endorse the ads placed in our system by the Institute for Historical Review. As a government transit agency, we are bound by law to carry the ads as written since they comply with free speech laws that allow advertisers to express a point of view without regard to the viewpoint. Past court rulings reinforce the fact that we cannot deny the ads.”

IHR’s website features titles to posts and videos, such as: “What Did Israel Know in Advance of the 9/11 Attacks” and “The Faking of Adolf Hitler for History.”

The website frequently promotes the work of David Irving, a well-known Holocaust denier who had served time in prison in Austria for speeches denying the Holocaust.

Mark Weber, IHR’s director, told the Guardian that he personally accepts “millions of Jews were killed during the second world war” but that whether the number is “10m or 6m or 2m is an argument among historians”.

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He also claimed that IHR is not a denial group but that his website has “published articles and items that reasonably could be called Holocaust denial”.

Remembering the Holocaust Show all 16 1 /16 Remembering the Holocaust Remembering the Holocaust 80,000 shoes line a display case in Auschwitz I. The shoes of those who had been sent to their deaths were transported back to Germany for use of the Third Reich Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Barracks for prisoners in the vast Auschwitz II (Birkenau) camp. Here slept as many as four per bunk, translating to around one thousand people per barracks. The barracks were never heated in winter, so the living space of inmates would have been the same temperature as outside. Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Sign for the Auschwitz Museum on the snowy streets of Oswiecim, Poland Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The Gateway to hell: The Nazi proclamation that work will set you free, displayed on the entrance gate of Auschwitz I Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A disused watchtower, surveying a stark tree-lined street through Auschwitz I concentration camp Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Stolen property of the Jews: Numerous spectacles, removed from the possession of their owners when they were selected to die in the gas chambers of Auschwitz Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A sign bearing a skull and crossbones barks an order to a person to stop beside the once-electrified fences which reinforced the Auschwitz I camp Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The peace and the evil: Flower tributes line a section of wall which was used for individual and group executions Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Life behind bars: Nazi traps set to hold the Third Reich’s ‘enemies’. In Auschwitz’s years of operation, there were around three hundred successful escapes. A common punishment for an escape attempt was death by starvation Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Burying the evidence: Remains of one of the several Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The three-way railway track at the entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. This was the first sight the new camp arrivals saw upon completion of their journey. Just beside the tracks, husbands and wives, sons and daughters and brothers and sisters were torn from each other. Most never saw their relatives again Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A group of visitors move through the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. Viewed from the main entrance watchtower of Auschwitz-Birkenau Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust "The Final Solution": The scale of the extermination efforts of the Nazis at Auschwitz-Birkenau can be seen by comparing the scale of the two figures at the far left of the image to the size of the figure to the left of the railway tracks' three point split Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Each cattle car would transport up to one hundred people, who could come from all over Europe, sometimes from as far away as Norway or Greece. Typically, people would have been loaded onto the trucks with around three days food supply. The journey to Auschwitz could sometimes take three weeks. Hannah Bills

The electronic ads are running in two BART stations for most of September. They reportedly say “History Matters!” with the name of the institute displayed.