JERUSALEM (AFP).- Israel's Yad Vashem has written to Amazon chief Jeff Bezos urging the internet retail giant to remove books which deny the Holocaust, the Holocaust memorial organisation said Monday.

"We strongly urge you to remove books that deny, distort and trivialise the Holocaust from your store," Robert Rozett, director of the Yad Vashem libraries, wrote in a letter to Bezos seen by AFP.

More than six million predominantly European Jews were killed during the Nazi genocide in World War II.

Yad Vashem said it was concerned that anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial was growing across the globe.

"Holocaust denial literature is freely available for purchase over Amazon," Rozett wrote.

"Many of the items appear with glowing readers' reviews and recommendations for further reading in the same vein."

He added that while he was in favour of free speech, "Holocaust denial and other forms of hate speech indisputably nurture prejudice and hate crimes."

Among the books Yad Vashem pointed to is "Did Six Million Really Die? The Truth at Last," by Richard Harwood.

"The more I search for hard evidence of the so called 'Holocaust,' the more I come up with a lack of physical evidence," one review of the book on the site said.

Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.


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