Polish refusal

I'm late on this story, but I haven't seen any coverage of it on the blogs:

Iran once again upset Jewish organizations and raised Western ire by questioning the Holocaust. This time, Iran proposed sending a team of investigators to conduct on-site inspections of Nazi concentration camps, in advance of a Tehran-sponsored conference to debate the "real scale of the Holocaust."
.....
The Auschwitz-Birkenau museum said in a statement that it would not allow Iranian experts to visit the camp.

From another report of the same item:

Polish officials vowed Friday to bar access to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp to a team that Iran allegedly plans to send to Europe to investigate the true scale of the Holocaust.

"People who deny that people died in the gas chambers, who profane the memory of the victims of the Holocaust, will not be admitted to Auschwitz-Birkenau," the management of the museum that was set up in 1947 at the site of the most grimly efficient of the Nazi German death camps, in southern Poland, said.

A member of the government went further:

Polish Foreign Minister Stefan Meller said the government should bar the Iranians from conducting their probe into the Holocaust in Poland.

"My view is that we should, on no account, allow this to happen. Researching or even discussing such matters goes beyond all imaginable standards," Meller said.

And that's rather too far - though one must allow for the possibility that Meller was speaking without due deliberation, and may not want to be held to the precise words he uttered. Researching and discussing don't go beyond anything at all - even where one is dealing with well-established facts like the nature and scale of the Nazi genocide. If there were a genuine interest in historical research on the Iranians' part, then that should obviously be encouraged. It would help to counter the lies currently being sponsored by President Ahmadinejad. But there are reasons for thinking that the team to be sent to Europe 'to investigate the true scale of the Holocaust' is not a serious proposition. If they really want to investigate the matter they could start by examining the voluminous extant scholarship and take it from there. A visit to Auschwitz undertaken in bad faith is not likely to produce robust research findings. In circumstances suggesting that this is an ideologically-driven move, one can see why the authorities might want to deny the Iranian team access. The Poles, after all, have some basis for knowing what happened on Polish soil during the war: not only Auschwitz-Birkenau, but also Chelmno, Maidanek, Stutthof, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka were located there. And as Auschwitz is a memorial site, its custodians are not bound to allow access to those they have grounds for thinking want this only to abuse it - to mock the dead by denying what befell them.