TEHRAN, Iran – Iran hosted Holocaust deniers from around the world Monday at a conference examining whether the Nazi genocide took place, a meeting Israel’s prime minister condemned as a “sick phenomenon.”

The 67 participants from 30 countries included former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke and Holocaust skeptics who have been prosecuted in Europe for questioning whether 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis or whether gas chambers were ever used.

“The number of victims at the Auschwitz concentration camp could be about 2,007,” Australian Frederick Toben told the conference, according to a Farsi translation of his remarks. “The railroad to the camp did not have enough capacity to transfer large numbers of Jews,” said Toben, who was jailed in 1999 in Germany for casting doubt on the Holocaust.

The two-day conference was initiated by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in an apparent attempt to burnish his status as a tough opponent of Israel. The hard-line president has described the Holocaust as a “myth” and called for Israel to be wiped off the map.

Organizers and participants touted the conference as a scholarly gathering aimed at discussing the Holocaust away from Western taboos and the restrictions imposed on scholars in Europe. In Germany, Austria and France, it is illegal to deny aspects of the Holocaust.

Duke, a former Louisiana state representative, praised Ahmadinejad for his “courage” in holding a conference “to offer free speech for the world’s most repressed idea: Holocaust revisionism.”

Also among participants were two rabbis and four other members of the group Jews United Against Zionism. The group rejects the creation of Israel on the grounds that it violates Jewish law.

The gathering brought quick condemnation from Israel and Germany. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert called on the world to protest, terming the conference “a sick phenomenon.”

German Parliament President Norbert Lammert protested the conference in a letter to Ahmadinejad, calling it anti-Semitic propaganda “under the pretext of scientific freedom.”