TEHRAN (AFP)--- An Iranian government-sponsored body set up to probe the veracity of the Holocaust on Tuesday challenged Europe to hand over documents about the mass slaughter of Jews in World War II, the Iranian state news agency IRNA reported.

Mohammad Ali Ramin, the head of the "World Holocaust Foundation" created after Iran’s controversial Holocaust conference last December, said Austria, Germany and Poland in particular should supply documents.

"They should hand over the proof for the dossier on the organized massacre of Jews in Europe during World War II to the independent international fact-finding committee affiliated to this foundation," the agency quoted him as saying.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ordered the creation of the foundation after inviting a number of controversial revisionist Holocaust researchers to a conference in Tehran in December that caused an international outcry.

Ahmadinejad has repeatedly questioned the scale of the Holocaust, described the mass killing of six million Jews in World War II as a "myth" and also called for Israel to be "wiped from the map".

The foreign researchers invited to the conference -- some of whom have criminal records at home -- gave papers claiming the Holocaust never happened on the scale assumed by the vast majority of historians.

Mainstream historians specialising in the Third Reich counter there is ample documentary to proof that around six million Jews were killed by the Nazis in World War II.

The UN General Assembly last month unanimously approved a US-proposed resolution condemning denial of the Holocaust, in a move diplomats said was directly aimed at Iran’s stance.

Meanwhile, leading reformist Iranian daily Etemad Melli published an editorial by an academic condemning the conference, the latest voice to be raised at home against the gathering.

"The Tehran Holocaust conference gave foreign media the chance to attack the Islamic republic, and several countries and also international figures like (former and present UN Secretary Generals) Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-moon reacted," said editorialist Mohammad Taghi Karoubi.

The conference caused Iran "international isolation over an issue that has nothing to do with our national interests and does nothing to help the oppressed Palestinian people," he added.