Holocaust Denial

August 27, 2018 • 17,600 Words

Reason Magazine and Holocaust Denial

A few years ago I somehow heard about a ferocious online dispute
involving a left-leaning journalist named Mark Ames and the editors
of Reason magazine, the glossy flagship publication of America’s
burgeoning libertarian movement. Although I was deep in my difficult
programming work, curiosity got the better of me, so I decided to
take a look.

During the Immigration Wars of the 1990s, I’d become quite friendly
with the Reason people, frequently visiting their offices, especially
during my “English” campaign of 1998, when I’d located my own
political headquarters in the same small Westside LA office building
they used. As my content-archiving software project began
absorbing more and more of my time during the early 2000s, I’d
gradually lost touch with them, but even so, the 40-odd years of their
magazine archives had become the first publication I’d incorporated
into my system, and I was now pleased to discover that both sides in
the ongoing feud had put my system to good use in exploring those
old Reason issues.

Apparently, the libertarians grouped around Reason had successfully

been making political inroads into Silicon Valley’s enormously
wealthy technology industry, and had now organized a major
conference in San Francisco to gather together their supporters.
Their left-leaning rivals decided to nip that project in the bud by
highlighting some of the more unsavory ideological positions that
mainstream libertarian leaders had once regularly espoused.
Perhaps Ron Paul and other libertarians might oppose overseas
wars and drug laws, and support cutting taxes and regulations, but
they and their Republican Party allies were unspeakably vile on all
sorts of other issues, and all “good thinkers” should therefore stay
very far away.

The debate began in rather mundane fashion with an article by

Ames entitled “Homophobia, Racism, and the Kochs” denouncing
Reason for sharing a platform with a high-ranking Republican
Congresswoman of Christian conservative views, as well as the
magazine’s reliance upon Koch funding and its alleged support for
Apartheid South Africa during the 1970s and 1980s. The response
by the Reason editor seemed quite persuasive, and he rightfully
dismissed the guilt-by-association attacks. He also outlined the gross
errors and omissions in the charges regarding South Africa, and
ridiculed Ames as a notoriously error-prone “conspiracy theorist.”
Surely few outsiders would have paid any attention to such a typical
exchange of mudslinging between rival ideological camps.

But then things took a very different turn, and a week later Ames
returned with a 5,000 word article bearing a title sure to grab
attention: “Holocaust Denial.” He claimed that in 1976 Reason had
published an entire special issue devoted to that explosive topic.

Surely everyone on the Internet has encountered numerous

instances of Holocaust Denial over the years, but for a respectable
magazine to have allotted a full issue to promoting that doctrine was
something else entirely. For decades, Hollywood has sanctified the
Holocaust, and in our deeply secular society accusations of
Holocaust Denial are a bit like shouting “Witch!” in Old Salem or
leveling accusations of Trotskyism in the Court of the Red Czar.
Progressive Sam Seder’s Majority Report radio show devoted a full
half-hour segment to the charges against Reason, and Googling
“Reason Magazine”+”Holocaust Denial” today yields thousands of
hits. This substantial explosion of Internet controversy was what
caught my own attention at the time.

My initial reaction was one of puzzlement. Reason had been the first
periodical I had digitized in my system a dozen years earlier, and
surely I would have noticed an entire issue promoting Holocaust
Denial. However, I soon discovered that February 1976 had been
excluded from the supposedly complete set the magazine had
shipped me for processing, an omission that itself raises serious
suspicions. But Ames had somehow located a copy in a research
library and produced a full PDF, which he conveniently placed on the
Internet to support his accusations.

Carefully reading his article and then glancing through the contents, I
decided that his accusation was technically false but substantially
true. Apparently the actual theme of the issue was “Historical
Revisionism” and except for a couple of paragraphs buried here and
there among the 76 pages, Holocaust Denial never came up, so
characterizing it as a Holocaust Denial issue was obviously a
grotesque exaggeration. But on the other hand, although few of the
authors were familiar to me, it seemed undeniably true that they
were numbered among America’s more prominent Holocaust
Deniers, and most of them were deeply associated with
organizations situated in that same camp. Furthermore, there were
strong indications that their positions on that topic must certainly
have been known to the Reason editors who commissioned their
pieces.

The clearest case comes when Ames quoted the explicit statements
of Dr. Gary North, a prominent libertarian thinker who had served as
one of Ron Paul’s earliest Congressional aides and later became his
longtime partner in politics and business:
 Probably the most far-out materials on World War II revisionism
have been the seemingly endless scholarly studies of the
supposed execution of 6 million Jews by Hitler. The anonymous
author [Hoggan] of The Myth of the Six Million' has presented a
solid case against the Establishment's favorite horror story—the
supposed moral justification for our entry into the war…The
untranslated books by the former Buchenwald inmate Prof. Paul
Rassinier, have seriously challenged the story…A recent and
very inexpensive book in magazine form, Did Six Million Really
Die?, appeared in 1973, written by Richard Harwood.

A later issue carried a thousand word letter by Prof. Adam Reed of

Rockefeller University, a past Reason contributor, strongly affirming
the mainstream Holocaust narrative by quoting from standard works,
and taking Dr. North to task for his citation of Holocaust Denial works
of doubtful quality. But North firmly stood his ground:

The second point, that about 6 million Jews really did die in the
concentration camps, is one that will be open until the records of
the period become fully available. I am not convinced yet, one
way or the other. I am happy to have Dr. Reed’s interpretation of
the data, but until the publishing companies and academic guild
encourage the re-examination of the data, I shall continue to
recommend that those interested in revisionist questions read
The Myth of the Six Million and Did Six Million Really Die? as
reasonable (though not necessarily irrefutable) pieces of
historical revisionism. If a person can’t make up his mind, he
should do more reading.”

Dr. James J. Martin was the lead contributor to the February

Revisionism issue, and the preceding January issue had featured an
extended Q&A by the editors, with one of the queries directly
addressing the controversial topic:

REASON: Dr. Martin, do you believe (1) that the specific charge
against the Nazis of having a mass extermination program of
several million Jews is true, and (2) that the Allied atrocities
 were as great or greater than those of the Germans, from your
study of the question?

MARTIN: Well, I never made a head count of all who lost their
lives in the War-we’ve seen a wide variety of statistical
materials, some of which have been pulled out of thin air. As a
consequence, it’s hard to make any kind of estimate of this sort,
whether ten more were killed on the one side or the other is not
a particularly entrancing subject as far as I’m concerned.
Whether allegations can be proven it remains to be seen. I don’t
believe that the evidence of a planned extermination of the
entire Jewish population of Europe is holding up. I have been
influenced over the years by the works of Paul Rassinier, and he
still has to be reckoned with. His works have been ignored for a
long time, and sooner or later somebody’s going to have to do a
decent job of coping with what he has presented. I think
Rassinier’s general case is sound at the moment and I haven’t
seen any strong evidence to upset his allegations or his
assertions that there was no planned program for the
extermination of European Jews. His other main case is that
there were no gas chamber extermination programs. The fact
that a great many people lost their lives is incontrovertible—that
the German concentration camps weren’t health centers is well
known-but they appear to have been far smaller and much less
lethal than the Russian ones.

Another major contributor to the issue was Dr. Austin J. App, and just
three years earlier he had published a short book bearing the lurid
title The Six Million Swindle: Blackmailing the German People for
Hard Marks with Fabricated Corpses.

In a follow-up column by Ames’ own editor, the stunned reactions of

various journalists are listed, with one of them Tweeting out “I had no
idea that Reason Magazine was once a haven for Holocaust
Revisionism. Holy Moly.” Despite the angry obfuscations of present-
day Reason staffers, this description seems quite correct.
Indeed, there seems considerable circumstantial evidence that
around that time “Holocaust Skepticism” extended rather broadly
within the entire nascent libertarian movement. Aside from the sharp
critique of the aforementioned Prof. Reed, the overwhelming majority
of the reader responses seemed totally favorable, with Samuel
Konkin III, editor of New Libertarian Weekly and various similar
publications, suggesting that the February issue was one of the best
they had ever published. David Nolan, founder of America’s
Libertarian Party, also praised the issue as “outstanding.”

The two editors of the issue in question even today remain quite
prominent figures at Reason and within American libertarianism,
while the masthead then carried names such as David Brudnoy and
Alan Reynolds, who both later became influential figures in
conservative and libertarian politics. There seems no evidence of
any resignations or angry recriminations following the issue’s
publication, which seems to have been digested with total
equanimity, apparently arousing less rancor than might have been
generated by a dispute over monetary policy.

I’d never paid much attention to Holocaust discussions over the

years, but the name of Murray Rothbard on the 1976 Reason
masthead prompted a memory. Rothbard is widely regarded as the
founder of modern libertarianism, and I recalled in the 1990s reading
somewhere that he had often ridiculed the Holocaust as being total
nonsense, which had stuck in my mind as a typical example of
libertarian eccentricity. A quick Google search seemed to confirm my
recollection that Rothbard was an avowed Holocaust Denier.

Although the whole controversy regarding Reason’s editorial line of

the mid-1970s soon died down, it remained a nagging puzzle in the
back of my mind. I’d always been quite skeptical of libertarian
ideology, but my Reason friends from the 1990s had certainly
seemed like smart and rational people to me, hardly raving lunatics
of any sort, and two of the ones I’d known best had been the co-
editors of the controversial issue in question.
I could easily understand how zealous libertarian ideologues might
be swept past the point of rationality on certain matters—perhaps
arguing that the police and the army should be abolished as statist
institutions—but the factual question of what had or had not
happened to the Jews of Europe during World War II hardly fell into
that sort of category. Furthermore, libertarianism had always
attracted a very large Jewish contingent, especially in its upper
ranks, and one of the issue editors came from that background, as
did Rothbard and numerous others featured on the masthead. While
deranged anti-Semitism is not impossible among Jews, I would think
that it is somewhat less likely. Clearly something very odd must have
been going on.

I was then too busy with my work to focus on the matter, but some
months later I had more time, and began a detailed investigation. My
first step was to carefully read the Reason articles produced by
those controversial writers previously unknown to me. Although
those pieces were not Holocaust-related, I thought they might give
me a sense of their thinking.

To my surprise, the historiography seemed outstandingly good, and

almost certainly accurate based on what I had picked up over the
years from perfectly mainstream sources. Dr. Martin’s long article on
the notorious framing of “Tokyo Rose” was probably the best and
most comprehensive treatment I had ever encountered on that topic,
and Dr. App’s analysis of the tragedy of the Sudeten-Germans was
equally strong, raising several points I had previously not known.
Percy Greaves effectively summarized many of the very suspicious
aspects of the Pearl Harbor attack, and although his case for the
prosecution against FDR was certainly not airtight, it accorded with
the views presented by numerous scholars in other books on the
subject. Moreover, his position was seconded by a young Bruce
Bartlett, later a prominent Reagan and Bush official, and still later a
strong Republican critic of George W. Bush, routinely feted by the
New York Times. Most of the other writings also seemed of very high
quality, including Dr. North’s summary of World War II Revisionism.
In general, the academic scholarship of those articles greatly
surpassed anything found in opinion magazines of more recent
decades, Reason itself included. Those so interested can click on
the above links, read the articles in question, and decide for
themselves.

Back then, Reason was a young and struggling magazine, with a

shoestring staff and budget. Publishing articles of such obvious
quality was surely a remarkable achievement for which the editors
could feel justifiably proud, and the overwhelmingly positive letters
they received seemed absolutely warranted. Meanwhile, the nasty
attacks by Ames appeared to be those of a mere political hack who
may not have even bothered actually reading the articles whose
authors he vilified.

As a further sign of Ames’ dishonesty, he flung the epithet “Nazi”

some two dozen times in his hack-job, along with numerous uses of
“anti-Semitic” as well, and Greaves was certainly the subject of many
of those slurs. But although Greaves and Bartlett wrote back-to-back
articles on exactly the same Pearl Harbor topic, and according to
Wikipedia, the former was the academic advisor to the latter on that
subject, Bartlett’s name appears nowhere in Ames’s hit-piece,
presumably because denouncing a prominent policy expert much
beloved by the New York Times as an “anti-Semitic Neo-Nazi” might
prove self-defeating. Even leaving that aside, accusing the Jewish
libertarians running Reason of being Nazi propagandists must surely
be the sort of charge that would strain the credulity of even the most
gullible.

Deborah Lipstadt and Holocaust Denial

With Ames’ credibility totally shredded, I decided to carefully reread
his article again, looking for what clues I could find to the whole
bizarre situation. Academic scholars who publish very good history
on certain subjects might still have totally irrational views on others,
but normally one would assume otherwise.
It appeared that much of Ames’ understanding of the issue had
come from a certain Deborah Lipstadt, whom he characterized as a
great Holocaust expert. Her name was very vaguely familiar to me
as some sort of academic activist, who years before had won a
major legal victory over a rightwing British historian named David
Irving, and Irving himself received further denunciations in the Ames
article.

However, one name did stick out. Apparently based on Lipstadt’s

information, Ames described Harry Elmer Barnes as “the godfather
of American Holocaust denial literature” and Martin’s “Holocaust
denial guru.”

A dozen years earlier, the name “Barnes” would have meant almost
nothing to me. But as I produced my content-archiving system and
digitized so many of America’s most influential publications of the
last 150 years, I had soon discovered that many of our most
illustrious public intellectuals—Left, Right, and Center—had been
suddenly purged and “disappeared” around 1940 because of their
stalwart opposition to FDR’s extremely aggressive foreign policy, and
Barnes, an eminent historian and sociologist, had been among the
most prominent of those. He had been one of the earliest editors at
Foreign Affairs and for many years afterward his important articles
had graced the pages of The New Republic and The Nation, while
even after his fall, he had edited Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace,
an important 1953 collection of essays by himself and other once-
prominent figures. But to have a figure of such intellectual stature
accused of being a Holocaust Denier, let alone the “godfather” of the
entire movement, seemed rather bizarre to me.
Since Ames was merely an ignorant political hack transmitting the
opinions of others, I focused on Lipstadt, his key source. Anyone
who has spent much time on the comment-threads of relatively
unfiltered websites has certainly encountered the controversial topic
of Holocaust Denial, but I now decided to try to investigate the issue
in much more serious fashion. A few clicks on the Amazon.com
website, and her 1993 book Denying the Holocaust arrived in my
mailbox a couple of days later, providing me an entrance into that
mysterious world.

Reading the book was certainly a tremendous revelation to me.

Lipstadt is a professor of Holocaust Studies with an appointment in
Emory University’s Department of Theology, and once I read the
opening paragraph of her first chapter, I decided that her academic
specialty might certainly be described as “Holocaust Theology.”

The producer was incredulous. She found it hard to believe that

I was turning down an opportunity to appear on her nationally
televised show. “But you are writing a book on this topic. It will
be great publicity.” I explained repeatedly that I would not
participate in a debate with a Holocaust denier. The existence of
the Holocaust was not a matter of debate. I would analyze and
illustrate who they were and what they tried to do, but I would
not appear with them…Unwilling to accept my no as final, she
vigorously condemned Holocaust denial and all it represented.
Then, in one last attempt to get me to change my mind, she
asked me a question: “I certainly don’t agree with them, but
don’t you think our viewers should hear the other side?”
Lipstadt’s absolute horror at having someone actually dispute the
tenets of her academic doctrine could not have been more blatant.
Surely no zealous theologian of the European Dark Ages would have
reacted any differently.

The second chapter of her book supported that impression. Since

many of the individuals she castigates as Holocaust Deniers also
supported the Revisionist perspective of the underlying causes of the
First and Second World Wars, she harshly attacked those schools,
but in rather strange fashion. In recent years, blogger Steve Sailer
and others have ridiculed what they describe as the “point-and-
sputter” style of debate, in which a “politically-incorrect” narrative is
merely described and then automatically treated as self-evidently
false without any accompanying need for actual refutation. This
seemed to be the approach that Lipstadt took throughout her rather
short book.

For example, she provided a very long list of leading academic

scholars, prominent political figures, and influential journalists who
had championed Revisionist history, noted that their views disagree
with the more mainstream perspective she had presumably imbibed
from her History 101 textbooks, and thereby regarded them as fully
debunked. Certainly a Christian preacher attempting to refute the
evolutionary theories of Harvard’s E.O. Wilson by quoting a passage
of Bible verse might take much the same approach. But few
evangelical activists would be so foolish as to provide a very long list
of eminent scientists who all took the same Darwinist position and
then attempt to sweep them aside by citing a single verse from
Genesis. Lipstadt seems to approach history much like a Bible-
thumper, but a particularly dim-witted one. Moreover, many of the
authors she attacked had already become familiar to me after a
decade of my content-archiving work, and I had found their
numerous books quite scholarly and persuasive.

Barnes, in particular, figured quite prominently in Lipstadt’s chapter

and throughout her book. The index listed his name on more than
two dozen pages, and he is repeatedly described as the “godfather”
of Holocaust Denial, and its seminal figure. Given such heavy
coverage, I eagerly examined all those references and the
accompanying footnotes to uncover the shocking statements he
must have made during his very long scholarly career.

I was quite disappointed. There was not a single reference I could

find to his supposed Holocaust Denial views until just the year before
his death at age 79, and even that item is hardly what I had been led
to believe. In a 9,300 word article on Revisionism for a libertarian
publication, he ridicules a leading Holocaust source for claiming that
Hitler had killed 25 million Jews, noting that total was nearly twice
their entire worldwide population at the time. In addition, Barnes
several times applied the word “allegedly” to the stories of the Nazi
extermination scheme, a sacrilegious attitude that appears to have
horrified a theologian such as Lipstadt. Finally, in a short,
posthumously published review of a book by French scholar Paul
Rassiner, Barnes found his estimate of just 1 million to 1.5 million
Jewish deaths quite convincing, but his tone suggested that he had
never previously investigated the matter himself.

So although that last item technically validated Lipstadt’s accusation

that Barnes was a Holocaust Denier, her evidence-free claims that
he was the founder and leader of the field hardly enhanced her
scholarly credibility. Meanwhile, all the many tens of thousands of
words I had read by Barnes suggested that he was a careful and
dispassionate historian.

A notorious incident that occurred soon after the Bolshevik

Revolution came to my mind. Eminent philologist Timofei Florinsky,
one of Russia’s most internationally renowned academic scholars,
was hauled before a revolutionary tribunal for a public interrogation
about his views, and one of the judges, a drunken Jewish former
prostitute, found his answers so irritating that she drew her revolver
and shot him dead right there and then. Given Lipstadt’s obvious
emotional state, I had a strong suspicion that she might have wished
she could deal in a similar fashion with Barnes and the numerous
other scholars she denounced. Among other things, she noted with
horror that more than two decades after his 1940 purge from public
life, Barnes’ books were still required reading at both Harvard and
Columbia.

All of us reasonably extrapolate what we already know or can easily

check against what is more difficult to verify, and the remaining
chapters of Lipstadt’s book left me very doubtful about the reliability
of her work, all of which was written in a similar near-hysterical style.
Since she had already been vaguely known to me from her well-
publicized legal battle against historian David Irving more than a
dozen years earlier, I was hardly surprised to discover that many
pages were devoted to vilifying and insulting him in much the same
manner as Barnes, so I decided to investigate that case.

I was only slightly surprised to discover that Irving had been one of
the world’s most successful World War II historians, whose
remarkable documentary findings had completely upended our
knowledge of that conflict and its origins, with his books selling in the
many millions. His entire approach to controversial historical issues
was to rely as much as possible upon hard documentary evidence,
and his total inability to locate any such documents relating to the
Holocaust drove Lipstadt and her fellow ethnic-activists into a frenzy
of outrage, so after many years of effort they finally managed to
wreck his career. Out of curiosity, I read a couple of his shorter
books, which seemed absolutely outstanding historiography, written
in a very measured tone, quite different from that of Lipstadt, whose
own 2005 account of her legal triumph over Irving, History on Trial,
merely confirmed my opinion of her incompetence.
Lipstadt’s first book Beyond Belief, published in 1986, tells an
interesting story as well, with her descriptive subtitle being “The
American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933-1945.”
Much of the volume consists of press clippings from the American
print media of that era interspersed with her rather hysterical running
commentary, but providing little analysis or judgment. Some of the
journalists reported horrifying conditions for Jews in pre-war
Germany while others claimed that such stories were wildly
exaggerated, with Lipstadt automatically praising the former and
denouncing the latter without providing any serious explanation.

Lenni Brenner’s remarkable book Zionism in the Age of the Dictators

had been published three years earlier. Although I only discovered it
very recently, any half-competent specialist in her own topic would
surely have noticed it, yet Lipstadt provided no hint of its existence.
Perhaps the reality of the important Nazi-Zionist economic
partnership of the 1930s, with Nazi officials traveling to Palestine as
honored Zionist guests and leading Nazi newspapers praising the
Zionist enterprise might have complicated her simple story of fanatic
German Jew-hatred under Hitler steadily rising towards an
exterminationist pitch. Her faculty appointment in a Department of
Theology seemed very apt.

Lipstadt’s wartime coverage was just as bad, perhaps worse. She

cataloged perhaps a couple of hundred print news reports, each
describing the massacre of hundreds of thousands or even millions
of Jews by the Nazis. But she expressed her outrage that so many of
these reports were buried deep within the inside pages of
newspapers, a placement suggesting that they were regarded as
hysterical wartime atrocity propaganda and probably fictional, with
the editors sometimes explicitly stating that opinion. Indeed, among
these under-emphasized stories was the claim that the Germans had
recently killed 1.5 million Jews by individually injecting each one of
them in the heart with a lethal drug. And although I don’t see any
mention of it, around that same time America’s top Jewish leader
Rabbi Stephen Wise was peddling the absurd report that the Nazis
had slaughtered millions of Jews, turning their skins into lampshades
and rendering their bodies into soap. Obviously, separating truth
from falsehood during a blizzard of wartime propaganda was not
nearly as easy as Lipstadt seemed to assume.

Ordinary Americans were apparently even more skeptical than

newspaper editors. According to Lipstadt:

Writing in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, [Arthur]

Koestler cited public opinion polls in the United States in which
nine of ten average Americans dismissed the accusations
against the Nazis as propaganda lies and flatly stated that they
did not believe a word of them.

Lipstadt convincingly demonstrated that very few Americans seem to

have believed in the reality of the Holocaust during the Second
World War itself, despite considerable efforts by agitated Jewish
activists to persuade them. Over the years, I have seen mention of
numerous other books making this same basic point, and therefore
harshly condemning the American political leaders of the time for
having failed “to save the Jews.”

Explicit and Implicit Holocaust Denial After World

War II
Yet as I began further investigating the history of Holocaust Denial in
the wake of the Reason contretemps, I was very surprised to
discover that this same pattern of widespread disbelief in the
Holocaust seems to have continued unabated after the end of the
war and throughout the 1950s, being especially strong among high-
ranking American military figures, especially top generals and
individuals with an Intelligence background, who seemingly would
have had the best knowledge of the true events.

Some years ago, I came across a totally obscure 1951 book entitled
Iron Curtain Over America by John Beaty, a well-regarded university
professor. Beaty had spent his wartime years in Military Intelligence,
being tasked with preparing the daily briefing reports distributed to all
top American officials summarizing available intelligence information
acquired during the previous 24 hours, which was obviously a
position of considerable responsibility.

As a zealous anti-Communist, he regarded much of America’s

Jewish population as deeply implicated in subversive activity,
therefore constituting a serious threat to traditional American
freedoms. In particular, the growing Jewish stranglehold over
publishing and the media was making it increasingly difficult for
discordant views to reach the American people, with this regime of
censorship constituting the “Iron Curtain” described in his title. He
blamed Jewish interests for the totally unnecessary war with Hitler’s
Germany, which had long sought good relations with America, but
instead had suffered total destruction for its strong opposition to
Europe’s Jewish-backed Communist menace.

Beaty also sharply denounced American support for the new state of
Israel, which was potentially costing us the goodwill of so many
millions of Muslims and Arabs. And as a very minor aside, he also
criticized the Israelis for continuing to claim that Hitler had killed six
million Jews, a highly implausible accusation that had no apparent
basis in reality and seemed to be just a fraud concocted by Jews and
Communists, aimed at poisoning our relations with postwar Germany
and extracting money for the Jewish State from the long-suffering
German people.

Furthermore, he was scathing toward the Nuremberg Trials, which

he described as a “major indelible blot” upon America and “a travesty
of justice.” According to him, the proceedings were dominated by
vengeful German Jews, many of whom engaged in falsification of
testimony or even had criminal backgrounds. As a result, this “foul
fiasco” merely taught Germans that “our government had no sense
of justice.” Sen. Robert Taft, the Republican leader of the immediate
postwar era took a very similar position, which later won him the
praise of John F. Kennedy in Profiles in Courage. The fact that the
chief Soviet prosecutor at Nuremberg had played the same role
during the notorious Stalinist show trials of the late 1930s, during
which numerous Old Bolsheviks confessed to all sorts of absurd and
ridiculous things, hardly enhanced the credibility of the proceedings
to many outside observers.

Then as now, a book taking such controversial positions stood little

chance of finding a mainstream New York publisher, but it was soon
released by a small Dallas firm, and then became enormously
successful, going through some seventeen printings over the next
few years. According to Scott McConnell, founding editor of The
American Conservative, Beaty’s book became the second most
popular conservative text of the 1950s, ranking only behind Russell
Kirk’s iconic classic, The Conservative Mind.

Moreover, although Jewish groups including the ADL harshly

condemned the book, especially in their private lobbying, those
efforts provoked a backlash, and numerous top American generals,
both serving and retired, wholeheartedly endorsed Beaty’s work,
denouncing the ADL efforts at censorship and urging all Americans
to read the volume. Although Beaty’s quite explicit Holocaust Denial
might shock tender modern sensibilities, at the time it seems to have
caused barely a ripple of concern and was almost totally ignored
even by the vocal Jewish critics of the work.

Much of this very interesting story is told by Joseph Bendersky, an

expert in Holocaust Studies, who devoted ten years of archival
research to his 2000 book The “Jewish Threat.” His work chronicles
the extremely widespread anti-Semitism found within the U.S. Army
and Military Intelligence throughout the first half of the twentieth
century, with Jews being widely regarded as posing a serious
security risk. The book runs well over 500 pages, but when I
consulted the index I found no mention of the Rosenbergs nor Harry
Dexter White nor any of the other very numerous Jewish spies
revealed by the Venona Decrypts, and the term “Venona” itself is
also missing from the index. Reports of the overwhelmingly Jewish
leadership of the Russian Bolsheviks are mostly treated as bigotry
and paranoia, as are descriptions of the similar ethnic skew of
America’s own Communist Party, let alone the heavy financial
support of the Bolsheviks by Jewish international bankers. At one
point, he dismisses the link between Jews and Communism in
Germany by noting that “less than half” of the Communist Party
leadership was Jewish; but since fewer than one in a hundred
Germans came from that ethnic background, Jews were obviously
over-represented among Communist leaders by as much as 5,000%.
This seems to typify the sort of dishonesty and innumeracy I have
regularly encountered among Jewish Holocaust experts.
Meanwhile, with the copyright having long lapsed, I’m pleased to add
Beaty’s work to my Controversial HTML Books selection, so
individuals interested can read it and decide for themselves:

The Iron Curtain Over America

John Beaty • 1951 • 82,000 Words

Beaty’s very brief 1951 discussion has been the earliest instance of
explicit Holocaust Denial I have managed to locate, but the
immediate postwar years seem absolutely rife with what might be
described as “implicit Holocaust Denial,” especially within the highest
political circles.

Over the years, Holocaust scholars and activists have very rightfully
emphasized the absolutely unprecedented nature of the historical
events they have studied. They describe how some six million
innocent Jewish civilians were deliberately exterminated, mostly in
gas chambers, by one of Europe’s most highly cultured nations, and
emphasize that monstrous project was often accorded greater
priority than Germany’s own wartime military needs during the
country’s desperate struggle for survival. Furthermore, the Germans
also undertook enormous efforts to totally eliminate all possible
traces of their horrifying deed, with huge resources expended to
cremate all those millions of bodies and scatter the ashes. This
same disappearance technique was even sometimes applied to the
contents of their mass graves, which were dug up long after initial
burial, so that the rotting corpses could then be totally incinerated
and all evidence eliminated. And although Germans are notorious for
their extreme bureaucratic precision, this immense wartime project
was apparently implemented without benefit of a single written
document, or at least no such document has ever been located.

Lipstadt entitled her first book “Beyond Belief,” and I think that all of
us can agree that the historical event she and so many others in
academia and Hollywood have made the centerpiece of their lives
and careers is certainly one of the most extremely remarkable
occurrences in all of human history. Indeed, perhaps only a Martian
Invasion would have been more worthy of historical study, but Orson
Welles’s famous War of the Worlds radio-play which terrified so
many millions of Americans in 1938 turned out to be a hoax rather
than real.

The six million Jews who died in the Holocaust certainly constituted
a very substantial fraction of all the wartime casualties in the
European Theater, outnumbering by a factor of 100 all the British
who died during the Blitz, and being dozens of times more numerous
than all the Americans who fell there in battle. Furthermore, the
sheer monstrosity of the crime against innocent civilians would
surely have provided the best possible justification for the Allied war
effort. Yet for many, many years after the war, a very strange sort of
amnesia seems to have gripped most of the leading political
protagonists in that regard.

Robert Faurisson, a French academic who became a prominent

Holocaust Denier in the 1970s, once made an extremely interesting
observation regarding the memoirs of Eisenhower, Churchill, and De
Gaulle:

Three of the best known works on the Second World War are
General Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe (New York:
Doubleday [Country Life Press], 1948), Winston Churchill's The
Second World War (London: Cassell, 6 vols., 1948-1954), and
the Mémoires de guerre of General de Gaulle (Paris: Plon, 3
vols., 1954-1959). In these three works not the least mention of
Nazi gas chambers is to be found.

Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe is a book of 559 pages; the six

volumes of Churchill's Second World War total 4,448 pages; and
de Gaulle's three-volume Mémoires de guerre is 2,054 pages. In
this mass of writing, which altogether totals 7,061 pages (not
including the introductory parts), published from 1948 to 1959,
one will find no mention either of Nazi gas chambers, a
genocide of the Jews, or of six million Jewish victims of the war.
Given that the Holocaust would reasonably rank as the single most
remarkable episode of the Second World War, such striking
omissions must almost force us to place Eisenhower, Churchill, and
De Gaulle among the ranks of “implicit Holocaust Deniers.”

Many others seem to fall into that same category. In 1981, Lucy S.
Dawidowicz, a leading Holocaust scholar, published a short book
entitled The Holocaust and the Historians, in which she denounced
so many prominent historians for having totally ignored the reality of
the Holocaust for many years following World War II. Indeed,
discussion of that topic was almost entirely confined to the Jewish
Studies programs which committed ethnic activists had newly
established at numerous universities throughout the country.
Although Lipstadt’s poor scholarly habits and hysterical style hardly
impressed me, she appears to have been among the most
successful academics who began a career in those ethnic studies
departments, which suggests that their average quality was far
below her own.

Meanwhile, Dawidowicz emphasized that mainstream histories often

entirely omitted the Holocaust from their presentations:

But it is plain from the most cursory review of textbooks and

scholarly works by English and American historians that the
awesome events of the Holocaust have not been given their
historic due. For over two decades some secondary school and
 college texts never mentioned the subject at all, while others
treated it so summarily or vaguely as to fail to convey sufficient
information about the events themselves or their historical
significance.

With regard to serious scholarship, she notes that when Friedrich

Meinecke, universally acknowledged as Germany’s most eminent
historian, published The German Catastrophe in 1946, he harshly
denounced Hitler as the leader of “a band of criminals” but made
absolutely no mention of the Holocaust, which surely would have
represented the height of such criminality. Major British accounts of
Hitler and World War II by leading historians such as A.J.P. Taylor,
H.R. Trevor-Roper, and Alan Bullock were almost as silent. A similar
situation occurred in America as late as 1972 when the massive
1,237 page Columbia History of the World, having a Jewish co-
editor, devoted a full chapter to World War II but confined its
discussion of the Holocaust to just two short and somewhat
ambiguous sentences. One almost gets a sense that many of these
experienced professional historians regarded discussion of the
Holocaust as a considerable embarrassment, a subject that they
sought to avoid or at least completely minimize.

Dawidowicz even castigates Slaughterhouse-Five, the 1969 fictional

masterpiece by Kurt Vonnegut, for its bald assertion that the
firebombing of Dresden was “the greatest massacre in European
history,” a claim that seems to reduce the Holocaust to non-
existence.

I myself had noticed something similar just a couple of years before

Dawidowicz’s book appeared. The English translation of German
journalist Joachim Fest’s widely praised Hitler had been published in
1974 and I had read it a few years later, finding it just as excellent as
the critics had indicated. But I remember being a little puzzled that
the 800 page book contained no more than a couple of pages
discussing the Nazi death camps and the word “Jews” never even
appeared in the index.
The vast majority of Hitler’s Jewish victims came from Russia and
the Eastern European nations included in the Soviet Bloc. That was
also the location of all the extermination camps that are the central
focus of Holocaust scholars, and therefore the Soviets were the
source of most of the key evidence used at the Nuremberg Trials.
Yet Dawidowicz notes that after Stalin grew increasingly suspicious
of Jews and Israel a few years after the end of the war, virtually all
mention of the Holocaust and German wartime atrocities against
Jews vanished from the Soviet media and history books. A similar
process occurred in the Warsaw Pact satellites, even while the top
Communist Party leadership of many of those countries often
remained very heavily Jewish for some years. Indeed, I recall
reading quite a number of newspaper articles mentioning that after
the Berlin Wall fell and the sundered halves of Europe were finally
reunited, most Eastern Europeans had never even heard of the
Holocaust.

These days, my morning newspapers seem to carry Holocaust-

related stories with astonishing frequency, and probably no event of
the twentieth century looms so large in our public consciousness.
According to public survey data, even as far back as 1995, some
97% of Americans knew of the Holocaust, far more than were aware
of the Pearl Harbor attack or America’s use of the atomic bombs
against Japan, while less than half our citizenry were aware that the
Soviet Union had been our wartime ally. But I’d suspect that anyone
who drew his knowledge from the mainstream newspapers and
history books during the first couple of decades after the end of the
Second World War might never have even been aware that any
Holocaust had actually occurred.
In 1999 Peter Novick published a book on this general theme entitled
The Holocaust in American Life, citing that survey, and his
introduction began by noting the very strange pattern the Holocaust
exhibited in its cultural influence, which seems quite unique among
all major historical events. In the case of almost all other searing
historical occurrences such as the massive bloodshed of the Somme
or the bitter Vietnam War, their greatest impact upon popular
consciousness and media came soon afterward, with the major
books and films often appearing within the first five or ten years
when memories were fresh, and the influence peaking within a
couple of decades, after which they were gradually forgotten.

Yet in the case of the Holocaust, this pattern was completely

reversed. Hardly anyone discussed it for the first twenty years after
the end of the World War II, while it gradually moved to the center of
American life in the 1970s, just as wartime memories were fading
and many of the most prominent and knowledgeable figures from
that era had departed the scene. Novick cites numerous studies and
surveys demonstrating that this lack of interest and visibility certainly
included the Jewish community itself, which had seemingly suffered
so greatly under those events, yet apparently had almost completely
forgotten about them during the 1950s and much of the 1960s.

I can certainly confirm that impression from my personal experience.

Prior to the mid- or late-1970s, I had had only the vaguest
impression that virtually all the Jews and Gypsies of Europe had
been exterminated during the Second World War, and although the
term “Holocaust” was in widespread use, it invariably referred to a
“Nuclear Holocaust,” a term long-since supplanted and scarcely
used today. Then, after the Berlin Wall fell, I was quite surprised to
discover that Eastern Europe was still filled with vast numbers of
unexterminated Gypsies, who quickly flooded into the West and
provoked all sorts of political controversies.

The Rediscovery of the Holocaust

The late scholar Raul Hilberg is universally acknowledged as the
founder of modern Holocaust studies, which began with the 1961
publication of his massive volume The Destruction of the European
Jews. In his very interesting 2007 Hilberg obituary, historian Norman
Finkelstein emphasizes that prior to Hilberg’s work, there had been
virtually no writing on the Holocaust, and discussion of the topic was
considered almost “taboo.” For a recent event of such apparent
enormity to have been so completely wiped away from public
discussion and the consciousness of historians and political
scientists can be explained in several different ways. But once I
began to investigate the circumstances behind Hilberg’s ground-
breaking work, I encountered all sorts of strange ironies.

According to Wikipedia, Hilberg’s family of Austrian Jews

coincidentally arrived in the United States on the exact day in 1939
that war broke out, and in his early teens he was soon horrified to
read all the news reports of the ongoing extermination of his fellow
Jews in the continent his family had left behind, even telephoning
Jewish leaders asking why they were doing so little to save their
kinsmen from annihilation. He subsequently served in the U.S.
military in Europe, then majored in Political Science at Brooklyn
College after the end of the conflict. The inspiration for his future
scholarly focus seems to have come when he was shocked by a
remark made by one of his lecturers, Hans Rosenberg:

The most wicked atrocities perpetrated on a civilian population

in modern times occurred during the Napoleonic occupation of
Spain.
When Hilberg asked how Rosenberg, himself a German-Jewish
refugee, could have so totally ignored the murder of 6 million Jews, a
monstrous crime committed just a couple of years earlier, Rosenberg
sought to deflect the question, saying that “it was a complicated
matter” and “history doesn’t teach down into the present age.” Since
Rosenberg was a student of Meinecke, whom Lipstadt has bitterly
denounced as an implicit Holocaust Denier, one wonders whether
Rosenberg may have shared the beliefs of his mentor but was
reluctant to admit that fact to his overwhelmingly Jewish students in
emotionally-charged postwar Brooklyn.

Later, Hilberg conducted his doctoral research at Columbia under

Franz Neumann, another German-Jewish refugee scholar. But when
Hilberg indicated he wanted his research to focus on the
extermination of Europe’s Jews, Neumann strongly discouraged that
topic, warning Hilberg that doing so would be professionally
imprudent and might become “his academic funeral.” When he
attempted to publish his research in book form, it received numerous
negative reviews, with Israel’s Yad Vashem fearing it would
encounter “hostile criticism,” and over a six year period, it was
rejected by several major publishing houses along with Princeton
University, based on the advice of the influential Jewish intellectual
Hannah Arendt. One naturally wonders whether all these established
scholars may have quietly known something that a naive young
doctoral candidate such as Hilberg did not. His book only appeared
in print because a Jewish immigrant whose business had suffered
under the Nazis funded the entire publication.

I’d never paid much attention to Holocaust issues, but the supporters
of my local Palo Alto Library operate a monthly book sale, and with
serious nonfiction hardcovers often priced at just a quarter each, my
personal library has grown by hundreds of volumes over the years,
now including several of the thickest and most influential Holocaust
texts. Aside from Hilberg’s classic volume, these include Nora
Levin’s The Holocaust (1968), Lucy Dawidowicz’s The War Against
the Jews, 1933-1945 (1975), Martin Gilbert’s The Holocaust (1985),
and Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996).

I claim absolutely no expertise in Holocaust issues, and analyzing

the evidence and argumentation these voluminous works offer is
entirely beyond my ability. But I decided to attempt to assess their
overall credibility by exploring a few particular items, without actually
bothering to read the thousands of pages of text they encompassed.

Consider the interesting case of Field Marshal Erhard Milch,

Hermann Goering’s very powerful number-two in the German
Luftwaffe. His father was certainly a Jew, and according to
researchers Robert Wistrich and Louis Snyder, there is archival
evidence that his mother was Jewish as well. Now it is certainly not
impossible that a Third Reich supposedly dedicated with grim
fanaticism to the extermination of each and every Jew might have
spent the entire war with a full- or half-Jew near the absolute top of
its military hierarchy, but surely that puzzling anomaly would warrant
careful explanation, and Milch’s apparent Jewish background was
certainly known during the Nuremberg Trials.

Yet when I carefully consulted the very comprehensive indexes of

those five books, totaling over 3,500 pages, there is virtually no
discussion of Milch, except a few very brief mentions of his name in
connection with various military operations. Either the authors were
unaware of Milch’s Jewish background, or perhaps they hoped to
keep that fact away from their readers lest it cause “confusion.”
Neither of these possibilities enhances the trust we should place in
their research skills or their scholarly objectivity.

Indeed, the fascinating and widely-praised 2002 book Hitler’s Jewish

Soldiers by Bryan Mark Rigg notes that aside from Milch, Hitler’s
military contained over a dozen half-Jewish generals and admirals
and another dozen quarter-Jews of that same high rank, plus a total
of roughly 150,000 additional half- or quarter-Jewish soldiers, with a
large fraction of these being officers. All of these individuals would
have had some fully-Jewish parents or grand-parents, which seems
decidedly odd behavior for a regime supposedly so focused on the
total eradication of the Jewish race.

Another obvious matter casts further doubt upon the historical quality
of those five immensely thick volumes of standard Holocaust
narrative, which together occupy nearly a linear foot on my
bookshelves. For prosecutors of any crime, establishing a plausible
motive is certainly an important goal, and in the case of the Jewish
Holocaust, these authors would seem to have an easy task at hand.
Hitler and his German colleagues had always claimed that the Jews
overwhelmingly dominated Bolshevik Communism, and much of
their struggle against the former was in order to prevent further
bloody deeds of the latter. So surely devoting an early chapter or so
to describing this central Nazi doctrine would provide an airtight
explanation of what drove the Nazis to their fiendish slaughters,
rendering fully explicable the horrifying events that would occupy the
remainder of their text.

Yet oddly enough, an examination of their indexes for “Bolsheviks,”

“Communism,” and all variants reveals almost no discussion of this
important issue. Goldhagen’s 1996 book provides just a couple of
short sentences spread across his 600 pages, and the other works
seem to contain virtually nothing at all. Since all of these Holocaust
books almost totally avoid Hitler’s self-declared motive for his anti-
Jewish actions, they are forced to desperately search for alternative
explanations, seeking clues buried deep within the German past or
turning to psychanalytical speculations or perhaps deciding that what
they describe as the greatest massacre in all human history was
undertaken out of sheer Nazi wickedness.

The obvious reason for this glaring omission is that the authors are
constructing a morality-play in which the Jews must be portrayed as
absolutely blameless victims, and even hinting at their role in the
numerous Communist atrocities that long preceded the rise of the
Third Reich might cause readers to consider both sides of the issue.
When purported historians go to absurd lengths to hide such glaring
facts, they unmask themselves as propagandists, and we must be
very cautious about trusting their reliability and candor in all other
matters, whether great or small.

Indeed, the topic of Communism raises a far larger issue, one having
rather touchy implications. Sometimes two simple compounds are
separately inert, but when combined together may possess
tremendous explosive force. From my introductory history classes
and readings in high school, certain things had always seemed
glaringly obvious to me even if the conclusions remained
unmentionable, and I once assumed they were just as apparent to
most others as well. But over the years I have begun to wonder
whether perhaps this might not be correct.

Back in those late Cold War days, the death toll of innocent civilians
from the Bolshevik Revolution and the first two decades of the Soviet
Regime was generally reckoned at running well into the tens of
millions when we include the casualties of the Russian Civil War, the
government-induced famines, the Gulag, and the executions. I’ve
heard that these numbers have been substantially revised
downwards to perhaps as little as twenty million or so, but no matter.
Although determined Soviet apologists may dispute such very large
figures, they have always been part of the standard narrative history
taught within the West.

Meanwhile, all historians know perfectly well that the Bolshevik

leaders were overwhelmingly Jewish, with three of the five
revolutionaries Lenin named as his plausible successors coming
from that background. Although only around 4% of Russia’s
population was Jewish, a few years ago Vladimir Putin stated that
Jews constituted perhaps 80-85% of the early Soviet government, an
estimate fully consistent with the contemporaneous claims of
Winston Churchill, Times of London correspondent Robert Wilton,
and the officers of American Military Intelligence. Recent books by
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Yuri Slezkine, and others have all painted a
very similar picture. And prior to World War II, Jews remained
enormously over-represented in the Communist leadership,
especially dominating the Gulag administration and the top ranks of
the dreaded NKVD.

Both of these simple facts have been widely accepted in America

throughout my entire lifetime. But combine them together with the
relatively tiny size of worldwide Jewry, around 16 million prior to
World War II, and the inescapable conclusion is that in per capita
terms Jews were the greatest mass-murderers of the twentieth
century, holding that unfortunate distinction by an enormous margin
and with no other nationality coming even remotely close. And yet,
by the astonishing alchemy of Hollywood, the greatest killers of the
last one hundred years have somehow been transmuted into being
seen as the greatest victims, a transformation so seemingly
implausible that future generations will surely be left gasping in awe.

Today’s American Neocons are just as heavily Jewish as were the

Bolsheviks of a hundred years ago, and they have greatly benefited
from the political immunity provided by this totally bizarre inversion of
historical reality. Partly as a consequence of their media-fabricated
victimhood status, they have managed to seize control over much of
our political system, especially our foreign policy, and have spent the
last few years doing their utmost to foment an absolutely insane war
with nuclear-armed Russia. If they do manage to achieve that
unfortunate goal, they will surely outdo the very impressive human
body-count racked up by their ethnic ancestors, perhaps even by an
order-of-magnitude or more.

Holocaust Frauds and Confusions

Since the Holocaust only became a major public topic after wartime
memories had grown dim, the story has always seemed to suffer
from the problems traditionally associated with “recovered memory
syndrome.” Truths and falsehoods were often mixed together in
strange ways, and the door was opened wide to an astonishing
number of outright frauds and liars.
For example, in the late 1970s I remember many of my high school
classmates devouring The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski, perhaps
the first widely popular Holocaust memoir. But then a few years later,
the media revealed that Kosinski’s national best-seller was simply
fraudulent, and the plagiarizing author eventually committed suicide.
Indeed, there have been so many fake Holocaust memoirs over the
years that they nearly constitute a literary genre of their own.

Probably the most world’s most famous Holocaust survivor was Elie
Wiesel, who parlayed the stories of his wartime suffering into
becoming an enormous political celebrity. His career was capped
with a Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, and the announcement declared
him “a messenger to mankind.” Yet journalist Alexander Cockburn
has persuasively argued that Wiesel was simply a fraud, and his
famous autobiographical work Night just another literary hoax.

Although the iconic figure of “the Six Million” has been endlessly
repeated by our media, the estimated numbers of the dead have
actually been shockingly variable over the years. Although I never
paid much attention to Holocaust issues, I have closely read my
major newspapers and magazines for decades, and had regularly
seen the statement that the Nazi death machine had brutally
exterminated five million Gentiles along with the six million Jews. But
just last year, I was stunned to discover that former total was simply
a whole-cloth invention by prominent Holocaust-activist Simon
Wiesenthal, who simply made the figure up one day with the intent of
giving non-Jews more of a stake in the Holocaust story. And despite
being based on absolutely no evidence or research, his casual claim
was never effectively refuted by actual Holocaust scholars, who
knew it to be total nonsense, and therefore it was so regularly
repeated in the media that I probably read it hundreds of times over
the years, always assuming it had some firm grounding in proven
reality.

Similarly, for decades I had always read the undeniable fact that the
Nazis had exterminated 4 million inmates at Auschwitz, with most of
the victims being Jews, and Lipstadt certainly treated that number as
absolutely rock-solid historical reality. But in the early 1990s after the
fall of Communism, the official total was quietly revised downwards
to as little as 1.1 million. The fact that a sudden reduction in the
official Holocaust body-count by 3 million has had so little impact
upon our public Holocaust media narrative hardly seems to inspire
great confidence in either the total figures or the media reporting of
them.

Over the last couple of generations, our media has engraved that
figure of Six Million so deeply onto the minds of every Western
citizen that the meaning of the iconic number is universally
understood, and those who question it risk a prison sentence in
many European countries. Yet its actual origin is somewhat obscure.
According to some accounts, Jewish groups lobbied President
Truman into casually inserting it into one of his speeches, and
thereafter it has endlessly echoed in the media down to the present
day. Some angry Internet activist has put together a graphic
displaying extracts from dozens of New York Times stories between
1869 and 1941 all citing the figure of 6 million Eastern European
Jews as being threatened with death, suggesting that our official
Holocaust body-count actually predated World War II by as much as
three generations. I really wouldn’t be surprised if that might be the
original source of the number.

Sometimes the creation of a new Holocaust hoax was only narrowly

averted. Throughout most of the twentieth century, Jews and blacks
had been close political allies in America, with the top leadership of
the NAACP almost invariably being Jewish, as were nearly all of
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s top white advisors and a very large fraction
of the key white activists involved in the black Civil Rights movement
of the 1950s and 1960s. But by the late 1960s, a schism had
erupted, with many younger black activists becoming deeply hostile
to what they perceived as overwhelming Jewish influence, while
more militant blacks, whether Muslim or otherwise, began siding with
the Palestinians against Zionist Israel. This growing conflict became
especially bitter during Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign of
1988 and reached a flash-point in the New York City of the early
1990s.

A couple of film-makers sought to help heal this rift by producing a

major 1992 PBS documentary entitled The Liberators, recounting
how black American troops had been among the first units that
captured the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps, thereby
freeing the tens of thousands of Jewish inmates from Nazi captivity.
A historical narrative of such deep symbolic resonance quickly
attracted overwhelming support from both black leaders and Jewish
ones, with Jesse Jackson sharing the stage with Holocaust survivors
and numerous Jewish luminaries at the Harlem premiere, and the
film received an Oscar nomination. However, in early Febuary 1993
Jeffrey Goldberg took to the pages of The New Republic to reveal
that the story was merely a hoax, based on falsified history. Although
the film’s Jewish co-producer angrily denounced her critics as racists
and Holocaust Deniers, those charges stuck, and were eventually
reported in the New York Times and other major media outlets. The
leading Jewish organizations and Holocaust centers that had been
heavily promoting the film soon distanced themselves, and in 2013
The Times of Israel even marked the twenty-year anniversary of
what it described as a notorious hoax. But I suspect that if matters
had gone a little differently, the story might soon have become so
deeply embedded in the canonical Holocaust narrative that anyone
questioning the facts would have been vilified as a racist.
A few years earlier, The New Republic had actually been in the
forefront of promoting a different hoax also relating to Jewish issues,
one with potentially enormous international political significance. In
1984 Joan Peters, an obscure Jewish writer, published a major
historical work claiming that her extensive archival research revealed
that the bulk of the present-day Palestinians were actually not native
to Palestine, but instead were recently-arrived immigrants, drawn
there by the heavy economic development produced by the Zionist
settlers who had actually preceded them.

Her shocking findings received hundreds of glowing reviews and

academic endorsements across the entire spectrum of the
mainstream and elite American media, and her book quickly became
a huge bestseller. Leading Jewish Holocaust luminaries such as
Dawidowicz and Wiesel took center stage in praising her remarkable
scholarship, which seemed likely to completely demolish the claims
of the expelled Palestinians, thereby reshaping the nature of the
Middle East conflict to Israel’s great advantage.

However, a young graduate student in History at Princeton named

Norman Finkelstein had considerable interest in the history of
Zionism, and being very much surprised by her findings, decided to
investigate those claims. Once he began carefully checking her
footnotes and her alleged sources, he discovered they were entirely
fraudulent, and her groundbreaking research merely amounted to a
hoax, which some later suggested had been concocted by an
intelligence organization and merely published under her name.
Although Finkelstein widely distributed his important findings, they
were totally ignored by all the American journalists, scholars, and
media organizations he contacted, with the sole exception of Noam
Chomsky, and the growing Joan Peters Hoax might have destroyed
the legal basis of the international Palestinian claims to their own
Palestine homeland. But some independent-minded British
publications eventually picked up his information, and the resulting
wave of media embarrassment caused the Peters claims to fade into
oblivion. Meanwhile, Finkelstein himself suffered severe retaliation
as a consequence, and according to Chomsky was completely
blacklisted by his Princeton department and the wider academic
community.

More than a dozen years later, Finkelstein’s work became the focus
of a second major controversy. In the late 1990s, international
Jewish organizations launched a major effort to extract many billions
of dollars from the largest Swiss banks, arguing that such funds were
the rightful property of European Jews who had died in the
Holocaust. When the banks initially resisted, arguing that no solid
evidence was being presented for such enormous claims, they were
harshly denounced by America’s Jewish-dominated media, and
Jewish lobbying led the American government to threaten them with
severe financial sanctions that could have destroyed their
businesses. Faced with such serious extortionate pressure, the
banks finally gave way and paid out the bulk of the funds being
demanded, with those billions mostly retained by the Jewish
organizations leading the campaign and spent on their own projects
since the purported Jewish heirs were impossible to locate.
This situation led historian Finkelstein to publish a short book in 2000
entitled The Holocaust Industry, in which he harshly critiqued what
he characterized as a global Jewish money-making enterprise aimed
at unfairly extracting wealth on behalf of the supposed Holocaust
victims, often with little regard for truth or fairness. Although almost
entirely ignored by the American media, it became a major bestseller
in Europe, which eventually forced American publications to give it
some attention. Among other things, Finkelstein noted that more
than a half-century after the end of the Holocaust, the number of
officially designated Holocaust survivors had grown so large that
simple mortality considerations seemed to imply that huge numbers
of European Jews must have survived the war. This obviously raised
serious questions about how many might have actually died during
that conflict and its accompanying Holocaust.

Over the years, I had noticed the same sorts of media reports
claiming enormous totals of Holocaust survivors still alive now six or
seven decades after the event. For example, even as late as 2009
an official at Israel’s Jewish Agency justified laws criminalizing
Holocaust Denial by explaining that almost 65 years after the end of
the war “there are still hundreds of thousands of living Holocaust
survivors,” a statement which itself seemed to constitute rather
explicit Holocaust Denial. Indeed, a very noticeable number of all the
New York Times obituaries I read these days in my morning
newspaper seem to include Holocaust survivors still expiring in their
eighties and nineties.

Anyone who reads serious history books knows that Jews have
generally enjoyed a reputation for producing many of the world’s
greatest swindlers and frauds, hardly surprising given their notorious
tendency to lie and dissemble. Meanwhile, the Jewish community
also seems to contain far more than its fair share of the emotionally
disturbed and the mentally ill, and perhaps as a consequence has
served as a launching-pad for many of the world’s religious cults and
fanatic ideological movements. Any exploration of the Holocaust
certainly tends to support this rather negative appraisal.
The Holocaust and Hollywood
Although the Holocaust began to enter American consciousness
during the 1960s and 1970s with the publication of major books by
Hilberg, Levin, Dawidowicz, and others, together with the resulting
articles and reviews that these generated, the initial social impact
was probably not substantial, at least outside the Jewish community.
Even highly successful books selling in the many tens of thousands
of copies would have had little impact in a population of more than
200 million.

Our media completely shapes our perceived reality of the world, and
although intellectuals and many of the highly educated are greatly
influenced by books and other forms of printed content, the vast
majority of the population understands the world through electronic
media, especially that of popular entertainment.

Consider, for example, the 1974 publication of Time on the Cross:

The Economics of American Negro Slavery, a magisterial two
volume analysis by economists Robert William Fogel and Stanley L.
Engerman. By applying quantitative methods, the study overturned
generations of assumptions about that American social institution,
demonstrating that black slaves in the South were encouraged to
marry and maintain their households, while having diets and medical
care comparable to that of the free white population and often
superior to that of Northern industrial wage-earners. Moreover,
following emancipation the life expectancy of freedmen declined by
ten percent and their illnesses increased by twenty per cent. All of
this is summarized in the extensive Wikipedia entry.

Although their results were controversial, the authors had the

strongest possible academic credentials, with Fogel, an eminent
scholar, being a leading figure in a school of economics who went on
to win a Nobel Prize. And Fogel’s ideological credentials were even
more robust, given that he had had a lifelong commitment to black
Civil Rights starting with the eight years he had spent as a young
Communist Party organizer, while his 1949 marriage to a black
woman had often subjected the couple to the indignities of the anti-
miscegenation laws of that era. Consequently, their findings received
unprecedented coverage in the mainstream media for an academic
study and surely influenced numerous historians and journalists. Yet
I think the long-term impact upon popular perceptions about slavery
has been almost nil.

By contrast, in 1976 the ABC television network ran the prime-time

miniseries Roots, a multi-generational account of a slave family. The
story closely adhered to the traditionally harsh slavery narrative,
while supposedly being based upon the recorded family history of
Alex Haley, the author of the best-selling book of that same title. But
although his work was later found to be fraudulent and apparently
plagiarized, the ratings were stellar and the social impact enormous
due to the audience of 100 million Americans who watched those
episodes. Thus, even the most impressive written scholarship had
absolutely no chance of competing with fictionalized television
drama.

All three of America’s television networks were under Jewish

ownership or control, so it was hardly surprising that two years later
ABC decided to repeat this process with the 1978 television
miniseries Holocaust, which also achieved an audience of 100
million and generated enormous profits. It seems quite possible this
may have been the first time many American families discovered that
colossal but almost entirely invisible event of World War II.

The following year, William Styron published Sophie’s Choice, a

heart-rending tale involving deeply buried memories of the
extermination of Christian Polish children in the Auschwitz gas
chambers. Although such an occurrence was absolutely contrary to
the doctrines of all Jewish Holocaust scholars, the novel became a
huge national best-seller anyway, and a 1982 film of the same name
soon followed, with Meryl Streep winning an Oscar for Best Actress.
A decade later, Steven Spielberg’s 1993 Schindler’s List won a
remarkable seven Oscars, while grossing nearly $100 million.
With Hollywood so overwhelmingly Jewish, the consequences were
hardly surprising, and a huge cinematic genre soon developed.
According to Finkelstein, Hollywood produced some 180 Holocaust
films just during the years 1989-2004. Even the very partial subset of
Holocaust films listed on Wikipedia has grown enormously long, but
fortunately the Movie Database has winnowed down the catalog by
providing a list of the 50 Most Moving Holocaust Films.

Many billions of dollars have surely been invested over the years on
the total production costs of this ongoing business enterprise. For
most ordinary people, “seeing is believing,” and how could anyone
seriously doubt the reality of the Holocaust after having seen all the
gas chambers and mounds of murdered Jewish corpses constructed
by highly-paid Hollywood set designers? Doubting the existence of
Spiderman and the Incredible Hulk would be almost as absurd.

Some 2% of Americans have a Jewish background, while perhaps

95% possess Christian roots, but the Wikipedia list of Christian films
seems rather scanty and rudimentary by comparison. Very few of
those films were ever widely released, and the selection is stretched
to even include The Chronicles of Narnia, which contains no mention
of Christianity whatsoever. One of the very few prominent exceptions
on the list is Mel Gibson’s 2004 The Passion of the Christ, which he
was forced to personally self-fund. And despite the enormous
financial success of that movie, one of the most highly profitable
domestic releases of all time, the project rendered Gibson a hugely
vilified pariah in the industry over which he had once reigned as its
biggest star, especially after word got around that his own father was
a Holocaust Denier.

In many respects, Hollywood and the broader entertainment media

today provide the unifying spiritual basis of our deeply secular
society, and the overwhelming predominance of Holocaust-themed
films over Christian ones has obvious implications. Meanwhile, in our
globalized world, the American entertainment-media complex totally
dominates Europe and the rest of the West, so that the ideas
generated here effectively shape the minds of many hundreds of
millions of people living elsewhere, whether or not they fully
recognize that fact.

In 2009, Pope Benedict XVI sought to heal the long-standing Vatican

II rift within the Catholic Church and reconcile with the breakaway
Society of St. Pius X faction. But this became a major media
controversy when it was discovered that Bishop Richard Williamson,
one of the leading members of that latter organization, had long
been a Holocaust Denier and also believed that Jews should convert
to Christianity. Although the many other differences in Catholic
doctrinal faith were fully negotiable, apparently refusing to accept the
reality of the Holocaust was not, and Williamson remained estranged
from the Catholic Church. Soon afterward he was even prosecuted
for heresy by the German government.

Internet critics have suggested that over the last couple of

generations, energetic Jewish activists have successfully lobbied
Western nations into replacing their traditional religion of Christianity
with the new religion of Holocaustianity, and the Williamson Affair
certainly seems to support that conclusion.

Consider the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Funded by

Jewish interests, it spent years launching vicious attacks against
Christianity, sometimes in crudely pornographic fashion, and also
periodically vilified Islam. Such activities were hailed by French
politicians as proof of the total freedom of thought allowed in the land
of Voltaire. But the moment that one of its leading cartoonists made
a very mild joke related to Jews, he was immediately fired, and if the
publication had ever ridiculed the Holocaust, it surely would have
been immediately shut down, and its entire staff possibly thrown into
prison.

Western journalists and human rights advocates have often

expressed support for the boldly transgressive activities of the
Jewish-funded Femen activists when they desecrate Christian
churches all around the world. But such pundits would certainly be in
an uproar if anyone were to act in similar fashion toward the growing
international network of Holocaust Museums, most of them built at
public expense.

Indeed, one of the underlying sources of bitter Western conflict with

Vladimir Putin’s Russia seems to be that he has restored Christianity
to a favored place in a society where the early Bolsheviks had once
dynamited churches and massacred many thousands of priests.
Western intellectual elites held far more positive feelings toward the
USSR while its leaders retained a stridently anti-Christian attitude.

The Rise and Suppression of Holocaust Denial

Since the Holocaust had been almost unknown in America until the
mid-1960s, explicit Holocaust Denial was equally non-existent, but
as the former grew in visibility following the publication of Hilberg’s
1961 book, the latter soon began to awaken as well.

Lipstadt’s vilification of Barnes as the “godfather” of Holocaust Denial

does contain a nugget of truth. His posthumously-published 1968
review endorsing Rassinier’s denialist analysis seems to be the first
such substantial statement published anywhere in America, at least
if we exclude Beaty’s very casual 1951 dismissal of the Jewish
claims, which seems to have attracted negligible public attention.

Near the end of the 1960s, a right-wing publisher named Willis Carto
came across a short and unpolished Holocaust Denial manuscript,
apparently produced some years earlier, and then ignored legal
niceties by simply putting it into print. The purported author soon
sued for plagiarism, and although the case was eventually settled,
his identity eventually leaked out as being that of David L. Hoggan, a
Barnes protege with a Harvard Ph.D. in history, serving as a junior
faculty member at Stanford. His desire for anonymity was aimed at
preventing the destruction of his career, but he failed in that effort,
and further academic appointments quickly dried up.

Meanwhile, Murray Rothbard, the founding father of modern

libertarianism, had always been a strong supporter of historical
Revisionism, and greatly admired Barnes, who for decades had
been the leading figure in that field. Barnes had also briefly hinted at
his general skepticism about the Holocaust in a lengthy 1967 article
appearing in the Rampart Journal, a short-lived libertarian
publication, and this may have been noticed within those ideological
circles. It appears that by the early 1970s, Holocaust Denial had
become a topic of some discussion within America’s heavily Jewish
but fiercely free-thinking libertarian community, and this was to have
an important consequence.

A professor of Electrical Engineering at Northwestern named Arthur

R. Butz was casually visiting some libertarian gathering during this
period when he happened to notice a pamphlet denouncing the
Holocaust as a fraud. He had never previously given any thought to
the issue, but such a shocking claim captured his attention, and he
began looking into the matter early in 1972. He soon decided that
the accusation was probably correct, but found the supporting
evidence, including that presented in the unfinished and anonymous
Hoggan book, far too sketchy, and decided it needed to be fleshed
out in much more detailed and comprehensive fashion. He
proceeded to undertake this project over the next few years, working
with the methodical diligence of a trained academic engineer.
His major work, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, first appeared in
print late in 1976, and immediately became the central text of the
Holocaust Denial community, a position it still seems to retain down
to this present day, while with all the updates and appendices, the
length has grown to well over 200,000 words. Although no mention
of this forthcoming book appeared in the February 1976 issue of
Reason, it is possible that word of the pending publication had gotten
around within libertarian circles, prompting the sudden new focus
upon historical Revisionism.

Butz was a respectable tenured professor at Northwestern, and the

release of his book laying out the Holocaust Denial case soon
became a minor sensation, covered by the New York Times and
other media outlets in January 1977. In one of her books, Lipstadt
devotes a full chapter entitled “Entering the Mainstream” to Butz’s
work. According to a December 1980 Commentary article by
Dawidowicz, Jewish donors and Jewish activists quickly mobilized,
attempting to have Butz fired for his heretical views, but back then
academic tenure still held firm and Butz survived, an outcome that
seems to have greatly irritated Dawidowicz.

Such a detailed and comprehensive book laying out the Holocaust

Denial case naturally had a considerable impact on the national
debate, especially since the author was a mainstream and
apparently apolitical academic, and an American edition of Butz’s
book soon appeared in 1977. I’m very pleased to have made
arrangements to include the volume in my collection of Controversial
HTML Books, so those interested can easily read it and decide for
themselves.

The Hoax of the Twentieth Century

The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European
Jewry
Arthur R. Butz • 1976/2015 • 225,000 Words

The following year, these Holocaust Denial trends seemed to gain

further momentum as Carto opened a small new publishing
enterprise in California called the Institute for Historical Review
(IHR), which launched a quarterly periodical entitled The Journal of
Historical Review in 1980. Both the IHR and its JHR publication
centered their efforts around Revisionism in general, but with
Holocaust Denial being their major focus. Lipstadt devotes an entire
chapter to the IHR, later noting that most of the main authors of the
February 1976 Reason issue soon became affiliated with that project
or with other Carto enterprises, as did Butz, while the editorial board
of the JHR was soon well-stocked with numerous Ph.D.’s, often
earned at highly-reputable universities. For the next quarter century
or so, the IHR would hold small conferences every year or two, with
David Irving eventually becoming a regular presenter, and even fully
mainstream figures such as Pulitzer Prize-winning historian John
Toland occasionally appearing as speakers.
As an important example of IHR efforts, in 1983 the organization
published The Dissolution of Eastern Europe Jewry, a very detailed
quantitative analysis of the underlying demographics and population
movements around the period encompassed by World War II,
apparently the first such study undertaken. The author, writing under
the pen-name Walter N. Sanning, sought to revise the extremely
simplistic population analysis casually assumed by Holocaust
historians.

Before the war, millions of Jews had lived in Eastern Europe, and
after the war, those communities had mostly vanished. This
undeniable fact has long stood as an implicit central pillar of the
traditional Holocaust narrative. But drawing upon entirely
mainstream sources, Sanning persuasively demonstrates that the
situation was actually far more complicated than it might seem. For
example, it was widely reported at the time that vast numbers of
Polish Jews had been transported by the Soviets to locations deep
within their territory, on both voluntary and involuntary terms, with
future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin being including in
those transfers. In addition, huge numbers of heavily urbanized
Soviet Jews were similarly evacuated ahead of the advancing
German forces in 1941. The exact size of these population
movements has long been uncertain and disputed, but Sanning’s
careful analysis of postwar Soviet census data and other sources
suggests that the totals were likely towards the upper end of most
estimates. Sanning makes no claim that his findings are definitive,
but even if they are only partially correct, such results would certainly
preclude the reality of traditional Holocaust numbers.

Another regular IHR participant was Robert Faurisson. As a

professor of literature at the University of Lyons-2, he began
expressing his public skepticism about the Holocaust during the
1970s, and the resulting media uproar led to efforts to remove him
from his position, while a petition was signed on his behalf by 200
international scholars, including famed MIT professor Noam
Chomsky. Faurisson stuck to his opinions, but attacks persisted,
including a brutal beating by Jewish militants that hospitalized him,
while a French political candidate espousing similar views was
assassinated. Jewish activist organizations began lobbying for laws
to broadly outlaw the activities of Faurisson and others, and in 1990,
soon after the Berlin Wall fell and research at Auschwitz and other
Holocaust sites suddenly became far easier, France passed a
statute criminalizing Holocaust Denial, apparently the first nation
after defeated Germany to do so. During the years that followed,
large numbers of other Western countries did the same, setting the
disturbing precedent of resolving scholarly disputes via prison
sentences, a softer form of the same policy followed in Stalinist
Russia.

Since Faurisson was a literary scholar, it is not entirely surprising

that one of his major interests was The Diary of Anne Frank,
generally regarded as the Holocaust’s iconic literary classic, telling
the story of a young Jewish girl who died after being deported from
Holland to Auschwitz. He argued that the text was substantially
fraudulent, written by someone else after the end of the war, and for
decades various determined individuals have argued the case back
and forth. I cannot properly evaluate any of their complex arguments,
which apparently involve questions of ballpoint pen technology and
textual emendations, nor have I ever read the book itself.

But for me, the most striking aspect of the story is the girl’s actual
fate under the official narrative, as recounted in the thoroughly
establishmentarian Wikipedia entry. Apparently disease was raging
in her camp despite the best efforts of the Germans to control it, and
she soon became quite ill, mostly remaining bedridden in the
infirmary, before eventually dying from typhus in Spring 1945 at a
different camp about six months after her initial arrival. It seems
rather odd to me that a young Jewish girl who fell severely ill at
Auschwitz would have spent so much time in camp hospitals and
eventually died there, given that we are told the primary purpose of
Auschwitz and other such camps was the efficient extermination of
its Jewish inmates.
By the mid-1990s the Holocaust Denial movement seemed to be
gaining in public visibility, presumably aided by the doubts raised
after the official 1992 announcement that the estimated deaths at
Auschwitz had been reduced by around 3 million.

For example, the February 1995 issue of Marco Polo, a glossy

Japanese magazine with a circulation of 250,000, carried a long
article declaring that the gas chambers of the Holocaust were a
propaganda hoax. Israel and Jewish-activist groups quickly
responded, organizing a widespread advertising boycott of all the
publications of the parent company, one of Japan’s most respected
publishers, which quickly folded in the face of that serious threat. All
copies of the issue were recalled from the newspapers, the staffers
were dismissed, and the entire magazine was soon shut down, while
the president of the parent company was forced to resign.

In exploring the history of Holocaust Denial, I have noticed this same

sort of recurrent pattern, most typically involving individuals rather
than institutions. Someone highly-regarded and fully mainstream
decides to investigate the controversial topic, and soon comes to
conclusions that sharply deviate from the official narrative of the last
two generations. For various reasons, those views become public,
and he is immediately demonized by the Jewish-dominated media as
a horrible extremist, perhaps mentally-deranged, while being
relentlessly hounded by a ravenous pack of fanatic Jewish-activists.
This usually brings about the destruction of his career.

In the early 1960s Stanford historian David Hoggan produced his

anonymous manuscript The Myth of the Six Million, but once it got
into circulation and his identity became known, his academic career
was destroyed. A dozen years later, something along the same lines
happened with Northwestern Electrical Engineering professor Arthur
Butz, and only his academic tenure saved him from a similar fate.

Fred Leuchter was widely regarded as one of America’s leading

expert specialists on the technology of executions, and a long article
in The Atlantic treated him as such. During the 1980s, Ernst Zundel,
a prominent Canadian Holocaust Denier, was facing trial for his
disbelief in the Auschwitz gas chambers, and one of his expert
witnesses was an American prison warden with some experience in
such systems, who recommended involving Leuchter, one of the
foremost figures in the field. Leuchter soon took a trip to Poland and
closely inspected the purported Auschwitz gas chambers, then
published the Leuchter Report, concluding that they were obviously
a fraud and could not possibly have worked in the manner Holocaust
scholars had always claimed. The ferocious attacks which followed
soon cost him his entire business career and destroyed his marriage.

David Irving had ranked as the world’s most successful World War II
historian, with his books selling in the millions amid glowing
coverage in the top British newspapers when he agreed to appear as
an expert witness at the Zundel trial. He had always previously
accepted the conventional Holocaust narrative, but reading the
Leuchter Report changed his mind, and he concluded that the
Auschwitz gas chambers were just a myth. He was quickly subjected
to unrelenting media attacks, which first severely damaged and then
ultimately destroyed his very illustrious publishing career, and he
later even served time in an Austrian prison for his unacceptable
views.

Dr. Germar Rudolf was a successful young German chemist working

at the prestigious Max Planck Institute when he heard of the
controversy regarding the Leuchter Report, which he found
reasonably persuasive but containing some weaknesses. Therefore,
he repeated the analysis on a more thorough basis, and published
the results as the Chemistry of Auschwitz, which came to the same
conclusions as Leuchter. And just like Leuchter before him, Rudolf
suffered the destruction of his career and his marriage, and since
Germany treats these matters in harsher fashion, he eventually
served five years in prison for his scientific impudence.
Most recently, Dr. Nicholas Kollerstrom, who had spent eleven years
as a historian of science on the staff of University College, London,
suffered this same fate in 2008. His scientific interests in the
Holocaust provoked a media firestorm of vilification, and he was fired
with a single day’s notice, becoming the first member of his research
institution ever expelled for ideological reasons. He had previously
provided the Isaac Newton entry for a massive biographical
encyclopedia of astronomers, and America’s most prestigious
science journal demanded that the entire work be pulped, destroying
the work of over 100 writers, because it had been fatally tainted by
having such a villainous contributor. He recounted this unfortunate
personal history as an introduction to his 2014 book Breaking the
Spell, which I highly recommend.

Kollerstrom’s text effectively summarizes much of the more recent

Holocaust Denial evidence, including the official Auschwitz death
books returned by Gorbachev after the end of the Cold War, which
indicate that Jewish fatalities were some 99% lower than the widely-
believed total. Furthermore, Jewish deaths actually showed a sharp
decline once plentiful supplies of Zyklon B arrived, exactly contrary
to what might have been expected under the conventional account.
He also discusses the interesting new evidence contained in the
British wartime decrypts of all German communications between the
various concentration camps and the Berlin headquarters. Much of
this material is presented in an interesting two hour interview on Red
Ice Radio, conveniently available on YouTube:

https://www.bitchute.com/embed/yqjW4EghPeO8/
The lives and careers of a very sizable number of other individuals
have followed this same unfortunate sequence, which in much of
Europe often ends in criminal prosecution and imprisonment. Most
notably, a German lawyer who became a bit too bold in her legal
arguments soon joined her client behind bars, and as a
consequence, it has become increasingly difficult for accused
Holocaust Deniers to secure effective legal representation. By
Kollerstrom’s estimates, many thousands of individuals are currently
serving time across Europe for Holocaust Denial.

My impression is that by the late 1960s, the old Soviet Bloc countries
had mostly stopped imprisoning people merely for questioning
Marxist-Leninist dogma, and reserved their political prisons only for
those actively organizing against the regime, while Holocaust Denial
is treated today in far harsher fashion. One clear difference is that
actual belief in Communist doctrine had entirely faded away to
almost nothing even among the Communist leadership itself, while
these days Holocaustianity is still a young and deeply held faith, at
least within a small slice of the population that exerts enormously
disproportionate leverage over our public institutions.

Another obvious factor is the many billions of dollars currently at

stake in what Finkelstein has aptly characterized as “the Holocaust
Industry.” For example, potentially enormous new claims are now
being reopened against Poland for Jewish property that was lost or
confiscated during the World War II era.
In America, the situation is somewhat different, and our First
Amendment still protects Holocaust Deniers against imprisonment,
though the efforts of the ADL and various other groups to criminalize
“hate speech” are clearly aimed at eventually removing that obstacle.
But in the meantime, crippling social and economic sanctions are
often used to pursue the same objectives.

Furthermore, various Internet monopolies have been gradually

persuaded or co-opted into preventing the easy distribution of
dissenting information. There have been stories in the media over
the last few years that Google has been censoring or redirecting its
Holocaust search results away from those disputing the official
narrative. Even more ominously, Amazon, our current near-
monopolistic retailer of books, last year took the unprecedented step
of banning thousands of Holocaust Denial works, presumably lest
they “confuse” curious readers, so it is fortunate that I had purchased
mine a couple of years earlier. These parallels with George Orwell’s
1984 are really quite striking, and the “Iron Curtain Over America”
that Beaty had warned about in his 1951 book of that title seems
much closer to becoming a full reality.

Various figures in the Holocaust Denial community have attempted

to mitigate this informational blacklist, and Dr. Rudolf some time ago
established a website HolocaustHandbooks.com, which allows a
large number of the key volumes to be purchased or easily read on-
line in a variety of different formats. But the growing censorship by
Amazon, Google, and other Internet monopolies greatly reduces the
likelihood that anyone will readily encounter the information.

Obviously, most supporters of the conventional Holocaust narrative

would prefer to win their battles on the level playing fields of analysis
rather than by utilizing economic or administrative means to
incapacitate their opponents. But I have seen little evidence that they
have enjoyed any serious success in this regard.
Aside from the various books by Lipstadt, which I found to be of poor
quality and quite unpersuasive, one of the most energetic Holocaust
supporters of the last couple of decades seems to have been
Michael Shermer, the editor of Skeptic magazine, who had earned
his degrees in psychology and the history of science.

In 1997, he published Why People Believe Weird Things, seeking to

debunk all sorts of irrational beliefs popular in certain circles, with the
book’s subtitle describing these as “pseudo-science” and
“superstition.” His cover text focused on ESP, alien abductions, and
witchcraft, but rebutting Holocaust Denial was the single largest
portion of that book, encompassing three full chapters. His
discussion of this latter subject was rather superficial, and he
probably undercut his credibility by grouping it together with his
debunking of the scientific reality of “race” as a similar right-wing
fallacy, one also long since disproved by mainstream scientists.
Regarding the latter issue, he went on to argue that the alleged
black-white differences claimed in works such as The Bell Curve by
Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray was entirely pseudo-
scientific nonsense, and he emphasized that book and similar ones
had been promoted by the same pro-Nazi groups who advocated
Holocaust Denial, with those two pernicious doctrines being closely
linked together. Shermer had recruited Harvard professor Stephen
Jay Gould to write the Foreword for his book and that raises serious
questions about his knowledge or his judgment since Gould is widely
regarded as one of the most notorious scientific frauds of the late
twentieth century.
In 2000, Shermer returned to the battle, publishing Denying History,
entirely focused on refuting Holocaust Denial. This time he recruited
Holocaust scholar Alex Grobman as his co-author and
acknowledged the generous financial support he had received from
various Jewish organizations. A large portion of the text seemed to
focus on the psychology and sociology of Holocaust Deniers, trying
to explain why people could believe in such patently absurd
nonsense. Indeed, so much space was devoted to those issues that
he was forced to entirely skip over the official reduction of the
Auschwitz body-count by 3 million just a few years earlier, thus
avoiding any need to explain why this large shift had had no impact
on the canonical Holocaust figure of Six Million.

Although various writers such as Shermer may have been

encouraged by generous financial subsidies to make fools of
themselves, their more violent allies on the extreme fringe have
probably had a greater impact on the Holocaust debate. Although
judicial and economic sanctions may deter the vast majority of
Holocaust Deniers from showing their face, extra-legal violence has
also often been deployed against those hardy souls who remain
stubbornly unbowed.

For example, during the 1980s the offices and warehouse storage
facilities of the IHR in Southern California were fire-bombed and
totally destroyed by Jewish militants. And although Canada has
traditionally had little political violence, in 1995 the large, ramshackle
house that served as the residence and business office of Canada’s
Ernst Zundel, one of the world’s leading publishers and distributers
of Holocaust Denial literature, was similarly fire-bombed and burned
to the ground. Zundel had already faced several criminal
prosecutions on charges of spreading “false news,” and eventually
served years in prison, before being deported back to his native
Germany, where he served additional imprisonment. Various other
prominent Holocaust Deniers have even faced threats of
assassination.

Most historians and other academic scholars are quiet souls, and
surely the looming threat of such serious terroristic violence must
have dissuaded many of them from involving themselves in such
obviously controversial issues. Meanwhile, relentless financial and
social pressure may gradually wear down both individuals and
organizations, causing them to eventually either abandon the field or
become far less active, with their places sometimes taken by
newcomers.

The year after the 9/11 attacks, the JHR ceased print publication.
The growth of the Internet was probably an important contributing
factor, and with the national focus shifting so sharply toward foreign
policy and the Middle East, its IHR parent organization became
much less active, while much of the ongoing debate in Revisionism
and Holocaust Denial shifted to various other online venues. But at
some point over the years, the JHR digitized many hundreds of its
articles and posted them on its website, providing over three million
words of generally very high-quality historical content.

Over the last couple of months, I have been repeatedly surprised to

discover that the historians associated with the IHR had long ago
published articles on topics quite parallel to some of my own. For
example, after I published an article on the Suvorov Hypothesis that
Germany’s Barbarossa attack had preempted Stalin’s planned attack
and conquest of Europe, someone informed me that a reviewer had
extensively discussed the same Suvorov book twenty years earlier in
an issue of JHR. I also discovered several pieces by CIA defector
Victor Marchetti, a important figure for JFK assassination
researchers, who had received little attention in the mainstream
media. There were also articles on the fate of the Israeli attack on
the USS Liberty, a topic almost entirely excluded from the
mainstream media.

Casually browsing some of the archives, I was quite impressed with

their quality, and since the archives were freely available for anyone
to republish, I went ahead and incorporated them, making the
millions of words of their Revisionist and Holocaust Denial content
much more conveniently available to interested readers. The
material is fully searchable, and also organized by Author, Topic, and
Time Period, with a few sample links included below:

The Journal of Historical Review, 1980-2002 Issues

Author Archives:

David Irving – 11 Articles

Arthur R. Butz – 15 Articles
Robert Faurisson – 47 Articles
James J. Martin – 13 Articles
Percy L. Greaves, Jr. – 8 Articles

Topic Archives:

Holocaust – 306 Articles

World War II – 201 Articles
Pearl Harbor – 15 Articles
USS Liberty – 3 Articles

So for those particularly interested in Holocaust Denial, well over a

million words of such discussion may now be conveniently available,
including works by many of the authors once so highly regarded by
the early editors of Reason magazine.
Secretive Holocaust Denial
The steadily growing economic and political power of organized
Jewish groups, backed by Hollywood image-making, eventually won
the visible war and crushed the Holocaust Denial movement in the
public arena, enforcing a particular historical narrative by criminal
prosecutions across most of Europe and severe social and economic
sanctions in America. But a stubborn underground resistance still
exists, with its size being difficult to estimate.

Although my interest in the Holocaust had always been rather

minimal, once the Internet came into being and my circle of friends
and acquaintances greatly expanded, the topic would very
occasionally come up. Over the years, a considerable number of
seemingly rational people at one time or another privately let slip
their extreme skepticism about various elements of the canonical
Holocaust narrative, and such doubts seemed to represent merely
the tip of the iceberg.

Every now and then someone in that category spoke a little too
freely or became a target for retaliation on a different matter, and our
media went into a feeding frenzy of Holocaust Denial accusations
and counter-accusations.

For example, during the impeachment battles of the late 1990s,

Clinton partisans believed that prominent liberal pundit Christopher
Hitchens had betrayed the personal confidences of presidential aide
Sidney Blumenthal, and journalist Edward Jay Epstein decided to
retaliate in kind, widely circulating a memo to the media accusing
Hitchens of secretly being a Holocaust Denier. He alleged that at a
1995 dinner gathering following a New Yorker anniversary
celebration, Hitchens had drunk a little too much wine and began
expounding to his table-mates that the Holocaust was simply a hoax.
Epstein backed his claim by saying he had been so shocked at such
statements that he had entered them into his personal diary. That
telling detail and the fact that most of the other witnesses seemed
suspiciously vague in their recollections persuaded me that Epstein
was probably being truthful. A bitter feud between Hitchens and
Epstein soon erupted.

In 2005 Hitchens denounced various opponents of Bush’s Iraq War

as anti-Semites, and in retaliation Alexander Cockburn published a
couple of Counterpunch columns resurrecting that 1999 controversy,
which is when I first discovered it. As a regular reader of
Counterpunch, I was intrigued and Googling around a bit, quickly
located media accounts of Epstein’s explicit accusations. Numerous
reports of the the incident still survive on the web, including one from
the NY Daily News as well as a portion of an MSNBC piece, and
although some of the more extensive ones have disappeared over
the last dozen years, the media text I remember reading in 2005 has
been preserved on the static HTML pages of several websites:

Epstein told MSNBC that Hitchens had misspoken himself on

the Holocaust on Feb. 12, 1995 – in fact, practically four years
ago – as the two of them, along with some other friends, were
dining in New York.

Epstein was so shocked, he says, and considered Hitchens

doubts so grave, that he went home and noted them in his diary!

According to the Epstein diary: “Once seated in a booth, and

freely sipping his free red wine, Hitchens advanced a theory
more revealing than anything going on at the Hudson theater.
His thesis, to the shock of everyone at the table, was that the
Holocaust was a fiction developed by a conspiracy of interests
bent on ‘criminalizing the German Nation'”

“He explained that no evidence of German mass murder had

ever been found – and what gruesome artifacts had been found
had been fabricated after the event,” Epstein confided to his
diary.

“What of the testimony of Nazi generals at Nuremberg about the

death camps,” he asked.
 Hitchens, according to the Epstein diary notation, explained “. . .
without missing a beat, that such admissions were obtained
under Anglo-American torture.” Epstein then asked, as noted in
his diary: “‘But what happened to the Jews in Europe?’ Hitch
shrugged and said, ‘Many were killed by local villagers when
they ran away, others died natural deaths, and the remainder
made it to Israel.”

After reading these interesting columns, I began noticing that

Cockburn himself sometimes provided hints suggesting that his own
personal opinion on the Holocaust might be somewhat heretical,
including his cryptical remarks that huge hoaxes were actually much
easier to create and maintain than most people realized.

Just a few months after his attack on Hitchens, Cockburn published

a two-part article strongly arguing that Nobel Peace Prize Winner
Elie Wiesel, the most famous of all Holocaust survivors, was simply
a fraud. I had always been taught that Zyklon B was the deadly
agent used by the Nazis to exterminate the Jews of Auschwitz and I
had vaguely become aware that Holocaust Deniers absurdly claimed
the compound had instead been employed as a delousing agent in
the camps, aimed at preventing the spread of Typhus; but then the
following year, I was shocked to discover in one of Cockburn’s
columns that for decades the U.S. government had itself used
Zyklon B as the primary delousing agent for immigrants entering at
its Mexican border. I recall several other columns from the mid-
2000s dancing around Holocaust issues, but I now seem unable to
locate them within the Counterpunch archives.

My growing realization 15-odd years ago that substantial numbers of

knowledgeable people appeared to be secret adherents of Holocaust
Denial certainly reshaped my own unquestioning assumptions on
that subject. The occasional newspaper account of a Holocaust
Denier being discovered and then flayed and destroyed by the media
easily explained why the public positions on that subject remained so
unanimous. Being busy with other things, I don’t think I ever had a
conversation with anyone on that controversial subject or even so
much as an email exchange, but I did keep my eyes and ears open,
and huge doubts had certainly entered my mind many years before I
ever bothered reading my first book on the subject.

Meanwhile, the concurrent collapse of my belief in our official

American Pravda narrative on so many other controversial topics
played a major role as well. Once I realized to my dismay that I
couldn’t believe a word of what our media and political leaders said
about major events in the here and now, their credibility on
controversial happenings so long ago and far away entirely
disappeared. For these reasons, I had grown quite suspicious and
held a very open mind on Holocaust matters as I eventually began
reading books on both sides of the issue in the wake of the Reason
controversy.

The Future of Holocaust Denial

For many years following the end of World War II very little seems to
have been written about the momentous topic now known as the
Holocaust. But from the 1960s onward, interest surged so
enormously that many thousands or even tens of thousands of
volumes on that once-ignored event have been produced. Therefore,
the fifteen or twenty books that I have personally read is merely a
sliver of that total.

I have invested only a few weeks of reading and research in studying

this large and complex subject, and my knowledge is obviously
dwarfed by that of the considerable number of individuals who have
devoted many years or decades of their lives to such activity. For
these reasons, the analysis I have presented above must surely
contain numerous gaping errors that others could easily correct. But
sometimes a newcomer may notice things that deeply-involved
professionals might normally miss, and may also better understand
the perspectives of those who have likewise never paid much
attention to the subject.
Any conclusions I have drawn are obviously preliminary ones, and
the weight others should attach to these must absolutely reflect my
strictly amateur status. However, as an outsider exploring this
contentious topic I think it far more likely than not that the standard
Holocaust narrative is at least substantially false, and quite possibly,
almost entirely so.

Despite this situation, the powerful media focus in support of the

Holocaust over the last few decades has elevated it to a central
position in Western culture. I wouldn’t be surprised if it currently
occupies a larger place in the minds of most ordinary folk than does
the Second World War that encompassed it, and therefore
possesses greater apparent reality.

However, some forms of shared beliefs may be a mile wide but an

inch deep, and the casual assumptions of individuals who have
never actually investigated a given subject may rapidly change. Also,
the popular strength of doctrines that have long been maintained in
place by severe social and economic sanctions, often backed by
criminal penalties, may possibly be much weaker than anyone
realizes.

Until thirty years ago, Communist rule over the USSR and its
Warsaw Pact allies seemed absolutely permanent and unshakeable,
but the roots of that belief had totally rotted away, leaving behind
nothing more than a hollow facade. Then one day, a gust of wind
came along, and the entire gigantic structure collapsed. I wouldn’t be
surprised if our current Holocaust narrative eventually suffers that
same fate, perhaps with unfortunate consequences for those too
closely associated with having maintained it.