Smith, Bradley.  _Confessions of a Holocaust Revisionist, Part 1_.  Prima
Facie, Los Angeles, California, 1988.  pp. 39-42.  Bracketed comments
are Nizkor's.  As of October 12, 1996, this chapter is online at
.


I first came to [Irving] Rubin's attention through a story I wrote for
Prima Facie titled "Nazi 'Smiled' as Dog Ate Jew. [sic, no close quote]
The titles was taken verbatim from a headline that appeared over a
story in the Torrance Daily Breeze (17 October 84), Torrance being the
Los Angeles suburb that had hosted the arson-destruction of the
Institute [of Historical Review].  I thought the Breeze headline
disgusting on the face of it, and after I read the story I thought that
was loathsome as well.  I saw the headline and the story together as
exemplifying, in our own neighborhood so to say, the ignorance, bad
faith, and sadomasochistic imagery American editors and publishers
encourage in their reporting of survivor tales.

Following is the complete story printed by the Breeze, which noted that
it was a "news service report" originating in Hamburg, West Germany. 
That is, by the time I saw it, the story had been reprinted all over
the Western world.

	Accused Nazi Gestapo officer Harri Schulz looked on smiling as his
	German shepherd dog killed an elderly Jewish man in a Polish
	marketplace in the summer of 1942, an American woman told a
	Hamburg court Tuesday.
	
	Rita Ledor, a Polish-born Jew now living in San Antonio, Texas,
	said the old man had been dragged to the marketplace when he was
	found hiding from German officials in the Jewish ghetto of
	awierce in Nazi-occupied Poland.
	
	"The old man lay screaming on the ground.  Next to him Harri
	Schulz stood and watched as his German shepherd dog ate him
	alive," Ledor said.
	
	Schultz [sic], 70, is accused of murdering seven people in the
	Zawierce ghetto and helping deport 5,000 to the Auschwitz death
	camp in 1942-43.
	
	He has denied the charges and said he worked only for the Nazi
	border police in occupied Poland.

Granted, this was a small story published in an insignificant suburban
daily, but I felt disgusted by the way the Breeze had handled it.
Breeze editors had had access to the work of the Institute for seven
years by then.  The offices of the two publishing companies were within
spitting distance of each other, yet the Breeze was unable to handle
this small story about Jews and a German with even a modicum of
professionalism or decency.  It was as if the Breeze editor responsible
for printing the story with such mock objectivity had been so
dehumanized by 40 years of Holocaust hate propaganda that in his mind's
eye he was unable to see the scene his story depicted.  I decided to
take a look at it in print.

For example, didn't that editor want to consider what size that bloody
Nazi dog was and what size the old Jew was?  Wouldn't that information
have some bearing on the credibility of the accusation made by the old
survivor from San Antonio?  Let's say the dog was an 80-pounder --
hell, let's say it was a 100-pounder!  Now, let's say the elderly Jew
was small and frail, maybe only a 100-pounder himself.  Is that fair? 
Is it reasonable?  With respect to the elderly Jew and the Nazi dog
then, the first question we want to ask ourselves is this one:  How
much of the one could the other really eat?  There aren't a lot of hard
facts to go on.  There oftentimes are not when Jewish survivors make
accusations against Germans.  So I had to go with what there was, just
like the Breeze editor did.  Through the force of my imagination I put
myself in the place of that great bloody Nazi dog.  It took a little
concentration, but I was treating with an accusation of murder most
foul, a scene flushed with the imagery of sadomasochistic brutality,
and a claim of innocence by the accused party.  I figured it was worth
my time.

My technique was to begin by identifying what I share in common with a
German shepherd Nazi dog.  I am a carnivorous being, for example, just
as German sheperd dogs are, regardless of their political affiliation.
A great-grandfather, or a great-great-grandfather, carried the name of
von Shmeeter [sic] so I am at least part German, again like the bloody
dog in the Breeze story.  At the National Writer's Union Conference a
few months earlier in New York I had been labeled an animal (Nazi
swine) for expressing disbelief in the gas chamber stories, which is
what every other bloody dog is labeled.  Oh, we had plenty in common,
that dog and me.  All that was left to do then was to thrust myself
imaginatively into the form of a bloody ferocious Hitlerian hound ready
to obey every whim, no matter how disgusting, of my German Nazi master,
Harri Schulz.

It wasn't long, in my mind's eye, before I was able to see an image of
myself there at my master's side, salivating at the sight of the
elderly Jew.  I could hear Harri's guttural German voice ordering me to
eat the old man "alive."  I leaped to it like any bloody Nazi dog
would.  The first 10 or 15 pounds slid down real smooth.  I paused to
gulp a little air but my Nazi master ordered me to get on with it.  I
gobbled down another five pounds or so, but the bloom was definitely
off the rose.  I gazed up at Harri, pleading for a little common sense,
but instead I saw a fury gathering in his bloody German face.  So,
calling up a final tremendous surge of demonic Nazi dog power from deep
within my dog heart, I tossed down four or five more pounds of my
victim, but that finished it for me.  Twenty-five pounds of the old
fellow down the chute, my master Harri Schulz petting my neck, urging
me on -- those Nazis never did know when enough was enoguh -- but I was
ready to chuck up the whole bloody mess.  I was ready to tell Harri to
shove it along. Don't get me wrong, I would have obeyed his command if
only I could have -- you know how we German bloody dogs are -- but I
was at my dog limit.  I'd rather have gone straight to Nazi dog-hell
than contemplate eating _55 more pounds_ of that old man.  Let Harri
eat it himself, the Nazi....!  That's how I felt about it.

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