A Response to Mark Weber
The following article is copyright 1997 by
The
Haworth Press, Binghamton, New York. It was published in
Public & Access Services Quarterly, Vol. 2 (3),
1997, pages 49-58. Article copies available from The Haworth Document Delivery Service:
1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: getinfo@haworth.com
A Response to Mark Weber
I had hesitated to respond to Mr. Weber's
letter,
because pulling people into a debate is what the Holocaust revisionists desire. They crave
legitimacy and seek to be thought of as "the other side" of a historical debate, when
in reality there is no debate over the actuality of the Holocaust. Nevertheless, I
have chosen to respond to Mr. Weber's assertions not because I want to debate him, but in order
to show the reader how Holocaust deniers manipulate the truth to serve their own ideological
agenda.
Mr. Weber, who is
editor of the Journal of Historical Review (hereafter JHR) and, since
Mar. 1995, Director of the
Institute for Historical Review
(IHR), is partially correct in his first point, regarding the use of the lowercase h.
My co-authors and I should not have made the sweeping generalization that revisionists
"always" spell Holocaust with a small h. The point we were trying to
make was that spelling Holocaust with a lowercase h is just one example of the
many pejorative ways revisionists discuss that event. For example, both
Michael Hoffman, II
and Charles E. Weber
consistently enclose the word Holocaust in quotation marks, showing their contempt for the
term.[1] Each of these
writers has also used the lowercase h, and Hoffman even described
Canadian denier Ernst
Zundel as "a true holocaust survivor."[2] Revisionist Doug Collins has also used the
lowercase h on more than one occasion.[3] Readers with Internet
access need only
check the USENET newsgroup alt.revisionism
to read some of the most vile, anti-Semitic messages concerning the Holocaust and Jews.
Mr. Weber's own JHR has even published an article by British revisionist David Irving where he used the
trademark symbol (TM) next to the word Holocaust.[4] Even more
repulsive are the activities of Swedish denier
Ditlieb Felderer, a one-time
member of the JHR editorial advisory committee.
According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), "
Felderer has been the source
of mailings to leaders to European Jewish communities containing locks of hair and pieces of fat
with enclosed letters asking recipients if they could identify the contents as Hungarian Jews
gassed in
Auschwitz."[5]
In June 1981, the French magazine Hara Kiri ran a fictitious advertisement for
Le pyjama Auschwitz, showing thin women modeling striped, Auschwitz-type
pajamas.[6] Thus, the effect
is the same: repeatedly being insensitive to, and
making fun of, the Holocaust, whether by using quotation marks, or upper- or lowercase letters.
Mr. Weber's assertion that the "
IHR is not, and never has been,
under the 'institutional control of the ultra-right
Liberty Lobby'"
clearly bends the truth. The IHR
was controlled and financed by
Willis A. Carto, who also controlled the Liberty Lobby and the
Legion for the Survival of Freedom(LSF).
Carto and the
IHR were together from 1978 until
mid-1993, when they broke over alleged financial improprieties involving a bequest to the LSF
from Jean Farrel, the
granddaughter of Thomas Edison.[7] In order to avoid charges of
bias or misrepresentation concerning the relationship of
Carto to the IHR, what follows are statements of
then-IHR Director
Thomas
J. Marcellus during the court battle:
I was hired as assistant director, and, since 1981 have served as director of the
Institute for Historical Review
(hereafter IHR) and The Noontide Press (hereafter NOONTIDE), the two names under which the LEGION [for the Survival of
Freedom] does business.... I will show how
CARTO has used and abused the
LEGION BOARD, officers and employees, using them as puppets to accomplish his own
personal ambitions....
In July 1993 CARTO
transferred $100,000 from the LEGION's account in Switzerland to
Liberty Lobby.[8]
The JHR has even referred to "IHR founder
Willis Carto."[9] Mr.
Weber himself described the
relationship between Carto
and the IHR during the legal
battle between the two parties:
For years Carto used
deceit and fraud to maintain illicit control of the IHR (and Noontide
Press), and its parent corporation, the "Legion for the Survival of Freedom, Inc."
Carto was
neither an employee, an officer, nor a director of the IHR or the
LSF....
No longer able to control it, Carto is now acting as a vengeful
enemy of the IHR.[10]
It is clear that Willis
Carto, who runs the Liberty Lobby, controlled
the IHR's parent
corporation (the LSF) and thus the IHR itself, until the break in
mid-1993. By way of background, let me point out that the article that
Weber objects to was based on
an MLS project prepared in the Fall of 1992, and which was revised for publication in the Spring
of 1993; Public & Access Services Quarterly finally
published it in early 1995.
Thus, when the article was written,
Willis Carto was fully in control of the IHR, even though Mr.
Weber now tries to
downplay their joint history.
Although Mr. Weber
claims that "Noontide Press is not a subsidiary of the
IHR," and that the
JHR "has never been published by 'IHR/Noontide,'" the two bodies are
virtually indistinguishable from one another, aside from the fact that they have separate post
office boxes in Newport Beach, California. Again, from Marcellus:
Since 1986 I have been the director of the Noontide Press and
Institute for Historical Review, the
company names under which the
Legion does business.[11]
In a letter, written on IHR
letterhead, to the editor of
Liberty Lobby's tabloid
The
Spotlightcomplaining about recent articles
attacking the IHR, Marcellus and Weber wrote:
Nor is the Noontide/IHR inventory being "looted" by
"conspirators who seized control of the
IHR"
as the item claims. The current Great Noontide Book Sale is our fourth such sale since
1988.[12]
So although the JHR is technically published by the
IHR, even Weber has referred to the IHR and Noontide together.
Mr. Weber also claims
that "Holocaust revisionists do not 'deny' the terrible persecution and suffering of Europe's
Jews during the Second World War." This is typical of present-day revisionists. They say:
some Jews died as a result of the War, but there was no systematic attempt at genocide. Although
not every revisionist holds the same exact views, here are just a few revisionist claims from the
hundreds of books and articles available:
1. There were no homicidal gas chambers: "What is clear from any careful technical
analysis of the supposed gas chambers for mass extermination is that the 'Holocaust' story is
absurd."[13]
2. Zyklon-B was only used to kill lice: "The purpose of the delousing chambers was to
save lives--and that is not denied except by the most passionate Exterminationist. No doubt,
many hundreds of thousands of people, possibly millions, including countless Jews, owe their
lives to these chambers and the German technology based upon
Zyklon-B."[14]
3. Jews and their sympathizers perpetuate the Holocaust hoax for sympathy and reparations:
the title of a book by Austin
App accurately sums up this view The Six Million Swindle: Blackmailing the
German People for Hard Marks With Fabricated Corpses.[15]
4. The Nuremberg trials were a sham,
where confessions were coerced: "The postwar Nuremberg trials were politically motivated
proceedings meant more to discredit the leaders of a defeated regime than to establish truth....
The fact that the Holocaust story must rely so heavily on highly dubious testimony evidence and
trials staged in a historically unparalleled atmosphere of hysteria, intimidation and propaganda
demonstrates its inherent weakness."[16]
5. The Jews were mistreated by Nazi Germany, but only thousands died (due to wartime
conditions), but nowhere near six million: "... the actual number of Jews who died in the
German concentration camps might well have been as low as 300,000 or as high as
600,000."[17]
6. Admiration for Adolf
Hitler: Ernst Zundel,
using a pseudonym, co-authored The Hitler We Loved and Why.[18]
Greg Raven, the associate
editor of the JHR, who became "chief executive officer and corporate
President" of the LSF in March 1995,[19] said on GEnie on Mar.
13, 1992:
I have no desire to get into any discussion about whether Jews are superior or inferior to
Gentiles, Arabs, etc. My only concern is in going after the facts. As such, I am not interested in
defending Adolf Hitler to my
dying breath. I will say, however, that he was a great man ... certainly greater than Churchill and FDR put
together, and possibly the greatest leader of our century, if not longer. This is not to say that he
was perfect, but he [was] about the best thing that could have happened to
Germany.[20]
Mr. Weber writes that my
co-authors and I misrepresented "the doctoral thesis of French scholar Henri Roques." He then
goes on to say that Hugh Trevor-Roper "lauded it as 'an entirely legitimate, scholarly and
responsible work of Quellenkritik [source critique] on a limited but important
subject.'" There are several points to make regarding this. First of all, Trevor-Roper wrote
this in a letter to Roques, not
in a published review; the letter was subsequently printed in the Sept./Oct. 1993
JHR. Secondly, Weber attempts to give the
impression that Trevor-Roper has endorsed both Roques and Holocaust
revisionism. Weber does not
quote from the rest of the letter, where Trevor-Roper said:
You argue that the elimination of Gerstein's evidence eliminates the alleged gas chambers at
Belzec; and your thesis suggests (though it does not explicitly state) that if the gas chambers at
Belzec disappear, the
others follow them into limbo. However, in your letter, you concede that this is not a necessary
consequence: you believe that the other did not exist, but you do not claim to have demonstrated
it.
t to argue the matter. It is a long time since I saw the evidence and I am
now too preoccupied (and too old) to immerse myself in the controversy....
... On the technical aspects cited by you in your thesis, and by Fred Leuchter, I am incompetent to
express a view. So there I must leave the matter--in suspense--only saying that I regard your
thesis as entirely legitimate and very interesting, and that I hope your appeal to the Conseil d'Etat
is upheld![21]
Mr. Weber also fails to
mention in his letter that Trevor-Roper's standing in the historical community has been
diminished ever since he proclaimed the "Hitler diaries" to be genuine back in
1983.[22] Try as he might,
though, Weber cannot change the fact
that the University of Nantes revoked the
doctorate of Roques, a
"retired agronomist and former leader (under the name of Henri Jalin) of the extreme-right
Phalange Francaise, which was outlawed in 1958,"[23] after it
became public that there were several irregularities regarding his dissertation, not the least of
which was the fact that it was revisionist.[24] Roques' thesis has been
described thusly:
Deliberately ignoring the testimonies of the deportees, the confessions of other SS (such as
the confession of Hoess, commandant
of Auschwitz from May 1940 until November 1943), the business correspondence of the firms
which constructed the great complex of Auschwitz II and furnished the Cyclon B
[sic], Roques
declared that Gerstein's confessions are "a masterpiece of mental construction intending to
prove the existence of homicidal gas chambers," since the confessions were made
spontaneously by an SS officer. The thesis being slanted to demonstrate that Gerstein was only a
mythomaniac and his testimony a fable, Roques draws the conclusion
that all construction crumbles and that "there are legitimate reasons to deny the existence
of homicidal gas chambers!"[25]
A declaration describing Roques' thesis as "a pseudo-textual critique, [which] joins in a
systematic campaign of misinformation led by the Nazi extreme right," and which "
reveals the absence of scientific investigation," was signed by over two hundred staff
members of the University of
Nantes.[26]
Although he claims that our article's characterization of the Mel Mermelstein case was
misleading, it is Mr. Weber
who misleads through omission when he says that Mermelstein's
"campaign against the IHR
came to a dramatic end on September 19, 1991, when his $11 million lawsuit against the IHR was dismissed in Los Angeles
Superior Court." In actuality, there was more than one Mermelstein case. Here
are the facts:
1. In July 1985, the IHR was
ordered to pay Mel
Mermelstein $90,000 by the L.A. Superior Court. The IHR was also forced to sign a letter
of apology to Mermelstein, which
contained recognition of the fact that Jews were gassed to death at Auschwitz. The letter was
signed on July 24, 1985, by G. G. Baumen (attorney for the LSF,
IHR, Noontide Press, and Elisabeth
Carto) and Mark F. Von Esch (attorney for Liberty Lobby and Willis Carto).[27]
2. In 1986, Carto and the
IHR sued Mermelstein for
defamation, after the latter gave a radio interview. The suit was dropped.[28]
3. Mermelstein
then filed suit against Carto
and the IHR for malicious
prosecution. This was the lawsuit that was dismissed by the L.A. Superior Court on Sept. 19,
1991. Mermelstein
appealed, and was rejected on Oct. 28, 1992.[29]
Mr. Weber attempted to
give the impression that the IHR
triumphed over Mr. Mermelstein, when
that is clearly only half of the story--although the
IHR won the last case, Mermelstein won the
first case, was paid $90,000, and received an apology.
Even though Paul
Rassinier, a one-time Communist and then Socialist, was a prisoner at both
Buchenwald and Dora for being a member of the
Resistance, he nevertheless became a Holocaust revisionist after the war. Although this seems
like an apparent contradiction, Aim‚ Bonifas has explained, referring to page numbers in
Rassinier's book The Lie of Ulysses, that of his 370 days
in Dora, "341 of them were
spent in a sheltered environment: 264 in the infirmary (Revier), thanks to his care
packages--he does not hesitate to admit it--and 77 days to the SS Master-Sergeant (pp. 163, 172,
177, 178). 'It was the good life,' he confesses (p. 177). In fact, he became a confidant of the
SS."[30] Rassinier blamed the excesses
that he witnessed in the camps on the kapos, not the SS. Thus, Mr. Weber should not use
Rassinier's time in the camps to try to legitimize his unfounded claims,
because Rassinier apparently did not
see, did not want to see, and/or did not want to admit seeing, anything that would damage the
reputation of the SS.
Mr. Weber cites the
"support of university professors" in his quest for legitimacy. He neglects to
mention that although Arthur Butz has a doctorate, it is
in electrical engineering, not history. Robert Faurisson, who is a
prot‚g‚ of Rassinier and has
been fined several times for revisionist statements, taught French literature, not history. Even David Irving, who has been
accused of distorting documents to serve his own purposes,[31] does not have a
graduate degree in history. Mr. Weber is one of the few
Holocaust revisionists who has actually been trained in history--he earned his M.A. in history
from Indiana University in 1977.[32]
It is clear from the above that Mr. Weber has ever-so-deftly
misrepresented the facts in his critique of my article, and has carefully omitted several key points
which contradict his assertions. Readers with World Wide Web access who would like to find
out more about how Holocaust deniers manipulate the truth, and read detailed rebuttals of their
arguments, are directed to the Nizkor Project, at the following URL:
<http://www.almanac.bc.ca>. [Nizkor's note: The preferred main address for the Nizkor Project
is now http://www.nizkor.org. The IHR's Web page is:
http://www.ihr.org/.
[
Index ]
Home ·
Site Map ·
What's New? ·
Search
Nizkor
© The Nizkor Project, 1991-2012
This site is intended for educational purposes to teach about the Holocaust and
to combat hatred.
Any statements or excerpts found on this site are for educational purposes only.
As part of these educational purposes, Nizkor may
include on this website materials, such as excerpts from the writings of racists and antisemites. Far from approving these writings, Nizkor condemns them and
provides them so that its readers can learn the nature and extent of hate and antisemitic discourse. Nizkor urges the readers of these pages to condemn racist
and hate speech in all of its forms and manifestations.
So Trevor-Roper feels that it is valid to investigate and question the validity of Kurt Gerstein's
statement, but he acknowledges that he is not competent to comment on specific revisionist
arguments concerning the gas chambers.