This attempt to give meaning to the absence of a specific statement is reminiscent of an incident that occurred during the trial of Adolf Eichmann when Pastor Heinrich Gruber, a Protestant minister, appeared as a witness. During the war he had repeatedly attempted to persuade Eichmann to ameliorate the treatment of the Jews. He had asked that unleavened bread be sent to Hungarian Jews for Passover and had traveled to Switzerland to urge his Christian friends to obtain immigration visas and entry permits for Jews. He even tried to visit the concentration camp at Gurs in southern France, where Jews were living in horrendous conditions. He was incarcerated in a concentration camp for his efforts. At his trial Eichmann tried to prove that his behavior during the war had been acceptable to the German public, arguing that no one had “reproached” him for anything in the performance of his duties. “Not even Pastor Gruber claims to have done so.” Eichmann acknowledged that Gruber had sought alleviation of Jewish suffering but had “not actually object[ed] to the very performance of my duties as such.”43
Eichmann and Butz used the same tangled kind of thinking to try to make a situation appear to be other than it was. Eichmann argued that because the pastor had not specifically said “Stop the extermination,” he approved of it. So, too, Butz contended that because the ICRC report did not explicitly mention extermination in relation to “transfer to Auschwitz,” those words meant nothing sinister.
Butz’s treatment of the ICRC report was a prime example of how he tried to play both ends against the middle, claiming that the ICRC officials had been duped while at the same time citing their statement to prove that nothing sinister happened at Auschwitz. As with his treatment of the media, such internal contradictions are standard elements of his methodology. In fact, it is possible for a portion of an individual’s testimony or a particular document to contain errors while other portions are correct. Witnesses in a court of law often differ on the details surrounding an event but agree on the essential element. It is axiomatic among attorneys, prosecutors, and judges that human memory is notoriously bad on issues of dimensions and precise numbers but very reliable on the central event. Nevertheless, one of the deniers’ favorite tactics is to charge that if a defendant errs in one portion of his testimony, then all of it must be dismissed as false.
But Butz engaged in a different tactic in relation to both the media and the ICRC. He was not declaring that they had made occasional errors but that they had to be rejected in their entirety as factual sources because they themselves constituted “vast lie machine[s]” and political pawns. And then he tried to use both these institutions as reliable judges of what happened. Butz cannot have it both ways: Either they were telling the truth about the essential elements or they were not. It cannot be logically argued that when the ICRC spoke of “extermination” it was speaking as a political pawn or a victim of the hoax, but when it spoke of “transfer to Auschwitz” it was indicating that there was no Holocaust.
Butz advanced no independent source of evidence to corroborate his conclusions. Scholars in any field (including electrical engineering), look for data to verify their conclusions. Deniers consistently ignore existing evidence that contradicts their claims. Many years ago Saint Anselm, a prominent figure in the medieval church, spoke of “faith in search of reason.” Such is the work of the deniers. Their faith that the Holocaust did not happen leads them to shape reason, facts, and history for their own purposes.
Butz could not conclude his attempt to create his hoax theory without addressing the question of the “missing” Jews. What happened to the Jews whose immediate family say they were killed? He proposed various explanations but offered no proof to support them. First, he scattered these Jews in different places—most, he claimed, throughout the Soviet Union.44 In addition, at least fifty-thousand entered the United States. These phantom Jews settled in New York City, where they were able to avoid detection because there were already millions of Jews. Who “would have noticed a hundred thousand more?”45
What, then, about all the “survivors” who claimed that their immediate families had been killed? Butz suggested that they may have well been lying and that others may not have been lying but mistaken in thinking their families had been murdered when in fact they were really alive.46 Where then had they gone? They survived the war but did “not reestablish contact with [their] prewar relatives.”47 While some survivors may have been forbidden by the Soviet Union from contacting their families, Butz offered “a more plausible motivation”: Many of these survivors were in marriages that were “held together by purely social and economic constraints.”48 Those constraints were dissolved by the war. In the postwar period these “lonely wives and husbands” found other partners and established relationships that were “more valuable” than their previous ones.49 Abandoning their spouses, children, and other relatives, they started a new life, becoming part of the hoax in order to justify their decision. (This casual explanation of why these people deserted their families could be dismissed as amusing were the topic not so serious.)
Obviously aware that this could not account for even a fraction of the people who are missing, Butz expanded on how this part of the hoax operated. One person was reported missing by a spouse, children, parents, siblings, and in-laws. Consequently one Jew was repeatedly counted as a victim. “The possibilities for accounting for missing Jews in this way are practically boundless.”50 Assuring readers of the credibility of this thesis, Butz observed that he too had “lost contact with a great many former friends and acquaintances but I assume that nearly all are still alive.”51 Even by Butz’s own standards of what happened to the Jews—they were forcibly moved from their homes, placed in ghettos, incarcerated in work camps, separated from their families, and forced to live under such difficult circumstances that one million died—such a statement was casual and callous. Given the reality of what did happen, it was far more than that.
Every author aspires to some form of immortality, hoping that his or her work will continue to speak beyond the limits of the years. Butz has achieved that. His conclusions are posted on numerous computer bulletin boards, including both mainstream ones as well as those associated with the Klan and neo-Nazis. Armed vigilante groups cite Butz’s conclusions to legitimate their antisemitism.52 Fascists, racists, and radical extremists all weave his conclusions into their worldview. Together with such other infamous works as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, it will serve as a standard against which other implausible and prejudicial theories will be measured.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Institute for Historical Review
Late in the summer of 1979 on the campus of a private technical school near Los Angeles Airport, a relatively obscure organization, the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), convened the first Revisionist Convention. At that time the IHR, which had been founded the previous year, had garnered little publicity. Most people who were aware of its existence dismissed it as a conglomeration of Holocaust deniers, neo-Nazis, philo-Germans, right-wing extremists, antisemites, racists, and conspiracy theorists. At the meeting the director of the institute, a man known to those gathered there as Lewis Brandon, announced that the IHR would pay a reward of fifty thousand dollars to anyone who “could prove that the Nazis operated gas-chambers to exterminate Jews during World War II.” Brandon, whose real name (it would soon be learned) was William David McCalden, subsequently admitted that the offer was never a serious endeavor but was designed as the linchpin of the institute’s publicity-seeking campaign: “The reward was a gimmick to attract publicity.” McCalden boasted to readers of the IHR’s journal, the Journal of Historical Review, that the plan was a great success. It generated newspaper clippings that could be measured in “vertical inches.” McCalden’s enthusiasm notwithstanding, the stunt actually ended up costing the IHR dearly.1
McCalden, who in addition to Lewis Brandon used a series of other pseudonyms, including Sondra Ross, David Berg, Julius Finkelstein, and David Stanford, was born in 1951 in Belfast, Northern
Ireland, where he attended grade school and high school.2 He then received a teaching certificate from the University of London. He was known in England for his neofascist and extremist involvements. A former officer of England’s right-wing extremist party, the National Front, McCalden edited antisemitic and racist publications in England prior to coming to the United States. An admitted racist, McCalden was denied membership in the English National Union of Journalists because of what was termed his “racist politics.” When he appealed the union’s decision, McCalden acknowledged that he believed in writing that encouraged “race discrimination” and called himself a “racialist.”3 He claimed to have been converted to Holocaust denial by Richard Harwood’s Did Six Million Really Die? In 1978 he moved to California, where he initially worked for the antisemitic journal the American Mercury. According to McCalden, when he saw that the magazine and everything associated with it were moribund, he helped found the IHR to spread the gospel of Holocaust denial.4 He served as IHR director from 1978 until 1981.1*
For the first year after the reward was announced the media ignored it and virtually everything else associated with the IHR. McCalden decided that in order to generate publicity, which was the real aim of the “contest,” letters should be sent to a number of well-known survivors challenging them to prove that Jews had been gassed in Auschwitz and offering them a reward of fifty thousand dollars if they could do so.5 The survivors received an application form for the contest and a list of the rules,6 which stipulated that claimants were to attend the second Revisionist Convention at their own expense to present their evidence. The decision of a tribunal of experts—to be named by the IHR to determine the validity of the testimony and evaluate the evidence presented—would be final. Claimants were asked for their ethnic origins, the dates of their internment in any concentration camp, and the exact date and location of any gassing operations they witnessed. In addition they were to describe fully all the mechanics involved in the gassing process they witnessed, and to provide any “forensic evidence” that would support their claim, including diaries they kept or photographs they took.7
One of the challenges was sent to Mel Mermelstein, a survivor of Auschwitz whose mother and sisters had been gassed there and whose father and brother were killed at a subcamp of Auschwitz called Jaworzno. Mermelstein, a resident of Long Beach, California, had come to the IHR’s attention because he had written letters to various newspapers, including the Jerusalem Post, decrying the institute and its activities. In its bulletin the IHR published an open letter to Mermelstein, accusing him of “peddling the extermination hoax.” McCalden also sent him a letter challenging him to participate in the contest. The IHR director demanded a speedy response and warned Mermelstein that if none was received the IHR would draw its “own conclusions” and publicize his refusal to participate in the contest in the media.8 The implication was clear: Refusal to participate would be interpreted by the IHR as an inability to substantiate the Holocaust as fact.
Mermelstein accepted the challenge.2* Within the month he sent the IHR a notarized declaration of his experiences at Auschwitz, along with additional names of other eyewitnesses and scientific witnesses who could be made available to the tribunal judging the matter. In his letter Mermelstein warned that if he received no response by January 20, 1981, he would institute civil proceedings to enforce the contract. On January 26, 1981, Mermelstein’s lawyer again asked the IHR for a “speedy resolution” of the matter. The ultimate resolution of what would become known as the Mermelstein case was anything but speedy.3*
McCalden informed Mermelstein that Simon Wiesenthal had also filed a claim and that the IHR would deal with his application first.9 According to Wiesenthal he had been offered fifty thousand dollars if he could prove that at least one Jew had been gassed in a concentration camp and twenty-five thousand dollars if he could prove that the Diary of Anne Frank was authentic. Wiesenthal agreed to participate, which for the IHR constituted a publicity coup. In April 1981, in a letter to subscribers of the Journal of Historical Review, McCalden acknowledged that the contest was a trap into which they had hoped some “naive zealot” would walk. He joyfully proclaimed that, in Wiesenthal, they had attracted the “most eminently suitable mouse.”10 What McCalden did not tell subscribers was that the “mouse” had already extricated himself from the trap.
Wiesenthal had proposed that a judge of the California Supreme Court preside over the case. The IHR rejected this proposal and insisted on its right to designate its own tribunal to judge the proof. On March 4, 1981, Wiesenthal informed “Brandon” that he was withdrawing because he believed the IHR judges would be biased. In a signed statement Wiesenthal explained that he was declining because he would not participate in an effort in which one party served as both prosecutor and judge.11 Wiesenthal’s suspicions were proved valid when Tom Marcellus, McCalden’s successor as IHR director, was deposed by Mermelstein’s lawyer. The lawyer asked Marcellus who would be selected to sit on the tribunal the IHR had promised to convene to hear the evidence. He suggested that appropriate members would be Robert Faurisson, Arthur Butz, and Ditleib Felderer. All three were members of the editorial advisory board of the Journal of Historical Review. Butz had already made his mark with his The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. At the time of the Mermelstein case, Faurisson had already been convicted, put on probation, fined, and ordered to pay damages by a French court for the libel of denying the fact of the Holocaust. Ditleib Felderer, an Austrian-born resident of Sweden who claims to be a Jew, published a vitriolic antisemitic publication, Jewish Information Bulletin, which, in contrast to the Journal of Historical Review, did not even try to camouflage its antisemitic diatribes under a respectable veneer.4* In 1983 he was sentenced to ten months in prison for disseminating hate material. According to the prosecutor in the case, Felderer had sent leaders of the European Jewish community mailings that contained pieces of fat and locks of hair with a letter asking them if they could identify the contents as Hungarian Jews gassed at Auschwitz.12
Undeterred by such considerations about the “judges” on February 19, 1981, Mermelstein filed a lawsuit against the IHR, Carto, and Brandon/McCalden. During pretrial hearings the presiding judge, Thomas T. Johnson, took judicial notice of the fact that Jews had been gassed to death in Auschwitz, ruling that it was not “subject to dispute” but was “simply a fact.” After many lengthy delays Mermelstein won his case. In July 1985 the Los Angeles Superior Court ordered the IHR to pay Mermelstein ninety thousand dollars, which included the fifty-thousand-dollar reward plus forty thousand dollars for pain and suffering. The defendants also agreed to sign a letter of apology to Mermelstein for the emotional distress they had caused him and all other Auschwitz survivors. The apology contained a verbatim repetition of the judicial notice regarding Auschwitz.13 (The Mermelstein case did not end there. On August 7, 1985, in the course of a radio interview, Mermelstein said that the IHR defendants had signed the judicial notice. On August 6, 1986, one day before the statute of limitations expired, Willis Carto and the IHR filed suit against Mermelstein, claiming that he had defamed them in the interview. A year and a half later the defendants voluntarily dismissed the suit. Mermelstein has subsequently filed action against the IHR and Carto for malicious prosecution. That case remains in litigation.14) Despite the financial loss and public ridicule the Mermelstein case caused the IHR, there were those in the organization’s leadership who continued to maintain that, given the press coverage generated by the contest, it succeeded.
But the Mermelstein case was not the IHR’s only public imbroglio during its early years. It rented the University of California’s Lake Arrowhead Conference Center for its 1981 meeting. Apparently, when the IHR applied for use of the facility, the university official in charge of renting the conference center assumed that the IHR was a legitimate scholarly group. Despite vigorous protests by faculty and students about the inappropriate nature of the use of a University of California building, the administration—with the support of G
ov. Jerry Brown—claimed it could not legally break the contract. When the university learned that McCalden had used his Brandon pseudonym to sign the contract, it charged that “deception was involved” and that this constituted legitimate grounds for cancellation of its agreement with the IHR. At approximately the same time that the university was trying to find a way to break its contract, McCalden had written a letter to IHR supporters acknowledging that the entire gas chamber contest was a public relations maneuver. The university also justified its decision to cancel by citing McCalden’s admission that the contest was a “publicity gimmick.”15
In many respects this case represented a detour from the IHR’s primary objective. The creation of the IHR had the same objective as Arthur Butz’s The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: to move denial from the lunatic fringe of racial and antisemitic extremism to the realm of academic respectability. The IHR was designed to win scholarly acceptance for deniers, which is why it was so anxious to use the University of California facility. Although the IHR and its followers proclaim that Holocaust denial is heir to a genuine intellectual legacy,16 analysis of the institute, its publications and activities, and the people most closely associated with it throws into stark relief the fact that, notwithstanding its claims to intellectual legitimacy, the IHR is part of a continuum of extreme antisemitism and racism. Were its publications and activities not enveloped in the aura of research, they would be dismissed out of hand for what they truly are: fanatical expressions of neo-Nazism. The institute’s anti-Israel, racist, and antisemitic attitude is reflected in virtually all its activities. The organizational form the IHR adopted—a research institute—and its outward trappings may have been innovative but its agenda was not: to rehabilitate national socialism, inculcate antisemitism and racism, and oppose democracy.
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