The Holocaust Historiography Project

From the editor

Theodore J. O’Keefe

This issue of The Journal, the first of Volume 10, signals the start of a stepped-up offensive against the foes of historical truth. While two of our European contributors, IHR editorial adviser Carlo Mattogno and Spanish Revisionist Enrique Aynat, continue the assault on the Auschwitz front, William Grimstad announces the opening of a vital new campaign in his article on the implications of the death of Communism.

Mattogno’s devastating examination of the relationship between the “memoirs” of Dr. Miklos Nyiszli and Filip Müller, and the gross discrepancies between these two works and the documented realities of Auschwitz-Birkenau, is not just another debunking of dubious “eyewitnesses,” although it would be of value were it no more than that. As Aynats timely piece demonstrates, Filip Müller, who played a key role in Claude Lanzmann’s pseudo-documentary Shoah, is regarded by Exterminationist authorities at Auschwitz as the key surviving witness to the alleged “Judeocide” there. Two more untrustworthy survivors, whose false testimony helped to send Germans to their deaths following the war, fall victim to Mattogno’s implacable analysis (one of them, Ada Bimko, who now calls herself Hadassah Rosensaft, is currently chair of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Archives and Library Committee!).

Journalist William Grimstad makes good his Establisment colleagues' failure by addressing the stunning implications of the collapse of the Communist system in the USSR and its former satellites. He further suggests avenues of inquiry for Revisionists into the unanswered questions and unsolved mysteries which surround the bloody three-quarter century of Soviet Communism. Unearthing the real history of Bolshevism — its antecedents, its secret supporters, its still veiled crimes, and its possible reverberations in the future — offers a new opportunity, indeed a pressing new duty, for Revisionists: the Establishment has too much interest in keeping its own decades-old skeletons hidden away to risk opening the door to historical truth.

Then Dr. James Martin, the dean of American Revisionist scholarship, confronts Paul Fussell’s controversial, sometimes useful, sometimes maddening War Time, the Ivy League academic and World-War-II combat veteran’s attempt to determine what the war was really like for the Americans and Englishmen who fought it. Martin’s sweeping, acidulous, and often hilarious survey of the actual intellectual and psychological underpinnings of the combat and the home fronts is more than a review, it’s a seminar — and it trashes the idea of the Big One as the Good One once and for all.

Reviewer Thomas Jackson takes a hard look at IHR’s latest book offering, Hiroshiman Akira Kohchi’s gripping Why I Survived the A-Bomb, and mostly likes what he sees. Grimstad sizes up a most welcome and unexpected video, in which the BBC lays the blame for the Pearl Harbor debacle squarely on the head of FDR: proper attention to the work of Revisionist giants who came before might have spared this impressive production some missteps, the reviewer believes. Finally, Paul Grubach examines another popular work, Jonathan Kaufman’s mass-market study of the unraveling of the black- Jewish civil rights alliance, and takes issue with one of the book’s central theses.

Besides Aynat’s currently very relevant report from Auschwitz (his account of the Auschwitz Museum director’s stupefaction at the news that one of his chief proteges has helped destroy the fake “confessions” of Rudolf Höss is priceless), “Historical News and Comment” focuses on things German. Otto Ernst Remer, a confidante of Adolf Hitler after his troops put down the abortive Twentieth of July plot in Berlin, shares numerous insights and opinions on Hitler’s policies in war and peace, as well as candid glimpses of the Fuhrer’s much misrepresented private life. Remer, a highly decorated combat veteran who ended the war as a brigadier general, has been a prescient exception to much of the German nationalist right by his willingness to cooperate with the Soviet Union to secure a united Germany, and in this interview, given privately during IHR’s Eighth International Revisionist conference two years ago, he speaks frankly on the Soviet past and the German future.

Dr. Alfred Schickel, one of West Germany’s leading Revisionist scholars, then receives his due in a mock scolding or diatribe from one of his colleagues, his fellow Sudeten German Dr. Heinz Nawratil. The happy occasion of Dr. Nawratil’s objurgation was the award to Dr. Schickel of one of the Bundesrepublik’s highest civilian honors: favorable breezes are blowing in our favor, and seem to be picking up strength.

Last but not least, IHR editorial adviser and frequent contributor Mark Weber reports on a rare, frank interview with Alois Brunner, billed in today’s headlines as “Nazi war criminal number one.” Adolf Eichmann’s former subordinate, presently in exile in Damascus, sets the record straight on Germany’s wartime Jewish policy as well as on certain statements wrongly attributed to him by the press And the revisionist onslaught continues, hard fought but inexorable, on more than one front.