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 Gov. 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.
From the outset the IHR has camouflaged its actual goal by engaging in activities that typify a scholarly institution. It sponsors annual gatherings that are structured as academic convocations and publishes the Journal of Historical Review, which imitates the serious and highbrow language of academia. Though virtually all its activities are concerned with Holocaust denial, the institute depicts itself as engaged in a far broader and loftier quest. It claims that its goals are to align twentieth-century history with the facts and expose the historical totems that are manipulated by secret vested interests. Primary among them are myths about previous wars. Like virtually every denier before it, the IHR professed that it was motivated by no animus toward any other group but only by a “deep dedication to the cause of truth in history.”17 In response to the accusation that Holocaust deniers are intent on reclaiming national socialism’s reputation, the IHR protested that it was not interested in resurrecting any regime. Its interest was “rehabilitating the truth” because, unlike establishment historians, it was willing to confront the “shadowy suppressors” of historical truth.18 Only through the exposure of historical myths that have been imposed on the United States could the country be prevented from being “railroaded” into one conflagration after another, particularly in the Middle East.19 These remain the IHR’s claims; however, the reality is quite different.
Despite its claims to a total revision of all history, the IHR focuses almost exclusively on World War II and the Holocaust. It is, they claim, the “most distorted period” in history and the event most often used as a “historical club to bully public opinion.” David McCalden was explicit about precisely what it was public opinion was being bullied into believing. In a letter urging people to subscribe to the Journal of Historical Review, McCalden described it as a step that could not only save every American family hundreds of dollars in taxes but deliver the United States from the threat of a disastrous nuclear war. McCalden spelled out how a simple act of subscribing to a journal could accomplish these lofty goals:
Each year a foreign government literally steals millions of dollars from you and other U.S. taxpayers. This thief is the corrupt, bankrupt government of Israel and its army of paid and unpaid agents in the United States—particularly in Washington. And the theft is perpetrated primarily through the clever use of the Greatest Lie in all history—the lie of the “Holocaust.”20
(The Israel connection is a constant refrain in IHR material.)
For the IHR debunking the “so-called ‘Holocaust’ ” was far more than an act of rewriting the historical record—it had critical policy implications. Until the Holocaust was revealed to be a hoax, the future of the United States would not be secure. According to the IHR, exposing the truth about the Holocaust also exposes the secret group that controls much of America’s military and foreign policy. Relying on traditional antisemitic motifs, the IHR accused this “superwealthy” and “tiny segment” of the population of being unconcerned about the “damage and distortion” it caused the culture at large. This group—a thinly veiled reference to Jews—control the media and use it to flaunt the Holocaust as the main rationale for “America’s dog-like devotion to the illegal state of Israel.”21
Tom Marcellus, McCalden’s successor as IHR director, broadened this line of argument. The Holocaust lie not only served as a “justification” for the commission of genocide by Israel but also affected the rights of American citizens in their own country. Americans’ constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech was suppressed in order to protect the interests of “Israel-firsters.” But it was not just the United States that was threatened. The “very existence of Germany and the Western Culture” were also caught in the balance.22
Marcellus revealed another of the IHR’s true agenda items with his warning that acceptance of the Holocaust myth resulted in a radical degeneration of accepted standards of human behavior and a lowering of the “self-image of White people.” These racist tendencies, which the IHR has increasingly kept away from the public spotlight, are part of the extremist tradition to which it is heir.23
The IHR’s ideology can be directly linked to its founder and primary supporter, Willis A. Carto, who was also the founder and treasurer of the Liberty Lobby, a well-established ultra-right organization that has a direct connection with other antisemitic publications, including the American Mercury, Washington Observer Newsletter, and Noontide Press. Only the most superficial attempt has been made by either the IHR or any of these publications to camouflage the connection between them. In fact, at one point the IHR, Noontide Press, and the American Mercury all shared the same post-office box.24 This antisemitic network is known for its anti-Israel publications, many of which contain details of a “World Zionist conspiracy.” In some of them Israel is referred to as a “bastard state.”25
Carto was born in 1926 in Indiana. After serving in the army he attended college and then moved to San Francisco to work for a finance company as a debt collector. For a short while he was associated with the radical, right-wing John Birch Society, until he had a falling out with its founder, Robert Welch. According to a former editor at the Liberty Lobby, Carto’s antisemitic activities were too extreme even for Welch, a known antisemite, who personally fired him.26 In 1958 he organized a “pressure group for patriotism,” which eventually emerged as the Liberty Lobby. A former chairman of the Liberty Lobby’s Board of Policy acknowledged that by the 1980s its annual income was close to four million dollars. The lobby’s antisemitic, anti-Zionist newspaper, Spotlight, claims a circulation of more than 330,000. When it reached this goal in 1981 it celebrated by holding a gala reception at the National Press Club in Washington.
The Liberty Lobby has been described as so extreme that it is “estranged from even the fringes of the far right.”27 The investigative columnist Drew Pearson described Carto as a Hitler “fan” and the Liberty Lobby as “infiltrated by Nazis who revere the memory of Hitler.” The Wall Street Journal is also among those who have identified Carto and the Liberty Lobby as antisemitic.28
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) believes Carto to be the most important and powerful professional antisemite in the United States. According to the ADL, the Liberty Lobby stands at the helm of a major publishing and organizational complex that for more than two decades has propagated antisemitism and racism in the United States.29 The Wall Street Journal and the ADL are not alone in their assessment. When Carto and the Liberty Lobby sued the Wall Street Journal for calling them antisemites, the District Court for the District of Columbia ruled against them and concluded that it would be difficult to imagine a case in which the evidence of antisemitism was “more compelling.”30
Some of the strongest condemnations of Carto and the Liberty Lobby have come from conservative and right-wing political groups in the United States. Scott Stanley, the managing editor of American Opinion, the publication of the John Birch Society, believes Willis Carto responsible for preserving antisemitism as a movement in the United States. In 1981 William F. Buckley described the Liberty Lobby as “a hotbed of antisemitism” centered around the “mysterious” Carto, who “regularly poisons the wells of political discourse.”31 The conservative weekly Human Events condemned the Liberty Lobby as an organization that exploited racist and antisemitic sentiments and Carto as someone who has long maintained sympathy for Hitler’s Germany. Buckley’s National Review, which accused Carto of always having “his eyes on Jewry,” warned that it was not only Carto’s antisemitism that was dangerous but his philosophy of pure power, which was alien and fundamentally hostile to the American tradition.32 The conservative columnist R. Emmett Tyrell, Jr., editor in chief of the American Spectator, condemned the lobby as an organization that always attracted a “colorful collection of bigots and simpletons” who make an art of applying conspiracy theories to every problem that vexed the public.33 Not surprisingly Carto denied these charges. Examination of what he has written, said, and done, however, reveals otherwise.
Willis Carto’s political vision is encapsulated by three things: contempt and revulsion for Jews, a belief in the need for an absolutist government that would protect the “racial heritage” of the United States, and a conviction that there exists a conspiracy designed to bring dire harm to the Western world. The articles, journals, and books brought out by the Carto nexus of publications consistently focus on predictable themes: the ignoble Allied treatment of Nazi Germany; Jewish responsibility for the ills of the Western world; the grotesque misdeeds of the “bastard” state of Israel; and the existence of a conspiracy perpetrated by a “high elite,” consisting mainly of people with Jewish names, to control American foreign and financial policy. Jews besmirch Germany’s good name and support the Communists’ attempt to impose their system on the Western world. At the heart of every serious problem facing the United States—civil rights, energy, defense, racial integration—are Jews manipulating matters for their own benefit.
Nevertheless, the Jews are not Carto’s sole target. Carto believes that at the root of civilization’s problems are the “Jews and Negroes.”34 In 1955, in a letter to the racist author Earnest Sevier Cox, Carto bemoaned the fact that so few Americans were concerned about the “inevitable niggerfication of America.”35 Racial purity is the lens through which much of Carto’s view of the world is viewed. In 1962 he advocated a racial view of history and argued that racial equality would be easier to accept if there were “no Negroes around to destroy the concept.”36 Carto’s sentiments are reminiscent of the German right wing’s fear of “foreignization,” (überfremdung). In an attempt to protect the United States from what Carto considered the danger posed to it by African Americans, he organized the Joint Council for Repatriation, which was designed to return all blacks to Africa. Shortly before the creation of the Liberty Lobby in 1957 Carto predicted to Judge Tom P. Brady, a member of the Mississippi Supreme Court and founder of the anti-civil-rights White Citizens Council, that the lobby would be a tremendous asset to the repatriation scheme. In a fashion that would become typical of his organizational methodology, Carto was intent on keeping the link between the two secret: “You can see that there must never be an obvious connection between the two, for if there is, either would kill the other off.”37 But the Joint Council for Repatriation did not envision just the repatriation of African Americans. It also aimed to deliver the strongest imaginable blow to the power of organized Jewry.38 During World War II, Carto argued, it had been the Jews’ influence on American policy that was responsible for blinding the West to the benefits of an alliance with Hitler. Treacherous Jewish “propaganda and lies” had led to Hitler’s defeat, which for Carto constituted the “defeat of Europe. And of America.”
But for Carto the danger had not been limited to World War II: “If Satan himself had tried to create a permanent disintegration and force for the destruction of nations, he could have done no better than to invent the Jews.”39 In a memo Carto expressed it even more succinctly: The Jews were “Public Enemy No. I.”40
The essence of Carto’s political philosophy and his introduction to Holocaust denial can be traced to Imperium—The Philosophy of History and Politics, by Francis Parker Yockey. The book, dedicated to Adolf Hitler, preached that the future greatness of the West would be modeled on the German “revolution” of 1933. Yockey, who has been described by some researchers as “America’s Hitler,” was born in 1917 in Chicago. After attending five different colleges, he graduated from Notre Dame Law School.41 He enlisted in the army in 1942 and went AWOL for an extended period shortly thereafter. He was eventually given a medical discharge from the army in 1943 on the grounds that he suffered from “dementia praecox, paranoid type.” According to the army report, he revealed marked delusions of persecution, had auditory hallucinations, and involved prominent people in his delusional system.42
In 1945, after the war, he took a job as a legal researcher for the War Crimes Tribunal in Germany. He left that post in less than a year because of what he claimed was the tribunal’s unfair treatment of the Nazi leaders awaiting trial. He subsequently went to Ireland, where he wrote Imperium. In 1952 his passport was revoked in absentia by the State Department, and by 1954 he was identified as a U.S. agent for a neo-Nazi, Rudolph Aschenauer.43 After writing Imperium he traveled throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, and Egypt spreading its message. He was arrested in 1960 when he was discovered to be holding three different passports with three different names. (His suitcase had been lost by an airline company. When it was retrieved, airport officials opened it to discover the identity of its owner. Instead they found the passports.) While in prison awaiting trial, Yockey took a cyanide pill and committed suicide. His last visitor, less than a week earlier, was Carto.
In Imperium Yockey called for an absolute imperial system, an imperium of Western Aryan nations united by the principles of Hitlerian national socialism. Yockey envisaged a time when power would no longer be held by individuals and all enterprises would be under public control and ownership. The regime Yockey proposed envisioned the death knell of democracy. He called for an age of absolute politics in which elections would become old-fashioned until they ceased altogether.44
It is the book’s antisemitic ideology that harks back most directly to national socialism. “The Jew is spiritually worn out,” according to Yockey. “He can no longer develop. He can produce nothing in the sphere of thought or research. He lives solely with the idea of revenge on the nations of the white European-American race.”45 Obsessed with the power of the Jews, Yockey warned that they were bound to destroy the West. Imperium is filled with descriptions of conspiracies against both the West and the United States. It christened those orchestrating these conspiracies as the “Culture-Distorters.” Included in their ranks were racial and cultural misceganists, egalitarians, believers in human rights and participatory democracy, and “the rear-guard in the West of the fulfilled Arabian Culture, the Church-State-Nation-People-Race of the Jew.”46
In 1949 Yockey wrote the “Proclamation of London,” which, in addition to calling for the reinstatement of national socialism, advocated the expulsion of the Jews by the nations of Europe. (In a sworn deposition in 1979, in a Liberty Lobby lawsuit against the ADL, Carto acknowledged under oath that he agreed with the tenets of Yockey’s proclamation.47)
But Yockey went beyond even this most extreme antisemitic rhetoric. Twenty years prior to the formation of the IHR, Yockey laid out the essential elements of Holocaust denial. He attributed the myth of the Holocaust to the culture-distorters’ claim that six million Jews had been killed in European camps. Not only had they made this claim, Yockey charged, but they had woven a web of propaganda that was technically quite complete:
“Photographs” were supplied in millions of copies. Thousands of the people who had been killed published accounts of their experiences in these camps. Hundreds of thousands more made fortunes in post-war black markets. “Gas-chambers” that did not exist were photographed and a “gasmobile” was invented to titillate the mechanically minded.48
Yockey’s book might have had little if any impact if not for the fact that in 1962 Noontide Press reissued it with a thirty-five-page introduction by Carto in which he expressed profound support for Yockey’s plans for world rule and contended that in order to obtain the necessary political power “all else must be temporarily sacrificed.”49 Noontide has kept the book in circulation since then.
During the late 1960s Carto participated in the creation of a number of political groups to advance his agenda of winning control of America’s right wing. The United Republicans for America, which was designed to win control of the Republican party, conducted a direct-mail campaign for G. Gordon Liddy’s congressional race in New York. (Liddy would shortly thereafter become infamous for his role in the Watergate break-in.) He also helped found Youth for Wallace, which, after supporting George Wallace’s presidential aspirations, became the National Youth Alliance (NYA). Officially the goals of the NYA were to oppose drugs, black power, the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and American involvement in foreign wars. But another item was on the organization’s agenda. According to former officials of the organization, who were drummed out by Carto when they protested, the NYA advocated Francis Yockey’s philosophy. Paperback copies of Imperium were printed for NYA members to sell. An NYA informational letter acknowledged that the organization’s political approach was based on the philosophy of Yockey’s “monumental Imperium.”50 At a 1968 meeting of the NYA in Pittsburgh at which Nazi paraphernalia were evident and Nazi songs sung, Carto praised Yockey’s ideas and described his own plan to amass as much political power as possible within an array of institutions. Anticipating a national swing to the right, he aimed to capture the leadership of as many conservative groups as possible. A former Liberty Lobby staffer who hosted its radio show testified in court that Carto often indicated that what this country needed was a “right-wing dictatorship.”51 Because leaders of the “legitimate right,” such as William F. Buckley, constituted an obstacle to his plan to win control of the conservative right Carto labeled them with the most extreme term of opprobrium he could conjure up: “ADL agents.”52 The publications linked to Carto and his organizational orbit disseminated plans for this right-wing dictatorship and called for active suppression of those who would conspire against it.
Among the publications under Carto’s direct control was the American Mercury.5* Though the journal had begun its descent into antisemitica under its previous owners, under Carto’s tutelage, which began in 1966, the pace of that descent quickened. By the time of the creation of the IHR in 1978 the American Mercury, which had been under the Carto aegis for thirteen years, was considered one of the leading antisemitic publications in the United States.53 It functioned as a cheerleader for Holocaust deniers. An editorial in the American Mercury lauded the IHR because it would function as an antidote to “the Anti-Defamation League’s campaign to prod public discussion of the ‘Holocaust.’ ”54
But American Mercury was not the only publication in the Carto orbit to disseminate these views. The Liberty Lobby’s newsletter, Liberty Letter, echoed the same themes. It praised Imperium as a major work of philosophy and ranted about the “aggressive minority” that tightly controlled the so-called free press. This “alien-minded and America-last group,” was the “ruthless Zionist pressure machine.” The Liberty Letter claimed to have uncovered thousands of undercover “Zionist ‘fixers,’ lobbyists and Leftists” prowling the corridors of Congress and converging on the White House.55
In 1975 the lobby’s Liberty Letter, whose circulation was more than one-hundred thousand, was subsumed by the Spotlight, a tabloid newspaper that regularly featured articles on Bible analysis and the putative efforts of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission to dominate the nation. It offered its readers tips on avoiding taxes and fighting the IRS. The paper attacked Martin Luther King, Jr., as a Communist and praised members of the Ku Klux Klan. It has memorialized Gordon Kahl, the leader of the right-wing-extremist group Posse Comitatus, who killed three federal marshals and wounded a number of others before he was killed in 1983 in a shootout with federal agents.
These publications find conspiracies everywhere. In 1976, shortly before the presidential election, the paper charged that Jimmy Carter was directly linked with the international cocaine trade.56 (The Federal Election Commission fined the Liberty Lobby for publishing this unsubstantiated story so close to the election.) In 1979 Spotlight’s lead article described how a global elite planned to topple world governments. The paper claimed that its reporter had attended an international conference in Austria at which such plans were discussed. In truth, no one from the Spotlight attended this legitimate conference, and the reporter who wrote the story admitted to falsifying it.57
But the main focus of Spotlight’s attention has been exposing what it calls the “Jew-Zionist” international bankers’ conspiracy designed to cause pain and suffering for dedicated, honest, and hardworking Americans. Though the tabloid finds conspiracies in many places, generally they are linked to Israel and its supporters’ successful efforts to control Congress and dictate American policy.58 During the 1979 gas shortage the paper informed readers that as a result of a secret deal between President Carter and Prime Minister Begin “your gas [was going] to Israel.”59 According to Spotlight, these Zionists do not work alone; cliques of bankers, Red Chinese, and American politicians, including Sen. Jesse Helms and the late Congressman Larry McDonald, were all part of the pro-Israel conspiracy against the United States.60
Since a major aspect of that conspiracy was the Holocaust hoax, Holocaust denial has also become a regular staple of Spotlight. The paper, which has identified Carto as the force behind the IHR, has devoted entire issues to Holocaust denial.61 The paper has frequently reported on the IHR’s annual meetings and on their retrieval of history from the “memory hole.”62 A fifteen-page supplement in the December 24, 1979, issue was completely dedicated to denial articles. Reiterating familiar denial themes, Spotlight has claimed that the bodies at Auschwitz were cremated as a hygienic measure to control typhoid, that the so-called gas chambers were actually life-saving delousing showers, that the Diary of Anne Frank was a propaganda hoax, that the six-million number was used to entice the United Nations to support the creation of the “illegal state of Israel,” and that professional Zionist “survivors” planned to extort five million dollars from America. It also touted the IHR’s contest. The front page of the “Holocaust Supplement” carried the following headlines:
WERE SIX MILLION JEWS EXTERMINATED?
FAMOUS “GAS CHAMBER VICTIMS” LIVING WELL
NEED $50,000? FIND A HOLOCAUST VICTIM
TORTURE USED TO MAKE GERMANS “CONFESS”
CHASING THE “WAR CRIMINALS” FOR PROFIT”.63
IN 1981 a two-page article bore the following headline:
GATHERING OF “LIBERATORS” MAY EXPOSE ALLIED WAR ATROCITIES; BELIEVERS IN THE “HOLOCAUST” HAVE INVITED THE “LIBERATORS” OF THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS TO GATHER FOR A CONVENTION. BUT TO SHOW UP WOULD BE TANTAMOUNT TO ADMITTING HAVING MURDERED INNOCENT GERMAN GUARDS.64
The nature of Spotlight’s readership can be gauged to some degree by the contents of its classified advertising section. There are ads for poetry, laetrile prescriptions, dating services for patriotic Christians, and devices for dramatically increasing a car’s gasoline mileage (these devices have supposedly been kept off the market in a conspiracy against the American consumer). In addition, its classified section regularly offers Nazi paraphernalia, gun silencer parts, bullet-proof vests, clandestine mail drops, and instructions for manufacturing false identification.65
The Noontide Press has also participated in spreading the message espoused by Yockey, Carto, the Liberty Lobby, and the IHR. Among the books listed in the 1992 Noontide Press catalog was Yockey’s Imperium. The catalog described Yockey as a brilliant young American who “saw through the Holocaust propaganda as early as 1948.” Also offered for sale were the standard works on Holocaust denial, many of which were published by Noontide, among them the Journal of Historical Review, Butz’s The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, and Harwood’s Six Million Lost and Found. The catalog also featured the antisemitic standards—Henry Ford’s The International Jew and The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Included as well was a listing of books on “Race and Culture,” many of them described by the catalog as focusing on the inherent dangers of racial integration. The Testing of Negro Intelligence, by Travis Osborne and Frank C. J. McGurk, was described as a searching evaluation of black performance on intelligence tests from 1966 to 1980 whose findings “give little comfort to egalitarians.” Race and Reason: A Yankee View, by Carleton Putnam, was touted as the “intelligent reader’s guide to the pitfalls of Black-White integration from the White standpoint.” The sequel, Race and Reality, demonstrated how “egalitarians” have used botched science and faulty scholarship to obscure “biological facts about racial differences.”66 Noontide not only offered these racist publications in its catalog, but it also tried to win subscribers for a tabloid newspaper, the White Student. According to Noontide the paper was designed to help students on campus “fight back.” It was an antidote to being brainwashed by Marxist teachers and debilitated “by the rigors of survival in our integrated schools.”67
In their espousal of antisemitism, racism, and extremism, these publications are no different from a variety of similar offerings worldwide. In fact, the articles in all of them are mind-numbingly similar. However, what is particularly disturbing about this group of publications is their interlocking network and growing source of funds.68 In 1989 the director of the IHR protested that neither he nor any other member of the staff could offer advice as to the merits of other “patriotic movements” or right-wing groups. The IHR, he claimed, “pleads agnosticism” concerning the goals or methods of any group whose objective was not the “revision of history.”69 This was an attempt by the IHR to maintain its facade as an independent research entity dedicated to the exposure of historical falsehoods. Despite its pronouncement, the connection between the Institute for Historical Review, the American Mercury, and Noontide Press had already been officially established. In 1980 Carto’s wife, Elisabeth, acting on behalf of the Legion for the Survival of Freedom, filed an application in Torrance, California, for a business license for the IHR. The institute, according to the papers filed, was to operate as the Noontide Press/Institute for Historical Review. The mailing address listed on the application for the IHR was identical with those of the American Mercury and Noontide Press. Some of the members of the management of the American Mercury were also officers of the Noontide Press/Institute for Historical Review. Former staffers, including David McCalden, have testified under oath that Carto had “ultimate authority” over all decisions made by the IHR.70
The courts have also found the IHR, Noontide Press, Spotlight, the Liberty Lobby, and Willis Carto intimately connected. In 1988 the United States Court of Appeals rejected the attempt of the IHR, Noontide Press, and the Legion for Survival of Freedom to present themselves as unrelated entities. Justice Robert Bork, in his decision dismissing Carto’s attempt to sue the Wall Street Journal for labeling him an antisemite, stated that Carto had “specifically designed the Liberty Lobby/Legion/Noontide/IHR network so as to divorce Liberty Lobby’s name from those of its less reputable affiliates.”71 One of the main tactics the Carto network uses to keep critics at bay has been the lawsuit. It has filed numerous lawsuits throughout the United States charging defamation. The Court of Appeals noted that Carto and his nexus of organizations have consistently used the libel complaint as a “weapon to harass.”72
The IHR’s early loss in the Mermelstein case did not stop it from proceeding with its objectives of spreading denial, antisemitism, and racism. One of the ways it has tried to give credence to its claim that it is a research institute with a broad historical agenda is by publishing articles in the Journal of Historical Review on topics that have no connection with World War II or the Final Solution. David McCalden, in a letter sent to students on various campuses, argued that history had long been orchestrated by those who were “willing to parrot . . . just what the establishment wants them to,” and that the IHR was dedicated to ending this.73 The spring 1982 edition of the Journal of Historical Review contained an article by Harry Elmer Barnes entitled “Revisionism and the Promotion of Peace,” in which Barnes argued that revisionism was dedicated to the “honest search for historical truth and the discrediting of misleading myths that are a barrier to peace and goodwill among nations.” Revisionists, as Barnes described them, were engaged in an effort to correct the historical record through the collection of more complete historical facts in “a more calm political atmosphere and [with] a more objective attitude.”74
The Journal enumerated a series of instances other than the Holocaust in which the historical record had also been manipulated. In need of a “revisionist” analysis were the American Revolution (the policies of the British had not been that harsh), the War of 1812 (Madison was not pushed into war but made the decision based on his own convictions), the German invasion of Belgium in World War I (the British would have done the same thing if Germany had not done it first), and Theodore Roosevelt’s role in the Spanish-American war (he ordered an attack on the Spanish fleet as part of his American imperialist and expansionist philosophy).75 As was often the case with revisionist arguments, the issues raised had a kernel of truth to them. But the deniers proceeded not only to distort that kernel but ascribed to it a conspiratorial nature—premeditated distortions introduced for political ends. By offering alternative conclusions in each of these cases the Journal apparently believed it could lull its readers into accepting that revisions were also needed in relation to the Holocaust.
This was the objective of an article on Civil War prisoner-of-war camps. The author, Mark Weber, claimed that false reports about Union prisoners’ suffering in Southern camps prompted the North to order similar abuse for prisoners in its “concentration camps.” Weber’s reliance on Sonderbehandlung (special treatment), the euphemistic term the Nazis used for what was to happen to the Jews once they were taken to the death camps in the East, was designed to make a link in the reader’s mind with the Holocaust. Exaggerations about conditions in the South multiplied with the passage of time, as former prisoners wrote books they claimed documented their experiences. Henry Wirz, the commander of Andersonville, the most notorious camp in the South, was executed by the United States because the inmates imagined him “the cruel and inhuman author of all their sufferings.” Weber described a proposal that Andersonville be maintained as a permanent reminder of the war as “shades of Dachau” and maintained (correctly) that many prisoners on both sides had died but prisoners had not been deliberately killed. It was “bad management,” particularly in the South, which caused such extensive death and misery. In the main, Weber’s article followed fairly well-established historical grounds; only his conclusion revealed his true agenda. He drew a direct parallel between the Civil War and World War II—in both wars the victors “hysterically distorted” the conditions in the camps and branded the defeated adversary as “intrinsically evil.” In Weber’s view: “All the suffering and death in the camps of the side that lost the war was ascribed to a deliberate policy on the part of an inherently atrocious power. The victorious powers demanded ‘unconditional surrender’ and arrested the defeated government leaders as ‘criminals.’ ”76
There was one major difference, Weber insisted: “The Civil War rendition of ‘Sonderbehandlung’ never achieved the sinister notoriety of its Second World War counterpart.” Nonetheless, Weber continued, in both wars the political system of the vanquished was considered to be not “merely different but morally depraved,” and the ethics of the side that lost the war were judged “in terms of [the losers] readiness to atone for past sins and embrace the social system of the conquerors.”77 This argument harked back to a basic tenet of Holocaust denial: War is evil; no side can claim the moral upper hand, and defeated parties are regularly accused by the victors of having committed terrible misdeeds. Weber’s immoral equivalency in terms of treatment of the defeated enemy was part of the deniers’ effort to cast the “myth of the Holocaust” as part of a long-established pattern of the distortion of history for political ends.
According to the deniers the Holocaust is not the only deceptive legacy of World War II. Another issue of prime importance to them is the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Continuing the battle that had been begun by the revisionists after World War II ended, an entire issue of the Journal of Historical Review was devoted to this topic.78 Its explicit objective was to portray Roosevelt as having known that the attack was imminent and having allowed it to take place unhindered so that America would be forced to enter the war.
The deniers’ obsession with Pearl Harbor has a dual objective: to demonstrate Roosevelt’s and, by association, the American government’s duplicity. It is also designed to dispel the Allied and “court historians’ ” claim that World War II was a moral as opposed to a power struggle. The revisionists believe that if they can demonstrate that this war was at its heart a conflagration like all others, they can argue that any unique accusations of guilt or special war crimes trials are invalid. In this case the revisionists established a straw man in order to knock him down. The United States entered the war because it was attacked by Japan. Japan’s ally, Germany, then declared war on the United States. But proving that the Allies were motivated by the age-old quest for “power and advantage” is far subtler and less distasteful than creating an immoral equivalence of the gulag versus the death camps or Auschwitz versus the bombing of Dresden.79
Despite its attempts to portray itself as a respectable organization, the Institute for Historical Review and its subsidiary publications and associated organizations are in essence nothing but part of a larger effort to further goals remarkably similar to those articulated by national socialism. Just as Holocaust denial must be regarded as not just an attack on a portion of history that is of particular importance to Jews but as a threat to all of history and to reasoned discourse, so too the IHR must not be seen as an entity whose only interest is attacking the historicity of the Holocaust. The tradition to which it is heir and the activities of those who are part of its amorphous orbit indicate that it poses a far greater danger.