Smith, Bradley R.

Bradley R. Smith, Fall 2010

Bradley R. Smith was born to a working-class family in South Central Los Angeles on February 18, 1930, where the family remained until 1970. He was a good student on occasion, but was more interested in horses than education. At 18 he joined the army and in 1951 served in the 7th Cavalry in Korea where he was twice wounded. It was in the army hospital at Camp Cooke California where he began to write.

In the 1950s he searched for something in addition to the writing that could hold his attention. He became a deputy sheriff for Los Angeles County, but that wasn't it. He left the department to travel to Mexico where he became involved with the bullfights, becoming a novillero – an apprentice bullfighter – in the central mountain states of Jalisco, Guerrero and Hidalgo. The bulls very much had his attention, but his liver gave out with hepatitis and he had to return to the States for hospitalization.

In 1958 Smith went to New York City where he worked for The Bodley Gallery on East 60th Street. He discovered the intellectual and cultural life of Greenwich Village, a new world for him. In the Village he read a bootleg copy of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and was, literally, rocked by it. He returned to Los Angeles where he opened a bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard specializing in paperback books, which at that time was new and all the rage. When Tropic was published he dedicated himself to promoting the book in his store windows. He was arrested, jailed, and prosecuted for refusing to stop selling the book.

The ensuing trial lasted six weeks, the longest civil trial ever to have taken place in Los Angeles at that time. There was considerable press coverage. Smith was intrigued by the proceedings. For six weeks he watched and listened to academics and writers and community leaders argue under oath that Tropic should be censored and those selling it be punished because the book expressed sensibilities that did not meet, legally, “community standards.” Leon Uris, author of The Exodus particularly caught Smith’s attention by arguing that Miller, a writer obviously more important to American culture, should be censored. In 1962 Smith was convicted for selling a book that "endangered" the community standards of Greater Los Angeles.

In the 1960s Smith patrolled the streets of Hollywood and worked as a seaman on merchant ships. He shipped to Japan, the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, and Taiwan. In 1968 he jumped ship in Thailand and made his way to Saigon where he traveled the country as a correspondent with accreditation by the Vietnamese. Meanwhile, in Hollywood, he had met a Jewish lady, they had exchanged hearts, each with the other, in a relationship that lasted into the mid-1970s.

Then it happened.

In 1979, when Smith was 49 years old, his life changed forever when he read a leaflet by Robert Faurisson, “The Problem of the Gas Chambers.” The story of this life-changing moment is recounted in his autobiographical work, Confessions of a Holocaust Revisionist. Smith writes, “I felt stunned, as if Buck Rogers had somehow come down from the 21st century and zapped me with a beam from his ray gun.” It took him three months to digest the core of the revisionist argument. And then he jumped into the struggle. He knew from the beginning that he was going to address the taboo against publishing revisionist arguments, not the arguments themselves. He would be the “Henry Miller” of the revisionists. Not so good as Miller, not so original, but he would do his best.

Through his efforts in the years that followed, millions of Americans learned for the first time about Holocaust revisionism and the scholarly debate on this chapter of history. In the mid-1980s, he published Prima Facie, a newsletter aimed at journalists and editors, quoting their own writings, that focused on cultism, suppression of free inquiry and censorship on the Holocaust issue.

Smith has had a long association with the Institute for Historical Review – as a contributor to their publications, as a speaker at conferences, and, during the late 1980s, as its Media Project director, a role that generated hundreds of radio and television interviews.

Starting in the late 1980s and on through to the present, he has been active as director of the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH), a group dedicated to defending free speech and free inquiry on the Holocaust issue, to encouraging greater public access to revisionist scholarship, and to promoting awareness of the controversy regarding the Holocaust story.

Since 1990, Smith has published a newsletter, Smith's Report, which reports on his own activities, those of CODOH, and various articles and news stories about revisionists and revisionism around the world.

Smith is perhaps best known for having published several essay-length advertisements calling for open debate on the Holocaust in student newspapers published at colleges and universities across the United States. In the 1991-92 school year, CODOH advertisements or statements appeared in 17 student newspapers, several at major universities. During the 1993-1994 academic year, his ad – headlined “A Revisionist Challenge to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum” – appeared in at least 35 college and university campus papers, as well as one major metropolitan daily. In 1999 and 2000, Smith created a new publication, The Revisionist, a 24 page pulp-stock publication that was distributed free on campus. The January 2000 issue which featured a story on intellectual freedom and book-burning was itself burned on the campus of St. Cloud University. By the end of the 2000-01 academic year, his ads had appeared in more than 350 student papers.

Bradley Reed Smith
Feb 18, 1930 - Feb. 18, 2016

Smith's campaign generated news reports and commentary in such prominent periodicals as The New York Times and Time magazine, and editorials in The Washington Post, The New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Los Angeles Times.

Deborah Lipstadt, a Jewish academic and a prominent figure in the Holocaust lobby, took aim at Bradley's efforts in her Denying the Holocaust. One chapter of her book, “The Battle for the Campus,” focuses specifically on Smith's advertisements. She laments that after seeing the ads many students may assume there is an “other side” [to the Holocaust story.]

Smith has spoken on the subject of intellectual freedom with regard to the Holocaust on more than 400 radio talk shows and news broadcasts, as well as on nationwide television, including an appearance with Michael Shermer (Skeptic Magazine) and David Cole as a guest on the Phil Donahue Show.

Bradley Smith and CODOH were one of the first Holocaust revisionist groups to develop a website in the early '90s. Since that time he has hosted several sites, blogs, a MySpace page, a Facebook page, and participated in many discussion groups and forums on-line.

He is the author of many articles, and several books. The first, Confessions of a Holocaust Revisionist, was praised by Canadian journalist Doug Collins as “fascinating” and as an “amusing walk through the valley of the shadow of doubt.”

Smith's Break His Bones: The Private Life of a Holocaust Revisionist, is a witty and thoughtful 315-page memoir published in 2002 that looks back on the challenges, disappointments and joys of his years-long battle against taboo and censorship. Break His Bones details the organized campaign to suppress free speech and intellectual freedom on the Holocaust issue, showing how skeptics are blacklisted, and their works banned. Smith provided a human face for the much-maligned “Holocaust deniers.” “It might be said,” he wrote, that Break His Bones “is an exercise revealing the subjective life of a thought criminal.”

In December 2006, Smith was invited and delivered a talk to an international delegation at the Tehran Holocaust Conference, “The Irrational Vocabulary of the American Professorial Class with Regard to the Holocaust Question.”

In 2008, Nine-Banded Books published this third book, The Man Who Saw His Own Liver. Liver was conceived and written as a one-act play. It was performed in Los Angeles in 1983, under the title The Man Who Stopped Paying. A review of the performance labeled Smith “an anarchist libertarian.”

Six years later, in 2014 Smith published a collection of his writing from the 1950s to the 1980s entitled, A Personal History of Moral Decay. Tito Perdue commented on Bradley’s final book calling it “a generous, lapidary, and much appreciated gift.”

Bradley Smith passed away at the VA hospital in San Diego, California, on February 18, 2016, his 86th birthday. He succumbed to lymphoma and congestive heart failure. He left behind his wife, two daughters and three grand children.



Confessions of a Holocaust Revisionist by Bradley R. Smith. Los Angeles: Prima Facie, 1987, 118 pages + (vi), $11.95 Hb (ISBN 0-943415-00-4), $6.95 Pb (ISBN 0-943415-00-4). When you see a title starting with the word Confessions nowadays, it's usually safe to assume that some sort of parody is being undertaken. …

***  Now that my Confessions of a Holocaust Revisionist is on the Amazon Kindle program, I will want to publicize the fact that it’s there. The first move would be to announce it to our online subscriber base. What text should I use? The easiest thing would be to send …

I’ve noted elsewhere that life, for me, is less interesting than it used to be. Why so? I can only speculate that it’s because I have allowed the work to divide the life itself into two parts. Work on the one hand, “life” on the other. I have allowed the …

[This letter was mailed via USPO to subscribers to Smith's Report in December 2004.] Dear Friend: With this season twenty-five Christmases will have come gone since that September evening when I first read Robert Faurisson's essay on "The Problem of the Gas Chambers, or the Rumor of Auschwitz." Twenty-five Christmases! …

Wednesday, 1 November When I clicked onto our Homepage this morning I found a blank screen. I had a small attack of anxiety. The first thing that came to me was that someone, probably from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, had leaned on the people at Valleynet and my provider had …

Thursday, 1 February 96 David Stennett, a student at University of Puget Sound (WA) left a review copy of David Cole's video about fraud at Auschwitz, "David Cole Interviews Dr. Franciszek Piper," at the UPS History office. The video was reviewed by Professor Theodore Taranovsky, who teaches something on the …

Wednesday, 3 January Denial, a new play by Peter Sagal, had its world premiere in December at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven. Shades of O'Niel and all the others. The play concerns a Jewish attorney working for the ACLU who is asked to defend a professor and author …

*** I’m hearing a lot of talk about how American veterans are committing suicide while on duty and after they are back in civilian life. But the military says that its suicide rate remains lower than that of America's civilian population. The AP cites the Pentagon as saying "the civilian …

*** The CODOH Homepage has been completely restructured. It’s a job that began with one volunteer back in 2010, was interrupted a number of times by real life, but now it’s up. It’s a work-in-progress, as are all Web pages, forever, but it’s up and functioning. What is particularly new …

*** Getting this issue of Smith’s Report done has been difficult for me. There is nothing in the Report itself that is difficult. An accounting of what Jett Rucker and I did at Kent State and Boston Universities with regard to the Elie Wiesel question. And then the story about …

*** From Germar Rudolf: Just read your piece on "The Snows of Kilimanjaro". I read "The First 49 Stories" by Hemmingway (a book featuring his first 49....) while in prison, The Snows being a part of it. I was amazed to read your first positive remarks about that story and …

When this newspaper printed Bradley Smith's advertisment last Thursday ("The Holocaust Story," April 4, page 11), it fanned not one, but two, gathering controversies on campus. The first concerns our knowledge about the Nazi massacre of the Jews of Europe. The second centers on the policies of The Daily itself. …

The first issue of Smith's Report came out in the Spring of 1990. Now Bradley is sending out the 200th issue. That is a pretty amazing achievement given the furious efforts of Believers to stifle discussion and thought on the Holocaust story. For over 23 years Smith's Report has been …

TUESDAY, 1 FEBRUARY. In Malibu this morning running down a geology report. The sky was full of sunshine and thick white clouds. Turned up Malibu Canyon and climbed swiftly up the grade. Ahead and below I could see fragments of black clouds blowing through the canyon from the East toward …

Bradley Smith reports on his work at the Eleventh IHR Conference. Bradley Smith is back in the news. The veteran revisionist activist has touched off a major furor that has received nationwide newspaper and television attention with the distribution at Hofstra University in Long Island, New York, of his new …

When I saw the first light of day come in through the window I pushed the three paperback books I used for a pillow against the wall and rolled up the reed mat and stood it in the corner of the room. On the bed, Bryant turned onto his side …

*** The last couple days I have gotten notices from three unknown entities that I am to appear in court, charged with—what? The notices do not say. I am asked to open an attachment to obtain copies of the legal documents. I don’t think so. This is an attempt to …

This is an astounding turn of events. My new book, A Personal History of Moral Decay, has been reviewed in Taki’s Magazine. This is a cultural event, if you will, that is a first. A book written by a Holocaust Revisionist being reviewed and reviewed positively, in one of the …

*** And then there’s the business of my bank account. Last week the account was down to $178. I was going to be in real trouble. I have all kinds of business expenses that come in and are paid automatically. If they start to bounce it will be one thing …

*** Der Spiegel is one of Europe’s most influential magazines. It’s commonly held that its influence is based on the moral authority established by the quality of its investigative journalism. Der Spiegel employs the equivalent of 80 full-time fact checkers, which the Columbia Journalism Review calls “most likely the world’s …

For some years now I have been writing a special cover letter to go with the December issue of this Report. Needing a little shove to get going I was searching for cover letters I wrote here for Christmas in 2004 and hopefully in 1994. Or there about. It could …

Late on July 16, Bradley Smith called to tell me that he won’t be able to do Smith’s Report anymore. Hence Jett, doing the writing, and I (formatting and actual publishing) got the present issue out all by ourselves. We don’t know whether this is temporary or permanent, but the …

This issue of Smith’s Report must be the first ever that lacks the byline of Bradley Smith. Our namesake and “face” has given over what for anyone else would be their “golden years” to the fight for freedom to discuss openly what might be history’s most-contended subject. It is a …

I understand perfectly well that the Hitlerian regime was anti-Semitic and that it persecuted Jews and others. I understand that many peoples experienced unfathomable catastrophes in Europe during World War II. The catastrophe of the Jews was one among them. Nevertheless. I no longer believe that there was a plan …

Hi Gang! Well, I’m back, for the time being anyhow. In the bigger scheme of things of course it’s always for the time being. Eight days ago I received a blood transfusion at the VA. When it was done I felt better. Still do. This week I began working. Getting …

I understand perfectly well that the Hitlerian regime was anti-Semitic and persecuted Jews and others. I understand many peoples, European Jews among them, experienced unfathomable tragedies in Europe during World War II. Nevertheless, I no longer believe the German State pursued a plan to kill all Jews or used homicidal …

If you received our Christmas letter and thought I looked a little hang-dog in the photo, well ... I was taking the photo myself on a ten-second delay. When I set off the process and made a run for my seat next to Paloma I accidentally kicked our dog in …

Sono perfettamente conscio del fatto che il regime di Hitler fosse antisemita e che perseguisse gli ebrei ed altri con loro. Sono perfettamente conscio del fatto che molti popoli, sopratutto gli ebrei europei, durante la seconda guerra mondiale abbiano vissuto una terribile tragedia. Comunque, non credo piú nel fatto che …

Compreendo perfeitamente que o regime Hitleriano era anti-semita e perseguiu Judeus e outros. Compreendro que muitos povos - entre eles os Judeus Europeus - conheceram profundas tragédias na Europa durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial. Contudo, eu já não acredito que o Estado Alemão seguisse um plano para matar todos os …

"Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death." George Orwell As the first seconds of July 4, 1996 ticked away, the Bradley R. Smith / CODOH (Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust) website was shut down from the World Wide Web. The Bradley R. Smith Website was dedicated to …

First it was one thing then another and so on until one day I decided I wanted to make an effort to encourage open debate on the Holocaust controversy. That was more than ten years ago. It's been an uphill pull ever since. Why I should have committed myself to …

Over the summer the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith (ADL) named me one of the “Top Ten Extremists” in America. The ADL published the charge in a print booklet, and to make certain no one missed it, published it on its World Wide Website on the Internet. I have never …

November has come again and the hour has changed and now when I go out walking in the evening it's dark and lonely in a way that this little town in Baja has never been before. I have to be careful when I walk in the dark because sometimes I …

It was dark and very cold and I had been walking for close to an hour. Now I turned West on Briggs and walked through the parking lot behind Gottschalks department store. At the corner of the building there I almost stepped on a sparrow lying on the concrete walk. …