1998 Revisionist Conference in Adelaide, Australia

A revisionist conference was held 7-9 August 1998 in Adelaide, Australia, and I was happy to be in attendance. I was there on the invitation of the Director of the “Adelaide Institute”, Dr. Fredrick Töben, and I gave two short lectures.

Arthur R. Butz

Conference participants came from the USA and Europe as well as Australia. In addition, there was a good number of remote participants. Dr. Robert Faurisson and some others sent videos in advance and were interviewed and questioned by telephone during the conference. Some made written papers available in advance and then were interviewed and questioned by telephone. Some only communicated by telephone. Most of the coverage was specifically of Holocaust revisionism, but some other subjects were treated as well.

Overall, it was an educational and enjoyable affair, and Dr. Töben should be commended for its success

It is well worth remarking that Faurisson participated on a remote basis because Australia will not issue him a visa on the grounds of “bad character”, by which is meant that he has been convicted of a criminal offense in France, namely violation of the infamous Fabius-Gayssot law of 1990, which outlaws contesting “crimes against humanity” as claimed in the 1946 judgment of the main Nuremberg trial! Although there is no such law in Australia, this conviction in France was used as a legal pretext to bar Faurisson. I do not have such a conviction on my record because there is also no such law in the USA, but I assured the conference attendees that, apart from legalistic mumbo-jumbo, my character is just as bad.

What follows does not purport to be a complete summary of the conference, which will probably appear soon on the Adelaide Institute website anyway. Therefore what follows are only certain highlights that occur to me. Other attendees no doubt have other ideas of the highlights.

One of the speakers was David Brockschmidt, who lives near Adelaide and who with his wife Vita hosted me in his house during the conference. The story he told, part of which I pass along below, is one of the most interesting of untold stories and involves some of the most important events of the century.

David Brockschmidt's father Heinrich was a plumber, general contractor and farmer in Germany during the war. He was a business partner of Oskar Schindler and in fact was the man who organized the move of Jews from the factory in Poland to a new location in Czechoslovakia, as depicted in the Steven Spielberg film Schindler's List (Brockschmidt was not mentioned in the film). The “list” of Jews who were moved was not drawn up by Schindler, as represented in the film, but by the camp commandant Amon Goeth, with the help of a Jewish accountant (not depicted in the film). Goeth and the accountant were deep into the rackets that prevailed at the time and under the circumstances and made those Jews, newly taken out of the labor camp to make the move, pay dearly to get on the list.

For Schindler the motivation for the move was that the German authorities were trying to force him to switch to a less profitable manufacturing activity.

Goeth was arrested for corruption in the famous SS internal investigation led by Konrad Morgen and was in jail when the war ended, awaiting probable execution. The most famous catch of Morgen's was Karl Koch, commandant of the Buchenwald concentration camp, who was executed.

As a veteran revisionist I understood immediately that the film scenes, in which Amon Goeth shot Jews in the labor camp from his balcony, at breakfast, were just typical Spielberg junk. Brockschmidt said that he had examined the aerial photos of the camp and had determined that such events would actually have been impossible. The labor camp was higher than Goeth's balcony, and other buildings intervened.

The Jewish women who were diverted to Auschwitz were freed not by a bribe paid by Schindler but by Frau Schindler's girlfriend, who slept with one of the Germans in command.

Like Oskar Schindler, Heinrich Brockschmidt is listed at the Yad Vashem in Jerusalem as a “righteous gentile”, not because of the move he facilitated, but because he hid Jews on his farm. David Brockschmidt spent some time in Israel, in 1967 and the seventies.

The Swiss revisionist Jürgen Graf, with whom I spent pleasurable hours because he was also accommodated by the Brockschmidts, gave interesting papers on the Majdanek concentration camp and on the current attempts by Jewish groups to extort money from Switzerland. His native country has not rewarded him for this: he was recently convicted under the new (1994) Swiss law making denial of genocide a criminal offense. USA Today (22 July 1998, p. 6A) reported:

SWISS REVISIONISTS GET PRISON: A Swiss author who wrote several books denying the existence of Nazi gas chambers was sent to prison along with his publisher by a Swiss court. Writer Juergen Graf, 47,and his publisher, Gerhard Foerster, 78, a former officer in Hitler's army, were convicted of breaking Switzerland's law against racial discrimination. Graf was sentenced to 15 months, and Foerster received one year. They were each fined $5,500 and forced to hand over the$38,000 in proceeds from Graf's books. Judge Andrea Staubli said the pair's lack of remorse contributed to the sentences. Graf has stood by his views claiming that it was an exaggeration to say that 6 million Jews died in the Nazi Holocaust of the 1940s.

Graf is convinced that the international Jewish pressure groups, mainly the World Jewish Congress, mounted their all out extortion attack on Switzerland only after the 1994 law guaranteed that any fundamental controversy within Switzerland would be throttled.

Graf's paper on Majdanek was based on recent work done by himself and the Italian revisionist Carlo Mattogno (not participating). That work will be summarized in a book appearing later this year. Graf and Mattogno have made several visits to Eastern Europe, collecting vast numbers of documents. Their work is very basic and has, it appears to me, great potential because they do not appear to be primarily interested in glory or any sensational thesis. For example, Mattogno has recently published in Italian a book on the organization of the Auschwitz “Zentralbauleitung” (Central Construction Office). This is the sort of dry factual foundation required for future sensations.

Germar Rudolf, a German chemist now living in England, gave a deeply technical presentation on alleged “gas chambers” at Auschwitz. Germar Rudolf was sacked at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart in 1993, convicted of “Volksverhetzung” (sedition) in 1995, and denied approval of his Ph.D. thesis at the Univ. of Stuttgart in 1996, all for daring to investigate technical aspects of the alleged “gas chambers”. He participated in the conference on a remote basis because an outstanding German warrant for his arrest makes travel hazardous for him.

Jürgen Graf knows many languages and is a language teacher. While he was in Australia he learned that he had been fired from his teaching job back home on account of his conviction and sentencing. Faurisson is a brilliant academic who has forced the European establishment to resort to hysterical defense of the “Holocaust” legend (the Fabius-Gayssot law is a Lex Faurisson, almost a bill of attainder). Graf is a learned gentleman. Rudolf was a young chemist with a bright future.

I wonder about people who can read of their persecution and not express enough outrage to force European countries to rescind their laws restricting free expression, and which could not possibly be laws in the USA. How often do we hear of the international outrage over China's failure to abide by our notions of civil liberties? As I write this, there is much attention being paid to violations of human rights in Mayanmar (Burma). The victims of this repression were foreigners intervening in that country's politics, not natives publishing historical studies. Dear reader, how is such hypocrisy possible? Are you guilty?

20 August 1998. Modified 26 August 1998.