David McCalden Most Macabre Halloween Holocaust Tale Challenge

Because the Holocaust has become in many ways a secular religion – even for those who are not Jewish – one is not permitted to say anything that can in any way be construed as less than fawning about the plight of the Jews in Europe. Likewise, one is permitted to say just about anything that supports the popular view of the Holocaust, no matter how erroneous or wrong-headed.

So many Holocaust extermination claims are ridiculous that even those who support the extermination thesis cannot always support each claim. We are left with a patchwork historiography of the Holocaust – which, remember, is supposedly the best-documented event in history – where nothing is as it seems.

For years I have been collecting and posting online a list of “Remarkable Nonsense about the Holocaust” (see www. historiography-project.org/nonsense/nonsense.html [now defunct; ed.]). In order to augment this list, I started a contest in 2004 named after the late revisionist David McCalden. It is planned to have such a contest every year. The winner gets a $200 cash prize.

Pits of boiling human fat? Human soap? Giant “death by steaming” pressure cookers? Fountains of blood squirting from the earth?

Help us find new Holocaust stories you find macabre and ridiculous.

Please submit the tale, with full citations of its appearance and use, to the following e-mail address: [email protected]. If you need or prefer to send photocopies (or originals, of course), you may do so to:

Halloween Contest
PO Box 1710
Apple Valley, CA 92307

The winner will receive a $200 cash prize.

Second place will receive a $50 cash prize.

Entries are to be judged on four factors:

1. Originality (that means: not yet included in our online list; search our site at www.historiography-project.org/search.html before entering).
2. The macabre nature of the tale.
3. Citation of the source(s) where the tale or claim has appeared.
4. The use of the tale in official Holocaust histories. (Receive added points if your submission was used in a court of law.)

The contest deadline is October 30 of each year’s contest. You may enter as many times as you wish, but there will be only one winning entry per person. Each contest entry is subject to verification. The winners will be announced on October 31 of each year (Halloween).

The prize is in honor of skeptic and founder of the Institute for Historical Review, David McCalden. All submissions become the property of the Holocaust Historiography Project, and may be published on this website.

Let’s make David proud!

[Editor's remark: As far as we know, this contest has been suspended. Please contact the webmaster of www.historiography-project.org for more details.]

Contest Winners, October 31, 2004

Holocaust Historiography Project is proud to announce the winners of the 1st annual David McCalden Most Macabre Halloween Holocaust Tale Challenge, which ended October 30, 2004.

Each submission is an example of the horror cult that has grown up around the Holocaust. Of course, these laughably absurd tales are believed by none but the most extreme, ideologically-driven fanatics. Unfortunately, lesser tales still walk among the living, on nights other than Halloween, finding victims among the credulous.

These less extreme tales are still promoted by professors of Holocaustology, by Holocaust propagandists, and by flim-flam artists out to con the gullible. So, as we announce the award-winning entrants, we tip our hat to the memory of a man who with simple straightforward skepticism worked to demolish these ugly myths.

Congratulations to one and all!

First Place – $200.00

Scores of Mengele’s guinea pigs died at this stage, many of them from a particularly bizarre experiment in which the blood supplies of different pairs of twins were interchanged. The results of one of these experiments were graphically described by a witness, Vera Alexander.

“One day Mengele brought chocolate and special clothes. The next day, SS men came and took two children away. They were two of my pets, Tito and Nino. One of them was a hunchback. Two or three days later, an SS man brought them back in a terrible state. They had been cut. The hunchback was sewn to the other child, back to back, their wrists back to back too. There was a terrible smell of gangrene. The cuts were dirty and the children cried every night.”

Source: Mengele: The Complete Story, by Gerald L. Posner and John Ware, (London: Futura paperback, 1987 edition), p. 37, and referenced in the notes from Vera Alexander interviewed by Central Television (London) for Home Box Office production, “The Search for Mengele,” October 1985.

Submitted by Alistair McConnachie (www.sovereignty.org.uk/)

Second Place – $50.00

During his interrogation at the investigations leading to the infamous Auschwitz Trial, witness Adolf Rögner said about a member of the camp Gestapo:

“In interrogations, Unterscharführer Quackernack Walter […] used torture by crucifixion, stabbing the testicles with steel needles and burning tampons in the vagina.”

Source: Staatsanwaltschaft beim LG Frankfurt (Main), Strafsache beim Schwurgericht Frankfurt (Main) gegen Baer und Andere wegen Mordes, ref. 4 Js 444/59, vol. I., p. 65. See www.vho.org/VffG/2002/4/Image75.gif

Stuttgart public prosecutor Weber described Rögner several times as a “glory-seeking psychopath.” (p. 7), a “contradictory and psychopathic professional criminal,” (p. 106r, p. 85r).

In a letter on April 9, 1958, the prison administration in Bruchsal, where Rögner spent his sentence for several crimes, wrote to chief prosecutor for district I in Munich as follows with respect to the prisoner Rögner: (pp. 24-26)

1. Rögner had served a term of imprisonment for fraud and attempted fraud;
2. he had been sentenced to imprisonment during the Third Reich for criminal deeds and part of the term was spent in concentration camps;
3. he filed “numerous, ungrounded complaints” against authorities, is “quarrelsome,” “eastern oriented” and will emigrate to Poland when he is released, sees himself as a “star witness in a series of great concentration camp trials”;
4. he resists official rules, constantly demands exceptions for himself, attempts to use his knowledge of concentration camps to lighten his punishment and pursues “obscure goals.”

On August 14, 1958, prosecutor Schabel wrote to the Baden-Württemberg Minister of Justice concerning the transcript of the decision of the Land Court Munich: (p. 39)

“[…] which shows that Rögner as the prosecution witness in trials against concentration camp personnel has obviously lied for reasons of hatred and revenge.

“Rögner was therefore sentenced to a prison term of 3 years and 6 months – although the sentence is not yet valid. […it became valid shortly after]. In addition, Rögner’s right to testify as a witness or expert in a trial has been revoked permanently.”

Here you have a star witness.

Another statement from Rögner (Interrogation of Nov. 4, 1958, vol. 2, pp. 247-261):

“Therefore I kept myself hidden behind a big tree and watched what was happening [Remark: There were no trees at the Birkenau camp]. Then I saw how [SS man] Boger went off to the side with a Jewish girl about 15 years old who had just come in on the last transport. […] When Boger and the girl were about 150 m. from his other colleagues – I myself was about 15-20 m. from the scene of the incident – Boger spoke to the girl and right afterward hit her powerfully, causing her to fall to the ground unconscious. I could not understand what Boger said to the girl, but I assume that he wanted to use the girl for sexual purposes. After the girl had been stricken unconscious, Boger could no longer accomplish his shameful purpose, because the selection commando had come closer in the meantime and he would be afraid to be seen. Boger had torn some of the clothing from the girl’s body, and some of it he had cut off with his pocket knife – or maybe it was a stiletto. After the girl was stripped down to her underclothes and stockings […]. Then he drew his pistol and shot the girl once each in the left and right breast. Then he stuck the pistol barrel in the girl’s genitals and fired one more shot.”

Rögner was the key witness to start the Auschwitz investigations! He also was a member of the Auschwitz “camp partisans,” together with Bruno Baum (who confessed to his propaganda activity), Hermann Langbein (head of the Int. Auschwitz Comité), and K. Smolen (Polish Auschwitz propagandist), to name only a few.

Submitted by Germar Rudolf (Castle Hill Publishers)

Honorable mention

Source: Boris Polevoi, The Final Reckoning: Nuremberg Diaries, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1978 (English edition), pp. 108-184

Submitted by a contributor who wishes to remain anonymous.

Contest Background: David McCalden (1951-1990)

David McCalden was born in 1951 into a working-class family in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He attended the University of London, Goldsmiths’ College and graduated with a Certificate in Education (Sociology) in 1974. From 1972 until 1977 he was involved with various movements for the preservation of British national integrity, traditions, wildlife, and environment. McCalden was always a controversialist who took nothing for granted. In the early 1970s he edited Nationalist News and was a regular contributor to Britain First newspaper. He was a founder of the early Hunt Saboteurs’ movement, the first editor of its journal, Howl, and later produced Beacon, a magazine that was well ahead of its time. He also wrote the book Nuremberg & Other War Crimes Trials (1978), which appeared under its publisher’s house nom de plume “Richard Harwood.” McCalden moved to the United States in the late 1970s and gave up active politics.

In 1978 he moved to California and established the Institute for Historical Review. As its Director and Editor-in-Chief, his work appearing under the pseudonym “Lewis Brandon.” As Director of the IHR, McCalden was responsible for several groundbreaking activities, including the instigation of the group’s “International Revisionist Conferences” in 1979, the founding of the Journal of Historical Review a year later, and perhaps most famously offering a $50,000 reward for anybody who could provide proof that the gas chambers existed. At the IHR’s Second International Revisionist Conference, Ontario, California, McCalden announced two new contests – each for $25,000 – to anyone who can either prove the diary of Anne Frank is genuine or that the Nazis ever made soap from the bodies of Jews. Although there were some who announced they could claim one or more of these prizes, they either did not come forward (such as Simon Wiesenthal), or others who did come forward but had no proof (such as Mel Mermelstein), not one single person was able to claim any of them, each of which dealt with claims made about “the best documented event in human history.”

McCalden had virtually unlimited energy to devote to revisionism, collecting audio tapes of every radio show that mentioned him, producing video tapes, reprinting several classic revisionist books, editing the IHR’s Journal of Historical Review, and doing all the other things that a small start-up outfit such as the IHR needed done, while still finding time to personally visit – without any warning whatsoever – most of the people who wrote to him from a return address less than a day’s drive away.

He left the IHR in 1981 to become a freelance writer, interesting himself in modern history, politics, ecology, and atheism, and founded “Truth Mission.” McCalden published a variety of publications under this imprint, including Holocaust news, David McCalden’s Revisionist Newsletter, and the booklets Exiles From History and The Amazing, Rapidly Shrinking ‘Holocaust’ (1987).

In 1984, after the California Library Association (CLA) cancelled contracts it had signed with McCalden to present an exhibit and separate program on his revisionist views at the CLA’s 86th Annual Conference in Los Angeles, McCalden sued, claiming the city of Los Angeles, the Wiesenthal Center, the California Library Association, the American Jewish Committee, and others illegally conspired to deprive him of his First Amendment free speech rights through “extortionate threats.” The suit eventually wound up in the Supreme Court, which decided to let stand a lower-court ruling in McCalden’s favor.

McCalden was a militant atheist who delighted in riling religious people. He died in El Segundo, California, on October 15, 1990, from complications due to pneumonia, after an illness of several months. He is survived by a wife and child.

Selected writings about David McCalden

• “Court stays clear of fray over free speech, Holocaust history,” UPI, June 1, 1992 (see www.historiography-project.org/contests/19920601scotus.html).
• Elliott, Mark; McClintock, Michael. “Holocaust ‘Revisionists’ and the California Library Association.” Midstream, Volume 32, Number 4 (Apr 1986) pages 36-38.
• Kamm, Susan. “‘Holocaust Hoax’ Publisher Barred From Annual Convention of California LA After Controversy Spreads Through State.” American Libraries 16.1 (1985): 5.
• Swan, John, and Noel Peattie. The Freedom to Lie: A Debate About Democracy, McFarland, Jefferson, NC, 1989.
• The Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies, et al., vs. Viviana McCalden, as administrator of the estate of David McCalden, Supreme Court of the United States, case number 91-1643.