From the Editor

We hear a lot about censorship these days. Our opinion- and taste-makers like to inform us that various attempts to constrict “freedom of expression,” understood to include the dissemination of pornography involving children and the burning of the American flag, will have “a chilling effect” on our First Amendment rights if they come to pass. Some of our artists, and their influential patrons, seem to believe that freedom of expression involves extracting subsidies from our already hard-pressed taxpayers to finance the creation and exhibition of art that outrages the sensibilities and the deepest-held beliefs of our people. Indeed, some pundits and promoters have gone so far as to imply that even to protest the exhibition and distribution of works that are arguably obscene or sacrilegious, or both, is to deny freedom of speech.

As readers of this journal know, Historical Revisionists and their allies in many countries that pass for “Western democracies” have been enduring, not a “chill,” but a veritable Ice Age as to rights which one thought had been won, after centuries of brave and bloody combat, in the academies and the public arenas of Europe and America by the mid-nineteenth century. By that time, any attempt by prince or potentate, cleric or policeman, to muzzle free expression among adults on subjects of public interest was liable to be decried around the civilized world as bigotry and obscurantism, and the censor to risk eternal ignominy at the pens of the best minds of the age.

A century and a half later, censorship is not merely alive and well, but more powerful than ever. Often eschewing prior restraint and police raids, (although not in France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Canada, and certain other “democracies”), today's censors work quite as effectively by clamorously proclaiming their devotion to every kind of free expression, while working behind the scenes not merely to deny dissenters access to the local, national, and global media market, but to silence and terrorize them with the threat of social and professional embarrassment and financial ruin should they deviate publicly in the slightest from the current tyranny over the mind.

Of late, journalists, educators, publishers, booksellers, and various other “intellectuals” and politicians – none of whom has ever uttered the slightest peep over the hounding of Robert Faurisson, Ditlieb Felderer, Ernst Zundel, Wilhelm Staglich, Henri Roques, and too many other Revisionists to do justice to by remembering here – are raising a great cry over censorship. We are pleased to present them this issue of The Journal of Historical Review, which is dedicated to all the Revisionists, men and women, from around the world who have battled to establish the truth about the history of this century and to make that truth known to mankind.

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While every issue of The Journal of Historical Review might properly be called a “free speech issue,” this one goes a bit further than most in justifying that name. It leads off with an excerpt from an important recent book by Dr. Jim Martin, the dean of living American Revisionists. Dr. Martin, a bibliophile as well as a historian of “men against the state,” takes careful aim at the insidious program of “self-censorship” undertaken, in the service of Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt, by the American publishing industry during the Second World War. After reading “Other Days, Other Ways,” one can only smile wanly at the effrontery of a segment of our contemporary book producers and marketers in wailing over this or that housecleaning or changing of the guard in the self-policing publishing houses of New York.

There follows an excerpt from Francis Parker Yockey's famous (or at least notorious) Imperium, self-published by its author, under the name Ulick Varange, in 1948. Here Yockey, who served as a lawyer with the war crimes inquisition at Wiesbaden in 1946, reveals what an intelligent and informed person was able to perceive about the “Holocaust” and the associated Allied propaganda against Germany three years after the war had ended, i.e., forty-two years ago.

Then Robert H. Williams, a wartime American counter-intelligence officer, reveals the real story of the murder of the Romanovs – Nicholas and Alexandra, their five children, several servants, and the family dog – at the order of the highest Bolsheviks in 1918. Of interest is the fact that, as Major Williams emphasized, the truth has been clear and public since 1920, but has been effectively denied the vast majority of persons, on this side as well as the other side of the old “Iron Curtain,” despite the great interest generated by such works as Robert Massie's spectacularly bestselling Nicholas and Alexandra. Of further interest is the fact that Williams's attempt to publicize long-known facts was undertaken thirty-three years ago.

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Our usual feature section begins with testimonies from three men who experienced what the Canadian magazine Saturday Night, summarizing James Bacque's Other Losses, has called “Eisenhower's Death Camps.” Recognizing that the debate over the fine points of Bacque's methodology, and in particular his ascription of blanket responsiblity to General Eisenhower, is likely to continue for some time, we are pleased to introduce these memoirs, two by German survivors and one by an American guard, into the discussion. Each text was submitted in English and has been lightly edited for style. We anticipate study and criticism of these accounts in accordance with the traditional historiographic method, and cheerfully encourage comparison of these documents, as to authenticity, veracity, and outlook, with the accounts of such “Holocaust” survivors as Elie Wiesel, Simon Wiesenthal, and others. Let it be noted that to date Bacque's important book has been unable to find a publisher in the United States, despite its bestseller success north of the border and in Germany, and its burning topicality in this centennial year of the birth of Dwight David Eisenhower.

The admirable Robert Faurisson has supplied us with an updated version of the preface which he wrote to Dr. Wilhelm's Staglich's Der Auschwitz Mythos (first published in English by the Institute for Historical Review, as The Auschwitz Myth, in 1986). As usual, Dr. Faurisson handles the issues raised in Dr. Staglich's book with courage, intelligence, and humanity. One should be reminded that this book was first placed on the Federal Republic of West Germany's “index” of “Publications Harmful to Young People,” then seized. with the equipment used for its production, after which the author's doctorate in law, duly awarded by the University of Gottingen in 1951, was revoked on the authority of a law originally promulgated by Adolf Hitler.

Next comes Carl Nordling's remarkable study of the fates of members of the Jewish establishments of twelve countries occupied by the Germans during the Second World War. While demographers, both Revisionist and Exterminationist, have long sought to examine the problem of the “dissolution” of East European Jewry through a telescope, so to speak, to our knowledge Mr. Nordling's study is the first by a professional demographer to assay the problem microscopically. After reading “The Jewish Establishment under Nazi Threat and Domination,” you won't be surprised to learn that this study was rejected for publication by media czar Robert Maxwell's Pergamon Press (Elmsford, New York) and its journal, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (published in association with the official U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem).

“A. Dibert” is the nom de guerre of an east-coast academic who has analyzed what he takes to be “Our Established Religion,” in its consequences for freedom of speech, thought, and even life and limb in these United States today. “Secular humanists” in particular may be traumatized by the shock of recognizing that they have allowed themselves, bit by bit, to be converted into slavish devotees of a cult that attempts to proscribe mercilessly any resistance to its tenets and sway.

The same writer deftly reviews Frenchman Henri Roques's dissertation on the remarkable “confessions” of SS officer Kurt Gerstein, the fabulous figure who gave rise to the “Deputy” story, the allegation that Pope Pius XII knew of mass German exterminations of the Jews but refused to denounce them, presumably out of ecclesiastical “anti-Semitism.” According to our reviewer, there is not much left of Gerstein's believability as a “Holocaust” eyewitness after Roques has finished with his minute investigation of the Gerstein texts. (For his pains, Henri Roques was stripped of his doctoral degree, duly awarded him by the University of Nantes, by the unprecedented ukase of a French Socialist minister.)

Canadian author and editor James Bacque's Other Losses is then reviewed by Arthur Ward, a previous contributor to The Journal, who gives ample tribute to Bacque's insight, industry, and tenacity in unearthing a mass atrocity which, although of course known to the victims and the perpetrators, had remained obscure as to its authorship, execution, and anything approaching the real number of deaths. (Bacque, while continuing to distance himself from the Institute for Historical Review's skepticism toward the “Holocaust,” recently told a newspaper reporter that IHR was the closest thing in the U.S. to a “samizdat,” the underground publishing operations which served such writers as Solzhenitsyn during the years of suppression under Brezhnev and his henchmen.)

JHR editorial adviser and frequent contributor Mark Weber examines Frenchman Jean-Claude Pressac's Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, and finds that this study, swarming with reproductions of Auschwitz documents never before published, powerfully bolsters the Revisionist case, whatever its author and publishers' (the well-known “Nazi-hunters” Beate and Serge Klarsfeld) intentions. It is perhaps worthy of note that although written in French, the book has not yet appeared in France, and that only 1,000 copies have been “offered for sale” in the United States. (That last in quotation marks because in certain cases Revisionists, upon identifying themselves, have not been allowed to buy the book from its American distributors: for the Pressac book there seems to be an index prohibitorum lectorum.)

One of the most praiseworthy World War II histories of recent years, The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, 1939-1945, is at last available in English. Originally published in Germany as Die Wehrmacht-Untersuchungsstelle, it is a brilliant study of how the German armed forces went about investigating alleged Allied war crimes, and includes a disturbing survey of some of the worst offenses committed by Germany's enemies. Such a book could perhaps only have been researched and written in the West Germany of that time (1979) by an American, such as lawyer and historian Alfred M. de Zayas, for then, as to a large extent now, a small number of Establishment West German historians, Professor Unraths who had unmanned themselves in whoring after the Lola-Lola of “volksp�dagogisch erwunschte” (folk-pedagogically desirable) historiography, held tyrannical sway over their profession. Such books as de Zayas's, expertly reviewed by the pseudonymous Professor Robert Clive, will soon elicit a last despairing “Cock-a-doodle-doo!” from the liars and cowards (David Irving's words) who dominate the West German historical profession, it is to be hoped.Dr. Charles Weber assesses Aspects of the Third Reich, an important collection of essays edited and commented on by H. W. Koch, and finds that, the current historical scene being what it is, the book is of value. On the other hand Exterminationist Christopher Browning, the chief academic witness against Ernst Zundel in 1988, found, in a review published not so long ago in a prominent “Holocaust” journal, that the “stench of apologetics” arose from the Koch collection. Long live the diversity of opinions freely expressed!

To close this issue of The Journal appear two highly competent reviews, by Robert Clive and Englishman James Hawkins, of military studies, one of Hitler's generals edited by Correlli Barnett, the other by John Keegan, which would scarcely be out of place in other American journals were it not for their objectivity of tone. In particular we think that Professor Clive is to be commended for his omission of the St Vitus's dance, the grand mal seizure, that normally afflicts academics who chance to utter the dread name of Adolf H. Perhaps that is why he writes under a pen-name.