From the editor

This issue of The Journal, the forty-first since publication was begun in 1980, opens Volume II with a long-sought contribution: Pulitzer-Prize winning historian John Toland's autobiographical remarks to IHR's Tenth Conference at Washington, D.C. last fall. IHR had sought out the best-selling author as a speaker for several years after the appearance of his Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath, Toland's Revisionist study of the cover-up by successive American presidential administrations, Congress, and the military (late IHR editorial adviser Pearcy L. Greaves played a key role in leading Toland through the maze of available proceedings and evidence from the nine official “investigations” by the government, on which Greaves was the pre-eminent expert).

Persistence pays, for here John Toland outlines the extraordinary story of how an intelligent, educated young American of literary bent, with a pronounced sympathy for the underdog that found its first reflection in a youthful affinity for Communism, grew into a marvelous historian dedicated to showing “how it actually was” in the experience and memory of historical participants, on all levels and all sides, of the mighty happenings he investigates and chronicles. Toland's road to a broadly Revisionist perspective on the Twentieth century's great wars and their actual origins, you will see, was marked by no Damascene crises, but by his taking the pains to seek out, talk and listen to, and even befriend men and women whom Toland's colleagues in the literary establishment, peering into the dark and silent glass of their own enlightened prejudices, could view only as orgres. We eagerly await the appearance of the autobiography which he and his lovely wife and collaborator Toshiko are presently writing.

In the previous issue we promised further analysis of Jean-Claude Pressac's gigantic and unintentionally revealing attempt to substantiate homicidal gassings at Auschwitz by publishing a wealth of documents, photographs, sketches, and plans hitherto unavailable to all but the small number of researchers who have had access to the archives at the Auschwitz State Museum and other Polish institutions. Who better to help Revisionism profit from Pressac's Gargantuan appetite for the minutiae of the planning, construction, and operation of the Auschwitz crematoria and delousing facilities than IHR editorial advisor Robert Faurisson, who preceded Pressac into the Auschwitz archives and served as the strange French pharmacists' first mentor in the on-site, material study of the realities on the ground (and underground) in the famous concentration camp. Here, in the first part of a monumental study of the Pressac thesis and its import for Revisionism (translated from the original French as originally published in Revue d'Histoire Révisionniste, no. 3, November-December 1990 January 1991, pp. 65-155), Dr. Faurisson spares all but the masochistic the chore of moiling through Pressac's mammoth (and all but unavailable) tome by reducing its author's unprecedented efforts to exploit the material evidence to so much grist for the Revisionist mill.

Seeing is believing, especially for Revisionists. Our new associate editor, Mark Weber, has selected and commented on just a few of the many revelatory, “tell-tale” documents and photographs which make Pressac's Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers a windfall for Revisionism. The relief one feels at the restoration of the architecture and equipment of Auschwitz to its original banality is a measure of just how bizarre and sinister a phantasmagoria the wizards of Exterminationism have conjured up. Truly Mark and Dr. Faurisson and their colleagues are benign magicians, wielding their restorative powers to dispel the hateful projections of the liars of Auschwitz!

The Journal of Historical Review is proud to publish, for the first time ever, the final plea of the defense lawyer in the 1947 trial of nineteen Germans for their role in alleged war crimes at the Nordhausen-Dora concentration camp complex. Major Leon Poullada's informed, thoughtful, yet impassioned pleas to the American officers who sat in judgement on the case in Dachau is noteworthy not merely for its impressive marshalling, just two years after the war, of arguments and insights which even the most informed Revisionist can profit from today, but also for its evidence that an American officer of unquestioned patriotism and probity made a case for which, in its essence, men and women of good will are being witch-hunted and scape-goated in Europe and America today, nearly 45 years later.

Frequent JHR contributor Bill Grimstad, a practiced journalist and long-time observer and connoisseur of the outlandish and inexplicable, from flying saucers to Zionism, considers a new look at the “occult roots of Nazism,” and gives it qualified approval. Here at last, it seems, is an author, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, who, despite his own “metaphysical” leanings and reflex anti-Hitlerism, does a measure of justice to the Führer's alleged “Ariosophist” influences and who leaves the “Spear of Destiny” to molder in the impotent obscurity to which he properly consigns it.

We wish to apologize to our subscribers for the belatedness of this issue of The Journal , which is due in some part to an imminent trial, occasioned by the complaint of Mel Mermelstein, who claims to have proved the Holocaust took place and has found a second judge to decree that event need not have been proved at all: it is simply beyond dispute. Nevertheless, we at IHR are confident, resolute, and determined to combat this renewed attempt to torpedo historical dissent to the best of our ability. Despite the approaching trial, we promise to be back on schedule this summer.