From the Editor

This Fall 1991 issue of The Journal of Historical Review begins with two more nails in the coffin of what Editorial Advisory Committee member Dr. Wilhelm Stäglich has called the “Auschwitz myth.”

The first, Brian Renk's expos e of what has seemed to a number of Exterminationists as the long-sought “smoking gun” (“dusty document” would be better) to prove that yes, there were homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz, there was a German program to exterminate the Jews, and the Führer not merely knew about it, he had specifically ordered it. Not so, demonstrates Renk, a promising young Revisionist scholar from Canada who painstakingly studied the so-called “Franke-Gricksch, ” or “Resettlement Action,” report, establishing that it is certainly a fraud. By doing so, he's landed a heavy blow against two heavyweights in the Exterminationist camp, Gerald Fleming and Jean-Claude Pressac, both of whom make much of the document (it was Professor Fleming who first brought the “Resettlement Action” report to prominence in his attempt to refute David Irving's thesis that Hitler had not ordered the alleged extermination). We have high hopes that Mr. Renk, a student of history on the college level who attended last year's Tenth IHR Conference, will be a featured speaker at a future conference.

Enrique Aynat, who represents Spain on the JHR's diverse and indeed cosmopolitan Editorial Advisory Committee, weighs in with a careful examination of the reportage on Auschwitz and the “Final Solution” in the Polish Fortnightly Review, the leading propaganda organ of the London-based Polish Government-in-Exile. As in the Watergate hearings, “What did they know and when did they know it?” is the question, the significance of which, for Auschwitz, was first made clear by Arthur Butz in his seminal Hoax of the Twentieth Century and in his subsequent essay “Context and Perspective in the 'Holocaust Controversy' ” (see the Winter 1982 JHR [Vol. 3, no. 4]), both of which bear readingagain and again for anyone with a real interest in Holocaust Revisionism. Señor Aynat, whose prolific writings on Auschwitz have appeared in this journal and elsewhere, bids fair, with the Italian Carlo Mattogno and numerous colleagues in France, to found a Revisionist Latin League: Teutonic Revisionists take note (or better, notate bene).

Like most contributors to the journal, Doug Collins is a man of parts bulldoglike-Englishman, World War II combat veteran and POW, award-winning Canadian journalist, and uncompromising defender of freedom of speech and the press. As he makes clear, Collins is skeptical of more than one Revisionist argument, often on his own experience, but he wants no part of the Establishment's permanent hatemongering against the Germans. Furthermore, and most important, he scores the press of own country for its cowardly submission to special interests, Jewish and otherwise, which decreed a practical news blackout of the second trial of Ernst Zündel, and which continues hypocritically to evade the issue of suppression of unpopular speech and writing from the politically incorrect, while functioning as a virtual cheering section for every Communist crank and pornographer. As we American Revisionists know as well as anyone, just because a man doesn't go to jail for unpopular opinions doesn't mean there is real freedom of the press a mass media which is uniformly hostile to, or blacks out, an important point of view might just as well be subject to state censorship.

Carl Nordling, a professional demographer, takes another look at the very open question for Revisionists and, increasingly, even non-Revisionists of how many Jews died in Europe during the Second World War. Nordling's synthesizing of the population and mortality estimates for European Jewry during the war years from the best Revisionist and Exterminationist sources with his own small-scale study of a cohort of the fates of several hundred individual Jews should open new vistas for Revisionist researchers in search of an accounting of the actual (and no less deplorable) losses suffered by Jews during the war to replace the fraudulent numerological fetish of the “Six Million.”

Then Frederick Kerr takes a look at a new textbook on a subject that has been all but flogged to death in the universities and schools over the past several decades, to wit Nationalism & Antisemitism in Modern Europe 1815-1945. As Dr. Kerr points out, students may learn more about that subject than their educator, Israeli professor, Shmuel Almog, and his publisher, Britain-based international media czar (or is that tsar?), Robert Maxwell, bargained for.

Robert Clive, an expert on the history of the Second World War, examines David Martin's account of Britain's (and America's) betrayal of yet another anti-Communist World War-II ally, Serbian General Draza Mihailovic.

This issue of The Journal has an usually long, and very newsy, “Historical News and Comment Section.” As Associate Editor Mark Weber, Dan Desjardins, and JHR Editorial Advisors John Bennett and Dr. Clarence Lang demonstrate, the enemies of historical truth are in retreat, and it's not a pretty sight, particularly when these powerful malefactors are devoting all their considerable resources to covering up their crimes and misdeamors by muzzling their critics. But murder will out, whether the murder of Rudolf Hess or of historical fact or of free inquiry, as these four articles testify.

In this issue, for the first time in some years, The Journal has published two letters from readers. We hope to continue publishing informed letters, with preference given to communications taking reasoned issue with, or adding materially to, articles previously published in The JHR.

Your editor has one final, pleasant task, to announce that on September 19, Mel Mermelstein and his pricey Beverly Hills lawyers voluntarily dismissed their complaints of libel, conspiracy, and intentional infliction of emotional distress against the Institute for Historical Review; its founder, Willis A. Carto; and the populist Liberty Lobby. Just hours earlier, Judge Stephen Lachs had dismissed Mermelstein's fourth complaint, for malicious prosecution, Aside from ending a potentially devastating $11 million suit, the end of the Mermelstein case, barring an appeal, rings down the curtain on a ten-year-long melodrama of costly, time-consuming litigation with one of America's most-honored “Holocaust survivors.” An upcoming issue of The Journal will include an examination of what the Mermelstein has involved, and produced, of note, historiographically as well as institutionally, for IHR and revisionism.