German Television Report Features IHR Interview

Portions of an interview filmed at the office of the Institute for Historical Review were featured in a television report broadcast on two German regional television networks. The half-hour report, “Neo-Nazis Online: The Advance of the Extremists on the Internet,” was shown on the “Shaft of Light” series broadcast in late 1996 on the SDR and WDR networks.

While most of the report focused on the activities of such figures as National Socialist leader Gerhard Lauck, “White Aryan Resistance” organizer Tom Metzger, and “Stormfront” Internet home page operator Don Black, a few minutes dealt with revisionism and the Institute.

The IHR is described as the “headquarters” of revisionism, which is characterized as a particularly perfidious form of anti-Semitism because it seeks to “relativize” the Holocaust story.

Simon Wiesenthal Center employee Rick Eaton is shown telling viewers that because it presents arguments in a scholarly way, the Institute is possibly “the most dangerous of all” the “hate” groups.

Both the outside and the inside of the IHR’s office-warehouse building (inaccurately described as a “wood barracks”) are shown. Greg Raven, seen working at his desk, is identified as the “system operator” responsible for the IHR’s Internet connection. Two portions of a filmed interview with IHR Director Mark Weber are shown. Described as the Institute’s “ideologue,” he gives a summary definition of Holocaust revisionism, and tells viewers that revisionism has now spread to the point that it can no longer be effectively suppressed.

The interview with Weber, and the shots of the Institute building, were filmed by Dr. Thomas Aders of SDR television in Stuttgart during an August 22 visit to southern California.

Simultaneously as the narrator describes the IHR conference speakers list as a “who’s who of history distorters,” brief clips are shown of Robert Faurisson, David Irving and Ernst Zündel addressing the 1994 IHR Conference.

While the report is effective in its purpose, it is essentially a glitsy, high-tech smear job. For example, it inaccurately characterizes the Institute, at least by implication, as a “neo-Nazi” organization. It’s essential bias is manifest in its completely uncritical, even sympathetic, portrayal of the Wiesenthal Center and the Anti-Defamation League, and their spokespersons. This in spite of these organizations’ well-documented record of distorting historical truth to further their ultra-Zionist objectives.