Internet Roundup

One of the great advantages of running a World Wide Web site is the ease and minimal cost of publishing. CODOHWeb has gained an international reputation not only for our republishing of classic revisionist texts like Fritz Berg's “Diesel Gas Chambers: Myth within a Myth” and the banned-in-Germany anthology, Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte (Foundations of Contemporary History), but also for publishing new works of revisionist scholarship.

One of the most interesting, and perhaps even groundbreaking essays posted to CODOHWeb is the book-length study “The Gas Chambers of Sherlock Holmes” by Samuel Crowell. Readers of SR will recall Crowell's brilliant analysis, based on painstaking research, of how German air raid shelter technology has been misconstrued as “traces” of evidence of extermination by J.C. Pressac and other experts. In this latest essay (which CODOH plans to publish in 1999), Crowell explores the origins of the gassing myth in popular anxieties and modem propaganda.

Crowell's unique argument is that the gassing stories are based not so much in lies or a grand conspiracy, as that they are rooted in widespread fears that long antedated the war and which were concerned with gas warfare, public health measures, cremation, and other threatening aspects of twentieth-century modernity. As we can see in the following dispatch from Crowell, sent to us to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the “War of the Worlds” hysteria, it is not just East European Jews in wartime who are vulnerable to that sort of panic. Nor is the duty of revisionism exhausted by unearthing the evidence of the secret misdeeds of governments~it also exposes and counters popular delusions and hysteria, whether fomented by design or set off by free-floating cultural anxiety.