It’s Going Direct to America’s Cultural Mavericks!

Samuel Crowell's 'The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes' is available for purchase here

The game’s afoot! Sherlock Holmes has joined CODOH’s battle to spread revisionism to the campus, to media, and to an elite of authors, intellectuals, and activists who are the most likely to be receptive to a bold, brilliant new synthesis of the case against the gas chamber and extermination canard.

Taking advantage of an unexpected turn of events, Smith sent the first prepublication copy of revisionism’s latest, most scintillating text, Samuel Crowell’s The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes—to Christopher Hitchens, the first of more than a hundred influential but dissident opinion makers who will be the first recipients of the book-length manuscript.

Hitchens, of course, is the iconoclastic British journalist who last month was accused by Bill Clinton’s sympathizers of being a clandestine “Holocaust denier.” Meanwhile, CODOH is targeting mainstream journalists and campus editors with Samuel Crowell’s sophisticated and graceful foreword to Sherlock, that explains how the former academic came to write the book—in response to the persecution of revisionism and revisionists abroad (and its blackout here). The accompanying cover letter directs the recipient to our Website, CODOHWeb, where Sherlock can be accessed in its entirety. A project for earmarking copies of Sherlock to an audience of (so far as we know) nonrevisionists with influence in media, academia, and the general cultural arena has been on CODOH’s drawing board for some months now.

As the work itself—The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes: An Attempt at a Literary Analysis of the Holocaust Gassing Claim—was nearing completion last month, as sometimes happens when great issues or great wars are joined, a panicky shot rang out from among the enemy ranks first. We mean the lurid tale told that Christopher Hitchens was a Holocaust “denier.” The story appeared in the heavily neo-conservative Washington Times. It originated with writer Edward J. Epstein, Kennedy assassination buff and good friend of White House aide Sidney Blumenthal, whom Hitchens recently accused of perjury for Blumenthal’s denial under oath that he had attempted to portray Monica Lewinsky as a “stalker.”

Hitchens, over the years, has passed, not for a liberal, but for a leftist—he wrote a book trashing saintly Mother Theresa, the nun who spent her career running a hospice for the down and out in Calcutta, as a “fascist Albanian dwarf.” Yet several years ago, readers of SR may remember, he objected strongly and publicly to the pressure campaign that resulted in St. Martin's Press dropping plans to publish Goebbels by David Irving, whom Hitchens called a “great fascist historian” (clearly, he likes the word “fascist”). More important, he wrote: “I have thought about this a lot and I feel the need to say, very clearly, that St. Martin's has disgraced and degraded the practice of debate.” (In Vanity Fair, June 1996—see SR no. 33, June 1996.) In other words, like the others on the list CODOH is working up. Hitchens is talented, unpredictable, curious, a maverick—and needless to say a member of a tiny minority apart from the great, shameless, shambling, herd of kept journalists and court historians: the Tom Brokaws, the Steven Ambroses, and their like.

Operation Sherlock is CODOH's response to a concrete event and a possible trend. The event, of course, is the appearance of The Gas Chambers of Sherlock Holmes itself, the first book-length, scholarly revisionist investigation of the establishment Holocaust story in many years. Samuel Crowell (the author’s pen name) has a broad knowledge of Central and Eastern European modem history, and is thoroughly versed in the sources for the “Holocaust.” and in the revisionist as well as the orthodox literature. In Sherlock, he has brought his learning to bear against the gas chamber-extermination story in a way that is at once incisive, but also conciliatory. On reading Sherlock, those new to revisionism will understand that the demolition of the myths and lies of the Holocaust need not be accompanied by unconditional hostility to Jews.

Crowell’s interest in the Holocaust story was kindled when he learned (from CODOHWeb) of State persecution of revisionists abroad. Crowell’s first effort, “Technique and Operation of German Anti-Gas Shelters in World War II,” dealt a heavy blow to Frenchman J.-C. Pressac’s attempt to salvage the Auschwitz gas chambers on behalf of his sponsors, “Nazi hunters” Serge and Beate Klarsfeld. Crowell’s “Technique and Operation,” the first study to focus on the role of air defense measures in the German camps, was made available on the Internet through CODOHWeb, and in print form in Germar Rudolf's journal, Vierteljahreshefte für freie Geschichtsforschung (Dec. 1997).

Crowell’s next essay, “Defending Against the Allied Bombing Campaign: Air Raid Shelters and Gas Protection in Germany, 1939-1945” is both an elaboration of “Technique and Operation” and a poignant, authoritative reminder of the suffering and the courage of German civilians under the murderous attacks of the Anglo-American air forces. This article, too, disclosed that the “gas chamber” door from Majdanek exhibited at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is identical with a door pictured in wartime, and pre-wartime, German ads for standard-issue air raid shelter doors.

It is Sherlock, though, that is (to date), Crowell’s summa. True to its name, it enlists the reader—particularly the reader new to scholarly revisionism of the Jewish holocaust story—in a bold, ratiocinative adventure in pursuit of the truth, and all the evidence that will lead us there. The “literary analysis” promised in the book’s subtitle proves to be a careful study of the rumors of the gas chambers; their antecedents by way of similar reports decades before, the fears that generated them; and the postwar evidence for the gas chambers and extermination policy: testimonies, confessions, documents, and the alleged gas chambers themselves.

Crowell, a Sherlock Holmes for our age, ranges knowledgeably from the California redwoods to Balkan backwaters, from Stalin’s show trials to BBC broadcasts to demonstrate satisfyingly, convincingly, to any alert, fair-minded reader that, as he writes: “There is no material or documentary basis for the gassing claims of any kind.”

We revisionists have strongly suspected this, for some time, of course. Even so, there is a great deal new for every' revisionist in this up-to-the-minute reexamination of the version of the Holocaust that, though false, dominates our culture today. And for those unfamiliar with revisionist literature, Sherlock is accessible, brief yet thorough, objective in tone, up-to-date—in short, the wake-up call that so many have been waiting for. How long is it going to take to see the orthodox Holocaust story replaced with the truth?

“There is no material or documentary basis for the gassing claims of any kind.” … Samuel Crowell

We believe that there may be a subterranean backlash brewing against Holocaustomania among the intellectuals—right now! There is the Hitchens affair, of course: no matter how mangled and twisted the representation is of whatever doubts Hitchens may have, he may very well doubt. Holocaustomania rampant; blanket permission (and a blank check) for Israel to run amok— in Lebanon, on the West Bank, on Capitol Hill and in the White House—breed that sort of doubt. It’s not just Hitchens, of course—and it won’t only be Hitchens who gets Sherlock. Gore Vidal, Israel Shahak, Pat Buchanan, Alexander Cockburn, and many more are on our list (and no, we’re not afraid to name names: let the buzz begin!). CODOH’s Operation Sherlock is another piece of heavy artillery—as are the Campus Project and CODOHWeb—this time bringing into range major targets in the larger culture who we have not had quite the right ammunition before. There won’t be any advertisements—at this stage of the game—just the real revisionist goods direct to the people who need them most—and can use them best.

[CODOH needs your help to launch Operation Sherlock and to sustain our other efforts, from the Campus Project to CODOHWeb. It will cost $11 to print, cover in plastic, gather in a spiral binding, package and mail each copy of the first one hundred copies of Sherlock we are sending to influential media figures—and I would like to send it to more. Your contribution of $33 (or more) brings you a pre-publication copy of The Gas Chambers of Sherlock Holmes and lets you share the excitement that Gore, Chris, Pat, Alex, Minister Louis, and other opinion makers will experience as they read their copies. And your $33 helps Smith to send Sherlock to three of the several hundred influential opinion makers who need to have it. If you’ve recently made a bundle on Internet stocks, you might decide to send $1,100 to cover the shipment of a full 100 copies of Sherlock and have done with it. How better to introduce the case for Holocaust revisionism to the opinion makers most ready for it?]