Letters

Best Money

Your new Journal of Historical Review is perfect. Well written and with a layout with lots of “air” and photos, it makes people interested. The best money I ever spent was to begin my subscription. I can't give you enough credit for it. Keep up the good work.

H. L.
Landskrona, Sweden

Some Style

I must say that you have taken out the “old style” Journal in some kind of style. The Winter 1992-93 issue is a great finale.

Combining the older style Journal with the Newsletter does not seem to be such a bad idea at all, and one may hope that the input of the readers grows in both volume and quality. I can't see how you can go wrong if you continue in the direction the first two numbers of the new series points. Still, I wonder how you are going to keep coming up with glamorous front cover photos!

In the commentary on Churchill in the March-April 1993 issue, you mentioned Francis Neilson's Churchill Legend, but omitted mentioning Emrys Hughes' Winston Churchill, British Bulldog (1955), a marvelous extension of what Neilson wrote about Winnie. Somebody ought to see if this could be resurrected and reprinted. In the meantime, I will stack my essay on Britain in Hog Island against anyone else's product of similar length.

I have read a friend's copy of Vidal-Naquet's Assassins of Memory. It struck me as a pretty sad excuse for a book.

James J. Martin
Colorado Springs, Col.

Serious Opponent

I warmly endorse the new form in which the IHR Journal is appearing: it is sincere, balanced, objective and devoid of polemics. It presents the enemies of the truth for the first time with a serious opponent. Having said that, it is clear that I also have confidence in each and every member of the current team behind this achievement: long may they, and the Journal, stay unchanged staunch and unflinching soldiers in what our brave comrade Robert Faurisson has called “this great adventure.”

David Irving
London, England

Feeling of Optimism

I thoroughly enjoyed Mr. O'Keefe's tongue-in-cheek review [in the Nov.-Dec. Journal] of Deborah Lipstadt's anti-revisionist book, Denying the Holocaust. He barely scratched the surface in identifying the slop in this failed opus. O'Keefe summed it up very well when he wrote that it does not deserve a review, but an epitaph. It seems a public confession of failure by Lipstadt. I finished her book with a new feeling of optimism for the future of Holocaust revisionism. If this is the best they can muster, all I can say is keep up the good work, for victory is at hand.

J. W.
Overland Park, Kansas

Former Scoffer

Three years ago I would have scoffed – did scoff in fact – at the ideas of revisionist historians without, of course, having read their work. A couple of years ago, and with much trepidation, I ordered a small batch of IHR books. The timing could not have been better. The daily operations of the media and the political elites have confirmed to me the pattern of disinformation, distortion and ostracism that revisionist historians discovered in the actions of the architects of the Allied world order. Media blitzkriegs, Orwellian rewriting of history, professional reprisals against those who question any part of the post-World War II apparat, all leave little doubt that the history of World War II as we were taught it in the '60s and '70s is largely mythic. In short, I wish I had subscribed to The Journal of Historical Review a year earlier.

J.H.
Scottsdale, Ariz.

More Vocal

Just a short note to tell you folks how grateful I am to have received an offer to subscribe to the Journal. I had heard about it and the Institute. I, for one, am sickened and fed up with the mass media's lies and one-sidedness. Here in Cleveland we have been saturated with false propaganda from the controlled media about John Demjanjuk. Even after he was acquitted, Jewish-Zionist radicals still wanted him lynched. What used to be faint whispers of skepticism about the so-called Holocaust are now a little more vocal in every gathering place and coffee shop in and around Cleveland. The average person is fed up with the Six Million lie shoved down his throat at every opportunity. The day will come when all those who seek the truth will discover it.

A.A.
Cleveland, Ohio

Crucial Times

Enclosed please find a contribution for the cause served so well by The Journal of Historical Review. I regret it can't be more, since our own struggle demands so much of us in these crucial times.

L. F. Stofberg
House of Assembly
Parliament of South Africa
Cape Town, South Africa

An “Abominable” Book

The Last Days of the Romanovs by Robert Wilton [reviewed in the Jan.-Feb. 1994 Journal] is not merely a bad book, it is an abominable one. The story of the murder of the Russian Tsar and his family, and of the attendant circumstances, has been told better, more than once. Similarly, the influence of Jews in the Bolshevist revolution has been pointed out many times. This book's only novelty is its resuscitation of British First World War anti-German hate propaganda. The caveat in Weber's introduction (p. xiii) about page 153 of Wilton's text is feeble and inadequate.

When it comes to identifying those who conceived, instigated, and carried out the murder of the Romanov family, Wilton declares, correctly, that they were Jewish Bolshevists, from top to bottom. This was widely known even in 1920. Wilton, like Churchill, hated Jews and Bolshevists. But he (also like Churchill) hated Germans even more, and for no reason, insensately.

Consequently, this British history twister introduces a previously – and, I believe, subsequently – unheard of group that, along with the Bolshevist Jews who led it, is supposed to have actually pulled the triggers. These were Letts [Latvians], or, rather “Letts,” since they weren't actually Letts, but rather Germans. But it was not only a few German “Letts” who killed the Tsar and his family, according to Wilton; it was Germany itself, and at its head, the Kaiser, that was ultimately responsible for the crime!

Wilton's Germanophobia causes him to see events from a strictly British perspective that has nothing to do with reality or truth. According to him, Germany was the prime mover in the Russian Revolution, and thus in the murder of the Imperial family.

The “Red Kaiser” (Wilhelm II) and the “Red Tsar” (Solomon/ Sverdlov) worked together toward both ends, Wilton argues. Sverdlov was supposedly on the lush payroll of “German bankers,” and the entire Jewish-Bolshevist apparatus was controlled by Germany through its satrap in Petrograd, Ambassador Mirbach. That Mirbach was promptly murdered by Jewish Bolshevists didn't unsettle Wilton's argument. In an effort to bolster it, Wilton quotes a brief passage, not precisely to the point, and out of context, from Ludendorff's memoirs.

Wilton is outraged because Germany, after fighting for three years on two fronts, and then with the Americans helping to bludgeon her, should decline to commit suicide for the benefit of those who had precipitated a war of aggression against her.

He alludes repeatedly to the much publicized “German sealed train” – which wasn't sealed at all – that facilitated Lenin's return to Petrograd. Wilton doesn't tell his readers that this rail journey came after the Russian armies had been defeated in the field, Nicholas had abdicated, and the revolution was under way.

In 1914 the Tsar had been so stupid as to allow himself and his country to be sucked into the Anglo-French aggression against Germany. What had Russia to gain from attacking Germany? An ephemeral internal political breathing spell? Nicholas II was too stupid to see that continued friendship with Germany would have given Russia a more durable breathing spell. Nicholas compounded this stupidity when, in 1916, while there was still time, the Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt, Alexandra's brother, left his headquarters on the Western Front and crossed the lines to offer Nicholas generous terms to make peace. Nicholas II refused them.

Wilton praises this disastrous folly as “loyalty to his Allies” who abandoned him to his murderers.

Wilton talks much about the [March 1918] Treaty of Brest-Litovsk [between the Soviet government and the Central Powers]. He doesn't cite its provisions. These were, notably, independence for Finland and the three Baltic countries, restoration of the integrity of Poland, and independence for Ukraine. Precisely the “self-determination of peoples” loudly and sanctimoniously proclaimed by Woodrow Wilson, then shamelessly scuttled by the Allied powers at Versailles. Wilton's twaddle about the “need,” by the Bolsheviks, or the Germans, for Nicholas to “approve” the Brest-Litovsk Treaty is just that. By 1918 he was already an un-person.

Another part of the history withheld by Wilton is that, after Britain was unable to move the Bolshevists to denounce the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty, and to resume the war against Germany, Churchill, in another of his “masterful” strategic strokes (like Gallipoli), landed a British-cum-Canadian army in Russia, but at a prudent distance from Petrograd and Moscow. The Americans, naturally, also had to meddle. After muddling about the countryside, losing men and materiel, the British and the Americans took their licking and departed. Only Pilsudski, and his Poles, beat back the Soviets, in 1920-21.

Wilton is silent about the shabby role of British King George V in the Ekaterinburg murder story. George V was then the only person in the world with the power and the means to free his first cousin, Nicholas II, and his family. He was urged to do so. He refused to make even a gesture in that direction, and left Nicholas, his wife, and his children, in the hands of their butchers.

Wilton's concoction is insidious and dangerous. It can be perceived, far too readily as offering “evidence” – endorsed by the IHR – of German “guilt” in matters, and in ways, the reader hardly would have imagined.

Carl Hottelet
Toms River, N.J.

Enemy Outflanked

The IHR is doing a great job. You are reaching more people than ever. In the war against untruth, you are gaining ever more troop-sappers. The enemy will continue to find themselves outflanked and “out-gunned.”

M.B.
Gold Hill, Oreg.

Significant

Congratulations on your article, “The Jewish Role in the Bolshevik Revolution and Russia's Early Soviet Regime,” in the January-February 1994 issue. I found it one of the most significant articles I have ever read in the JHR.

(Dr.) Charles Weber
Tulsa, Okla.

Outstanding

I have just this minute finished reading your feature article about the Bolshevik Revolution. Congratulations! It's outstanding.

Y.F.
Paris, France

Readable

Mark Weber has done it again. In “Zionism and the Third Reich” (July-August issue), he has taken a complex topic and presented it in a concise, cogent and very readable fashion. A pleasure to read.

John Mortl
Toronto, Canada

Effective Photos

The article on the Spanish-American War era (in the July-August 1993 issue) was very well done. In recent years engineers have determined that the destruction of the US warship “Maine” in Havana harbor in 1898 resulted from an internal rather than an external explosion. This suggests either an accident or deliberate sabotage by the US to create a pretext for war with Spain.

The new Journal format is excellent. I am very glad that you are now using photographs. These often carry a point much more effectively than prose.

T.K.
Hornell, N.Y.

Vatican Orders

Having been raised a Catholic, I particularly appreciate the article by Mary Ball Martinez on Pius XII [in the Sept.-Oct. issue]. I would like to add the additional fact that when Rev. Charles Coughlin, the great populist “radio priest” of the prewar era, was “silenced” in 1942, it was not FDR who forbade him from further speaking out, but rather, according to Coughlin's bishop, the order came from the “highest authority in the Vatican,” that is, Pius XII.

M.B.
Los Angeles

Earliest Claims of Nazi Gassings?

Recently I have been engaged in a project of collecting newspaper and magazine accounts of early wartime claims of homicidal gassings by the German National Socialist government. While doing so I re-read the feature in the September-October 1993 Journal (p. 43), “How Fake War Propaganda Stories are Manufactured.” The article reproduces in facsimile an October 1941 document from the British War Cabinet's Joint Intelligence Committee on “suggestions for rumours of a military nature.” Of particular interest is the Committee's proposal to spread rumors that German officials were killing their own wounded soldiers with poison gas.

I believe that this rumor may indeed have been put into circulation by British propagandists, and might also have been the source of the very earliest claims of homicidal gassings by the Nazis.

Two months after these British Intelligence Committee suggestions were made, Thomas Mann, the German novelist and expatriate, broadcast a speech in German on British radio to the German public. In this speech he said: “Collapse is near. Your troops in Russia lack doctors, nurses, medical supplies. In German hospitals the severely wounded, the old and feeble are killed with poison gas – in one single institution, two to three thousand, a German doctor said.”

The full text of Mann's speech was published in The New York Times, December 7, 1941, p. 45. This is the earliest public claim of homicidal gassing by the Nazis that I have found. Are there any earlier claims of such World War II German gassings? If not, then the machinations of the British Joint Intelligence Committee appear to represent the origin of the myth of homicidal gassings by the German National Socialist regime.

Revisionist arguments refuting claims of alleged German extermination programs are more likely to gain public acceptance if it can be shown precisely how the Holocaust story evolved from wartime propaganda and disinformation. The Joint Intelligence Committee document and Thomas Mann's speech are valuable evidence in this regard.

Jack Wikoff
Aurora, N. Y.

Mania of Anti-Anti-Communism

The statement by Anti-Defamation League official Arnold Forster [quoted in the Nov.-Dec. Journal, p. 42] that ''The civilized world was more revolted by McCarthyism than by Communism,” while astounding, is unfortunately true, if by “civilized world” one means the liberal political establishment and its press organs. Senator Joe McCarthy disturbed the “respectable” citizens far more than “Uncle Joe” Stalin ever did. The “anti-anti-Communism” mania of the media is exceeded only by its Holocaust propaganda.

W.W.
Walnut Creek, Calif.

A Good Year

Revisionism has had a good year, and the elites don't quite know what to do about it. The more they attack the revisionists, the more they give it a platform for ideas they wish they did not have to face.

T.K.
Homer, Alaska

Intellectual Revolution

Revisionism is the intellectual revolution of the 21st century. I want to join this revolution, and to contribute to the search for historical truth.

P. B.
Freilassing, Bavaria Germany

Khazars and “Anti-Semitism”

The term “Anti-Semitic” is something of a misnomer. Most Jews living in the world today are not of Hebrew ancestry, and are therefore not Semites. The largest group of Semites are Arabs.

As Arthur Koestler explains in his book, The Thirteenth Tribe, European Jews had their origin in the empire of the Khazars, a Turkic people that was powerful in the Caspian sea region of southern Russia from about 600 A.D. to 1000 A.D. Jewish merchants became powerful, and in the year 740 succeeded in converting the Khazar rulers to Judaism. A century later incoming Slavic tribes broke the power of the Khazars, eventually scattering these people over eastern and central Europe, where they were known as Jews. Today, most Jews of Eastern and Central European origin, so-called “Ashkenazi” Jews, are descended from the converted Khazars, and therefore are not Semites.

G.C.
Carencro, La.

We welcome letters from readers. We reserve the right to edit for style and space.