In Memoriam Thomas Dunskus, 29 Jan. 1933 – 17 Sept. 2021

When Thomas Dunskus passed away on September 17, 2021, Holocaust revisionism lost a vital friend and supporter. While most people reading these lines may never have heard his name before, for those who have been involved in our struggle to get the revisionist message out, he was probably the most-resourceful and hardest-working volunteer we at CODOH had ever seen.

When I decided back in 2002 to take over and revive CODOH’s struggling periodical The Revisionist, I planned on initially infusing it with articles there had been or were about to be published in my German revisionist periodical Vierteljahreshefte für freie Geschichtsforschung (VffG). Since I could not possibly do all the work to make this happen, I appealed to my many friends and supporters to who have any translation skills to sign up for the many translations that had to be done to make this project happen. Thomas Dunskus was among the first to sign up. If you search the CODOH library for his name, you will discover three papers published by The Revisionist that originated from VFFG and were translated by him, two of which are quite significant.

But Thomas Dunskus also wrote a few articles himself, two of which show up when you look up his name in CODOH’s list of authors. Both are book reviews; one of them about a book revealing the true aspects of the National-Socialist obsession with “Jewish Bolshevism,” the other discussing various books about Rudolf Hess and his thwarted peace mission to the UK in 1941. He also spoke out in a letter to the editor of VffG once. And then there is his one original revisionist contribution he published under the pen name Heinrich Köchel, “Outdoor Incineration of Livestock Carcasses,” which was originally published in German in VffG, and later in an updated English translation in Inconvenient History. It is now included in the appendix of Holocaust Handbooks Volume 17 on outdoor cremations in Auschwitz.

All this would not necessarily demand a eulogy from me, though. In order to really appreciate what Thomas Dunskus has done for revisionism in the years between 2003 and 2015, we need to turn to the contributions he made under his pseudonym Henry Gardner. To keep his private life safe from harassments by government authorities and societal pressure groups, he chose to have most of his translations signed with this name. It is no exaggeration to say that, without Thomas’s multilingual skills put highly effectively to the task of translating a long list of our books at no charge at all, our prestigious series Holocaust Handbooks would be a mere shadow of what it is today. Here is the long list of books that he translated for us from Italian into English, and a few of them also into German:

• Vol. 9: Belzec: Propaganda, Testimonies, Archeological Research, and History
• Vol. 11: Debunking the Bunkers of Auschwitz: Black Propaganda versus History
• Vol. 17: Auschwitz: Open-Air Incinerations
• Vol. 18: Auschwitz Lies: Legends, Lies, and Prejudices on the Holocaust (all of Mattogno’s contributions)
• Vol. 19: Sobibór: Holocaust Propaganda and Reality (all German and Italian contributions)
• Vol. 20: Auschwitz: The First Gassing. Rumor and Reality
• German Vol. 20: Auschwitz: Die erste Vergasung. Gerücht und Wirklichkeit (together with Jürgen Graf)
• Vol. 21: Auschwitz: Crematorium I: and the Alleged Homicidal Gassings
• German Vol. 21: Auschwitz: Krematorium I und die angeblichen Menschenvergasungen
• Vol. 22: The Real Case for Auschwitz: Robert van Pelt’s Evidence from the Irving Trial Critically Reviewed
• Vol. 24: The Cremation Furnaces of Auschwitz: A Technical and Historical Study
• Vol. 25: Inside the Gas Chambers: The Extermination of Mainstream Holocaust Historiography

The quality of his translation work was remarked by Ezra Macvie. Macvie himself is a rather exacting editor who since 2015 has been doing a lot of editing and translation work for CODOH and Castle Hill Publishers, so his professional assessment carries great weight for me. In a review of the last books listed above, Macvie wrote:

“The English translation is credited to one Henry Gardner, and of his work here reviewed, I must say that he (together with those working with him) must be a master of the translation craft. The end result, unlike so many translations I have had the misfortune to read, is a coherent, eminently readable, not to say persuasive, presentation of rather intricate, technically challenging material.”

Keep in mind that Thomas Dunskus was a native-born German (living most of his later life in France), hence not even a native English speaker. His skills and productivity were indeed supreme.

Dunskus’s greatest achievement is without any doubt his English translation of Volume 24 of our series, the highly technical, massive three-volume tome about The Cremation Furnaces of Auschwitz. When I set out to finally have this work translated into German in June of 2021, I asked him whether he would be willing to chip in, at least by helping me to locate the many original German documents quoted in the work that he must have had (at least as electronic files) when preparing the English translation back in 2014/2015. He tried to locate them but couldn’t, and with reference to his advanced age sadly had to decline my request to be of any more assistance. Little did I know that just three months later we would lose this great friend.

Through all these years I have been in very close contact with him, communicating through emails with such intensity and frequency as I have rarely done with anyone else. Though I never met him in person, he still grew to become a close friend by virtue of his generous and energetic commitment to our common cause and his efficient and swift way of getting the jobs done.

Thank you very much, dear Thomas! May you rest in peace!