One More Reason for Bizarre Eyewitness Accounts

Introduction

In my book Lectures on the Holocaust, I summarized on more than forty pages a plethora of reasons why witnesses may make untrue statements.[1] While spending a three-quarter year living together with Bradley R. Smith in his home at Rosarito, Mexico, from September 2010 to May 2011, I realized that I had missed one reason about which I want to report here: schizophrenia.[2] Many popular misconceptions exist regarding this mental disorder, which has nothing to do with a split personality, as the original Greek term misleadingly suggests.[3] Apart from side effects like social dysfunctions and depressions, the most striking symptoms of this disorder are sensory delusions, which means that the affected person sees or hears things that aren’t real. It can perhaps best be described as a superimposition of impressions from our dream world, created by the brain itself, onto the real world as perceived with our senses. Usually we dream only while sleeping, whereas we do not dream while awake. In schizophrenia, things get mixed up, as the brain creates a dream-like animation during wake phases and projects it into what we perceive as the real world. The intensity of the disorder can range from marginal, with only rare delusion hardly interfering with life, to severe. When the brain’s animating activity gets too intense, in particular when creating “special effects” of nightmares, the affected person becomes incapacitated to live a normal life, as he gets permanently distracted, has a hard time distinguishing between reality and delusion, and subsequently often becomes depressed and frequently turns into a substance abuser.

I think that the relevance of this condition for historiography is clear. According to scientific studies, some 0.4% of the entire world population is affected by this disorder in one way or another.[4] This is not much, but when considering several million “Holocaust survivors” after the war,[5] there must have been several thousand among them with that disorder. Since the diagnosis of this disorder was rarely even attempted in the first half of the 20th Century, let alone addressed with therapy, it is unlikely that many people with that disorder ever got diagnosed at all, let alone understood that what they perceived wasn’t real. As a matter of fact, most people with mild symptoms probably never get diagnosed even today.

To prove my point, I may now relate my experience with Bradley Smith. I wrote down my experiences with him already in November of 2010, while I was still living with him, and I submitted an earlier version of this paper, without mentioning Bradey’s name, to Inconvenient History a short while later. However, the paper got rejected by the then chief editor. Hence, I shelved it for later times.

Background

In late 2005, in violation of an act of Congress, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security arrested and deported me to Germany, thus separating me from my U.S. wife and daughter. They banned me from returning for five years, and even after that, they flatly refused to adjudicate my application for a “fiancé visa” to get back to my family. I had to sue them with a writ of mandamus to force a decision.

While this legal battle dragged on for years, I decided after the end of the five-year mandatory waiting period in late 2010 to get as close to the U.S. as possible, hoping that I would be permitted very soon to return home to my family in Illinois. The closest place to home was just across the border in northern Mexico (Canada was not an option due to their hostility toward revisionists). It so happened that Bradley Smith lived with his family just across the border in Playas de Rosarito, Baja California, northwestern Mexico. Finding out about my intentions, Bradley and his wife generously invited me to stay with them in their home for as long as it took until I was home free. I arrived at their place in Early September 2010, integrated nicely into their family life – dogs and grandchildren included – and left them again in May 2011, to go back to Germany in order to obtain my immigrant visa from the local U.S. Consulate, after my legal battle had been won thanks to a very supportive U.S. federal judge.

The Events

During my time at the Smith residence, I spent many hours sitting together with Bradly in his office. We talked about many topics during these months, especially in the evening, after we were done with our office work. During one of these late evening chats, he related an experience of renting a room in a cheap hotel many decades ago. As he entered this room, he saw a rug hovering over the bed. He also saw blood sprinkled all over the room. He marveled at this scene for a few seconds, until rug and blood sprinkles suddenly disappeared. He didn’t think anything about it. When I asked him whether he hadn’t been curious to find out what this was by reaching out to the carpet, he merely replied that he wasn’t curious. He had such visions once in a while and had lost interest in them. He figured that it couldn’t be real, so he just gazed at it waiting for it to disappear, as other delusions had before. He also stated that he thinks it is normal: “Don’t we all see things once in a while that aren’t real?” I tried to convince him that this was absolutely not the case, but he insisted that we all do. I left it at that. He probably needs it for his mental balance, so he can assume that he is absolutely normal, and I wouldn’t rob him of this delusion.

On another occasion, he related that, not too long ago, he had seen a mouse floating in mid-air across his office. He was quite amused by the sight, he said, knowing that this couldn’t be true either, could it? He then told me a story he had experienced while being a teenager, lying somewhere on a lawn in nature with a friend, staring into the sky. He related how he suddenly saw several objects hovering in the sky. I cannot remember anymore whether the boy who was with him at that time saw the same thing or denied seeing it. Bradley did not claim that they were UFOs, just the usual bizarre delusional nonsense.

The point is that Bradley insisted that these bizarre, unreal visions had always been a part of his life. Since they did not disrupt his life very much, if at all, he never sought medical advice as to what was going on. He simply accepted them as part of his reality.

Assessment

To add another piece to the puzzle, I may also relate that Bradley kept telling me – and others – repeatedly that he was quite a “shallow person, intellectually and emotionally. I just don’t care too much what it means for me. And I really am not curious to find out the truth.” In his case, this attitude showed in the fact that he would not read revisionist research results. He had read a few bits and pieces here and there in the past, but that was enough for him to conclude that in this field of study as well, truth is a fickle, ephemeral thing. He was interested neither in any details nor in getting himself involved in any kind of research.

His lack of commitment to anything in particular is actually a red thread running through his early life, when he dabbled in many things in his professional and private life, never committing to anything long term and seriously. That changed only when the eternal enemies of free speech forced him into a corner and burned all bridges behind him, leaving him no other choice but to dig in.

Unfortunately, he displayed this lackadaisical, noncommittal attitude also when interacting (or rather not interacting) with the people who should have been close to his heart: his wife, his daughter, his grandchildren. I was an integral part of this family for nine months, and Bradley’s emotional and social detachment from all the people in his home was at times disheartening to experience.

A lack of intellectual and emotional investment in anything is a common attitude of persons with schizophrenia, usually correlated to the intensity of this disorder. For those suffering from more severe forms, emotional attachments to “real” objects are difficult to establish, for what is real, if your mind plays tricks on you all the time? For them, “truth” is such an elusive concept that they lose interest in it. Bradley’s self-proclaimed primary interest was therefore not to establish the truth, but to establish the freedom for everyone to express their views – even if others think they are delusional at best (which applies to Holocaust revisionism in the eyes of the orthodoxy). “What is delusion and what is reality anyhow, if it all merges and mixes in your mind?,” Bradley asked, and he meant it.

Some revisionists are driven by the quest for truth, and this is why they demand the freedom to express what they think is true. Not so Bradley. I have the impression that he was unwittingly on a quest of demanding freedom for all those who have delusions – including some Holocaust survivors who may have suffered from similar symptoms as he did. Bradley wanted to have the right to be wrong, and he wanted everyone to understand that the reality we believe to behold with our faulty senses and brains may not be an accurate reflection of reality at all. That was his very profound personal experience, suffering from mild schizophrenia, never having been diagnosed as such, and never having realized or seriously considered that what he experienced all his life long was not “normal” at all.

Bradley didn’t trust his own senses and brain, and he didn’t trust anyone who, with the zeal of a fanatic, insisted that their perception of the world is infallibly correct and accurate. He simply wouldn’t buy it. Hence, I think that his schizophrenia was actually a main ingredient that made him the revisionist activist that he was.

Conclusion

0.4% of all Holocaust survivors who, statistically speaking, might have suffered from schizophrenia may not be much, and may not be enough to bother looking into it any deeper to see whether that had an influence on their testimony, and whether it contributed to the narrative we struggle with today. But one thing I am personally certain of: Without schizophrenia, Bradely Smith would not have become a revisionist; there would have been no CODOH, and there would have been no Inconvenient History either for you to read these lines. Deluded or not, Bradley had a real impact on this world as a fighter for our civil right to doubt our senses and to communicate our doubts.

Post Scriptum

I loved Bradley. He was one of my best friends, and I miss him dearly. To be clear to all those how might get the wrong impression: this paper was in no way written to show Bradley in a bad light. Mental disorders are NOT a reason to disparage or discriminate against others. There is no shame in admitting or reporting such disorders. They are a part of the human experience, and we need to understand them, if we want to understand ourselves.

Post Post Scriptum, August 2024

I am currently editing a new edition of Bradley Smith’s last work Break His Bones. Back in 2002, I help Bradley publish the first edition of this book by doing the layout and production-file preparation. However, I never actually read the book cover to cover. Now that I am preparing the second edition, I do what I should have done a long time ago: actually read it thoroughly. What I find in it is a multitude of descriptions of what Bradley calls “visions”: his many (undiagnosed) schizophrenic episodes during his younger years. Some of them were quite severe (just read Chapter Six, subchapter “1964”) and probably contributed to his marriage with his then-wife Pamela eventually falling apart.

Endnotes