Prima Facie: Smith’s Report no. 1, April/May 1990

Dear Revisionist Friend:

This is the first issue of a much promised newsletter that I'll send to you without charge every couple months so long as you express some interest in receiving it.

If it seems to you that you haven't heard from me for a long time, it's probably true. Last summer I came down with a pneumonia that for three months left me unable to do more than a fraction of the work that needed doing. Then, along in October when I was at last coming out of it, our landlord put the house we were renting up for sale and we had to find a new place to live. We couldn't find a suitable place in southern California that I could afford, so toward the end of November I moved my family, my office, and our storage to a rented house in Visalia, a small town in the San Joaquin Valley some 160 miles north of Los Angeles. I spent the next ten weeks working on setting up a speaking tour for Pennsylvania, did the tour and returned the first week in March.

In any event, here I am in our new rented house in Visalia writing this letter to you. My apologies for all the unanswered correspondence, unfilled orders and general lack of communication during the last months. I'm pretty sure I'll be better at everything this year than I was last.

The Work Calendar: 1 January through 10 April 1990

5 January: Telephone interview on WSPD radio in Toledo OH. Davy Macy hosting. Afterwards I received a note from his producer saying: “It was an interesting conversation, to say the least.” I have a C-60 cassette of the program.

8 January: Telephone interview over WTKN radio in St. Petersburg FL. Hosted by Jay Marvin at the St. Petersburg fairgrounds, complete with a pair of alleged survivors on hand. A carnival atmosphere, not inappropriately. I'd done an interview once before with this man and didn't remember him being so hostile. His tack this day was to insist that since his “survivors” had “been there” and I hadn't, they knew what they were talking about and I didn't. It was a frustrating interview with a loud-mouthed hostile host. There is a C-90 cassette available.

9 January: Telephone interview on KRPC radio in Houston TX. Host, Roger Gray. An unsympathetic host, not too bad an interview. I can get a cassette recording if anyone wants it.

9 January: Telephone interview on WARB radio in Covington LA. Trey Blossman, host. (Yes, sometimes I do two interviews in one day.) Covington is across lake Pontchatrain from New Orleans and, as I heard someone say in-studio during a commercial break, it's David Duke country. Duke, who it is well known accepts Revisionist theory on the Holocaust, refuses to discuss it openly because it might damage his political career. It's difficult to imagine what Duke could possibly say that would damage his career more than some of the things he has already said, but there you are. When even the David Dukes are unwilling to talk straightforwardly about Holocaust fraud and falsehood you are reminded of the depths of the taboo that protects the story.

Trey Blossman interviewed me for two hours. Blossman is a professional and receptive host who actually interviewed me rather try to argue me into the ground. That's both good and bad. It's usually easier for me to respond to assertive questioning than it is to give a series of little talks, or lectures, which is sometimes necessary when the host in question doesn't really know what to ask. I remember this as being in, good part, a good program. There's a C-90 cassette available, but the first twenty minutes of the program are missing.

11/12 January (midnight): Telephone interview with Rick Barber over KOA radio in Denver CO. A couple months earlier I had tried to get Barber together with historian David Irving for an interview. I had done the Barber program a year or so before and had gotten responses from Oregon to Tennessee. I called Irving in London and before I had time to really pitch the value of doing the Rick Barber interview Irving said: “Yes. I'll do it. I'll ring him up now. What's his number?” So I gave Irving Rick Barber's number and David Irving Barber's number but in the event they couldn't get together and the interview never came off. So when the issue of an interview came up again I just went ahead and did it myself. The broadcast went quite well, tho we did it on the spur of the moment.

KOA no longer provides recordings of their interviews. If anyone recorded this interview at home I'd very much like to have a dub of it.

13 January: Telephone interview on WAMJ radio in South Bend IN. Mark Murray was the host. I remember him being very doubtful of what I was saying, but fair and inquiring. No cassette.

30 January: Telephone interview on KBX radio in Denver CO with Peter Jones. This is the third interview I've done with Jones. He's never come clean with me really, but in all likelihood he's an anti-Zionist leftist. This interview was half an hour and not particularly memorable. No cassette. The best program we've done and the most interesting was on KDZR Denver, 24 February 1989 (Prima Facie cassette CT-30).

Continuing Projects in January:

The Pennsylvania/New England Speaking Tour: Alex Stewart was doing a lot of front work on the telephone for this. We had started working on it in December. The Penn State affair had been the jumping off point. We were making, literally, hundreds of telephone calls. We called every broadcast TV station in Pennsylvania, every cable station, every radio station, every college and nearly every newspaper. We called them back again and again. We were mailing press releases, sending fax transmissions, following up on every lead we could possibly put our fingers on. It was an all day, every day job. Lots of broa1dcast TV was interested, but it was like pulling teeth to rent lecture halls. There were scheduling problems, insurance problems, campus regulation problems, and through it all the sense that we could not be certain that people were being honest with us, or if, once they committed themselves to an event, they would not change their minds. We simply kept at it doggedly, booking what we could, changing the bookings as people backed out, trying to fill in for what we lost.

The Penn State File: originally 32 pps., is now 41 pps., including a very revealing exchange between myself and the dean of the Penn State School of Communications, Bryan Winston. Photo copies available.

Visalia Public Library: I donated the two CODOH pamphlets written by Mark Weber to the library's vertical file: The Holocaust: Let's Hear Both Sides and “Auschwitz: Myths and Facts. Ten days later I donated a copy of David Irving's version of The Leuchter Report together with a photocopy of the 4-page profile of Fred Leuchter in the February 90 issue of Atlantic Monthly. I stamped CODOH's Visalia mailing address and telephone number on each item. They were all accepted and filed under “Holocaust.”

The “vertical file” consists of manila folders arranged in alphabetical order by subject in file cabinets. Here is where newspaper and magazine clippings, pamphlets, leaflets and so on are filed. Items that are worthwhile but can not be shelved because they have no bindings. This is an easy and very inexpensive way to introduce Revisionist materials into your library. The reference library usually handles this and will see to it that each item you donate is stamped with the date of receipt.

“The Case For Teaching Holocaust Revisionism in Our Colleges and High Schools:” this is the brochure I have at last worked out to use as the center piece for soliciting campus speaking engagements. It can be used for other purposes too. It's the first time in six years of Revisionist activism that I have been able to develop a coherent concept that is POSITIVE in nature. The case FOR Revisionism rather the case against exterminationism. It's one of those subjective cases of the glass that's half full being pitted against the glass that's half empty. But I think the brochure begins to place my argument in a positive mode for the first time, and I am very enthusiastic about it.

The brochure examines The Historical Issue, The Intellectual Freedom Issue and The Moral Issue underlying Revisionism. There is a short biog of myself, a list of Unasked Questions and my address and telephone number. It's 8 1/2 x 11 and is folded into letter size. I hope some of you would want to distribute it.

18 February: In-studio interview for WPXI Television in Pittsburgh PA for the Don Riggs Show. This was a Sunday night. The day before I had bussed from Visalia to Fresno, caught a flight to Los Angeles and another on to Pittsburgh. Alex Stewart had driven over from Gettysburg and picked me up at the airport. We stayed that night at the house of a supporter in an outlying town and the next evening drove to WPXI for the taping.

Riggs appeared to be very receptive to Revisionism but as the interview progressed I understood that he hadn't read the materials I had provided him with. Before the taping while he was looking through my “The Case For….” brochure Riggs actually threw his arms in the air and said: “This is what's behind everything that's happening in the Middle East.” During the taping Riggs remarked that I was “very astute,” that (ironically I thought at the time) “these are questions that should never be asked,” and “You may be fifty years ahead of your time.” (Alex writes about this a little more fully in the 5 March issue of Christian News, p22.)

When the taping was over I had the uneasy feeling that I had talked too much and that Don Riggs hadn't talked enough. That the interview had gotten away from him. I tried to head off I-didn't-know-what and assured Riggs that if there were any problems about airing the tape that I would do what I could to help him. I would respond on or off air to anyone or any charge that he might come up against. He shook his head and said No, that he was going to air it. Three days later there was a message from Riggs on my answering machine in Visalia informing me that he was not going to air the interview. He didn't give a reason and he has never answered my phone calls. While he promised to send me a video of the interview he hasn't done that either.

After the taping when Mr. Riggs rose from his chair I couldn't help but notice how unfit he was. He had to struggle with both arms and with his legs just to stand up. I wanted to rush to his side and help him but I noticed that no one among those who worked with him was trying to help, so I didn't either. But his struggle to get out of his chair was agonizing. Being under such a physical burden is difficult, and it probably didn't make it any easier for Riggs to stand up to the pressure that in all likelihood was brought against him to suppress the interview.

19 February: In-studio interview on WBVP radio in Beaver Falls PA. We had scheduled a talk at Duquense University in Pittsburgh for this Monday afternoon. I had gone back and forth for weeks over it with Duquense administration and the meeting room had finally been finalized the week before. On Friday the 16th I had made arrangements over the telephone with a Pittsburgh printer to do up leaflets for us. That afternoon Duquense called me and postponed the talk again. My room had been taken over by a winter carnival committee. This was a major disappointment, coming as it did after so many other cancellations, postponements and procrastination. I canceled the leaflet job, and Alex got on the horn to the press to tell the city desks that we would not be at Duquense after all.

I had flown to Pennsylvania then knowing that there were very big holes in our schedule, and that now we had lost a another major event. So Monday morning we got on the horn and managed to get a radio interview in Beaver Falls, an hour or so north of Pittsburgh. We were happy to do it because WBVP covers the Pittsburgh area and because the talk at Duquense might still come off and this interview could provide up-front PR for it. Alex and I drove up along Beaver river on a very cold day to the old town. There on the run-down main street we found the studio and as we approached the doorway in the freezing wind we could hear the host, Rick Bergman, attacking the “revisionists” who had been urging him to have me on his show. His voice was coming from two little loudspeakers set up over the doorway to the studio lobby.

I had done a telephone interview with Bergman six months before, during which he had been a hostile host. He had explained it away, enigmatically I thought, by saying that he was himself German. In person he was a wiry young man not yet 30 with a short page-boy haircut covering his ears. We climbed up a narrow staircase to his studio and away we went.

Bergman is one of a handful of media people I have talked with who doesn't understand why Holocaust Revisionism is important enough to talk about. For Bergman, the Central American Wars are important. I tried to point out that it was the institutionalization of German monstrosity and U.S. sainthood at Nuremberg that helped to legitimize the U.S. government's moral understanding that it could go anywhere anytime and do anything to anyone and feel in the right about it. I couldn't convince Bergman that there is anything to that point of view.

The incident I recall most clearly is one where, after listening to a caller go on and on about a program that the Germans designed to breed women with gorillas, I suggested to Bergman that she might be drunk and that he ought to get her off the air. He went into an arm-waving tirade about my insulting his guests. I was rather taken aback, having thought he might have agreed with me on this one. He didn't understand that the caller had been insulting the entire Germans people with her foolish charge about the Nazi breeding program, even tho he is German himself. That's one of the insidious ways that taboo works. No cassette. Bergman pressed the wrong button at the onset of the interview and recorded 60 minutes of rock music for me.

21 February: Four one-half hour interview tapings for WCBG Television in Red Lion (York) PA with host Jim Nichols. WCGB-TV is a Christian station. Nichols' interviews go out on West Star satellite, CH. 9, and on both fm and am radio. Alex and I were staying in his house in Gettysburg now, only 40 miles from Red Lion, and that morning I drove to the studio beneath a clear sunny sky.

Jim Nichols is a free press fundamentalist, but he was so tentative in introducing me on his show that he reached the end of the second half-hour taping without getting around to asking me a single question. I look like a dope sitting there for an hour while Nichols goes on and on. That evening I was so bored watching the interview that I fell asleep before the third section came on. A few days later when I had time to watch it all I saw that the third segment opened up pretty well and the fourth was given over to me almost entirely. But because Nichols is not a particularly assertive interviewer, on this subject anyhow, even the portions where I do have my say, while they are effective enough, are not very dramatic.

22 February: My final contact with Penn State University. After almost a year of extended correspondence, much of it published in the campus Daily Collegian and State College's Centre Daily Times, we had come close but had failed to get a speaking date there. Spokesmen for three student organizations had shown an interest but in the end had all backed out. I may have done something to cut my own throat on this one.

The Centre Daily Times had published a letter from a Penn State alumni, Fred Shihadeh, suggesting that since it had once been claimed gassings had taken place at Dachau and is now claimed that no gassings took place there that it might be a good idea to hear other criticisms of the Holocaust story.

Bryan Winston, dean of the School of Communications at Penn State, wrote an insulting diatribe in return, claiming that in his research he had found no claims in the literature for gassings at Dachau and no survivors who claimed gassings there.

I wrote a four page letter documenting charges of gassings at Dachau, and another four page open letter to Penn State students giving my reasons why it would be good to have a Revisionist speaker on campus. I mailed the entire eight pages to much of the press in Pennsylvania and to all the student VIPs on the Penn State campus. Nothing came from it. Further, my people at Penn State assure me that, contrary to what was being published before in both the Daily Collegian and the Centre Daily Times, once the Dachau letter was received on campus nothing more has been published on the Holocaust issue. Not a single word.

So on this day I made a final attempt to speak at Penn State. I called the campus radio station and learned that the one program that might interview me was called The Dean's List, hosted by dean Bryan Winston himself. I thought I'd give him a chance to tell his side of the story. I called his producer, a young man named Steven Aaron, and presented my case. Aaron said: “I don't believe anything you say, and I would never have you speak on any program that I produce.” With that, Penn State became a dead issue for me, so far as the tour was concerned. The Penn State File, 41pps of published and unpublished correspondence, is all available.

B>23 February: Press interview with staff writer for the York Daily Record. Print press in Pennsylvania had expressed an interest in interviewing me, but only if I had created a significant media event in their neighborhood. I had completed the four Jim Nichcols taping, so that gave the Daily Record an excuse to assign a reporter to listen to the other side of the Holocaust story. The Record would publish the interview when WCGB-TV aired the interviews.

That Friday morning I drove back to York to the Record where staff writer Peter Buelletin interviewed me for an hour and a half. He had been to Dachau a few months earlier. This made me very happy because I had with me the eight pages from The Penn State File addressing the Dachau gas chamber hoax in a particularly effective way. He seemed interested. They always do. I felt like I had such a winner with the Dachau material that I gave him everything I had, including the slick version of the Leuchter Report produced by David Irving. I thought the interview went very well. I always do.

Jim Nichols still has not aired the four TV interviews, delaying them for a second time, so the York Daily Record has not published Peter Bulletin's interview with me.

It was at this point that Alex decided, for the time being, that he had enough of the uncertainties of working with media and university administrations. That very day we had originally been scheduled to speak at Temple University in Philadelphia. Originally they had been very happy to have me. I was at first offered a full theater with banked seating. Over a period of several days the site was changed and changed again, until I was told that it would be impossible to book me anytime soon for reasons of space. This was a very big disappointment for us. Temple is the home base of the Christian exterminationist Franklin Littel, it's in Philadelphia, I have support there, and five (5) broadcast TV stations had expressed interest in covering the event. It was the day that we lost the Temple University date that I decided we had better not limit ourselves to Pennsylvania. It was that day that I decided that we had better follow up on an offer we had received earlier to do the Jerry Williams Show in Boston. Anyhow, Penn State, Temple and probably Pittsburgh had all gone down the tubes and now it was Friday afternoon, and Alex was disgusted with how things were going, so we decided to split up. He drove me to Harrisburg where I caught a bus to Philadelphia. A supporter, who I had called ahead, picked me up and I stayed with him that night. The next morning he went out on a limb and used his credit card to rent a car for me and I headed east alone.

24 February: Two interesting conversations with Fritz Berg and my first look at Jean-Claude Pressac's Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers. When I left Philadelphia I had driven across New Jersey to stay that night with Fritz Berg and family. It was bitter cold and icy. Pressac's Auschwitz has more than 500 double-sized pages and is full of interesting illustrations. It appears to contain one German document mentioning a “gassing cellar” in one of the crematoria, but places it in a location within the building that doesn't make sense. I was too distracted by tour business to really get a fix on the significance of the document but it appears to be something that Revisionists are going to have to deal with.

Fred Leuchter, author of the Leuchter Report, has told me that when he called Pressac's distributors to order a copy of the book they wouldn't sell it to him. They told him straight out that his Report was the immediate cause for rushing Pressac into print, that he had made a lot of trouble for them and cost them a lot of money and, in short, that he could shove it along.

Meanwhile, Fritz Berg opened my eyes to two important points:

• The Design Function of a Crematory Oven: a crematory oven is designed so that the fuel used to consume its human load is located outside the oven itself. The reason for this is to keep separate the residue of the corpse as it settles on the clean bed of the oven from the trash left by the coke or coal that fueled it. The uncontaminated ashes and bone can then be collected and placed in a container for return to the deceased's family. The crematory oven, unlike a furnace, is designed to fulfil the needs of ritual and religion.
  If the Germans had planned to destroy the remains of millions of murdered victims they would in all likelihood have designed furnaces capable of burning several, or even many, corpses at once, and would not have worried about the human residue falling into the fuel firing the furnace, as all of it was going to done away with anyhow. Or maybe the Nazi fiends didn't think of that. The truth is, I never thought of it and maybe those Nazi engineers weren't any smarter than I am.
• Poison Gas Chambers Did Exist At Auschwitz: We're talking about the little professionally designed gas chambers that were used in camps all over Europe for fumigating clothes and bedding etc. I have always been careful to refer to these rooms as “fumigation cubicles.” Fritz views this as a contemptible subterfuge behind which lies a secret uncertainty, perhaps, about what the Germans really were up to.

Somehow, I was finally able to understand the significance of his point of view. At the behest of the Nazi Government, German engineers designed state-of-the-art poison gas chambers and German businesses manufactured them. The Nazi Government ordered these poison gas chambers to be installed in camps and other places all over Europe. Some of them still exist. The Nazi purpose was to save lives, not destroy lives. These poison gas chambers were used to fumigate everything from personal clothing to locomotives and boxcars. The Nazis were trying their best to save people from the ravages of typhus bearing lice and other plague carrying bugs. The poison gas chambers were humanitarian in nature. And practical.

It is not claimed that at Auschwitz, or Dachau for example, that people were murdered in the humanitarian poison gas chambers that really did exist there. The charge is that the Nazis converted buildings that were originally used for other purposes, shower rooms and morgues, etc. and used these improvised spaces as execution gas chambers. I don't know of any attempt on the part of anyone to try to explain why.

When I talked about the “fumigation cubicles” I understand now that I didn't want to take on the burden of having to defend the proposition that the Nazis installed poison gas chambers in the camps for humanitarian reasons. I've got enough problems as it is.

Anyhow, Fritz has kicked me up and over another subjective hurdle in my attempt to talk about the Holocaust story as straight as I can. The professionally designed and manufactured poison gas chambers that really did exist in the camps were expressions of Nazi humanitarianism and practicality. They were installed to keep people alive, and a significant portion of those people could then be used as forced labor in the German war effort. Now that I've said it here, I look forward to saying it to the media and to student audiences.

26 February: In-studio interview on WBET radio in Brocton MA. On the 25th I had drive into upstate New York to stay over with a supporter and the morning of the 26th I got up at 3am to drive to Massachusetts for the 9 am interview. It was bitter cold. Brocton is a half hour's drive south of Boston. I wanted to use the radio interview to tout a television show I was going to do that night in Boston, and the talk I was going to give on the 28th at University of Massachusetts.

The host at WBET was the very professional Bill Alex. His audience is about 20-25,000 a large part of it in Boston. Alex is receptive to Revisionist theory and appears to be impatient with how the Holocaust story appears to be, to a large extent, an expression of Jewish chauvinism. The cassette recording of the program I was given has malfunctioned. If any of you recorded the program I would very much like to have a dub of the cassette.

Live in-studio interview on WXFT-Television for the Jerry Williams Show in Boston MA. Other guests: Fred Leuchter, author of The Leuchter Report and Mike Slomich, Boston spokesman for the Jewish Defense League.

Leaving Brocton I drove to Boston and took a motel room near U.Mass. I spoke with Leuchter by telephone and suggested that, because the JDL was going to be on the scene, he not drive his own car to the station but take a cab as I planned to do, and arrive at the last minute. When I arrived at the station in the outlying town of Needham at 9:45 for the 10pm broadcast, Fred and his wife and the JDL were already there. It was quiet.

The broadcast went off with hardly a hitch. Leuchter was very effective and our Boston audience of 80-100,000 viewers watched while for the first time in the U.S. on broadcast TV Americans were told that there were no execution gas chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Maidanek and that there never had been.

Jerry Williams, who in his own words is a World War II scholar, defended before the cameras the human-soap stories, the human-skin lamp shade stories and all the rest of it. Williams is the founder of a national association of talk show hosts, a Jew, and a very assertive interviewer. Off camera he made it a point to not speak to either Leuchter or myself. No fraternization. Mike Slomich, who resembles Bluto in the old Popeye cartoons, represented the JDL in a very telling way. Boston Jews who watched the show must have felt ashamed by his performance, while those who have got a case against Jews to begin with must have been hootin and hollerin all over their living rooms.

I handled the show pretty well, tho afterwards while I watched the video I could see the missed opportunities and so on, as usual. I nailed our friend Elie Wiesel – he teaches at Boston University so Boston is a good town to nail him in. The callers were typical: the young Jew who lost his grandparents in the Holocaust; the U.S. veteran who had helped liberate Dachau and saw the execution gas chambers there; the Israeli who had grown up in a town where “half” the inhabitants were “survivors,” which proved to him that there had been a “genocide.”

After the program I wandered out into the lobby and almost bumped into an attractive young girl who had a glazed look in her eyes. She seemed to not notice what had happened. A moment later I heard someone behind me say: “I think I'd like to piss on you.” I half turned and found a tall fellow about 30 with a nordic/semitic face thrust down into mine. The somnambulant girl was coming awake. She planted herself in front of me and said: “I'd like to slap you.” The guy said: “How'd you like me to kick the shit out of you then piss in your mouth?”

I asked the girl if she had read any Revisionist literature. “I'd just like to slap your face,” she said. The guy said: “You want me to piss in your mouth? Would you like that?” I didn't think that I'd really care for it so I went back onto the sound stage and told Williams that there was going to be a problem with some of his friends. Williams yelled for his producer and after 15 or 20 minutes two squad cars pulled into the little parking lot. A cab was called to take me to the airport, which was a subterfuge, and the cops held the JDL in the parking lot while they yelled around and the taxi driver headed back to Boston.

The cabby, a fat, long-haired Irish kid, turned out to be a history major at Boston U. so I gave him some literature. His immediate worry was that we not be followed. He took such a circuitous route to get me back to my motel that when I signed the stations's chit the ride had cost WFXT-TV fifty-six dollars.

28 February: Talk (sort of) at the University of Massuchessets, Harbor Campus. This is the talk that I advertised on WBET radio Brockton. I had also gotten an announcement into the campus newspaper Mass Media the previous day. I expected quite an affair, particularly after the Jerry Williams Show two nights earlier. The talk was to start at 2pm. It was titled “The Case For Teaching Holocaust Revisionism in Our Colleges and High Schools.”I had a number of things on my mind. How I would handle the JDL threat and whatever other protest was developing. The right moment to inform campus security and the police. And the fact that because of unexpected expenses all along the tour that I had now let myself run out of money. I was completely alone and the truth is, I felt a little on the tense side. About noon I received a phone call in my motel room from a man who, without giving me his name, said he was looking forward to listening to me speak that afternoon, then hung up.

No one in Boston had my phone number other than Leuchter, it hadn't been he who had called, so within 15 minutes I had packed my bags and checked out of the motel. I spent the next couple hours in a super market parking lot. I used the public phone there to make an emergency call to a supporter in New York and he jumped up and wired me $500. I had it within the hour. I relaxed considerably. At 1:30 I called U. Mass administration to report that I was going to speak there shortly and that there might be some trouble. By that time it was too late to worry about taking a cab to the campus so I drove there and parked in one of the covered lots.

I walked to the McCormick building where I had been assigned room 062. The lobby and halls were quiet. I couldn't find the room. I felt a little bit stupid. It was after 2pm. Finally I went to an information booth and a couple kids there tried to find the 062 and they couldn't find it either. I called Gail Hobin, the lady who had booked the room for me, and she said she was sorry but that room 062 was not in the McCormick building but in another building across the campus. She said she would be right over and walk me to the room herself. I suggested that if I couldn't find the room then security might not be able to find it either and I might have a problem. She said security had already called her and she had sent them to the right room. When Ms. Hobin arrived all out of breath it was after 2:30.

She was very nice and very apologetic. She had made a booking error, which isn't all that unusual she said. I took her at her word. I make all kinds of mistakes myself. By the time we got to the right building and the right room it was almost 3pm. Except for the two plain clothes detectives, no one was there. Those who had managed to figure out where the room actually was, had left. Hobin left after apologizing again, and I waited. A professor showed up with one student. At 3pm I decided it was pointless to wait so the three of us had a little chat about the Holocaust. After awhile a second professor came in and listened, without taking part. As it turned out, the two professors had each seen me on the Jerry Williams Show. We talked, I gave the three of them literature, and that's all there was to my great breakthrough public speaking effort at the University of Massachusetts.

I had expected to be busy the next day with media over the fall out from the U. Mass talk but now I figured that nothing more would come of it. There is a one-hour video cassette available of the WXFT-TV broadcast of the Jerry Williams show.

1 March: In-studio interview for WQQW Radio, Waterbury CT. This interview had been booked for the 2nd, but now that Boston was finished I bucked it up a day. When I left U. Mass I drove straight on out of town and to Waterbury where I took a room for the night.

Dave Feda hosted the interview. I had done a telephone interview with him last year. During that show a “survivor” tried to convince me she knew something about gas chambers. Feda grew impatient with her obvious stalling around and began to grill her himself. It was the first time in the more than three years of doing these interviews that a host had ever taken over the critical questioning of a “survivor.”

This interview went on for three hours. I did almost all the work in handling the callers. Feda spent his time cleaning his pipe and straightening out a couple drawers in his desk. At one point toward the end of the show a man led some 20 students into the viewers room on the other side of the glass sound booth. They took seats and watched. They could hear us through speakers in their ceiling. When I saw them file in I felt uneasy but I didn't let on. The next time we went off-air I was quite taken aback when Dave Feda said: “When I saw those kids come in I saw magnum 357s.” So we had both been made uneasy by their sudden appearance. Now we laughed about it. It isn't just Revisionists then who feel like they have to keep an eye out for what might go down. Even some of those who might want to just talk to us feel the same way. That's why, psychologically, the promotion of taboos is such a filthy business.

The Dave Feda show goes out to about 15,000 people. I am supposed to receive two C-90 cassettes of the interview.

6 March: In-studio interview on WBBW Radio, Youngstown OH. After finishing the Feda interview I spent the night with my good supporter in up-state New York. The next morning I returned to Fritz Berg's and tried there to make contact with Nat Hentoff of the Village Voice. It was cold and snowing. I left messages at his apartment and at the Voice, faxed him some materials and waited but he didn't respond. He believes he can be a First Amendment authority while ignoring the suppression and censorship of Revisionist scholarship. I don't think he can, not with out compromising the most important part of the work he does, and corrupting his inner life.

The Duquense talk was, technically, still possible, but I decided to let it slide once and for all and drive to Indianapolis to protest the firing of Indianapolis U. professor Don Hiner for using Revisionist materials in his history class. On Saturday I drove back across Pennsylvania to the Pittsburgh area to get within striking distance of Indianapolis. I stayed with friends there. On Monday I worked for five hours on the telephone trying to book media in and around Indianapolis. It was hard going. Then in mid-afternoon I discovered that it was spring break at Indiana U. There were no students attending classes. There were no professors attending classes. I would have no audience. I understood that I wasn't going to Indianapolis after all.

Meanwhile, I had booked the radio interview over WBBW in Youngstown. The host would be Michael Vaughn. A rabbi and I were going to debate the Holocaust in-studio for two hours. I had set it up to do on my way through to Indianapolis. I wasn't going to Indianapolis any longer, but I didn't want to give up a two-hour face to face debate with a rabbi so I made the three hour drive to Youngstown but when I arrived the rabbi had canceled because of his own scheduling problem. It was very cold. I am supposed to receive a C-90 cassette tape of the program, including what came over “open lines” after I left the studio.

The tour was over. I had six days left on my airline ticket but there was nothing more I could do that would be worth the expense that I would have to go to do it. The next morning I turned in the car at the Pittsburgh airport and flew to Los Angeles. It was 67 degrees at the airport there. I caught a plane to Fresno and, finding that Greyhound was out on strike, paid a cabbie $55 to drive me to our house in Visalia.

21 March: Telephone interview over KEAG radio, Anchorage AK. The host was libertarian Fred James. He had some familiarity with Revisionist theory. As an introduction he read a long, sordid account of alleged German atrocities in Poland from the novel Poland by James Michener, which rather surprised me. He took half an hour to get to me. At the beginning of the second hour a Jewish lawyer who at one time had been involved in the preliminary planning for the IMT trials appeared in the studio to participate in the program. Besides being childishly cranky, in my view he behaved very unprofessionally as well. It was a periodically lively show. It was booked by a local man in Anchorage who showed a great deal of patience and perseverance. He has sent me two C-90 cassettes of the three hour broadcast.

Continuing Projects, March:

“Tools of Memory,” a New Chapter from Part II. Confessions of a Holocaust Revisionist. Here I look at how Vietnam vets use memory one way in recalling their wartime experiences while Holocaust “survivors” use it in a very different way. Photocopy of this draft is available. llpps.

5 April: Letter to the Editor Published in Visalia Times-Delta. The Times-Delta published a letter by a Dr. Sidney Sament relating how, when the German army invaded Lithuania, some of his family and other Jews were rounded up and ordered to spit in the face of an old rabbi. Since Dr. Sament wrote that he had left Lithuania in 1937, four years before the spitting incident, and that the participating spitters and non-spitters alike had been shot, I suggested that the story was hearsay.

When I join the Visalia Chamber of Commerce I may have the good fortune to be able to chat with Dr. Sament personally.

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Dear Reader:

There's a lot on my mind that will have to wait for the next letter. I particularly want to talk about the “Open Debate” announcements that we were placing in campus papers. This is a truly excellent project that produced more responses than I could handle during a very difficult time for me last year.

There is an opportunity to create a very profitable tour of the Washington D.C. area this coming October. It could payoff with major broadcast TV interviews and speaking engagements.

Much of what I will be able to do depends on the help I receive from those of you who read this letter and think what I am doing is worthwhile. The tour cost considerably more than I had planned. I can't kick off the projects I have ready until I clear off some of this debt. These are cost-effective projects that I feel certain will produce results. I know that you are approached from every side to help with Revisionist activism, but please do what you can.

In any event, I thank you for your support in the past, and I hope all is well with you.

Sincerely, (sgnd)

Bradley Smith

Note: If you've tried to call me at my regular number on the above letterhead and found you couldn't get through well, that telephone was disconnected last month because I couldn't pay the bill. I still can't. If you need more info you can reach me at Telephone: […]