Promoting Revisionism

Around the turn of the millennium, an anonymous author wrote a brochure titled Auschwitz: Facts versus Fiction, had it printed in great numbers, and wanted Castle Hill Publishers to distribute it from the UK. Castle Hill agreed initially, stocked it, and added it to its sales website.

On closer inspection, it turned out that the brochure’s claims about the infamous Auschwitz Camp were not always accurate, somewhat incomplete and outdated. While that was still borderline acceptable for a product that had been donated as a gift, one passage in it was not: it basically justified the mass incarceration of civilians without due process, meaning the admission of Jews to concentration camp by the Third Reich.

Already back then, Castle Hill had a similar policy as CODOH has these days: free speech is given, as long as it does not advocate, promote, justify or condone the violation of anyone’s civil rights. Therefore, we took this brochure offline and stopped selling it. I cannot remember now what happened to the many copies we still had in stock. Eventually, they were probably pulped.

20 years later, some activist discovered this old brochure in some crevice of the never-forgiving, never-forgetting internet, deemed it convincing and important, scanned and reset it, and offered Castle Hill the file with the suggestion to revise it were needed and republish it. However, 20 years after its initial creation, the text was even more out of sync with the state of the art of Auschwitz research. In addition, there really wasn’t the need for yet another (cheap) print product for the elucidation of the masses, because by 2020, fliers and brochures were the advertisement formats of the past century. What we need are instructional documentaries and brief video clips.

Therefore, instead of wasting my time and Castle Hill’s resources in an attempt to fix a bad text, I sat down and wrote a completely new one meant to serve as a comprehensive yet concise introduction to Holocaust revisionism in general rather than just Auschwitz. Moreover, the only way to justify such a brochure that we had neither the money to print in large quantities nor the means to distribute in any meaningful way, I designed this brochure to serve as Castle Hill’s book program. Rather than peddle books to inclined customers the usual way – with brief descriptions and a cover image – this one tells a consistent story of all the major claims of Holocaust revisionism, while pointing the interested reader to the sources that back it all up – not by way of footnotes and a bibliography, but by adding floating advertisement boxes introducing the books the classic way. This puts the majority of Castle Hill’s books into a systematic revisionist narrative, showing where they all fit in to prop up 50 years of iconoclastic research.

This brochure, aptly titled The Holocaust: Facts versus Fiction, is less advertisement for Castle Hill’s book than promotion of Holocaust revisionism in general, all the more so as most books cited can be accessed online and downloaded as eBooks free of charge, and the brochure clearly points that out, too. Hence, it promotes a lot of freebees.

The brochure was first launched in the German language (as the original brochure was in that lingo as well), and now, roughly a year later, we also launched it in an English edition. However, since we currently do not have any means of adding any printed material to our print-book orders, we won’t have a printed version any time soon. The brochure is therefore available only as an online “eBook” version. [https://armreg.co.uk, menu option “Catalog”]

The effort put into this brochure to succinctly summarize Holocaust revisionism on only 32 pages (including book ads) warrants spreading the text farther and wider than just keeping it within the confines of Castle Hill. Hence, the entire main text of this brochure is part of this issue of Inconvenient History, although without the floating book-ad boxes. References to books have been banned to footnotes with the usual bibliographic data, links to free online versions included.

May it serve to further the cause.

PS: In Issue No. 2 of Volume 10 of Inconvenient History (2018), we reprinted the complete contents of the 20-page full-color, letter-size promotion brochure Holocaust Skepticism: 20 Questions and Answers about Holocaust Revisionism. That promotion brochure is apologetic in nature, in terms of primarily answering skeptical and hostile questions people commonly have about revisionism. In contrast to that, this new 6”×9”, 32-pages, black-and-white brochure The Holocaust: Facts versus Fiction takes a radically different approach: It unapologetically and uncompromisingly tells the revisionist Holocaust narrative in a systematic fashion. This brochure is about wartime history, not about navel-gazing revisionism. Hence, both brochures are complementary.