Stripe Goes Belly up

This summer, Castle Hill’s payment processor Stripe decided to terminate the credit-/debit-card processing agreement we had with them, claiming that Castle Hill is in violation of the agreement’s terms by selling illegal material. On closer inquiry, we concluded that this referred to Castle Hill’s German language material. Although not illegal in the US., Stripe requires that all trade be legal in all jurisdictions where sales are made.

PayPal cancelled Castle Hill’s payment processing agreement back in 2006, if I am not mistaken – I was in a German prison back then for my books The Chemistry of Auschwitz (14 months prison term) and Lecture on the Holocaust (30 months more), and merely faintly remember my wife telling me in one of her letters to me in the dungeon that PayFoe, as she called them, had closed my account with them and banned me for life. Square joined the club of censors a few years ago. Now Stripe is the next to go.

With currently only conventional payment options left, Castle Hill’s turnover has shrunk even more than it did with previously reported censorship measures. The situation is financially critical. Of course, we have had a Plan B for payment processing in place for exactly this scenario, meant to be activated with a flip of a switch, so to speak. After some incomprehensible hesitation by Castle Hill’s current manager Michael Santomauro, we hope that he will activate Plan B soon, so bear with us while I am trying to figure out where things are stuck.

In the meantime, we consider various options regarding our festering German-language publishing branch, as it is the main cause for the entire operation becoming a threatened species. If the survival of the company requires that we cut off that leg, then that’s what we will have to do. We are negotiating handing over this branch completely to a different company.

Some company history needs to be explained here, so the reader may understand the journey I have been on with Castle Hill over the past more than 20 years.

Before my arrest and deportation from the U.S. in 2005, Castle Hill’s German-language branch was the company’s financial mainstay, raking in some 80% of its turnover, and driving the as-of-then still unprofitable English-language branch, which I had started in the U.S. only in the year 2000. However, my arrest had severe consequences beyond the simple loss of my personal freedom for some four years.

Between mid-October and mid-November 2005, I was held in the jail of Kenosha County, Wisconsin, awaiting a decision by the cognizant U.S. Federal Court either to allow my deportation or to stay it until my pending immigration court case had been decided. During those four weeks, Michael Santomauro – back then merely an acquaintance of mine – offered me to help in this critical situation. Since I was a “non-criminal” in jail, there were no restrictions on my ability to place collect phone calls. Mr. Santomauro accepted my repeated collect phone calls, and we devised a plan. I would give him exact written instructions on what to do to make the company survive and run even in my absence.

Castle Hill’s English-language branch in the U.S. had no chance of survival, as I had not enough volunteers and professionals with the necessary skill sets to run the show without me. Hence, I did not spend much time on it. However, the situation was entirely different in the UK with the German-language branch. All bases were covered there: printer, warehouser, order fulfiller, editors, translators were all on standby to take over. All they needed were the company’s customer contact information, and most importantly: the subscription data for my German periodical, which brought in more than $50K a year alone.

To get this all going, I sat down in jail and wrote a detailed 20+-page handwritten letter to Mr. Santomauro, describing exactly what needed to be done. The most important aspect of it was the extraction of customer contact and subscription information from my computer back home, and to send it by email to a contact person in the UK.

Unfortunately, Mr. Santomauro decided to completely ignore the instructions. He later claimed he had never owned a computer, hence did not know what to do with it after my wife had shipped it to him. Instead of asking a professional or any person skilled in computers to assist him, he shipped the computer straight back to my wife without doing anything with it. I found out about this only after my release from prison, when the editor in chief of Castle Hill’s German magazine revealed to me that they never received any customer and subscription data from Mr. Santomauro.

As a result of this complete refusal to follow the agreed-upon procedure, subscription numbers to Castle Hill’s German-language magazine plummeted from around a thousand subscribers to just over a hundred, and the roster of some 3,000 regular book buyers collapsed to a few dozen. After a little over a year, the German magazine folded, and Castle Hill’s book operations withered down to a trickle.

When I came out of prison, Castle Hill’s German customer base had basically evaporated. It was no different in the U.S. with the English-language operation, which had ceased operations entirely. But here, book buyers had an alternative: The Barnes Review operated a revisionist magazine, and sold revisionist books to a customer base much broader than Castle Hill ever had. When I approached the then-manager of The Barnes Review, Willis Carto, to revive Castle Hill’s book program of yore, he enthusiastically agreed to republish Castle Hill’s books in reprints and new editions with his imprint, and to release new books as I produced them. This way, the revisionist flame was rekindled and maintained in the U.S. In 2015, Castle Hill took back over what The Barnes Review had maintained and grown since 2011. Brand recognition subsequently allowed Castle Hill’s new English-language activities to quickly grow into a profitable and stable enterprise. The German-language branch, however, hobbled behind, getting slower and slower with every censorship strike the powers that be imposed on it.

Stripe’s decision has made it very clear that, compared to 2005, the situation is now reversed: Castle Hill’s English language operations have become its mainstay, while the German-language branch has become an increasingly risky liability.

We will see how things evolve. Looking back at Castle Hill’s censorship history, I am not sanguine​…