Looking at the pattern of censorship we have experienced over the years, it emerges that the beginning of each year seems to be the most challenging for us. The reason for that seems obvious. In 2005, the General Assembly of the United Nations officially declared the 27th of each January “an annual International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust.”[1] January 27, 1945 was the day when the Red Army conquered the Auschwitz Camp. I intentionally refuse to use the word “liberated” in this context, because the Red Army did never liberate anyone; they merely conquered and subjugated those conquered to totalitarian Stalinist rule.
Ever since that year in particular, certain partisan groups have driven censorship campaigns against skeptical, objective Holocaust researchers and their published research results mainly during that time of the year.
Gilad Erdan, Israel’s representative to the United Nations, gives a propaganda speech during the UN General Assembly on January 20, 2022, talking the nations of the world into censoring unwanted historical research result. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIYYDktE0SM)
The same happened again in early 2022, when Germany and Israel ganged up to make the General Assembly of the United Nations pass another resolution appealing to all nations of the world “to reject without any reservation” and “to take active measures to combat” any unwanted skeptical research into the National-Socialists’ persecution of the Jews, and the popular social-media chatter resulting from it. This resolution passed without a vote on January 2022.[2]
When we heard about this resolution, we braced for impact. Something sure was coming our way again…
On January 24, the company we used up to that point in time to have our books printed, distributed and mailed to our customers, Lightning Source, which is a subsidiary of the almighty Ingram Content Group, suspended all our books. We could not even place any orders for our own customers. A day later, all books were available again for us to place individual orders for our own customers, but all books had been removed from distribution through Ingram, which basically has a monopoly on book distribution in the U.S. Asked what the reason was for this action, we received the following email on January 26:
A love letter from Ingram. Click to enlarge.
“Dear Publisher,
Please be advised that due to recent complaints of your titles from retailers we are providing notice to terminate your account effective March 7, 2022, as outlined in our agreement under section 6b (page12).
During this time your titles will only be available for short-run ordering.
Sincerely,
Catalog Integrity Team”
That Section 6b reads succinctly:
“b) Termination for Convenience. Publisher may terminate this Agreement without cause by giving the other Party forty-five (45) days written notice. Lightning Source may terminate this agreement with or without cause, immediately upon written notice to Publisher.”
To this I merely responded, without having heard back from them since:
“This is peculiar. No retailer is forced to sell or even offer our books, if they don’t like them, so why would they complain?
Is there any way of letting us know what the contents of those complaints were?”
Brick-and-mortar book shops most certainly have no influence on which books Ingram offers as a distributor. If they don’t like a book, they simply don’t carry it. It is different with the big book chains and online book retailers. In the U.S., they get their book data with which they fill their websites directly from Ingram via a live ftp hook-up. Ingram feeds all these sites, without exception, every day with updates of new books release, revisions made, and books withdrawn. That’s why you could always find our books on Amazon for at least some time after we had released a new book or a new edition. Amazon and all the rest of the websites in the U.S. where you get your books have all their data fed in real time and automatically by Ingram. If they want to ban any book Ingram carries, they have to go into this data of millions of books and manually delete the ones they despise. It is a real hassle for them to do that, as it requires perpetual monitoring and, if something offensive is spotted, manual intervention to their database contents.
So, guess which retailer with lots of clout (due to selling some 50% of all the books Ingram distributes) and influence has had enough of our at times successful undermining of their censorship efforts and put the thumbscrews on Ingram, using the UN Resolution just passed as a broad hint?
Now we’re in the next round of the battle for free speech, which is to be reported in later posts…
Call for Support
Ingram’s censorship means that, for the foreseeable future, our cutting-edge revisionist books will become unavailable through any third-party outlet that does not buy them from us directly. We will try to find a way around this, but it is yet unclear whether we will succeed. Needless to say, having all of our books cut off from distribution will hurt us considerably, both financially – roughly a quarter of our turnover came from Ingram’s international distribution – and regarding our mission to reach out to the world with the good news of revisionism.
In the meantime, we are back to square one by establishing warehouses and distribution centers of our own both in Europe and the Americas. This results in considerable up-front investments which we are struggling to rake together. If you want to help us with these expenses, please consider donating, so we can look with a little more hope into the near future. Thank you very much! — Germar Rudolf
Just a week after the UN resolution, Barclay’s Bank in the UK, with whom we had our business banking since 2007 and never had any problems, opened some investigation by requesting more details about what our business was all about. Then three weeks later, they told us unceremoniously that they will close our accounts, citing a passage in the agreement that simply allows them to close whatever account they want whenever they please. Period.
Editor’s Note
This censorship blow turned out to be fatal for Castle Hill in the long run. A year later, Castle Hill’s new printer also refused to do any business with them, then all payment processors quit accepting payments in the second half of 2023, and finally, to break the camel’s back, in December of 2023, a former associate of Castle Hill took control of all company assets and demanded 330.000 (three hundred thirty thousand) US dollars in ransom payments for their release, an amount no one could afford. Castle Hill therefore went out of business in late 2023. It was resurrected in the same spirit, away from criminal former associates, in the UK as Academic Research Media Review Education Group Ltd, or short: Armreg Ltd (which stands for Germar backward, almost anyway). See: armreg.co.uk.
Germar Rudolf was born on October 29, 1964, in Limburg, Germany. He studied chemistry at Bonn University, where he graduated in 1989 as a Diplom-Chemist, which is comparable to a U.S. PhD degree. From 1990-1993 he prepared a German PhD thesis at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in conjunction with the University of Stuttgart, Germany. Parallel to this and in his spare time, Rudolf prepared an expert report on chemical and technical questions of the alleged gas chambers of Auschwitz, The Rudolf Report (now titled The Chemistry of Auschwitz). He conclude in it that "the alleged facilities for mass extermination at Auschwitz and Birkenau were not suited for the purpose as claimed." As a result he had to endure severe measures of persecution in subsequent years. Hence he went into British exile, where he started the small revisionist outlet Castle Hill Publishers. When Germany asked Britain to extradite Rudolf in 1999, he fled to the U.S. There he applied for political asylum, expanded his publishing activities, and in 2004 married a U.S. citizen. In 2005, the U.S. recognized Rudolf's marriage as valid and seconds later arrested and subsequently deported him back to Germany, where he was put in prison for 44 months for his scholarly writings. Some of the writings he got punished for had been published while Rudolf resided in the U.S., where his activities were and are perfectly legal. Since not a criminal under U.S. law, he managed to immigrate permanently to the U.S. in 2011, where he rejoined his U.S. citizen wife and daughter. He currently resides in Upstate New York.
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