The Making of The Making

Carlo Mattogno’s little booklet Auschwitz: A Three-Quarter Century of Propaganda (see illustration), first published in 2018, was a huge success, as it presents in a nutshell – and pleasant to read (not usually Carlo’s strength) – the best evidence to demonstrate the fraudulent nature of the orthodox Auschwitz narrative. I reported about its German edition having gone viral in an earlier IH editorial (“Revisionism Going Viral”, Vol. 10, No. 4, of 2018). Knowing Carlo, it was to be expected that he turns what started as a simple journal article,[1] into a major study covering all the nooks and crannies. Because that’s what Carlo does for a living.

In early 2018, Carlo Mattogno sent me the “final” Italian version of this study he had told us he had been working on for some time. In christened the project The Making of the Auschwitz Myth, with respectful reverence to the original title of Wilhem Stäglich’s book: The Auschwitz Myth.

In late 2018, when I was almost done translating it from Italian into English, Carlo told me that he had split the book into two separate studies and had completely rewritten the first part. I was not amused. I decided to keep the project as one single volume, and adjust Carlo’s text accordingly.

When I returned to that project this past September after the COVID-mania had somewhat subsided, I realized that Carlo had made more changes to the whole project, so I had to do a lot of comparing of what I had with what he gave me as the final, published Italian version. As I write this, I am translating this from scratch into German (I’m half-way through), and I discover a lot of issues with the just-publish English edition, some of them resulting from the book having been split in two by Carlo, but kept as one by me for the English translation. This means that we will soon release a corrected, second edition of this accursed project… (sometime early 2021).

Revising a text once considered “finished” is standard procedure. After all, we are revisionists. It must be part of our nature to revisit and, where needed, revise our own views continually, and thus adjust or even rewrite what we’ve written before. Hence, I do not bear a grudge against Carlo. He’s just doing his job.

Because texts get constantly revised and updated, Castle Hill repeatedly releases new editions of books we have published. John Ball’s Air-Photo Evidence, for example, is now in its 6th edition, and Kollerstrom’s Breaking the Spell in its 5th. And so it goes on. In the world of print-on-demand, new editions can be release on the fly, and with little additional cost. Back in the 20th Century, when offset printing of at least 1,000 copies was the only way of getting a proper book published, releasing new editions made sense only if you could sell at last a thousand copies of them. Considering revisionist books’ tiny niche market, this means that no second edition of most of them was ever released. In fact, many books that could have been published never even saw a first edition, because there was (and is) simply no market to sell a thousand copies of most of them within a reasonable span of time.

That restriction no longer exists. We can issue a new edition every year, if there is a need, because every copy of a book gets printed and bound individually, as the need arises, just as it was done back in the 15 Century, only much faster and cheaper.

Having recent editions of most of our books is a marketing boon. If our customers can be sure that our books are not outdated, old wares, but up-to-date and kind of brand-spanking-new material, they are more inclined to buy them. But keeping a growing roster of books up to date is also an increasing challenge. Having to handle a few dozen books is one thing. However, our combined roster of English and German books has now exceeded 160 titles, and it keeps growing. We’ll see where this leads, but I will keep trying to include and release necessary revisions and updates wherever possible.

Coming back to The Making of the Auschwitz Myth, the present issue of Inconvenient History includes an excerpt from this book, Mattogno’s latest masterpiece: its introduction as well as the very first subchapter of the book’s first part on British radio intercepts. This is Volume 41 of our prestigious series Holocaust Handbooks. May it serve as an appetizer for more.

[1] Carlo’s text was first published in print in my Germar-language journal: “Auschwitz — 60 Jahre Propaganda. Die Gaskammern: Ursprung, Entwicklung und Verfall einer Propagandalüge,” Vierteljahreshefte für freie Geschichtsforschung, Vol. 9, No. 2 (2005), pp. 167-187.