This Is What CODOH Will Do

First of all, CODOH will both grow and shrink. It will grow, because the CODOH Trust now includes the publishing outlet Castle Hill Publishers (CHP) with all its book stock and copyrights. If well-maintained, this will give CODOH a steady source of income and reduce the necessity to beg you all for money. CHP, established in 1998 by German revisionist Germar Rudolf, has been without any proper leadership during the years (2005-2009) of Germar’s incarceration for his peaceful dissent. When Rudolf was released in 2009, he had to keep living in Europe until the summer of 2011. During that time Rudolf was always within the reach of the German prosecutors, so he could not unfold his old level of activities. Even after his emigration to the U.S., he has still been wary of getting back to his “old ways”—once burned, twice shy. So CODOH will step in and take over legal responsibility, allowing Germar to pitch in as he sees fit. The course set by Germar will not change. CHP’s focus will remain on serious revisionist scholarship, with the prestigious series Holocaust Handbooks at its core, plus increasingly also video documentaries.

CODOH will shrink by shedding some baggage. As indicated on page one of this issue, this issue of Smith’s Report will be the last to appear in print. The entire operation will now move online, and only after each year will we put together a “Best of Smith’s Report” book, available for purchase from the usual sources (although the title may be different).

The reason for this decision is simple: When we took over this newsletter, we received a list of subscribers, no money, and no data about who had subscribed for how long (or donated when and how much). So we went out on a limb by producing five issue of Smith’s Report (most likely the average length of all running subscriptions) at our expense for some $3,500, with no money in CODOH’s bank account, using the resources of one of our generous volunteers. He hoped to get it back, once subscriptions would be renewed.

As indicated on page one, that hope got thoroughly busted. Although shrinking subscription numbers of print periodicals is quite normal these days, an utter collapse as we see it here is rather unusual. With hardly anyone being interested in the print edition of SR anymore, it is now officially dead.

This outcome is both disappointing and a relief. It is disappointing because it looks like past donors and subscribers to the print edition of SR were not really interested in it, but were more likely interested in donating to Bradley Smith out of a general feeling of loyalty to him, and in order to support his other activities, not at least his Campus Project. It is a relief, because the print edition of SR has always consumed much of both our financial as well as human resources. SR also impeded growth and attractiveness of our main outreach tool, CODOHWeb.

Last month we decided that we will no longer collect papers  and news items for SR each month, effectively holding them back, but will publish them on the CODOH blog instantly and then summarize the most interesting ones in the SR print edition. We had to do this, because CODOH now mainly lives from traffic to its website, not from its SR readers, and our main goal is outreach to the general public, not preaching to the choir. For this reason, our website needed to be more vivid and attractive, with new items posted regularly and frequently.

Hence the pieces all fell into their proper places: Smith’s Report has moved completely online, is now one with the CODOH library.

We are currently revamping the admin side of our website to facilitate posting news items and papers to the point where all of our volunteers should be able do it, even without any knowledge of html code—similar to how a WordPress site works. (We cannot use WordPress or other free software like Drupal and ModX, because our site has way too much traffic, which such PhP/MySQL software cannot handle). This will increase the amount of individuals who can and will write papers and news items for CODOH, again increasing the site’s appeal.

We are striving to maintain CODOH’s Campus Project, finding new ways to promote it, and new personalities to represent it, in order to prepare it for a future without our founder.

We will also expand our activities to create more documentaries and other video productions, and to place them in public venues, because a picture is worth a thousand words. But that also depends on contributions from you, our supporters, sponsors and volunteers!