Total Revisionist Collapse – and Resurrection

As reported in last issue’s editorial, the situation at CODOH and Castle Hill had become critical, after one of CODOH’s board members, Michael Santomauro, until mid-December 2023 manager of Castle Hill, had seized all of Castle Hill’s company assets, and had taken exclusive control of domain-name and hosting accounts, using this as “leverage” (his word) to extort $300,000 from CODOH.

Subsequently, Mr. Santomauro increased his demand by insisting that Castle Hill and CODOH pay him 3% of all incoming proceeds for the next 10 years. He later increased that time span several times, and then even demanded that 3% of all proceeds of any enterprise should be paid to him in which I, Germar Rudolf, have or will have an interest in.

However, CODOH has articles of formation that clearly state on page one, Point 3.A:

“No part of the net earnings of this trust shall inure or be payable to or for the benefit of any private shareholder or individual […]”

Ignoring the outrageously criminal methods applied by Mr. Santomauro, his demands were also a clear violation of the Trust’s articles, which he was held to honor and protect as a trustee.

Sensing that a resolution was difficult if at all possible, we decided to make a clone of the Castle Hill online store, rebrand it as the internet outlet of Armreg Ltd located at www.armreg.co.uk, with Armreg paying a licensing fee to Castle Hill for all Castle-Hill books sold. Printing and order fulfillment of the books was outsourced, with no startup costs involved. This way, revisionist books were again for sale as the new year started, and the total financial drought was lifted.

To resolve the conflict with Mr. Santomauro, a CODOH board meeting was arranged for January 8, where the other four trustees would try to reason with Mr. Santomauro. However, during the night from January 7th to 8th, CODOH’s internet hosting service provider switched off our two servers due to overdue invoices, making all websites hosted on these servers disappear:

• the CODOH Library at  www.CODOH.com
• the CODOH Forum at https//forum.codoh.com
• the static revisionist repository www.vho.org
• Inconvenient History (IH) at www.InconvenientHistory.com
• the series Holocaust Handbooks at www.HolocaustHandbooks.com
• and Castle Hill’s (then suspended) online store at www.CastleHill.shop

This happened because the hosting fees used to be paid by Castle Hill. But since Castle Hill’s bank account had been closed, payment attempts by the hosting-service provider failed.

Mr. Santomauro had changed all contact information in that hosting account to him personally, wiping out any trace that the account was actually owned by CODOH. Hence, the hosting company would not talk to any of us other than Mr. Santomauro. For weeks, Mr. Santomauro denied access to the account to any other board member. He moreover evidently also ignored emails sent to him by the hosting company pointing out the unpaid bills and the danger that the servers will be shut down.

As mentioned in my previous editorial, Mr. Santomauro also tried to hijack the domain name codoh.com, but I managed to thwart that attempt, gaining back control over that name a few weeks later. However, all other domain names in CODOH’s account – including www.Holocaust​Encylopedia.com – are now under Mr. Santomauro’s control, and he refuses to give anyone access to it.

With revisionism as we know it having been wiped off the planet overnight, we started our board meeting with only one important point on the agenda: get the outstanding hosting bills paid, to have the servers get turned back on. However, when asked by all four other board members to please give one of us access to the hosting account, so that updated debit-card information could be entered, or alternatively to enter such data himself. Mr. Santomauro lied through his teeth by claiming that he had been utterly unaware that he had this kind of leverage over the Trust’s very existence. Feigning surprise of his powers, he refused to allow access to the hosting account, and he also refused the outstanding hosting bill to be paid, demanding first that an “exit agreement” be signed along the line he had demanded before. Since his proposed exit agreement was financially impossible and illegal under the Trust’s articles of formation, the other board members rejected his proposal. An alternative exit agreement was proposed by me that would have been possible to implement, but Mr. Santomauro rejected it. Mr. Santomauro then abruptly left the meeting.

In other words: Mr. Santomauro was hell-bent at destroying Holocaust revisionism as we know it for pure and simple greed.

To make matters worse, our backup service had terminated our account with them after repeated payment attempts had failed earlier in 2023. (Their recurrent payments feature had failed repeatedly before.). Notification emails to this effect were ignored at our end, because I had temporarily dropped out of CODOH, and no one else was paying attention. Therefore, CODOH did not even have any kind of backup of its various websites, short of what I had on my private computer (a complete copy of vho.org and Holocaust Handbooks).

Fortunately, when we had to suspend Castle Hill’s shop due to Mr. Santomauro’s seizure of all of Castle Hill’s books, a supporter in Germany correctly smelled a rat and made a complete front-end html dump of the CODOH library in late December 2023. Furthermore, an avid user of the CODOH forum had secured a forum backup in the summer of 2023, al­though without media contents (just database structure and text contents).

When it became clear that Mr. Santomauro was the enemy within who could not be reasoned with, we devised “Project Phoenix”:

A new, modernized website for the Holocaust Handbooks had been envisioned before. Now, I implemented it within a few days. Since I had not relinquished that domain name to CODOH in 2023 after Mr. Santomauro had requested to stop offering the books as free eBook downloads, we still had control over that domain name. Hence, it is back up and more beautiful than ever:

Holocausthandbooks.com

Working together with volunteers, we extracted all the necessary data from the CODOH library front-end backup. Next, we organized it for a PHP import into a new framework we had already planned to create back in late 2023. On March 17, 2024, we reported on our new CODOH blog that CODOH was back up and running, with basically all content recovered and reorganized:

“We Are Back in Business!”

While there is still a lot of cleaning up to do – broken internal and external html links as well as faulty media links – this would have been an issue, even if we had migrated to the new platform in a controlled fashion. The only difference is that we had to do it in a hurry, with the old site having been completely wiped out.

Inconvenient History is back up as part of the CODOH Library, but not featured on a separate domain. The original *.com domain name is lost for now. We do own www.InconvenientHistory.org, but we want to keep IH as part of the library, as it has always been since 2015, and we will not maintain the journal in two separate databases. Hence, for now, that *.org domain merely redirects to IH’s location on www.CODOH.com.

As mentioned earlier, Castle Hill’s shop was cloned a couple weeks before the Santomauro-induced core meltdown:

Armreg.co.uk = CastleHill.shop

Therefore, the financial core of all revisionist operations, financing the Encyclopedia, Inconvenient History and the Holocaust Handbooks, was unaffected by this latest act of treachery.

The one issue we have not yet been able to resolve is the Forum. Recreating this forum from the backup we have requires dedication and skills by volunteers willing to put in considerable time and effort. Being COO of Armreg Ltd, lead editor of the series Holocaust Handbooks, manager of CODOH, and editor in chief of Inconvenient History, my resources are already stretched thin. There simply isn’t more left to rebuild and kick-start the forum on top of it. Unfortunately, none of the other members of CODOH’s board of trustees has any skills helpful in this regard.

Any volunteer willing to tackle this task and take charge of that aspect of “Project Phoenix” is welcome to get in touch, to have this last bird rise from the ashes as well. We will also consider having him/her as a Trustee, to give the Forum a voice and the Board some competence in these matters.

Last and least, sometime early this year, Mr. Santomauro decided to switch off the domain name www.HolocaustEncyclopedia.com, thus wiping out this new and profound revisionist resource. We scrambled to reserve a different domain name, cloned the old site, and had it back online within a day: www.NukeBook.org. A short while later, Mr. Santomauro switched the domain back on and apologized, claiming that this had happened by accident. Knowing the many steps required to turn off a domain name within GoDaddy, this cannot have been an accident at all. It was just another attempt by Mr. Santomauro to gain leverage for his blackmailing attempts. I am not sure what made him back off, but he keeps that domain name under tight control, refusing to hand it over or sell it, so we can expect future attempts to blackmail us.

With his recent actions, Mr. Santomauro has done more harm to Holocaust revisionism than the combined might of the U.S. Government, Germany, Israel and all the other censoring nations, plus the ADL, SPLC, Jewish Defense League, Antifa, Amazon, YouTube, Vimeo, PayPal, Stripe, Square, Authorize.net, Wise, Ingram, Publishers’ Graphics and all the other corporate censors could ever inflict on us.

Mr. Santomauro insists that the ransom money he demands is for his claim of 24 years of loyal services as a friend and to revisionism.

With friends like that, who needs enemies?