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What I Believe, What I Don’t

By Bradley R. Smith ∙ October 1, 1992

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I understand perfectly well that the Hitlerian regime was anti-Semitic and that it persecuted Jews and others.

I understand that many peoples experienced unfathomable catastrophes in Europe during World War II. The catastrophe of the Jews was one among them.

Nevertheless. I no longer believe that there was a plan to “exterminate” the Jews of Europe. I used to believe it, but now I don’t.

I no longer believe that Germans built or used homicidal “gas chambers” in which millions of Jews and others were exterminated. The gas chambers either existed or they didn’t. If they did, someone should be able to prove it.

If there were no homicidal gas chambers, then the orthodox holocaust story is a hoax, and we should say so. It would be craven not to.

lt’s my view that much of the “eyewitness”·testimony about German atrocities against Jews is invented. Those who bear false witness against Germans and others should be exposed.

I believe that the attempt to identify every expression of doubt about the gas chamber stories with hatred for Jews is infantile. I invite the spokes persons for organizations like the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Hillel and the Anti-Defamation League to stop behaving like children and join with me and other revisionists in a grown-up exchange of ideas about the holocaust story.

In short, then, I do not believe it is “hateful” to doubt what others believe or to express my doubt in public. That’s what grown-ups do. Those who protest that it is wrong for me to say what I really think and reveal how I really feel represent a world view that did not originate in a society of free men and women.

I’m willing to be convinced that I am wrong about any or all of this. I do not believe, however, that I will be convinced of anything whatever by slander, threats, censorship or any of the other infantile behavior favored by the Holocaust Lobby in response to my call for open debate.

– Bradley R. Smith
Editor and Publisher

  • Bradley R. Smith

    Bradley R. Smith was born in Los Angeles on February 18, 1930. At 18 he joined the army and in 1951 served with the infantry in Korea where he was twice wounded. After three decades of a variety of professional activities, it suddenly hit him: In 1979 he read a leaflet by Professor Robert Faurisson, "The Problem of the Gas Chambers." Then, Arthur Butz’s The Hoax of the Twentieth Century did it for him. He understood from the beginning that he would address the censorship, the suppression of independent thought, the taboo against publishing and debating revisionist arguments—not the arguments themselves. That has remained his position. In 1989, Smith founded Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH) dedicated to defending free speech and free inquiry into the Holocaust question. He handed over CODOH's helm in late 2014. He passed away on his 86th birthday, February 18, 2016. Read a series of obituaries here.

Bibliographic information about this document: Smith's Report, no. 11-14, Sept./Oct. 1992 through March/April 1993, each on p. 2
Other contributors to this document: n/a
Editor’s comments: n/a

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