The Holocaust Historiography Project

From the Editor

Theodore J. O’Keefe

This expanded issue of the Journal coincides with the sixtieth anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack. As it goes to press, the same questions about Pearl Harbor — to what extent did U.S. policies invite the attack? how much did our government know in advance? — still swirl around the ruins of the World Trade Center and the badly damaged Pentagon. Skepticism of the official version is hardly limited to these two “surprise attacks,” however, for in Russia, in Germany, and even in America a growing number of historians is challenging the standard story that Hitler’s June 1941 invasion of the USSR was unprovoked aggression. Each of these issues is dealt with incisively and informatively in this double issue of the JHR.

In the following pages Robert Faurisson argues that we Americans, after decades of support for Israeli oppression of the Palestinians and years of waging of push-button wars against Muslim countries, should certainly have been forewarned. He argues that the cult of the “Holocaust,” with its message that the Jews are only victims and always victims, and thus all is allowed them, may propel the world into a real holocaust, where all will be victims. An expanded Revisionist News & Comment section looks with a jaundiced eye at the latest on 9/11, including the explosive, and scandalously underreported, news that scores of Israeli agents may have been spying on the alleged perpetrators of the World Trade and Pentagon massacres — and that those Israelis who weren’t spying on the terrorists were probably spying on us.

Russian specialist Dan Michaels, whose work has appeared frequently in these pages, assays the latest literature from Russia and Germany on the growing historical debate over Operation Barbarossa. Michaels examines the increasing evidence that Josef Stalin was aware of the German build-up, and was planning to strike first, and considers, if so, why the cunning Red despot was beaten to the punch. Then an editorial review looks at two recent books on Pearl Harbor, each of them claiming to solve the mystery of how much FDR and his government knew.

We are honored to publish the text of former Congressman Paul McCloskey’s lecture to IHR’s last conference. This highly decorated combat Marine and eminent American patriot placed defending his country’s real interests, upholding its laws, and supporting justice at home and abroad ahead of his own political career. While McCloskey has made it clear that he is not a revisionist on the essentials of the Holocaust, his lecture shows that revisionism has a wide spectrum, and a growing potential to engage men and women of outstanding character and achievement.

IHR director Mark Weber takes aim at the sacrosanct Six Million number, by way of an examination of the career of one of its chief authorities, ex-SS officer (and ex-CIA agent) Wilhelm Höttl. The result is a fine essay that reevaluates Höttl’s credibility in light of new documents, and shows that the “Six Million” is not merely a sacred cow, but one that is industriously milked by the Holocaust industry.

Perhaps the most important article in this big issue focuses on the seemingly insignificant. Yet in his brilliant survey of the evidence for (and against) needed to have introduced the killing agent into the most notorious “gas chamber” of Auschwitz, Brian Renk, a longtime revisionist researcher with a professional knowledge of construction techniques, establishes that there are no holes, and there were no holes, in the “gas chamber” roof. His deconstruction of the evidence offered by the other side’s leading experts, in last year’s riveting Irving trial and elsewhere, aims a mortal blow at an Achilles heel of the Auschwitz myth.

That’s far from all, of course. Our double year-end number features a review of Jürgen Graf’s valuable take-down of Raul Hilberg’s hypertrophied Holocaust history. Samuel Crowell surveys Paul Weindling’s double-edged book on epidemics and genocide in eastern Europe between 1890 and 1945. There is much news, and more comment, with detailed reports on revisionist conferences here and abroad, an update from Robert Faurisson on persecution and France and Switzerland, notice of items of interest in the professional journals, and more.

As long-suffering subscribers will recognize, this double issue is meant to help us to catch up as well as to catch you up. You have our promise that we'll make up the “missing” pages, and be back on schedule at last, as quickly as possible during the next year.


Bibliographic information
Author: Theodore J. O’Keefe
Title: From the editor
Source: The Journal for Historical Review
Date: September/December 2001
Issue: Volume 20 number 5/6
Location: page 2
ISSN: 0195-6752
Attribution: “Reprinted from The Journal of Historical Review, PO Box 2739, Newport Beach, CA 92659, USA.”
Please send a copy of all reprints to the Editor.