Revisionist Activism in Australia

The Adelaide Institute Conference

For some time now, Australia has been one of the most dynamic battlefields in the worldwide struggle against the historical blackout. And at the forefront of the battle there is the Adelaide Institute, which publishes an important revisionist newsletter and maintains an information-packed Internet web site.

Centered in South Australia's largest city, and funded by donations, the Adelaide Institute was founded in 1994 by Fredrick Toben, who directs its work and edits its newsletter (P.O. Box 3300, Norwood 5067, Australia. E-mail: fredadin@adam.com.au).

Born in northern Germany in 1944, Dr. Toben (Töben) studied at Melbourne University in Australia, as well as at universities in Heidelberg, Tübingen and Stuttgart in Germany, where he earned a doctorate in philosophy. He also hold a Master's degree in education, and has worked as a school teacher in Victoria, Australia.

The Institute's twice-monthly newsletter has developed into one of the most informative revisionist periodicals anywhere, with a keen readership around the world. A typical issue, twelve pages in length, reports on revisionist activism both at home and abroad, and provides news and commentary about recent noteworthy historical news. Aspects of revisionist scholarship are sometimes dealt with in detail.

In the spring of 1997 Toben made a round-the-world tour, financed by Adelaide Institute supporters, that included an inspection visit of the Auschwitz camp site, and meetings with revisionist scholars and activists in North America and Europe.

In radio and television appearances, Dr. Toben has been an outspoken voice for historical accuracy and free historical inquiry.

All this has predictably enraged the powerful Jewish-Zionist lobby. In 1997 the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), the country's main Jewish community organization, brought legal action against Toben to shut down the Institute's web site (http://www.adam.com.au/fredadin/adins.html). In this case, the first test of the country's Racial Discrimination law involving the Internet, Toben was brought before the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC). Outraged by its guiding principle that truth is no defense, Toben walked out of the Commission hearing and refused to cooperate further with it.

A Successful Conference

Over the weekend of August 7-9, 1998, the Adelaide Institute hosted Australia's first-ever revisionist conference. About 50 persons attended the successful three-day meeting in Adelaide, which was noteworthy for the scope and depth of the presentations. While much of the focus was on the Holocaust issue, other subjects were dealt with as well. The meeting, which began on Friday, the 7th, with registration at a hotel and an informal dinner, continued over the next two days at the comfortable and stately Fernilee Lodge.

Speakers included Arthur Butz and John Sack from the United States, and Jürgen Graf from Europe. In addition, a number of revisionist scholars and activists who could not attend in person "participated" by pre-recorded video cassette or by live telephone hookup, or both. Among those attending was the ambassador to Australia of the United Arab Emirates, Khalifa Bakhit Al-falasi. The envoy's attendance predictably prompted complaints from Jewish-Zionist groups.

Dr. Toben opened the conference by welcoming the speakers and attendees, and by reading greetings from several political prisoners, including Günter Deckert and Udo Walendy, each of whom has been imprisoned in Germany for their dissident views on history. Attendees then viewed a clip of a 1994 Australian television "Nightline" broadcast on the Holocaust issue that included remarks by revisionist Geoff Muirden (who later addressed the conference), as well as by Jeremy Jones, a prominent Jewish community figure. A second video clip presented to the attendees was an excerpt of another Australian "Nightline" broadcast, this one from March 1998, which also showed Jones bitterly complaining about revisionist "haters." But this broadcast also presented portions of an interview with Dr. Toben. Among other things, he told viewers: "There is no evidence to prove that the gas chambers existed."

Traveling from Switzerland for the meeting was educator, researcher and author Jürgen Graf, who delivered two talks, including the keynote address. A few weeks earlier, a Swiss court had sentenced him to 15 months imprisonment and a fine of 8,000 francs for his revisionist writings on the Holocaust issue. (See "Swiss Court Punishes Two Revisionists" in the July-August 1998 Journal, pp. 2-10.) During his stay in Australia, he learned that he had lost his teaching job due to his July 16 conviction.

In his keynote address, Graf spoke about Majdanek, the large German wartime concentration camp at Lublin, in Poland, which he personally inspected in June 1997. His presentation was based on research conducted for a newly published, 300-page book on this subject, co-authored with Italian scholar Carlo Mattogno. Although Allied officials charged in 1945 that the Germans had killed one and a half million people at Majdanek, it has been a relatively "neglected" camp. Contrary to its image as a top secret extermination center, Graf pointed out, the camp in fact was "completely open" and "visible from all sides." Any mass killings there could hardly have been kept secret.

By 1943 Germany was battling for existence against industrially and numerically superior enemies. In this situation, Graf noted, it would have been madness to kill valuable workers, or even to let them die.

The death rate in Germany's wartime camps was high, due especially to typhus and other diseases caused by overcrowding and poor sanitation. German authorities accordingly took measures to deal with the catastrophe. In December 1942, for example, SS Reichsführer Himmler ordered that the death rate in the camps "absolutely must be reduced." Documents discovered by Graf and Mattogno detail the specific hygienic measures ordered by German authorities to bring down the prisoner death rate at Majdanek. These measures, which largely proved effective, included installation of sewers, running water taps and toilets, and delousing facilities, as well as regular showers for the inmates, and expansion of the prisoner hospital.

In the largest of the alleged homicidal gas chambers at Majdanek, Graf told the conference, there is, remarkably, a large window that doomed prisoners could easily have broken. This "gas chamber," Graf concludes, was actually a facility for delousing clothes and similar items. Another purported "gas chamber" at Barracks 41, which is routinely shown to tourists, has no traces of Zyklon B. However, visitors can view canisters there that reputedly contained lethal carbon monoxide (CO) gas. Oddly, though, these canisters are marked "CO2," which denotes non-lethal carbon dioxide.

Among the clearly baseless, or at least greatly exaggerated allegations about Majdanek is a report that the corpses of 70,000 victims were burned in three ditches. But to burn so many bodies, Graf pointed out, would have required many tons of wood. Furthermore, he went on, it would have taken days for the ditches to cool, tons of human ash would have needed removal, and a grinding mill would have been required to process residual bones on a physically impossible scale.

Graf's second conference address, "Assault on a Nation," dealt with the on-going attack against Switzerland by organized Jewry, especially the World Jewish Congress, including the "Swiss bank" scandal.

Arthur Butz

Dr. Arthur R. Butz, a professor at Northwestern University near Chicago, and author of the classic revisionist study, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, flew from the United States to deliver his address, "The Hoax Ends The Twentieth Century" (which appears elsewhere in this Journal issue).

John Bennett

For decades Australia's most active and outspoken revisionist writer and publicist has been John Bennett, an attorney with a well-deserved reputation as a staunch defender of civil rights.

After graduation from the University of Melbourne, he served from 1966 to 1980 as secretary of the Victorian Council for Civil Liberties, and since 1980 has been president of the Australian Civil Liberties Union (P.O. Box 1137, Carlton, Vic. 3053, Australia). He is also the author of Your Rights, a widely-circulated citizens' rights handbook that has been regularly revised and updated since the first edition of 1974.

Since 1979, when he was "converted" by reading The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, Bennett has actively promoted revisionism in numerous interviews, in pamphlets mailed to thousands of people around the country, and in successive editions of Your Rights. A member of this Journal's Editorial Advisory Committee since 1980, Bennett has also been a Journal contributor and an IHR conference speaker.

John Sack

Also traveling from the United States was John Sack, Jewish-American author of An Eye For An Eye, an extraordinary account of the suppressed story of torture and murder of German civilians in Jewish-run camps in postwar Soviet-ruled Poland. The veteran journalist and historian, who accepts the Holocaust gas chamber and "six million" claims, noted the remarkable efforts by Jews and Jewish groups to suppress his book (which is no longer in print), and even to prevent him from speaking on the postwar mistreatment of Germans at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. (See "Suppressing the Story of Genocide Against Germans," in the Sept.-Oct. 1997 Journal, pp. 31- 33.)

Nigel Jackson

Just as Shakespeare's Hamlet had to commit new murders in an effort to hold on to power, remarked Nigel Jackson in his address, so also do the Zionists have to keep "murdering" free speech on the Holocaust issue with newer and ever more restrictive laws. Jackson, a journalist, secondary school teacher, poet and author (The Case for David Irving), has made a name for himself in Australia as an eloquent defender of freedom of speech. Further suppression of freedom is inevitable, he warned, unless citizens take "disinfective" steps.

Robert Faurisson

Attendees viewed a pre-recorded video presentation by French revisionist scholar Robert Faurisson, "Marshal Pétain, Anti-Communism and the Revisionist Challenge," which gave a "tour" of "Vichy France," the administrative capital of (unoccupied) France from 1940 to 1944. For decades it has been customary to castigate Pétain for his wartime policy of collaboration with Third Reich Germany. It is not well known, for example, that the Vichy administration of Marshal Pétain was duly recognized as the legitimate government of France by more than 16 countries, including the United States.

After his video presentation, Professor Faurisson spoke to the attendees by telephone from France. Regarding the future of revisionism, he expressed the view that "we shall never win and never lose." Revisionists cannot "win," Faurisson explained, because we face a three-thousand-year-old Jewish mindset of irreconcilable conflict: "the Jew against the goyim." Because the Holocaust story has become a religious dogma for Jews, it is impervious to reason and facts. It also endures because it is "big business" and a profitable "golden calf."

In this great struggle -- which Faurisson believes should be regarded as the last great intellectual adventure of this century and the first of the 21st century -- he urges revisionist activists and scholars to "try to be clear, simple, not pedantic, and keep a smile on your face."

David Brockschmidt

In his address on "Schindler's List," conference speaker David Brockschmidt related that his father had known Oskar Schindler well, and had been instrumental in saving Jewish lives. However, he received no credit for this, either from Steven Spielberg in his film "Schindler's List," or from Tom Keneally in his book of the same name, upon which the motion picture was based. As Brockschmidt noted, Schindler's widow, Emily Schindler, has dismissed the influential Spielberg film as "lies."

Geoff Muirden

For several years now, Geoff Muirden has been making a mark in Australia as an articulate and effective partisan of free speech and historical revisionism, both as secretary of the Australian Civil Liberties Union, and, more recently, as Assistant Director of the Adelaide Institute. He provided "An Overview Of Historical Revisionism In Australia," citing, for example, the impact of John Bennett's work.

Andrew Gray

A recognized authority on Richard Wagner, and the translator of his autobiography, spoke on "Errors, Lies, and Nonsense" about the great German composer. Because sensuality and sexuality pervades his work, said Gray, this "skull-splitting genius" forever robbed music of its innocence. Gray spoke against the absurd but enduring campaign to blame Wagner, at least in part, for Hitler, who was a great admirer of the composer. More than a century after his death, Gray noted, Wagner is still being vilified for his notorious anti-Jewish essay on "Jewry and Music."

Olga Scully

In her address, "My Battle Against Australia's Zionist Lobby," Mrs. Olga Scully reported on her legal struggle for her right to free speech. Because of complaints by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry about leaflets she had distributed in her home town in Tasmania, she has been brought before the Australian Human Rights Commission. She expressed appreciation for the support she's received in this legal battle, including backing from David Brockschmidt and Dr. Toben.

Much like a patient on "life support," said William DeMaria in his address, democracy in Australia is now "in crisis." Dr. DeMaria, who teaches at the School of Social Work and Social Policy of the University of Queensland, said that an illusion of freedom is maintained to keep the system going. Even the universities have ceased to cultivate an unfettered search for truth, but have instead become "edu-business" job placement training centers.

Video and Telephone Speakers

Most of those who "participated" in the conference did so by telephone and/or pre-recorded video. They included:

Retired journalist Doug Collins, speaking by telephone from western Canada, reported on the Jewish-Zionist campaign to punish him and the North Shore News for a column criticizing Spielberg's "Schindler's List." This brought the British-born writer before a "Human Rights Commission" where, typically for such bodies, the truth of the allegedly offensive writing is irrelevant. (See "Canadian Jewish Congress Threatens Journalist for Holocaust Heresy," in the Jan.-Feb. 1996 Journal.)

Mark Weber, Director of the Institute for Historical Review, sent greetings to the conference on behalf of the IHR by pre-recorded video presentation. He also spoke briefly to the attendees by telephone from California, congratulating Dr. Toben and his colleagues for their achievement in organizing this important event.

Friedrich Berg, an American engineer and IHR Journal contributor, spoke by telephone on "The Diesel Gas Chamber Hoax Revisited." According to the standard Holocaust story, he pointed out, about a million Jews were supposedly killed in gas chambers with Zyklon B, while some two million Jews were supposedly killed in diesel engine gas chambers. Despite its "dirty" appearance, Berg explained, diesel engine exhaust is actually not toxic.

Germar Rudolf, a German-born certified chemist, author of The Rudolf Report, and editor of the important German-language revisionist quarterly VffG, is currently living in exile to avoid a politically motivated prison sentence imposed by a German court. He submitted a paper on the "gas chambers" of Auschwitz and Birkenau, and spoke to the conference by telephone.

In a video address to the conference, Dr. Robert Countess, a close associate of the IHR, spoke on "Historical Sources and Their Use in Holocaust Historiography." Sources for the alleged wartime homicidal gas chambers are rare and unreliable, he pointed out, and he spoke of the often religious nature of the anti-revisionist critique. He cited the 1993 Master's thesis of New Zealand scholar Dr. Joel Hayward as a noteworthy and courageous study that shows the seriousness of revisionist scholarship, and affirms the validity of numerous specific revisionist arguments.

Ernst Zündel, the veteran German-Canadian publicist and free speech activist, and his attorney, Doug Christie, addressed the conference by video. Currently Zündel and his "battling barrister" are defending themselves before a "Human Rights Tribunal" in Toronto, that is investigating charges that he has been spreading "hate" through the California-based Internet "Zündelsite." In this Orwellian case, Christie mentioned, the Tribunal has declared that "truth is no defense."

Ingrid Rimland, "webmaster" of the California-based "Zündelsite," spoke about "My Wandering Years" in her video address to the conference. Her most recent published work is the Lebensraum trilogy.

Dr. Charles Weber, editor-publisher of a revisionist newsletter, spoke by telephone from Oklahoma. The case for Holocaust revisionism, he said, is much stronger today than it was in 1983 when his booklet, The Holocaust: 120 Questions and Answers (no longer in print), was published.

Speaking by telephone from Sweden, Morocco-born author Ahmed Rami reported on his work and its impact in the Scandinavian country, especially through "Radio Islam," which he started in 1987. Through this important voice for historical revisionism in Scandinavia, he has often dealt with the Palestine issue and Jewish propaganda.

Dr. Serge Thion, speaking by telephone from France, described his visits to the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. At neither center, he said, are visitors permitted to take photographs or to record what they see. The Museums invent supposedly historical dialogue. As part of their effort to prove a German program to exterminate Europe's Jews, they cite the 1942 Wannsee Conference protocol, as well as a reconstructed "gas chamber" model.

Hans Schmidt, editor-publisher of the GANPAC Brief newsletter, and author of Jailed in Democratic Germany (available from the IHR), spoke by telephone from Florida about his arrest and incarceration in Germany for critical remarks about Jews and Freemasons he had written in a letter.

Robert Brock, African-American community activist, spoke by telephone from Washington, DC, about the Jewish role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Michael Hoffman, II, who operates the "Campaign for Radical Truth in History," including a newsletter and Internet website (www.hoffman-info.com), spoke by telephone from Idaho about "Racism in the Jewish Talmud."

Paul Fromm, director of the Canadian Association for Free Expression (CAFE), spoke by telephone from Canada about the on-going assault against free speech in "Cuba del Norte."