McCalden, who in addition to Lewis Brandon used a series of other pseudonyms, including Sondra Ross, David Berg, Julius Finkelstein, and David Stanford, was born in 1951 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where he attended grade school and high school.{2} He then received a teaching certificate from the University of London. He was known in England for his neofascist and extremist involvements. A former officer of England’s right-wing extremist party, the National Front, McCalden edited antisemitic and racist publications in England prior to coming to the United States. An admitted racist, McCalden was denied membership in the English National Union of Journalists because of what was termed his “racist politics.” When he appealed the union’s decision, McCalden acknowledged that he believed in writing that encouraged “race discrimination” and called himself a “racialist.”{3} He claimed to have been converted to Holocaust denial by Richard Harwood’s Did Six Million Really Die? In 1978 he moved to California, where he initially worked for the antisemitic journal the American Mercury. According to McCalden, when he saw that the magazine and everything associated with it were moribund, he helped found the IHR to spread the gospel of Holocaust denial.{4} He served as IHR director from 1978 until 1981.[1]
For the first year after the reward was announced the media ignored it and virtually everything else associated with the IHR. McCalden decided that in order to generate publicity, which was the real aim of the “contest,” letters should be sent to a number of well-known survivors challenging them to prove that Jews had been gassed in Auschwitz and offering them a reward of fifty thousand dollars if they could do so.{5} The survivors received an application form for the contest and a list of the rules,{6} which stipulated that claimants were to attend the second Revisionist Convention at their own expense to present their evidence. The decision of a tribunal of experts—to be named by the IHR to determine the validity of the testimony and evaluate the evidence presented—would be final. Claimants were asked for their ethnic origins, the dates of their internment in any concentration camp, and the exact date and location of any gassing operations they witnessed. In addition they were to describe fully all the mechanics involved in the gassing process they witnessed, and to provide any “forensic evidence” that would support their claim, including diaries they kept or photographs they took.{7}
One of the challenges was sent to Mel Mermelstein, a survivor of Auschwitz whose mother and sisters had been gassed there and whose father and brother were killed at a subcamp of Auschwitz called Jaworzno. Mermelstein, a resident of Long Beach, California, had come to the IHR’s attention because he had written letters to various newspapers, including the Jerusalem Post, decrying the institute and its activities. In its bulletin the IHR published an open letter to Mermelstein, accusing him of “peddling the extermination hoax.” McCalden also sent him a letter challenging him to participate in the contest. The IHR director demanded a speedy response and warned Mermelstein that if none was received the IHR would draw its “own conclusions” and publicize his refusal to participate in the contest in the media.{8} The implication was clear: Refusal to participate would be interpreted by the IHR as an inability to substantiate the Holocaust as fact.
Mermelstein accepted the challenge.[2] Within the month he sent the IHR a notarized declaration of his experiences at Auschwitz, along with additional names of other eyewitnesses and scientific witnesses who could be made available to the tribunal judging the matter. In his letter Mermelstein warned that if he received no response by January 20, 1981, he would institute civil proceedings to enforce the contract. On January 26, 1981, Mermelstein’s lawyer again asked the IHR for a “speedy resolution” of the matter. The ultimate resolution of what would become known as the Mermelstein case was anything but speedy.[3]
McCalden informed Mermelstein that Simon Wiesenthal had also filed a claim and that the IHR would deal with his application first.{9} According to Wiesenthal he had been offered fifty thousand dollars if he could prove that at least one Jew had been gassed in a concentration camp and twenty-five thousand dollars if he could prove that the Diary of Anne Frank was authentic. Wiesenthal agreed to participate, which for the IHR constituted a publicity coup. In April 1981, in a letter to subscribers of the Journal of Historical Review, McCalden acknowledged that the contest was a trap into which they had hoped some “naive zealot” would walk. He joyfully proclaimed that, in Wiesenthal, they had attracted the “most eminently suitable mouse.”{10} What McCalden did not tell subscribers was that the “mouse” had already extricated himself from the trap.
Wiesenthal had proposed that a judge of the California Supreme Court preside over the case. The IHR rejected this proposal and insisted on its right to designate its own tribunal to judge the proof. On March 4, 1981, Wiesenthal informed “Brandon” that he was withdrawing because he believed the IHR judges would be biased. In a signed statement Wiesenthal explained that he was declining because he would not participate in an effort in which one party served as both prosecutor and judge.{11} Wiesenthal’s suspicions were proved valid when Tom Marcellus, McCalden’s successor as IHR director, was deposed by Mermelstein’s lawyer. The lawyer asked Marcellus who would be selected to sit on the tribunal the IHR had promised to convene to hear the evidence. He suggested that appropriate members would be Robert Faurisson, Arthur Butz, and Ditleib Felderer. All three were members of the editorial advisory board of the Journal of Historical Review. Butz had already made his mark with his The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. At the time of the Mermelstein case, Faurisson had already been convicted, put on probation, fined, and ordered to pay damages by a French court for the libel of denying the fact of the Holocaust. Ditleib Felderer, an Austrian-born resident of Sweden who claims to be a Jew, published a vitriolic antisemitic publication, Jewish Information Bulletin, which, in contrast to the Journal of Historical Review, did not even try to camouflage its antisemitic diatribes under a respectable veneer.[4] In 1983 he was sentenced to ten months in prison for disseminating hate material. According to the prosecutor in the case, Felderer had sent leaders of the European Jewish community mailings that contained pieces of fat and locks of hair with a letter asking them if they could identify the contents as Hungarian Jews gassed at Auschwitz.{12}
Undeterred by such considerations about the “judges” on February 19, 1981, Mermelstein filed a lawsuit against the IHR, Carto, and Brandon/McCalden. During pretrial hearings the presiding judge, Thomas T. Johnson, took judicial notice of the fact that Jews had been gassed to death in Auschwitz, ruling that it was not “subject to dispute” but was “simply a fact.” After many lengthy delays Mermelstein won his case. In July 1985 the Los Angeles Superior Court ordered the IHR to pay Mermelstein ninety thousand dollars, which included the fifty-thousand-dollar reward plus forty thousand dollars for pain and suffering. The defendants also agreed to sign a letter of apology to Mermelstein for the emotional distress they had caused him and all other Auschwitz survivors. The apology contained a verbatim repetition of the judicial notice regarding Auschwitz.{13} (The Mermelstein case did not end there. On August 7, 1985, in the course of a radio interview, Mermelstein said that the IHR defendants had signed the judicial notice. On August 6, 1986, one day before the statute of limitations expired, Willis Carto and the IHR filed suit against Mermelstein, claiming that he had defamed them in the interview. A year and a half later the defendants voluntarily dismissed the suit. Mermelstein has subsequently filed action against the IHR and Carto for malicious prosecution. That case remains in litigation.{14}) Despite the financial loss and public ridicule the Mermelstein case caused the IHR, there were those in the organization’s leadership who continued to maintain that, given the press coverage generated by the contest, it succeeded.
1
In the spring of 1981 he left the IHR because of differences with the organization’s controlling power, Willis Carto. He spent most of the rest of his life until his death in 1991 engaged in a bitter and vitriolic fight with Carto and the IHR.
2
Various Jewish organizations with which Mermelstein consulted, including the ADL and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, suggested that he ignore the IHR’s challenge because participating would only give the deniers the attention they craved. He decided to proceed nonetheless.
4
Among the mailings distributed by his so-called Jewish Information Society is a grossly distorted sexually explicit cartoon depicting male and female elderly Jew. Both have large hooked noses. The woman, whose breasts droop down to her knees, has stubble on her chin and is smoking a cigarette. The man’s penis, which is erect, is supported by a splint, and his scrotum droops to his knees. The caption reads, “In spite of his feeble condition, Dr. Mengele was able to rejuvenate him and he is now proudly showing off his fine restoration to his beautiful, most anticipating, and sensuous looking sweetheart.”