This response prompted some observers to argue that the controversy had a positive impact. Students had become increasingly aware not only of the Holocaust but of the contemporary attempt to subvert history and spread antisemitism. While this may be a relatively accurate analysis of the immediate outcome of Smith’s endeavor, there is another more sobering and pessimistic aspect to the matter. Analysis of the students’, faculty’s, and administration’s responses reveals both a susceptibility to the worst form of historical revisionism and a failure to fully understand the implications of Holocaust denial, even among those who vigorously condemned it.
This was not Smith’s first use of college newspapers to spread Holocaust denial. For a number of years Smith, along with other deniers, had been placing small ads containing the phone number and address of the Committee on Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH), an organization Smith had created with fellow denier Mark Weber in 1987. According to the ADL, CODOH was initially funded by the late William Curry, a Nebraska businessman known for his antisemitic activities. In 1986, he first attempted to place an ad denying the Holocaust in a campus newspaper. He sent one thousand dollars to the Daily Nebraskan for a full-page ad claiming the Holocaust was a hoax.{4} The paper rejected the ad. Shortly thereafter Curry died, and Smith continued his work.
Smith claims that he has no connection to any other denial group and his only association is with CODOH. He has had a long-standing association with the IHR, serving as a contributing editor of its newsletter since June 1985. At the time he was placing the ads he still maintained a relationship with it.{5} In 1986 he launched the IHR radio project, writing a regular column on the project for the IHR’s newsletter, in which he touted his success in getting Holocaust denial onto the radio. Under the auspices of the IHR he planned to tour colleges and universities to speak about “Holocaust fraud and falsehood.”{6} Smith’s objective was not to “plant seeds” for coming generations but to “take revisionist scholarship directly into our universities NOW!” In a letter to his followers he announced that the IHR had guaranteed to pay a portion of both his “start-up costs” and his “on-going expenses.”{7}
Before becoming involved with the IHR’s radio project, Smith published Prima Facie, which he dedicated to “monitoring Holocaust Cultism, Censorship and Suppression of Free Inquiry.” In it he attacked Mel Mermelstein, who had successfully challenged the IHR’s demand for “proof” that the Holocaust happened. Smith’s description of Mermelstein—as a “yokel” who had sued the institute because it refused to believe that “a hank of hair and a jar full of ashes proves” that Jews were “exterminated” in gas chambers—typified the tone of the newsletter. Mermelstein had developed a “tongue so twisted he could drill his own teeth.”{8}
Articles from Prima Facie have been reprinted in Spearhead, the publication of the right-wing extremist British National party. One such article referred to a wire service report of how a Gestapo officer watched with a smile as his German shepherd dog killed an elderly Jew in Poland in 1942. Smith’s use of sarcasm in his attempt to cast doubt on the story was a hallmark of his style.
Let’s say the dog was an 80-pounder—hell let’s say it was a 100-pounder! Now let’s say the elderly Jew was frail and small, perhaps only a 100-pounder himself. Hell, let’s say he was an 80-pounder! I do want to be fair about this. So one question to get straight about the German dog and the elderly Jew is this: How much of the one could the other really eat?{9}
Smith’s accomplice was Mark Weber, co-director of CODOH,{10} one of the more active spokesmen for Holocaust denial, and a former member of the National Alliance, a pro-white organization. Spotlight described Weber as the “shining star” of defense witnesses at the Zundel trial.{11} At the trial and in denial publications Weber has argued that the Jews who died were the “unfortunate victims” not of an extermination program but of “disease and malnutrition brought on by the complete collapse of Germany in the final months of the war.” Repeating a denial argument that had first been voiced by Austin App, Weber contended that if the extermination program had actually existed, the Jews found alive by the Allied forces at the war’s end “would have long since been killed.”{12}
Born in 1951, he was educated in a Jesuit high school in Portland, Oregon. In an interview in November 1989 with the University of Nebraska Sower he expressed his concern about the future of the white “race” in the United States and about the future of the country. Weber contended that the country was heading in one of two possible directions. Either it would become “a sort of Mexicanized, Puerto Ricanized country,” a result of the failure of “white Americans” to reproduce themselves, or it would break up because of long-standing racial problems. He rejected the possibility of a unified American heritage or culture based on a multiplicity of races and groups. He did not think it desirable or feasible for “black Americans to be assimilated into white society.” He seemed to yearn for a time when the United States was defined as a “white country” and nonwhites were “second-class citizens.” This gave the country a “mooring, an anchor.” He bemoaned the fact that “today we don’t even have that.”{13} As the newspaper controversy became more public and Weber became more publicly involved in denial activities, his ideas on race were increasingly left unarticulated.
One of the first papers approached by CODOH, which for all intents and purposes consisted of Smith and Weber, was Pennsylvania State University’s Daily Collegian. After running the small ad that contained CODOH’s number for a few weeks it dropped it in response to campus criticism. Smith immediately sent a series of letters to local newspapers accusing the Daily Collegian of trying to “suppress and even censor radical scholarship.”{14} It may have been the “Sturm und Drang” he created with this small ad that persuaded him to expand his efforts.
Shortly after his failed attempt at Penn State he experienced the same problem with the Stanford Daily, which had been running a similar ad for a period of seven weeks. The editor cancelled it due to student protests. Smith, implying that Hillel, the Jewish student organization, controlled the Daily’s coverage of other issues, including American politics in the Middle East, urged the editor to take a stand for “free inquiry and open debate” by running the ad.{15} He told Hillel students that it was in Jews’ best interests to know the truth about the Holocaust.{16}