BREAKING THE SPELL — what was the moment?

I have told my story a few times, and it might be kind of boring, but this is a new forum platform so here goes ...

In Grade School in the 1960s I had a time or two heard that the Germans in World War II gassed 6 million Jews to death, but no further information was given, and it was really only incidental. I definitely heard that Jews were cremated in ovens, that their fat was turned into soap, and their skin into lampshades.

On television, Westerns and war movies were still popular and there were quite a few military-themed TV shows where the Genocide subject never directly came up. What we now call the Holocaust was only an historical footnote and not in any way the focus of World War II.

One of my favorites was the campy Rat Patrol, with Hans Gudegast (aka the soap opera star Eric Braeden) as the erudite German officer and sometimes villain, and sometimes I watched the goofy comedy McHales's Navy. Later I watched the comedy Hogan's Heroes, and as a teenager I watched reruns of the gritty and fairly realistic, mostly black-and-white, 1960s TV show Combat!.




What we now call the Holocaust was seldom even hinted at in the media.

A lot of the WWII movies and TV shows from that period were somewhat believable because the actors usually had military experience themselves, and many WWII veterans were around who were still living, and still relatively young.

When I was in Junior High School I was at a friend's house and we had been watching Hogan's Heroes, and suddenly my friend's Mom got triggered about how "this is not a funny show."

Hogan's Heroes was notable for being set in the fictional Luftwaffe PoW camp - StaLag 13, and not mentioning much or anything about what we now call the Holocaust. Most of the actors and producers were, in fact, Jewish - and they prided themselves for being able to satirize the subject of the Nazis and Germans.

The fictional Colonel Klink, played by the actor Werner Klemperer, was born in Germany from a mixed Lutheran and Jewish marriage. He was the son of the famous conductor Otto Klemperer, who though he had converted to Catholicism emigrated to the United States from Germany in 1933. Klemperer the actor, played a very different sort of role than the bumbling Colonel Klink in his earlier 1961 film Judgement at Nuremberg.

The fictional Sergeant Schultz, played by the jolly John Banner, once remarked (paraphrasing here), "who else but us Jews can best satirize the Nazis?"

This was fairly obvious. Hogan's Heroes (1965-71) was humor directed against Germans and Nazis. But my friend's Mom got set off suddenly for some reason anyway. She apparently thought that the WWII comedy was inappropriate considering the gravity of what we now call the Holocaust.

I am not sure what prompted this lady's epiphany. My friend's Dad was an American Civil War buff and he had all kinds of books on that subject, and he had been in the National Guard and the Army Reserve so was pretty knowledgeable. He was an engineer on contract in Idaho, and she was a bored housewife who had her tubes tied after the second kid to save the planet, and actually subscribed to MS. magazine, so evidently a Women's Liberationist.

I thought she was a bit strange, and she probably thought that the Mormons and country folk that she found in Idaho were themselves strange and backward. The family were happy enough to go back East when the husband could get another job.




There is no way that a TV show like Hogan's Heroes could be made today, by Jews or by anyone else. One notable thing about the show is that even though Col. Klink and Sgt. Schultz were a little dumb ─ or pretended to be ─ they were decent Germans and people, in spite of being Nazis.

The actor Bob Crane, who played the American mastermind Col. Hogan of the comedic plot, was in real life a lapsed Catholic who had a home video pornography addiction and was murdered by a friend in Scottsdale, Arizona in 1978. This bizarre murder was never officially solved, and there is an interesting 2002 biographical movie about it called Auto Focus starring Greg Kinnear and Willem Dafoe.

Notably in the Bob Crane biopic the incongruous idea of making Hogan's Heroes ─ "a comedy about the Holocaust" ─ is discussed. This conversation in the movie hits at the above point about the propriety of making comedic films about Germans and Nazis, although it is actually anachronistic for two reasons:

1) the Holocaust term was not popularized yet in this context, and ─

2) the Jewish dominated entertainment industry did not yet revolve around the Holocaust.

In reality, the Jews who made the WWII PoW camp TV comedy, Hogan's Heroes did anything but make a TV show "about the Holocaust."

The term Holocaust was never (or very seldom) used in the context of WWII or Jews until the eponymous 1978 NBC miniseries, Holocaust aired. Before then, the only time the word Holocaust ever came up was in regards to a calamity like a "Nuclear Holocaust," or a disastrous conflagration such as the 1871 Great Chicago Fire that killed 300 and left 100 thousand homeless, or the massive 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire.

In the United States in the 1970s, an 11th grade Junior in High School takes a year of intensive U.S. History. My teacher, Mr. Brown was also known as "coach," but he was quite excellent. The focus in those days usually covered the American Revolution, and there was another great emphasis on the issues pertaining to the Civil War.

By the time WWII came about, the school year was almost over and that didn't get covered much, maybe a word or two about Woodrow Wilson and his supposed reluctance to enter World War I, his Fourteen Points and the failed Versailles Treaty.

My understanding is that for students today, if they have any U.S. or World History at all, it mainly covers Slavery, Civil Rights, and the Holocaust.

I was a Junior in the Spring of 1978 when the TV series Holocaust came out, and most of us watched it at home. I do not remember any official discussion about it in school.

The main talk among the students in school about the miniseries was the graphic nudity shown (very rare for primetime TV) when Jewish boys were machine gunned in front of ditches by the SS, and naked women and men were herded into homicidal gas-chambers.

The only educational exposure that we got about what we now call the Holocaust came a little earlier in literature class. I think it was my 10th grade - Sophomore year, and the subject was the Diary of Anne Frank. Yawn.

The term Holocaust was not being used yet as a rule, but we did get introduced in a fairly ham-handed way to the subject indirectly because in the course of reading and discussing the Diary of Anne Frank, we officially got what would now be called "the Holocaust narrative" ─ and particularly through Literature (not History), where the teacher showed us Allied and Zionist propaganda films that featured the Liberation of the camps and the epidemics found there. This was put into ZERO context other than enemy barbarism. Remember, the subject was Literature, and little Anne Frank's supposed wartime diary.




I do remember an English Composition teacher in my Senior year whom I liked, Mr. Bennett who cautioned us about propaganda films specifically ─ but the subject wasn't the Holocaust, per se. It is just that all mass-media of literature, film, etc. had bias and viewpoints, and these did not usually label themselves as propaganda.

What students should receive in addition to the usual subjects in High School is some comprehensive Logic and critical-thinking skills, but that had to wait for College.

In my High School Senior year, I took World History and U.S. Government, and in the Fall of 1978 was a Midterm election ─ and because the teacher for both classes, Mr. Bateman was also an Idaho State Legislator, this was particularly interesting. Our cozy class was visited by all of the top political officials running for office from the state except for the Governor himself.

However, the Holocaust was not part of the course material from what I can remember.

Once in Mr. Bateman's class about Medieval towns, an exam question was asked looking for the answer "Stadtluft Macht Frei". A peasant serf who left the manor estate for the "city air" for the proverbial period of a year and a day, escaped his ancestral obligations to his Feudal Lord.

My cheeky answer was "Arbeit Macht Frei". Mr. Bateman was not amused and his curt response was: "This would apply in your case."

All I can say is that after having seen various WWII Propaganda Films and the NBC TV miniseries Holocaust, I had some serious schoolboy doubts.

In my Junior and Senior years of High School, I took photography classes and the teacher, Mr. Black was a Conservative who subscribed to an interesting Right-Wing tabloid newspaper founded by publisher Willis Carto and Liberty Lobby called the Spotlight.

In the 1970s, there was also a news program from "Liberty Lobby" that we listened to on AM radio while riding the school bus, and sometimes at Noon in the study hall. The radio personality was very similar in style to "Paul Harvey News and Comment," but I have forgotten the actual names involved.

The Mutual Broadcasting System of the time also put out the "CBS Radio Mystery Theater" late at night with host E. G. Marshall. I built a homemade radio using a germanium diode, and listened to the CBS Radio Mystery Theater regularly ─ a show that attempted to mimic old time radio programing, and as a kid I enjoyed it immensely.

Liberty Lobby re-popularized the old Isolationist slogan America First!, and they were against foreign entanglements and American interventions in foreign wars. In later years, not long after my High School graduation, the Liberty Lobby AM radio show dropped hints that there was something wrong with the Holocaust story ─ and not long after that Liberty Lobby was no longer on the radio.

In December of 1979, I was a High School graduate living in Scottsdale, Arizona and working for an electronic circuit board manufacturer. My two favorite 1960s Science Fiction TV programs had been Star Trek (the original series) and Lost In Space.

For Christmas 1979, Star Trek: the motion picture was released and I was very excited. It annoys me to this day how bad it actually was, a major disappointment. Lost in Space was re-made for cinema in 1998 ─ the launch date of October 16, 1997 was the futuristic date from the original 1965-68 TV series ─ and again remade for television in 2018, but I have long become accustomed to reboots being far inferior to the classic originals.

Anyway, I remember that on the Saturday in December of 1979 when I went to see the Star Trek movie at the theater, a very interesting issue of the Spotlight newspaper was in my mailbox, featuring a special on "Holocaust Revisionism."

It seems that publisher and Washington, DC Liberty Lobby founder, Willis Carto had also founded a historical revisionist group based in Los Angeles called the Institute for Historical Review.

Apparently there were academic people such as Prof. Robert Faurisson in France and Prof. Arthur Butz, an Electrical Engineer at Northwestern, who did not believe in the now-customary "Holocaust." The IHR was publishing books about this and holding annual academic conferences.

I read Butz's 1977 book, The Hoax of the 20th Century as well as the 1974 booklet by Richard Harwood that got German-Canadian publisher Ernst Zündel into trouble for Thoughtcrimes heresy called Did Six-Million Really Die?

Not too long after the Diary of Anne Frank study in my English class in High School, I had read in the newspaper about the Richard Harwood book being published and causing a flurry. The newspaper article said that the book argued that the body stink-piles found at Bergen-Belsen and other Nazi concentration camps could be explained by epidemics caused in part by Allied bombings ─ and that the Germans had been forced to burn bodies on pyres and in crematoria ovens.

This, perhaps not-too-surprising, revelation planted a seed ─ but I never actually investigated it until much later, after the Spotlight article came out late in 1979. I started subscribing to the Journal of Historical Review from that time forward, and even submitted a few book reviews many years later until Mark Weber stopped publishing the journal circa 2002. Then I did so a few more times for the former JHR editor Ted O'Keefe for degreed chemist Germar Rudolf's new journal the Revisionist until Mr. Rudolf was deported to serve his prison sentence in Germany as a "Holocaust Denier," causing that publication to also cease.

The RODOH discussion forum was founded in 2003, and despite many setbacks, such as my getting run over by a car in 2005, we are still hanging in there. In 2004, we sponsored a debate with Roberto Muehlenkamp and others against Revisionist Dr. Robert Countess ─ but he died of brain cancer early in the next year, so that didn't amount to as much as we would have liked, and then I got run over while riding my bicycle home from work.

A very bad year, 2005 ─ Ernst Zündel, Germar Rudolf, and also historian David Irving were all serving prison time for "Holocaust Denial."

I AM STRONGLY IN FAVOR OF FREEDOM OF SPEECH, and that is one of the primary reasons that I am so interested in Holocaust Revisionism, even studying historiography in college. I had just started working on an advanced degree when I was hit by the car, and that ended any fancy for actually becoming "the Dr. Smith of Real History."