Freitag, 13. Dezember 2013

Nicholas Kollerstrom 

* 13. Dezember 1946 in London.
 
English writer and historian of science.

He is a former honorary research fellow in Science and Technology Studies at University College, London (UCL), and a former lunar gardening correspondent for the BBC. He is the author or co-author of a number of books, including Gardening and Planting by the Moon (an annual series beginning 1980), Newton's Forgotten Lunar Theory (2000), Crop Circles (2002), and Terror on the Tube (2009).

Kollerstrom attended Corpus Christi College, Cambridge from 1965 until 1968. He graduated in Natural Sciences, specializing in the history and philosophy of science, after which he worked as a physics teacher. He received his PhD from UCL in 1995 for a thesis entitled, "The Achievement of Newton's 1702 Theory of the Moon's Motion." He became an honorary research fellow in Science and Technology Studies at UCL, and in 1999 received a grant from the Royal Astronomical Society to work on the classification of correspondence related to the British discovery of Neptune; along with William Sheehan and Craig Waff, he concluded in an article for Scientific American in 2004 that the British had wrongly taken credit for the discovery of the planet.He has a particular interest in the effect of the sun, moon and planets on plant growth and chemical reactions.

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Kollerstrom has been involved in the UK as a political activist regarding issues such as the 1982 sinking of the Belgrano by the British Navy during the Falklands War, after which he helped set up the Belgrano Action Group, and the 7 July 2005 London bombings , which he argues may not have been carried out by the men accused of the attack. He came to public attention in April 2008 when he lost his fellowship with UCL after posting what he described as revisionist material about Auschwitz on a website.

UCL announced on 22 April 2008 that it had removed Kollerstrom's honorary fellowship after articles of his were published on Holocaust websites. The college wrote that he had expressed views "diametrically opposed to the aims, objectives and ethos of UCL, such that we wish to have absolutely no association with them or with their originator." Kollerstrom's "The Auschwitz 'Gas Chamber' Illusion" and "The Walls of Auschwitz" appeared on a website run by the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH), and a third, "School trips to Auschwitz," was published in March 2008 in Smith's report, a newsletter and website run by the co-founder of CODOH, Bradley Smith . In May 2008, "The Walls of Auschwitz" appeared on the website of the Iranian government's Press TV, when he gave them an interview at the suggestion of Michèle Renouf , a British woman known for her involvement with writers accused of Holocaust denial.

In "The Auschwitz 'Gas Chamber' Illusion," first published on the CODOH website in June 2007, Kollerstrom wrote that there were no lethal gas chambers in the Nazi's concentration camps, that cyanide gas chambers operated in Auschwitz only for the purpose of hygiene and disinfection, and that the only intentional mass extermination program in the concentration camps of World War Two was targeted at Germans in French and American-run concentration camps.

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In "School trips to Auschwitz," he wrote: "Let us hope the schoolchildren visitors are properly taught about the elegant swimming-pool at Auschwitz, built by the inmates, who would sunbathe there on Saturday and Sunday afternoons while watching the water-polo matches; and shown the paintings from its art class, which still exist; and told about the camp library which had some forty-five thousand volumes for inmates to choose from, plus a range of periodicals; and the six camp orchestras at Auschwitz/Birkenau, its theatrical performances, including a children's opera, the weekly camp cinema, and even the special brothel established there. Let's hope they are shown postcards written from Auschwitz, some of which still exist, where the postman would collect the mail twice-weekly. Thus the past may not always be quite, as we were told."

Britain's Index on Censorship asked Brendan O'Neill of Spiked and "Unity" of Liberal Conspiracy to comment on Kollerstrom's loss of his fellowship. Unity argued that it was justified because of the poor scholarship and lack of judgment, whereas O'Neill's position was that Kollerstrom was pursuing his ideas in his spare time and his dismissal amounted to a witch hunt. The Jewish Chronicle reported that Kollerstrom saw himself as the victim of a calumny" by bloggers. Kollerstrom said he had no interest in the Nazi movement, had always belonged to groups like the Green Party, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and the Respect party, and regarded himself as having been accused of a thought-crime.

Kollerstrom is the author of three entries in the Biographical Encyclopaedia of Astronomers on John Flamsteed, Isaac Newton, and John Couch Adams. In 2010 Noel Swerdlow in a review in Isis (journal) called for the publishers to withdraw this work because it contained material by Kollerstrom. In reply James H. Fetzer attacked Swerdlow for committing the 'ad hominem fallacy'. The publishers have not withdrawn this work.

Kollerstrom is a founding member of the UK’s 9/11 Truth movement , member of the New York Academy of Sciences , and author of 7/7: TERROR ON THE TUBE (3rd edition, 2012) .

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