Regardless of these flaws, his main argument gains support from an analysis of aerial photographs of the entire Auschwitz complex, including the massive I.G. Farben synthetic petrol facility which was nearby, taken on random occasions 

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121 / Mohrkirch, Kritik-Verlag, 1973.
122 / Ibid., p. 19.
123 / Ibid., p. 4.
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throughout the spring and autumn of 1944 by USAAF reconnaissance aircraft. These very detailed photographs, made clearer by advanced [60] computer-enhancement techniques, were first made public in February 1979 by two officers of the central Intelligence Agency, who had obtained them from the archives of the Defense Intelligence Agency. [124] In none of the photographs, from various months in 1944, can be seen any evidence of extermination. Despite the statements of many former Auschwitz internees that smoke and flame emanated continually from the crematory chimneys, and was visible for miles around, not one of the detailed photographs show any smoke or flames. Additionally, and more importantly, one cannot find in any of the photographs even one of the piles of corpses, large pyres, burial pits, or flaming fires that were often alleged to have been present in the camp, even though the photographs were sufficiently clear for one to see such details as vehicles, open gates and columns of internees queuing for registration.

Christophersen's arguments gain support from another important West German Revisionist article on the Holocaust: a short eyewitness account of wartime Auschwitz published in the October 1973 issue of the nationalistic West German journal, Nation Europa.[125] The author was a Hamburg judge, Dr. Wilhelm Stäglich, who had served during the war as the Ordonnanzoffizier on the staff of the 12th Paratroop Anti-aircraft Detachment. This unit was stationed in Osiek, just outside Auschwitz, from July to September 1944. As the Ordonnanzoffizier, it was Stäglich's duty to liaise with the SS camp command, situated in the Stammlager (Main Camp), or Auschwitz I. In this capacity he entered Auschwitz I "three or four times", once being as part of a camp inspection invited by the 
camp command. He did not, however, enter Birkenau. In his short published account of his experiences, which is consistent with Christophersen's, he recalled: 

On none of these visits did I see gassing installations, crematoria, instruments of torture, or similar horrors. The camp gave one the impression of being well-kept and very well-organized. ... On none of my visits did I find that inmates – at least the ones present in the camp, for example, inmates employed in the various workshops or on clean-up details – were badly, much less inhumanely, treated. ... Finally, I can report that the German residents of Osiek were unaware of mass exterminations or other atrocities in the camp. At any rate they never spoke to me of such things. [126] 

Stäglich saw no gas chambers, flaming crematories, pyres, burial pits or piles of decaying [61] corpses. The camp was, he insisted, "well-kept and very well-organized", and to the best of his knowledge no internees were murdered, tortured or barbarously treated. Further, most did not appear malnourished or unhealthy, and, in fact, worked productively in factories, workshops or on clean-up details.

Stäglich's testimony is weakened because he never visited Birkenau, where – according to accepted opinion on the Holocaust – two gassing "bunkers" and four large gas chambers functioned, and it was the victims' bodies from those facilities that were incinerated in crematories and on pyres, or buried in huge burial pits. It was there, and not in the Auschwitz Stammlager two kilometers away, that he would have seen evidence, if it existed, of the mass extermination in gas chambers of Jews and others. Accepted opinion is that only one homicidal gas chamber – in the old crematory building – functioned at the Stammlager and that ceased operating in the middle of 1943 (a full year before Stäglich arrived), when it was partially dismantled and converted into an air raid shelter. Former internees have described conditions in that camp as being deplorable and inhumane, and their treatment as hostile and cruel, but – if accepted opinion is correct – in the middle of 1944 Stäglich would have seen evidence of mass exterminations only if he had visited Birkenau. Thus, his recollection of the Auschwitz Stammlager provides some evidence that it was contrary to popular belief, relatively productively and humanely run, and in this respect his account agrees with Christophersen's, but it provides absolutely no evidence that the alleged exterminations in Birkenau did not occur.

It has been argued that the accounts of Christophersen and Stäglich are worthless as historical evidence because no-one else but Nazis would try to present the 'death camps' in a positive light; their aim must be to rehabilitate 

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124 / The Holocaust Revisited: A Retrospective Analysis of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination Complex, Prepared by D. A. Brugioni, and G. Poirier, (Washington, D.C.: Central Intelligence Agency, 1979).
125 / Volume XXIII, number 10, pp. 50-52.
126 / From the English translation of Stäglich's article, published as Appendix II in W. Stäglich, Auschwitz: A Judge Looks at the Evidence Second Edition, 1990. Translated from German by Thomas Francis (Costa Mesa: Institute for Historical Review, 1986).
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and absolve the guilt of the Third Reich. [127] However, if one accepts this line of argument and disregards their accounts, one must also disregard the testimony of all former internees, Jewish or otherwise, as they might have reasons for wishing to exaggerate their sufferings or the crimes of their former captors. Rather, the evidence of all eyewitnesses, from either side of the barbed wire or electric fences, should be examined by historians and objected to identical, impartial criticism before its credibility or reliability can be established.[62]

Unfortunately for the two Germans, the authorities in the western half of their divided nation chose not to treat their accounts dispassionately or tolerantly, and they soon found themselves the victims of what must he considered persecution and – in Stäglich's case – prosecution. The publication of Die Auschwitz Lüge horrified and outraged Jews in Germany, Austria and Israel, with newspapers in those and several other countries attacking the book as "anti-Semitic" or "Nazi". In Germany, the July 13, 1973 issue of the influential Jewish weekly paper, Allgemeine Jüdische Wochenzeitung, published a front page article on it, which carried the bold headline, "Lügner am Werk" (Liars at work"), a reference to Christophersen and the booklet's publisher, attorney Manfred Röder, who had also written its introduction. The newspaper insisted that it was the worst example of anti-Jewish propaganda since the demise of the Third Reich, and one that would have made Hitler and Goebbels proud. The statements considered most objectionable were not in Christophersen's memoir – but in Röder's introduction:

The government of the German Reich was illegally removed from office. German officers, who had done nothing but their duty, and whose characters were far superior to those of the Allies passing judgement on them,were sadistically strangled, whilst no single soldier or partisan of the enemy was brought to court for war crimes. German jurisdiction and search for truth was made impossible. Only the victors were to sit in judgement and to write history....There is not one authentic document in existence which places the overall losses of the Jewish population during the last war higher than 200,000. During one single night, in Dresden, more defenseless, innocent Germans perished – children, women, old people and especially wounded men – than Jews have died in all the concentration camps in the years of the National Socialist regime!

In a letter of May 10, 1973, Simon Wiesenthal attempted to press the Präsident der Rechtsanwaltkammer [president of the lawyers' association] into having Röder, a successful attorney, investigated by the ethics committee of that bar association, in the hope that he would be disbarred. After some initial reluctance, they did disbar him and, on February 20, 1976 he was convicted in a Darmstadt court of insulting the Jewish people. He was sentenced to seven months imprisonment, three years probation and a fine of three thousand Deutschmarks. [128] The judge, explaining why he, and not Christophersen, was charged with the crime explained that "We have freedom of speech, and anybody can write as he pleases, but your interpretation of Christophersen's report sounds anti-Semitic, and for this criminal attitude you are punished." [129] Nonetheless, his statement that Röder was being punished for a criminal "attitude" – as opposed to a criminal act – arguably suggests that West Germany did not have the claimed regard for freedom of expression. After protests by the Vienna-based Comité international des Camps, Austrian authorities totally prohibited distribution of Die Auschwitz Lüge in that country, and confiscated all unsold copies. Insisting that the book should not be given added publicity, the West German Minister of the Interior (Maihofer) chose not to take similar action. [130] 

After publishing his short article on Auschwitz, Stäglich suffered extreme persecution, and was even forced to resign from his position as a Hamburg judge after disciplinary proceedings were commenced against him. However, his resignation did not satisfy his many opponents, who sought to have his pension stripped as well. In this they were partly successful; the judicial authorities, intent on punishing him for publicly expressing doubts about the Holocaust, reduced his pension by twenty percent for a period of five years. [131] Although this action caused the Stäglich family some financial difficulties, it did not cause the now retired judge to stop writing on the Holocaust. On the contrary, it motivated him to explore the subject in more depth, and allowed him the time to do it. The result was the publication in 1979 of Der Auschwitz Mythos: Legende 

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127 / For example, see E. Kulka, The Holocaust Is Being Denied, translated by Lilli Kapecky (Tel Aviv: The Committee of Auschwitz Camp Survivors in Israel, 1977). Also, see R. Kvam, "Nazism Resurgent: Among Two Hundred Survivors From Auschwitz", op. cit., p. 283-292. According to Kvam, "The pamphlet, Die Auschwitz-Lüge, must be one of the ugliest examples in our time of the manner in which what happened to the Jews during WW II is so completely turned upside down that Nazis appear in angels' wings and the Jews as filthy moneygrubbers." (p. 287).
128 / "Nazi Kampflieder im Gerichtssaal", Neue Insenburger Anzeigeblatt, February 24, 1976.
129 / Quoted by Röder in the epilogue published in the American edition of Die Auschwitz Lüge (Reedy, Va.: Liberty Bell Publications, 1979).
130 / Jüdischer Pressedienst (Düsseldorf, 1975), Number 3/4, p. 28.
131 / W. Stäglich, " 'Der Auschwitz Mythos': A Book and Its Fate in the German Federal Republic", The Journal of Historical Review, Volume Five, Number One, Spring 1984, p. 49.
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oder Wirklichkeit? ("The Auschwitz Myth: Legend or Reality") [132], a lengthy, detailed and generally well-written analysis of accepted opinion on Auschwitz/Birkenau. Because of the depth and seriousness of its arguments, this 457-page book was immediately recognized by Revisionists as a 'masterpiece'. In fact, it would not be inaccurate to say that this book and Arthur Butz's The Hoax of the Twentieth Century now form the two testaments in the Holocaust Revisionist 'bible'. However, Stäglich's book, although focusing narrowly on Auschwitz, contains many of the same arguments as Butz's. Therefore, because the restrictions of this summary prevent a detailed analysis of both books, we will only be investigating Butz's, which is wider-ranging.

Sadly for the former judge, West German authorities did not share the Revisionist enthusiasm for his book, and within three months of publication it was included on the Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Schriften's index of censored books [133] This resulted in a severe limitation [64] of the distribution of the book, prohibition of any advertising of it, and its exclusion from sale on the open book market.

Things became worse for Dr. Stäglich on July 23, 1979 when the prosecution attorney's office in Stuttgart initiated criminal proceedings against him and his publisher, under sections 86 ("distribution of propaganda material") and 130 ("incitement of the populace") of the Criminal Code. Perhaps finally realizing that these charges were unsustainable, the public prosecutor dropped the charges eight months later. Nonetheless, the prosecutor's office was directed instead to commence proceedings in order to seize all copies of the book, and on July 31, 1980 the Stuttgart Landgericht (district court) ordered the sequester of the "dangerous book" and the seizure of the printing plates used for its production. This decision was upheld on January 26, 1983 by the Bundesgerichtshof, the Federal Supreme Court. [134]

On November 15, 1982, Stäglich suffered another bitter humiliation when the University of Göttingen initiated academic proceedings against him with the intention of depriving him of his Dr. Jur. (Doctor of Jurisprudence) degree, which it had awarded him in 1951. On March 29, 1983 the degree was officially withdrawn by virtue of a resolution of the Council of Deans, who felt that Stäglich was a "Nazi-apologist" who must he discredited. Academic persecution of this type had not occurred in a German university since the days of the Nazi regime, and, ironically (and perversely), the law used by the university to strip the former judge of his doctorate was a previously forgotten Nazi law – dated June 7, 1939 and personally signed by Adolf Hitler – designed for use against titled German émigrés who criticized the Reich from abroad. [135]

Stäglich was not the only West German in this period to suffer at the hands of those opposed to Revisionism. In October 1978, Dr. Helmut Diwald, the distinguished professor of history at the Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen, caused an academic and public furor when he published Geschichte der Deutschen ("History of the Germans") [136], a general history of the German people from the tenth century to the present day. In his chapter on the Third Reich and the Final Solution he made several comments regarding the Nazi persecution of the Jewish people which were very much in harmony with the theses of Holocaust Revisionists. He wrote, inter alia:

Since the capitulation in 1945, 'Auschwitz' has also served as the main vehicle to reduce the German people to complete moral degradation.... Countless works have been written and claims made since 1945 which cannot be proven and which cynically add to the infamy. The most horrible events of modern times have been exploited through the use of distortions, deceptions and exaggerations.... Thus, the victorious Allies claimed the existence of
'extermination camps' of which there was not a single one in Germany. For years visitors to the Dachau concentration camp were shown 'gas chambers' where as many as 25,000 Jews were allegedly killed daily by the SS. Actually the rooms displayed were dummy chambers which the U.S. military had forced imprisoned SS men to build after the capitulation.... The deportation of the Jews took place as part of a general forced-labour programme for the war industry.... During the war Jewish immigration was no longer possible and the expression 'total solution'["Gesamtlösung"] or 'final solution' ["Endlösung"] was coined to refer [not to extermination, but] to the policy whereby all Jews were to be segregated from the German population, removed from central Europe, evacuated to the East, and relocated in new ghettos. This plan was outlined by Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Security Main Office on 24 June 1940. The central questions about what actually happened [to the Jews] in the subsequent years ["was sich in den

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132 / W. Stäglich, Der Auschwitz Mythos: Legende oder Wirklichkeit? (Tübingen: Grabert-Verlag, 1979).
133 / "Federal Office for the Examination of Publications Harmful to Young People". This Orwellian office gives "harmful" books – including some academic publications – a classification which is similar in some respects to pornography. The National Socialist regime is still condemned (and rightly so) for passing similar laws, but there has been no universal condemnation of this state censorship and deprivation of intellectual freedom.
134 / Stäglich, "'Der Auschwitz Mythos': A Book and Its Fate...", p. 65.
135 / Reichsgesetzblatt I, 985, June 7, 1939. On November 17, 1987 the Higher Administrative Court at Lüneburg rejected Stäglich's appeal to regain his doctorate.
136 / Berlin/Frankfurt/Vienna: Propyläen Verlag, 1978.
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folgenden Jahren tatsächlich abgespielt hat"] still remain unclear despite all of the literature." [137]

When copies of Diwald's book reached the bookstores an avalanche of opposition and hostility immediately thundered down upon the academic, threatening to engulf and suffocate him. Golo Mann, the eminent historian, exclaimed that "these two pages... are the most monstrous that I have had to read in a German book since 1945". [138] His reaction, the evidence reveals, was typical of those of scores of academics and media pundits. Axel Springer, a very influential West German press baron, even dismissed the head of his publishing company, Propyläen, which had produced Diwald's "horrendous" book. Further, he ordered the pulping of the entire stock of unsold copies of the book (several thousand in all) and the publication of a new edition, in which all offending passages would be removed. The second edition would be – he stated before its release – rewritten to the point where it would he "unrecognizable." [139] Diwald, aware that his book could face a total ban and that he himself could be prosecuted for his 'crime'or dismissed from his chair at the university, dutifully agreed to Springer's demands and rewrote the offending pages. The role of academic martyr was one that he did not wish to play. [140]

Although we have focused our analysis of German Holocaust Revisionism on the works of Christophersen, Stäglich and Diwald, one point needs to be made before our focus moves to the more noteworthy Revisionist works in English: these German works were the most important and influential Holocaust Revisionist publications in Germany up until the late 1970s (hence the lengthy discussions of them), but they were by no means the only such publications. Very briefly we will look at one or two others.

In the late 1960s Dr. Franz J. Scheidl, an academic with three Ph.Ds (in Law, Philosophy and Political Science) self-published in Vienna a series of five volumes entitled Geschichte der Verfemung Deutschlands ("History of Germany's Defamation"). In several of these volumes the author attempted to prove that the Holocaust was exaggerated and that the Jews themselves were responsible for much of their wartime suffering. Perhaps because of their limited publication runs, these volumes have had very littleinfluence in shaping historical opinion, Revisionist or orthodox, and do not appear in the bibliographies of any Revisionist works published after the late 1970s.

In the early-1970s Emil Aretz published a small and tendentious book entitled Hexen-Einmal-Eins einer Lüge ("The Witches' Multiplication Table is a Lie"), which underwent three printings. The most widely circulated edition was the third, published in 1973.[141] Although Aretz provided a slight amount of fresh evidence, his book appears to have been heavily based on the writings of Paul Rassinier, and failed to take the debate further.

Pamphlets and small booklets, similar in many ways to the shoddy American pamphlets mentioned above, also began circulating in Germany at this time.[142] Many of them can be traced to Heinz Roth, a German nationalist. Roth argued soberly that Germany was not solely responsibility for the outbreak of hostilities in 1939, that not only Germany committed war crimes of [67] enormous proportions, and that the Allied nations had no right to continue occupying a vanquished and divided Germany so long after the war. Yet his arguments against the verity of Holocaust orthodoxy, which were partly based on unreliable and often incorrect secondary sources, were much less convincing. Aside from Stäglich, who also frequently cited Scheidl, few Revisionist historians in the last fifteen or so years have cited or quoted Roth's booklets.

Mention should also be made of Udo Walendy, a graduate of the Institute for Advanced Political Studies in Berlin and a prolific and talented writer with a long history of involvement in right-wing, nationalistic organizations. For example,

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137 /Ibid., pp. 164-165.
138 / Mann in Der Spiegel, December 4, 1978.
139 / Der Spiegel, April 9, 1979.
140 / For Diwald's attitude towards his acquiescence, see an interview with him published in the Austrian student magazine, Die Aula, Number 3, 1980, pp. 9-10.
141 / E. Aretz, Hexen-Ein-Maleins einer Lüge (Pähl/Obb: Verlag Hohe Warte – Franz von Bebenburg KG, 1973). Aretz apparently based the very unusual title on Scene VI of Goethe's magnificent Faust, in which a witch was observed by Faust and Mephistopheles to be juggling figures in an abominable fashion; the inference being that the Jews have done likewise in calculating their wartime fatality totals. Aretz was no stranger to Holocaust Revisionism, and had been publishing Revisionist articles since the early 1960s; Cf. "Das fragwürdige Auschwitz", Der Quell, Issue 9, 1961.
142 / Cf. Was geschah nach 1945 ? (1972); Wieso waren wir Väter Verbrecher ? (1972); Was hätten wir Väter wissen müssen ? (1973); et al. (all self-published).
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Walendy became an active member of the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD) after its founding in November 1964, and within a year had gained a position on the party's executive committee. Considered to be an intellectual and the rising star of NPD, he was often lauded in the party's newspaper, Deutsche Nachrichten. [143]

Between 1964 and the time of writing (February 1993), Walendy had penned over two dozen books or booklets, almost exclusively on aspects of the Second World War and the Holocaust. However, for the purposes of the present discussion only his major works up to the mid-1970s will be discussed, with an analysis of several of his later works being included in a germane section below. 
In 1964 he published his first book, Wahrheit für Deutschland – Die Schuldfrage des Zweiten Weltkriegs ("Truth for Germany – The Guilt Question of the Second World War") [144], which was very well received and even ordered by the West German Foreign Office as a reference work for its embassies around the world. In 1966 and 1967 his two volume Europa in Flammen, 1939-1945 ("Europe in Flames, 1939-1945") [145] was published, in which over 150 pages were devoted to the treatment of Jews during the Nazi regime. His arguments contained therein, although tenable and well argued, largely replicated those of his Revisionist precursors, notably Paul Rassinier and David Hoggan.

In 1973 he published Bild-"Dokumente" für die Geschichtsschreibung ? [146], later printed in English with the title: Forged War Crimes Malign the German Nation. Whereas many of Walendy's books are plausible if unremarkable, this 80-page book is amongst the more [68] convincing Revisionist works of the period, in that parts of it seem quite irrefutable. The book's thesis is that many of the published Holocaust atrocity photographs, many allegedly taken by the Allies when they overran Nazi concentration camps, are complete forgeries or genuine photographs that have been altered or retouched to appear incriminating.

To support that thesis, Walendy presented a lengthy series of the more famous examples of photographic proof of the Holocaust, stated what publications the photos were published in, and then enlarged sections of them to reveal what he claimed was evidence of forgery. In some of the photos the forgery seems obvious; in a very clear magnification, for instance, of a photograph of a corpse lying amongst others on an open railroad wagon, one can clearly see that the careless forger had apparently drawn only three fingers on the corpse's right hand. [147]

In another photograph, allegedly taken in Mauthausen on liberation day, three rows of emaciated men are standing in front of a wooden fence and directly behind a large pile of equally emaciated cadavers,which obscures their feet and much of the foreground. This horrific photograph was presented by the prosecution as evidence at the International Military Tribunal, and has also been reproduced in several books on the Holocaust. [148] However, Walendy placed beside it a different version of the same photograph – only in this one the fence is not present, nor (more importantly) is the pile of corpses. Indeed, because the legs and feet of the standing men are shown in the second photograph (proving it is the original), there is no alternative but to conclude that the first photograph was faked, a photo-montage. A photograph of corpses was superimposed onto the photograph of the standing men.

Walendy published a famous photograph, reproduced in numerous books, of many corpses being burnt at Birkenau in the open air. It was allegedly taken from the door of the gas chamber in Krema IV by an internee named David Szmulewski. Walendy argued that this photo was falsified in a similar way. [149] A magnification of the cadavers does indeed reveal that at least some [69] of them 

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143 / Cf. an interview with Walendy, in which he is called a "brave young historian", Deutsche Nachrichten, February 17, 1967.
144 / Vlotho/Weser: Verlag für Volkstum und Zeitgeschichtsforschung, 1964.
145 / Vlotho/Weser: Verlag für Volkstum und Zeitgeschichtsforschung, (Vol. I) 1966; (Vol. II) 1967.
146 / Vlotho/Weser: Verlag für Volkstum und Zeitgeschichtsforschung, 1973. The 1979 English edition was by the same publisher.
147 / Bild-"Dokumente" für die Geschichtsschreibung ?, p. 54. The clearly altered photograph had been published on page 345 of R. Schnabel' s book Macht ohne Moral – Eine Dokumentation über die SS (Frankfurt/Main: Röderberg-Verlag GmbH, 1957), with the
following caption: "Corpses of prisoners in a goods truck of a transport train from the CC-Sachsenhausen to CC-Dachau."
148 / Ibid., p. 74. The photograph was published in IMT, Volume XXX, p. 421, and shortly before in Eugene Aroneanu, Konzentrationslager – Ein Tatsachenbericht über die an der Menschheit begangenen Verbrechen, Doc. F321 for the "International Court of Justice" in Nürnberg; also in R. Schnabel, Macht ohne Moral, p.341; et al.
149 / Ibid., pp. 38-39. The original photograph is listed at the Panstwowe Muzeum Oswiecim (PMO) as photographic negative number 281. It has been reproduced as evidence of the gassing process in numerous books, including G Schönberner, Der Gelbe Stern – Die Juden-Verfolgung in Europa 1933-1945 (Hamburg: Rütten und Löning Verlag, 1960), and its 1969 English translation, The Yellow Star: Persecution of the Jews in Europe, 1933-1945 (London: Corgi, n.d.); Adler, Langbein, and Lingens-Reiner, Auschwitz: Zeugnisse und Berichte (Frankfurt/Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1962); SS-Henker und ihre Opfer (Vienna: Internationale Föderation der Widerstandskämpfer, 1965); J-C. Pressac, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers (New York: Beate
Klarsfeld Foundation, 1989); D. Czech, Auschwitz Chronicle: 1939-1945 (London/New York: l. B. Taurus & Co., Ltd., 1990); et al.
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appear to have been drawn, and not even very accurately. The anatomical irregularities – which could not be actual physical deformities – of one 'corpse' are so physically impossible that the figure scarcely looks human.

Nonetheless, in many other photographs in Walendy's book the present writer was unable to see signs of alteration or falsification, despite the author's detailed and specific commentary, which actually contains in places several specious arguments. The only evidence Walendy offered, for example, that some photographs had been falsified or retouched were the slight anatomical oddities of some of the figures contained therein. If a person in a photograph had legs or arms too long for his body, Walendy would conclude that the person must have been drawn in. This disregards the obvious fact that many people do have unusually long or short legs or arms.

In all, Walendy analysed fifty-one different photographs (a small percentage of those published in books on the Holocaust), and in many cases other than those already mentioned one is forced by the weight of evidence to conclude that they had been altered or falsified. Walendy cautiously chose not to state whom he thought the forgers were, or even why in his opinion they had altered or falsified the photographs. Hence, despite several weaknesses, there is nothing in the book that could be identified as neo-Nazi, racist or anti-Semitic. Indeed, this provocative book is useful for historians in that it raises valid questions about the nature of photographic evidence, and casts some doubt on the usefulness of photographs as 'proof for various claims.

It has thus been shown that up until the mid-1970s, Holocaust Revisionism was predominantly a European phenomenon which had its genesis in the French writings of Rassinier, who remained its most prominent figure until his death in 1967. In the late 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, several German Revisionists strode to the forefront – notably Christophersen, Stäglich and Walendy – bringing their theses to the attention of the German-speaking public, which reacted with the same outrage as had the French public to Rassinier's books. Nonetheless, until 1974 [70] the only Holocaust Revisionists publications in English were those already mentioned – by Marschalko, Hoggan and App – plus a few pages here and there in books on international politics and economics by politically conservative authors [150], and an unusual booklet written by an Australian Nazi, which was essentially a poor reworking of Rassinier's early writings. [151] Holocaust Revisionism made virtually no impact in the English-speaking world.

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150 / J. Beaty, The Iron Curtain Over America (Los Angeles, The Noontide Press, 1951), et al.
151 / E. Cawthron, The Big Lie: Six Million Murdered Jews (Fyshwick: The History Research Unit, Unity Publishers, c. 1970). Cawthron was then one of Australia's leading Nazis and the editor of the Australian National Socialist Journal. His Revisionist booklet opened with these nasty words: "Whenever you see or hear a Jew teaching, do not think otherwise than that you are hearing a poisonous basilisk who with his face poisons and kills people ... be on your guard against them." Interestingly, Cawthron had an outstanding academic career, gaining a B.Sc with first class honours at the University of Adelaide in 1963 and being awarded a Ph.D in 1970. Cf. Harcourt D., Everyone Wants to be Führer: National Socialism in Australia and New Zealand (Melbourne: Angus and Robertson. 1972), pp. 143-144.

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