W. was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. He studied history at the University of Illinois (Chicago), the University of Munich (Germany), and Portland State University, from where he received in 1977 a bachelor's degree in history with high honors. He then did graduate work in history at Indiana University (Bloomington), where he served as a history instructor and received a Master's degree in European history. W. has never held an academic post at the university level, he is fluent in German.  

During the five years W. lived in Washington, DC, he carried out extensive historical research at the National Archives and the Library of Congress. In the 1970s, W. lived and worked for two and one-half years in Germany (Bonn and Munich), and for a time in Ghana (West Africa), where he taught English, history, and geography at an all-Black secondary school. In 1978, W. served for a year as the News Editor of 'National Vanguard'. In 1988 he testified for five days in Toronto District Court as a recognized expert witness on Germany's wartime Jewish policy and the Holocaust issue.

W.'s first contact with Revisionism and Revisionists dated from a 1977 visit to England, where he spent time in Brighton with Tony Hancock, the publisher of Revisionist books. Coincidentally, Arthur Butz happened to visit Hancock at the same time as part of a European promotion tour for 'The Hoax of the Twentieth Century', which Hancock had just published. Butz and W. spent an evening together. During that visit, W. also briefly met David McCalden, who moved to the United States in 1978 to work as the first director to the IHR (under the penname of Lewis Brandon). W. was quite sceptical of Holocaust Revisionism at that time. It was during that visit that he first read Richard Harwood's 'Did Six Million Really Die?', but that booklet actually reinforced his scepticism, because of some factual errors, which tended to discredit its central thesis. 

In early 1979, after he had moved to Washington, D.C., W. received a letter from Butz, who asked him to visit the National Archives to examine the wartime Allied aerial reconnaissance photographs of Auschwitz, which had just been made public by the Central Intelligence Agency. Butz asked him to look through the entire collection of Auschwitz reconnaissance photographs to see if there were any significant or revealing aerial photos that had not been made public. W. had been following the media coverage of the published photographs. Even though he had no special interest in the subject, he had been impressed by the fact that the photographs contained no evidence of mass exterminations in Auschwitz and, in fact, apparently could not be reconciled with accepted opinion on what transpired in that camp. 

W.'s examination, on Butz's behalf, of the original reconnaissance photos in the National Archives strengthened this view. He was disturbed at what he considered the distorted way that these photographs were portrayed in newspapers and magazines. He was also outraged that some prominent Jewish figures – like Elie Wiesel – openly charged that these photos proved that Allied military and political leaders not only knew that Jews were being systematically exterminated in Auschwitz, but callously refused to do anything to stop the slaughter. W. reasoned that if such gross misrepresentation of historical evidence was possible thirtyfive years after the fact, comparable distortion of the truth was at least very probable in the emotioncharged years during and just after the Second World War. He later raised this matter with Robert Wolfe, director of the Military Branch of the National Archives, where captured German records are held. Wolfe, himself Jewish, told W. of his repugnance at the way that Wiesel and others misrepresented these photographs for their own purposes.

W. then decided to begin a serious and in-depth investigation of this issue. He purchased a copy of Raul Hilberg's 'The Destruction of the European Jews' – generally regarded as a standard work on the subject – to look into the precise evidence presented for a German policy or programme of systematic extermination. He was at once struck by the paucity of evidence there for an extermination programme, or even for systematic mass killings in gas chambers at Auschwitz and other camps. However, he was intrigued by the apparently detailed documentary evidence presented by Hilberg for mass killings of Jews in the occupied Soviet territories by the notorious Einsatzgruppen security police units.

W. then began a methodical investigation at the National Archives of the copious written reports of the activities of the Einsatzgruppen. He quickly concluded that these units had indeed killed large numbers of Jews, including civilians, but contrary to what Hilberg and others have insisted for years, he also concluded that the Einsatzgruppen reports themselves indicated that there was no overall German programme to exterminate Soviet Jewry. Further encouraged by what he had discovered, W. decided to devote whatever spare time he could to researching and writing on this subject of his conversion to the Revisionist view of the Holocaust in 1979. One of W.'s last articles for the 'National Vanguard' (issue No. 69) reflected his new interest in this subject. Entitled "Holocaust Claims Exposed as Lies", analysing the main arguments against accepted opinion.

In December 1979, W. published a short article, entitled "Allies Used Torture to 'Prove' Jews Were Extermination Victims". In this article he argued more persuasively that some of the documentary evidence offered in support of the extermination thesis at the postwar trials of alleged German war criminals was in fact fallacious, some of it even obtained by coercion or torture. An important factor in W.'s decision to devote himself to Holocaust Revisionism was his meeting in 1979 with Robert Faurisson. It was during this visit that W. wrote a petition in defence of Faurisson's rights of free speech and inquiry. Within a short period, some six hundred persons signed this appeal – including Noam Chomsky, MIT professor and linguist, as well as Alfred Lilienthal, the prominent Jewish anti-Zionist historian. 

In 1984, W. joined the Editorial Advisory Committee of the IHR quarterly 'Journal of Historical Review' JHR, and in December 1991 he moved to southern California to work for the institute. IHR is an independent think tank and publishing-educational enterprise based in southern California. It was founded in 1978 by Dave McCalden and Willis Carto. W. became editor of both the IHR's Journal of Historical Review JHR (1995-2002), and the IHR Newsletter, and published articles, reviews and essays in numerous periodicals. In 1985, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1990 and 1992, W. operated as a master of ceremonies for the IHR conferences. 

In the first of these essays, "Buchenwald: Legend and Reality", W. argued that the popular image of Buchenwald as a death camp bears little relationship to reality. The first Commandant, Karl Koch, was executed after an SS court found him guilty of corruption, a fact which contrasts sharply with the accepted view that in the concentration camps the incidental murder of internees was the norm. Koch's wife Ilse, noted W., was entirely innocent of the accusation that she personally selected tattooed internees and had them murdered and their skins made into lamp shades, book covers and other items. That charge (reiterated to the present day) was first advanced by the United States prosecution team at the International Military Tribunal. W. provided evidence to conclude that the Buchenwald 'skin peeling' allegations were nothing more than wartime atrocity stories, and that the testimonies of witnesses which supported those stories were spurious. W. also proved that a very large percentage of the murders and atrocities that occurred in Buchenwald were not committed by SS officers or guards, but were committed or caused by the Communist internee organization. This line of argument had already been expressed by Paul Rassinier almost thirty years earlier, in 1958. W. also provided evidence that Buchenwald did not have a homicidal gas chamber and was not an extermination camp. 

Elie Wiesel, the Jewish writer and 1986 Nobel Peace Prize recipient, had testified: "In Buchenwald they sent 10,000 to their deaths every day." The International Tracing Service of Arolsen, an affiliate of thee International Red Cross, stated in 1984 that the number of documented deaths (of both Jews and non-Jews) at Buchenwald was 20,671, with another 7,463 for Dora (Mittelbau). More than 20,000 of them died in the chaotic final months of the war. Numerous inmates were murdered by order of the Communist underground camp organization, and several hundred were killed in Allied bombing attacks. W. notes that Buchenwald inmates could both receive and send two letters or postcards monthly. They could receive money from the outside. Inmates were also paid for their labor with special camp currency which they could use to purchase a wide variety of items in the camp canteen. They played soccer, handball and volleyball in their spare time. Soccer matches were held on Saturdays and Sundays on the camp playing field. A camp library offered a wide range of books. A motion picture theater was very popular. There were also variety shows, and musical groups put on regular concerts in the central square. A camp brothel, which employed 15 prostitutes when the Americans arrived, was available to many inmates. W. added in his essay that from 1945 to 1949 the Soviet secret police operated Buchenwald as a concentration camp for Germans considered dangerous or politically undesirable. At least 13,000 (but possibly as many as 21,000) persons died in the camp during the period it was run by the Soviets.  

A second important essay by W. was "Jewish Soap", which appeared in the Summer 1991 JHR. In this study W. scrutinized the widely repeated allegation that the Nazis manufactured soap from the cadavers of murdered Jews, and showed that this charge was in fact nothing more than groundless Jewish wartime atrocity propaganda. Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, wartime head of both the World Jewish Congress and the American Jewish Congress, publicly charged in November 1942 without evidence that Jewish corpses were being processed into such warvital commodities as soap, fats and fertilizer by the Germans. He further announced that the Germans were even exhuming the dead for the value of the corpses and were paying fifty marks for each body. Typical of many other American periodicals, the influential New Republic reported in early 1943 that the Germans were using the bodies of their Jewish victims to make soap and fertilizer in a factory at Siedice. During June and July 1943, two prominent representatives of the Moscow-based 'Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee' toured the United States and raised more than two million dollars for the Soviet war effort at a series of mass meetings. At each of these rallies, Soviet Jewish leader Solomon Mikhoels showed the crowd a bar of soap that he said was made from Jewish corpses. After the war the soap story was given important legitimacy at the main Nuremberg trial. L. N. Smirnov, Chief Councilor of Justice for the USSR, declared at the Tribunal: "Rationalized SS technical minds which created gas chamber and murder vans, began devising such methods of complete annihilation of human bodies, which would not only conceal the traces of their crimes, but also to serve in the manufacturing of certain products as soap from human bodies and the tanning of human skin for industrial purposes." A sample of what was supposed to be a piece of human soap was submitted to the Nuremberg Tribunal as exhibit USSR-393. In his closing address to the Tribunal, chief British prosecutor Sir Hartley Shawcross echoed his Soviet colleague: "On occasion, even the bodies of their [the Germans'] victims were used to make good the wartime shortage of soap." By the way, evidence presented at the Nuremberg Tribunal for the soap story was no less substantial than the evidence presented for the claims of mass extermination in gas chambers. 

After the war hundreds of cakes of human soap turned up around the world, and many museums and Holocaust memorials put cakes of this soap on public display. On numerous occasions bars of soap were given Jewish funeral services and were buried in Israelite cemeteries with the required rituals. Additionally, far from diminishing in acceptance in the decades since the war, the allegation that the Nazis transformed the corpses of Jews into soap has increasingly become accepted. Scores of former concentration camp internees, as well as very many journalists and historians, have promoted the soap story. Amongst the numerous examples quoted by W. were the following two. First: "Canada: The Twentieth Century", a standard history studies textbook published in 1982 and used throughout Canada in secondary schools, declared that the Germans "boiled" the corpses of Jews to make soap. Secondly: "The Anatomy of Nazism" a widely circulated booklet published in 1979 by the Anti-Defamation League of the B'nai B'rith, stated that; "The process of brutalization did not end with the mass murders themselves. Large quantities of soap were manufactured from the corpses of those murdered." In April 1990, Professor Yehuda Bauer of Israel's Hebrew University, regarded as a leading Holocaust historian, as well as Shmuel Krakowski, archives director of Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust centre, confirmed that the human soap story was not true. They argued that camp inmates were prepared to believe any horror stories about their persecutors and asserted that the Nazis did not turn Jews to soap because they did not have time to realize. W. concluded his essay: "Easily demonstrable falsehoods like the soap story have become dangerous embarrassments, because they raise doubts about the entire Holocaust legend."  
   
Since 1995, W. has been director of the IHR. W. has been a guest on numerous radio talk shows, and has appeared many times on television, including on the nationally broadcast 'Hannity and Colmes' and 'Montel Williams' shows. He has conducted numerous interviews with television, radio and print journalists from across the United States, and from Britain, Germany, Sweden, Lebanon, Iran, South Africa, and other countries. 

Because of the vast quantity and scholarly form of his work on the Holocaust and other aspects of twentieth-century history, W. is to be considered as one of the most important Revisionist historians in the United States. The IHR views on the Holocaust are largely noted and criticized, for calling into question major aspects of the orthodox Holocaust extermination story. W. concluded his approach: "If by the 'Holocaust' you mean the political persecution of Jews, some scattered killings, if you mean a cruel thing that happened, no one denies that. But if one says that the 'Holocaust' means the systematic extermination of six millions Jews in concentration camps systematically murdered by gassing, that's what we think there's not evidence for."