Institute for Historical Review

IHR author biographies

Harry Elmer Barnes

Harry Elmer Barnes (1889-1968) is generally regarded as the founding father of historical revisionism. The first-ever Revisionist Convention in 1979 was dedicated to his memory. He authored scores of books and hundreds of articles, which take up forty-seven pages of listings in his biography. The best introduction to his writings is The Barnes Trilogy (IHR, 1979).

Lewis Brandon (see David McCalden)

Arthur R. Butz

Dr. Arthur R. Butz was born and raised in New York City. He received his Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1965 he received his doctorate in Control Sciences from the University of Minnesota. In 1966 he joined the faculty of Northwestern University (Evanston, Illinois), where he is now Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. Dr. Butz is the author of numerous technical papers. Since 1980 he has been a member of the Editorial Advisory Committee of The Journal of Historical Review, published by the Institute for Historical Review.

Dr. Butz is the author of The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The case against the presumed extermination of European Jewry. The book is available from the Institute for Historical Review.

Dr. Butz maintains his own Web site, which deals with Holocaust-related issues.

Hellmut Diwald

Hellmut Diwald, author of Geschichte der Deutschen, is a professor of history at the Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen, West Germany.

Robert Faurisson

Robert Faurisson is Europe's leading Holocaust revisionist scholar. He was educated at the Paris Sorbonne, and served as associate professor at the University of Lyon in France from 1974 until 1990. He is a recognized specialist of text and document analysis. After years of private research and study, Dr. Faurisson first made public his skeptical views about the Holocaust extermination story in articles published in 1978 in the French daily Le Monde. His writings on the Holocaust issue have appeared in two books and numerous scholarly articles, many of which have been published in the IHR's Journal of Historical Review.

Louis FitzGibbon

Louis FitzGibbon is the author of the finest book on the Soviet murder of 15,000 Polish officers in 1940 -- Katyn (re-published by the IHR). He was chairman of the Katyn Memorial Committee in London, which brought about the erection of the Katyn Memorial. Mr. FitzGibbon also designed the monument. He is fluent in the Polish language and is very highly regarded amongst Polish expatriate communities on both sides of the Atlantic. He is currently an executive with a commercial company in London. He is the half-brother of the exterminationist writer Constantine FitzGibbon, who translated the Rudolf Höss "autobiography."

K. C. Gleason

K.C. Gleason is a Washington D.C. journalist whose feature reporting has appeared in numerous periodicals in Europe and the Middle East.

Russ Granata

Russ Granata, a Southern California free-lance writer, taught German for many years in California public school systems. He is a specialist in German literature and history.

Paul Grubach

Paul Grubach holds an Associate Arts degree in liberal arts, and a Bachelor of Science degree in physics, with a concentration in chemistry and minor in history, from John Carroll University (Ohio). He received a scholarship for his work in chemistry, and is a member of the Phi Alpha Theta history honor society.

Darryl Hattenhauer

Darryl Hattenhauer is a graduate student and instructor at Minnesota State University.

David Irving

David Irving was born in Essex, England in 1938, the son of a Royal Navy Commander. After education at London University, our next speaker spent a year working in a German steel mill to perfect his fluency in German. In the years since, he has firmly established himself as not only one of the most courageous historians of this or any age, but also as one of the most successful and widely read: several of his many books have been best-sellers.

His first work, The Destruction of Dresden, was published in 1963, when he was twenty-five years old. This was followed by many other books, including The Mare's Nest: The Secret Weapons of the Third Reich, published in 1964, The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe, The German Atomic Bomb, The War Between the Generals and The Trail of the Fox, a best-selling biography of Field Marshall Erwin Rommel. Several of his books have appeared in various languages, and several have been serialized in periodicals including the Sunday Express, the Sunday Telegraph and Der Spiegel.

Over the years our next speaker has contributed articles to some 60 British and foreign periodicals including the Daily Telegraph , the Sunday Express in London and Der Stern and Der Spiegel in Germany. You'd need a wheelbarrow to carry away all the newspaper and magazine clippings that have been written about him.

Mr. Irving has a track record of uncovering startling new facts about supposedly well-known episodes of history. Much of his effectiveness is due to his extensive reliance on original source materials, such as diaries, original documents and so forth, from both official and private sources. He is tenacious in his ceaseless digging in just about every important historical archive in the Western world. He has little respect for colleagues who are guilty of what he calls inter-historian incest, and who have thereby helped to keep alive myths and legends left over from Second World War propaganda. British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper once said of Irving: "He is one of the few guys I would entirely trust. Indefatigable in the pursuit of evidence, fearless in face of it, sound in judgment."

Well, Irving's reputation took a beating following the publication in 1977 of Hitler's War, a monumental work that was hysterically criticized for its contention that Hitler did not order the extermination of Europe's Jews: the mass killings must have been carried out by Himmler and his cohorts behind Hitler's back, Irving concluded at that time. So enraged was the Zionist Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith by Irving's book that the shadowy organization promptly added his name to its ever-growing list of enemies.

As it turned out, though, the ADL's troubles with David Irving were only just beginning. The campaign against him became even more emotional and intense following the publication, in 1981, of Uprising , an unvarnished history of the 1956 anti-Communist revolt in Hungary. This book enraged the ADL crowd because it does not whitewash the significant Jewish role in the Hungarian Communist regime.

In 1987, the first volume of Irving'smonumental biography of Winston Churchill, a work representing ten years of reasearch and writing, was published in Australia. And last year Irving's biography of Hermann Goring was published by William Morrow.

A startling climax in the second Holocaust trial in 1988 of Ernst Zündel was the testimony of our next speaker, who was the last of twenty-three defense witnesses. Irving stunned the completely packed Toronto courtroom by announcing that he had changed his mind about the Holocaust story. During his three days on the stand, he explained in detail why he now accepts the Revisionist view of the extermination story.

As a kind of one-man IHR, David Irving has made highly successful speaking and promotional tours in West Germany, Canada, Australia, South Africa, the United States and other countries. German listeners delight in hearing an Englishman say out loud what many in that country believe in their souls, but have been intimidated to keep to themselves. In Germany Irving has become a kind of conscience for a people who have been all but robbed of their own.

During this past year, in the wake of the collapes of the Soviet-Communist domination of Eastern Europe, Irving has made triumphal speaking visits in what was the East German Democratic Republic. Last February, he addressed a large audience in Dresden on the 45th anniversary of the Allied firebombing of that once beautiful, baroque city. Large posters with Irving's picture appeared throughout Dresden to announce his presentation. He was greeted with flowers by the city's cultural affairs director, and was interviewed on East German television. When he appeared on stage before the microphones, more than a thousand people gave him a standing ovation. Speaking in fluent German, he recounted Winston Churchill's campaign to obliterate German cities. Irving's appearance in Dresden on the anniversary of the firebombing was also noteworthy because his first book, the one that launched his career, was about this very event.

Last June, Irving returned for another speaking tour in what was still the German Democratic Republic. In spite of a tenmark admission fee, large crowds came to hear him speak in Leipzig, Gera, and again in Dresden. Interestingly, his audiences were mostly younger Germans; middle-aged and elderly people were in the minority. By contrast Irving's treatment during the past year in West Germany and Austria has not always been as cordial.

In Austria, following the violent demonstration staged in Vienna by Jewish groups, a warrant was issued for his arrest. Even though his speaking tour scheduled for November of 1989 had been approved by the Austrian Interior Ministry months earlier, he was not permitted to speak in that country. Irving has initiated legal proceedings to overturn this ban. In West Germany, police forbade him, at the last minute, from addressing a mass rally on March 10, of some 8,000 people in Passau, organized by the German People's Union. He was the only speaker who was so forbidden to speak. Irving is now also fighting this ban through the courts. One bright side to this affair is that Irving's forbidden speech was recorded elsewhere on videotape, and is now being widely sold.

Some weeks later, Irving was arrested after addressing a sell-out crowd in Munich's famed Lowenbrau beer-hallon April 21st. This was followed by a spontaneous demonstration of some 250 supporters who carried posters of Irving, Faurisson and Zündel. After the crowd made its way past the historic Feldherrnhalle, police waded in and arrested about 10 of the demonstrators.

In June of 1989, David Irving published a British edition of the Leuchter Report . This handsome, illustrated edition,for which he wrote a foreword, was launched by him at a press conference in London. He told the journalists there that the infamous extermination gas chambers at Auschwitz and Majdanek did not exist, except perhaps, as the brain-child invention of Britain's war-time propaganda bureau, the Psychological Warfare Executive. More than 100 members of the British House of Commons, signed a statement condemning the Irving edition of the Report as "evil."Of course this statement made no effort to refute the Report's findings.

Earlier this year a new American editionof Irving's book Hitler's War was published in paperback by Avon books.It combines earlier editions of two books: The War Path and Hitler's War. Taking into account his most recent researchand insights, all references to so-called extermination camps were removed from this new revised edition. And in his introduction, Irving blasts one historical legend after another. The very fact that this iconoclastic work was published by a major New York publisher, is itself a gratifying victory over the dark forces that have been working over time to silence him.

David Irving is currently at work on more books that promise to raise even more hackles. One of them will entitled Roosevelt's War. He is also working on a biography of Hitler's propaganda chief, Dr. Joseph Goebbels.

Soviet Premier, Nikita Khrushchev, once warned: "... that historians are dangerous because they have the power to upset everything." Our next speaker is just such an historian. German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck once said: "That the main thing is not to write history, but to make it." David Irving is a man who has been able to do some of both. He is also living proof that the life of an historian need not be dull.

David Irving maintains his own web site at: http://www.fpp.co.uk.

Samuel E. Konkin, Jr.

Samuel E. Konkin, Jr., is the editor of The New Libertarian, the organ of the Movement of the Libertarian Left. He received his B.Sc. degree in Chemistry from the University of Alberta and his M.A. in Economics from New York University.

Elisabeth Kuesters

Elisabeth Kuesters is a free-lance journalist, specializing in political and cultural themes. She was at one time a prominent labor activist.

Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.

Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., is the foremost expert on the design and fabrication of hardware, including homicidal gas chambers, used to execute convicted criminals in the United States. After receiving a Bachelor's degree (in history) from Boston University in 1964, Leuchter did postgraduate work at the Harvard Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. He holds patents on the design of sextants, surveying instruments and optical encoding equipment. He is an accomplished pianist and an NRA-qualified small-arms instructor. Leuchter is perhaps best known as the author of two controversial forensic reports on alleged German wartime extermination gas chambers.

Walter Lüftl

Walter Lüftl is a leading Austrian engineer. He is a court-recognized expert engineer, and heads a major engineering firm in Vienna. Until March 1992, he served as president of Austria's 4,000-member association of professional engineers.

Charles Lutton, Ph.D.

Charles Lutton, Ph.D., was a specialist in diplomatic history. At the time of his retirement, he was teaching in the Seattle area.

James J. Martin

James J. Martin received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Michigan in 1949. He is the author of Men Against the State, American Liberalism and World Politics 1931-1941, Revisionist Viewpoints, The Saga of Hog Island, and The Man Who Invented 'Genocide'. His long teaching career included posts at Northern Illinois University (DeKalb), San Francisco State College, Deep Springs College, and Rampart College.

David McCalden  

David McCalden (1951-1990) served as the first director of the Institute for Historical Review, founded in December 1978, and in 1980 and early 1981 was editor – under the pen name “Lewis Brandon” of the IHR’s Journal of Historical Review. He left the IHR in April 1981.

L. A. Rollins

L. A. Rollins, a Los Angeles free-lance writer, is the author of The Myth of Natural Rights. He received his B.A. degree in Philosophy from California State College, Los Angeles, and has published in Reason, Critique, The Personalist, The New Libertarian, and Books for Libertarians.

Robert Row

Robert Row is a veteran British political journalist, active for many years in the Union Movement of Sir Oswald Mosley.

W. D. Rubenstein

W. D. Rubenstein, pre-eminent Australian critic of "Holocaust" revisionism, is a professor in the School of Social Sciences at Deakin University, Victoria. He is the author of The Left, the Right and the Jews.

Walter N. Sanning

Walter N. Sanning is the author of The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry. Currently in private industry, he taught international business, finance, and economics for a number of years at a leading West Coast university.

Howard F. Stein

Howard F. Stein is currently a tenured professor with the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, Oklahoma City. At the time he wrote this article he was an Associate Professor of Medical-Psychiatric Anthropology with the Department of Community Medicine at the University of Oklahoma. From the University of Pittsburgh he received a B.A. in historical musicology (1967) and a Ph.D. in anthropology (1972). Dr. Stein is the author of dozens of scholarly, clinical and research papers. He has contributed dozens of articles to numerous journals, including Family Medicine, The Psychoanalystic Quarterly, The Journal of Psychohistory, Ethos, and The Journal of Psychological Anthropology. He has served as editor and book review editor of The Journal of Psychoanalytic Anthropology. He is the author of several published books, including The Psychodymanics of Medical Practice and American Medicine as Culture. Dr. Stein is a member of numerous professional associations.

Keith Stimely

Keith Stimely is a past editor of The Journal of Historical Review. He received his B.S. degree in History from the University of Oregon in 1980.

Serge Thion

Serge Thion, born in 1942, has devoted some 30 years to study, analysis and writing on social, economic and political issues, particularly in agrarian societies.

His research has taken him to many countries in the Middle East, northern, eastern and southern Africa, Southeast Asia, and the South Pacific. After seven years of studies in sociology, anthropology, history and linguistics at the Paris Sorbonne, he received a doctorate in sociology from that school in 1967. His doctoral dissertation on the South African political system was published in 1969 under the title Le pouvoir pâle, ou le racisme sud-africain. Between 1967 and 1970 he taught in Vietnam and Cambodia.

From 1971 until 1993 he was a research fellow with the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris, with special emphasis on the history of land problems and land reform in Vietnam and Cambodia, as well as political history and war and revolution in Rhodesia and Mozambique, and the history of statecraft in Southeast Asia.

Dr. Thion is the author of numerous scholarly articles, half of them dealing with Southeast Asia, which have appeared in academic periodicals in the USA, France, Germany and other countries. He is also the author of several books, including Vérité historique ou vérité politique? (in collaboration with Robert Faurisson), Une Allumette sur la banquise: Ecrits de combat, and (in English, 1993) Watching Cambodia (White Lotus, G.P.O. Box 1141, Bangkok 1141, Thailand).

H. Keith Thompson

H. Keith Thompson, a New York City corporate executive, editor of Dönitz at Nuremberg: A Re-Appraisal, is recognized as one of America's leading authorities on the Nuremberg war crimes trials.

Mark Weber

Mark Weber is an accredited historian. He is currently the Director of the Institute for Historical Review.

Weber has been a guest on numerous radio talk shows, and on the nationally-syndicated "Montel Williams" television program. Millions of Americans saw and heard Weber speak about the Holocaust issue on the March 20, 1994, edition of the CBS network television program "60 Minutes."

In March 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.

Weber was born in October 1951 in Portland, Oregon, where he was also raised. He graduated from Jesuit High School there in 1969.

He studied history at the University of Illinois (Chicago), the University of Munich (Germany), and Portland State University, from where he received 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 in 1977.

He has traveled widely in Europe and northwestern Africa. He 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.

During the five years he lived in Washington, DC (1978-1983), he carried out extensive research on the Holocaust issue at the National Archives and the Library of Congress. Weber is the author of over 100 articles, reviews, and essays dealing with the Holocaust story, and his writings on other historical, political, and social issues have appeared in a variety of periodicals.

He moved to southern California in early 1991 to work for the IHR. He was the editor of the IHR's acclaimed Journal of Historical Review from April 1992 to December 2000.