Updated: Target Removes Holocaust Denial Books Following CAMERA’s Exposè

The Nazi-planned and perpetrated genocide of Jews – its so-called “Final Solution” – began 80 years ago: Most of the survivors and witnesses have since passed away.  A recent (Sept. 2021) report/alert by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) focuses on the increasing distortion and disregard of the Holocaust’s historical record in Europe, after decades of progress in meticulously documenting the Holocaust and memorializing its victims.  

In fact, the repugnant assaults on Holocaust memory and the concomitant rise in anti-Semitism is not limited to Europe, but is being mainstreamed in the U.S., as well, including by one of America’s largest retail corporations that is part of the S&P 500 index -- Target.

Target, more than any other online vendor – whether through choice, negligence or ignorance – is facilitating the dissemination of Holocaust denial material and thus mainstreaming its industry of lies by offering books – in a variety of languages –on its website with such titles as “The Hoax of the Twentieth Century”; “Auschwitz Lies”; “Dissecting the Holocaust”; “Curated Lies”, and other, less conspicuous titles by a fringe band of international Holocaust deniers. No label or description is appended to warn readers of what these books represent: The marketing material includes only the deniers’ own self-promoting blurbs and reviews.  

Holocaust denial, in and of itself, is a manifestation of anti-Semitism, according to the IHRA working definition of anti-Semitism, which has been adopted by the U.S. State Department and Commission on Civil Rights, by the EU Parliament, the Global Imams Council, Argentina, Uruguay, Australia, Cyprus, Canada, England, Scotland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Greece, and almost two dozen other European countries.  

But, in addition to peddling anti-Semitism in the form of Holocaust denial, Target also markets French translations of the 1905 Russian-language, fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion by Roger Lamberlin, a contemporaneous French writer of anti-Semitic texts who promoted the hoax as truth; and William Luther Pierce’s The Turner Diaries, which the New York Times called an "explicitly racist and anti-Semitic" novel, the FBI has described as “the bible of the racist right,” and which has incited multiple, violent and deadly hate crimes.

Who are the Holocaust deniers and what is the propaganda that Target is marketing without warnings, comments, or labels?

Paul Rassinier (1906-1967): Known as the “father of Holocaust denial,” Rassinier was a French communist and bitter anti-Semite who, at one time, was a political prisoner in Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora concentration camps. He used his own experience at these camps to deny the Nazi genocide of Jews and the existence of gas chambers, which he contended were an invention of the “Zionist establishment.”  Although Rassinier’s claims were completely debunked by scholars, with extensive documentation, his claims are repeated by fringe elements of Jew haters and anti-Zionists.  Target markets a German-language book by Rassinier, entitled, Was Ist Wahrheit? (What is Truth?), published by Castle Hill, part of the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH), a marginal, Holocaust denial outfit.  The blurb and book synopsis on Target’s website refer to “Rassinier's groundbreaking revisionist pioneering work,” that “exposes” the Nuremberg military tribunals as a “lynch-like show trial” and condemns the Eichmann trial as “scandalous.”

Wilhelm Stäglich (1916-2006): An officer in the German army during WWII who later joined a neo-Nazi party and became a notorious Holocaust denier, Stäglich wrote a book claiming the documents relating to the Holocaust were forgeries and that no gas chambers had existed.  His book, Der Auschwitz-Mythos - Legende oder Wirklichkeit  (The Auschwitz Myth – Legend or Reality) was published by a far-right German publishing house, Grabert Verlag, in 1979 but was subsequently banned in Germany.  Target, however, currently markets and promotes it in its original German.

Arthur R. Butz : An associate professor of electrical engineering at Northwestern University, Butz is best known for his 1976 Holocaust denial book, “The Hoax of the 20^th Century” and his tenure on the editorial board of the now-defunct, racist Journal of Historical Review, a periodical dedicated to Holocaust denial, put out by the pseudo-academic, anti-Semitic Institute of Historical Review founded by neo-Nazi Willis Carto.  (The above-mentioned Stäglich also served on the Holocaust denial institute’s advisory board.) The marketing material on Target’s website refers to Butz’ “precise and scientific manner,” and calls the book a “penetrating study and lucid commentary” that “separates the cold facts from the sheer tonnage of disinformation that has served as a formidable barrier to the truth since the end of WWII.” Hoax is a “book you must read if you want a clear picture of the scope and magnitude of the historical cover-up of our age, who is behind it, and what can be done to put an end to it” urges the blurb.

Carlo Mattogno: An Italian writer who formerly served on the advisory council of the aforementioned Institute of Historical Review and as editor of its journal, Mattogno devotes his career to promoting vicious, anti-Jewish propaganda and Holocaust denial. He is currently involved with CODOH and its Holocaust Handbook series of denial books, the majority of which he authored or co-authored. Target markets his books, along with others from the abhorrent series, including:

Bungled - "The Destruction of the European Jews", which takes aim at the carefully evidenced  studies of the late Raul Hilberg, a world-renowned scholar and founder of the academic field of Holocaust studies who based his research and writings on millions of pages of Nazi documentation seized by the US Army. The marketing material on Target’s website repeats Mattogno’s crude attacks on the scholar, asking potential readers, “Why did anyone ever take this imbecilic imposter [Raul Hilberg] seriously?”

Curated Lies, which  targets the Holocaust evidence gathered at the Auschwitz Museum in Poland, by claiming it is “manipulated” and “misrepresented.” Target's website features the author’s claim that the book “proves  the Auschwitz Museum is lying about the Auschwitz camp to millions of tourists… and to scholars by obfuscating the nature and meaning of documents in its archives.”

The Operation Reinhardt Camps Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, which denies the reality of the Nazi killing camps, in which 1.7 million Jews were murdered.  The promotional material on Target’s website consist of the author’s claim that the book “demonstrates how the myth of the ‘extermination camps’ was created.”

The Einsatzgruppen in the Occupied Eastern Territories, which refutes the role of the the special units of the Nazi security police and SS intelligence known as the “mobile killing squads”  that were responsible for the mass shooting murders of Jews on Soviet territory. The marketing blurb on Target’s website consists of the author’s claim that “there is not a shred of evidence” to prove this happened and that “witness testimonies and forensic expert reports… reek of atrocity propaganda marked by absurdly impossible and often contradictory claims.”

Other books by Mattogno that can be found on Target’s online market include The Real Case for Auschwitz, which takes aim at Holocaust scholar Robert van Pelt, a world authority on Auschwitz, who testified for Deborah Lipstadt in the 1996 civil libel lawsuit against her by Holocaust denier David Irving; Neither Proof Nor Trace for the Holocaust, which attacks Piotr Setkiewicz, director of the Centre for Research at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, editor-in-chief of the scientific publication The Auschwitz Journal and the chief historian at the Auschwitz Museum;  Rudolf Reder versus Kurt Gerstein, which attacks the seminal testimonies about atrocities that occurred at the Belzec extermination camp (those of Rudolf Reder, the only Jewish survivor of the Belzec extermination camp left to give eyewitness testimony and Kurt Gerstein, an SS officer who tried to alert Western diplomats of the atrocities he witnessed in Belzec), calling them “contradictory," "absurd," "unreliable” and "fantasy";  Sonderkommando Auschwitz I, which lashes out at the Sonderkommando, the unfortunate, wretched Jewish prisoners who were forced to prepare their fellow inmates for extermination in the gas chambers, search their corpses for hidden valuables to be turned over to the SS officers, and  dispose of the corpses in the crematoria.   Members of the Sonderkommando were routinely killed by their Nazi overlords after a short time, leaving almost no survivors. Target’s website features Mattogno’s attack on the powerful and tragic testimonies of the few survivors’ as "lies and hyperbole."

Germar Rudolf: A German chemist who, in the mid 1990’s, was convicted and sentenced to prison for inciting racial hatred through Holocaust denial (a criminal offense in Germany), Rudolf was dismissed from Germany's prestigious Max Planck Institute and his books were banned in Germany. Rudolf escaped to England where he founded the above-mentioned Castle Hill Publishers to disseminate Holocaust denial literature in English and German. He later settled in the U.S. before being extradited to Germany, where he served prison time. Following his prison sentence, Rudolf returned to the U.S. where he was more recently convicted of indecent exposure and public lewdness near his Pennsylvania home.  Rudolf affiliates himself with Mattogno and others in the small, Holocaust denying CODOH community.  Among his books featured on Target are:

The Chemistry of Auschwitz, which was previously known as “The Rudolf Report,” and banned in Germany. It was the “report” for which Rudolf was dismissed from the Max Planck Institute and sentenced to 14 months in prison.  The book denies the existence of Nazi gas chambers and crematoria.  Target’s website includes several laudatory “quotes” for the book from fellow Holocaust deniers identified as “Historians.”

Lectures on the Holocaust,which was similarly banned and confiscated in Germany. After his extradition to Germany in 2005, Rudolf was convicted of sedition and anti-Jewish incitement for writing and publishing this fraudulent, pseudo-scientific book that consciously attempts to depict the Holocaust as a Jewish fabrication.  Not only is it readily available on Target’s website, but it is billed as “the most-comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the critical research into the Holocaust” that puts lie to witness testimony and “the mainstream Holocaust narrative.”

Air Photo Evidence, which shows aerial photos of Nazi killing camps and sites that allegedly refutes witnesses’ testimony about Nazi atrocities and murder. Rudolf's self-described “analysis” claims the photos of Auschwitz were “tampered with” in order to show things that never happened. 

Other books that Rudolf co-authored, annotated or edited that are marketed through Target include Dissecting the Holocaust, a collection of essays by the familiar coterie of Holocaust deniers; Auschwitz Lies, co-authored with the aforementioned Carlo Mattogno, which lashes out at Holocaust scholars who have debunked the deniers’ lies;   Auschwitz - Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, which re-writes French Holocaust-denier-turned-Auschwitz-authority Jean-Claude Pressac’s earlier book.  Rudolf, here,  attempts to re-interpret Pressac’s findings at Auschwitz to demonstrate that no gas chambers ever existed. In fact, Pressac’s subsequent book  explains and confirms the Nazi death machinery/process at Auschwitz more clearly, but Rudolf annotates and re-interprets the first book in order  to create another Holocaust denial source; and The Leuchter Report (see below).

Target also sells Eine Zensur findet statt!, Rudolf’s German-language, self-justifying attack on the German authorities who banned his anti-Semitic incitement and Holocaust denial.

Fred A. Leuchter: An American manufacturer of execution equipment for capital punishment, Leuchter, with no qualifications, falsely misrepresented himself as an engineer and testified in defense of neo-Nazi Ernst Zündel at a Canadian Human Rights Tribunal in which the latter was charged with publishing false, anti-Semitic propaganda denying the reality of the Holocaust. Leuchter’s testimony, the basis of which was published as The Leuchter Report, was dismissed by scholars, discredited on both scientific and historical grounds. It is marketed on Target’s site, authored by Leuchter, together with Robert Faurisson and Rudolf,  as a “devastating report which concluded that there were no gas execution chambers” in Auschwitz, Birkenau, Majdanek, Dachau, Mauthausen, Hartheim --  i.e. Nazi killing camps.

Robert Faurisson: A British-French professor of literature, Faurisson became better known as a purveyor of Holocaust denial, of which he was convicted in French court in 1990 and which prompted his subsequent dismisseal from his academic post.  Faurisson’s books on Target’s website include the above-mentioned Leuchter Report, which he co-edited, as well as the French-language Écrits révisionnistes I, which justifies his Holocaust denial as legitimate, academic “revisionism.”  The website includes his “dedication” of the book to those who refuse “to endorse the atrocious, grotesque, and insolent fraud of the alleged genocide of Jews and supposed Nazi gas chambers.”

In addition, a defamatory, anti-Semitic book that is part of the Holocaust Handbook series, authored by one Warren Routledge, vilifies the late Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Prize-winning Holocaust survivor who gave voice to the Jewish victims who were silenced by the Nazis.  Entitled Elie Wiesel, Saint of the Holocaust, the book is marketed as “a biography exposing Wiesel's personal and historical deceits, showing how the U.S.'s Zionist establishment allowed Wiesel to force a string of U.S. presidents to genuflect before this imposter as symbolic acts of subordination to World Jewry.”

This is not an exhaustive list of all the Holocaust denial and anti-Semitic material found on Target’s website.  Other books from deniers associated with CODOH/Castle Hill Publishers are marketed in German or French.

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Because Holocaust denial is a criminal offense in much of Europe and in Germany, the international clique of anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi deniers have moved their operations to the U.S., where the First Amendment allows even bigoted Jew haters and anti-Zionists the right to lie about the Holocaust and vilify Jews with impunity.

That doesn’t mean, however, that online marketers are required to play a role in mainstreaming their dangerous bigotry and defamatory lies. Indeed, Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms have made moves toward clamping down on Holocaust denial. Amazon has  tried to prevent its platform from being used to market the denier's anti-Semitism, as have others.  Isn’t it time that Target follow suit?