Sitting across from Mark Weber, formerly the leading light of American Holocaust revisionism, in his California office, I asked him the unavoidable question: did the gas chambers ever exist? “There may have been gas chambers,” he said. But he wanted to make a larger point about the war and historical memory: “It would be astonishing if a historical chapter as big as the Holocaust weren’t subject to some exaggeration. The same is true of Stalin—how many people did he kill? Estimates vary. Now the idea that the Holocaust is free of this kind of exaggeration is almost impossible.”

From there, Weber segued to the discussion he hopes to have more of, since he now is willing to concede—to use his words—“the immense catastrophe in which millions of European Jews died during World War II.” Today, Weber is much more interested in Jewish-Zionist power, which of course, he says, is what allows that Jewish suffering to be exaggerated.

“I don’t hate Jews,” he said. “I don’t wish ill to anyone because of his ancestry. But I talk about Jewish-Zionist power because it is a real thing and it has consequences, and those consequences are harmful.” For Weber, some of those consequences are how the United States exercises power in the Middle East: unconditional support for Israel, the invasion of Iraq, the death of young American soldiers in unnecessary foreign adventures—all brought about in large part by the unique power of American Jews, with their dual loyalties and preternatural skill for organization.

Of course, the very idea that Jews have too much influence presupposes that there’s an appropriate amount of influence any ethnic or religious group should have; so as much as Weber would like to keep his views on culture separate from his views on foreign affairs and politics, his reasoning ineluctably links the two. I was glad to find, then, that he is refreshingly candid in his views on culture. These views were formed partly during his travels in Europe, during time he took off from college. It was an interregnum during which, according to one person close to Weber, he lived in Germany and was arrested for displaying a swastika—an episode the details of which Weber disputes. (That “is wrong, and I will leave it there,” he told me. “Were you arrested for something else, then?” I asked. “I’m not going to get into that,” he said.)

“When I was in Europe,” Weber said, “I was very struck that there are all sorts of different groups: Flemish, Dutch, Bretons, French. I thought it’s a good thing all these groups exist and the world would be worse off if they disappeared.” I pointed out that even if that kind of homogeneity were desirable, the United States has never had it—we’ve always been a country of immigrants. Weber conceded the point, but said that up until the time of World War II we had a common narrative, that we were “this English people that brings other people in to assimilate.”

The loss of that unifying story is in good measure, Weber says, Jews’ fault. Weber believes that even Jews who embraced this mainstream, Christian America often undermined it. “The Jewish role in American culture has served immensely to de-Christianize Christmas, that’s just one example,” he said. “And one of the most popular Christmas songs is ‘White Christmas,’ by Irving Berlin. Jewish songs about Christmas strip it almost of any religious character.” Another time, on the phone, Weber put his concern even more starkly: “Jewish leaders in America push for, work for, an America—it’s a gross generalization, I know—an America with no racial or cultural identity. Not just in this country, but around the world, including in Europe. That’s almost a truism.”

Jews succeed in this deracinating project because of their extraordinary constitution as a people. “It’s an ethnic community with a consciousness fortified by an unusual religion,” Weber told me. “There’s no other group in the world like that…. It’s a collective community narrative, or community sense,” one that holds even for Jews who are secular, ignorant of Torah, married to non-Jews, and never in synagogue. “Every Jew is aware that Jews are a chosen people. They may not understand what that means. But to pretend—I don’t want to say I know lots of Jews or I have lots of Jewish friends—but there’s a Jewish consciousness that says they’re a special people.”

Mark Weber had just described the plaintive, hopeful dream of every rabbi in America. While Jewish rabbis, scholars, and grandmothers across the land fret that Jews have no sense of common purpose, no Jewish learning, and no loyalty to the tribe, Weber was here to announce that Jews were purposive, unified, loyal, and engaged.

Weber’s voice was thick with admiration for Jews—and it was full of derision, or at least pity, for his old friend, gas-chamber skeptic Bradley Smith. “Smith was on Donahue in the ’80s, and he was on TV and radio a lot,” Weber told me. “[But] he’s increasingly obscure. The times are different…. When Bradley first started, that was a startling claim, that the gas chambers didn’t exist…. But Bradley Smith has been marginalized in a way he wasn’t in the ’80s and ’90s.” It was ironic, then, that Smith was getting a dose of new publicity thanks to Weber, whose rather histrionic break with Smith and his kind had made them all interesting again, at least to me.

But the elderly and kindly-looking Smith, when I met him at a California Starbucks, wanted to talk not about the Holocaust but mainly about his short-lived career as a self-published author. He has written a book-length monologue called The Man Who Saw His Own Liver, which includes mysterious koans like this: “Jews were in there too from the beginning with Christians and Nazis and the others working on the bomb. They were good at it too. Einstein, Oppenheimer. Teller. What distinguishes Jews primarily from the others is that there aren’t so many of them.” When I insisted on discussing the work for which he is most famous—a series of advertisements in campus newspapers, beginning in the 1990s, questioning various aspects of the received Holocaust story—Smith began attacking David Sweet, the president of Youngstown State University, in whose campus newspaper Smith had recently placed his advertisement asking for, “with proof, the name of one person who was killed in a gas chamber at Auschwitz.” In a letter to the Youngstown State newspaper in March, just days before I met with Smith, Sweet had quoted John Silber, the former president of Boston University, who in 2000 had called Smith a liar.

It incensed Smith that he had been called a liar—just as it incensed him that more non-Jewish professors at Northwestern didn’t stand up for their colleague Arthur Butz, an engineering professor who has argued the gas chambers did not exist; just as it incensed him that Mark Weber has allowed the Institute for Historical Review, once the premier organization in the world for Holocaust revisionism, to lapse into irrelevance. Back in 1993, Smith sided with Weber and others against Willis Carto, who according to Smith “wanted to change the nature of the Journal of Historical Review,” then the IHR’s major publication. “[The journal] was set up primarily to pursue revisionist arguments with regard to the gas-chamber story and the Holocaust,” Smith clarified for me, by phone, a few weeks after our meeting. But Carto, who was accused of hiding funds bequeathed to the IHR, and now runs a fringe publication called The Barnes Review, grew more interested in “nationalism and the race issues and conspiracy stuff,” Smith said. “I mean, he is interested in the Bilderbergers, and stuff like that, and that simply isn’t what those of us who wanted the journal wanted in it…. It was the center of the revisionist movement internationally, and we wanted it to remain that way. They published good stuff, carefully edited.”

Alas, The Journal of Historical Review has not been a priority of Mark Weber’s for a long time, and hence there was mistrust between Smith and Weber even before Weber’s eccentric turn away from the important stuff—gas-chamber questioning—toward the more abstract project of extreme anti-Zionist paranoia. After all, the journal “failed under Mark Weber,” Smith told me. “He hasn’t published it in 10 or 12 years. He’s not really a businessman, and he’s not an editor. It’s difficult for him to work with writers. Mark has a tendency to rewrite stuff, rather than edit stuff.

“I think he functions much better when he has a boss than when he is the boss,” Smith said. “He is not lazy at all, and he is very smart, and he’s a good speaker, and he’s a good writer, when he writes. He has everything. But he can’t run the business, and he can’t work with writers. He lost everybody.”

Smith and Weber each tried to be charitable about the other. For example, Weber had told me that while he didn’t approve of race-mixing, he’d never held it against Smith that Smith has a Mexican wife and a half-Mexican daughter. And Smith was careful not to traffic in the unsavory rumors spread by Weber’s enemies—for example, that he has a Jewish sister. The rumor “comes across my desk every two to three years,” Smith told me, “and I’ve never thought to ask him about it.”

But the rumor was true. Weber did have a Jewish sister. And Smith, currently married to a Mexican, once shared his life with a Jewish lover. I set out to find these women.

TOMORROW: Part IV of “The Denial Twist”: My Sister, My Lover: The Jewish women in the Holocaust deniers’ lives.

In reality, however, that caricature grossly misunderstands this anti-Semitic Holocaust skepticism, which is not a unified movement but a loose confederation of people who often have very little in common. The major American organization known for its theories of Holocaust denial, the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), received just under $250,000 in contributions for the 12 months ending on April 30, 2008, the last year for which figures are available, and that money could have come from only a handful of contributors; the Institute’s publishing arm had sales of $53,269—or, to give a generous estimate, about 5,000 books. The Institute’s Journal of Historical Review was last published in 2002, and the very next year a rival publication, The Revisionist, which had already folded once before, ceased publication. The world of Holocaust denial comprises one-man enterprises, fledgling organizations with tiny budgets and few followers, and amateurish magazines with the lifespans of fruit flies.

These enterprises seem poised to become even more fragile, thanks to an internecine feud that began early this year and threatens to cripple an already lame Holocaust-denial movement. In January, IHR director Mark Weber posted an article on his web site arguing that Holocaust “revisionism” has failed to gain traction in either history departments or with the public at large: “[T]here has been little success in convincing people that the familiar Holocaust story is defective,” Weber wrote. And, he continued, it was time to leave the Holocaust behind and focus on Jewish malevolence today: “Jewish-Zionist power is a palpable reality with harmful consequences for America, the Middle East, and the entire global community. In my view, and as I have repeatedly emphasized, the task of exposing and countering this power is a crucially important one. In that effort, Holocaust revisionism cannot play a central role.”

Soon after Weber’s statements became public, his onetime friend and colleague, 79-year-old Bradley Smith, was quick to denounce his former fellow traveler. “There are those who feel he has … betrayed the revisionist movement,” Smith told the Forward.

Holocaust deniers are a touchy bunch, prone to infighting, but the war of words between Weber and Smith, two old allies, was something special; a battle had been joined in the heart of the American Holocaust-denial movement.  I was intrigued by Weber, this man who claimed to be leaving Holocaust revisionism behind. It was easy enough to judge him just an anti-Semite at war with other anti-Semites. If anything, Weber’s shift to anti-Zionism only confirmed his anti-Semitism; after all, if he were just a disinterested, objective historian, then having dropped the historical question of the Holocaust he’d begin a study of, say, the British raj or the history of Hawaiian agriculture. That he continued to be obsessed with the alleged lies and machinations of Jews seemed proof of an objective disorder.

But because I believe in redemption, and because Weber’s web site offered a curious mixture of anti-Semitic nonsense and mainstream news articles about Israel, and even articles from the Jewish press, I decided that it was worth trying to talk to Mark Weber. Maybe he was a new man. Or maybe he was trying to become one. And while I was at it, I figured, I might as well also try to talk to Smith.

Between February and May, I met in person and spoke multiple times on the telephone with both Smith, who lives in Mexico and whose cuddliness in person seems to mock his reputation as a dangerous extremist, and Weber, a 57-year-old native Oregonian who seems a good deal smarter than Smith but also a good deal less mirthful. These were men whose friendship was on the outs, and each was eager to emphasize his differences with the other. But they were also similar, in ways I did not expect. For example, both Weber and Smith seem to think of themselves as Enlightenment liberals: Smith fashions himself a free-speech absolutist, whose Holocaust skepticism is merely about usefully breaking taboos, while Weber sees himself as a positivist, sifting evidence to determine what is true and what is not. Each man, too, seems to want to be loved and, I thought, a bit puzzled that it has not worked out that way.  Most surprising, both Weber and Smith loved Jews. They don’t love Jews generally, of course, but each man has a Jewish woman in his past with whom he has had a close relationship. Discovering these contradictions in the lives of Smith and Weber did not arouse in me any sympathy, and of course it doesn’t discredit their ideas, which are wrong on their own merits. But to meet these two men late in their careers in anti-Semitism, and to get to know them as they tangled with each other, helped illuminate what kind of man might choose to cross the borders of respectable opinion, and what inner needs might keep him exiled from his fellow man.

****

After I had secured the Weber interview, Smith, whose home in Mexico is just 100 miles from where Weber lives in Southern California, volunteered to drive across the border and meet me. For one airfare, I could meet two extremists.

Of the two men, Bradley Smith is much closer to the common perception of a classic Holocaust denier, singularly obsessed with disproving the existence of the Nazi machinery of death. But the elderly Smith was kindly enough to endure the traffic jam at the Mexican-American border and meet me at the Starbucks in San Clemente, California, the beach town where Richard Nixon began his exile. Smith had left a message on my mobile phone saying that he would wait for me in the parking lot, and that’s where I found him, snoozing behind the wheel of his pickup truck. I rapped on the window, and the aging radical opened his eyes with a start, remembered where he was, smiled at me, popped open his door, and lumbered out, smiling warmly. In his worn flannel shirt and jeans, a scraggly white beard dressing up his weather-beaten face, Smith looked like an old, sagacious cowhand, the kind of guy whose favorite story is about how he forgave the beloved bull who once got startled and kicked him in the head.

Once we were both seated at the coffee shop, I tried to ask Smith about possible flaws in the works of great Holocaust historians.

“You’ve read all the standard accounts,” I asked, “like Lucy Dawidowicz and Raul Hilberg?”

“Yeah,” Smith said, “that’s what I started with, I read Hilberg. I didn’t read them very closely. Because I’m not really interested in the history of the period.”

I was a little shocked. “I mean, you read Lucy Dawidowicz’s book on the period? You read David Wyman?”

“Not thoroughly,” Smith said. “Wyman, I didn’t read. He came a bit too late.”

I was astounded. “But that’s kind of amazing, right? Because here are these classic works of Holocaust literature that purport to show it all and you say you haven’t read them closely. So you have read Arthur Butz, who’s a nobody in the field, closely, but you haven’t read the great titans in the field closely?”  “You know what? I’m not interested in the story,” he replied. “Revisionists have written very detailed documents about the holes—”

“So what are you interested in?”

“In a free exchange of ideas.”

“But you aren’t interested in trying to find out which ideas are right?”

“Not particularly. You know what I’m really interested in? Every generation has its taboo, and I happen to be here with this taboo. I happen to be here with this one. And I can see how it’s exploited, and who benefits from the exploitation.”

And so it went for a while. As we got up to leave, Smith said that he had a gift for me. He reached into his bag and produced paperback copies of The Man Who Saw His Own Liver and his self-published memoir, Break His Bones: The Private Life of a Holocaust Revisionist. He assured me that they were both good reads.

TOMORROW: Part II of “The Denial Twist”: Meeting Mark Weber.