More in ‘Bradley Smith’

One point to which Mark Weber, one of the leading proponents of Holocaust revisionism in the country, often returned is that it’s impossible to know why people believe what they do. Weber seemed almost amused by his own choice of obsessions, as if he knew that his own path has been more random than not. I happen to agree. Maybe, I surmised, if he’d read Tolkien at a young age, he would have been a fantasy fan; maybe if he’d been born 10 years earlier, he would have got involved in the Goldwater campaign and ended up a mainstream conservative. Who knows?

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.”

In his long lifetime, James von Brunn—the 88-year-old who earlier this month allegedly shot and killed United States Holocaust Memorial Museum guard Stephen Johns—managed to embody every cliché about the Holocaust-denying anti-Semite: seething with hatred toward Jews, convinced that somehow they rig the money system, certain that there are multiple world-wide conspiracies afoot. And if ...