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Mermelstein for the emotional suffering they had caused him and all other Auschwitz survivors.
In 1990 his story was mad einto a TV-movie starring Leonard Nimoy.
After the initial defeat in 1981, Carto fired the director, William McCalden, and replaced
him with Tom Marcellus, formerly a field staff member for the Church of Scientology. In 1993
following an internal struggle over funding (including the disposition of a $15,000,000 bequest
from the granddaughter of Thomas Edison), Carto was ousted from the IHR. In 1995 Marcellus
left the institute, and Mark Weber, the editor of the Journal of Historical Review, took over as
director. He is currently its leading light, along with his associate, Greg Raven.
The IHR along with several other deniers have sought in recent years to become
respectable, and they tried to distance themselves from the extreme hate-mongers. One result of
this is their effort to produce professional-looking books and monographs complete with
footnotes, pictures, and bibliography. This is certainly the case with the guru of denier
historiography, the British self-taught historian David Irving, who has generated a long list of
books on World War 2, including biographies of Churchill, Rommel, Goering, and Goebbels,
accounts of the Nazi atomic program and the bombing of Dresden, and a two-volume work on
Hitler's war. In April 2000 he lost a celebrated court case in London in which he had sued
American writer Deborah Lipstadt, for labeling him a denier in her book, Denying the Holocaust.
Although Irving's books are full of references to unpublished letters and documents, many of
which he claimed to have discovered himself through his assiduous labors, scholars who have
looked at his works carefully have found them to be riddled with errors and inconsistencies.
An academic that gives some small measure of respectability to the movement is Arthur
R. Butz, a graduate of MIT and holder of a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and an
associate professor of electrical engineering at prestigious Northwestern University in Evanston,
Illinois. In 1976 he published a book entitled The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, which
attracted considerable press attention and was a great embarrassment to the institution. The
school's administration was under considerable pressure to fire Butz, but he was a tenured
faculty member and the risks of this becoming entangled in civil rights issues was too great.
Another luminary is Fred Leuchter, a so-called "execution engineer" living in Massachusetts
who made and sold execution equipment. He traveled to Auschwitz to see if he could find any
evidence that cyanide gas had been used in executions there. Of course, he didn't.