I am surmising that all of my readers are stuffed to the brim with Holiday turkey and other Christmas goodies, so I thought that some light fare might be in order from the Zundelsite.
How about UFOs? :)
Having watched some of the action in the news groups, I know that the Nizkorites are still throwing that old Zundel UFO book promotion red herring around, hoping that the innocent will swallow it. I have done a shortie explanation ZGram before, but I came across a more expansive one, and I thought that additional background color and information might not hurt at this point.
Enjoy! Here are some excerpts of what Ernst Zundel wrote about the UFO thing:
I started very early with my fascination and research into this UFO space flight area and, in fact, worked as a 16-17 years old teenager, while still in Germany, with a schoolmate on some miniature home-made rockets before I left home. I got briefly side-tracked by my forced emigration from Germany due to the re-arming of Germany and the impending military draft for people of my age. I believed in German atrocities and in the WW II genocide of the Jews and therefore wanted no part in renewed German militarism, and thus left Germany to avoid the draft.
The German Government under Adolf Hitler had done some important basic research in UFO matters, as I found out in my research into German secret weapons. As soon as I was settled in Canada, married and in a stable relationship I re-kindled my interest in matters of space - did a lot of reading, drawing, set up a file on anything to do with space matters and UFO's unexplained flying objects etc.
During that period I began to correspond with German aero-space engineer Rudolf Lusar from Munich who wrote on Nazi secret weapons and on German circular flying craft produced in WW II.
I soon realized that there was a whole community or segment of the population, both in French Quebec, in English North America incl. Canada, and in German Europe interested in these same topics. I began to talk about these topics on radio talk shows and immediately grasped that people - very intelligent independent thinkers, not just kooks or crazies - were fascinated by these topics. Many, in fact, were scientists, engineers, pilots, etc., or had a general science background.
I also found that people, who were willing to grant that there might be extra-terrestrial life, were usually suspicious of government because of the government's censorship and attempted suppression and debunking of UFO sightings - in the past and present.
I was going to do a booklet on the topic and commissioned model builders to build me prototype scale models of WW II German type circular flying craft. Then, as if by magic, I received a 100-page manuscript, written by a German named Mattern who had moved to Latin America (Chile) before the war, about German secret weapons, especially flying saucers.
This man had tried for 15 years to have that manuscript published, with no success. He sent me his second-to-last copy of the German language manuscript.
I read it, thought it had good and interesting elements in it, and became co-author of an expanded version of Mattern's collection, which I merged with my own research - files, photos and drawings, etc., - into a fully-fledged book manuscript.
I tried to get German publishers, nationalist publications etc. interested in the book. They all laughed and called me a nut, "ein Spinner." So I decided I was going to publish the manuscript myself, with a "?", question mark, behind the title.
"UFO's letzte Geheimwaffe des III. Reiches?" (UFO's Last Secret Weapon of the Third Reich?) was the title which my Chinese printer printed on an old press in his basement in Toronto. I sent this book, which cost me 75 cents to produce, to some supporters as gifts, putting a $4.95 sales price on it. That was in the early 1970s, and I was still a very young man.
By word-of-mouth, the book became a virtual instant bestseller!
I soon had to reprint it, and Germans in North America wanted an English language version for their friends. I produced a "Mickey Mouse" English version, far less deep and less explanatory of national-socialist ideas and philosophy than the German version- and ***it*** became a run away bestseller as well, and a hot topic in radio talk shows and on the lecture circuit in UFO circles in Canada and the USA.
I realized I had discovered a potent publicity tool with this topic - which would get me lots of free time on radio and T.V. shows, to expose other, more "politically incorrect" topics to vast audiences. Therefore I sent out hundreds of free books to radio and T.V. stations as a "come-on promo" - and I was overwhelmed by invitations to do radio talk shows, especially in America on that unusual topic!
Sometimes these shows lasted two, three, four, even five hours, and at the height of my UFO book promotion I did over 160 live radio interviews and guest talk shows in one year, with a listening audience of well over 350 million people!
Naturally, after each guest appearance I would sell more of the books we had discussed on the shows, and I had to print ever more editions. I also wrote and produced quickly a few more titles in the UFO series - in the Rocky I + II + III series vein, just like Hollywood did.
It was an all-around success! The listeners got to hear an entertaining show - and I slipped in lots and lots of "Revisions of history", always saying things such as "Why would the Nazis kill all those supposedly brilliant Jewish engineers and skilled Jewish craftsmen and laborers who are said to have built some of these secret weapons?"
I would talk about the disinfecting procedures to protect the valuable worker inmates in the Dora-Mittelwerke rocket underground assembly factories run by Werner von Braun's deputy Dr. Arthur Rudolph. I mentioned the medical facilities in the camps, the calorie count of the meals served etc. I also talked about operation Bernhard, where Jewish forgery experts produced absolutely perfect, undetectable fake British currency in concentration camp for the German war effort.
The UFO books themselves also had very important politically otherwise impossible-to-tell messages embedded within them, such as the National-Socialist Party program and Hitler's analysis of the Jewish question - matters the reading public seldom, if ever, gets to see.
All that - and I made a fine bundle of money!
The money I made from the UFO books I invested in publishing the booklets "Die Auschwitz-Lüge" - a translation of "The Auschwitz Lie", Dr. Austin App's booklet, "The Six Million Swindle" and "A Straight Look at the IIIrd Reich"; and, of course, later, "Did Six Million Really Die?" by Richard Harwood.
***Tens of thousands of these booklets were printed and distributed free of charge worldwide*** as advertisements, paid for by the profits coming from the successful UFO book series. By then I was getting so many requests and queries from people all over the world that I and one secretary could not handle the volume of correspondence!
That's why I had to switch to a monthly newsletter and activity report, which turned into today's "Germania" and "Power" Revisionist newsletters.
By now it was 1977-78, and the Hollywood television mini-series called "Holocaust", based on a novel by Gerald Greene, was broadcast, with devastating effects on German morale and German pride in German clubs all over North America and Europe - and I was furious at the chutzpah of the Hollywood propagandists to lie so massively about the German people's policies towards the Jews before and during WW II!
I decided to organize a worldwide counter-protest campaign, relying on my largely UFO based mailing lists contacts. And I was right! ***Over 90 %*** of these independent thinkers took to revisionism like a duck takes to water!
Money and help were pouring in towards my Holocaust revisionist work as a result!
We expanded and expanded - till my alarmed enemies had the Government of Canada temporarily suspend my postal mailing privileges by Government action!
Needless to say, I won that case in the end - after a tough, costly, and prolonged legal fight!
I realized, by then, that I was becoming a symbol and far more of a serious Holocaust revisionist than a UFO concept and book promoter, and that my seriousness as a Revisionist was being overshadowed and compromised by the UFO promoters image. I realized very clearly that the subject of revision of history was far more important to me and the world than the money to be made from UFO books.
Thus I quietly phased out the UFO promotion in favour of pure historical Revisionism. I have never regretted that decision. But from a marketing point of view, even my enemies have to concede that my UFO series was a brilliant and successful campaign! To this day, they are furious about it!
Thought for the Day:
"Ideas shape the course of history."
(John Maynard Keyes)