Updated: November 2003.
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This file deals with a thesis that many obscure forces have tried to annihilate. The title is: The Fate of Jews in German Hands: An Historical Enquiry into the Development and Significance of Holocaust Revisionism, written in 1993 by Joel S. A. Hayward, in New-Zealand. This is by far the best neutral assessment of what Holocaust Revisionism is about.Several attempts have been made to display this work on the Web. It has been removed already three times under pressure exercised by lobbies more interested in mythology than in history . Now, two differents websites have taken up the gauntlet. You may find the thesis at two places under two different formats. We are in no way responsible for these sites:
Version html: <http://www.resistance.com/Hayward/hay1.html>
Version PDF: <http://free.hostdepartment.com/g/gengis/index.html>
Another scholarly work has been assailed by the same black forces, also in Canterbury: a MA thesis inHistory: Judgement on Nuremberg, by Steven Daniel Eaton. We have displayed this work, with a preface by Robert Countess, which says a lot about the circumstances of the publication, or no-publication, os this thesis.
"I have chosen, of course, not
to side with one school of thought against the other, but to
seek critical distance and get "both sides of the story".
Noting that many scholars involved in the Holocaust controversy
wear their moral values on their sleeves, I have consciously
attempted not to do so, and not to let my own values harden into
biases. Thus, I have contacted and on many occasions received
and used material from both anti-Revisionist and Revisionist
organizations and individuals. I make no apologies for this and
I am tiling to acknowledge on this page the assistance I received
from members of both camps, even from those whose views or actions
I personally find unpalatable."
We, revisionists, have never considered
Dr. Hayward as one of us, but only as someone who attempted to
build an objective point of view. Although he heavily relied on
Jewish sources and help from such unpalatable caracters such as
the Bnai Brith or Searchlight, he must have encountered
difficulties, since in his aknowledgements, he thanks "Margaret
and (the late) Allen Stott, who defended my right to intellectual
autonomy when immoderate and uninformed factions challenged it".
He did not elaborate on these "immoderate and uniformed factions",
but we know who they are.
He passed his thesis in 1993. The university and the "immoderate
factions" knew of this. Hayward went on with his studies
(he later got a PhD on other historical subjects). He took the
precaution of imposing a five-year ban on his thesis in the Library
of the University in Canterbury. We sent a spy there and the spy
reported: "It's in the catalogue. But when I tried to look
at it in the thesis section of the library, the supervisor came
rushing out to tell me there was a "no access without written
permission by the author" restriction on it -- which incidentally
comes off in January (5 years)". In the meantime, Hayward
had sent copies of his thesis to a number of revisionists. One
or possibly several persons got it in France.
Then we noticed an anonymous attempt to display the thesis on
Internet. That did not last very long. But long enough for us
to acquire the computerized version of the thesis. Then came a
second attempt to post it on the Web. We later learned, from a
letter sent by Mr Hayward to Greg Raven (15 dec. 1999) this:
"Thank you for notifying me about this ratbag's attempt to post my old MA thesis on the internet. I appreciate your kindness. Truly.
I succeeded in having the server company delete my thesis after this mysterious person posted it last time, and I will try this method again."
And for the second time, the thesis disappeared. During all these
years, we have remained passive. We did not approve of M. Hayward
trying to cover up the known fact that he had written the now
controversial thesis. But we did not press to display it, although
it was sleeping in our archives.
Then something new happened which gave a new dimension to this
small affair. In the pseudo-judiciary persecution of Frederick
Toben in Australia, he, Toben, sent a copy of the thesis (which
he had received from Hayward himself) to the so called "Human
Rights" Kangaroo Court. The Jewish persecutors started howling.
And lodged complaints in Canterbury. A world press campaign was
launched against Hayward who promptly got on his knees and licked
the shoes that were kicking him in the ass, an exercise that requires
a considerable spine flexibility. Just try.
First, let's see letters send by Hayward and Toben, in chronological
order:
From Dr Joel Hayward
Mr Mike Regan The Editor The New Zealand Jewish Chronicle P.O. Box 27156 Wellington, New Zealand
4 December 1998
Dear Sir,
Please permit me to address several inaccurate points made in the article "New Zealand Connection to Internet Incitement Case", published in the December/January issue of your fine newspaper.
First, Dr Fredrick Toben violated my rights as an author by presenting a copy of my 1993 Master of Arts thesis to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) in Sydney. He did so even after I had expressly forbidden him -- in writing on 17 October -- from reproducing or distributing my work in part or in whole.
Second, his reported claim that my thesis (written when I was still a Masters student anyway) is somehow "proof" that the Holocaust did not happen is preposterous, and may yet bring Dr Toben and I into litigation.
I state emphatically to your readers my rock-solid belief, based on extensive archival research and a thorough reading of published sources, that European Jewry did experience a ghastly holocaust. To be more specific, I believe European Jews suffered dreadfully during the 1930s and especially during World War II, when Germans and others maltreated, enslaved and murdered great numbers.
I can make no stronger statement regarding those events -- which I lament -- than one I made in the very thesis that Dr Toben illegally presented to the HREOC. On page 335 of that thesis I stated (and now I quote verbatim): "The present writer [that is, me] considers the Nazis' brutal and destructive treatment of Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, Communists, Jehovah's Witnesses, the physically and mentally ill and other such groups to be abhorrent. As a libertarian he also finds repugnant the Nazis' assault on freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press, and considers their persecution of political dissenters and academic and artistic free-thinkers worthy of the international condemnation it was and continues to be met with."
I strongly dislike much of what Dr Toben and others write about Jews in their newsletter. Even when I seek proper scholarly "distance" from my subjective feelings of unabashed warmth towards Jewish affairs, I still consider that material anti-Semitic, and I have told them this.
For example, on 21 September 1998, I wrote to Dr Toben in order to make my position clear. Part of my letter stated: "I am unhappy with the heavy focus on things Jewish in Issue No. 81 (October 1998), a focus so one-sided in its presentation of Jewish activities -- only negative activities get mentioned -- that I must conclude that the Adelaide Institute's editorial team possesses strong bias against Jews and wishes to present them to readers in a negative light." After identifying what I considered the anti-Semitic sections, I added: "I wish to register my unhappiness at this anti-Jewish focus in the strongest terms." I have no involvement in the ferocious debate between Holocaust Revisionists and their opponents. I find it distasteful and refuse to be drawn into it. As a scholar I am much too busy; as a person I am much too sensible.
I am sending a copy of this letter to Mr Jeremy Jones, Executive Vice-President, Executive Council of Australian Jewry. I hope these comments clarify my position.
Yours sincerely,
Dr Joel Stuart A. Hayward,
Lecturer, School of History, Philosophy and Politics Massey University, Palmerston North New Zealand
The author seems to forget that the fine
sentence he quotes from his page 335 were preceded by the following
sentences: "Finally, the gassing claim is irreconcilable
with the overwhelming weight of evidence on the nature of
official Nazi policy on the Jewish question. That policy, our
careful and unbiased reading of the evidence suggested, was
not one of total extermination, but was a brutal policy of
deportation and forced labour.
This departure from accepted opinion on the gas chambers does
not represent an ideological defence of one school of historical
thought on this issue against the other. Nor is it an attempt
to rehabilitate the Third Reich." (Our emphasis)
This prompted a reply from Toben:
From Fredrick Töben
Mr Mike Regan Editor The New Zealand Jewish Chronicle,
PO Box 27156, Wellington, New Zealand
5 February 2000
Dear Sir
My attention has been drawn to a letter written to you on 4 December 1998 by Dr Joel Hayward of Massey University, New Zealand. Permit me briefly to respond to Dr Hayward's assertion that I have violated his rights.
Dr Hayward sent me his original thesis, and he invited me (in writing) to use it in any way I liked. This permission to use his thesis was subsequently withdrawn -- but by that time I had made copies of the thesis and distributed it to our associates and various members of the media, including Mr Bernard Freedman of The Australian Jewish News, Canberra office. From other sources I have heard that Dr Hayward has done this in the past, i.e. first offered his thesis, then withdrawing it, and this since 1993! It is thus wrong to state that I made illegal use of his thesis.
In some extended email correspondence I indicated to Dr Hayward that I did not share his attitude as regards the five-year embargo on publishing his thesis as that infringes against the "publish or perish" argument, as well as violating the scientific ideal of having a free flow of information. I consider it an immoral stance -- especially for an academic.
Further, I have never claimed the thesis is "proof" that the Holocaust never happened. The term `holocaust' is much misused and I am now tending to move in the direction of J-C Pressac who avoids the term `Holocaust' and, instead, speaks of a "massive massacre". Jewish groups, in any case, speak of the `Shoah'. You, of course, know the tremendous pressure that Dr Hayward is under because he dared to state that there were no gassings -- extermination of European Jewry, and that what the Germans did was forcibly remove same. The current Irving-Lipstadt trial in London further accentuates the issues raised by Dr Hayward in his thesis.
My seven-month imprisonment, from 8 April to 11 November 1999, in Mannheim Prison, Germany, for allegedly `defaming the memory of the dead', and `inciting hatred', confirms that Dr Hayward's work would prevent a lot of suffering amongst those persons who have a moral conscience -- who value the search for truth in all matters above all else.
There simply is no proof that gassings occurred at Auschwitz concentration camp, or at any other such concentration camps. Unfortunately this truth cannot emerge because of the number of judicial murders perpetrated by the Allies at the end of the war. For example, the owner of the factory that produced the delousing agent, Zyklon-B, was hanged, as was Rudolf Höss, the Auschwitz camp commandant. Such judicial murders locked the Allies into perpetuating this story of extermination. Similarly, the murder of Eichmann did likewise. Today the imprisonment in Germany of individuals who dare to reject the `Holocaust dogma' merely reinforces the injustice of withholding Hayward's thesis from wider distribution. Adelaide Institute is on record as stating that were proof of any such gassings to emerge, then it would publish this proof. We are not defending a certain ideological position -- except truth, of course!
On a personal note, at no time in the attacks upon my person is it stated that I make this provision of `publishing proof of gassings' in my disseminating my professional opinion about the allegation that Germans systematically exterminated European Jewry in homicidal gas chambers. Perhaps you can enlighten me as to why this kind of `lying by omission' is taking place whenever anyone attacks our position in this `Holocaust' debate.
Most sincerely
Dr Fredrick Töben
Copy: Dr J Hayward, HREOC, The Nizkor Project.
Toben has been a target, for quite sometimes
now, of Jewish organizations trying to have somehow the Adelaide
Institute shut down. They have been trying their hand with this
bizarre Aussie institution, called Human Rights and Equal Opportunity
Commission (HREOC), which has the same ambiguous nature as the
platypus, looking like a mammal but laying eggs. This is a court,
but not a real one. It delivers sentences but they are not real
ones. It could be construed as a kind of preliminary of a real
court, although it looks like a real one. The Canadians have a
similar hybrid monster. But nobody else.
In the course of his dealing with that hermaphrodite body, Toben
send them a copy of Hayward's thesis, triggering an attempt to
destroy him through the destruction of Hayward. The former student,
then teaching military history in Massey, North Palmerston (New
Zealand), is instrumentalized by people who want to annihilate
any suspicion of an opposition. Understandably, Hayward does not
want anything from this. He sank into prosternation in the vain
hope of removing himself from the battle field. He does not know
that apologies and recantations are only reasons for more pressures
to extract from the unfortunate recanter more apologies and more
retractions. See the Catholic Church or the Japanese governement,
for that matter, who now routinely apologize for WWII on a weekly
basis. And soon every morning. To no avail.
The consequence has been a University inquiry to placate the demand
by Jewish organizations that Hayward should be stripped of his
MA title. This is a classical ploy from Jewish organizations against
people they perceive as enemies. Dr Stäglich, in Germany,
author of The Auschwitz Myth, was stripped of his legal
degree, with the help of a nazi-era law. Henri Roques, who has
earned a degree in Nantes studying Gerstein papers, was later
despoiled by the ministry on the basis of legal minutiae which
would warrant the annulment of 50% of the theses passed in France.
Leuchter was destroyed by the admission he had to make that he
was not registered as an engineer with the Massachusetts Commonwealth,
a situation shared by one engineer out of two in Massachusetts,
etc. Swiss lawyers at the Amaudruz trial (April 2000) alleged
that Faurisson's doctoral thesis has been cancelled, a pure invention.
Jean Plantin, who got his degrees in history in Lyon, had later
published revisionist works. After a violent press campaign, he
has been stripped, ten years later, of his diplomas. And two years
later, a higher court said it was impossible. What had been given
had been given. The action against Hayward comes into perfectly
usual pattern. First, call for denounciation, then strip him
from his diplomas, and then have him kicked out of his job. Destroy
his social being in order to destroy his intellectual authority.
Consider this denounciation:
WORLD REPORTNew Zealand Jews want thesis yanked SYDNEY, Australia (Jewish Telegraphic Agency) -- Jewish leaders in New Zealand are calling on a university to withdraw a 1993 master's thesis that questioned whether Jews were killed in gas chambers during the Holocaust.
The author of the thesis, Joel Hayward, recently sent a letter to the New Zealand Jewish Chronicle saying that his thesis' "conclusions are wrong" and that he now believes the Nazis did, indeed, kill 6 million Jews.
Jewish Bulletin News of Northern California
<http://www.jewishsf.com/bk000421/iworld.shtml>
Then action is taken:
University of Canterbury
(NZ)
[....]
Hayward thesis working party named
Sir Ian Barker, a retired High Court judge and former university
chancellor, will chair the Working Party investigating the master's
thesis of Dr Joel Hayward.
Sir Ian, of Auckland, who was a High Court judge for 21 years
and chancellor of the University of Auckland for eight years,
will be joined by Emeritus Professor Anne Trotter of Wellington
and Professor Stuart Macintyre of Melbourne.
Professor Trotter is a historian and former assistant vice-chancellor
(humanities) at the University of Otago. Professor Macintyre is
Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne and
Ernest Scott Professor of History.
At its 26 April meeting the University of Canterbury Council called
for an independent investigation of the circumstances in which
Dr Hayward was awarded a master of arts degree with first-class
honours in 1993 after submitting his thesis, entitled The Fate
of Jews in German Hands: An Historical Enquiry Into the Development
and Significance of Holocaust Revisionism.
The Working Party's terms of reference require it to investigate
widely and report to the University Council.
It will enquire into: how the topic/research proposal was approved
and whether it changed during the course of the candidate's work
on the thesis; the supervision of the thesis at Canterbury and
its examination both internally and externally; the embargoing
of the thesis in the University Library; any other relevant matters
of significance which arise.
The party will also consider the request of the New Zealand Jewish
Council that the University revoke the master's degree and substitute
it with a bachelor of arts (honours), and whether that request
is legally possible under the relevant legislation and
University statutes.
The Working Party will determine its own procedures and seek legal
advice as appropriate.
Sir Ian expects the investigation and report to take several months.
He has advised that the Working Party will make no public comment
on the matter but will present its report to the University Council.
There will be no further comment by the Council until the report
has been presented.
<http://www.canterbury.ac.nz/diary/2000/D000519.htm>
(extract) In May 2003, that part of "UC Diary" has
disappeared from the web (19 and 20 May 2000. Funny isn't
it ?
Toben tried to intervene. He came out with some kinds of excuses
for Hayward abject recantation. He insisted we should not pass
moral judgements on cowards. OK. Fair enough. We understand a
man has to earn his life; he has to feed his wife whom he thanked
in his thesis, because, he said, she made such a good coffee.
By Jeremy Jones, The Jewish Telegraphic Agency, <www.virtualjerusalem.com>, April 18th 2000
SYDNEY, Australia, April 18 (JTA) -- A case of Holocaust denial has heated up in New Zealand.
Jewish leaders in New Zealand are calling on Canterbury University to withdraw a 1993 master's thesis that questioned whether Jews were killed in gas chambers during the Holocaust.
The author of the thesis, Joel Hayward, recently sent a letter to the New Zealand Jewish Chronicle saying that his thesis' "conclusions are wrong" and that he now believes the Nazis did, indeed, kill 6 million Jews.
Hayward, who is now a senior lecturer in history at Massey University, received his masters' degree from the University of Canterbury in 1993 on the topic of Holocaust revisionism.
Hayward's thesis shared many of the conclusions of David Irving, who was labeled a Holocaust denier by a British judge after he lost the libel suit he had filed against American scholar Deborah Lipstadt.
The president of the New Zealand Jewish Council, David Zwartz, said he applauds Hayward's recent letter, but added "the University's reputation for scholarship is in question as long as it stands by this thesis, which has been repudiated even by its own author."
The official position of Canterbury University is that Hayward wrote an addendum to his work that "sets out the perspectives he now has on this sensitive issue and the validity of the references he used in the thesis."
But Professor Dov Bing, of the department of political science and public policy at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, said the addendum is misleading and does not go as far as the outright apology in Hayward's letter to the Jewish Chronicle.
"I believe the addendum should be removed and replaced with a clear and precise statement from Dr. Hayward," Bing said.
Australian Holocaust denier Fredrick Toben recently submitted Hayward's thesis in his defense against a complaint filed under the country's racial hatred laws. The complaint, filed by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, alleges that Holocaust denial has no academic acceptance.
Hayward subsequently wrote to the commissioner hearing the complaint, saying that Toben is an anti- Semite. Hayward added that he opposes Holocaust denial.
Let's now turn on Fredrick Toben's comments, and his greetings to Dr Joel Hayward and Mr Jeremy Jones:
Another recantation -- for
the sake of wife, children, and job. Like David Cole, Joel Hayward
joins the group of Jewish people who, for whatever reason, retract
their earlier clear-sighted and honest appraisal of the homicidal
gas chamber allegation.
Then again, who would deny Dr Hayward the right to change his
views, his honestly held professional opinion on the homicidal
gas chamber allegation? It is his right to change his mind on
this contentious issue. Changing ones opinion is the hallmark
of a thinking person, otherwise dogmatism charges can arise.
Anyone who decries Dr Hayward as a coward must remain fair
and just to him by according him natural justice -- giving
him a right of reply.
Hence it is now quite a legitimate task to demand of blond, blue-eyed
Dr Hayward that he provide us with his rationale, his reasoned
arguments upon which that change of opinion is based. What
information since 1993 has come Dr Hayward's way that causes
him to revise his 1993 views about the matter of the homicidal
gas chamber allegations, about the six million dead figure?
Adelaide Institute has on a number of occasions stated that should
new evidence emerge concerning the homicidal gas chamber allegations
at Auschwitz, and then we will unhesitatingly publish such information.
We would be foolish to suppress such information. Why should
we cling to our current professional opinion that there is no
evidence to support the hypothesis that homicidal gas chambers
existed at Auschwitz?
Dr Joel Hayward, I beg you to advise me on this matter. You have
behaved like a true gentleman, a scholarly revisionist -- a thinker
who revises his professional opinion upon gaining new information
from some source. Please advise me what is this information,
and is the source impeccable? Please also inform me whether you
have received further threats from Jewish groups about the safety
of yourself and that of your family. I do know that Mr Jones
has been corresponding with you. Has he pressured you into recanting?
This pressure may also appear in the form of a letter subtly
reminding you that your societal standing will be affected if
you do not recant.
An example of one such letter is in our possession, written by
Alan Goldberg, QC, -- now Justice Goldberg of the Federal Court.
Therein he attempts to `persuade' a former South Australian parliamentarian,
Mrs Joyce Steele, OBE, to disendorse John Bennett's book, Your
Rights. Mrs Steele did not fear Alan Goldberg's threats and
she continued, until her death, to endorse Bennett's book --
as did recently the Herald Sun in a review of Your
Rights 2000. But then pressure was put on the newspaper editor
and on the Law Society of Victoria who engaged the reviewer to
write the piece -- and bingo, a public apology is made for having
written and published a positive review of Bennett's work. The
days of applying subtle pressure, as in the past, are gone. It
is now outright censorship of views that do not subscribe to
the Holocaust dogma.
So, Dr Hayward, if you are the subject of such blackmail, rest
easy because others have received such treatment before you.
Be not afraid of these blackmailers -- all you can lose is your
life! Be courageous and firm and call their bluff because these
blackmailers deserve nothing but contempt because they stifle
free speech and they hate truth seeking. It is terribly liberating
to become fearless of those who tell lies and try to rape your
mind. In other words, these immoral persons deny others the right
to think and to speak freely, thereby robbing them of their humanity.
I charge Jeremy Jones with committing a crime against humanity
by stating publicly that he wishes "to stop them from functioning",
meaning anyone who does not share his world-view.
I am surprised to learn that Jeremy Jones, who has taken me to
the Human Rights Commission, quotes from Hayward's letter to
the commissioner. Did Jones receive a copy of it or did Hayward
write to Jones separately, advising him of having called me an
anti-Semite? To my knowledge Hayward has not personally advised
me that he considers me an anti-Semite.
In any case, the term anti-Semite is a nonsense word, especially
if used by those who claim to be Jewish but are not Semites themselves,
such as the Khazar-Jews; and isn't that about 80 per cent of
those who call themselves Jewish?
Being Jewish is a state of mind. I know non-Jews people who display
the so-called Jewish syndrome -- eternal victim hood! It is all
such an immature form of behaviour -- but the shekels jingle.
Jones fears the moral virtue of truth telling -- and that's very
sad. He is a man possessed by hatred for anyone who does not
agree with his worldview -- and he thus loves to mentally rape
those who do not submit to his morally unsound desires. This
is mental pedophilia! He sees hatred everywhere in the world,
yet he will not reflect on how his behaviour is a self-fulfilling
prophecy: he is projecting his inner hatreds upon the world,
and then seeks to justify this personal arousal within him by
blaming others for generating hatred. His mind-set is the wellspring
of hatred.
An Australian of Palestinian descent living in Adelaide informed
me that the problem with people who call themselves Jewish is
that after 50 years' residence in Israel, there has been no archaeological
proof that would sustain their claim to the Palestinian lands.
I heard similar comments during my Iranian visit in December
1999. I raise this as an issue and not as a statement of historical
fact. It would explain why softly spoken Jeremy Jones has that
urgency and fanaticism in his eyes -- the lost cause syndrome.
What hard road truth has to travel before emerging victoriously.
Reflecting on the lost Irving defamation action, why did Justice
Gray not visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau site where the remains
of the alleged Krema II gas chamber are still to be found? Is
it perhaps because the issue would then have been resolved in
Irving's favour?
Since 1996, when Jeremy Jones began to hound me by using a government
instrumentality, HREOC, I have asked why will Jeremy Jones not
talk with me, but rather talk about me through the courts? That's
legal persecution, surely. Mr Jones, if you are an upright man,
if you are serious and sincere about finding out the truth, if
you are an honest and courageous man who lacks fear and loves
the truth, then travel with me to Auschwitz-Krema II. Do not
be as foolish as Professor Lipstadt and exclaim, "There
is no debate about the homicidal gas chambers allegation".
In 1994 Professor Deborah Lipstadt advised her Australian audience
there is no debate about the Holocaust. She was plainly wrong.
Was she then telling a lie or was she merely ignorant of the
facts? Or did she indulge in a bit of wishful thinking, of believing
her own propaganda, then manipulating her environment to activate
the self-fulfilling prophecy? Do we now force her into the court
to recant this statement of hers, and admit that there is a roaring
debate about the Holocaust, and that she belongs to the group
that wishes to stifle debate on this contentious historical issue?
Oh, Mr Jones, one final message: I have no fear of anyone who
fears truth seeking and truth telling. Have you? Let's not be
euphemistic about this matter, Mr Jones. Those that oppose Adelaide
Institute, we have found, are either ignorant of the physical
facts of the debate, or they are outright liars. What are you
-- a liar or ignorant of the facts?
<http://www.adelaideinstitute.org/chapter_03/diary_2000_a.html>
This document also disappeared (May 2003) from the Web, under
the strong pressure of Jeremy Jones and his mafia of enemies of
freedom.
We have the REPORT
to the Council of The University of Canterbury of the Working
Party established to enquire into (...), in PDF format
(89 pages).
The campaign had been launched. For instance, we saw the following
articles, among many others:
University gave MA for thesis denying Holocaust David Cohen in Wellington New Zealand's University of Canterbury -- an institution that has long prided itself on its reputation for being more English than England -- has said this week that it regretted any distress caused by its award of a master's degree to a student for a thesis that denied the Holocaust.
But the university, based in Christchurch, has not accepted a call from a national Jewish group for the degree to be revoked.
Canterbury now has the dubious distinction of being the only known accredited university in the west to have conferred an MA for a thesis that even its author now admits was a work of Holocaust revisionism.
Although written in 1994, the contents of the thesis by Joel Hayward -- now a military historian at Massey University in New Zealand -- were embargoed for five years at the request of its author and with the support of his university supervisor.
The work might still be under wraps were it not for the recent libel case in London brought by David Irving against Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books. She had called him a "falsifier of history" for his claim that the Holocaust never happened.
Mr Hayward was invited but refused to testify for Mr Irving, whom the judge in the case described as an avowed anti-Semite. Irving lost.
Mr Irving had been impressed with the arguments in the thesis, which claimed that the idea of gas chambers being used to kill Jews during the second world war was propaganda invented by Britain, the US and Jewish lobbyists in the thrall of Zionist forces.
In his work, Mr Hayward argued that far fewer than 6m Jews, perhaps fewer than 1m, perished in concentration camps during the time of Nazi rule across most of Europe. He also said that Hitler could not be held personally responsible for any suffering experienced by European Jews. He has since apologised for the thesis, The Fate of Jews in German Hands: An Historical Inquiry into the Development and Significance of Holocaust Revisionism.
In a letter to a national newspaper last month, The New Zealand Jewish Chronicle, Mr Hayward expressed remorse over the "mistakes I made as an inexperienced student".
He was, he said, "inexperienced in the historian's craft and knew relatively little about the Holocaust and its complex historiography."
He has also asked the university to withdraw his thesis from its library, a request the institution turned down. He has not endorsed the call for his degree to be annulled.
Citing traditions of academic freedom and independent inquiry, officials have said their institution cannot, even if it were of a mind to, rescind Mr Hayward's degree.
Daryl Le Grew, the vice-chancellor, announced this week that an independent inquiry would be held into the situation and whether the request for the degree's annulment has any legal standing.
The Guardian, May 18, 2000
University won't revoke degree for student who queried the Holocaust David Cohen / Wellington
(June 5, 2000) The University of Canterbury, in Christchurch, New Zealand, has refused to revoke a master's degree it awarded to a student for a thesis that questions the existence of the Holocaust. Citing academic traditions of open scholarship, the institution has told Jewish community leaders it cannot rescind the degree earned six years ago by Joel Hayward, who argued that the notion of gas chambers being used to kill Jews during World War II was propaganda invented by the US and Britain.
In his work, Hayward also claimed that far fewer than 6 million Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps, and that, to the extent any collective suffering was experienced by European Jewry, Hitler had not been aware of its nature and could not be held personally responsible for it.
Hayward, who is now a lecturer in military history at Massey University on New Zealand's north island, recently expressed regret over the thesis, entitled "The Fate of Jews in German Hands: An Historical Enquiry into the Development and Significance of Holocaust Revisionism," which came into the public domain last year, following a five-year embargo made at the request of its writer. But bootleg copies of the thesis have long been in circulation among revisionist groups.
Hayward turned down an invitation to testify on behalf of David Irving in his London libel action against the American academic Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books, who had accused Irving of falsifying history by making virtually the same claims. Instead, in a letter to the New Zealand Jewish Chronicle, Hayward apologized for the "mistakes I made as an inexperienced student."
He has since asked the university to withdraw his thesis from circulation -- a request the institution also declined -- although he has stopped short of endorsing the call for his own degree to be revoked.
The appeal to cancel the degree was made by the New Zealand Jewish Council, a national organization whose spokesman has likened the local controversy to a well-publicized case in France, in 1986, where the University of Nantes awarded a doctorate for a thesis written along similar lines to Hayward's. The French Ministry of Higher Education subsequently revoked the degree.
That could not happen in New Zealand, where the eight publicly funded national universities are given full independence on scholastic issues.
The Jerusalem Report.com
<http://www.jrep.com/Reporter/Article-7.html>
Then some kind of pressure is threatened
on the academic authorities, as in the case of Serge Thion in
France.
Tuesday, May 23 2000 08:29 18 Iyar 5760 :
Inquiry into New Zealand master's thesis that denies Shoah By Mike Regan AUCKLAND, New Zealand (May 23) - A retired New Zealand High Court judge, Sir Ian Barker of Auckland, will head a working party to investigate a master's thesis which questions key assumptions about the Holocaust, following its disclosure in the New Zealand Jewish Chronicle and a letter to the chancellor of the University of Canterbury from the New Zealand Jewish Council (NZJC) requesting that the author of the thesis, Dr. Joel Hayward, be stripped of his degree. Criticism of Canterbury University was first raised in the Chronicle last month when it revealed the University had awarded first class honors to Hayward for his master's thesis entitled: "The Fate of the Jews in German Hands: An Historical Enquiry Into the Development and Significance of Holocaust Revisionism." Among the claims in the thesis were: that fewer than two million Jews died; that the gas chambers at Auschwitz didn't exist; that there were no plans for the mass murder of Jews; and that the discredited Leuchter Report was a valid piece of research. The working party will look into how Joel Hayward's 1993 master's thesis was awarded. It will enquire into how the topic and research proposal were approved and whether they changed during the course of his work on the thesis; the supervision of the thesis and its examination within Canterbury and externally; the embargoing of the thesis for more than five years, and any other relevant matters of significance which may arise. In completing the thesis, Hayward consulted widely among Holocaust revisionists, including David Irving, who at one time says he asked Hayward to write his biography. At the time of writing the thesis Hayward had written at least one article refuting the claims of the Leuchter Report. Nevertheless he still used its claims to back up his conclusions in the thesis. As soon as the thesis was accepted, Hayward imposed an embargo on it, allowing only those with his permission to see it. He gave copies of the thesis to Dr. Frederick Toben in Australia and to David Irving, but to no one else. It remained embargoed until last year, at which time he endeavored to have it revoked. The University refused and instead offered to allow him to write an addendum to be read with the thesis. The Chronicle published the story together with a letter of apology to the Jewish community of New Zealand from Hayward. The NZJC and the Chronicle both asked the University to revoke Hayward's master's degree. The working party will consider whether this request is legally possible. The University, through its chancellor, Dame Phyllis Guthardt and vice-chancellor Daryl Le Grew have expressed regret at the level of distress the thesis has had on the Jewish community and will work closely with the Jewish community to resolve the issue. Meanwhile the thesis remains in the University's library together with Hayward's addendum.
The New Zealand Jewish Chronicle, a monthly Zionist federation newspaper.
Regan is the editor: <[email protected]>
Then we had this:
By John Myers, Manawatu Evening Standard,
2 June 2000
Massey University's Dr Joel Hayward is stunned by a Victoria University seminar reviving his controversial student thesis on the Jewish Holocaust, now under academic inquiry.
The Victoria-based Centre for Strategic Studies is planning a seminar entitled `Denying -- Diminishing the Holocaust', on June 29.
It is promoting the seminar with a flyer questioning what Dr Hayward's beliefs about the Holocaust are now, but hasn't invited him or even advised him of the seminar. Organiser David Dickens said Dr Hayward was welcome to attend but it probably wouldn't be advisable.
Dr Hayward, clearly upset by events since his 1991/92 Canterbury University masters thesis was made public under embargo late last year, said he was reluctant to comment.
"How am I supposed to respond, with a Canterbury University working party (chaired by retired judge Sir Ian Barker) still working on my thesis?" he said. "I'm just trying to handle the whole situation with some dignity."
Dr Hayward said he believed the Victoria seminar was professionally inappropriate, given that the Canterbury academic working party was still about two months from its conclusion.
"I'm fully supportive of Canterbury's action and I sincerely hope the working party reaches a resolution that is satisfactory to all concerned parties, including the Jewish community," he said.
Dr Hayward is now senior lecturer in defence and strategic studies at Massey University.
The flyer promoting the seminar also asks what the controversy means for academic freedom, standards of academic supervision and whether Canterbury University's inquiry into these issues -- yet to conclude -- goes far enough.
Dr Hayward said it was remarkable that an academic competitor would hold such a seminar whilst an academic inquiry was still running.
"It's a remarkably inappropriate topic for a Centre of Strategic Studies that has a focus on defence issues and regional security," he said. "One has to wonder if there is personal or professional competition or rivalries involved. I think one should be questioning Dr Dickens' motives on this."
Dr Dickens said he believed the subject did relate to defence and strategy. "It is not designed to embarrass Joel," he said. "Joel just wants it to go away."
Dr Hayward's thesis has been subject of a range of claims, including denial and understatement of the Holocaust, since it was released by Canterbury University under embargo. The subject is described as a historiography of Holocaust revisionism.
By then the story had been propagated
around the world. We even had en echo in the Jewish monthly L'Arche
in Paris. (July-Aug. 2000): "L'étrange Joel Hayward"
by Henri Pasternak. The usual bullshit.
When the level of pressures reached a climax, Mr Hayward thought
his best interest would be served by a proper and formal act of
recantation. He choose to write a letter to the New Zealand
Jewish Chronicle (NZJC). He withdrew the main conclusions
of his thesis and said: "I stuffed up. The conclusions are
wrong". In the same letter he added that "without doubt,
around six million Jews perished during World War II. They were
murdered by Nazis and their allies. The perpetrators used a range
of methods, including gas chambers, shooting, physical exhaustion
and starvation, to carry out this monstrous crime."
On April 30, 2000, he sent an e-mail to Nizkor, asking the webmanager,
the gasoline station manager Mc Vay, to publish it:
I am therefore wondering whether you will
post the following letter on the Nizkor page "assigned"
to my name. This may help to present a fair picture.
Thank you. Sincerely,
Dr Joel Hayward
Palmerston North New Zealand
I would like to correct some of the statements
that Mr David Irving has made on his web site.
First, I have not "recanted" about the Holocaust because
of pressure from Jewish groups or individuals. I have instead
changed my mind about the conclusions I reached as a young MA
student in the very early 1990s.
I'm baffled by the insistence of some people that I "must
not" change my mind about the Holocaust debate. This attitude
is unscholarly. Why can I not change my mind? Must my ideas be
stuck in a 1991 rut?
I am obliged as a scholar to remain open to new evidence, to
reflect on old evidence, to test arguments, and to abandon those
that -- to me -- don't stack up. I have done this, and now know
from reflection and further reading that my old MA thesis contains
errors of fact and interpretation. I also know that those errors
have caused pain to some people in the New Zealand Jewish community,
especially to Holocaust survivors. So I have done what I sincerely
believe is the right thing: admitted my mistakes and said I'm
sorry.
My change of mind is genuine, and absolutely not the product
of coercion by Jewish groups or individuals or anyone else (even
though it's true I have experienced some resistance over the
years). I have simply come to realise that I made mistakes and
now want, on my own initiative, to say sorry so that my mistakes
don't continue to cause distress.
The responsibility to do so wouldn't normally accompany recognition
of errors in an unpublished masters thesis, but I am well aware
that my old work dealt with an unusually sensitive and contentious
topic.
I would also like to clarify one other issue: In a letter to
a Wehrmacht military history discussion group (which now appears
on Mr Irving's web site) I once offered support for the quality
of Mr Irving's MILITARY history scholarship, even though I simultaneously
stated that I did not agree with his political and racial views.
My research in German primary MILITARY documents (conducted in
several European archives) does indeed show me that Mr Irving
did not falsify those sources or employ them according to an
improper methodology. I have not seen any examples from the diaries
of Jodl, Milch, Richthofen, etc, where he falsified evidence.
But I have now seen enough evidence from the trial transcripts
to believe that Mr Irving has a problem with Jews and consequently
employed improper methodology when dealing with certain documents
relating to aspects of the Holocaust. I did not know this until
the intense scrutiny of his books during the recent trial made
it manifest.
was also offended by some of his statements and actions, and
consider the trial to be extremely informative. I learned many
new things about Mr Irving.
I still consider much of Mr Irving's work on Wehrmacht operational
history to be strong and useful (as even the judge observed),
and he deserves credit for books like Trail of the Fox. But I
accept the judge's verdict that Mr Irving's obvious difficulty
with Jewish issues distorted the way he sees and presents the
Holocaust.
The same letter was posted by Holocaust
moghul Harry Mazal on his Holocaust History Project website, dated
15 May 2000.
While recanting, the recanter denies he is recanting. That is
a classical joke. Of course, Mr Hayward may change his opinion.
Nobody would dispute his right to do so. What leaves the reader
uneasy is the total absence of any sort of argument on which Mr
Hayward would ground himself to explain why he changed his mind.
"..remain open to new evidence, to reflect on old evidence,
to test arguments, and to abandon those that -- to me -- don't
stack up. I have done this..." We know nothing of what Mr
Hayward did. While giving him the benefit of the doubt, we see
clearly that he is kneeling in front of the Jewish doctors of
the Faith. Besides intellectual clarity, what is absolutely lacking
here is a man's courage. But for this we are no judges.
The recantation was to swim upstream, as is shown in this extract
of a local newspaper:
"Here in New Zealand, however, a ***five-year embargo*** placed on the thesis with the support of Hayward's supervisor, Dr Vincent Orange, meant it did not reach the public domain until late last year. No explanation for the embargo has been given. Last December, Dr Hayward asked the university to pull the thesis from its libraries. The university refused, but allowed him to write an addendum in which he casts doubt on several of his key conclusions and the strength of his own scholarship." (http://www.fpp.co.uk/Online/00/05/Christchurch230500.html)
Note:
We have a rather well-informed article in The Press, a
newspaper of Christchurch (NZ) with some biographical datas, including
Haywards supposed part Jewish heritage, and reactions from the
NZ scholars. See "Making
History" by Sean Scanlon.
Here is the famous "addendum"
:
"The Fate of the Jews in German Hands: An historical Enquiry into the Development and Significance of Holocaust Revisionism"
In January 1993 I submitted to the University
of Canterbury the attached thesis for examination. I gained my
M.A., with First Class Honours in History, and subsequently completed
my Ph.D., also at Canterbury. I am now a Senior Lecturer in Defence
and Strategic Studies at Massey University in Palmerston North,
where I teach military history, strategy and operational art.
Looking back on my M.A. thesis with the benefits of hindsight,
and eight years of subsequent research, I can now see that it
contains several errors of fact and interpretation. Given that
the thesis deals with a controversial and highly sensitive topic,
and could potenttially cause pain to the Jewish Community, I would
like briefly to clarify several important points.
First, I remain convinced that any individual, regardless of ethnicity,
nationality and political persuasion, should be able to investigate
any aspect of the past, and to form and express conclusions based
upon his or her own understanding of the evidence, withoiut fear
of punishment or ridicule for deviating from accepted wisdom.
To deny an individual this right is out of keeping with the spirit
of our age.
Having said this, I can now see that I failed in my MA thesis
to place adequate analytical weight on the motivation of numerous
authors ont he Holocaust, even though some were obviously writing
with a view to attacking Jews and rehabilitating Nazis. Although
I don't believe that a writer's reason for writing, by itself,
disqualified his or her research from consideration, I should
have demonstrated far more clearly the antisemitic nature of much
of the revisionist literature. Extensive reading during the last
eight years, coupled with the extremely negative experiences I
have had with certain revisionists, strengthens my belief that
they care less about recreating the past in an honest, even-handed
and methodoligically sound way that they do about spreading antisemitic
and neo-Nazi conspiracies.
Second, subsequently published research by those far more skilled
in physics and chemistry than I am convince me that my original
assessment of the Leuchter Report of 1988 (dealing with the extant
remains of buildings in Auchwitz) was excessively complimentary.
The report contains serious errors of fact and judgement, several
of them significant enough to rob the report of its evidential
value.
Third, I have spent much time studying the reports of the Einsatzgruppen,
which I obtained on microfilm from the National Archives in Washington
a year or so after completing my MA, and miscellaneous other German
documents relating to the Holocaust, which I found in the German
Federal Archives in Koblenz and the German Military Archives in
Freidburg. I am now convinced that the scale of Einsatzgruppen
murders was greater than I had previously thought, and that many
regular Army officers -- including Erich von Manstein and other
illustrious generals -- knew murders were taking place. Some even
provided assistance.
Fourth, having reflected more on the nature and evidential value
of oral testimony, I now consider my criticism of certain sources
too harsh. It is true that many statements about homicidal gassings
based on the recollections of eyewitnesses contain incorrect dates,
embellishments or inaccurate estimates of size and quattity, but
this alone is not reason enough to disregard the sources or consider
them entirely unreliable as evidence. Just because someone got
the dimensions of a gas chamber wrong, or the number of people
herded into it, does not mean that the gassing did not take place.
I recently tested myself in various rooms in my own house, guessing
how big each room was and then measuring them with a tape measure.
I estimated my living room to be almost half as big again as it
actually was -- and this was done in a relaxed fashion, with no
fear for my life.
Finally, I regret writing on page 17 that "hundreds of thousands
of Jews (or even more) unnecessarily lost their lives during the
Second World War. Pogroms, random atrocities and the Einsatzgruppen
actions claimed the lives of tens of thousands. Routine brutality
claimed the lives of thousands more." These sentences may
leave readers with the impression that the Holoccaust "only"
caused a few hundred thousands death and was no worse -- and may
have been "better" (if such a word can be used for these
horrific events) -- than, say, the Turkish massacre of Armenians
during the Great War or the Hutu massacre of Tutsi during the
mid-1990s.
That statement was careless and inconsistent with other passages
of the thesis, which indicate that the Einsatzgruppen alone systematically
murdered many hundreds of thousands. Moreover, extensive reading
in subsequent years convinces me that, without doubt, millions
of Jews perished during World War II, murdered by Nazis and their
allies. The perpetrators used a range of methods, including gassing,
shooting, physical exhaustion, and stravation, to carry out this
monstrous crime.
My thesis represents an honest attempt on my part to make sense
of events I wanted to understand better. Yet I now regret working
on such a complex topic without sufficient knowledge and preparation,
and hope this brief addendum will prevent my work causing distress
to the Jewish community here in New Zealand and elsewhere or being
misused by individuals or groups with malevolent motives.
[signed] Dr Joel Hayward
Senior Lecturer in Defence and Strategic Studies
26 January 2000
<http://www.canterbury.ac.nz/hayward/Addendum.PDF>
More than three years, later, this addendum
is still available at the same address.
Our conclusion: As much as Mr Joel Hayward is entitled, in
year 2000, to change his opinions and disavow his 1993 work, the
public, for whom the thesis has been written and passed (giving
Mr Hayward a title), has a right to know its content. The university
logically refused to withdraw it from its shelves, meaning it
now belongs to the public domain. By rejecting to nothingness
his own work, Mr Hayward has made an orphan of it. This work belongs
to nobody anymore. We adopt it as surrogate parents in order to
reintroduce it into a commonwealth of reasonable and disputables
ideas.
We will follow our vocation and display the thesis on Internet,
acknowledging both that it is the work of Mr Hayward and that
he now disowns it.
The whole thesis is available in PDF format: <http://joelhayward.tripod.com/>
Now, [in 2001] you discover you cannot access those files. We are going to tell you why. First, look at this:
We have received an avalanche of emails in a matter of two hours.
----- Original Message -----
From: Richard J Green <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, March 19, 2001 8:04 PM
Subject: copyright infringement
To whom it may concern,
The page, http://aaargh.vho.org/engl/opponents/greenblue.html, is my intellectual property. By hosting this page, you are infringing upon my copyright. I am instructing you to remove this page within 5 days.
HALF an hour later
----- Original Message -----
From: John Drobnicki <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, March 19, 2001 8:33 PM
Subject: Copyright violation
To whom it may concern:
On your web site at
http://aaargh.vho.org/fran/inst/bib/NIZKORlibraries.html
you have reproduced an article written by me on the acquisition of Holocaust-denial materials by libraries. You may not know it, but that article was published in Public & Access Services Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1995): 5-40, and is copyrighted by myself and The Haworth Press <http://www.haworthpressinc.com/>. Permission for it to appear on the Nizkor Project server, and ONLY the Nizkor Project server, was granted by me. I have not consented for it to appear on your web site.
By hosting this page, you are infringing upon my copyright. Thus, I am instructing you to remove the file from your server within 5 days. Please note that I am not concerned with the rest of your site and am in no way trying to censor your expression; I only want my own copyrighted material to be removed. You may feel free to replace the file with a link to Nizkor's authorized version:
http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/bibliographies/biblio.20a
I thank you in advance for your cooperation.
John A. Drobnicki Associate Professor & Head of Reference Services York College, The City University of New York http://www.york.cuny.edu/~drobnick/ "I speak for no one but myself."
TWO hours later:
From: <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, March 19, 2001 9:49 PM
Subject: Copyright Violation
I have recently learned that VHO, like aaargh before it, is violating copyright material. You may be aware that aaargh was kicked off of its site for these violations. If VHO does not remove the below cited material, I will file the following complaint with Rietta.
Dear Sir/Ms
It has come to my attention that Rietta is the ISP for the website which has reproduced the following: http://aaargh.vho.org/fran/techniques/bodydisposal.html.
Please be advised that I am the author of this essay and never gave permission to have it reproduced. Therefore, my copyrights have been violated. I am a member of the California bar and unless this material is withdrawn I will file a lawsuit against Rietta. You should also be aware that aaargh was kicked off by its prior host for violating the copyrights of a number of authors, including myself. Other vilations are as follows.
http://aaargh.vho.org/engl/hay/hayindex.html
[incl. Hayward's entire thesis]
http://aaargh.vho.org/fran/inst/bib/NIZKORlibraries.html [my thesis]
http://aaargh.vho.org/engl/dl/dlindex.html [Dr. Lipstadt's entire
book] http://aaargh.vho.org/engl/opponents/greenblue.html [Rich
Green's essay] http://aaargh.vho.org/engl/opponents/PVNEichpaper.html
[article by Vidal-Naquet]
All of these authors will be filing a class action lawsuit unless the situation is remedied immediately.
Sincerely Yours
John C. Zimmerman
First of all, M. Zimmerman is a liar. He is inventing "that aaargh was kicked off of its site for these violation". This is pure nonsense. A company bought a company and the whole domain, of which aaargh was a part has been wiped out by the new owners. There was no explanation, no warning, no demand. We did not bother to ask for reasons. Pure and simple censorship.
Secondly, we do not believe in the existence of "intellectual property". We believe that educated people have to share their views and ideas with the rest of mankind, as ideas are a common property of the human race. "Intellectual property" is a legal concept, which, beyond its intrinsic absurdity, has its role in economy. It is recognized by courts and we know it. But consider how 30 million people have joyfully trampled the so-called intellectual property of musicians in appropriating music with Napster.
Thirdly, we have systematically introduced, on our website, views which are opposed, or highly critical of the views we support. We have conceived this website, more than 4 years ago, as an arena for a very important intellectual debate on several historical and political questions. We believe in the virtue of examination, discussion and comparison. We are rationalists and we believe that we may find common grounds with those whom we perceive and who perceive us as intellectual enemies. This is all the more necessary because we deal with events replete with human sufferings, violent deaths, and all sorts of horrors. Our adversaries are totally unable to follow us in the field of open discussion.
Four, we do not extract any material benefit from this activity as we sell nothing. Displaying a text from one of our adversaries costs us some energy and a small amount of money. There is no way to retrieve this energy and this money which are given away free to readers and people interested in trying to make up their mind about difficult subjects.
Five, we respect authorship and "intellectual property" by always attributing the responsability of texts to authors. We name them, and advise our readers to buy, whenever possible, the texts we display, from publishers and bookshops. We just received M. Zimmerman book and in our "April actualities" we'll advise readers to buy it. But this could escape Mr. Zimmerman who unfortunately cannot read French or German.
Six, there is here an obvious conspiracy. No chance that these messages could be sent independently. It seems Mr Zimmerman wants to build a case and is trying to get support in consorting with colleagues at Nizkor or similar sites, which are dedicated to the struggle against revisionists. These people made a habit, for this purpose, to distort revisionist views which they do not allow on their site. Mr. Zimmerman himself is grossly distorting revisionist views at almost every page of his writings. Our readers will appreciate this absolute lack of intellectuel honesty.
We are requested by Zimmerman and Cy to censor their own writing. We'll gladly comply. We have not found much, in Mr Zimmerman's writings, to be be proud of, and we understand that he wishes to restrain the number of his readers.
Seven, to limit ourselves to the case of Mr. Zimmerman, a Las Vegas lawyer, an amateurish historian, a linguistic invalid, who pretends to be the first (!!!) to refute revisionist arguments (he says in his jargon "denier" although we deny nothing, we maintain views different from his), we thought that we could spend some time and energy in entering a discussion with him and elaborating a critique of his writings to which our reader would take part in being able to visualize his contribution and our response to it.
Obviously, this perpective makes Mr. Zimmerman fret a lot. His attitude smacks very much of intellectual cowardice. It is his right to make a fool of himself in showing how frightened he is by the very debate he is conducting in his book for over 400 p.! We are not part of that bigotry.
Let's wipe away Zimmerman and his likes back to their own obscurity.
21 March 2001
Several days later, a message from Hayward:
----- Original Message -----
From: Dr Joel Hayward <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, April 03, 2001 6:41 AM
Subject: please remove my thesis from your site a.s.a.p
> I intend to send this if you do not remove my MA. Please
help me avoid
this.
> Sincerely,
> Joel Hayward
> ------------------------------
>
> Dear Rietta
>
> It has come to my attention that Rietta is the ISP for the
website
> which has reproduced the following:
> http://aaargh.vho.org/engl/hay/hayindex.html
> Please be advised that I am the author of this 1993 MA thesis
and
> never gave permission to have it reproduced and placed on
the
> internet. Therefore, my copyrights have been violated. You
should
> also be aware that aaargh was kicked off its prior website
by its
> host for violating the copyrights of a number of authors,
including
> myself.
> I will file a copyright infringement lawsuit unless immediate
action
> is taken against this website.
> Sincerely
> Joel Hayward
> ----------------------------------------
> Dr Joel Hayward,
> Senior Lecturer in
> Defence and Strategic Studies,
> School of History, Philosophy and Politics,
> Massey University,
> Private Bag 11-222,
> Palmerston North,
> New Zealand
>
> Tel.: NZ 06 350 4234
> Fax: NZ 06 350 5662
> Email: [email protected]
> ----------------------------------------
>
It is obvious that poor Hayward has been coaxed into writing this letter by no one else than Zimmerman. Where else could he find the stupid and false allegation saying that aaargh "was kicked off its prior website by its host for violating the copyrights of a number of authors, including myself" .This is purely and simply false. aaargh was kicked off as a small part of a wider domain, <abbc.com>, the content of which did not please the new owners of the IAP company. Zimmerman wrote on March 19: "aaargh was kicked off by its prior host for violating the copyrights of a number of authors, including myself. " Hayward excised the word "prior". That is the whole of his freedom.
Because of his recantation, Hayward is now a slave to these people. His thesis had been displayed since September 2000 and he did not mumble a word about it. When the nizkorites come into play, he is treated by them as horse manure and sheepishly copies what he is being told to mail us. It will never stop.
There is a strange contradiction here: On one hand, Hayward dimisses his thesis, rejects it into obscurity, but at the same time he is claiming authorship and ownership. Poor guy!
Post Script.
We have the content of Joel Hayward home page on the Net, which
seems to have disappeared, as of Sept. 2000:
Joel Hayward
Z.D.a.F., B.A., M.A. (Hons), Ph.D. Research Associate of the United
States Air Force Historical Research Agency
Hello there. My name is Joel Hayward, and I am a tenured academic (military historian and defence commentator) in the School of History, Philosophy and Politics at Massey University, which is a medium-sized university in Palmerston North, New Zealand. I am the Programme Coordinator for Massey's Defence and Strategic Studies programme. I am thus closely involved with the teaching and administration of a Master of Philosophy degree in Defence and Strategic Studies, which is a degree course taught jointly by my university and the New Zealand Army's Military Studies Institute. I have a particular interest in theoretical and conceptual aspects of modern warfare, including airpower and joint doctrines and the theoretical foundation of both Maneuver Warfare and the AirLand battle. One of my current research focuses is German military history, particularly that of the Third Reich. I have published widely on the Wehrmacht's operations during the Second World War. I am the author of a 400-page book, entitled Stopped at Stalingrad: the Luftwaffe and Hitler's Defeat in the East 1942-1943 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1998. ISBN: 0-7006-0876-1) and a number of academic articles that have appeared in The Journal of Strategic Studies, Airpower Journal, Air Power History, The Journal of Slavic Military Studies, New Zealand Army Journal, and other periodicals. I am currently working on Adolf Hitler as Military Commander, a scholarly study of Hitler's war leadership that Macmillan Press (U.K.) has contracted me to write. I also lecture at the New Zealand Army's Officer Cadet School (OCS) and the Royal New Zealand Air Force's Command and Staff College (RNZAF CSC).
My contact details are: Dr Joel Hayward,
Programme Coordinator, Defence and Strategic Studies,
School of History Philosophy and Politics, Massey University,
Private Bag 11-222, Palmerston North, New Zealand. Tel.: NZ (06)
350 4234. Mobile: 021 120 8625 Fax: NZ (06) 350 5662. Email:
[email protected] (Accurate Sept 1998)
Further Developments (2000-2003)
We took out the thesis. And Zimmerman's ridiculous article. His book revealed the depth of his intellectual ineptness. The poor guy had to pay people to read and translate German documents for him ! Let's forget his case, lost in the Nevada sands.
Unbeknownst to us, some people who had made copies of our site, displayed the Hayward thesis on the Web, with aaargh markings. These people seem to belong to some kind of "White Power" movement, which is the opposite of our political ideas. We did not interfere, as we believe in the free circulation of ideas.
Then another enterprise recently created a one-volume in-one-click version of Mr Hayward's thesis available from another website.
We also learned that Hayward has left Massey University to establish himself as a free lance writer. We do not doubt he took that decison on account of pressures inside of Massey. He just now publishes a book on Admiral Nelson, which we found advertised that way:
For God and Glory
Lord Nelson and His Way of War
by Joel HaywardNaval Institute Press, $32.95
Hardcover | 256 pages | 1591143519 | March 2003Taking a highly original, thematic approach to the study of Horatio Lord Nelson, this book analyzes the admiral's unique war-fighting style. Doctrine, tactics, and operational art are part of the analysis, as are Nelson's command and leadership abilities and his attitudes and beliefs. But the book's focus is on how all these elements combined to form the man whose infectious ethos spread through his entire force. It shows that Nelson's creative genius, excitable and intense personality, dramatic visage, and fervor for all things martial not only inspired courage and loyalty but so dazzled and enflamed the hearts and minds of his men that he reached near cult status in his lifetime.
As a professional military analyst who has devoted his career to researching, writing, and teaching about the tactics and operational art of warfare, the author draws on his own training and experience to view the admiral's war fighting from a vantage point not accessible to many of Nelson's leading biographers. Joel Hayward breaks free from the constraints of chronology to thematically explore in greater-than-usual depth and coherence the key aspects of Nelson's fighting style and to answer questions not previously raised about that style and its supporting ideas, including to what degree Nelson's style can be adopted by modern warriors. Nelson scholars and enthusiasts will consider the book to be a fine companion to the more traditional studies of the great admiral. The book will also appeal to students of warfare in general, especially those who focus on the Napoleonic period.
Joel Hayward was until recently a senior lecturer in defense and strategic studies at Massey University in New Zealand. Now a freelance defense analyst and author, he has written several books on military subjects as well as poetry and fiction.
On Hayward resignation from Massey, the abuses he received and the nervous breakdown caused by the wild campaign against him, see below, the first article published by Philip Matthews, in the NZ Listener, 2-8 November 2002.
While the hooligans of the Jewish organizations were working their telephones tryinhg to harass Hayward and kill him if possible, Jewish members of the Establishment were using other methods of harassment, such a the fanatical Dov Bing:
July 2000
Pseudo-history
New Zealand's Holocaust denial problemBy Dov Bing Holocaust Denial, which refers to itself as Holocaust Revisionism, is not history at all. It is one of the most notable forms of antisemitic propaganda to develop in the post-war period.
Holocaust deniers like David Irving, Frederick Toben, Roger (???) Faurisson and Mark Weber have tried to give the movement academic respectability. Universities have generally been very vigilant not to associate their institutions with Holocaust deniers. Universities in Australia, the United States and Europe are very much aware that association with Holocaust deniers could be deadly for their reputation.
Anti-racism protesters at the University of Waikato
It must have come as a surprise to many observers therefore that two cases of Holocaust denial have recently been uncovered at New Zealand universities, prompting protests on campus and attracting much media attention around the world.
The Hayward thesis
In February 1993, Canterbury University student Joel Hayward submitted a Master's thesis entitled: 'An Historical Enquiry into the Development and Significance of Holocaust Revisionism'. The thesis was accepted for examination by the Chief Superviser, Associate Professor Vincent Orange of Canterbury University's History Department. The External Examiner was Professor John Jensen of Waikato University's History Department. Mr Hayward received First Class Honours for his Master's degree.
In the concluding chapter of his thesis, Hayward wrote: "A careful and impartial investigation of the available evidence pertaining to Nazi gas chambers reveals that even these apparently fall into the category of atrocity propaganda." His main argument is actually based on the discredited Leuchter Report, commissioned by Canadian Holocaust denier, Ernst Zundel, and written by an "engineer" later shown to have no formal qualifications whatsoever. Hayward argued that "Leuchter's unorthodox conclusions, which at first seem incredible, do appear to be supported by ample evidence."
The other conclusion in the Hayward thesis refers to the number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust. On page 336 of the thesis, he writes: "The total number of deaths is probably impossible to determine... the total would undoubtedly be more than one million and far less than the symbolic figure of six million." Elsewhere in the thesis, he was not so generous. On page 17 he suggests the figure to be "hundreds of thousands of Jews or even more".
After Hayward received his degree, the issue then slumbered for many years because the thesis remained embargoed in the Canterbury Library, at the author's request, until it was recently made public.
The April 2000 edition of the New Zealand Jewish Chronicle (NZJC) contained five items on the Hayward thesis. The media took up the story both in New Zealand and abroad. In a letter to the NZJC of April of this year, Dr Hayward (now a Senior Lecturer in Defence and Strategic Studies at Massey University) withdrew the main conclusions of his thesis and says: "I stuffed up. The conclusions are wrong". In the same letter he now states that "without doubt, around six million Jews perished during World War II. They were murdered by Nazis and their allies. The perpetrators used a range of methods, including gas chambers, shooting, physical exhaustion and starvation, to carry out this monstrous crime."
The New Zealand Jewish Council while accepting Hayward's subsequent apology and withdrawal of his main conclusions, wondered how a Holocaust Denial thesis could have been accepted for examination and approved with a First Class Honours at Canterbury. The President of the New Zealand Jewish Council, David Zwartz, called upon the University to cancel the Master's degree awarded to Hayward on the basis of his thesis.
The response of Canterbury University was sensitive and swift. Its Chancellor Dame Phyllis Guthardt announced that the University Council would immediately set up an independent Committee of Enquiry. The Canterbury Vice Chancellor, Professor Daryl LeGrew, issued a public statement on 20 April indicating that "the university is dismayed at the level of upset to the Jewish community and regrets this deeply" and stressing, "We wish to work with the Jewish community to resolve these matters."
The Kupka doctorate
However, in the second prominent Holocaust Denial case, the University involved has been much less sensitive and forthcoming. The case is that of Hans Joachim Kupka, who is writing his doctoral thesis at the University of Waikato on the topic: 'The Use of German in New Zealand'. Mr Kupka makes it clear that as part of the thesis he intends to analyse the contribution of immigrants from Germany and Austria to New Zealand society. Many of these immigrants are, of course, Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe and/or Holocaust survivors. The topic would have been unexceptional were it not for the fact of Kupka's neo-Nazi activities.
Mr Kupka was one of the leading lights of the German Neo-Nazi 'Republikeiner Partei' before he emigrated to New Zealand in 1992. (This was known in the German Department of the University of Waikato.) In the 1980s Kupka was the regional party Chairman in lower Bavaria. In October 1987 he became Deputy Chairman for the Bavarian section of the Repuiblikeiner. Mr Kupka was also responsible for the 'Ordnungsdienst' of the Party, that is, their bodyguards and bouncers.
When Kupka arrived in New Zealand in 1992, he continued his neo-Nazi activities on the internet via several discussion groups. About 3000 pages of his correspondence published since 1996, mostly in German, have been archived. [By whom, may we ask ? ]
Six experts in the field of Holocaust history have classified Kupka's writings as antisemitic Holocaust Denial. These experts were Professor Konrad Kwiet of Sydney University; Emeritus Professor John Moses of the University of Queensland; Ms Luise Freudenberg, a Research Scholar of the University of Berlin; Professor Peter Longerich of the University of London; Professor A. Sywottek of the Institute of Contemporary History in Hamburg and Professor Marion de Ras of the University of Waikato.
Professor Kwiet stated : 'Herr Kupka presents himself - and is pleased with his role - as an intellectual who does not hide his antisemitism, Holocaust Denial and racism."
Ms Luise Freudenberg agreed: "It is absolutely clear to me that he is a neo-Nazi, a rabid antisemite and apparently denies that there was a Holocaust. ...Also, the tone and language he uses to write about Jews and about the Holocaust is openly antisemitic. He uses stereotypes and polemical expressions that seem to come straight from Goebbel's speeches... [Is not the use of "Goebbels speech" a stereotype in its own right ? ] The idea that a German Jewish refugee who escaped by the skin of his teeth and whose whole family was murdered should receive someone like Kupka in his home is more than disgusting."
Waikato academic Norman Franke and I raised the issue of Kupka's antisemitic and racist writings on the internet with Professor Knuferman, Kupka's sponsor in the University's German Department. Our request for a copy of Kupka's doctoral proposal was turned down by Knuferman and by the Chairperson of the Postgraduate Research Committee, despite the fact that Franke was a member of the German Department. Once we finally gained possession of the Kupka doctoral proposal via a different channel, it became clear to us why there had been so much secrecy. Kupka's doctoral proposal involved an analysis of the contribution of German and Austrian immigrants to New Zealand society which would involve Kupka in researching the contribution made by Jewish refugees and Holocaust survivors to New Zealand.
In order to respond to concerns about Kupka's antisemitism and racism put forward by myself and Franke, an ad hoc committee was set up by the Dean, Professor Peter Oettli. Oettli was himself not disinterested, having been involved in approving Kupka's entry into the German Department with inadequate academic qualifications, and approved that his research project be written in German and not be externally assessed, both exceptions to university policy. The Committee consisted of Knuferman, Oettli, both native German speakers, and Dr Ann McKim, who had no knowledge of that language. After examining only 150 pages of Kupka's internet writings, Knuferman and Oettli decided that the Kupka internet writings "could in no way be interpreted as being remotely rightwing."
Franke and I also wrote a 9-page letter to the University's Ethics Committee, alerting the University to the 'culturally unsafe' and academically problematic nature of the Kupka doctoral outline. We pointed out that no serious study about 'The Use of German in New Zealand' could be undertaken without extensive reference to the many Jewish refugees and Holocaust survivors from Nazi Europe; that such a study could hardly be undertaken without the co-operation of these refugees and their families; and that to allow this doctoral study to be undertaken without reference to the contribution of the Jewish immigrants, would make the study effectively 'Judenrein'. However, the convenors of the various University Committees refused to receive and table our correspondence. A request to the Faculty's Human Ethics Committee to receive a delegation of Jewish academics to discuss the issue was denied.
The University responded to correspondence from myself and other Jewish academics by referring part of the issue to the Human Rights Commission. The Legal Adviser of the Office of the Race Relations Conciliator wrote that it would be difficult to establish whether Kupka's internet writings were likely to excite hostility against the Jewish people. The University used the advice and argued that the Kupka case had to do with free speech. This was of course a red herring. The main issue which had been raised with the University was that of the inherent academic problems and "cultural safety" of the Kupka doctoral proposal.
When public pressure became too strong and the New Zealand Jewish Council entered the debate, asking for an independent public enquiry, Vice-Chancellor Professor Gould responded by arguing that it was his opinion that Kupka's writings did not constitute Holocaust Denial. The implication was that the six international experts had all been wrong in their assessments of Kupka's writings despite the fact that Professor Gould admitted that he was not an expert on the subject. The University -- albeit at this late stage -- has now agreed to deal with the core issue of 'cultural safety' and academic standards raised in our correspondence of 26 November.
In a recent newspaper article, Kupka states that "no interviews with Holocaust survivors are explicitly intended or necessary in the context of my research." If this approach has been approved by Prof. Knuferman and the Ethics Committee, it would mean that the University of Waikato has now purged the thesis of its Jewish content and made the matter worse.
It seems that Professor Gould and his senior academic staff (Knuferman and Oettli in particular) are unwilling to admit that they have made serious errors of judgement. The academic staff of the German Departments of Victoria, Massey and Canterbury Univerities have all written to the University of Waikato advising the Vice Chancellor that Kupka is not a suitable candidate to undertake doctoral research on the topic 'The Use of German in New Zealand'. The University of Waikato stands alone in its stubborn and steadfast support of the neo-Nazi Kupka.
Professor Knuferman has now resigned from the University and Kupka is apparently now keeping a low profile in Australia.
The requests for an independent inquiry by the New Zealand Jewish Council, the Waikato Jewish Association, and the University's own Law Faculty should now be honoured. Only an independent inquiry set up by the University Council can restore Waikato's tarnished reputation.
Professor Dov Bing teaches in the Department of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of Waikato.
<http://www.aijac.org.au/review/2000/257/pseudo.htm>
AIJAC= Asutralia/Israel & Jewish Affaires Council
One can admire the mafiosi methods of
the good Dov Bing. Obviously Kupka is an adventurer and most probably
a quack and a pseudo-medical crook. His biography, established
by a group of German private cops, if true, is telling.
<http://www.idgr.de/lexikon/bio/k/kupka-hj/kupka.html>
But one things is certain: the Zionist lobby took this opportunity to curb the university and to force Kupka to abject apologies, before he escaped and vanished.
See "Gould apology over New Zealand dispute", Jewish Chronicle, 18.10.02 et "Holocaust uproar student apologises", New Zealand Herald, 31.10.02 Those who are interested in the most fastidious details of that story could look at the Renwick Report:
The University of Waikato -- A
Review of the Case of Hans Joachim Kupka. The report of
a review carried out for the Vice Chancellor of the University
of Waikato by Bill Renwick:
<http://unipr.waikato.ac.nz/news/kupka_report/pdf/kupka-report.pdf>
In the meantime, a campaign developped about yet another thesis written by a friend of Mr Hayward, on the legal value of the Nuremberg Trials. This thesis was submitted in Canterbury in 1994 by Mr Daniel Eaton, a colleague of Mr Hayward. The offensive was led by none else than the big Goybasher, Dov Bing who teaches at Waikato. The press reported these news attempts at censorship:
Second Holocaust thesis under fire
By Amanda Warren24 October 2002 http://www.stuff.co.nz/ (This text cannot be found anymore on the website - 2003) Canterbury University is under fire after claims that a second thesis by one of its students is being used by the Holocaust denial movement. The thesis, by Steven Eaton, was supervised by Dr Vincent Orange who supervised Joel Hayward's controversial thesis questioning key aspects of the Holocaust. Dr Hayward's thesis sparked an international outcry and prompted the university to conduct an investigation into whether he should have been awarded a first-class masters degree.
Mr Eaton's thesis questions the validity of the Nuremberg trials, conducted by the Allies after World War Two, to punish German war criminals. His thesis concludes that "the Allies evidenced scant regard for the system known as international law", and their disposal of major Nazi war criminals was an "arbitrary exercise of power".
Mr Eaton, whose masters degree in history with first-class honours was confirmed in May 1994, argues that in 1945 no law existed to give the Allies the legal right to punish Nazis to the full extent. In his thesis acknowledgements, Mr Eaton thanked Dr Hayward for introducing him to the Nuremburg trials. "It is to him that I owe my enthusiasm for the subject," he wrote.An international law expert at the University of Canterbury, Alex Conte, said Mr Eaton's thesis was not the first to question the Nuremberg trials. Mr Eaton's thesis has been seized upon by a well-known Holocaust denier, the Rev Dr Robert Countess, who posted details of it on his website.
Waikato political science professor Dov Bing yesterday said it was one of the base tenets of the Holocaust denial movement that the Nuremberg trials had no standing in international law and that German war criminals were falsely convicted. Canterbury University could have prevented this latest controversy if it had identified other theses involving Holocaust denial, Professor Bing said. The university's Chancellor, Dame Phyllis Guthardt, said it would be a huge undertaking to re-examine old theses. "There is no suggestion of an investigation into the Eaton thesis. There is no evidence of fraud or dishonesty, there had been no criticism of it, and it had never been embargoed or withheld." She did not believe a shadow had been cast on other history theses written in the mid-1990s. Dr Orange did not return The Press' calls and Mr Eaton could not be found.
The whole pandemonium is explained in a preface
to this thesis, written by Robert Countess, a US academic
and a revisionist. Have a look at
this preface: it says a lot.
This thesis is a cold examination of legal aspects of Nuremberg.
Suffice is to say that, today, no court would work the way Nuremberg
did. The scandal would be too obvious. But in those times, everything
was permitted to the winners.
In a way, the Hayward Affaire was re-launched by a New Zealander
journalist, foremost interested in his own fame and glory. Philip
Matthews writes in The Listener, "New Zealand's premier
Radio and Television magazine". In October 2002, he wrote
the following article, which, interestingly, deals with the (supposed)
"refusal" by the University to "dishonor"
Hyward's thesis. Matthews is obviously the spokesman of the repressive
lobby:
SPECIAL REPORT: HOLOCAUST DENIAL AND THE NZ CONNECTION
For the serious historian, an endorsement from David Irving is worse than no endorsement at all. In April 2000, a high-profile libel case in the High Court in London confirmed to the wider public something that historians had long suspected: that, far from being an impartial chronicler of Hitler and the Third Reich, Irving had deliberately twisted and misrepresented historical records to support his dubious and harmful arguments. Those aligned with Irving call themselves 'Holocaust revisionists'. Others know them better as 'Holocaust deniers'.
'Holocaust deniers,' wrote the trial's expert witness, Cambridge University historian Richard Evans, in a report later that year, "are engaged in the politically motivated distortion of the past through the tendentious manipulation of evidence, in order to support their preconceived view that there were no gas chambers, no programme of extermination, no six million dead Jews."
What would those in the Jewish community say to those who wonder why denying a historical event should be such a big deal? "I would say, imagine what it's like to be Jewish and on the receiving end," says David Zwartz, president of the New Zealand Jewish Council. "In all the years that I've been involved with this sort of thing, the people who have spoken the loudest about the rights of freedom of speech have been the least likely to be affected by any abuses. They're not in a position of really understanding what that freedom of speech is doing to people."
Irving brought the case himself, suing Penguin over an otherwise obscure 1993 book, Denying the Holocaust, by American scholar Deborah Lipstadt. It proved to be his downfall. His requirement to pay Penguin's costs has bankrupted him. His Mayfair flat (estimated to be worth £750,000) was seized in May by "the enemy".
In late September, the Listener found him in Key West, Florida. It was late afternoon and he had just finished a game of tennis. He was considering a return to the UK - the often-bitten, never-shy Irving is threatening to take on Richard Evans over his account of the trial, published in the US as Lying About Hitler and in the UK as Telling Lies About Hitler.
Irving's conviction that he is in the right has only increased -- just as it does for many who believe themselves to be persecuted. And a leading piece of ammunition is a 1993 MA thesis awarded first-class honours by the History Department of Canterbury University. It is titled The Fate of the Jews in German Hands and it is by Joel Stuart Hayward. It builds towards the startling conclusion that "the weight of evidence supports the view that the Nazis did not systematically exterminate Jews in gas chambers". It cites Irving's notion that the Holocaust is "the biggest propaganda offensive that the human race has ever known". It repeats the deniers' fiction that 95 percent of 'orthodox' Holocaust historians are Jewish, and therefore have an agenda.
"Hayward wrote a very good thesis on revisionism," Irving says with confidence. "It was very fair and objective. He got the story virtually correct and I think that it still holds. In about 10 years, people will look back and say that he got the story as correct as anybody could, on the basis of the available evidence."
The Listener reached Hayward at his home in Palmerston North. Initially, he seemed rather less keen than Irving to hear from the media, although he did then talk for more than an hour off the record and also agreed to answer questions by email, supplying more than 3000 words of answers in one night.
Did he get the story "virtually correct", as Irving says? "I was not correct," he replies. "I made errors of fact and judgment. I still regret those and have apologised for them. I wish I could turn the clock back. I also absolutely hate the fact that these people wish to use my academic credibility to bolster their work, which commonly has anti-Semitic objectives. I detest anti-Semitism and other forms of racism."
Irving: "Hayward came under very heavy attack from vested interests who have big financial interests involved." Does he think that Hayward only recanted under pressure and still believes in his conclusions in private? "I don't know what his private views are. All I know is what he wrote in his master's thesis. And I'm familiar with the books that he's written and his general reputation as a historian. And the fact that he's upset people with the money to throw around to cut him down to size just confirms to me that he's probably right."
German historian Christian Leitz, of Auckland University's History Department, believes that the academic credibility that Canterbury bestowed in Hayward was "a heaven-sent opportunity" for the likes of Irving. The deniers were not slow in exploiting it. Although Irving no longer hosts the thesis on his own website, he offers instructions on how to find it (anyone with basic Internet skills can find it in a minute). It is also hosted by other 'revisionist' sites and is still circulated by such Holocaust deniers as Adelaide-based Fredrick Toben and Robert Countess, in Alabama.
"We're powerless to do anything about it," Zwartz says. "Even if it is discredited, it's in circulation and probably will be for all time."
"Hayward has to confront that risk," Leitz says. "It is, after all, the only academic thesis that really deals with Holocaust denial in a rather dubious way that has been passed by an institution. You could argue that part of it is a summary of different crackpots around the world, but you can see how he gets drawn into it."
It's not as though Hayward wasn't warned. In January 1992, Lipstadt wrote to Hayward, who was then researching his thesis, that "I certainly hope you do not fall" into the trap of taking the deniers seriously. Hayward includes that comment in a footnote. Might that inclusion of that embarrassing quote have had a subconscious motivation? Hayward's attitude to the deniers over those years was marked by internal conflict and strange inconsistencies.
The official version of the Hayward story, as it broke in 2000, was that Hayward was, in 1992, a 28-year-old history student researching an MA under the supervision of military historian Dr Vincent Orange. Hayward claims that, due to his own inexperience, he fell for the arguments of Holocaust deniers, including Irving, but after he completed the thesis he had no further interest in them. He went on to write a PhD on the Nazi siege of Stalingrad, published as a book called Stopped at Stalingrad, and took up a position teaching at Massey University. He was young, he "stuffed up", he regrets it.
Other puzzling aspects of the Hayward story were explained as mere youthful eccentricities. Such as the fact that he added the Hebrew 'Joel' to his name by deed poll and, depending on who you talk to, claimed either Jewish parentage or more remote Jewish ancestry. And the fact that he formed a university group called Opposition to Anti-Semitism (OAS) and then fell out with it. And the fact that, after completing his thesis, he placed a five-year embargo on it -- a decision that has still gone unexplained by both Hayward and Orange.
Canterbury was also warned about the leanings of Hayward's thesis. A Jewish member of the OAS wrote to university authorities in 1992 with hard evidence of the attitudes that he was forming. The warning went unheeded. A transcript of an OAS meeting in 1992 reveals that Hayward recites nearly every tenet in the denier's book before the other, incredulous OAS members: there were no gas chambers, the Holocaust is a propaganda trick, and so on. He adds that his net project, his doctorate, will be the authorized biography of David Irving (both Irving and Hayward maintain to this day that they have never met or even spoken to each other). More alarmingly still, Hayward claims that he has also convinced Orange that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz and that Orange was so excited by the breakthrough that he proposed a public lecture based on Hayward's research. Was this Hayward's delusion? Possibly, but it's a fact that Orange awarded the thesis first-class honours and still stands by the high mark.
An article by Waikato University professor Dov Bing in the New Zealand Jewish Chronicle in early 2000 broke the news about this unbelievable thesis. [See below for a more recent article by Mr Dov Bing, a Zionist, i.e. an accomplice of the war criminals roving freely in Palestine.]
Hayward announced that he had attached an addendum, pointing out is mistakes and apologizing for them. Canterbury set up a working party that found fault with the system of supervision, flaws in the thesis and ethical issues in the way in which Hayward "undertook to provide copies of his thesis to at least two informants". The working party added that the thesis did not deserve the high mark that it received in fact, it should have been revised and resubmitted. But the university could not take the crucial final step and strip Hayward of the degree because there was no evidence of "dishonesty" and nor can the case be re-opened, the university says, unless there is new, credible evidence.
In other words, the working party found that Hayward did his best, but simply read the wrong books and talked to the wrong people. It was an honest mistake. End of story. Hayward still holds to this. "Without trying to deny my own responsibility for some of the problems, I do believe that I was somewhat let down by the overall system at Canterbury," he writes. "The working party concluded that I was not at fault as a student, but that my university and department didn't watch out for me adequately The topic was too contentious for an inexperienced master's student."
However, in the two years since the working party met, more information has emerged about Hayward that makes that naivety look less tenable.
Consider Hayward's position on Irving. To the media in 2000, Hayward said that he had always rated Irving highly as a military historian, but has been shocked to learn, as a result of the trial, of his anti-Semitic and racist prejudices (infamously, there was the rhyme that Irving taught his young daughter to recite: "I am a Baby Aryan/Not Jewish or Sectarian? I have no plans to marry an/ Ape or Rastafarian").
Hayward's public statements seem to support this: in the 1993 thesis, Hayward takes Irving seriously and finds no anti-Semitic attitudes. In a letter posted to a WWII online discussion group in 1998, he wrote that he couldn't find any serious flaws in Irving's methodology nor any examples of the "deliberate falsification of evidence", therefore dismissing books such as Lipstadt's as "weak and unpersuasive, reflecting the author's own biases". But here, unlike the thesis, Hayward starts to see doubts about Irving's racial attitudes, and the person whose biography he had longed to write is now "an unpalatable person".
He adds, however, that he would be happy to host Irving at Massey, if he lectured on Nazi war leadership, rather than the Holocaust or race policy. "Only because he is no specialist in them, not because of my personal feelings."
The Canterbury working party may have been convinced by this intellectual progress, but was apparently unaware that, in February 1991, Hayward published a piece in the New Zealand Jewish Chronicle that completely contradicted the thesis he was then researching. Hayward somehow acquired knowledge that he did not have until a decade later: Irving is a "Holocaust denier [who] openly admires the Nazi regime". In an emotional torrent, Hayward writes that Irving is the most "gifted" modern historian, yet he is also the one who he "despises" the most. Any attempt he makes at spreading his vile arguments must be opposed," he writes. Hayward is identified as the secretary of OAS. He even provides the illustration, which is his own drawing of "Irving at work" -- at a desk with a picture of Hitler on the wall, a Nazi flag and a Nazi uniform in the closet.
So, did Hayward write a piece for the Jewish Chronicle, in 1991 that identified Irving as an anti-Semite? "I don't know if I did or not," he replies. "But I did once write many articles for the Jewish Chronicle, so I may well have. Certainly, even as an undergraduate, I used to think that he disliked Judaism, Zionism and organised Jewry."
Really? A central argument in Hayward's thesis depends on the Holocaust deniers, including Irving, being free of anti-Semitism and therefore seeming objective, as Evans has noted. In 2000, Zwartz asked Evans to review Hayward's thesis. Evans was then fresh off the Irving trial and his report was damning, identifying biases, errors, superficialities: "He accepts the Holocaust deniers' arguments without taking into account the detailed criticisms that have been levelled at them; and he presents them as politically neutral scholars despite the fact that he has read, or consulted , work which proves them to be otherwise. This can hardly be described as a balanced approach."
Like other observers of the Hayward case, Evans was interested in the Jewish question. Besides, Hayward sometimes presenting himself as Jewish, the Jewish Chronicle identified the OAS as a "majority" Jewish group, and Hayward did not identify himself as a gentile -- most readers would have assumed that he was Jewish. Certainly, it was in Hayward's interest to seem Jewish. "The belief that Hayward was Jewish evidently played an important part in persuading [Orange] to accept the topic that Hayward proposed," Evans wrote. The anti-Irving vitriol may have been part of a disguise.
What of Hayward's claim that he had no further interest in the Holocaust deniers after completing the thesis? This also looks shaky. Hayward has said that he turned down an offer to speak at Toben's 'revisionist' conference in Adelaide in 1998, where his thesis was praised by Countess as "a noteworthy and courageous study that shows the seriousness of revisionist scholarship".
Irving claims that he invited Hayward to speak at his conference in the US in 2000, and that Hayward only turned him down because of the attention that his thesis attracted that year. Hayward, however, writes, "I have not been invited in recent years, and have no contact, even by email, with even one single revisionist. None of them even has my email address."
But further revelations about Hayward and Orange have emerged from within the deniers' own camp. Last year, Countess published an article about Hayward -- whom he calls 'My friend Stuart" - in a far-right historical journal. It was illustrated by a photo of Hayward firing a gun during a visit to Countess's property in Alabama. Countess adds that he introduced Hayward to two other prominent Holocaust deniers -- Mark Weber and David Cole -- and that Hayward presented Countess with a photocopy and CD of his thesis, Orange's examiner's report and another, more recent Canterbury thesis, by a history student named Stephen Daniel Eaton. This thesis, titled Judgment on Nuremberg, was a reconsideration of the Nuremberg war trials (it is a plank of Holocaust deniers that the confessions of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg are not reliable). That it was also supervised by Orange was enough for Countess to say, with obvious admiration, that Canterbury had nurtured a "favourable climate" for Holocaust denial.
How does Hayward remember Eaton's thesis? "I never read his thesis, do not know what it argued or what grade it received," he writes. "I was never his tutor, and I had no influence over his choice of topic or his eventual conclusions." Yet, in his acknowledgements, Eaton put it differently. "It was Joel Hayward who first introduced me to Nuremberg and it is to him that I owe my enthusiasm for the subject," Eaton wrote. "I also owe him thanks for his scrupulous proofreading and criticism of this text."
And how does Hayward remember that afternoon with Countess? Well, he happened to be in Alabama and Countess heard that he was around [Hayward does not explain how Countess knew he was there] and asked if he would like to meet the family of Jesse Owens. Hayward was thrilled at the opportunity. Along the way, they fired guns at Countess's place. Hayward claims never to have seen any photos, but he remembers vividly that "it was in a backyard, in midwinter with me wearing a multi-coloured ski jacket.
"I have fired many weapons and, as a defence studies academic, I always take any opportunity to learn about weaponry. What's wrong with that? I fired at a block of wood, not a person. And it wasn't at any paramilitary or far-right training camp. I'm surprised, though, that no one's accused me of being at Waco."
While at Massey University, Hayward taught modern German history. Lecture notes supplied to the Listener by a former student show that, in 1999, Hayward was teaching so-called 'orthodox' history and Holocaust denial as equally valid. This is the "false equivalence" -- giving valid and spurious arguments equal weight -- that Evans condemned in his review of the thesis.
It is also understood that Irving's book Hitler's War, which proposed the myth of Hitler not ordering the Holocaust, was on the reading list, along with Arthur Butz's notorious The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jews (Evans: "The Nuremberg trials were a frame-up in Butz's view, and the myth of the Holocaust was propagated after the war by the Jews for their own advantage"). When Dov Bing sought a copy of the reading list, he says, Hayward claimed variously to have lost it, not have one in his study at the time and that it was intellectual property. "Why wouldn't a respectable academic want to supply a copy of readings that was made available to 100 students each year?" Bing asks.
Even Hayward's post-thesis research has been seen by some to contain biases. In a review of Stopped at Stalingrad in the Times Literary Supplement in October 23, 1998, Omer Bartov, professor of history at Brown University, noted that "even today some historians remain under the spell of the German rhetoric of the period": Bartov was amazed that Hayward described both General Alfred Jodl, Hitler's subservient operations chief, and General Kurt Zeitzler, the army's Nazi chief of staff, as "honourable men", and accepted Field Marshall Erich von Manstein's assertion "that he was merely 'a professional soldier', while in fact he issued some of the most notorious racist orders of the war as early as 1941".
Hayward knows this review well. Two weeks after it appeared, he posted, on the same WWII online forum where, only days before, he had posted his praise of Irving and criticism of Lipstadt, an assessment of Bartov. "He comes from the viewpoint that any discussion of Germans at war should include strident condemnations of their Nazi atrocities, etc." Hayward wrote. What is this 'viewpoint'? Perhaps, Bing has wondered, Hayward means that Bartov is Jewish.
"I have never adored Hitler, and have never owned a bust or wall photos or plaques of him," Hayward writes, describing as "utter mischievous rubbish" rumours that he had photos of Hitler in his office at Massey near photos of himself in similar poses.
"I had a picture of me in Nuremberg, taken in 1994, as I did of me in Colmar and Strasbourg in France. I have traveled very widely, after all. The picture I have displayed most often in my office over the years was actually of me at Tel Arad in Israel. So, does this now prove I wish I were Moshe Dayan (a great general by the way)?
"Let me be clear: Hitler was a creep. He was a misanthropic, murderous tyrant who manipulated his nation into war and despicable criminal barbarism. He gets no praise from me whatsoever, even though, as a military strategist, I can recognise that he made some innovative and effective strategic decisions. I add that he also made some hopeless amateurish blunders."
Hayward resigned from Massey University in June [2002], without any fanfare. He has not gone on to any other institution. He says that he is living on his savings, developing his abilities as a writer of fiction and poetry (he submitted one, with his answers, about Jesse Owens) and enjoyed watching videos and Coronation Street and going for walks along the Manawatu River with his wife and two daughters. Although two years have passed since the attention of the media and the working party, he left Massey "to recover my shattered emotional health after suffering a nervous breakdown caused by acute stress and depression about this dreadful saga". In a Press story in 2000, he also alluded to a breakdown, and again to Auckland's University's Leitz last year. The reference usually comes with a sense of persecution."I received literally scores of abusive letters and threats, including death threats," he writes. "I must add that I received worse treatment, and had my freedom and privacy violated to a worse degree, than if I had committed an armed robbery.
"I also wanted to find a new career, one that would free me artistically and creatively. I no longer believe that all staff within New Zealand universities care about freedom of enquiry and expression. Many teachers encourage extreme political correctness and the conformity of ideas and they discourage free thinking. But that's also typical of wider Western society, isn't it? I'm a liberal democrat, so freedom is important to me. Maybe that's why I feel so sad about what I see as the decline of academic freedom in New Zealand. And of course I'm talking generally, not about my own painful circumstances."
For all the confusions and obfuscation in Hayward's account, it seems that the person who is really being protected by Canterbury's unwillingness to strip Hayward of his master's degree is Orange. He joined Canterbury's staff some 40 years ago and, now in his late sixties, will retire at the end of this year. For other academics, the Hayward saga has been a black mark in his career. It was Justice Gray at the Irving trial who said, "No objective, fair-minded historian would have serious cause to doubt that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz." It was Orange who did just that. [The fact is Orange is an established historian and Gray a little judge taking counsel only of himself...]
"The onus is on the supervisor to make sure that a young student, doing a contentious topic, doesn't get pulled in a certain direction," Leitz says. "In most institutions, this would have been the end of somebody's career. "I still feel that this is a case where everything that could go wrong did go wrong, in terms of choice of topic, choice of supervision, the individuals involved, the choice of external examiners."
After finding the thesis to be "tendentious, biased and dishonest", and having "no doubt" that it constituted Holocaust denial, Evans extended his criticism to the supervision: "No competent examiner anywhere would have passed it. More serious still, if anything, is the scandalous incompetent level of supervision."
All through 2000 and 2001, Orange repeatedly refused to comment about Hayward and maintained that position with the Listener. However, he changed his mind on the eve of publication and released a previously confidential letter written to Canterbury's chancellor on April 20, 2001 ("Hitler's birthday!" Orange notes). Here, Orange admits to letting Hayward down as a supervisor. "I now know, as a result of the most intense, protracted and (I am sorry to say) generally hostile scrutiny that any half-MA thesis has ever received, that he made some serious mistakes," he writes. "I also know that I failed to offer him adequate supervision during most of 1992, while I was on leave. And yet: how much of Joel's apprentice work has withstood that intense, protracted generally hostile scrutiny!"
Elsewhere in the 14-page letter, Orange refers, usually ominously, to "Mr Zwartz and his associates", whom he sees as "not 'men of probity' ". He describes Evans's report as hostile and often incorrect, which is a point of view not shared by most experts, including Leitz -- "Evans has an impeccable reputation," Leitz says. [Wrong. Evans is seen as an arrogant and ignorant mad dog by most scholars in Europe. ] Orange adds that, unlike the working party, he sees nothing improper in his friendship with Hayward. Ten years after the thesis, they remain close.
The person officially designated to speak for Canterbury is registrar Alan Hayward (who is not related to Joel), "I myself wouldn't use the word 'embarrassment', " he says, in regards to the university's image. Although the university did apologise in 2000, the working party proposed that the university could make further amends by sponsoring, for example, a Holocaust memorial lecture, "We haven't actually gone down that path, " Hayward says, although he believes that one new course reflects a heightened sensitivity. "There is a summer course being offered on Jewish-Muslim relations and the whole question of Israel and Palestine."
Not quite the same thing. "We thought that the university was not very serious about our concerns," says Zwartz. Like Zwartz and others Evans believes that the degree must be withdrawn -- only this would send a clear signal. Zwartz hopes that the formal replacement for recently departed vice-chancellor Daryl Le Grew -- due to be announced in the new year -- may be finally in a position to make such a move.
There is a precedent. Evans cites the case of Henri Roques, a protégé of French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, who had his 'revisionist' doctorate revoked in 1986 by the French Ministry of Higher Education. Evans's report concluded: "Allowing a work of Holocaust denial to appear with the imprimatur of a university gives it scholarly credibility. In the present case, this has also been exploited by anti-Semites and political extremists seeking to argue for the validity of Holocaust denial. If a degree is awarded to a candidate who is subsequently found to have plagiarized his or her work, or who has systematically violated the canons of scholarship which the degree is intended to certify and endorse, then it is reasonable to ask the university in question to withdraw recognition of the degree originally awarded. This indeed happened in the case of Henri Roques. It should happen in the case of Joel Hayward, too."
in New Zealand's premier Radio and Television magazine, Listener, 2-8 November 2002, but actually printed on Friday, 25 October 2002.
--------------
Now we see why a warning appeared on Irving's website in 2003:
READERS should be aware that the New Zealand journalist Philip Matthews who may contact them about Dr Hayward is working for the newspaper The Listener, and writing on behalf of a special interest group which is trying to destroy Dr Hayward's career.
We recorded some letters ritten in response to the Listener article, "In denial," November 2, 2002
Joel Hayward replies:
GUILT by association is a nasty tactic. Nonetheless, I'll swat that aside for a moment and address some of my 'obfuscation' alleged in 'In Denial' (November 2), which, by the way, contains nothing new, and certainly nothing not seen by the Working Party two years ago. But first let me make one thing clear: Vincent Orange (with whom I still have occasional email correspondence) is a warm and kind man -- a true gentleman -- and an outstanding military historian. He, too, has found the last two or three years difficult, I believe that, like me, he did his best to be honest and accurate all those years ago. He doesn't deserve this vilification.
Now, to the main claims. It would have been fair journalism to point out the following:
1. My meeting with Robert Countess took place nine or so years ago, when I was in Alabama on a prestigious scholarship with the US Air Force. Countess was then a minor figure in the Holocaust controversy, and I knew almost nothing about him. He offered to take me to meet the family of my athletics hero, Jesse Owens. I jumped at the offer (who wouldn't?), and Countess kept his word. My day at the Owens house is a wonderful memory. I even supplied the Listener with photographs of me with the Owens family as evidence.
2. I declined David Irving's request to testify for his defence at his 2000 trial in London, and I also turned down a similar request from a Canadian revisionist, Ernst Zündel, a few years earlier. I want no part in the debate.
3. As a gesture of goodwill to the concerned Jewish community, I gave my large and expensive collection of Third Reich books, sources and microfilms (including rare first editions of obscure German texts) to the Mazal Research Library in the US, a center that counters anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.
4. I received one bad review for my book Stopped at Stalingrad. The one that the Listener quoted from was the only bad review it received. All others, and the book was widely reviewed internationally, were glowing. The book is in its third printing and is considered the standard work on the Stalingrad airlift. It is used in many staff colleges and university defence studies courses as a set text.
5. In the years since I wrote my controversial thesis I have had around one million words published, yet not one sentence denies the Holocaust. I have several new books out soon, none of them on a remotely related topic. My favourite military commanders (my professional 'heroes', if you like) are Lord Nelson and the Duke of Wellington. They pre-dated the Nazis -- not one of whom features in my list of favourites -- by one-and-a-half centuries, and were 'good guys', not 'bad guys'.
I'm certainly not an extremist. I am an ordinary liberal and democratic New Zealander. How I came to attract more publicity two or three years ago than criminals and gang leaders is still beyond my comprehension. I have received worse treatment, and had my freedom and privacy violated to a worse degree, than my alleged 'crime' warrants. I did not rob a bank; I wrote a thesis. I regret that I hurt people, and have apologised often on my own initiative, but this character assassination has to stop. I have to be able to move on in life without further smears. I am not a 'story'; I am an average Kiwi man with a loved and loving family. We deserve the same privacy and freedom from hassles that every other citizen gets.
Dr Joel Hayward,
Then a reader from Palmerston North, New Zealand, apparently a student of Hayward:
IT IS with disgust that I read of the further smears and attacks levelled at Dr Joel Hayward, who was a senior lecturer at Massey University until he could no longer cope with the anguish he felt.
His truth-twisting opponents seem to want to portray him as responsible for, or involved in, almost every controversy regarding Jews in the country. They seem to hate him with undisguised ferocity. This reflects badly on the New Zealand Jewish Council.
I had the pleasure of being in Dr Hayward's stimulating, informative classes and have known him for several years. He is the best lecturer I have ever studied under. I can confirm his popularity among students, many of whom share my disgust at his treatment. They miss him at Massey and think the university suffered a great loss when he resigned. Dr Hayward is a helpful, honest and sensitive man. Even when the controversy over his thesis erupted a few years ago, and students could see that it was taking a toll on his health and nerves, he remained a dedicated and inspiring lecturer. His books and articles are highly regarded around the world.
Dr Hayward is certainly not a neo-Nazi, Holocaust denier, anti-Semite or right-winger. He has always demonstrated tolerance and cultural kindness in classes and in person. He deserves to be left alone to rebuild his life and career.
Kelly Badman,
Then the comic. This writer, Zimmerman, a lawyer of Las Vegas, of all places, (see above) has repeatedly tried to enlist Hayward in his self-appointed crusade against revisionnists on Internet. He is also the author of one of the most ridiculous anti-revisionist books.
I AM the author of a book debunking the claims of Holocaust deniers and a member of The Holocaust History Project, an organisation that fights Holocaust denial. I have read Dr Hayward's Masters thesis as well as the report issued by Canterbury University. I fully endorse the report's findings and agree with Dr Richard Evans' critique of the supervision, or lack thereof, that Hayward received. However, the article omitted two key points that I brought to the attention of its author, Philip Matthews, whom I contacted at the request of Dr Hayward. First, much to the consternation of Holocaust deniers, Dr Hayward has issued a public apology for his thesis. Second, Dr Hayward made a valuable contribution to the Project of documents dealing with the Nazi era. This material helps us to continue to fight against the lies and distortions of deniers.
Dr Hayward also assisted me in obtaining key information for a study I published refuting Pearl Harbour revisionism. He does not even accept Pearl Harbour conspiracy theories, much less the more mendacious claims of Holocaust deniers.
I have corresponded with Dr Hayward off an on over the past three years and know that he has been trying to sever his ties with the deniers, despite what the deniers themselves may be claiming. Like the Mafia, Holocaust deniers never like to let go -- a lesson that Dr Hayward has learnt the hard way.
A current prominent member of the Ku Klux Klan, as was a former highly respected justice of the Supreme Court, the highest court in the US. The Klan is a racist and terrorist organisation that has plagued the US for over 100 years. Both of these individuals regretted and apologised for their association and were able to make valuable contributions to American democracy. Surely if a US senator and Supreme Court justice can be allowed to live their lives in peace after denouncing the Klan, everyone can grant Dr Hayward the same consideration.
John C Zimmerman, University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Philip Matthews replies:
NOWHERE in the story is it suggested that Joel Hayward is "responsible for, or involved in, almost every controversy regarding Jews in the country". This is paranoid and persecutionist. I will leave it to the New Zealand Jewish Council to confirm whether or not they hate Hayward "with undisguised ferocity", but this comment seems to have the same thinking behind it.
It is unfortunate that the detail that Hayward met Robert Countess in Alabama in 1994 was omitted, but it doesn't change the fact that Hayward was circulating his thesis (and another student's) to Holocaust deniers within a period during which he has claimed to have had no contact with them. Nor am I convinced that "Countess was then a minor figure in the Holocaust controversy and [Hayward] knew almost nothing about him", given that Countess was acknowledged among the sources and experts in Hayward's thesis -- which was completed, remember, in 1993.
It's worth adding that Countess was so inspired by the theses that Hayward presented to him that he established a company -- Theses & Dissertations Press -- with the express intention of publishing both of them. That company' s website (tadp.org) says that "neither thesis was published for various reasons of logistics and constraints of time". However, the company has gone on to become one of the leading Holocaust denial presses. Hayward did not need to send the Listener photos of himself with the Owens family -- that visit was never doubted in the story. Regarding John Zimmerman's letter, it was clear that Hayward has publicly apologised. Zimmerman also endorses Richard Evans' thorough and incisive report on Hayward's thesis, although, in correspondence with me, he went further than simply blaming the supervisor, as he does above. "Evans was right on the money about the thesis," he wrote. "Having read the thesis I know it constitutes Holocaust denial."
Fredrick Töben comments:
WHEN the heat was on him, Dr Joel Hayward was quick to label me an antisemite, etc. and his reference to his poor health tended to neutralize my desire to fend off his attacks on my person. He even rang me up after my release from the German prison and expressed his concern for my wellbeing. I even stated publicly that Hayward had the right to change his mind, this being a normal revisionist characteristic. But I did demand of Hayward that morally he owes the Revisionists a detailed justification as to what caused him to change his mind, i.e. what new information was it that made him change his mind. This material has not been made public.
For the sake of completeness, I would like to state the following, something I have mentioned in my book: The pressure on Revisionists is tremendous, and Joel Hayward , among other things, did receive death-threats -- and it involved the Israeli embassy in Auckland. He therefore had to make his recantation appear as realistic as possible. Unfortunately my request that he detail the reasons on which he based his change-of-mind remains unanswered. But I can still empathise with him, that he loves his wife and children above all else. During 2000, while we spent time together in his office, every few minutes his wife would ring through to enquire how he was. Perhaps she thought that I had evil intentions upon her husband.
Professor Robert Faurisson made the pertinent comment about pressure. If Revisionists have to endure a lot of stress and pressure, think about the pressure, for example, the US president has to endure from the Zionist lobby. I think we are all realistic enough to know that this battle about getting the true story of the 'Holocaust' out into the wider world is a life and death struggle. It is not for the fainthearted. And a Revisionist who still has a wife and young children is perhaps foolish to risk all. I have been given a rather friendly reminder via our court system not to doubt the 'Holocaust' and not to question the details of the murder weapon. I am complying with that court order to the best of my ability. The most important thing is to lose one's fear of fear, but unfortunately we are moving closer and closer to what prevailed in the eastern European countries and in the former Soviet Union until the collapse: a general hush, a shroud of modesty and serenity, befitting those who live cautiously, pervaded socialist societies. Public offices were all guarded, something we did not see in western countries until recently.
So what is happening today is actually a transference of the fear factor that operated in the former communist countries onto the once vibrant democratic western world. Through their work, Revisionists are at the forefront of sensing this negative fear-driven development. Hayward himself clearly alludes to it in the Matthew interview where he addresses the loss of academic freedom.
Joel Hayward, like David Cole before him, has done his job, and we must respect his silence with the proviso that he does not attack Revisionists. For example, his comment about not attending the Toronto Zündel trial as an expert witness can be regarded from his view-point and also from the perspective as expressed by Professor Faurisson. The critical point of it all is this: Hayward's thesis still stands, as does Germar Rudolf's report. Legal and social sanctions have been imposed to discourage others from reading this material, but we all know that the Internet is our weapon of mass instruction. Individuals will make up their own minds, and dissent according to their personal sense of urgency that surrounds the "Holocaust'.
One final point, John C Zimmerman ( I always muse how many prominent Jews have such good German names!) claims the Mafia does not like to let go. I thought he was referring to the anti-Revisionists who will simply not let Hayward go. Revisionists have moved on, and some don't even look upon his work as important. But I would rather deal with the Mafia than with anti-Revisionists such as Zimmerman. Why? The Mafia has a code of honour, something the anti-Revisionists lack.
This article triggered opposition, among them two vehement letters by Australian Adelaide Institute members:
Adelaide Institute's New Zealand Associate, K R Bolton, writes the following letter to the NZ Listener
29 October 2002
Dear EditorThat there is still outrage about the Joel Hayward thesis several years on, Listener November 2, 2002, indicates the intolerance of those who have a vested interest in perpetuating war era propaganda. If the World War I allegation that the Germans bayoneted Belgian babies served the interests of Zionism and Israel we would no doubt also continue to be bombarded with that myth.
Dr Hayward's thesis, which I have read, amounts to a review and assessment of Holocaust revisionist literature and its development. It weighs the merits of revisionist literature, and on virtually every page finds errors with it. However, what has the Holocaust propagandists enraged is that Hayward also found some justification for the revisionist questioning of the many strange allegations relative to the Holocaust.
Where Dr Hayward errs is in his retraction appended to the thesis, in which he states that he subsequently found the Leuchter Report, the first forensic examination of the alleged Auschwitz gas chambers, was erroneous. The material he cites as repudiating Leuchter was known to him prior to his writing the thesis, as shown in some of his previous articles. Rather than being repudiated, Leuchter's findings have been replicated, chemical analysis showing that the alleged gas chambers at Auschwitz do not have sufficient traces of 'Prussian Blue' residue from Zyklon gas.
The allegations concerning mass gassings are as credible as the testimony and documents that accused the Germans of the Katyn massacre. I would ask, what of all the documents, testimony and confessions relating to the gassings supposed to have taken place at the camps in Germany and Austria, such as Dachau, which were finally conceded during the 1960s not to have taken place? Why are the same allegations regarding Auschwitz and other work camps in Eastern Europe considered any more credible?
Mr Zwartz of the Jewish Council pontificates about tthe hurt done to Jews when such oddities are questioned. What of the hurt done by this Blood Libel to the Germans, increasingly to other Europeans and even the Vatican, and of course to the Palestinians?
K R Bolton
Fredrick Töben also responds to the NZ Listener:
<[email protected]> 30 October 2002
Right of Reply to Philip Matthew's 'In Denial'Dear Editor
Permit me briefly to respond to your staff member's five page article in the Listener, November 2-8 November 2002.
1. After Hayward asked me to remove his thesis from our website, I did: <www.adelaideinstitute.org>
2. It is a pity that Philip Matthews did not even bother to ring me about this matter. The tone in which he references our 'revisionist' conference indicates his deep-set prejudice to open and free enquiry. Such a matter has a lot to do with mental maturity.
3. Matthews fails to point out that Justice Gray left an opening in his otherwise condemning judgment: he had not read the Rudolf Report and David Irving had failed to submit it. To date no-one has refuted the findings of The Rudolf Report that support the Leuchter Report's findings.
4. Putting all the hot air aside because talk is cheap, there is just one challenge that needs to be taken up, and Dr Robert Faurisson throws it out to the world. He invites anyone to show him the murder weapon, as is the sensible thing to do in any murder enquiry:
Show me or draw me the homicidal gas chambers of Auschwitz! To date this challenge has been met by verbal abuse and legal restraints, as is being suggested by Professor Dov Bing. Bing's authoritarian mindset is a shame to academia, and Hayward is right in lamenting the demise of free enquiry at New Zealand's universities.
Bing is a disgrace to the world academic community (as is Professor Evans) because as a Zionist he is someone who supports the apartheid-racist state of Israel. That in itself is a shame for which Bing should hang his head in shame.
5. Finally, a German historian, Fritjof Meyer, has written a long article in a publication wherein he claims that Auschwitz-Birkenau's, Krema II, was not a gas chamber, but that the gassings occurred at two farmhouses outside the perimeter of the concentration camp. Irving had expressed this view at his trial.
Of course, Dr Faurisson would vehemently disagree and claim that Irving is not a revisionist because he wants to have it both ways. Faurisson says you cannot say a woman is half pregnant, and so you cannot say "limited gassings took place" when there is no evidence to prove this claim that any gassings at all took place.
6. Professor Evans knows he is the liar and his dialectic tricks will help save him for a little longer, as will the legal protection he enjoys. But truth will out in time -- and Revisionists don't care about winning or losing battles. They seek clarification without threats of consequences. Revisionists work without any social protection because they embrace the factual truth of a matter, no matter how contentious. Revisionists do not fear death and are not intimidated because we only get one go at living on this earth!
Although I do not know Professor Orange, from his adopted stance I can guess he is a man of principles, and a man whose moral and intellectual courage and integrity remain intact and for that I salute him. He obviously does not suffer from a failure of moral nerve. And perhaps you ought to be congratulated for running the article.
Fredrick Töben
The story continues.
In May 2003, Thomas Fudge, who teaches Mediaeval history at Canterbury
wrote a long paper to sum up and explain the Hayward case. This
article was published in the University's periodical History
Now. Some 500 copies were printed. The morning after the publication,
hell broke out. We have this from the local press:
Holocaust scholar at heart of 'book burning' row A "book burning" scandal has erupted at Canterbury University over an article on controversial Holocaust scholar Joel Hayward. The decision to recall and destroy copies of the history department's journal History Now -- and dump editor Ian Campbell -- is dividing the academic community.
Canterbury lecturer Thomas Fudge, who wrote the offending article, has resigned in disgust and plans to leave at the end of the year. Dr Fudge said he could not remain at a university that suppressed academic freedom. "It made me a hypocrite trying to teach my students to think critically and ask the tough questions - all of the academic values that universities are about -- and here my department was saying, effectively, we're going to burn books."
The article revisits the storm that surrounded the 1993 masters thesis of former Canterbury student Joel Hayward, which questioned the validity of Holocaust history. Dr Fudge, who lectures on medieval religious dissent and witch-hunting, explored what for Dr Hayward became a career-ending controversy.
He revealed in the article that Dr Hayward had been harassed and received death threats against his children. Dr Hayward suffered an emotional breakdown and left his teaching post at Massey University in June last year. He now cannot get a job.
The Fate of Joel Hayward in New Zealand Hands: From Holocaust Historian to Holocaust? played on the title of his thesis, The Fate of Jews in German Hands.
The article appeared on May 6. Next morning, Professor Campbell was asked to appear before his editorial committee and history department head Peter Hempenstall. Professor Campbell said he was effectively pushed: "The fact is that board disapproved of my editorial decision and, as a result, I couldn't continue as editor."
An embargo was slapped on the journal and 500 copies recalled. Staff were later advised that copies of the offending journal had been destroyed on the authority of Professor Hempenstall. Another May edition of History Now was printed without the Fudge article and an editorial discussing truth and martyrdom.
On May 14, Dr Fudge defended his article at a special meeting of history department academics, calling the censorship "unconscionable". Last week, he confirmed to his students that he had resigned. Professor Hempenstall declined to speak, saying the matter had now become an employment issue between the university and Dr Fudge.The New Zealand Herald, 22 juillet 2003.
<http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID=3513941&thesection=news&thesubsection=general7-22-03>
Thus, two more scholars paid the blood price exacted by the forces of Darkness. A shorter version was finally made public in the New Zealand Herald, Wednesday, July 23, 2003 and Thursday 24. We contacted Thomas Fudge with a request for the full censored article and he obliged immediately by sending it without further ado. For more details se the complete article by Thomas Fudge. This is the most up-to-date information of the fate befallen on Joel Hayward. We knew it from the beginning: if you bow and apologize for perfectly honorable endeavors, they are going to kick you and smash you to death. No gratitude, no pardon, just revenge. They are not Christians and do not share the Christian values of forgiveness or pardon.
We believe that we are the only place where the Fudge paper is to be found in its entirety. Though we did not intend it. Some, in some quarters, had hoped that historian Fudge would disappear in the thin air. He had first hinted to such a an issue. But he decided to dig in on his heels and fight back
Lecturer warns he will stay at university to battle for academic freedom HISTORY lecturer Thomas Fudge last night warned that he may stay at Canterbury University to "battle out" his fight over academic freedom. Last night, the university's council dismissed his formal complaint over Vice-Chancellor Roy Sharp's handling of the furore over an article Dr Fudge wrote for the university journal, History Now.
Dr Fudge had threatened to resign after the university ordered the destruction of copies of the journal in May, but now says he may reverse his decision and stay. "If they think this is the end of it, I can assure the chancellor, the vice-chancellor and the council it's not," he said before giving a public lecture on the journal controversy in Christchurch last night. "Maybe ... I won't resign after all and will stay on to give them 30 years of grief."
Dr Fudge, yet to give formal notice of leaving at the end of the year, has consulted a lawyer about the handling of his complaint and will meet his lawyer again today to initiate legal action against the university. "I intend to pursue this," he said.The university's council, which also sought legal advice over the complaint, considers the matter closed. After meeting for more than an hour behind closed doors last night, council members unanimously reaffirmed their full confidence in Professor Sharp. Members considered the advice of the vice-chancellor's employment committee and resolved that circumstances did not reveal any action or failure to act by Professor Sharp that failed to protect, promote or enhance academic freedom.
They also resolved that the vice-chancellor's instruction to Dr Fudge that his lectures were not the place to air his private dispute with colleagues did not impinge on his freedom of expression. Council members also condemned the release of Dr Fudge's letter of complaint to the media as "most improper". Earlier in the meeting, Chancellor Robin Mann criticised The Press newspaper, saying its August 19 article about the complaint was irresponsible and possibly defamatory.
This week, senior academics from several universities took out a $1,200 advertisement containing 63 signatories from New Zealand and overseas. It accused Canterbury of acting improperly in endorsing a review of the thesis.The New Zealand Herald, 28 August 2003
The Petition was published on the 25 August, 2003, as a commercial ad in The Dominion. Here is the text:
In relation to the master's thesis of Joel Hayward at the University of Canterbury, we note the following events, of which the first five are detailed on the University's own website:
I . Joel Hayward was awarded a Masters degree by thesis, with first class honours, by the University of Canterbury in 1993, in accordance with the procedures that the University employed at the time.
2. It was subsequently argued by an external party that the degree should be revoked.
3. The University of Canterbury established a Working Party in 2000 to examine this claim.
4. The Working Party concluded that the thesis was not dishonest, and therefore could not be "amended, removed, downgraded or altered". It further concluded that the thesis was flawed and did not deserve the award of first class honors.
5. The University accepted these conclusions, apologised to those who were offended by the thesis, and stated that it did not support holocaust revisionism.
6. Dr Hayward resigned from his position at Massey University in 2002, apparently as a result of the ongoing hostility towards him arising from the previous events.
7. Recently, Dr Thomas Fudge of Canterbury's History Department wrote a review of these events, for inclusion in the University's journal 'History Now'. Although the journal was printed with this article, the Head of the University's History Department (Professor Peter Hempenstall) destroyed copies of the journal, with the concurrence of the University's Vice-Chancellor (Professor Roy Sharp). As a result of this action by the University, the editor (Associate Professor lan Campbell) has now left that position, and Dr Fudge has indicated his intention to resign from the University.
Our views on these events are as follows. Notwithstanding any personal misgivings or objections that individual signatories may have as to the content of the thesis, we believe that certain fundamental principles have been breached by the University. First. we accept that a University has both the right and the obligation to revoke any thesis on the grounds of proven dishonesty. However, in the event of it not revoking a thesis on those grounds, we believe that it is totally inappropriate for any university administrator or sponsored body to issue negative public judgements about it, or to apologise to anyone who may be offended by it. No student should be subject to a de facto second round of assessment as to the quality (as opposed to the honesty) of their thesis, particularly after having just been exonerated of the charge of dishonesty.
Secondly, we believe that the Working Party's actions in criticising the quality of the thesis. and the University's public reiteration of that, constitutes the very 'downgrade' that the Working Party asserted to be unwarranted. We consider it inconceivable that the University and the Working Party did not understand the contradiction involved here.
Thirdly, we do not believe that it is the business of any university administrator to issue public pronouncements upon any historical issue, that are unrelated to the University. This is a matter for individual academics in the relevant area, in the normal exercise of their professional duties.
Finally, whilst there may be a range of opinions concerning the University's action in destroying copies of 'History Now', we view he destruction of any published academic work with considerable concern. These concerns are not ameliorated by the University's earlier and clear breaches of the fundamental rights of a thesis student, of its own judgement that the thesis could not be downgraded, and of the proper boundary between academics and administrators in the issuing of public statements.
We further consider that the effect of the University's actions has been to send a clear signal to potential students and other researchers at the University as to the acceptable conclusions to be reached in a particular area of enquiry, and this is antithetical to the proper function of any university. Furthermore. the effect of the University's actions is likely to have contributed to the general climate of hostility towards Dr Hayward, and therefore to his subsequent resignation from Massey University.
These University actions are improper, and place an obligation upon the University of Canterbury to acknowledge its errors and to offer appropriate remedies to Dr Hayward.
Signatories
Martin Lally, Associate Professor of Finance, Victoria
University, PhD (Victoria University)
Glenn Boyle, Professor of Finance, University of Otago,
MA (Canterbury), PhD (University of Texas, Austin)
Beverley McNally, MBA (Henley). PhD student
Tim Beat, Senior Lecturer in Marketing, Victoria University,
DBA, PhD (Fdinbugh)
Benoit Julien, Assistant professor in Economics, University
of Miami, PhD (Western Ontario)
Vincent Orange, Reader in History (ret), Canterbury University,
PhD (Hull)
Stephen Brewster, Accountant, Ministry of Economic Development,
CA, BCA MBA (Victoria University). MTax student
Scott Chaput, Lecturer in Finance, University of0tago,
MBA (UIC). PhD (Oklahoma)
Robert Mann, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Studies (ret),
University ofAuckland, PhD (University of California. Berkeley)
Geoff Bertram, Senior Lecturer in Ecconomics, Victoria
University, D Phil (Oxford)
Bryce Wilkinson, Capital Economics, BSc Hons, MCom, PhD
(Canterbury)
Rodney Hide, Member of Padiament, MSc (Canterbury and Lincoln).
MSc (Montana State)
Richard Marriott, Managing Director, Altair Financial Consulting
Pty Ltd, formerly Senior Lecturer in Finance at Victoria University,
MCom, MBA, B.Eng (elec)
Alan Wilkinson, Company Director, BSc Hons, PhD (Canterbury)
Richard Martin, Lecturer in Economics, Victoria University,
PhD (Simon Fraser University)
Stephen Burnell, Senior Lecturer in Economics, Head of
School of Economics and Finance, Victoria University. PhD (Cambridge)
Claire Gardner, Lecturer in Accountancy, University of
Otago, MCom
Arie Brand, Associate Professor, Dept of Sociology and
Anthropology (ret), University of Newcastle (NSW), MA. PhD (Leiden)
Charles Corrado, Professor of Finance, University of Auckland,
PhD (University of Arizona)
Anna Carr, Lecturer in Tourism, University of Otago, Postgraduate
Diploma in Tourism Studies, PhD student
Bryan Sinclair, Strategic Adviser, LLB, BMS
Jerry Bowman, Professor of Finance, University of Auckland,
PhD (Stanford)
Michael Naylor, Lecturer in Finance, Massey University,
MSc (University ofLondon)
Matthew Ryan, Senior Lectureir in Economics, University
of Auckland, PhD (Yale)
Andrey Ivanov, Research Assistant, Dept of Economics, University
of Auckland, BCom Hons, PhD student
Roger Kerr, MA (Canterbury)
Rhema Vaithianathan, Lecturer in Economics, University
of Auckland, PhD (University of Auckland)
Stephen Poletti, Senior Tutor, Dept of Economics, University
of Auckland, PhD (University of Newcastle, England)
Maureen Coulter, Teacher, MA, PhD student in English and
French
Tony Chad, Musician/Poet/Editor
John Randal, Lecturer in Finance, Victoria University.
MSc PhD (Victoria University)
Katie Drake, Postgraduale Diploma in International Relations
and Security Studies, MA student
Andrea Bennett, Lecturer in Finance, Massey University,
BSc Hons (Canterbury), MBS Hons (Massey)
John Jensen, Professor in History (ret), University of
Waikato, MA, PhD (University of Pennsylvania)
Francis Jensen, BEd (University of Waikato)
Trevor Reeves, writer/publisher, Dunedin
Christopher Milne, BComm LLB (University of Otago), CA
Jeff Sluka, Associate Professor, Social Anthropology Programme,
Massey University, PhD (University of California, Berkeley)
Tania Hinchou Butcher, Poet, GradCert ResAn, BA, PGrad
Cert Def Strat Studs
Mary Beth Taylor, Language Education Consultant, MA (University
of Washington)
Rick Boebel, Senior Lecturer in Finance, University of
Otago, MBA (Chicago), PhD (University of North Carolina)
Blair Simpson, Student Teacher, BA (Massey University)
John Ross, Hon Research Fellow in English, Massey University,
MA (VUW), PhD (University of London)
Joseph Tanner, Engineer, MA in Philosophy
John Irvine, Poet, Writer and Editor, Coromandel
Adrian Phillips, Director, Kanuka Grove Educational Resource
Centre, Massey University
Carl Bradley, Masters student in Defence Studies, Massey
University
Emma Hamilton, BSLT, Masters student in Speech and Language
Therapy, University of Canterbury.
Doreen D'Cruz, Senior Lecturer in English and Media Studies,
Massey University, PhD (University of Michigan)
Brendan Judd, Engineer, BA Hons, MA (Massey University)
Ananish Chaudhuri, Senior Lecturer in Economics, University
of Auckland, PhD (Rutgers)
Roger Openshaw, Professor of Social and Policy Studies
in Education, Massey University College of Education, MA. D.Phil
(University of Waikato)
Cary Nederman, Professor of Political Science, Texas A&M
University, formerly lecturer in Political Science at Canterbury,
MA, PhD (York University, Canada)
James Corum, Professor of Comparative Military Studies,
School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, MA (Brown), M.LITT (Oxon),
PhD (Queen's University)
Simonne Walmsley, Legal Secretary, BA (History) student
Alan Papprill, Teacher, Auckland, BA, Dip TCh
Kris Vette, General Manager in the National Health Service,
UK, BSc, Dip Bus, Dip Bus. Admin, M.Phil (Massey University)
Lazar Drazeta, PhD (Massey University)
Garth Martin, Manager, Roturoa
Paul Dunmore, Associate Professor of Accounting, Victoria
University, BSc Hons, PhD MBA (McMaster University, Ontario)
Judith Lawrence, Copy Editor, formerly librarian at Massey
University. MA Hons in English (Massey University)
Tania Lamb, Counsellor, B.Ed, M.Phil, M.Managentent
Philip Meguire, Senior Lecturer in Economics, University
of Canterbury, MBA PhD (University of Chicago)
Petition Organiser: Martin Lally, Associate Professor, School of Economics and Finance, Victoria University of Wellington, PO Box 600, Wellington <[email protected]>. Further signatories are very welcome, and should if possible be communicated to me by email. Contributions to the cost of this advertisement are also welcome.
Paid advertisement published in The Dominion Post, around the 25 of August 2003, we believe. After publication, a hundred more scholars signed it. Ask Mr Lally.
Some days later, an exchange between Mr Lally, organizer of the Petition, and Mr Evans, pointman for the lobby, found its way on Irving website:
Thursday, August 28, 2003Dear Richard
Thanks for your response, which appears below. I appreciate that you are busy.
I note that you don't wish to answer the latest questions that I have posed. Of course, that is your privilege. You also note that I have not addressed any of the arguments that you put forward in response to my first round of questions (although strangely your email finishes with the contrary claim that all of the ground has been covered more than once). Your complaint is a fair one to raise, and it was my intention to deal with your arguments in due course. However, if you would prefer me to do that now, I am happy to do so. I would appreciate it if you framed your points in terms of questions that you wish me to respond to. If you wish, you can ask a set of questions or alternatively ask one question, wait on my response, then move to the next question (in the style of a cross examination).
At the end of all this (you will be the judge of that), I hope that you will then be willing to respond to my questions, but this is not essential. I am interested in your questions at least as much as I am in your answers, and I acknowledge the possibility that I am wrong in this matter.
Your email here implicitly poses at least one question. So, if you can forgive the presumption, I will answer that one here.
QUESTION 1: Should a university recognise a work of holocaust denial?
ANSWER 1: The word university here could be interpreted to mean a university administrator or an academic acting as an examiner on the thesis. I will consider both possibilities. First, regarding university administrators, I do not think that any university administrator should assert that certain propositions regarding the past are now settled, and must never again be questioned in a thesis. This would be true even if no new evidence had been unearthed, and therefore the debate was limited to reinterpretation of the existing evidence. Should new evidence be unearthed, it would be doubly remarkable for any university administrator to refuse to award a degree that presented and analysed that new information. To do so in the face of new information would itself constitute a case of denial.Turning now to the question of whether an academic examiner on a thesis should recognise a work of holocaust denial, my view is that they should read it and then reach a conclusion based upon that reading. I am not aware of any other method of assessing a thesis. If there are other recognised methodologies in assessing History theses, I would be grateful to be apprised of them.
I look forward to your next question or questions. Regards,
Martin Lally-------
Friday, 29 August 2003
Dear Martin,
Apologies for the delay in replying. My time over the last week has been fully taken up by correcting the proofs of both English and German editions of my next book, due out in October.
It's time to wrap this up, I think. As I said in my last email, I am not going to answer your latest questions because I think they are not only loaded but also beside the point, which is not procedural but substantive. Your additional questions are even more pedantically remote from the central issues of whether or not a university should recognise a work of Holocaust denial, or a work devoted to vindicating it. You yourself have not addressed any of the central arguments I put forward in response to your questions.
I note that Dr Hayward was given considerable space in the New Zealand Herald on Monday to attacking me, using the same selective and biased techniques that are so evident in his MA thesis. Lest anyone should take what he says seriously, let me make the following points.
* First, Hayward implies I am biased because I was paid for my work. On the Irving case I was paid the standard hourly rate that all expert witnesses are paid. Is Dr Hayward implying that no expert witnesses in any court cases can be trusted because they are paid for their work? As for my commission from the NZJC to report on Hayward's thesis, I undertook the work (about four working days) on the same basis as I would have done as an external examiner, and I asked for the usual token fee that an external examiner is paid. I did not want to be seen to be doing the work on a political basis, which no doubt I would have been accused of doing had I lent my services free of charge, but on a professional basis.
* Second, to repeat what I wrote in the NZH, the Working Party did not say I was highly partisan - this is pure invention on Hayward's part - but accepted my criticisms of his thesis as resting on a strong scholarly foundation.
* Thirdly, Hayward says I applied excessively high standards in judging his thesis. This is not so. Any thesis at any level, even an undergraduate dissertation, has to conform to basic standards of scholarship: it has to master the relevant secondary literature and it has to deal with its topic in a balanced, obje ctive and thorough manner. Hayward's thesis failed on all these counts.
* Fourthly, I did point out that the topic Hayward covered was far too large for an MA thesis, and the thesis itself was far too long and tried to cover far more ground than was possible in the time available. This is the fault of Canterbury University, whose then regulations let him down. But it does not excuse the systematic tendentiousness , bias, double standards, lack of objectivity and all the other faults that the Working Party agreed were present in the thesis.Finally, Dr Hayward repeats some of the Holocaust deniers' claims that he supported in his thesis (that most historians of the Holocaust are Jewish, for example) [Does Evans mean that "most" historians of the Holocaust are Welsh, for instance ? ] and which, despite the selective quotes in his article, his thesis used to try and discredit their work. It would be nice to see him admit he was wrong on this and other claims he makes in the thesis, as he has not done so far.
I think we have covered all the ground more than once now, so I'll sign off.
Richard J. Evans, Professor of Modern History, University of Cambridge
<http://www.fpp.co.uk/BoD/origins/Hayward/Evans_vs_Lally.html>
Then Philip Matthews re-entered the circus. He flashed e-mails to a lot of people, including us, which is what prompted Irving's warning about the sinister intentions of the journalist. See above. (We know for a fact that all journalists are bent on denouncing us. They crave for recognition from the powers-that-be.) Here is the result of this agitation:
There is a question that,
judging from the tone of his response, no one had previously thought
to put Canterbury University historian Thomas Fudge. What is his
opinion the Joel Hayward master's thesis on which he seems to
have staked both his public and academic reputation? "My
opinion on the Hayward thesis?" he says. "I don't know
that I've got an opinion on the Hayward thesis."
Well, is the thesis correct or is it flawed? "I'm not in
a position to judge that, actually." Because he is not a
specialist in the area?" Yeah,yeah." Its rightness or
wrongness is not an issue? "No, it isn't. And I'm not just
trying to dodge the question. It is a subject that is not within
my scholarly purview. It would be unfair of me to say that it's
a good thesis or a bad thesis."
So, because his field of expertise is medieval and reformation
history, Fudge is unable to offer any judgement on such Hayward
claims as "The weight of evidence supports the view that
the Nazis did not systematically exterminate Jews in gas chambers.
He can't even hazard a guess or offer a hunch. But this
seems to contradict his privately circulated views of the thesis.
Last year, when the Listener investigated the ongoing controversy
of the Hayward thesis ("In denial", November 2, 2002),
the thesis's supervisor and examiner, Canterbury history professor
Vincent Orange, broke his silence at the eleventh hour to release
a letter to the Listener. The letter, written to former
Canterbury University chancellor Phyllis Guthardt in April 2001,
describes the documents that Orange had compiled in his and Hayward's
defence when a Canterbury University working party examined the
thesis -- although Orange did not release the documents themselves.
Describing a letter from Fudge to Orange, written in April 2000
just as the Hayward thesis became a national story, Orange writes,
"His [Fudge's] warm approval of the thesis attracts no comment
from the working party." In another entry, Fudge "finds
much merit in the work", according to Orange. He offers support
to both Hayward and Orange in further letters, as does fellow
Canterbury history professor Ian Campbell.
Orange's summary of Fudge's April 2000 letter continues, "and
yet Thomas is recognised as a careful scholar. It may be objected
that he is not a specialist in Holocaust studies. The same is
true of all three members of the working party. I regret that
the university did not ensure that at least one member of that
party had proven expertise in the field."
The one historian who did have unquestionable expertise in the
field was Richard Evans, professor of modern history at Cambridge.
In 2000, Evans had just completed work as an expert witness in
the David Irving trial at the High Court in London. Irving, the
world's most famous Holocaust denier, had sued author Deborah
Lipstadt; Evans's analysis of the falsifications in Irving's work
destroyed both his legal case and his reputation as a historian.
The New Zealand Jewish council sought Evans's opinion on
the Hayward thesis and submitted that opinion -- a 71-page report
to the working party. Evans argued that Hayward's thesis was "a
thoroughly tendentious, biased and dishonest piece of work"
that clearly constituted Holocaust denial. He recommended that
Canterbury strip Hayward of his mater's degree. While agreeing
that the thesis was "flawed", the university was unable
to prove dishonesty, a required ground for revoking a degree.
Thus Canterbury remained the only reputable university in the
world to endorse a work of Holocaust denial.
Yet the affair still nagged at Fudge. In his capacity as the editor
of the history department's journal, History Now, Ian Campbell
commissioned an essay from Fudge on the Hayward story. Given the
support that both men had offered Hayward, it was no surprise
that the resulting essay attacked Evans and others while seeking
to rehabilitate the Holocaust-denying thesis. When the journal
appeared in May, the department withdrew it, sacked Campbell as
its editor and held a crisis meeting at which the volatile Fudge
spontaneously offered his resignation (he has since publicly signalled
his intention to remain "for 30 years"; but also says,
in a subsequent interview, that he may yet leave). Why did the
department withdraw the journal? Among the reasons cited are fears
of defamation action, Fudge's misuse of personal and interdepartmental
correspondence and breaching of an informal agreement that Fudge
would stop discussing the Hayward affair in public. It was also
noted that Campbell should have sought the prior approval of his
departmental colleagues, most of whom did not share Fudge's view
that Hayward was an academic martyr.
A bowdlerised version of the Fudge essay, minus some of the more
extreme claims and the 85 footnotes, appeared in newspapers in
July. The same newspapers made righteous noises about "academic
freedom", although, as Evans has since written, the issue
is different: "It is rather the upholding of academic standards.
Nobody has stopped Hayward or Fudge from publishing what they
have written. Whether or not it should receive the imprimatur
of a respected university is the question at issue. It's a question
that seems to be beyond Fudge's understanding: he charged that
the University's vice chancellor, Roy Sharp, suppressed his academic
freedom. Last month, the University council found Sharp had not
done so. Fudge had always, Sharp has said, been free to publish
in the public arena. "Indeed, Fudge was offered suggestions
as to other media in which he could publish."
However, Fudge and others managed to sneak some copies of the
original journal past the ban. Fudge sent one copy to Hayward,
for example. The original, unedited essay has also appeared on
the website of a group dedicated to the circulation of Holocaust
denying material. [This is AAARGH, of course but the guy is
too shy to tell it. ] "The above complete version has
been kindly sent to us by the author," the site's reprints
editor writes. Fudge professes ignorance of the website - which
is not one that any credible historian would be willingly associated
with - and claims not to have given permission to reprint. Contacted
by the Listener, the site's manager reiterates his claim
that Fudge "supplied the copy".
[The account is not entirely honest: Let's quote from his demand by e-mail: «Your reprint of Fudge's original version of his Hayward essay concludes with a note that Fudge approved publication and supplied the copy. He denies this. Are you able to tell me which is true?» We replied immediately: «He supplied the copy but we decided the publication, or, to be exact, the re-publication, as this text had already been published, as you know.» We had in fact written: «The above complete version has been kindly sent to us by the author and we would like to thank him.» The allegation that this means that Thomas Fudge has "approved" our publication is a figment of the journalist imagination, obsessed by his pursuit of guilt-labelling.]
The original, unedited essay challenges Fudge's image as "a
careful scholar". Lincoln University lecturer Greg Ryan has
written to the Press (July 31), claiming that Fudge "selectively
and inaccurately represented" a private conversation held
nearly three years earlier. "I am left to ponder the ethics
of Fudge's approach to oral history in that private conversations
are documented and reproduced without the knowledge or consent
of the source," Ryan wrote.
This writer has also had experience of Fudge's peculiar biases
and inaccuracies. Among the material cut from Fudge's essay for
newspaper publication was a paragraph on the Listener,
including a quote attributed to myself that I did not recognise
("Nothing new had appeared for a while," was attributed
to me as the reason for doing last November's story). "It
came from one of the people that you talked to late last year,"
Fudge said, when asked. "I don't remember who it was, offhand."
When it was put to him that he was unable to provide a source,
he replied: "I don't know if I am unable or unwilling."
Huh? What was the mystery, as I obviously knew the names of all
those I talked to last year? My belief is that this quote might
be a distorted version of a comment made to Hayward during an
off-the-record conversation. This would call into question Fudge's
endnote that "neither Joel Hayward nor Vincent Orange has
been associated with the preparation of this article". Clarifying;
Fudge says, "that endnote was put there simply to deflect
comments that Hayward and Orange were behind it".
From there, the interview -- my first of two with Fudge -- descended
into farce. Fudge spoke about "speculation" -- "I'm
not going to mention names" -- about myself, the Listener
and "your motivations and your journalism". When
asked to elaborate, he said, "I'm not at liberty to repeat."
Pressed further, he offered, "speculation among media specialists
in the country". Which media specialists? Pressed further
still, he managed to come up with Canterbury's public relations
department: "There's all kinds of people," he added.
But what about these secret motivations? Are they at all related
to "the specialist interest group" -- read: the Jewish
community -- that the website of Holocaust denier David Irving
believes is behind the Listener's journalism?
OF COURSE, PARANOID WEIRDNESS
is never too far from the surface when one looks into the world
of the Holocaust denier and those who apologise for them. Running
contemporaneously with Fudge's ill-fated "academic freedom"
campaign has been the emergence of the story's self-styled victim,
Joel Hayward. When Hayward's thesis emerged from the obscurity
of its six-year embargo into the glare of negative attention in
late 1999, he was moved to attach an addendum
[see above] that apologised for his errors and any offence
caused to the Jewish community. Many took the apology as sincere.
Since July, Hayward has broken his silence in some media. In the
absence of an explanation from him -- Hayward is unwilling to
answer any questions put by the Listener -- one can only
speculate about why. Either Hayward has sensed that public and
media support for a nebulous idea of "academic freedom"
is strong enough to rehabilitate him and his thesis, or, having
resigned from his position at Massey University last year, he
sees that he has nothing to lose in the academic world. When he
apologised in 2000, he had a teaching position to protect.
Many in the media have happily bought the image of Hayward as
victim. TV3's 60 Minutes went to air with Hayward's claims that
he received death threats in 2000, even though, the story's producer
Paula Penfold concedes, no evidence of threats exists and Hayward
never lodged a complaint with the police. "We spent a couple
of days with him, and found him to be genuine and credible,"
Penfold says. In this same report, Hayward produced a bullet that
he claimed had been handed to him, in his Massey office, to signify
a threat to his life. "You'll get yours, mate," was
the alleged threat. [This is hapeaning in Paris where a dozen
of known antizionists have (2003) received a bullet with a caption
saying: "The next one will not come through the post office",
a typical Jewish extremist threat. ]
However, the Listener has
a signed affidavit that this bullet -- a dud from a World War
era rifle that few in New Zealand would use -- was presented to
Hayward as a "keepsake" by a defence studies student.
If this "you'll get yours, mate" sentence ever occurred,
it did not come from that student. Is Hayward a harmless fantasist
or is this victim act a smokescreen for the rehabilitation of
the thesis's more dangerous leanings? Certainly, Hayward's former
cohorts in the Holocaust denial industry never believed his apology
to be genuine. Active deniers Irving, Fredrick Toben and Robert
Countess -- on whose Alabama property Hayward was photographed
shooting a gun in 1994, during a period in which he said he had
no further contact with deniers -- have written and spoken of
continued correspondence and contact with Hayward that suggests
a different image to the mask he has worn in public.
"I have no reason to believe that Hayward really changed
his view of his fine thesis," Countess wrote to me, "but
he did make 'a public apology ' for fear of the Jews." Countess
goes on, using appropriately muscular language: "Hayward
is not a man of the personality type to be bold. He is a good
and decent fellow and a fine scholar, but his personality is weak...
He erred greatly in his personal weaknesses before the Jewish
onslaught." Publicly, Hayward has made efforts to distance
himself from this kind of rhetoric. In his addendum,
he wrote about "negative experiences with certain revisionists"
who spread "anti-Semitic or neo-Nazi conspiracies".
HOWEVER, THE LANGUAGE of Hayward's most recent public pronouncements
is beginning to differ from the prostrate tone of 2000 when he
faced that alleged "Jewish onslaught". [Note the
use of the word "alleged". Matthews is trying to convince
his readers that the persecution did not happen, that it is purely
delusional. That is what a cheap employee of the lobby is really
aiming at: whitewashing his masters. ] In a letter to the
Press (August 12, 2003), he offers the opinion that "a
student can ask honest questions about the Holocaust and arrive
at unconventional answers" -- how does that compare to the
mea culpa of his 2000 addendum with its reference to his admitted
"errors of fact and interpretation"? In that addendum,
he fretted about "causing distress to the Jewish community".
Now, in a column syndicated in New Zealand newspapers in late
August, he believes that the university "should never have
succumbed to external pressures from any minority or special-interest
group" rather than stand firm and hold up the principles
of free inquiry and free speech, it buckled ..." Does this
mean that Hayward has gone back on his apology? We would love
to ask.
In the same column, Hayward mentions -- three times, in fact --
that Evans was paid for his assessment of the thesis and his work
on the Irving case. The innuendo is nasty -- could Evans be bought?
By those Jews with their moneybags? -- but is easily refuted.
On the Irving case, Evans was paid the standard hourly rate that
witnesses are paid. [In that case, only 250,000 US $..., not
including the royalties for the book he published afterwards,
using the same material he had already been paid for. ] "Is
Hayward implying that no expert witnesses in any court cases can
be trusted because they are paid for their work?" Evans writes.
For the New Zealand Jewish Council, he received a token fee for
four days' work. "I did not want to be seen to be doing the
work on a political basis, which no doubt I would have been accused
of doing had I lent my services free of charge, but on a professional
basis." [Professional witness, huh ? ]
The reality of Evans's token fee undermines Hayward's self-pitying
remark that he, unlike the Jewish Council, "could not afford
to employ an expert". Such a fee would not have been beyond
a lecturer's salary. The question is, what kind of "expert
historian" would have gone in to bat for Hayward's thesis?
Irving, perhaps?
Running parallel to all this is the circulation of a petition,
devised by Victoria University economics professor Martin Lally,
calling for an apology to be granted to Hayward [see above.
]. It also deals with other, more general issues of academic
freedom and university process -- so general, apparently, that
MP Rodney Hide was happy to sign the petition without having read
either the Hayward thesis or the unedited Fudge essay. However,
at the time of going to press, the only two New Zealand historians
to have added their names to it are both retired from academic
life and implicated in the thesis's contents -- Vincent Orange
was its supervisor and internal examiner and John Jensen, formerly
of Waikato University, was its external examiner.
These events are being watched with fascination by the international
Holocaust denial network, who seem to see New Zealand as fertile
ground (Irving has announced plans for a visit early next year).
Fudge's essay and statements and Hayward's letters appear on denial
websites with approving headlines and endnotes; Lally's pedantic
correspondence with Evans somehow made its way to Irving's online
"action report" (Lally claims that he has had no direct
contact with Irving, and assumes that his emails were forwarded
by one of the 300 that he copied his correspondence to) as did,
somewhat amusingly, my own correspondence with Lally about how
his correspondence reached Irving (same answer, presumably). A
thesis reconsidering the Nuremberg trial, written by former Canterbury
student Stephen Daniel Eaton, marked by Orange and presented by
Hayward with his own thesis to Robert Countess - although Hayward
later denied, to the Listener, ever having even read Eaton's thesis
- has appeared online with a new preface by Countess attacking
the New Zealand Jewish Council as, predictably, "vicious,
envious, hate-filled, racist, anti-intellectual ideologues".
[Again, Matthews is too shy to say where the thesis "appeared"...
]
The removal of New Zealand Herald cartoonist Malcolm Evans --
who produced some work critical of Israel -- was taken as evidence
of a powerful and censorial Jewish lobby by media commentator
Brian Edwards. Edwards was immediately hailed as a courageous
spokesman by Holocaust denier Fredrick Toben for his statement,
recorded in the Waikato Times, that, "I want to say
that the Holocaust didn't happen, then I should be allowed to
say that. " Edwards was trying to make a point about free
speech, rather than deny the Holocaust. However, as it stands
in New Zealand, he already is allowed to say that it didn't happen.
The real point, though, is why would anyone want to? Why would
such overwhelming documentary evidence as exists for the Holocaust
be wilfully denied? Swiss Holocaust denier Jurgen Graf, whose
work is titled The Holocaust on Trial, has summed up the
mindset: "If the Holocaust were publicly exposed as a shameless
fraud, if people all over the world learned that, while the Jews
undoubtedly were brutally persecuted during the Second World War,
there was no attempt to exterminate them, that the death factories,
gas chambers and gas vans were a Jewish swindle, and that the
six million figure was a fantastic exaggeration, the Zionist led
'New World Order' would be all but finished? [The consequences]
would be catastrophic beyond repair for international Jewry and
the state of Israel."
In the world of the Holocaust denier, naked anti-Semitism is now
dressed up with otherwise unrelated criticism of Israel -- this
is why you will also find links to pro-Palestinian reporting on
Irving's website. Valid criticisms can be made of Israel as an
occupying military power, but Holocaust deniers are not renowned
for their support of oppressed minorities, unless that minority
happens to be engaged in urban warfare with Jews. Holocaust denial
begins with anti-Semitism as the irrational driving force and
then looks for intellectual or pseudo-intellectual support: it's
the hatred of a race that extends to hatred of a nation. And in
New Zealand, the Holocaust deniers have found otherwise reputable
academics who are able to be exploited by this hatred. [All
cheap lies. We hate nobody, not even Matthews. We pity them.]
The Listener, 20 September 2003
<http://www.listener.co.nz/default,716,712,0.sm>
This article prompted some reactions, as usual.
Kerry Bolton's Letter to The Listener
15 September 2003
Editor NZ Listener
Having read Dr Joel Hayward's thesis on holocaust revisionism, the Canterbury University working party report and the full text of Dr Thomas Fudge's article, I would like to make a few comments on Philip Matthews' article (Canterbury Tales, 20 September).
Dr Fudge is an expert on the inquisition and heresies, and his article on Hayward was written on that basis.
Richard Evans, lauded by Mathews as the "holocaust expert" who provided testimony at the Irving-Lipstadt libel trial and for the NZ Jewish Council, was criticised by both the Canterbury working party tribunal and Justice Gray in Britain, for his polemical, emotional statements.
The working party's main criticism of Hayward was that he had offered a conclusion which was outside the scope of his thesis requirements. The working party report shows that "like Justice Gray at the Irving-Lipstadt trial" the tribunal was not capable of comprehending the significance of the technical evidence regarding gas chambers and the plausibility of execution by diesel.
Mathews fails to acknowledge the academic credentials of the revisionists he cites, doctors Countess and Toben. Proponents of holocaust orthodoxy claim that revisionism has no academic standing. Most spokesmen for revisionism are academics, or are qualified in relevant fields such as engineering and toxicology. I would challenge Mathews as to whether most revisionists are pro-Nazi or anti-Semitic. Among the first to question holocaust orthodoxy was Prof. Paul Rassinier, imprisoned at Buchenwald as a leader of the French resistance.
Where Dr Hayward errs is in his retraction of his conclusions. The original Leuchter investigation of the alleged Auschwitz gas chambers has been professionally replicated by Germar Rudolf, chemical analysis showing that there is insufficient cyanide residue for these buildings to have been used for mass executions.
K R Bolton
Then Bob Countess:
Dear Mr. Matthews:
I have just read your article in THE LISTENER about the Hayward controversy and I believe you have quoted me rather accurately in terms of my remarks about both the Hayward thesis and the Eaton thesis.
Perhaps you will do me the courtesy of answering the following question: Why is Holocaust Denial of greater significance than Resurrection Denial?
In so far as I have taught on the college and university levels for many years both in these United States and in the Ukraine and The Netherlands, and given lectures in Germany, in my field of New Testament Greek, I have learned that a fundamental genius lying within the framework of the Western Enlightenment mentality is that ON THE UNIVERSITY LEVEL, THERE OUGHT TO BE AND MUST BE A RADICALLY OPEN ATMOSPHERE FOR OPEN DEBATE ON CONTROVERSIAL ISSUES OF HISTORY, POLITICS, SCIENCE, AND RELIGION.
The entire Hayward and Eaton affair points -- at least in New Zealand -- AWAY FROM this centuries old Enlightenment tradition.
Might it be within your ability to analyze and write an article on this Enlightenment tradition that millions of us cherish so dearly? And might you THEN focus on WHY it is that Holocaust Denial is punishable by fines and loss of employment and even imprisonment in some countries in 2003?
You certainly SEEM to have at least minimal literary ability to compose and publish relevant articles, although your demeanor SEEMS to be rather haughty against those with whom you disagree. Please inform me if I am incorrect in this surmise on my part.
Sincerely for full freedom to pursue the Enlightenment tradtion there in Kiwi-Land,
-- Robert H. Countess, in Alabama.
Then, the usual Jewish view in a business paper
Media watch: Open minds, empty minds and the Holocaust by David Cohen Don't believe the guy who once said the problem with history is that there's no future in it.
The dust has been disturbed yet again in the long-buried case of Joel Hayward and the University of Canterbury.
Another scholar is seeking to still or confirm the question of whether Dr Hayward was the victim of an academic witch-hunt on account of the revisionist views he once took but has since repudiated on the subject of the Holocaust. Do we need this?
Apparently so. Already the opening of this old casket has got a number of local media outlets loudly sneezing, such is their passion for unfettered historical investigation, as they claim to understand it.
Their general position has found support this past fortnight, with a raft of press interviews given by Dr Hayward to mark his colleague's relitigation of the original scandal.
The work, you'll recall, argued that far fewer than six million Jews, perhaps fewer than one million, perished in concentration camps during the time of Nazi rule across most of Europe.
It speculated that the idea of gas chambers being used against the innocent during World War II might have been a propaganda invented by the UK, the US and Jewish lobbyists in the thrall of Zionist forces. It postulated that Hitler could not be held personally responsible for the situation. And so on.
As somebody who was involved in reporting on the situation at the time, I have no personal judgment to make on Dr Hayward, who has said he now wishes only to concentrate on his new career as a freelance scholar. But the latest surge of coverage isn't only about the acknowledged "mistakes" a 29-year-old student made a decade ago. It's about the way in which a confused local media irrigates the past.
This has not been our finest hour. With only three lonely, impressive and, it has to be said, left-leaning exceptions -- stand up, Anthony Hubbard of the Sunday Star-Times, New Zealand Herald columnist Diana Wichtel and the Listener's Philip Matthews -- the tendency on the journalistic front has been far more toward what the Amer ican columnist George F. Will once tactfully characterised as historical amnesia, fumigated by gassy notions of "tolerance" that cannot distinguish between an open mind and an empty mind when it comes to the critical world events of the past century.
Peculiarly uninformed when it comes to the collective fate that befell European Jewry during World War II, the empty heads have clucked on about little else other than the need to maintain the air of scepticism Dr Hayward attempted to cast over the topic in his ill-starred master's thesis.
As an editorial in the New Zealand Herald put it, "All of history has to be open to constant reappraisal of events, their causes and consequences and the light they throw on the past and present."
Much the same point was made, implicitly and somewhat less elegantly, in an impromptu apologia written by Diana McCurdy in the Dominion-Post, which included the fatuous warning of "a possible backlash against the Jewish community" if they or others were to ever again make known their displeasure at their history being so reappraised.
On first blush the stance may appear high-minded, even impressively sophisticated; it could also be described as pernicious and kind of creepy.
To be sure, history is about open-ended questions. So is journalism. As Mr Will asks, speaking on behalf of those who practise the other craft, what kind of student of history makes a career out of denying the reality of an almost contemporary event that has been recorded graphically, documented bureaucratically and described in vast detail by victims, bystanders and perpetrators?
More than three years have passed since Canterbury was forced to ask itself the same question after first apologising to the country's tiny Jewish community for the unwarranted distress caused by its conferral of a master's degree for the 360-page dissertation The Fate of Jews in German Hands: An Historical Inquiry into the Development and Significance of Holocaust Revisionism.
An independent inquiry convened by the university later found the work to be seriously flawed and its central conclusions unjustified. They acknowledged that the affair had been deeply embarrassing to one of the country's most respected institutions of higher learning, a university that has long had a special claim to know better than most on questions of bogus history.
Canterbury, after all, is the same institution that provided the setting for two of last century's most seminal philosophical works, The Open Society and Its Enemies and The Poverty of Historicism, both of them exegesis on the pseudoscientific ideas about "history" put forward by Plato, Hegel and Marx, which were completed there in the 1940s by the Jewish-Austrian émigré Sir Karl Popper.
Like many others here from a similar background, the culturally assimilated Sir Karl arrived looking for shelter from the cataclysmic events opening up at the time in Europe, whose reality has been academically contested at the master's level of study in just one country during the past 60 years.
In awarding the Hayward degree with honours, Sir Karl's old institution achieved the dubious distinction of becoming the only accredited institution of higher learning in the world ever known to have conferred an MA on the basis of a historical "inquiry" of this type.
The good news is that the work's author has since apologised and indicated his willingness to move on. So has the university. Isn't it about time the epistemologically challenged in the forthright estate followed suit?
National Business Review (NBR) New Zealand, 8 August 2003.
<http://www.nbr.co.nz/home/column_article.asp?id=6713&cid=1&cname=MHome>
New developments are bound to happen...
Oct. 2003.
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
Other sources:
Adelaide Institute Newsletter 184 (January 2003)
<http://www.adelaideinstitute.org/newsletters/n184.htm>David Irving's website also maintains documents on the Hayward case.
<http://www.fpp.co.uk/online>
We had resumed the publication online of the Hayward Thesis. The Eaton thesis had to be removed under duress. For the time being. They belong to us, the readers, those who pay taxes for universities to give degrees to valuable students. Their work belong to the community at large. The theses are always available in university libraries, and most often circulated in different ways. That is what libraries are made for. We act as a library, just on line.
«It also seemed futile for an alleged
"denier" to be denying his denial.» JH
There were signs in the summer of 2003. JH was obviously getting out depression. He was standing again. Wrote to newspapers. And then, in a matter of a few days, he launched a new website to his own name and attacked us viciously. Alive, he was obviously alive again. Looking for vindication. Why not ? Let's see what he has got to say:
My goal in establishing and regularly updating this site is not to participate in any politically motivated debates, especially the long-running and, in my experience, distasteful, international Holocaust revisionism/anti-Holocaust revisionism debate.
I have no interest in that or any other political debate. I do not feel any need to tell people what is "true" and what is not, or what is "right" and what is not. People can make up their own minds, and I certainly don't mind if they disagree.
[Quote from: <joelhayward.com> Other quotes below from the same website.]
He is "prompted" by
injurious articles, specially those published by The Listener.
But he seems frightened. We see that in the disclamer. Such a
panicky disclaimer cannot be found anywhere else on the Web. The
guy is scared. Of what ?
Please note: these webpages are my copyrighted property. I did not, do not, and will not give permission for any of my pages or their particular content to appear on any other individual's or organisation's website(s). If any of my material appears elsewhere it has not been copied or placed there with my permission.
He insists: " Dr Joel Hayward
is not a Holocaust revisionist and does not support Holocaust
revisionism." But of course. Revisionist have always maintained
that he was not part of their crowd. Those who maintain
that he is a revisionist are the enemies of free speech,
the enemies of the revisionists, and the enemies of anybody who
dares not to bow in front of the governor's hat.
In order do dispel any idea that he would lean towards any kind
of racism, Dr Joel is proposing, as a first page, a visit to the
Jesse Owens family in Alabama. The only difficult thing to believe
is that Jesse Owens was part of his pantheon, since, in 1936,
when Owens won these goldmedals at the Berlin Olympics, Dr Joel
was far from being born... It looks very much like a device to
deflect accusations of racism that could be launched by the enemies
of free speech, the lobby whose existence is often denied.
Then we learn that Dr Joel has signed a contract mith a major publisher to write his autobiography. As the life of Mr Joel Hayward seems abolutely devoid of the least interest, it seems quite probable that the crux of the story will be the Jewish persecution of Dr Hayward. Although he may coat it with a thick layer of sugar, the result might appear unpalatable to Our Good Masters who so kindly police our minds. But let's wait till next June (2004).
To protect his ass, Dr Joel is now led to reclaim what he calls his "Jewish heritage":
«Even before I began my university studies I had gained a strong reading ability in Hebrew, which I studied because of pride in what I long believed was my Jewish heritage on mum's side of the family. My nana, Myrtle Bush, identified herself as Jewish, and my dear mum and I, more so than my two siblings, took an interest in all things Jewish.»
It is not quite cetrtain that
he can get the rabbinical certificate and the benefit of the Law
of Return.
As he himself feels this is not enough, we are now treated with
a Zionist declaration:
As well as learning Hebrew I travelled to the small nation I felt a bond with: Israel, the Jewish homeland. This is a photo of a very young me in Tel Arad, Israel, in 1989 or 1990, the year before I commenced my now-controversial masters thesis. Notice the menorah (Jewish candlestick) necklace. [Photo]
I loved my times in Israel and believe without reservation that, while Palestinian grievances need addressing (and they are a lovely people, like their Israeli Jewish neighbours), Israel is a legitimate state that has given Jews a sense of focus and safety after the horrors of World War II. I have never wavered in this belief. As I said in the 15 April 2002 issue of the Evening Standard: "Israel clearly has a right to exist within its current borders, and its citizens must be able to live in safety.
Let's point out that Israel is totally devoid of any legitimacy and owes its existence to sheer force. Support of Israeli genocidal policy will bring condemnation from the future international courts.
Then we reach the heart of the problem:
The New Zealand Jewish Council would later claim that I relied mainly on revisionist sources and made inadequate efforts to obtain anti-revisionist, or Jewish, sources. I can refute this claim with a clear conscience and plenty of proof.
In fact, and we could give hundreds of exemples, those who write
about revisionism are not supposed, if they want to remain on
the safe side, to quote any document, or book, or article, written
by a revisionist. The latest exemple that we could cite is a thesis,
later a book, written by a Canadian lawyer, in French, Martin
Imbleau, La Négation du génocide nazi -- le négationnisme
de la Shoah en droit international et comparé (Paris,
L'Harmattan, 2003) [Shoah denial in international Law] who achieves
a great success: in his 442 pages, he does not quote
once a "negationist" author, while he makes a prolific
use of the non-scholarly polemical works of anti-revisionist authors.
If Dr Hayward had followed this wise path, he would never have
a problem and he could play tennis with the golden boys of the
New Zealand Jewish Federation.
Worse. He has written to the established anti-revisionist authors in the field, crying for help, and he got nothing:
I also asked Professor Browning, and all the others, as well as The American Jewish Committee and Shelly Shapiro of Holocaust Survivors and Friends in Pursuit of Justice, for evidence with which to rebut Mr Arthur Butz's central theses.
I explained that I was a lowly but genuinely searching masters student. I stated that I was actively opposed to antisemitism and was not a revisionist, and added that, in fact, I was an office-holder in The New Zealand Friends of Israel, Inc.
To my regret, and perhaps now their regret, these persons and organisations provided nothing in the way of historical or historiographical evidence.
He obviously did not know that
the Holy Story of the Holy Cost does not need any evidence. It
is true in itself. And the disbelievers will be sent to Hell.
He then mentions the original complaint by the established Jewish
body. We are still waiting for a complete version of this, and
Dr Joel said he has asked permission to put if on his website.
The original Complaint by the New Zealand Jewish Council, dated 4 April 2000, appealed on a strong emotional level for the stripping of my MA degree. It stated in part:
"Over the two thousand year history of anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial in our time follows on the heels of the earlier accusations of Christ-killing, the Blood Libel, Desecration of the Host, and promotion of the forgery, 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,' some of which still continue while some have only comparatively recently been dropped by the church. Holocaust denial, as well as being anti-Jewish, aims to undermine historic truth and exonerate the evils of Nazism."
The Complaint added: "Only revoking Joel Hayward's MA degree will achieve the proper outcome. There may be procedural awkwardness, but this should not be allowed to outweigh the moral, academic and historical correctness of revoking the degree."
JH wants the public to be able to judge now:
It is my hope that, now both sides of the story have been told, the fair-minded New Zealand public will make up its own mind as to whether I am the architect of my own misfortune or the victim of narrow-minded hostility and maltreatment stirred up by the complainants, whose public condemnations of me continued into 2001.
He adds he regets three things
only: the errors in his thesis (errors he always mentions but
never describes) and "some people's (never described) anger"
about these undetermined errors. And then "the misuse of
the thesis by certain racists and politically motivated cranks",
a direct allusion to people like us, except that we do not believe
in race, and our political motivations are freedom of thinking
and political freedom for all. Very crank indeed.
He also regrets that all his abject apologies were not aknowledged,
"fell on deaf ears", as he put it. We had told him before:
the more you apologize, the more they'll kick you in the head.
He adds that "during 2000 I twice sought arbitration with
the New Zealand Jewish Council." His requests were declined.
He should have known that the word "enough" is not part
of their vocabulary. Never enough. He went on his knees
in 2003, phoning repeatedly in person the horrible Zwartz (=Mr
Black...), thought policeman of the New Zealand Zionist Federation,
pleading for mercy and the guy gave him the boot. Haha ! Could
be funny, if it was not tragic naivety.
He then criticizes the University Working Party, without seeing
that they behaved with the same servile cowardice as his own,
serving him with the punishment decided by their Good Masters.
At least, he recognizes that this "made [him] feel and behave
like a victim." He insists:
At no time was I permitted to cross-examine or question my accusers directly -- which any court in the land would have permitted -- and my written request for mediation with my accusers was denied.
To note: in a photographed letter, we can read from Shapiro, one of the persecuters of Leuchter in the USA, of Holocaust Survivors and Friends in Pursuit of Justice, the following admission:
"Unfortunately we have collected quite a file on these people and their activities".
See <Shapiro.jpg>
He then proceed to republish the Thomas A. Fudge article,
"The Fate of Joel Hayward in New Zealand Hands: from holocaust
historian to holocaust?", without aknowledging he lifted
the Web version from the AAARGH website, but followed by a "disclaimer"
running like this:
" Dr Fudge and I prefer the article to be posted here, in the interests of public access, rather than have it available only on antisemitic or politically-inspired web sites. Neither Dr Fudge nor I support those web sites in any way."
We object to the qualification but we do not need "support" from anybody. We are sure that ideas support themselves. As for public access, we believe we have a far wider readership than the little heroes of our strory.
The atmosphere in NZ universities is still gloomy:
Now I hear that Canterbury University authorities have asked all History staff not to communicate with the media on either the "Hayward Affair" or the "Fudge Affair," and have also instructed Dr Fudge not to discuss either affair with students. Although the University authorities are doubtless trying to put these controversies behind them, they are also shutting down debate and the healthy exchange of ideas. What must their students think?
We are then treated to a series of newspaper articles, which we have also used to illustrate the case in the past. (See above) With that caveat:
Prior experience told me that this journalist had an agenda. I knew it, and worried about the result of his bias, but felt determined to prove that I have done nothing to be ashamed of. I agreed to be interviewed.
Advice preceding the Sunday Star-Times, 27 July 2003, article, called it "a miserable article".
And he comments in this way:
Given that Mr Hubbard apparently sees this alleged heresy -- Holocaust denial -- as deserving of active retribution, I wonder where he places it in terms of other offenses. Is it worse than white-collar crime, tax evasion, driving under the influence, car theft, burglary, assault with intent, rape, murder?
It's a good question, we know that.
Then comes the Listener
article by Philip Matthews, a highly politically motivated pro-establishment
journalist. [See above]. The interesting feature is that the article
is intersped with Hayward's comments. Some of them could justify
further comments but the reader may find by himself, if he wants
to go into details. Hayward is dishonest in his turn when he says:
"I did not remember reading Mr Eaton's thesis. " This
guy is not a good pal.
Then Hayward tries to sell us his literary production, and the
favorable reviews he got.
Growing more and more pathetic, he then proceeds to convince us
that he has condemned Hitler, repeatedly, and he offers evidence
! Should we remind him that Hitler has been dead for some time
? Then, he offers proof that he is not "culturally insensitive".
All that is quite ridiculous. Having no spine contrives him into
producing bloody limbs, to attract our generosity. The poor wretched
is positively begging. But he never dares to bite the hand that
slaps him or the boot that kicks him. He is a kind of golum, by
his own doing.
In another file, he publishes his "complete, unaltered, Main Submission to the Canterbury Working Party" in response to the expensive report given by the pseudo-expert Richard Evans:
"I was amazed by what I considered the inaccurate and mistake-riddled historical scholarship within the former submission but initially daunted by eminent Professor Evans' heavy-weight report.
Nowhere does he dare to say that Evans is a nut and a greedy exploiter of Jewish gullibility. He just says:
"Actually, I humbly submit that his description of my thesis as "thoroughly tendentious, biased and dishonest" is -- if I apply to his report the criteria he applied to my thesis -- no less applicable to his report."
We got word that the publisher of Hayward's thesis in pdf format,
Gengis Khan Publishers Online, from Ulaan Baator, are publishing
Hayward's Main Submission, which can be seen on his websiste at
<http://www.joelhayward.com/drhaywardssubmissioni.htm>
or, alternatively, at
<http://free.hostdepartment.com/g/gengis/Sub.pdf>
A very interesting piece indeed, because for the first time, Hayward
defends his work in a close combat attitude with the Working Group,
a group subjected to intense bowel movements due to fear and panic
of the Jews.
The final touch is to be found
in a small piece titled "Read the thesis ?"
From it, it is clear that Hayward wishes people to actually read
his thesis, before making an opnion on it. This is quite logical.
But he complains about those nasty characters who have put the
thesis online for the benefit of the average reader, which is
less logical:
I am aware that some web sites are posting what they claim is an exact copy of my thesis with no changes or alterations.
Given that these web sites are posting the thesis in violation of my rights as an author, and against my often-expressed wishes, I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the text they are posting.
[There, the logic is lost. "Accuracy" and "rights" do not belong to the same category.]
I cannot guarantee that the thesis is, word-for-word, exactly and completely what I submitted to the University of Canterbury over a decade ago. [Why ? He could just check.]
Moreover, some of the web sites posting what they claim is my thesis are unmistakably antisemitic or otherwise racially motivated sites. [This is not our case. We are totally indifferent in the matter of something we believe does not exist: race. What we know is ONE HUMAN RACE. ] It seems most unfortunate that my thesis is introduced and analysed on these sites by conspiracy theorists and cranks, whose explanations of events are far from accurate. [This means he does not agree with what he supposes is our position. But who cares ? ]
I therefore recommend that if anyone wants to read my old thesis in order to make sense of this New Zealand controversy, he or she should obtain a copy on loan directly from the University of Canterbury Library. From this library they will get an exact copy of the thesis as originally submitted. It is true that they will also get the Working Party Report, but at least the text of the thesis and my 2000 addendum will be genuine and unaltered.
The University of Canterbury's website address is:
<http://library.canterbury.ac.nz/>
Its postal address is: The Library, The University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch, New Zealand
OK. If anyone want to register
his name and address with the University of Canterbury which,
as we have seen, does not refuse anything to the New Zealand Jewish
(and Zionist) Though Police Federation, then this is a golden
opportunity. Circulation control, they call it. Just another bad
joke.
But there is more to it:
Please note:
I can confirm that the following three web sites are posting versions of my thesis that are different to the one I submitted to the University of Canterbury over a decade ago.
That is, these websites are not posting an accurate copy of my thesis.
[This is simply not true. Why on earth should we change anything?, as we publish scores of other books and articles. Nobody ever complained about tempering. If anything, we corrected some of his misprints. ]
Moreover, the versions they are posting are illegal; they are on the internet without my permission and, indeed, in violation of my expressed wishes.
<http://joelhayward.tripod.com/hay.pdf>
<http://www.aaargh-international.org/engl/engl.html>
<http://joelhayward.tripod.com/hay.pdf>Those sites are not affiliated or associated with this website (www.joelhayward.com), my Totem press website
(http://www.freewebs.com/totempress/index.htm), or me in ANY way. I do not support those web sites, agree with those websites, or wish them to post their altered versions of my old thesis.
This story of "altered version" is a pure lie. He cannot give any evidence of that. He announces three sites and give twice the same address. Then we receive the following mail:
Dear Sirs and Ma,ams
It has come to my attention that XXX is the ISP that hosts websites which is illegally posting my intellectual property, namely my copyrighted 1993 MA thesis. I am sole author and copyright holder and have not given anyone else permission to reproduce/copy/disseminate/post the thesis in whole or in part.
The illegal sites are:
http://www.aaargh-international.org/engl/hay/hayindex.html
http://www.aaargh-international.org/engl/hay/jhth1.html
http://www.aaargh-international.org/engl/hay/jhth2.html
http://www.aaargh-international.org/engl/hay/jhth3.html
http://www.aaargh-international.org/engl/hay/jhth4.html
http://www.aaargh-international.org/engl/hay/jhth5.html
http://www.aaargh-international.org/engl/hay/jhth6.html
and
http://www.resistance.com/Hayward/hay1.html
http://www.resistance.com/Hayward/hay2.html
http://www.resistance.com/Hayward/hay3.html
http://www.resistance.com/Hayward/hay4.html
http://www.resistance.com/Hayward/hay5.html
http://www.resistance.com/Hayward/hay6.html
http://www.resistance.com/Hayward/hay7.html
http://www.resistance.com/Hayward/hay8.html
http://www.resistance.com/Hayward/hay9.htmlI object to the violation of my rights. I alone have the right to publish my thesis in any form that I wish, or not to publish it as I wish, and no-one else has ANY rights in these matters.
I am unhappy to see my thesis posted on a site that expresses conspiratorial political and racial views that I do not support.
I do not favour censorship, and can inform you that legal public access to the thesis already exists elsewhere, as described below.
But I do want lawful and fair control over my property as well as the context of any publication or dissemination. I thus ask you to take action against the specified site(s).
Your law-violating site,s owners know that the only legal public access to my thesis is from:
The James Hight Library, the University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch, New Zealand. Web: http://www.canterbury.ac.nz
They also know that copyright law protects the thesis copies held by that afore-mentioned library, and that any reproduction/ transmission/ copying or internet dissemination is an unlawful act.
I also object to the typographical/scanning errors and inaccuracies in the version of the thesis posted.
I will file a copyright infringement lawsuit unless immediate action is taken against this website.
Yours sincerely
Dr Joel Hayward, P.O. Box 8065, Hokowhitu, Palmerston North, New Zealand 5301, Fax: 0064 6 3540184
Of course we remain quite unimpressed
by this bunch of half-lies and half-truths. But we comply. The
pressure is not on us, but on the providers and a law case costs
a fortune in some countries, whatever the results. We know Hayward
is agitating empty threats. He is in a complete contradiction:
on one hand, he aknowledges his thesis is a public thing, available
from the University, and on the other hand he objects to see it
on sites he dislikes. What stops him to display the thesis
himself, in the most accurate way ? He fears the NZ Jewish
Federation which would consider such a publication as a casus
belli, a declaration of war. He chickens out. He is attacking
us while telling to his Jewish Masters: "Look, Bwana, I am
a good kid, I kick the poor devils, ya see ?"
Pathetic is the word.
This text has been displayed
on the Net, and forwarded to you as a tool for educational purpose,
further research, on a non commercial and fair use basis, by the
International Secretariat of the Association des Anciens Amateurs
de Récits de Guerre et d'Holocauste (AAARGH). The E-mail
of the Secretariat is <aaarghinternational-at-hotmail.com>. The postal address is: PO Box 81475,
Chicago, IL 60681-0475, USA.
We see the act of displaying a written document on Internet as
the equivalent of displaying the said document on the shelves
of a library open to the public. It costs us a modicum of labor
and money. The only benefit accrues to the reader who, we surmise,
thinks by himself. We have no reason to believe that the author
agrees with any other document displayed on this site. We do not
request permission from authors living in countries like Germany,
France, Switzerland, Canada, China, Angola, where freedom of expression
id denied by law: they are not free to consent. This applies to
the case of New Zealand too, considering the very heavy pressures
stemming from New Zealand's and Australia's main Jewish organizations,
demanding the annulment of Dr. Hayward's thesis.
Displaying such a threatened document is our usual response to
bigotry, hate, parochialism and censorship..
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
ARTICLE 19.
<Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression;
this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference
and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through
any media and regardless of frontiers.>
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the
United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948.
You downloaded this document from
<http://aaargh-international.org/engl/hay/hayindex.html>