Jurgen graf: history of revisionism

1. The intellectual adventure which changed my life
I was born in Basel, Switzerland, on August 15, 1951. My father was a bank employee, my mother a housewife. Both of them are still alive and well; my father, who celebrated his 80th birthday on 12 December 2000, retired from his job many years ago.
After finishing school, I went to Basel University, where I studied French, English, andScandinavian philology. In 1979, I acquired a master's degree which entitled me to teach languages at a school in Basel. In 1982, I went on a journey to South East Asian from where I did not return before 1988, as I had got a job as a university teacher of German in Taipeh, Taiwan. Back in Switzerland, I gathered some professional experience in fields unrelated to teaching before returning to my formerprofession in 1990. Until March 1993, when I was fired in the aftermath of the publication of my first revisionist book, I taught Latin and French in Therwil, a small town near Basel.
In October 1994, I got a job as a teacher of German for foreign students at a private language school in Basel. Though badly paid, my work greatly appealed to me because most of my students were highly motivatedadults. While the director of the school, Mr. Remo Orsini, did not share my views about the holocaust and Zionism, he was tolerant of my revisionist activities (which I never talked about in class). In August 1998, after the infamous Baden trial in which my editor Gerhard Foerster and myself were sentenced to stiff prison terms because of our revisionist publications, Mr. Orsini reluctantly dismissedme in order to prevent the ruin of his school which would have become the target of a relentless media smear campaign had he kept me as a teacher. Apart from some translation jobs, I was unable to find any work in Switzerland after the Baden trial because no employer would have dared to hire me. I left Switzerland on August 15, 2000, my 49th birthday, and I do not intend to return there before thepolitical situation has changed and Switzerland is a free country again. (Should I go back now, I would face immediate arrest.)
Before 1991, I did not know anything about revisionism. While I thought that the six million figure might be somewhat exaggerated, I never had the slightest doubts as to the reality of the Nazi extermination program and the homicidal gas chambers. I was dimly aware thatthere were some authors who questioned even the approximate truth of the official holocaust version,
but I thought they were just a bunch of Neo-Nazis eager to whitewash Hitler, so I made no effort to find out what there arguments were. However, I was already quite anti-Zionist at that time. First of all, I was profoundly disgusted by Israel's inhuman treatment of the Palestinians, and secondly,I was greatly angered by the fact that the Jews shamelessly exploited the tragedy which had befallen them during World War Two to extort huge sums of money from Germany and to malign the entire German nation. Because I had many German relatives (my father, though a Swiss citizen, was born in Germany and did not come to Switzerland before 1947), I was a Germanophile from earliest childhood andfound it totally inadmissible to blame the German people as a whole for Hitler and his holocaust. Although greatly interested in contemporary history in general and the Second World War in particular, I always tried to keep away from the holocaust subject. The holocaust was an ugly and shameful episode of European and German history, and I felt no desire whatsoever to know the gory details.
All thischanged in April 1991 when I made the acquaintance of a elderly Swiss gentleman, Mr. Arthur Vogt. Vogt, a retired teacher of mathematics and biology who was born in 1917, has been my close friend and generous sponsor ever since. At our first meeting, he introduced himself as a revisionist and gave me a tape with a revisionist text authored by himself. Even if this text did not convince me...