True story of concentration camp survivor Mel Mermelstein excellently played by Leonard Nimoy-of Mister Spock fame-fighting the good fight against the holocaust revisionist IHR-Institute of Historical Review-who challenged Mel to either put up or shut up with his stories of his life as an inmate in a number of Nazi concentration camps like Auschwitz & Buchenwald in WWII. Told by the Jewish ADL and Simon Wiesenthal Center that he went for help to ignore the IHR's challenge and not give them any publicity by doing it Mel instead went full tilt on his own snapping at its $50,000.00 offer by it in proving that there were gas chambers and crematories at the camps he was incarcerated in, for being Jewish, as well as later getting another $40,000.00 in damages for the pain and suffering that the IHR caused him and his family!
Mermelstein first caught the eye of the IHR by going around telling school children as well as their parents of the horrors that he suffered at the hands of the Nazis in WWII losing his entire family in what was called the Nazi "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" in Nazi occupied Europe. Trying to shut him up the IHR planned to call his bluff in making his plight or accusations public thinking that he's really full of it and unable to prove what he's saying only to have him win in court a libel action against It. And also by it having to pay out almost 100 grand to him, not to mention the court costs, he brought the holocaust revisionist and in many cases denial organization to the point of bankruptcy! It also had its wear-house in California fire bombed three times by outraged citizens that destroyed most of its anti-Holocaust as well as anti-Semitic material that it was, in many cases free of charge , handing out to the public.
As big as a victory it was for Mel Mermelstein at the time it may well have turned out to be a "Pyrrhic Victory" for him in the long run. That by giving the IHR free and undeserved publicity that has now, some 30 years later, spawned scores of like wise holocaust revisionist sites on the internet that are still around-Like IHR-with us now and unfortunately still growing all over the net or cyberspace. This makes me feel that if Mermelstein listened to both the ADL & Simon Wiesenthal Center to just ignore the slings and arrows being thrown at him by the IHR it as well as it fellow websites would have died an lonely and ignominious death or never would have come into existence in the first place!
Mermelstein first caught the eye of the IHR by going around telling school children as well as their parents of the horrors that he suffered at the hands of the Nazis in WWII losing his entire family in what was called the Nazi "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" in Nazi occupied Europe. Trying to shut him up the IHR planned to call his bluff in making his plight or accusations public thinking that he's really full of it and unable to prove what he's saying only to have him win in court a libel action against It. And also by it having to pay out almost 100 grand to him, not to mention the court costs, he brought the holocaust revisionist and in many cases denial organization to the point of bankruptcy! It also had its wear-house in California fire bombed three times by outraged citizens that destroyed most of its anti-Holocaust as well as anti-Semitic material that it was, in many cases free of charge , handing out to the public.
As big as a victory it was for Mel Mermelstein at the time it may well have turned out to be a "Pyrrhic Victory" for him in the long run. That by giving the IHR free and undeserved publicity that has now, some 30 years later, spawned scores of like wise holocaust revisionist sites on the internet that are still around-Like IHR-with us now and unfortunately still growing all over the net or cyberspace. This makes me feel that if Mermelstein listened to both the ADL & Simon Wiesenthal Center to just ignore the slings and arrows being thrown at him by the IHR it as well as it fellow websites would have died an lonely and ignominious death or never would have come into existence in the first place!