On Tuesday this week a group of nazis and conspiracy theorists tried to insult the memory of Adolf Hitler’s victims by staging a Holocaust denial conference coinciding with Holocaust Memorial Day.
They failed, because for once an internet service provider refused to do business with nazis and cancelled their account. Thankfully not every online business has the Elon Musk policy of deliberately promoting evil.
Confusion and embarrassment
After hours of confusion and embarrassment with their followers wondering why the promised live stream hadn’t started, jailbird and all-round weirdo Germar Rudolf (chairman and chief promoter of the event) admitted defeat. The conference has been rescheduled for a second attempt next Saturday, 7th February.
For decades Searchlight has been on the trail of Hitler apologists in the worldwide Holocaust denial movement.
Our late editor and publisher Gerry Gable famously targeted the nazi “historian” David Irving as early as 1963.
Working with members of the anti-fascist 62 Group, Gerry knew even then what it took the London courts another forty years to establish, that Irving was a dishonest fake historian working with Third Reich veterans to rehabilitate their evil ideology by denying Hitler’s crimes.
As we have explained in recent years the Holocaust denial movement has been at a turning point, with its original leaders dead or dying.
The advertised line-up of conference speakers for Rudolf’s “Holocaust Summit” shows a deliberate effort to reinvigorate this Hitlerian apologist scene with a new generation of online conspiracy theorists who in some cases grew out of pandemic-era paranoia.
No gas chambers
Stars of the show are the remaining leaders of old-school denial. Germar Rudolf is a 61 year old who started out in far-right youth movements in his native Germany and was jailed for producing a “report” that asserted there were no homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz.
Searchlight monitored his work in Britain where he tried to take advantage of the lax legal framework here.
Rudolf went into the Holocaust denial publishing business with one of Britain’s most infamous nazis, the Sussex-based printer and forger Tony Hancock, who died in 2012.
After moving to the USA, Rudolf found new ways to get on the wrong side of the law.
Indecent exposure
He was convicted in 2020 of indecent exposure and open lewdness after being arrested naked from the waist down in a Pennsylvania public park.
56-year-old Vincent Reynouard is together with Rudolf now the world’s most prolific Holocaust denier.
He was once active in France’s most militant neo-nazi group PNFE, which for years collaborated with the British National Party but closed down after one of its members tried to assassinate French President Jacques Chirac.
Reynouard became an aging poster boy for the far right when he went on the run, trying to escape criminal charges in France.
Hiding in London
He lived in hiding in Welling, SE London, for several years and was investigated by Searchlight when he continued while in exile to work with British nazis and Holocaust deniers Richard Edmonds, Michèle Renouf and Peter Rushton.
After fleeing London, Reynouard hid in a Scottish village before justice caught up with him and he was extradited from Scotland to France after a year in prison in Edinburgh.
Reynouard’s present legal position is unclear but readers have good reason to hope that he might be jailed again before too long.
Lower profile
The third well known Holocaust denial star at the conference is a lower profile but also prolific author, 75 year old Italian Carlo Mattogno.
He has been part of the Third Reich apologist scene for decades, beginning with the Institute for Historical Review, founded by American antisemite Willis Carto and British nazi exile Dave McCalden in the 1970s.
Mattogno’s brother Gian Pio is a traditionalist Catholic, and this movement (which harbours a disturbing number of antisemites) has helped produce a new generation of Holocaust deniers.
One of these is among the three Britons advertised as conference speakers. Fr James Mawdsley (52) became known in the 1990s as a human rights activist in Burma, where he was jailed by the military junta in 1998.
He then tried to become a Tory politician, contesting the North West England region at the 2004 European election, and the marginal Hyndburn constituency at the 2005 General Election.
Mawdsley’s next change of direction was to become a “traditionalist” Roman Catholic priest, at first with a faction called FSSP (a rival to the SSPX which yet another notorious British Holocaust denier, Bishop Richard Williamson, used as a platform for Holocaust denial and other antisemitism).
Conspiracies
Just as Williamson was kicked out of the SSPX, Mawdsley left the FSSP in 2022 and has become more extreme ever since, ranting about Covid conspiracies and Jews.
An even more eccentric priest on the conference panel is Nathaniel Kapner, known online as “Brother Nathanael”. This 75 year old antisemite and conspiracy theorist describes himself as a Jewish convert to Russian Orthodoxy.
SS guard
American speakers include Heinz Bartesch and Andrew Allen. Bartesch’s father Martin was an SS guard at Mauthausen where he shot and killed Max Ochshorn, a Jewish prisoner who was trying to escape.
In 1987 the US government stripped him of his citizenship after finding that he had lied on his immigration forms when he first came to the USA in 1955.
A diplomatic incident followed when the Austrian authorities at first refused to accept Bartesch, then dropped charges against him when they found that (even for murder) the statute of limitations for his crime had expired due to his being 17 years old when he shot Max Ochshorn.
The SS man died in 1989, but his son Heinz still lives in Los Angeles where he ran an IT recruitment company. His fellow “Holocaust Summit” speaker Andrew Allen was Martin Bartesch’s Californian lawyer and has been part of the Holocaust denial movement since the days of Carto’s IHR in the 1970s.
False name
Another conference speaker was until recently operating in the shadows. 65 year old David Skrbina was a philosophy lecturer at the University of Michigan, Dearborn, for fifteen years and more recently taught at the University of Helsinki.
He also hid behind the name “Thomas Dalton” to produce Holocaust denial books and articles, but seems now to have dropped that mask after being outed in March 2025. Skrbina first accidentally outed himself during a podcast in 2024 when he logged on by mistake using his “Dalton” identity.
British speakers
Two of the British speakers are less bashful and have longstanding open ties to British and European extremist movements. Peter Rushton is assistant editor of the nazi magazine Heritage and Destiny and has been one of the few so-called “intellectuals” on the British far right for over thirty years.
He split from the BNP in 2002 after one of many clashes with its then führer Nick Griffin and soon started working with another opponent of Griffin’s, magazine editor Mark Cotterill.
Rushton is also known for his jaunts around Europe where he has worked with a succession of leading nazis, most recently the Madrid Hitlerite fanatic Isabel Peralta.
Michèle Renouf is an Australian-born model who first caught Searchlight’s attention when she began associating with David Irving at the time of his failed libel case against the American academic Deborah Lipstadt in 2000.
Saudi prince
She tried to arrange funding for Irving from a Saudi prince, who inconveniently dropped dead before the cheque was signed.
Renouf went on to build close connections to some of Europe’s most militant nazis including the terrorist Manfred Roeder, whose German home she bought and renovated.
In recent years Renouf has spoken at a conference with the banned terrorists of the Nordic Resistance Movement and with one of Britain’s most extreme racist groups Patriotic Alternative.
New blood
The aging leaders of Holocaust denial are looking for new blood. Mattogno, Renouf and Kapner are in their 70s. Rudolf and Skrbina are in their 60s. Reynouard, Rushton and Mawdsley are in their 50s.
Rudolf is well aware of the need to recruit younger audiences and has been desperately touring online far right broadcasters trying to drum up interest.
There are rumours that Rudolf will pull a rabbit out of the hat, if and when his conference takes place, and that this will involve linking his aging movement to younger elements on the dissident right.
Searchlight investigators are looking into these ties and will report soon.
