Yet
two years later, after having submitted his thesis in 1993, Hayward requests
that his thesis be embargoed for three years. Although this is an unusual
request by any academic who thrives on the ‘publish or perish’ maxim,
Professor Vincent Orange approves the request.
It
is little wonder Hayward was in panic mode because the final chapter of his
thesis states:
“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.”
In
1996 Hayward requests another extension to the publication of his embargoed
thesis until 1 January 1999, and again it is granted.
At
the beginning of October 1998, Hayward sent his original thesis to Adelaide
Institute for photocopying, with the comment that it may be used in any way.
Copies were made and distributed to all Associates. A copy is also handed to
the Commissioners, Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, hearing
the complaint laid by Jeremy Jones against both Fredrick Töben
and Olga Scully.
Also
in October 1998 Joel Hayward even contemplates being a witness in the
Toronto Zündel trial. The dilemma facing him was the worry that he may say
something helpful for the defence, for example his view that Revisionism
“can promote anti-Semitism (although I naturally don’t think that it
does in its own right).”
[Email
from Hayward to Töben,
dated 5 October 1998.]
Dr
Robert Faurisson anticipated this in one of his perceptive comments.
Hayward’s opinion, says Faurisson, “is that the Revisionists are right
BUT THAT THEY HAVE NO HEART AND DO NOT CARE DISTRESSING THE JEWS. He
believes in Babi Yar and all sorts of stupid things. His testimony could be
very harmful in a ‘Human Rights’ ‘tribunal’ since that kind of
‘tribunal’ thinks that ‘truth is no defence’. Hayward could even be
the ideal witness for the prosecution: Zündel
is all the more dangerous since he is right!”
[Letter
dated 16 October 1998, from Faurisson to Zündel.]
Faurisson
also advised Fredrick Töben
“… there is nothing confidential, at least today, with this thesis since
I see that in 1996 I purchased my own copy. Hayward asked me for the
money (because of the photocopy), got it and never asked me to keep all this
secret. He asked me my opinion about his thesis. I sent him my draft and
asked him two questions:
1.
“Would it be right to say that, for you, at the beginning of 1993
the revisionists were generally right as reason is concerned but wrong as
sentiments are concerned?”
2.
I heard you were from Jewish descent; is that right?
I
asked those questions on 24 August, 18 November and 27 November. I told him
that, being overworked, I need first his answer to my first question to go
and read carefully his thesis. He sent me finally a rather rude answer but
without addressing my two questions. Faurisson also pointed out that
Hayward’s thesis “seems also to say that the revisionists tend to
distress Jewish people. If he really says so, what are his arguments and,
anyway, is this the role of an historian? … Ignores that there is absolutely
no physical violence from the Revisionists against the Jews.”
[Letter
dated 18 October 1998, from Faurisson to Töben]
In
the December 1998/January 1999 issue of the New Zealand Jewish Chronicle,
a report appears headed ‘NZ connection to Internet incitement case’. It
states “Evidence submitted by Dr Töben
days before the hearings included a 500-page Master’s thesis on Holocaust
revisionism by New Zealand Canterbury University student, Joel Hayward.”
When
in 1999 Hayward makes another request to have his thesis embargoed for
another period, the University of Canterbury refuses and invites Hayward to
add an addendum to his thesis, which he does. (In essence the two-page
Hayward Addendum states that his thesis contains ‘several errors of fact
and interpretation’.)
[Appendix
B, ibid.]
Hayward
also writes a letter to the New Zealand Jewish Chronicle, which is
published in its February 1999 edition at p.7. Among other things, he
states:
“…
First, Dr Fredrick Töben
violated my rights as an author by presenting a copy of my 1993 Masters 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
October 17 – from reproducing or distributing my work in part or in whole
… 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.”
Hayward
goes further into damage control. In a letter dated 8 December 1999, headed
‘Strictly Confidential’ and addressed to Canterbury’s Vice Chancellor,
Hayward states, among other things:
“Toward
the end of 1998 an Australian racist named Dr Fredrick Tobin (sic), who has
just completed a prison term in Germany for Holocaust denial, attempted to
present a copy of my thesis to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity
Commission (HREOC) in Sydney as proof that the Holocaust did not happen. I
immediately wrote to the HREOC and asked them to withdraw the thesis from
their proceedings. They kindly agreed to do so.”
[Commissioner
Cathleen McEvoy, now dean of the law faculty, University of Adelaide, never
informed Fredrick Töben
of this Hayward communication. Nor did Hayward forward a copy of his letter
to Töben,
though he did send an Email requesting that Töben
stop using his thesis.]
Graeme
Wake, Dean of Postgraduate Studies, and Professor of Applied Mathematics at
Canterbury responds in a letter dated 3 May 2000 (with a hand-written note
‘Today’s date January 2000 sent’):
“We
share your distaste for the actions of racist persons like those you
mention. Nonetheless it is incumbent on us, as a premier research
University, to maintain open access to scholarship produced, and accepted
for, a research degree. To act otherwise could lead to accusations of a
cover-up and compromise us in other ways. So we have sought another
alternative (which we broached with you by telephone).
In
the interest of all, and especially the victims of the Holocaust, the
University invites you to write a (brief) addendum to the thesis. This would
presumably state your more recent views and insights on this topic and
summarise results of any post-1993 scholarship which might point to
different conclusions than you made originally … it would further
strengthen the stand against the likes of Dr Fredrick Tobin and his ilk.”
On
15 December 1999, Hayward writes a letter to Greg Raven of the IHR:
“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.”
[From:http://aarghinternational.org/engl/hay/hayindex.html.
For an account of the Hayward File it is well worth reading Serge Thion’s
comprehensive treatment of the moral and intellectual problems raised by
Hayward’s behaviour and failure of moral nerve.]
Also
in 2000, Professor Dov Bing comes on to the scene. A political science
lecturer at Hamilton’s Waikato University, Dr Bing broadcasts the fact
that Hayward had distributed his thesis to Faurisson, Irving and Töben.
The
New Zealand Jewish Chronicle of April 2000 whips up a storm that is
picked up internationally. Hayward apologises to New Zealand’s Jewish
community:
“I
stuffed up. The conclusions are wrong … without doubt, around six million
Jews perished during World War Two. 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.”
K
R Bolton, a New Zealand observer of the controversy sums up the 89-page and
29 appendices Working Party Report thus:
“After
some five months and $200.000 a tribunal of eminent persons reached
conclusions so predictable and cliché-ridden that a fiver and a day spent
over a cuppa could have reached the same result.
The
Party found that Dr Joel Hayward, now an eminent military historian and
lecturer in his own right, did not merit an MA with First Class Honours from
Canterbury University for his 1993 thesis: The Fate of Jews in German
Hands: an enquiry into the significance of Holocaust Revisionism.
Upon
seeking legal advice, the Working Party was unable to revoke the MA Hons.
Degree, which had been demanded by the New Zealand Jewish Council because it
could not be demonstrated that Hayward had acted dishonestly. However, the
opinion was that Hayward did not merit such honours. The Working Party found
that although Hayward had demonstrated superior abilities as a researcher
and had put together his thesis with exceptional skill, his conclusions were
flawed. He should not have offered an opinion as to which side of the
Holocaust debate, revisionism or orthodoxy, was correct on the weight of
evidence. Also, a particularly contentious point was that Hayward’s thesis
was three times longer than required … What irked the Jewish Council was
that by awarding the Hayward thesis First Class Honours, this appeared to
give academic legitimacy to holocaust revisionism …The Working Party was
only required to consider if Hayward had acted dishonestly and therefore
whether his MA Hons should be revoked. It found that he had not. It offered
that Hayward was not required to render an opinion on the evidence in the
Holocaust debate and that the thesis was too lengthy. What the Party should
not have done is indulged in a large amount of unfounded criticism of
revisionists and revisionism, on the basis of comments supplied by and for
the Jewish Council. Outside submissions were not accepted …Despite the
recommendations of two reputable New Zealand scholars the thesis ‘did not
deserve the highest accolade’, and therefore the opinions of two acclaimed
and experienced New Zealand academics are trashed in favour of Jewish
ethnocentrists and their ally, a less than dispassionate Professor Evans
from England.”
[In:
Western Destiny, February 2001, Issue #23.]
This
same Professor Richard Evans was the so-called ‘expert witness’ at the
2000 London Irving-Lipstadt trial. Evans is professor of German history at
Cambridge University.
Things
began to quieten down a little for Hayward.
3.
A detour covering similar grounds
While
the University of Canterbury had its problems caused by the New Zealand
Jewish community’s representatives with their particular ‘Holocaust’
obsession, Waikato University attended to its own as well. The Jewish
community had sniffed out a right-wing extremist who had been accepted into
the university’s doctoral program.
“Berlin-born
Hans-Joachim Kupka was accepted to study the role the German language played
in contemporary New Zealand – a field which critics said would have meant
his having to interview German-speaking Holocaust survivors. Kupka, the
former deputy chair of the Bavarian branch of the extreme right-wing
Republikaner Party, withdrew his candidature in the wake of the
controversy.”
[Australian
Jewish News, 5 January 2001.]
The
restless paranoid Jewish community leaders would not let things be and
demanded that the university investigate and apologise – which it did.
4.
Updating the old issue with a new one
On
9 October 2002 Waikato University releases its report A Review of the
Case of Hans Joachim Kupka, available at http://unipr.waikato.ac.nz/news/kupka-report.shtml.
The Report, prepared by Mr Bill Renwick, details the University's handling
of the Kupka case.
The
Waikato Times, the regional newspaper ran the story and Professor Dov
Bing weighed in heavily.
However, generally there was not much community interesting the Kupka affair
and observant individuals realized the alleged hysteria had been
artificially whipped up by the leaders of the Jewish community. It seems
that this displeased Bing somewhat.
And
so he issues a Press Release and sends it to the WaikatoTimes, and
journalist Lester Thorley turns it into an article that is published on 23
October 2002.
Essay
was revisionist: professor
By
Lester Thorley
A
Waikato University professor believes he has uncovered a Holocaust
revisionist thesis at Canterbury University.
Waikato
political science professor Dov Bing, who led Jewish academic outrage during
Waikato's Kupka Holocaust denial affair, wants answers from Canterbury over
the history thesis Judgment On Nuremberg, by Steven Eaton.
It
was produced one year after the 1993 Hayward thesis, which attracted
worldwide attention for its conclusion that the Nazis did not systematically
exterminate Jews in gas chambers.
Prof
Bing said the Canterbury theses had been hailed on an Alabama, US, Holocaust
revisionist website. The Theses and Dissertations Press home page says it
started in 1994 in response to "the reception of two unpublished
masters theses in history from a foreign university".
The
company says its aim is to publish views which are "suppressed"
elsewhere.
Mr
Eaton's thesis, which argued the 1945 Nuremberg war criminal trials were
illegal, was part of an honours masters degree. He credits Joel Hayward:
"who first introduced me to Nuremberg and it is to him that I owe my
enthusiasm for the subject".
Prof
Bing said, "Holocaust revisionism, especially when it enters the halls
of academia, is a matter of considerable public interest."
A
2000 investigation into Hayward's paper led to Canterbury's apology to the
Jewish community for accepting a "seriously flawed thesis". A
working party said standards had "slipped on just one occasion".
Canterbury's
chancellor Dame Phyllis Guthardt said yesterday the Hayward case was
investigated fully.
"From
the university's point of view the matter is closed."
Canterbury
would not investigate Mr Eaton's thesis unless there was clear evidence of
fraud or dishonesty in his work.
Waikato
professor John Jensen, who has since left, was the external marker for
Hayward's work, which was given an A+.
Canterbury
would not name Mr Eaton's external marker, but said it was not Prof
Jensen.”
As
this item mentions the Hayward affair, it becomes relevant for the press in
Christchurch, and
the Canterbury Press’s Amanda Warren elaborates and fabricates that
the Eaton thesis is actually on Dr Robert Countess’ website, when this is
not a fact because Countess does not have a website.
Second
Holocaust thesis under fire
By AMANDA
WARREN
24
October 2002
http://www.stuff.co.nz/
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.”
Adelaide
Institute’s call to the University of Canterbury yielded the following
response from a source that did not wish to be named, though the speaker met
Fredrick Töben in 2000:
“The
Hayward thesis is behind us. The Eaton thesis is on the Nuremberg War Crimes
Trials. It is not a Holocaust issue. The issue at any university is the
freedom to research … with sensitivity.”
[See
the university’s response:
http://www.canterbury.ac.nz/search/intro.htm
5.
The latest on the Hayward Affair
The
above Press article spawns the following in New Zealand’s premier
Radio and Television magazine, Listener, 2-8 November 2002, but
actually printed on Friday, 25 October 2002.
It
bills the following article on its front page as:
SPECIAL
REPORT: HOLOCAUST DENIAL AND THE NZ CONNECTION
In Denial
The
continuing story of why a New Zealand university refuses to dishonour a
thesis denying the Nazi Holocaust.
By
Philip Matthews
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 bis 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 pf 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
attitude s 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.
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, 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 bas 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
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 even 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. 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
imprimature 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.”
--------------
Adelaide
Institute’s New Zealand Associate, K R Bolton, writes the following letter
to the NZ Listener
29
October 2002,
Dear
Editor
That
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 pervious 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 the 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
responds to the NZ Listener:
editor@listener.co.nz
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.
Sincerely
Fredrick
Töben
6.
Conclusion.
Whenever
a former Soviet-controlled country joins NATO, then it is required to pass
before the joining date a specific law that outlaws ‘Holocaust’ denial.
Poland passed a law in January 1999, and in April of that year it was
permitted to join NATO.
The
pattern has repeated itself, all for the well being of the 1500 families
that control the thriving business enterprise called NATO, and of course for
the ‘memory of the victims of the Holocaust’.
New
Zealand is as yet not going down this road, not yet. But the Jewish
lobby’s attempt to stifle debate on matters ‘Holocaust’ indicates it
is well on its way. Outright ‘Holocaust’ denial is as yet not on the New
Zealand legal books, as is the case in Australia where the 17 September 2002
Federal Court of Australia judgments in Jones v Scully and Jones v Töben
has enshrined in law a European-style ‘Holocaust denial’ law, albeit
without criminal sanctions.
New
Zealand is focusing on academia to reign in dissident thinkers, the road
that Germany walked along in 1983 when Göttingen
University withdrew its doctorate conferred upon Justice Wilhelm Stäglich
during the 1950s for having written in 1977 the classic: The Auschwitz
Myth. France has done likewise. Switzerland and Austria have not, as
yet!
A
call to New Zealand’s well-known current affairs TV program Paul Holmes,
indicates that a general interest in the matters raised by the Listener
article seems not to warrant a specific program on the Hayward affair, so
according to producer Vicky Poland.
It
remains to be seen whether Professor Dov Bing will let matters rest.
Fredrick
Töben
Adelaide
1
November 2002
[The
letter was not published.]
Addendum
31 October 2002
Holocaust
uproar student apologises
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/
31.10.2002
A German student
at the centre of a controversial Holocaust denial case at Waikato University
has apologised to the Jewish community and university staff.
Hans-Joachim
Kupka, who is in his early 50s, offered his apology from his home in Germany
after reading about a report on the case released this month after a
two-year investigation.
Mr Kupka, who was a New Zealand citizen, left Waikato in June 2000 after
allegations that he denied the Holocaust during internet chatroom debates.
The
chatroom comments were unrelated to Mr Kupka's doctoral thesis on the use of
German in New Zealand, but academics feared he would contact Jewish migrants
who survived the Holocaust - the systematic killing of Jews in the 1940s.
The Jewish community considered this a clear breach of university cultural
safety protocols. The report, by former Education Department head Bill
Renwick, criticised the university's handling of Mr Kupka's 1999 enrolment
and found that he was clearly a Holocaust denier. By email, Mr Kupka said:
"It has never been my intention to hurt anybody with my internet
postings.
"They
were never intended to be racist, anti-Semitic or Holocaust-denying.
"Some of these postings have been quoted out of context, others have
been cited incompletely."
Mr
Kupka apologised to the Jewish community for any statement which might have
hurt them, and to university staff.
"What more can I do?" he wrote. He believed that up to 90 per cent
of the Renwick report could be disputed, and he had been continually
labelled a Holocaust denier or Neo-Nazi.
Fredrick
Töben comments:
Another
good man apologises for what? "The Jewish community considered this
a clear breach of university cultural safety protocols.”? "That's
a new one! More to come, no doubt. Hayward was right in bemoaning the state
of moral and intellectual enquiry declining within western culture.
In whose
interest is all this? In
whose interest is it that the western world is attacking Islam via that
;'terrorism' imperative coming from the USA?
Just
asking.
