Speaker 1: Col Zone Media.
Speaker 2: On the Saturday night before Labor Day in two thousand
Speaker 2: and three, charter buses pulled into the lot at Cincinnati's
Speaker 2: public landing. Passengers streamed out of the buses, one hundred
Speaker 2: and fifty or so, mostly older white men in suits,
Speaker 2: and they boarded the Delta Queen. It was a beautiful
Speaker 2: late summer evening for a dinner cruise down the Ohio River,
Speaker 2: and they'd spent all day cooped up inside in a
Speaker 2: rented ballroom at the Marriotte near the airport. They'd paid
Speaker 2: three hundred and seventy five dollars apiece to attend a
Speaker 2: weekend long conference called Real History USA. But the history
Speaker 2: they were interested in wasn't what any real historian would
Speaker 2: call real history at all. This was the fifth year
Speaker 2: in a row that disgraced historian and infamous Holocaust denier
Speaker 2: David Irving had brought anti Semites from around the world
Speaker 2: to Cincinnati. Over the years, he's been banned from entering Canada, Germany, Austria, Australia,
Speaker 2: New Zealand, and Lithuania, but he seemed to enjoy the
Speaker 2: Ohio River, and he came back to Cincinnati year after
Speaker 2: year that weekend speakers ranged from notorious to obscure, but
Speaker 2: they all shared a passion for Nazi Germany. Brigham Young
Speaker 2: University professor Tom Catherall had to cancel at the last
Speaker 2: minute due to a health concern, and I'm sure the
Speaker 2: attendees were devastated to miss his presentation on Hermann Goering's
Speaker 2: love of model Trains. Over lunch at the Marriotte on Saturday,
Speaker 2: they watched Lenny Riefenstahl's Victory of the Faith, the less
Speaker 2: famous predecessor to her infamous Nazi propaganda film Triumph of
Speaker 2: the Will. The conference program notes that Reefenstahl is quote
Speaker 2: still going strong at over one hundred and Irving said
Speaker 2: that Reefenstahal sends her greetings to the conference's attendees. David
Speaker 2: Irving couldn't have known then that his friend would actually
Speaker 2: die later that week. On Sunday morning, the conference resumed
Speaker 2: with presentations from Donald Bustian, an adjunct professor at Southern
Speaker 2: Arkansas University and founding member of a group called Scholars
Speaker 2: for Nine to eleven Truth. Before lunch, Charles Pravaan, a
Speaker 2: theologian whose anti contraception writing is highly regarded by adherents
Speaker 2: of the Quiverful movement opined on the possibility that a
Speaker 2: self published book by an American Jew was actually to
Speaker 2: blame for Hitler's policies in Germany. And that afternoon, David
Speaker 2: Irving gave the stage to a young protege, an up
Speaker 2: and coming white nationalist blogger who'd recently finished his master's
Speaker 2: degree at Texas A and M University, Curtis Maynard presented
Speaker 2: his master's thesis on a lesser known incident from World
Speaker 2: War II. The one hundred and four page thesis doesn't
Speaker 2: actually mentioned the Holocaust a single time. It's not about that.
Speaker 2: It's about a nineteen forty three German air raid on
Speaker 2: US naval vessels docked at Bari, Italy. But the old
Speaker 2: man in the Marriott conference room probably spent most of
Speaker 2: their Sunday afternoons watching the History Channel, so I'm sure
Speaker 2: they enjoyed hearing a dry resitation of facts about planes
Speaker 2: and ships. Either way, in two thousand and three, Curtis
Speaker 2: Maynard was a rising star in the revisionist history community.
Speaker 2: Sharing the stage with David Irving was a great honor
Speaker 2: for an aspiring white supremacist writer, and in certain circles
Speaker 2: his writing was well regarded and is sometimes still remembered,
Speaker 2: but Curtis Maynard is best remembered for how his story
Speaker 2: ends at the wheel of a nineteen ninety four Lincoln
Speaker 2: sedan crash in a ditch with a bullet hole in
Speaker 2: his head. I'm Molly Counger, and this is where the
Speaker 2: little guys. When I started writing this episode, I thought
Speaker 2: the story of Curtis Maynard would revolve around the revisionist
Speaker 2: historians and pseudo intellectuals he admired, But instead I spent
Speaker 2: most of this week reconstructing one man's disastrous downward spiral
Speaker 2: after getting into a flame war on a form thread
Speaker 2: about Ron Paul. I think, at its core, this is
Speaker 2: a story about lies, not just the lies of dishonest scholarship.
Speaker 2: No listener to this show needs to be told this,
Speaker 2: But the Holocaust did happen. Millions of Jews, roma queer people, communists,
Speaker 2: and political dissidents or shot, gassed and starved to death
Speaker 2: by Nazi Germany. I have no interest at all in
Speaker 2: engaging with the revisionist history of David Irving and his ilk.
Speaker 2: There's no debate to be had there, Although we will
Speaker 2: wade through a bit of the swamp they inhabit. No,
Speaker 2: this is a story about smaller lies, about the gossip
Speaker 2: and rumors that live in the comments on twenty year
Speaker 2: old blog posts and ancient threads on hateful online forums,
Speaker 2: about interna scene, squabbles for clout on Nazi message boards,
Speaker 2: and debate within the white power movement about what kind
Speaker 2: of messaging will actually advance their cause. And it's a
Speaker 2: story that ends in a despicable, tragic act of domestic violence.
Speaker 2: A woman was murdered, a child was shot, and children
Speaker 2: lost their parents. It's a story about the violent speech
Speaker 2: of violent men, men who talk about mass murder and genocide,
Speaker 2: and how sometimes those men cross the threshold into real
Speaker 2: world violence. This is something I spend a lot of
Speaker 2: time thinking about. It's unavoidable, really, I spend a lot
Speaker 2: of time studying the digital debris left behind after the fact,
Speaker 2: after a man like this stops posting and starts loading
Speaker 2: his gun. But that's almost always where I start reading.
Speaker 2: I'm looking back in time. I already know what he did.
Speaker 2: A few months ago, I started researching for an episode
Speaker 2: about a different man, a different murderer. I realized something
Speaker 2: that seems obvious now. I just never really thought about
Speaker 2: it this way before. When I study the internet footprint
Speaker 2: of a killer, I'm looking at a fossil of sorts,
Speaker 2: these posts preserved in stone, evidence of where he once was.
Speaker 2: But those online ecosystems are thriving, busy places, full of
Speaker 2: people who read those posts the day they were made,
Speaker 2: people who responded to them. So what is for me
Speaker 2: some kind of artifact was once an actual conversation between
Speaker 2: real people who really knew each other, And when one
Speaker 2: of them logs off for the last time, the ones
Speaker 2: left behind processed that violence right there in the same
Speaker 2: digital forum they'd spent years chatting. The story they got
Speaker 2: me thinking about this particular genre of online conversation is
Speaker 2: when I haven't finished. Fraser Glenn Miller murdered three people
Speaker 2: in Kansas in twenty fourteen. He died in prison, convicted
Speaker 2: of those murders, but he was He was also a
Speaker 2: suspect in three other murders in nineteen eighty seven, and
Speaker 2: was a central figure in the Greensboro massacre, where Nazis
Speaker 2: and klansmen murdered five communist organizers in nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 2: He didn't pull the trigger in nineteen seventy nine, and
Speaker 2: nobody ever proved he did in eighty seven, but he
Speaker 2: played a part in those deaths. His hands were unclean
Speaker 2: long before he opened fire in Overland Park. It's a
Speaker 2: long and complicated story, with mountains of archival material left
Speaker 2: to consume before I'm ready to write it. But on
Speaker 2: the day Miller started shooting outside a Jewish community center
Speaker 2: in Kansas, his peers saw the news. Within an hour
Speaker 2: of the shooting. There were threads on Stormfront and Vanguard News,
Speaker 2: the two most popular Nazi message boards of the day,
Speaker 2: and in the immediate aftermath, a lot of the posters
Speaker 2: were celebrating. They thought there were some dead Jews, in
Speaker 2: their words, but others were skeptical about initial reports that
Speaker 2: the shooter had yelled Hyle Hitler as officers handcuffed him,
Speaker 2: and then someone posted the news footage of that moment
Speaker 2: of the shooter yelling Hyle Hitler, and the shooter's face
Speaker 2: isn't terribly clear, as he's being shoved into the back
Speaker 2: of a police car. If you didn't know him, that blurry,
Speaker 2: poorly lit image wouldn't really look like anything at all.
Speaker 2: But they did know him. It was Brad Griffin, a
Speaker 2: prominent member of the secessionist group the League of the South,
Speaker 2: and a man I have my own history with who
Speaker 2: recognized Miller first. The shooter wasn't just one of their own.
Speaker 2: He was a prolific poster in their online community. He
Speaker 2: was someone they talked to every day, someone who'd been
Speaker 2: a significant figure in their movement for decades. And on
Speaker 2: both sides, users were searching for meaning, and some said
Speaker 2: they always knew this would happen, that he was going
Speaker 2: to crack one of these days and do something like this.
Speaker 2: Others insisted that the man they knew would never do
Speaker 2: this and he must have been set up. Some celebrated,
Speaker 2: some were disappointed, but no one grieved for his victims.
Speaker 2: And those conversations seemed so unique to me. What a
Speaker 2: strange window into this terrible world. They're deeply troubling, of course,
Speaker 2: but surely those were an anomaly, I thought. But while
Speaker 2: I was researching for this episode, the story I'm circling
Speaker 2: around getting to this week, I saw it again because
Speaker 2: four years before Fraser Glenn Miller made his last post,
Speaker 2: that same online community reacted to the news that Curtis
Speaker 2: Maynard had murdered his ex wife and then taken his
Speaker 2: own life. But I suppose we should start at the end.
Speaker 2: On April twenty first, twenty ten, Curtis Boon Maynard was
Speaker 2: harassing his ex wife. It wasn't the first time they'd
Speaker 2: been divorced for a little over a year, and he
Speaker 2: hadn't reacted well to losing custody of their two daughters.
Speaker 2: I couldn't find any coverage that included the contents of
Speaker 2: any of those texts he sent Melissa Masa that day,
Speaker 2: but whatever it was, she was upset enough about the
Speaker 2: texts that she'd discussed them with a friend. That afternoon,
Speaker 2: at eight twenty pm, Melissa's neighbors heard gunshots. Her middle daughter,
Speaker 2: just twelve years old, ran to a neighbor's house with
Speaker 2: her two year old sister in her arms. A neighbor
Speaker 2: heard the commotion and came outside and saw Melissa, a
Speaker 2: thirty four year old mother of three, dead in her
Speaker 2: front yard. He was still taking in the sight of
Speaker 2: his neighbor's body there on the lawn when he noticed
Speaker 2: her ex husband, Curtis Maynard, pulling out of the driveway.
Speaker 2: The neighbor dialed nine when one as he started his
Speaker 2: own car following Maynard and providing his location to the dispatcher.
Speaker 2: Officers who arrived at the house found Melissa's oldest child,
Speaker 2: a sixteen year old daughter from a prior marriage inside.
Speaker 2: She survived, but she had been shot in the face
Speaker 2: by the man who had been her stepfather since she
Speaker 2: was a toddler. Curtis Maynard was driving seventy miles an
Speaker 2: hour down the highway when police caught.
Speaker 1: Up to him.
Speaker 2: He ended the chase without ever even stepping on the brakes.
Speaker 2: He shot himself in the head while he was still
Speaker 2: speeding down the dark road. With the driver dead at
Speaker 2: the wheel, his car slammed into an SUV that had
Speaker 2: pulled over on to the shoulder to get out of
Speaker 2: the way of the high speed chase. The mother and
Speaker 2: her two children inside were thankfully uninjured. The irresistible and
Speaker 2: unanswerable question in the aftermath of a tragedy like this
Speaker 2: is always why Why did he murder his ex wife?
Speaker 2: Why did he shoot his stepdaughter in the face? Why
Speaker 2: did he take his own life?
Speaker 1: Why? Today? Why like this? And there are no answers.
Speaker 2: Nothing I can tell you will explain this, not for
Speaker 2: lack of trying, But I can try to understand who
Speaker 2: he was before the last day of his life, and
Speaker 2: piece together the fragments of an online argument that seems
Speaker 2: to have been the beginning of the end of Curtis
Speaker 2: Maynard's dream of making a career out of being a
Speaker 2: racist blogger. I don't know exactly when Curtis Maynard decided
Speaker 2: he wanted to be a writer.
Speaker 1: He served briefly in the US.
Speaker 2: Army after high school. In nineteen ninety two, at the
Speaker 2: age of twenty five, he got his associate's degree in
Speaker 2: nursing began working as a registered nurse. In nineteen ninety six,
Speaker 2: while he was still married to his first wife, he
Speaker 2: started seeing the woman who had become his second wife
Speaker 2: and only murder victim, Melissa Mesa was actually still married
Speaker 2: to her first husband at the time, but they were separated,
Speaker 2: and Maynard would later say he'd believed she was already divorced.
Speaker 1: It's hard to piece together the particulars.
Speaker 2: Of a man's personal life so many years before he
Speaker 2: got online, but things were not going well.
Speaker 1: In nineteen ninety seven.
Speaker 2: Just as his divorce from his first wife was finalized,
Speaker 2: a judge in Texas issued a bench.
Speaker 1: Warn't for him.
Speaker 2: He'd pled guilty to a dui in nineteen ninety four,
Speaker 2: and he.
Speaker 1: Got off easy. He didn't have to go to jail.
Speaker 2: All he had to do was complete the DUI education program.
Speaker 1: But he never did it.
Speaker 2: So maybe he skipped town to avoid the benchwarn't maybe
Speaker 2: he was just looking for a fresh start after his divorce.
Speaker 2: But just as he was doing court in Corpus Christi, Texas,
Speaker 2: he got a job at a hospital in Idaho in
Speaker 2: June of nineteen ninety seven, right around the time Melissa
Speaker 2: probably would have been realizing she was pregnant with Maynard's daughter.
Speaker 1: He did something he should not have done.
Speaker 2: And I don't mean impregnating a woman who was still
Speaker 2: married to another man.
Speaker 1: I don't care about that.
Speaker 2: But according to a decision from the Idaho Board of Nursing,
Speaker 2: one vial of demarole and one vial of morphine went
Speaker 2: missing from the locked narcotics cabinet at Boundary County Community
Speaker 2: Hospital on June twenty eighth, nineteen ninety seven. Missing opiates
Speaker 2: are a big deal in a hospital. They're not something
Speaker 2: that just gets misplaced and shrugged off. It's not a
Speaker 2: lost pen. These things are carefully accounted for.
Speaker 1: These days.
Speaker 2: Every things tracked in a computer system, but even in
Speaker 2: the dark ages of the nineteen nineties, every dose of
Speaker 2: an opiate had to be signed for. There was a
Speaker 2: record where every drop of this was supposed to be.
Speaker 2: If those vials were missing, someone had to have taken them.
Speaker 2: An inventory was done to determine if anything else was missing,
Speaker 2: and a few days later it was discovered that two boxes,
Speaker 2: each containing ten vials of morphine, had been tampered with.
Speaker 2: The evidence was turned over to the Bonners Ferry Police department.
Speaker 2: The hospital had their own investigation to conduct. They drug
Speaker 2: tested every hospital employee who had access to that cabinet. Sure,
Speaker 2: it's possible that a nurse who steals pain medication is
Speaker 2: just selling it, but there's a really good chance that
Speaker 2: whoever took that morphine was going to test positive for it.
Speaker 2: Everyone tested negative, well, everyone except for Curtis Maynard, who
Speaker 2: didn't show up for his shift on the day of
Speaker 2: the drug test. In fact, he never came back.
Speaker 1: To work at all. The police investigation.
Speaker 2: Would eventually determine that Maynard's fingerprints were on the boxes
Speaker 2: that had been tampered with. The morphine that should have
Speaker 2: been in those vials in that box had all been
Speaker 2: replaced with what the Board of Nursing decision only calls
Speaker 2: quote a benign substance, which I assume is a saline
Speaker 2: solution or something like that. So the investigation was kicked
Speaker 2: off because two vials were physically missing from the cabinet,
Speaker 2: But in the end, it looks like a significant amount
Speaker 2: of morphine was actually missing, having been taken from the
Speaker 2: vials and replaced with something else.
Speaker 1: And so if he.
Speaker 2: Hadn't slipped up and stolen the vial of demarole, they
Speaker 2: might never have noticed that he'd been replacing morphine with
Speaker 2: salt water, and hospital patients may have been administered an
Speaker 2: unknown substance instead of their pain medication. By the time
Speaker 2: those lab results came back, though Maynard had already moved
Speaker 2: back to Texas, he was technically still a registered nurse
Speaker 2: with a valid license in Texas. When his oldest daughter
Speaker 2: was born in March of nineteen ninety eight, he was
Speaker 2: working as a nurse at a hospital in Corpus Christi.
Speaker 2: The Idaho Board of Nursing filed their formal complaint against
Speaker 2: him that summer, a year after the morphine first went missing.
Speaker 2: Maynard never responded. After months of getting no response from Maynard,
Speaker 2: the Idaho Board of Nursing got a default order against
Speaker 2: him suspend his nursing license, and before the Texas Board
Speaker 2: of Nursing had a chance to suspend him, a standard
Speaker 2: practice in most professions where if you're disciplined by a
Speaker 2: board in one state, there is what's called reciprocal discipline
Speaker 2: in most other states. But before Texas could do anything
Speaker 2: like that, he mailed them a letter saying I no
Speaker 2: longer desire to be licensed as a professional nurse, and
Speaker 2: he voluntarily relinquished his nursing license before it could be taken.
Speaker 2: The bonners Ferry Herald, a newspaper in bonners Ferry, Idaho,
Speaker 2: ran several announcements in the summer of two thousand that
Speaker 2: Curtis Maynard was wanted on a felony warrant for possession
Speaker 2: of controlled substance and theft, but Idaho court records don't
Speaker 2: show that any criminal case was ever filed.
Speaker 1: I have to.
Speaker 2: Assume that's in relation to the theft of the morphine
Speaker 2: three years earlier, but I don't know how those pieces
Speaker 2: fit together. He did move back to Idaho years later,
Speaker 2: but the five year statute of limitations had already passed,
Speaker 2: so he was never actually criminally charged in connection with
Speaker 2: the missing morphine. But in nineteen ninety nine, Curtis Maynard
Speaker 2: had lost his nursing license in Idaho and given it
Speaker 2: up in Texas. He was unable to work in the
Speaker 2: only field he had any real experience in. He had
Speaker 2: a baby and a common law wife to support, and
Speaker 2: he had a pretty serious addiction to alcohol and opiates.
Speaker 2: After twenty eight days of residential treatment for substance abuse,
Speaker 2: he did what a lot of people do when they
Speaker 2: have no idea what to do with their lives. He
Speaker 2: went to graduate school, enrolling in a master's program in
Speaker 2: history at Texas A and M University. I wish I
Speaker 2: could tell you which came first. Did Curtis Maynard set
Speaker 2: out to write his master's thesis about a German air
Speaker 2: raid on US naval vessels in Italy because he had
Speaker 2: a genuine interest in this lesser known chapter of World
Speaker 2: War II history, and he accidentally stumbled upon David Irvings's
Speaker 2: work while he was researching or was he already familiar
Speaker 2: with the work of revisionist historians and hoping to add
Speaker 2: his voice.
Speaker 1: To the choir.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure there's anyone left to ask, but whichever
Speaker 2: it was. By the time Maynard finished his thesis in
Speaker 2: the spring of two thousand and three, he wasn't just
Speaker 2: reading David Irvings's Holocaust denial works. They were corresponding. The
Speaker 2: thesis not only lists three of Irving's books in its bibliography,
Speaker 2: there are several footnotes indicating the source for a particular
Speaker 2: claim is an email exchange between Curtis Maynard and David Irving.
Speaker 2: Maynard's thesis isn't about the Holocaust. The word doesn't even
Speaker 2: appear in the paper. There's no mention of Jews, camps,
Speaker 2: gas chambers, nothing like that. The writing isn't great, in
Speaker 2: my opinion, but I think he could have produced a
Speaker 2: serviceable paper about a real historical event. I dropped out
Speaker 2: of college, so to be honest, I have no idea
Speaker 2: how the thesis writing process works. Maybe there was no
Speaker 2: point at which someone read any of this in draft
Speaker 2: form and asked him, hey, why did you write quote
Speaker 2: Without the works of historians like Elkafrolic and David Irving,
Speaker 2: who conducted research in the former Soviet archives in Moscow,
Speaker 2: there is a distinct possibility that we would not be
Speaker 2: privy to the uncensored and unedited thoughts, ideas, and words
Speaker 2: of doctor Joseph Gerbels today.
Speaker 1: End quote.
Speaker 2: Because not only is that not true, David Irving is
Speaker 2: not solely responsible for existing works of scholarship on the
Speaker 2: diaries of Joseph Gerbels, but it's also just a really
Speaker 2: weird thing to say. There must not be any feedback
Speaker 2: provided in the process, because surely someone in the history
Speaker 2: department would have clocked it as very inappropriate to drop
Speaker 2: this line.
Speaker 1: Quote.
Speaker 2: David Irving's opinion cannot be dismissed easily, as he is
Speaker 2: a recognized expert on the third Reich end quote. I
Speaker 2: don't know how to convey to you how not true
Speaker 2: that is. That is the not truest thing that you
Speaker 2: could write in your master's thesis or history. Now you
Speaker 2: might have been able to say it with a straight
Speaker 2: face in the nineteen sixties. Maybe in the nineteen sixties
Speaker 2: you could say David Irving is a recognized expert on
Speaker 2: the third Reich.
Speaker 3: Maybe maybe you could still say it in the seventies
Speaker 3: into the eighties. If you're reckless, if you're careless, if
Speaker 3: you're not keeping up with current events, maybe you could
Speaker 3: still say it in the eighties, but by two thousand
Speaker 3: everyone in the world knew that David Irving was not
Speaker 3: a historian. In nineteen ninety three, Jewish history professor Deborah
Speaker 3: Lipstadt wrote a book called Denying the Holocaust, The Growing
Speaker 3: Assault on Truth and Memory, and in the book, David
Speaker 3: Irving was just one of a variety of figures within
Speaker 3: the Holocaust denial movement that Lipstat discusses, but he in
Speaker 3: particular took issue with her criticism of his work, and
Speaker 3: so in nineteen ninety six he filed a libel suit
Speaker 3: against Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher. David Irving is British,
Speaker 3: so he filed this lawsuit in the United Kingdom, and
Speaker 3: libel laws are different in the UK. I don't want
Speaker 3: to get into the weeds there.
Speaker 1: They just are.
Speaker 2: But even in England, the truth is the best defense
Speaker 2: against an act acusation like this. It can't be liable
Speaker 2: if it's true, and so Lipstot's lawyers hired Sir Richard Evans,
Speaker 2: a Cambridge University history professor who is an actual historian
Speaker 2: of modern Germany, and Evans spent two full years, with
Speaker 2: the help of full time research assistance producing a seven
Speaker 2: hundred and forty page report on his findings. He read
Speaker 2: everything David Irving ever wrote, everything David Irving ever said
Speaker 2: about the things that he wrote, and ultimately Evans concluded that,
Speaker 2: in his expert opinion, everything David Irving had ever written
Speaker 2: was quote completely worthless as history, because Irving cannot be
Speaker 2: trusted anywhere in any of them to give a reliable
Speaker 2: account of what he is talking or writing about. If
Speaker 2: we mean by historian someone who is concerned to discover
Speaker 2: the truth about the past and to give as accurate
Speaker 2: representation of it as possible, then Irving is not a historian.
Speaker 2: And at the end of the trial, a judge agreed,
Speaker 2: writing that Irving had quote persistently and deliberately misrepresented and
Speaker 2: manipulated historical evidence end quote because he was ideologically motivated
Speaker 2: to portray Hitler in a positive light and.
Speaker 1: Deny the Holocaust.
Speaker 2: So he sued Deborah Lipstadt for calling him a Holocaust denier,
Speaker 2: saying that was libel, and the judge said, it's not
Speaker 2: libel because legally you're a Holocaust denier. So we lost
Speaker 2: the libel lawsuit. But even worse for David Irving than
Speaker 2: losing the lawsuit and having to pay quite a large
Speaker 2: sum of money. Was the fact that a small army
Speaker 2: of historians had spent years going over his work with
Speaker 2: a fine toothed comb. This wasn't the first time people
Speaker 2: had found inconsistencies and inaccuracies in his work, but they'd
Speaker 2: never been dissected quite like this. So all of these
Speaker 2: professors and historians had read all of his books, and
Speaker 2: they'd all written these reports, and they published those reports
Speaker 2: as books, and they talked to reporters, and now all
Speaker 2: of a sudden, it's very easy to find a laundry
Speaker 2: list of the debunked, made up, and outright fraudulent claims
Speaker 2: that riddled his body of work. So, no, there's really
Speaker 2: no excuse in two thousand and three for citing David
Speaker 2: Irving as an expert on the history of the Third Reich.
Speaker 2: That's malpractice. But maybe his thesis adviser was in a
Speaker 2: hurry when she's still his bibliography, and she didn't notice
Speaker 2: that he'd cited David Irvings's book The Destruction of Convoy PQ. Seventeen,
Speaker 2: despite the fact that every copy of that book was
Speaker 2: withdrawn from the market in nineteen seventy after Irving loss
Speaker 2: a massive libel lawsuit. I have to wonder if his
Speaker 2: adviser noticed that he cited Irving's Destruction of Dresden, a
Speaker 2: book that had been a best seller in the nineteen
Speaker 2: sixties but completely fell apart under the slightest scrutiny. The
Speaker 2: entire book relies on a premise supported only by a
Speaker 2: document that turned out to have been a Nazi forgery,
Speaker 2: as well as the personal assurances of a man who
Speaker 2: had been a major general in the Wehrmacht. Apparently, just
Speaker 2: finishing a thesis at all, regardless of what it says,
Speaker 2: is the biggest hurdle. Because Maynard graduated with a master's
Speaker 2: degree in May of two thousand and three, and just
Speaker 2: a few months after presenting him thesis to the committee
Speaker 2: at Texas A and M University, he presented it again,
Speaker 2: this time to the attendees of the Holocaust Denial Conference
Speaker 2: in Cincinnati. A few months after that conference, he applied
Speaker 2: for the reinstatement of his nursing license in Idaho. He
Speaker 2: planned to work part time while enrolled in a history
Speaker 2: PhD program at the University of Idaho in Moscow, on
Speaker 2: the condition that he attended narcotics, anonymous meetings three times
Speaker 2: a week, submit to random drug tests, and receive quarterly
Speaker 2: evaluations of his performance. He was allowed to work in
Speaker 2: a nursing home near the university, but he left the
Speaker 2: PhD program after just a few months and moved back
Speaker 2: to Texas again. But even as he's struggling to stay
Speaker 2: enrolled in school or keep a nursing job, his career
Speaker 2: as a professional racist is really starting to take off.
Speaker 2: In two thousand and seven, four years after David Irving
Speaker 2: invited him to share the stage at the Holocaust Denial
Speaker 2: Conference in Cincinnati, things were finally going well for Curtis Maynard.
Speaker 2: He was penn pals with Ernst Zundel, the German born
Speaker 2: Canadian whose criminal prosecutions in Germany and Canada had made
Speaker 2: him one of the world's most famous Holocaust deniers. Maynard's blog,
Speaker 2: The Politically Correct Apostate, was banned by blogspot and word
Speaker 2: press every couple of months, but it always re emerged,
Speaker 2: and the readers followed him to each new url. He
Speaker 2: wrote prolifically, often publishing multiple pieces per day, and his
Speaker 2: content was cross posted on the websites of some big
Speaker 2: names in the movement, like David Duke, and John Denugen.
Speaker 2: His writing appeared often on the website for Jeff Rentz,
Speaker 2: a talk radio guy that I think you could most
Speaker 2: quickly describe as a more explicitly Nazi version of Alex Jones.
Speaker 2: But you've probably never heard of Jeff Rentz because he
Speaker 2: got into a fight with Alex Jones in two thousand
Speaker 2: and nine that ended with Rents getting dumped by the
Speaker 2: network that they shared, Genesis Communications. Alex Linder, the webmaster
Speaker 2: at Vanguard News Network, posted dozens of Maynard's pieces on
Speaker 2: his site, and in April of two thousand and seven,
Speaker 2: Linder called him quote one of the most active and
Speaker 2: powerful of a rising generation of white writers. In July
Speaker 2: of two thousand and seven, just weeks after his wife
Speaker 2: gave birth to their second child, Maynard traveled to Sandpoint, Idaho.
Speaker 2: He was a guest at a conference hosted by America's
Speaker 2: Promise Minis, a Christian identity church funded by the sale
Speaker 2: of Holocaust denile literature. The keynote speaker at the conference
Speaker 2: was Michael Collins Piper, a regular contributor to the white
Speaker 2: nationalist publications American Free Press and The Spotlight. According to
Speaker 2: a write up about the event that was published in
Speaker 2: American Free Press. Piper's speech was about Jewish control of
Speaker 2: American politics conspiracy theorist Mark Glenn performed an original musical
Speaker 2: number about Jewish domination of society with the help of
Speaker 2: his five oldest children, and I guess it's for the best.
Speaker 2: But I couldn't find any video of that.
Speaker 1: But I don't know. I'm kind of curious.
Speaker 2: But Glenn was proud enough of this performance to include
Speaker 2: it in his article about the conference, and the article
Speaker 2: mentions Manard by name calling him quote a well known
Speaker 2: writer dealing with the issues similar to the themes covered
Speaker 2: at the conference, the themes being I guess Jewish control
Speaker 2: of society, and the write up ends with a quote
Speaker 2: from Michael Collins Piper, the keynote speaker, and he said
Speaker 2: of the conference quote, it was obvious to me five
Speaker 2: minutes after arriving at the church that once again everything
Speaker 2: the mainstream media has said about North Idaho being a
Speaker 2: haven for violent extremists and malcontents is all a big lie,
Speaker 2: and that no better people can be found anywhere. I
Speaker 2: wouldn't expect a man like Michael Collins Piper to be
Speaker 2: honest about something like America's Promised Ministries. But I will
Speaker 2: point out that there is a reason he felt the
Speaker 2: need to counter the idea that the church was a
Speaker 2: haven for violent extremists, because it was. In nineteen ninety six,
Speaker 2: four congregants of America's Promise Ministries bombed a Planned Parenthood
Speaker 2: in Spokane, Washington, and the offices of the newspaper The
Speaker 2: Spokesman Review during a crime spree that also involved several
Speaker 2: bank robberies. In nineteen ninety nine, a member of the
Speaker 2: church named Beauford Furrow shot several people at the Los
Speaker 2: Angeles Jewish Community Center before murdering a Filipino mailman as
Speaker 2: he fled the scene. Those are both stories that deserve
Speaker 2: their own telling. Beauford Furrow, for one thing, was dating
Speaker 2: Bob Matthews's widow. But what I'm getting at here is
Speaker 2: that America's Promised Ministries was not just a church. It
Speaker 2: was a propaganda mill with a body count. But at
Speaker 2: this conference, Curtis Maynard was once again rubbing elbows with
Speaker 2: some very important racists. One of his better known essays,
Speaker 2: one called I Am a Holocaust Denier and I Am Unafraid,
Speaker 2: was republished off and by multiple outlets, even appearing in
Speaker 2: translation in an Ohio based newspaper run by a group
Speaker 2: called the Hungaria Freedom Fighter's Movement. There really is a
Speaker 2: community for everything, I guess now. This little newspaper, Sitya Kurt,
Speaker 2: was published from nineteen sixty eight until the death of
Speaker 2: its editor, Tibor Mayor in twenty ten. Now I'm not
Speaker 2: going to pronounce a single Hungarian word or name correctly.
Speaker 2: I did try. I looked them up, I watched videos.
Speaker 2: Don't email me about it, and I'm not sure that
Speaker 2: the time I spent down this rabbit hole will ever
Speaker 2: pay off in any meaningful way. It's certainly not relevant
Speaker 2: to the story I'm trying to tell here, but it's
Speaker 2: always a little bit of a thrill to find a
Speaker 2: whole new genre of guys I've never encountered before. So
Speaker 2: I know I'm straying terribly from Curtis, but just humor
Speaker 2: me for a minute. Curtis Maynard's essay appeared in a
Speaker 2: two thousand and seven issue of citya Kurt, and I
Speaker 2: wanted to get a feel for the kind of newspaper
Speaker 2: it was, so I browsed a few other issues in
Speaker 2: the couple of years on either side of two thousand
Speaker 2: and seven, I found articles by Mark Weber, the director
Speaker 2: of the Institute for Historical Review, an organization dedicated to
Speaker 2: Holocaust denial. There were essays by Klansman, David Duke, and
Speaker 2: Neo not c William Luther Pierce, all of which had
Speaker 2: been translated into Hungarian. On the back page, as is
Speaker 2: common in publications like this, they offered books for sale.
Speaker 2: You could buy Hungarian language editions of books by David Irving,
Speaker 2: David Duke, Pat Buchanan. You could even buy DVDs of
Speaker 2: Lenny Reefinstall's Nazi propaganda films with Hungarian subtitles. So, okay,
Speaker 2: I admit it. It got distracted. I got lost. I
Speaker 2: wasted a lot of time copying and pasting chunks of
Speaker 2: Hungarian Nazi news into Google Translate. And I did find
Speaker 2: decades of issues of the paper itself, issues spanning nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty eight till twenty ten, but there's almost no mention
Speaker 2: of its existence, outside of the fact that some university
Speaker 2: libraries have issues in their archives. I found almost no
Speaker 2: information at all about the group behind the paper. At
Speaker 2: a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty one, the Hungarian UN representative referred to them briefly
Speaker 2: as a US based neo fascist group dedicated in the
Speaker 2: spirit of Ferenz Salashi, the Nazi collaborator installed as the
Speaker 2: nation's leader after the German occupation of Hungary in nineteen
Speaker 2: forty four.
Speaker 1: There are no.
Speaker 2: Good fascists that you could claim as a role model.
Speaker 2: You shouldn't pick any of them, but this is a
Speaker 2: particularly bad one. In the short few months that he
Speaker 2: was in power, his Aaro Cross party worked directly with
Speaker 2: Adolph Eikman to resume the deportation of Hungarian Jews to
Speaker 2: the camps, and as Soviet troops closed in on the
Speaker 2: Hungarian capital, Arrow Cross death squads carried out mass executions
Speaker 2: in the walled ghettos of Budapest, shooting thousands, thousands of
Speaker 2: Hungarian Jews and pushing their bodies into the Danube River.
Speaker 2: And in that nineteen eighty one UN General Assembly meeting,
Speaker 2: the Hungarian representative read aloud excerpts from this newspaper. The
Speaker 2: Hungaria Freedom Fighters, as they called themselves, said their goal
Speaker 2: was to reconquer the historical living space of the Hungarian people,
Speaker 2: whose racial purity they hold very dear, and they praised
Speaker 2: the regime of Faren Salagi, calling him his actions a
Speaker 2: brave attempt to save the fatherland and its ancestral honor.
Speaker 2: Five years later, in the December nineteen eighty six issue
Speaker 2: of Sitiakurt, there is a brief note on the backpage
Speaker 2: thanking President Ronald Reagan for his proclamation in support of
Speaker 2: the Hungarian freedom fighters, the anti communist heroes of the
Speaker 2: nineteen fifty six uprising. Most of what I found were
Speaker 2: issues of Sitya Kurt, which is in Hungarian. I did
Speaker 2: find a handful of issues of a companion newspaper in
Speaker 2: English called The Fighter, and its first issue in nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty eight featured a full page front page glowing endorsement
Speaker 2: of segregationist George Wallace's presidential campaign, written by Sityakurt contributing
Speaker 2: editor Louis Molnar, who was George Wallace's Ohio campaign chair,
Speaker 2: and according to his obituary, he personally toppled the statue
Speaker 2: Joseph Stalin in the city square in Budapest in nineteen
Speaker 2: fifty six. Hard to Say and the first issue of
Speaker 2: Sityakurt in Hungarian, also published in nineteen sixty eight, announced
Speaker 2: the formation of new chapters of a Hungarian nationalist paramilitary
Speaker 2: organization called the Cross and Sword Movement. It had originally
Speaker 2: been founded a few years earlier by a former Hungarian
Speaker 2: army officer named Zultan Vasvari, and as I looked through
Speaker 2: more issues of Sitya Kurt, most issues in the sixties
Speaker 2: and seventies list Zultan Vasvari's home address in New Jersey
Speaker 2: in case you want to send a cash donation to
Speaker 2: the paramilitary. In an interview about her twenty seventeen documentary
Speaker 2: called Cold Warriors, Hungarian American journalist Raka Pigniski said that
Speaker 2: the Cross and Sword Movement was not an anti Semitic organization.
Speaker 2: They were nationalists, they were patriots. Were some of the
Speaker 2: members of the Nazi collaborationist Arrow Cross Party, Yes, but
Speaker 2: that was in the past. I didn't watch the documentary,
Speaker 2: I read the interview. I am not sure I believe that,
Speaker 2: And maybe Zultan Vasvari is.
Speaker 1: A common name. I don't know.
Speaker 2: I've never been to Hungary, so I can't rule out
Speaker 2: the possibility that there were multiple Hungarian Army officers in
Speaker 2: World War Two who had that name. But not only
Speaker 2: can I not find any evidence that there were, I
Speaker 2: have pretty convincing evidence that there were not multiple Sultan Vasvari's.
Speaker 2: A few years ago, Dida's Secrets founder Emma Best won
Speaker 2: a foya battle with the federal government, and one of
Speaker 2: the thousands of documents made available to the general public
Speaker 2: for as a result was a nineteen fifties era CIA
Speaker 2: file that contained a seven hundred page book that they
Speaker 2: had obtained from the Hungarian Army during World War II.
Speaker 2: And the book lists every officer in Hungary's army in
Speaker 2: nineteen forty four, every officer by name, rank, date of birth,
Speaker 2: which medals they have when they began their service. Seven
Speaker 2: hundred pages of Hungarian names, and there is only one
Speaker 2: officer named Zultan Basvari and his date of birth is
Speaker 2: listed as May thirteenth, nineteen twelve. Now I also found
Speaker 2: New Jersey Department of Health records that show that a
Speaker 2: Zultanvaswari born May thirteenth, nineteen twelve died in Bergen County
Speaker 2: in nineteen ninety. Okay, that set of facts is not
Speaker 2: exactly earth shattering. There are interviews with Hungarian Americans who
Speaker 2: have fond memories about learning to shoot rifles on a
Speaker 2: farm owned by a man they called Uncle Zoli. And
Speaker 2: those articles sometimes mentioned that he'd been an officer in
Speaker 2: the war, but those fond memories shared in English language
Speaker 2: sources sounded like a very different Sultan Vasvari than the
Speaker 2: man described in Romanian. In nineteen forty, a Hungarian army
Speaker 2: officer named Zultan Baswari gave the order to massacre more
Speaker 2: than one hundred and fifty Romanian civilians in the Transylvanian
Speaker 2: village of Epe. An interview with Gavriel Bhutkavan, one of
Speaker 2: the very few survivors of that massacre, has been transcribed
Speaker 2: in the collections held by the Holocaust Museum. He describes
Speaker 2: finding his eleven month old sister shot and crushed with
Speaker 2: the butt of a rifle in her crib. His eleven
Speaker 2: year old brother was shot in the back of the
Speaker 2: head running from the soldiers. When the massacre was over,
Speaker 2: ordered his soldiers to dig a massive pit, burying the
Speaker 2: victims in a mass grave. Most English language sources about
Speaker 2: the massacre at Ep say that Vasvari was sentenced to
Speaker 2: death for war crimes by the Romanian People's Tribunal at
Speaker 2: Cluge after the war, and the source cited for that
Speaker 2: does indeed name Baswari among those war criminals who were
Speaker 2: sentenced to death at Cluche, but none of the English
Speaker 2: language sources I could find mentioned that this Romanian document
Speaker 2: also says that he was tried in absentia, and at
Speaker 2: the time his sentence was pronounced, his current location was
Speaker 2: not known. According to a two thousand and four report
Speaker 2: of the International Holocaust Commission in Romania, the People's tribunals
Speaker 2: at Cluje and Bucharest sentenced over a hundred war criminals
Speaker 2: to death, but it was largely symbolic. In one mass trial,
Speaker 2: more than a third of those charged were even accounted for,
Speaker 2: let alone present. Even among those who were ever actually
Speaker 2: in custody, only a very small number of those sentences
Speaker 2: were ever carried out. So technically those articles aren't wrong.
Speaker 2: Zoltan Vasvari was convicted of war crimes by a Romanian
Speaker 2: tribunal and he was sentenced to die, but they left
Speaker 2: out the extremely important detail that when they sentenced him
Speaker 2: to death, he wasn't there, They didn't know where he was,
Speaker 2: and he was absolutely not actually executed by the Romanian government.
Speaker 2: I struggled for entirely too long with a blurry PDF
Speaker 2: in Romanian. Considering that this is so far beyond tangential
Speaker 2: to this story. But I'm going to have to find
Speaker 2: a history to talk to about this, because I am
Speaker 2: having a hard time believing that a Hungarian war criminal
Speaker 2: started a paramilitary organization in New Jersey. Surely there was
Speaker 2: some other Zultan Vasfari born in Hungary on May thirteenth,
Speaker 2: nineteen twelve. I must have made a mistake. I've really
Speaker 2: lost the plot here. I got completely derailed by the
Speaker 2: discovery of a Hungarian fascist newspaper in Ohio running ads
Speaker 2: for a war criminals nationalist militia.
Speaker 3: Maybe, but if you're looking.
Speaker 2: For a Hungarian translation of David Duke's autobiography, you might
Speaker 2: try looking at a used bookstore in Cleveland. All that
Speaker 2: to say, circling back around, Curtis Maynard's Holocaust denile essays
Speaker 2: were very popular among a wide variety of the world's
Speaker 2: worst people in two thousand and seven. Within the admittedly
Speaker 2: small world world of racist conspiracy theory bloggers, Curtis Maynard
Speaker 2: was really making a name for himself. He's only nursing
Speaker 2: part time at this point. He picks up shifts on
Speaker 2: the weekends and spends weekdays at home with his daughters
Speaker 2: while his wife worked as a chemical engineer. In later
Speaker 2: angry screeds mail to his divorce attorney, he claims he
Speaker 2: was the girl's primary caregiver and that the decision was
Speaker 2: made jointly in the marriage that he would sacrifice his
Speaker 2: career so the girls wouldn't have to go to daycare.
Speaker 2: But I think he really enjoyed the freedom of being
Speaker 2: home on the internet all day. He posted thousands of
Speaker 2: times that year on Nazi message boards, and he was
Speaker 2: writing hundreds of blog posts about how the Jews control
Speaker 2: the media, black people are doing all the violent crime,
Speaker 2: the Holocaust never happened. I mean, he's churning them out,
Speaker 2: and he's attending conferences, he's networking with movement leaders, He's
Speaker 2: doing interviews on conspiracy theory radio shows about his friendship
Speaker 2: with Ernstundel.
Speaker 1: His hard work is starting to pay off.
Speaker 2: He's just on the cusp of being a real figure
Speaker 2: in professional racism. But then in December of two thousand
Speaker 2: and seven, he got into an argument with a former
Speaker 2: friend that would end up ruining everything. But I lost
Speaker 2: too much time this week trying to translate the records
Speaker 2: of a war crimes tribunal from Romanian, so I'll have
Speaker 2: to pick back up next week with the story of
Speaker 2: two Nazi bloggers trying to destroy each other over a
Speaker 2: disagreement about Ron Paul. I really did mean to get
Speaker 2: it all out in one I'm actually really looking forward
Speaker 2: to revealing who it was that Maynard was beefing with
Speaker 2: Weird Little Guys as a product of Cool Zone Media
Speaker 2: and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded by me, Mollie Knger.
Speaker 2: Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The
Speaker 2: show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The
Speaker 2: theme music was composed by Brad Dickard. You can email
Speaker 2: me at Weird Little Guys Podcast at gmail dot com.
Speaker 2: I will definitely read it, but I almost certainly will
Speaker 2: not answer it. It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy
Speaker 2: theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird
Speaker 2: Little Guy's subreddit. Just don't post anything that's going to
Speaker 2: make you one of my Weird Little Guys.