The ‘truth’ is out of business

“You’re persistent, aren’t you?” said Walter Mueller with a sigh after several calls from SN&R. It’s no surprise that Mueller doesn’t want to talk. For the better part of a decade, many local papers have made a sport of dragging this Austrian immigrant turned community activist turned Holocaust revisionist’s name through the mud.

Well, no more, says Mueller. In the last edition of the Patriot Letter, his online newsletter that denies the official version of the Holocaust, Mueller announced his split from the revisionist community.

At one time, the media celebrated Mueller’s community activism. SN&R readers even named him “Best activist” two years in a row.

The celebration abruptly ended in 1999 when Mueller “came out” as a Holocaust revisionist. His friends and political connections scattered, and Mueller quickly fell from his position as a neighborhood hero. In the years to follow, Mueller more closely aligned himself with the revisionist community, a community closely tied to (if not a euphemism for) white supremacy and neo-Nazism. He railed against the widely accepted version of the Holocaust in his Community News, a small, self-published newspaper, and in the Patriot Letter. He liked to sign off his columns and inflammatory letters to local papers, “The truth is back in business.”

But the revisionism business got a lot tougher when Mueller organized the 2004 International Revisionist Conference in Sacramento—before its venue, the German-American social organization Turn Verein, pulled the rug out from underneath him one week before the conference. (See “History lessens,” SN&R News, April 15, 2004; and “Come for the food, stay for the National Alliance,” SN&R News, April 29, 2004.)

Now, a year-and-a-half later, Mueller is finally throwing in the towel. An e-mail titled “Patriot Letter: I Bid You Farewell” darkened revisionists’ inboxes worldwide early last December.

“The time is here to close an incredibly disappointing chapter in my life,” Mueller says in his final letter. Among his many reasons for his split with the revisionist community, Mueller claims, “I had to learn that revisionists are in great part closely linked to the white supremacists and are as bigoted and racist as they are. … The lack of common sense, civility, truth and compassion has marked the revisionist community like a curse.”

One might find a tinge of irony lingering in these words, considering that Mueller once wrote in a letter to The Sacramento Bee upon reading an article saying that then-Mayor Joe Serna Jr. had cancer, “Hallelujah! That’s the best news I’ve read in months in The Bee! And cut out the whining attitude because Serna has cancer. Who cares? A handful of Mexicans? I for one say that finally it’s his turn to suffer.”

So, what do Mueller’s critics think of his change of colors?

“Honestly, I think he’s the most vile human being on the planet,” said Sean South, who has done battle with Mueller over the years. South protested Mueller’s 2004 revisionist conference and now heads Fight Hate Northern California.

Mueller now considers revisionism to be a scholarly matter that he equates to the rewriting of African and American Indian history.

“[I’m] not saying that no Jew was killed, because we all know it’s a lie,” Mueller said. Instead, Mueller questions why so many died and cites disease, Allied bombing of concentration camps and other countries’ rejection of Jewish refugees as alternatives to Nazi killing.

As for why Mueller spent seven years sympathizing with a crowd that he now “wants nothing to do with” and thinks “should be watched,” Mueller said, “I was just checking it out.”

He insists that his rejection of the revisionist community has nothing to do with pressures from activist groups, such as the Jewish Defense League. He also claims that these “other groups” started a 2003 rumor about his supposed same-sex marriage to his longtime companion—to attempt to stir up trouble.

Despite Mueller’s divorce from the revisionist community, he maintains that he is still a revisionist and will continue to talk about it to people of all ethnic backgrounds through “little booklets I pass out” and small gatherings, but for now the Patriot Letter remains defunct. Mueller still holds tightly his First Amendment rights, rights he said his native Austria denied him. “Why does that make me a criminal?” he said.

But Mueller’s silence isn’t good enough for his enemies. “What I’d like to do with Mr. Mueller is put him in a room with people whose families died or who were there, who saw what was going on,” South said. “Put him in a room with those people and let those 80- and 90-year-old people beat Walter Mueller, because he’s disgusting.”