Unlike Heddesheimer, Ingrid Weckert is a known quantity. She
has a long career on Germany’s far-right; of all the HH authors, she has the
clearest connections with the neo-Nazi movement in Europe, with Jürgen Graf a
close second. Now in her 90s, she has spent the last 40 years writing
exculpations of Nazi figures (including Julius Streicher and Josef Goebbels)
and crimes (most notably Kristallnacht). Beyond contributions to Holocaust
denial, she was closely affiliated with the neo-Nazi leader Michael Kühnen in
the 1980s and participated in attempts to form legitimate far-right political
parties -- most recently, Kühnen’s
Deutsch Alternative, which was banned in 1992. Trained as a librarian, she also
studied theology and history, including allegedly studying Jewish history in
Israel.
Weckert’s contribution to the HH collection, Jewish
Emigration from the Third Reich, is a translation of her Auswanderung
der Juden aus dem Dritten Reich, which Castle Hill published in 2004. A
slim volume numbering only 70 pages not including frontmatter, backmatter, and
appendices, it attempts to strike a more seemingly conciliatory tone than much of
Weckert’s previous work. Nevertheless, it repeats the grotesque errors of that
work, with the typical lying by omission, whitewashing, and blame shifting
found there. It is important to state at the outset that a thorough checking of
Weckert’s use of source material is beyond the scope of this short review. That
said, an earlier review by Andrew E. Mathis of Weckert’s article on Kristallnacht in the Journal
of Historical Review (summer 1985 issue) found that she
was a routine abuser and misrepresenter of her cited sources.[1]
