Revisionist History Riverboat Cruise: Curtis Maynard, Pt .1
In 2010, a rising star in the small world of holocaust denial blogging murdered his ex-wife and then took his own life. This first chapter of his story follows his path from a troubled career as a registered nurse to his growing fame as a white supremacist blogger. Sources: https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Lawyer-Lake-Jackson-murder-suicide-followed-1710794.php http://www.thenation.com/article/arrows-war https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/americas-promise-ministries/ https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/proclamation-5555-national-hungarian-freedom-fighters-day-1986 https://library.hungaricana.hu/en/view/Szittyakurt_USAHUN_1986/?pg=39&layout=s https://www.bocskairadio.org/en/an-interview-with-akos-l-nagy-president-of-the-american-hungarian-federation/ Katalin Hasulyó-Pintz. Doctoral dissertation, Identity Preservation and Diaspora Relations in the USA: the Hungarian Community of New Brunswick, New Jersey. Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest 2020 https://collections.ushmm.org/oh_findingaids/RG-50.573.0005_tcn_en.pdf https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1465015471074263044.html https://www.yadvashem.org/docs/international-commission-on-romania-holocaust.htmlSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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It was big news.
I mean, white girl gets murdered, found in a cemetery.
Big, big news.
A long investigation stalls until someone changes their story.
I like saw.
What can that happen?
An arrest, trial, and conviction soon follow.
He did not kill her.
There's no way.
Is the real killer rightly behind bars or still walking free?
Did you kill her?
Listen to The Real Killer, Season 3, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What if you ask two different people the same set of questions?
Even if the questions are the same, our experiences can lead us to drastically different answers.
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We've asked an entirely new set of guests our seven questions, including Jane Lynch, Delaney Rowe, and Cord Jefferson.
Listen to Minnie Questions on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Seven questions, limitless answers.
Cool Zone Media music On the Saturday night before Labor Day in 2003, charter buses pulled into the lot at Cincinnati's public landing.
Passengers streamed out of the buses, 150 or so, mostly older white men in suits, and they boarded the Delta Queen.
It was a beautiful late summer evening for a dinner cruise down the Ohio River, and they'd spent all day cooped up inside in a rented ballroom at the Marriott near the airport.
They'd paid $375 apiece to attend a weekend-long conference called Real History USA. But the history they were interested in wasn't what any real historian would call real history at all.
This was the fifth year in a row that disgraced historian and infamous Holocaust denier David Irving had brought anti-Semites from around the world to Cincinnati.
Over the years, he's been banned from entering Canada, Germany, Austria, Australia, New Zealand, and Lithuania.
But he seemed to enjoy the Ohio River.
And he came back to Cincinnati year after year.
That weekend, speakers ranged from notorious to obscure.
But they all shared a passion for Nazi Germany.
Brigham Young University professor Tom Catherall had to cancel at the last minute due to a health concern.
And I'm sure the attendees were devastated to miss his presentation on Hermann Goering's love of model trains.
Over lunch at the Marriott on Saturday, They watched Lenny Riefenstahl's Victory of the Faith, the less famous predecessor to her infamous Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will.
The conference program notes that Riefenstahl is, quote, still going strong at over a hundred.
And Irving said that Riefenstahl sends her greetings to the conference's attendees.
David Irving couldn't have known then that his friend would actually die later that week.
On Sunday morning, the conference resumed with presentations from Donald Bustian, an adjunct professor at Southern Arkansas University and founding member of a group called Scholars for 9-11 Truth.
Before lunch, Charles Pravan, a theologian whose anti-contraception writing is highly regarded by adherents of the quiverful movement, opined on the possibility that a self-published book by an American Jew was actually to blame for Hitler's policies in Germany.
And that afternoon, David Irving gave the stage to a young protege, an up-and-coming white nationalist blogger who'd recently finished his master's degree at Texas A&M University.
Curtis Maynard presented his master's thesis on a lesser-known incident from World War II. The 104-page thesis doesn't actually mention the Holocaust a single time.
It's not about that.
It's about a 1943 German air raid on U.S. naval vessels docked at Bari, Italy.
But the old men in the Marriott conference room probably spent most of their Sunday afternoons watching the History Channel, so I'm sure they enjoyed hearing a dry recitation of facts about planes and ships either way.
In 2003, Curtis Maynard was a rising star in the revisionist history community.
Sharing the stage with David Irving was a great honor for an aspiring white supremacist writer.
And in certain circles, his writing was well-regarded and is sometimes still remembered.
But Curtis Maynard is best remembered for how his story ends.
At the wheel of a 1994 Lincoln sedan, crash in a ditch with a bullet hole in his head.
I'm Molly Conger.
And this is Weird Little Guys.
When I started writing this episode, I thought the story of Curtis Maynard would revolve around the revisionist historians and pseudo-intellectuals he admired.
But instead, I spent most of this week reconstructing one man's disastrous downward spiral after getting into a flame war on a forum thread about Ron Paul.
Oh.
I think at its core, this is a story about lies.
Not just the lies of dishonest scholarship.
No listener to this show needs to be told this, but the Holocaust did happen.
Millions of Jews, Roma, queer people, communists and political dissidents were shot, gassed and starved to death by Nazi Germany.
I have no interest at all in engaging with the revisionist history of David Irving and his ilk.
There's no debate to be had there, although we will wade through a bit of the swamp they inhabit.
No, this is a story about smaller lies.
About the gossip and rumors that live in the comments on 20-year-old blog posts and ancient threads on hateful online forums.
About internecine squabbles for clout on Nazi message boards and debate within the white power movement about what kind of messaging will actually advance their cause.
And it's a story that ends in a despicable, tragic act of domestic violence.
A woman was murdered.
A child was shot.
And children lost their parents.
It's a story about the violent speech of violent men.
Men who talk about mass murder and genocide.
And how sometimes those men cross the threshold into real-world violence.
This is something I spend a lot of time thinking about.
It's unavoidable, really.
I spend a lot of time studying the digital debris left behind after the fact.
After a man like this stops posting and starts loading his gun.
But that's almost always where I start reading.
I'm looking back in time.
I already know what he did.
A few months ago, I started researching for an episode about a different man.
A different murderer.
I realized something that seems obvious now.
I just never really thought about it this way before.
When I study the internet footprint of a killer, I'm looking at a fossil of sorts.
These posts preserved in stone, evidence of where he once was.
But those online ecosystems are thriving, busy places, full of people who read those posts the day they were made.
People who responded to them.
So what is for me some kind of artifact was once an actual conversation between real people who really knew each other.
And when one of them logs off for the last time, the ones left behind process that violence right there in the same digital forum they'd spent years chatting.
The story that got me thinking about this particular genre of online conversation is one I haven't finished.
Fraser Glenn Miller murdered three people in Kansas in 2014. He died in prison, convicted of those murders.
But he was also a suspect in three other murders in 1987 and was a central figure in the Greensboro Massacre, where Nazis and Klansmen murdered five communist organizers in 1979. He didn't pull the trigger in 1979, and nobody ever proved he did in 87, but he played a part in those deaths.
His hands were unclean long before he opened fire in Overland Park.
It's a long and complicated story with mountains of archival material left to consume before I'm ready to write it.
But on the day Miller started shooting outside a Jewish community center in Kansas, his peers saw the news.
Within an hour of the shooting, there were threads on Stormfront and Vanguard News, the two most popular Nazi message boards of the day.
And in the immediate aftermath, a lot of the posters were celebrating.
They thought there were some dead Jews, in their words.
But others were skeptical about initial reports that the shooter had yelled Heil Hitler as officers handcuffed him.
And then someone posted the news footage of that moment of the shooter yelling Heil Hitler.
And the shooter's face isn't terribly clear as he's being shoved into the back of a police car.
If you didn't know him, that blurry, poorly lit image wouldn't really look like anything at all.
But they did know him.
It was Brad Griffin, a prominent member of the secessionist group The League of the South, and a man I have my own history with, who recognized Miller first.
The shooter wasn't just one of their own.
He was a prolific poster in their online community.
He was someone they talked to every day.
Someone who'd been a significant figure in their movement for decades.
And on both sites, users were searching for meaning.
And some said, They always knew this would happen, that he was going to crack one of these days and do something like this.
Others insisted that the man they knew would never do this, and he must have been set up.
Some celebrated, some were disappointed, but no one grieved for his victims.
And those conversations seemed so unique to me.
What a strange window into this terrible world.
They're deeply troubling, of course, but surely those were an anomaly, I thought.
But while I was researching for this episode, the story I'm circling around getting to this week, I saw it again.
Because four years before Fraser Glenn Miller made his last post, that same online community reacted to the news that Curtis Maynard had murdered his ex-wife and then taken his own life.
But I suppose we should start at the end.
On April 21st, 2010, Curtis Boone Maynard was harassing his ex-wife.
It wasn't the first time.
They'd been divorced for a little over a year, and he hadn't reacted well to losing custody of their two daughters.
I couldn't find any coverage that included the contents of any of those texts he sent Melissa Meza that day.
But whatever it was, she was upset enough about the texts that she'd discussed them with a friend that afternoon.
At 8.20 p.m., Melissa's neighbors heard gunshots.
Her middle daughter, just 12 years old, ran to a neighbor's house with her two-year-old sister in her arms.
A neighbor heard the commotion and came outside and saw Melissa, a 34-year-old mother of three, dead in her front yard.
He was still taking in the sight of his neighbor's body there on the lawn when he noticed her ex-husband, Curtis Maynard, pulling out of the driveway.
The neighbor dialed 911 as he started his own car, following Maynard and providing his location to the dispatcher.
Officers who arrived at the house found Melissa's oldest child, a 16-year-old daughter from a prior marriage, inside.
She survived.
But she'd been shot in the face by the man who had been her stepfather since she was a toddler.
Curtis Maynard was driving 70 miles an hour down the highway when police caught up to him.
He ended the chase without ever even stepping on the brakes.
He shot himself in the head while he was still speeding down the dark road.
With the driver dead at the wheel, his car slammed into an SUV that had pulled over onto the shoulder to get out of the way of the high-speed chase.
The mother and her two children inside were, thankfully, uninjured.
The irresistible and unanswerable question in the aftermath of a tragedy like this is always, why?
Why did he murder his ex-wife?
Why did he shoot his stepdaughter in the face?
Why did he take his own life?
Why today?
Why like this?
And there are no answers.
Nothing I can tell you will explain this, not for lack of trying.
But I can try to understand who he was before the last day of his life, and piece together the fragments of an online argument that seems to have been the beginning of the end of Curtis Maynard's dream of making a career out of being a racist blogger.
I don't know exactly when Curtis Maynard decided he wanted to be a writer.
He served briefly in the U.S. Army after high school.
In 1992, at the age of 25, he got his associate's degree in nursing and began working as a registered nurse.
In 1996, while he was still married to his first wife, he started seeing the woman who would become his second wife and only murder victim.
Melissa Meza was actually still married to her first husband at the time, but...
They were separated, and Maynard would later say he believed she was already divorced.
It's hard to piece together the particulars of a man's personal life so many years before he got online, but things were not going well in 1997. Just as his divorce from his first wife was finalized, a judge in Texas issued a bench warrant for him.
He'd pled guilty to a DUI in 1994, and he got off easy.
He didn't have to go to jail.
All he had to do was complete the DUI education program.
But he never did it.
So maybe he skipped town to avoid the bench warrant.
Maybe he was just looking for a fresh start after his divorce.
But just as he was due in court in Corpus Christi, Texas, he got a job at a hospital in Idaho.
In June of 1997, Right around the time Melissa probably would have been realizing she was pregnant with Maynard's daughter, he did something he should not have done.
And I don't mean impregnating a woman who was still married to another man.
I don't care about that.
But according to a decision from the Idaho Board of Nursing, one vial of Demerol and one vial of morphine went missing from the locked narcotics cabinet.
at Boundary County Community Hospital on June 28, 1997. Missing opiates are a big deal in a hospital.
They're not something that just gets misplaced and shrugged off.
It's not a lost pen.
These things are carefully accounted for.
These days, everything's tracked in a computer system.
But even in the dark ages of the 1990s, every dose of an opiate had to be signed for.
There was a record where every drop of this was supposed to be.
If those vials were missing, someone had to have taken them.
An inventory was done to determine if anything else was missing.
And a few days later, it was discovered that two boxes, each containing ten vials of morphine, had been tampered with.
The evidence was turned over to the Bonners Ferry Police Department.
The hospital had their own investigation to conduct.
They drug tested every hospital employee who had access to that cabinet.
Sure, it's possible that a nurse who steals pain medication is just selling it.
But there's a really good chance that whoever took that morphine was going to test positive for it.
Everyone tested negative.
Well, everyone except for Curtis Maynard.
who didn't show up for his shift on the day of the drug test In fact, he never came back to work at all John Stewart is back in the host chair at The Daily Show, which means he's also back in our ears on The Daily Show Ears Edition podcast.
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The police investigation would eventually determine that Maynard's fingerprints were on the boxes that had been tampered with.
The morphine that should have been in those vials in that box had all been replaced with what the Board of Nursing decision only calls, quote, a benign substance, which I assume is a saline solution or something like that.
So the investigation was kicked off because two vials were physically missing from the cabinet, but in the end it looks like a significant amount of morphine was actually missing.
Having been taken from the vials and replaced with something else.
And so if he hadn't slipped up and stolen the vial of Demerol, they might never have noticed that he'd been replacing morphine with salt water.
And hospital patients may have been administered an unknown substance instead of their pain medication.
By the time those lab results came back, though, Maynard had already moved back to Texas.
He was technically still a registered nurse with a valid license in Texas.
When his oldest daughter was born in March of 1998, he was working as a nurse at a hospital in Corpus Christi.
The Idaho Board of Nursing filed their formal complaint against him that summer, a year after the morphine first went missing.
Maynard never responded.
After months of getting no response from Maynard, the Idaho Board of Nursing got a default order against him, suspending his nursing license.
And before the Texas Board of Nursing had a chance to suspend him, a standard practice in most professions where if you're disciplined by a board in one state, there is what's called reciprocal discipline in most other states.
But before Texas could do anything like that, he mailed them a letter saying, I no longer desire to be licensed as a professional nurse.
And he voluntarily relinquished his nursing license before it could be taken.
The Bonners Ferry Herald, a newspaper in Bonners Ferry, Idaho, ran several announcements in the summer of 2000 that Curtis Maynard was wanted on a felony warrant for possession of controlled substance and theft, but Idaho court records don't show that any criminal case was ever filed.
I have to assume that's in relation to the theft of the morphine three years earlier, but I don't know how those pieces fit together.
He did move back to Idaho years later, but the five-year statute of limitations had already passed, so he was never actually criminally charged in connection with the missing morphine.
But in 1999, Curtis Maynard had lost his nursing license in Idaho and given it up in Texas.
He was unable to work in the only field he had any real experience in.
He had a baby and a common law wife to support, and he had a pretty serious addiction to alcohol and opiates.
After 28 days of residential treatment for substance abuse, he did what a lot of people do when they have no idea what to do with their lives.
He went to graduate school, enrolling in a master's program in history at Texas A&M University.
I wish I could tell you which came first.
Did Curtis Maynard set out to write his master's thesis about a German air raid on U.S. naval vessels in Italy because he had a genuine interest in this lesser-known chapter of World War II history and he accidentally stumbled upon David Irving's work while he was researching?
Or was he already familiar with the work of revisionist historians and hoping to add his voice to the choir?
I'm not sure there's anyone left to ask.
But whichever it was, by the time Maynard finished his thesis in the spring of 2003, he wasn't just reading David Irving's Holocaust denial works.
They were corresponding.
The thesis not only lists three of Irving's books in its bibliography, there are several footnotes indicating the source for a particular claim is an email exchange between Curtis Maynard and David Irving.
Maynard's thesis isn't about the Holocaust.
The word doesn't even appear in the paper.
There's no mention of Jews, camps, gas chambers, nothing like that.
The writing isn't great, in my opinion, but I think he could have produced a serviceable paper about a real historical event.
I dropped out of college, so to be honest, I have no idea how the thesis writing process works.
Maybe there was no point at which someone read any of this in draft form and asked him, Hey, why did you write, quote, without the works of historians like Elka Froelich and David Irving, who conducted research in the former Soviet archives in Moscow?
There is a distinct possibility that we would not be privy to the uncensored and unedited thoughts, ideas, and words of Dr. Joseph Goebbels today." Because not only is that not true, David Irving is not solely responsible for existing works of scholarship on the diaries of Joseph Goebbels, but it's also just a really weird thing to say.
There must not be any feedback provided in the process because surely someone in the history department would have clocked it as very inappropriate to drop this line.
David Irving's opinion cannot be dismissed easily as he is a recognized expert on the Third Reich.
I don't know how to convey to you how not.
True that is.
That is the not truest thing that you could write in your master's thesis or history.
Now, you might have been able to say it with a straight face in the 1960s.
Maybe in the 1960s, you could say David Irving is a recognized expert on the Third Reich.
Maybe, maybe you could still say it in the 70s.
Into the 80s?
If you're reckless, if you're careless, if you're not keeping up with current events, maybe you could still say it in the 80s.
But by 2000, everyone in the world knew that David Irving was not a historian.
In 1993, Jewish history professor Deborah Lipstadt wrote a book called Denying the Holocaust, The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory.
And in the book...
David Irving was just one of a variety of figures within the Holocaust denial movement that Lippstadt discusses.
But he, in particular, took issue with her criticism of his work.
And so in 1996, he filed a libel suit against Deborah Lippstadt and her publisher.
David Irving is British, so he filed this lawsuit in the United Kingdom.
And libel laws are different in the UK. I don't want to get into the weeds there.
They just are.
But even in England, the truth is the best defense against an accusation like this.
It can't be liable if it's true.
And so Lipsot's lawyers hired Sir Richard Evans, a Cambridge University history professor who is an actual historian of modern Germany.
And Evans spent two full years With the help of full-time research assistants, producing a 740-page report on his findings.
He read everything David Irving ever wrote.
Everything David Irving ever said about the things that he wrote.
And ultimately, Evans concluded that, in his expert opinion, everything David Irving had ever written was, quote, If we mean by historian,
someone who is concerned to discover the truth about the past and to give as accurate a representation of it as possible, then Irving is not a historian.
And at the end of the trial, a judge agreed, writing that Irving had, quote, Because he was ideologically motivated to portray Hitler in a positive light and deny the Holocaust.
So he sued Deborah Lipstadt for calling him a Holocaust denier, saying that was libel, and the judge said, that's not libel because legally you're a Holocaust denier.
And so he lost the libel lawsuit.
But even worse for David Irving than losing the lawsuit and having to pay quite a large sum of money was the fact that a small army of historians had spent years going over his work with a fine-toothed comb.
This wasn't the first time people had found inconsistencies and inaccuracies in his work, but they'd never been dissected quite like So all of these professors and historians had read all of his books and they'd all written these reports and they published those reports as books and they talked to reporters and now all of a sudden it's very easy to find a laundry list of the debunked,
made-up, and outright fraudulent claims that riddled his body of work.
So, no, there's really no excuse in 2003 for citing David Irving as an expert on the history of the Third Reich.
That's malpractice.
But maybe his thesis advisor was in a hurry when she skimmed his bibliography and she didn't notice that he'd cited David Irving's book, The Destruction of Convoy PQ-17, despite the fact that...
Every copy of that book was withdrawn from the market in 1970 after Irving lost a massive libel lawsuit.
I have to wonder if his advisor noticed that he cited Irving's Destruction of Dresden, a book that had been a bestseller in the 1960s but completely fell apart under the slightest scrutiny.
The entire book relies on a premise supported only by a document that turned out to have been a Nazi forgery.
As well as the personal assurances of a man who had been a major general in the Wehrmacht.
Apparently, just finishing a thesis at all, regardless of what it says, is the biggest hurdle.
Because Maynard graduated with a master's degree in May of 2003. And just a few months after presenting his thesis to the committee at Texas A&M University, he presented it again.
This time to the attendees of the Holocaust Denial Conference in Cincinnati.
A few months after that conference, he applied for the reinstatement of his nursing license in Idaho.
He planned to work part-time while enrolled in a history PhD program at the University of Idaho in Moscow.
On the condition that he attend Narcotics Anonymous meetings three times a week, submit to random drug tests, and receive quarterly evaluations of his performance, He was allowed to work in a nursing home near the university, but he left the PhD program after just a few months and moved back to Texas again.
But even as he's struggling to stay enrolled in school or keep a nursing job, his career as a professional racist is really starting to take off.
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In 2007, four years after David Irving invited him to share the stage at the Holocaust Denial Conference in Cincinnati, things were finally going well for Curtis Maynard.
He was pen pals with Ernst Sundl, the German-born Canadian whose criminal prosecutions in Germany and Canada had made him one of the world's most famous Holocaust deniers.
Maynard's blog, The Politically Correct Apostate, was banned by Blogspot and WordPress every couple of months.
But it always re-emerged.
And the readers followed him to each new URL. He wrote prolifically, often publishing multiple pieces per day.
And his content was cross-posted on the websites of some big names in the movement, like David Duke and John DeNugent.
His writing appeared often on the website for Jeff Rents, a talk radio guy that I think I could most quickly describe as...
A more explicitly Nazi version of Alex Jones?
But you've probably never heard of Jeff Rents because he got into a fight with Alex Jones in 2009 that ended with Rents getting dumped by the network that they shared, Genesis Communications.
Alex Linder, the webmaster at Vanguard News Network, posted dozens of Maynard's pieces on his site.
And in April of 2007, Linder called him, quote, One of the most active and powerful of a rising generation of white writers.
In July of 2007, just weeks after his wife gave birth to their second child, Maynard traveled to Sandpoint, Idaho.
He was a guest at a conference hosted by America's Promise Ministries, a Christian identity church funded by the sale of Holocaust denial literature.
The keynote speaker at the conference was Michael Collins Piper.
A regular contributor to the white nationalist publications American Free Press and The Spotlight.
According to a write-up about the event that was published in American Free Press, Piper's speech was about Jewish control of American politics.
Conspiracy theorist Mark Glenn performed an original musical number about Jewish domination of society with the help of his five oldest children.
I guess it's for the best, but I couldn't find any video of that, but I don't know, I'm kind of curious.
But Glenn was proud enough of this performance to include it in his article about the conference.
And the article mentions Maynard by name, calling him, quote, a well-known writer dealing with the issues similar to the themes covered at the conference.
The themes being, I guess, Jewish control of society.
And the write-up ends with a quote from Michael Collins Piper, the keynote speaker.
And he said of the conference, quote, It was obvious to me, five minutes after arriving at the church, that once again, everything the mainstream media has said about North Idaho being a haven for violent extremists and malcontents is all a big lie, and that no better people can be found anywhere.
I wouldn't expect a man like Michael Collins Piper to be honest about something like America's Promise Ministries.
But I will point out that there is a reason he felt the need to counter the idea that the church was a haven for violent extremists.
Because it was.
In 1996, four congregants of America's Promise Ministries bombed a Planned Parenthood in Spokane, Washington.
and the offices of the newspaper, the Spokesman Review, during a crime spree that also involved several bank robberies.
In 1999, a member of the church named Buford Furrow shot several people at the Los Angeles Jewish Community Center before murdering a Filipino mailman as he fled the scene.
Those are both stories that deserve their own telling.
Buford Furrow, for one thing, was dating Bob Matthew's widow.
But what I'm getting at here is that America's Promised Ministries was not just a church.
It was a propaganda mill with a body count.
But at this conference, Curtis Maynard was, once again, rubbing elbows with some very important racists.
One of his better-known essays, one called I Am a Holocaust Denier and I Am Unafraid, was republished often and by multiple outlets.
Even appearing in translation in an Ohio-based newspaper run by a group called the Hungarian Freedom Fighters Movement.
There really is a community for everything, I guess.
Now, this little newspaper, Sitya Kurt, was published from 1968 until the death of its editor, Tibor Mayor, in 2010. Now...
I'm not going to pronounce a single Hungarian word or name correctly.
I did try.
I looked them up.
I watched videos.
Don't email me about it.
And I'm not sure that the time I spent down this rabbit hole will ever pay off in any meaningful way.
It's certainly not relevant to the story I'm trying to tell here, but it's always a little bit of a thrill.
To find a whole new genre of guys I've never encountered before.
So I know I'm straying terribly from Curtis, but just humor me for a minute.
Curtis Maynard's essay appeared in a 2007 issue of Sitya Kurt.
And I wanted to get a feel for the kind of newspaper it was, so I browsed a few other issues in the couple of years on either side of 2007. I found articles by Mark Weber, the director of the Institute for Historical Review, an organization dedicated to Holocaust denial.
There were essays by Klansman David Duke and neo-Nazi William Luther Pierce, all of which had been translated into Hungarian.
On the back page, as is common in publications like this, they offered books for sale.
You could buy Hungarian language editions of books by David Irving, David Duke, Pat Buchanan.
You could even buy DVDs of Lenny Riefenstahl's Nazi propaganda films with Hungarian subtitles.
So, okay, I admit it.
I got distracted.
I got lost.
I wasted a lot of time copying and pasting chunks of Hungarian Nazi news into Google Translate.
And I did find...
Decades of issues of the paper itself, issues spanning 1968 till 2010. But there's almost no mention of its existence outside of the fact that some university libraries have issues in their archives.
I found almost no information at all about the group behind the paper.
At a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in 1981, The Hungarian UN representative referred to them briefly as a U.S.-based neo-fascist group dedicated in the spirit of Ferenc Salasi, the Nazi collaborator installed as the nation's leader after the German occupation of Hungary in 1944. There are no good fascists that you could claim as a role model.
You shouldn't pick any of them.
But this is a particularly bad one.
In the short few months that he was in power, his Aerocross party worked directly with Adolf Eichmann to resume the deportation of Hungarian Jews to the camps.
And as Soviet troops closed in on the Hungarian capital, Aerocross death squads carried out mass executions in the walled ghettos of Budapest, shooting thousands, thousands of Hungarian Jews and pushing their bodies into the Danube River.
And in that 1981 UN General Assembly meeting, the Hungarian representative read aloud excerpts from this newspaper.
The Hungarian freedom fighters, as they called themselves, said their goal was to reconquer the historical living space of the Hungarian people, whose racial purity they hold very dear.
And they praised the regime of Ferenc Salasi.
Calling his actions a brave attempt to save the fatherland and its ancestral honor.
Five years later, in the December 1986 issue of Sityokert, there is a brief note on the back page thanking President Ronald Reagan for his proclamation in support of the Hungarian freedom fighters, the anti-communist heroes of the 1956 uprising.
Most of what I found were issues of Sityakert, which is in Hungarian.
I did find a handful of issues of a companion newspaper in English called The Fighter.
And its first issue in 1968 featured a full-page, front-page, glowing endorsement of segregationist George Wallace's presidential campaign, written by Sityakert contributing editor Louis Molnar, who was George written by Sityakert contributing editor Louis Molnar, who was George Wallace's Ohio campaign chair.
And according to his obituary...
He personally toppled the statue of Joseph Stalin in the city square in Budapest in 1956. Hard to say.
And the first issue of Sityakert in Hungarian, also published in 1968, announced the formation of new chapters of a Hungarian nationalist paramilitary organization called the Cross and Sword Movement.
It had originally been founded a few years earlier by a former Hungarian army officer named Zoltan Vasvari.
And as I looked through more issues of Sitya Kurt, most issues in the 60s and 70s list Zoltan Vasvari's home address in New Jersey in case you want to send a cash donation to the paramilitary.
In an interview about her 2017 documentary called Cold Warriors, Hungarian-American journalist Reika Pigniski Said that the Cross and Sword movement was not an anti-Semitic organization.
They were nationalists.
They were patriots.
Were some of them members of the Nazi collaborationist Arrow Cross Party?
Yes, but that was in the past.
I didn't watch the documentary.
I read the interview.
I am not sure I believe that.
And maybe...
Zoltan Vasvari is a common name.
I don't know.
I've never been to Hungary.
So I can't rule out the possibility that there were multiple Hungarian army officers in World War II who had that name.
But not only can I not find any evidence that there were, I have pretty convincing evidence that there were not multiple Zoltan Vasvaris.
A few years ago, DDoS Secrets founder Emma Best won a FOIA battle with the federal government.
And one of the thousands of documents made available to the general public for viewing as a result was a 1950s-era CIA file that contained a 700-page book that they had obtained from the Hungarian army during World War II. And the book lists every officer in Hungary's army in 1944. Every officer by name,
rank, date of birth, which medals they have when they began their service.
700 pages of Hungarian names, and there is only one officer named Zoltan Vasvari.
And his date of birth is listed as May 13, 1912. Now, I also found New Jersey Department of Health records that show that a Zoltan Vasvari, born May 13, 1912, Died in Bergen County in 1990. Okay, that set of facts is not exactly earth-shattering.
There are interviews with Hungarian-Americans who have fond memories about learning to shoot rifles on a farm owned by a man they called Uncle Zoli, and those articles sometimes mention that he'd been an officer in the war.
But those fond memories, shared in English-language sources, sound like a very different Zoltan Vasvari.
In 1940, a Hungarian army officer named Zoltan Vasvari gave the order to massacre more than 150 Romanian civilians in the Transylvanian village of Ypres.
An interview with Gavril Budkovan, one of the very few survivors of that massacre, has been transcribed in the collections held by the Holocaust Museum.
He describes finding his 11-month-old sister shot and crushed with the butt of a rifle in her crib.
His 11-year-old brother was shot in the back of the head, running from the soldiers.
When the massacre was over, Vasvari ordered his soldiers to dig a massive pit, burying the victims in a mass grave.
Most English-language sources about the massacre at Ypres say that Vasvari was sentenced to death.
For war crimes by the Romanian People's Tribunal at Cluj after the war.
And the source cited for that does indeed name Vasvari among those war criminals who were sentenced to death at Cluj.
But none of the English language sources I could find mention that this Romanian document also says that he was tried in absentia.
And at the time his sentence was pronounced, his current location was not known.
According to a 2004 report of the International Holocaust Commission in Romania, the people's tribunals at Cluj and Bucharest sentenced over 100 war criminals to death.
But it was largely symbolic.
In one mass trial, fewer than a third of those charged were even accounted for, let alone present.
Even among those who were ever actually in custody, only a very small number of those sentences were ever carried out.
So, technically those articles aren't wrong.
Zoltan Vasvari was convicted of war crimes by a Romanian tribunal, and he was sentenced to die.
But they left out the extremely important detail that, when they sentenced him to death, He wasn't there.
They didn't know where he was.
And he was absolutely not actually executed by the Romanian government.
I struggled for entirely too long with a blurry PDF in Romanian, considering that this is so far beyond tangential to this story.
But I'm going to have to find a historian to talk to about this because I am having a hard time believing that a Hungarian war criminal started a paramilitary organization in New Jersey.
Surely there was some other Zoltan Vasvari, born in Hungary on May 13th, 1912. I must have made a mistake.
I've really lost the plot here.
I got completely derailed by the discovery of a Hungarian fascist newspaper in Ohio running ads for a war criminal's nationalist militia?
Maybe?
But if you're looking for a Hungarian translation of David Duke's autobiography, you might try looking at a used bookstore in Cleveland.
All that to say, circling back around, Curtis Maynard's Holocaust denial essays were very popular among a wide variety of the world's worst people.
In 2007, within the admittedly small world of racist conspiracy theory bloggers, Curtis Maynard was really making a name for himself.
He's only nursing part-time at this point.
He picks up shifts on the weekends and spends weekdays at home with his daughters while his wife worked as a chemical engineer.
In later angry screeds mailed to his divorce attorney, He claims he was the girl's primary caregiver and that the decision was made jointly in the marriage that he would sacrifice his career so the girls wouldn't have to go to daycare.
But I think he really enjoyed the freedom of being home on the internet all day.
He posted thousands of times that year on Nazi message boards.
And he was writing hundreds of blog posts about how the Jews control the media, black people are doing all the violent crime, the Holocaust never happened.
I mean, he's churning them out.
And he's attending conferences, he's networking with movement leaders, he's doing interviews on conspiracy theory radio shows about his friendship with Ernst Zundel.
His hard work is starting to pay off.
He was just on the cusp.
Of being a real figure in professional racism.
But then, in December of 2007, we got into an argument with a former friend that would end up ruining everything.
But I lost too much time this week trying to translate the records of a war crimes tribunal from Romanian, so I'll have to pick back up next week with the story of two Nazi bloggers trying to destroy each other over a disagreement about Ron Paul.
I really did mean to get it all out in one.
I'm actually really looking forward to revealing who it was that Maynard was beefing with.
*music* Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
it's researched written and recorded by me Molly Conger our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans the show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagin the theme music was composed by Brad Dickert you can email me at weirdlittleguyspodcast at gmail.com I will definitely read it but I almost certainly will not answer it it's nothing personal You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.
just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my weird little guys.
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