Mel Mermelstein
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Mel Mermelstein is a Hungarian-born Jew, sole-survivor of his family's extermination at Auschwitz concentration camp who defeated a Holocaust denial organization in an American court and had the occurrence of the Holocaust declared a legally incontestable fact.
In 1980, the Institute for Historical Review, an organization dedicated to proving that the Holocaust did not happen, promised a $50,000 reward to anyone who could prove Jews were gassed at Auschwitz.
Mermelstein, a survivor of Auschwitz, wrote a letter to the Jerusalem Post claiming he could prove that Jews were gassed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. The Institute for Historical Review wrote back, offering him $50,000 for proof that Jews were, in fact, gassed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Mermelstein, in turn, submitted a notarized account of his internment at Auschwitz and how he witnessed Nazi guards ushering his mother and two sisters towards (as he learned later) gas chamber number five.
Despite this, the IHR refused to pay the reward. Mermelstein subsequently sued the IHR in California Superior Court for breach of contract. On October 9, 1981, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Thomas T. Johnson ruled in favor of Mermelstein, finding that he had provided sufficient evidence to prove his claim that Jews were gassed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. The Court issued a judgment requiring the IHR to pay Mermelstein $50,000, plus $40,000 for personal suffering, and write a public apology to Mermelstein.
Holocaust revisionists have subsequently claimed that the proof offered by Mermelstein was "never released to the public," implying that it had been sealed by the court or otherwise kept secret. In a pre-trial determination, Judge Thomas T. Johnson declared:
- "This court does take judicial notice of the fact that Jews were gassed to death at Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Poland during the summer of 1944. It is not reasonably subject to dispute. And it is capable of immediate and accurate determination by resort to sources of reasonably indisputable accuracy. It is simply a fact."
In California, the Evidence Code permits the Court to take judicial notice of "facts and propositions of generalized knowledge that are so universally known that they cannot reasonably be the subject of dispute." (Evidence Code sections 451(f) and 452(h)) This was the first time that any court in the United States took judicial notice of the Holocaust.
In 1986, the IHR, along with its founder Willis Carto, sued Mermelstein for allegedly libelling them during an interview with a New York radio station, but dropped the charges in 1988. Merlmelstein also sued the IHR in 1988 for an article in the IHR Newsletter that examined flaws and inconsistencies in his 1981 lawsuit testimony. This suit was dropped in 1991.
Mermelstein was portrayed by Leonard Nimoy in a 1991 TV movie on the 1981 lawsuit called Never Forget. He wrote of the court battle in his autobiography, entitled By Bread Alone.