$5.25 Million Awarded by Jury to Survivor of Hitler’s Death Camps

A 59-year-old survivor of the Nazi death camps was awarded $5.25 million in damages Friday against the last remaining defendant in his lawsuit against organizations and individuals who claimed the Holocaust never happened.

Mel Mermelstein, a Huntington Beach businessman who still bears a tattooed concentration camp number on his left forearm, said the Los Angeles Superior Court jurors’ verdict sends a message to others who would “use and abuse this barbaric event to mock and ridicule (its) survivors.”

“Translated into reality,” he said emotionally, “it is America. I have faith in the jury system and it prevailed.”

After only four hours of deliberation, the jurors returned a unanimous verdict that Mermelstein had been libeled and caused severe emotional distress by Ditlieb Felderer, a citizen of Sweden whose alleged acts included mailing Mermelstein abusive tracts and, on one occasion, a swatch of hair purported to be “hair of a gassed victim.”

The jury awarded Mermelstein $500,000 in compensatory damages and $4.75 million in punitive damages. “Some wanted to give him more,” said jury foreman Delia Hackett.

No defense was presented at the unusual two-day trial before Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Alfred Margolis, and Felderer was not present. But Hackett indicated this did not dictate the verdict.

“I feel the defendant had been served with the complaint and he certainly knew about it,” Hackett said. “My opinion is that he chose not to be here.” She declined to say if Felderer’s absence was actually discussed as part of the deliberations, but added, “We certainly discussed his despicable acts.”

During the brief trial, Mermelstein identified numerous exhibited items he said he received from Sweden mocking him and “his exterminationist goons” and the “extermination hoax,” and calling his court case “trial of a nut.” Some had caricatures of concentration camp life and contained gruesome enclosures purported to be camp victims’ hair and semen.

“I think it is despicable and horrific,” Hackett said after the jury was dismissed Friday. “I don’t think there is any amount of money that can compensate someone who is subjected to (such) acts.” She said jurors found Mermelstein to be “a very credible witness.”

From the witness stand, Mermelstein had told of seeing his mother and two sisters led into a gas chamber at Auschwitz on May 22, 1944, and of the deaths of his father, in slave labor, and his brother, shot during a death march between two camps.

Publication Committee

Felderer was identified as a member of the editorial advisory committee of the Institute for Historical Review and publisher of the “Jewish Information Bulletin,” which stated that Jews were not gassed to death at Auschwitz and that the Holocaust was a hoax.

Mermelstein sued the institute and other organizations and individuals, contending that they reneged on an open offer to pay $50,000 for proof that a single Jew was gassed by Nazis in World War II.

All the defendants except Felderer participated in a settlement last July in which Mermelstein was granted about $100,000, “every penny” of which has been collected, according to attorney Gloria Allred, who with her partner Michael Maroko represented Mermelstein in the case.

Allred said Friday that the case is historically important on several levels, including that it was the first in which a Nazi death camp survivor successfully sued those who deny the Holocaust occurred.

Maroko said collection of the award from Felderer will be begun at once by contacting an international law agency that records judgments in each of its member countries. The object is to get the judgment recorded as a Swedish one, to be enforced in Sweden.

In 1982, Felderer was tried and convicted by Swedish prosecutors for violation of Sweden’s criminal laws and sentenced to 10 months in prison. Mermelstein was present at the trial.