Group Denying Holocaust Secretive About Location

The director of an organization that claims the Nazi Holocaust never took place said Monday that the group has relocated to Orange County from Torrance but would not divulge the organization’s new telephone number or address for “security reasons.”

“We have a security problem,” said Robert Karl Berkel, director of the Institute for Historical Review. “People call us up with death threats. We don’t like to give out our phone number or address because there are a bunch of radical people there who would like to take away our freedom of speech.”

The organization, which was founded in the late 1970s, formerly had an office on Cabrillo Avenue in Torrance. On July 4, 1984, terrorists firebombed the office, gutting the structure and most of its contents, FBI officials said.

The firebombing was “devastating,” Berkel said. The group moved to Orange County last January “because we didn’t want to be firebombed again.”

The institute has a listed Costa Mesa mail box: 1822 1/2 Newport Blvd. No. 191.

‘Public Relations Gimmick’

“ ‘Holocaust’ is a word that only came into use 10 to 15 years ago,” Berkel said. “It is a word that was invented, just like ‘genocide,’ which was invented in 1944 as a public relations gimmick.

“After the Second World War, there was a propaganda campaign going on saying that the Germans had a policy of exterminating Jews. Now that the war is over and 40 years have passed, no one can prove that. . . . We do contend that nobody was gassed.”

Berkel denied that his organization--which compiles quarterly journals for a worldwide readership of about 3,000 and sells books to further its beliefs--is racist or anti-Semitic.

“Personally, I’m a libertarian,” he said. “Revisionists come in all different stripes. They can’t really be categorized in any particular way.”

However, local Jewish organizations that follow the group’s movement disagreed and are chagrined that the organization has moved south.

“Finding the institute in Orange County is quite disturbing,” said Steve Edelman, the regional director of the Orange County Anti-Defamation League. “We hope that their reception in Orange County is as inhospitable as it was in Torrance from the community.”