January 23, 2025 • 49 mins
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:
http://www.thenation.com/article/arrows-war
https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/americas-promise-ministries/
https://library.hungaricana.hu/en/view/Szittyakurt_USAHUN_1986/?pg=39&layout=s
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.html
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Col Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
On the Saturday night before Labor Day in two thousand
and three, charter buses pulled into the lot at Cincinnati's
public landing. Passengers streamed out of the buses, one hundred
and fifty 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,
(00:30):
and they'd spent all day cooped up inside in a
rented ballroom at the Marriotte near the airport. They'd paid
three hundred and seventy five dollars 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
(00:53):
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
(01:15):
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
(01:37):
love of model Trains. Over lunch at the Marriotte 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 Reefenstahl is quote
still going strong at over one hundred and Irving said
(01:59):
that Reefenstahal 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
(02:19):
for Nine to eleven Truth. Before lunch, Charles Pravaan, 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
(02:41):
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 and M University, Curtis Maynard presented
his master's thesis on a lesser known incident from World
War II. The one hundred and four page thesis doesn't
actually mentioned the Holocaust a single time. It's not about that.
(03:04):
It's about a nineteen forty three German air raid on
US naval vessels docked at Bari, Italy. But the old
man 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 resitation of facts about planes
and ships. Either way, in two thousand and three, Curtis
(03:27):
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
(03:48):
ends at the wheel of a nineteen ninety four Lincoln
sedan crash in a ditch with a bullet hole in
his head. I'm Molly Counger, and this is where the
little guys. When I started writing this episode, I thought
(04:22):
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 form thread
about Ron Paul. I think, at its core, this is
(04:43):
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 or shot, gassed and starved to death
by Nazi Germany. I have no interest at all in
(05:06):
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 twenty year
old blog posts and ancient threads on hateful online forums,
(05:30):
about interna scene, 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
(05:52):
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
(06:16):
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.
(06:36):
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,
(06:57):
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
(07:19):
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 processed that violence right there in the same
digital forum they'd spent years chatting. The story they got
(07:43):
me thinking about this particular genre of online conversation is
when I haven't finished. Fraser Glenn Miller murdered three people
in Kansas in twenty fourteen. He died in prison, convicted
of those murders, but he was He was also a
suspect in three other murders in nineteen eighty seven, and
was a central figure in the Greensboro massacre, where Nazis
(08:07):
and klansmen murdered five communist organizers in nineteen seventy nine.
He didn't pull the trigger in nineteen seventy nine, and
nobody ever proved he did in eighty seven, 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
(08:30):
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,
(08:50):
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 Hyle Hitler as officers handcuffed him,
and then someone posted the news footage of that moment
(09:11):
of the shooter yelling Hyle 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
(09:33):
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
(09:56):
both sides, 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,
(10:17):
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
(10:40):
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.
(11:07):
On April twenty first, twenty ten, Curtis Boon 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
(11:28):
any of those texts he sent Melissa Masa that day,
but whatever it was, she was upset enough about the
texts that she'd discussed them with a friend. That afternoon,
at eight twenty pm, Melissa's neighbors heard gunshots. Her middle daughter,
just twelve years old, ran to a neighbor's house with
(11:48):
her two year old sister in her arms. A neighbor
heard the commotion and came outside and saw Melissa, a
thirty four 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.
(12:09):
The neighbor dialed nine when one 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 sixteen year old daughter from a prior marriage inside.
She survived, but she had been shot in the face
by the man who had been her stepfather since she
(12:30):
was a toddler. Curtis Maynard was driving seventy miles an
hour down the highway when police caught.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
Up to him.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
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 on to 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
(13:03):
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?
Speaker 1 (13:16):
Why? Today? Why like this? And there are no answers.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
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
(13:49):
he wanted to be a writer.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
He served briefly in the US.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Army after high school. In nineteen ninety two, at the
age of twenty five, he got his associate's degree in
nursing began working as a registered nurse. In nineteen ninety six,
while he was still married to his first wife, he
started seeing the woman who had become his second wife
and only murder victim, Melissa Mesa was actually still married
(14:15):
to her first husband at the time, but they were separated,
and Maynard would later say he'd believed she was already divorced.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
It's hard to piece together the particulars.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
Of a man's personal life so many years before he
got online, but things were not going well.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
In nineteen ninety seven.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
Just as his divorce from his first wife was finalized,
a judge in Texas issued a bench.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
Warn't for him.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
He'd pled guilty to a dui in nineteen ninety four,
and he.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
Got off easy. He didn't have to go to jail.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
All he had to do was complete the DUI education program.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
But he never did it.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
So maybe he skipped town to avoid the benchwarn't maybe
he was just looking for a fresh start after his divorce.
But just as he was doing court in Corpus Christi, Texas,
he got a job at a hospital in Idaho in
June of nineteen ninety seven, right around the time Melissa
probably would have been realizing she was pregnant with Maynard's daughter.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
He did something he should not have done.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
And I don't mean impregnating a woman who was still
married to another man.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
I don't care about that.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
But according to a decision from the Idaho Board of Nursing,
one vial of demarole and one vial of morphine went
missing from the locked narcotics cabinet at Boundary County Community
Hospital on June twenty eighth, nineteen ninety seven. Missing opiates
are a big deal in a hospital. They're not something
(15:50):
that just gets misplaced and shrugged off. It's not a
lost pen. These things are carefully accounted for.
Speaker 1 (15:59):
These days.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
Every things tracked in a computer system, but even in
the dark ages of the nineteen nineties, 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.
(16:20):
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,
(16:44):
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
(17:05):
the drug test. In fact, he never came back.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
To work at all. The police investigation.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
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
(17:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
And so if he.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
Hadn't slipped up and stolen the vial of demarole, 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
(18:29):
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 nineteen ninety eight, 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.
(18:51):
Maynard never responded. After months of getting no response from Maynard,
the Idaho Board of Nursing got a default order against
him suspend 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
(19:13):
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,
(19:35):
ran several announcements in the summer of two thousand 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.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
I have to.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
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 nineteen ninety nine, Curtis Maynard
(20:12):
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 twenty eight days of residential treatment for substance abuse,
(20:34):
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 and 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
(20:54):
raid on US 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 Irvings's
work while he was researching or was he already familiar
with the work of revisionist historians and hoping to add
his voice.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
To the choir.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
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 two thousand and three, he wasn't just
reading David Irvings's Holocaust denial works. They were corresponding. The
thesis not only lists three of Irving's books in its bibliography,
(21:36):
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
(22:01):
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
(22:26):
Without the works of historians like Elkafrolic 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 doctor Joseph Gerbels today.
Speaker 1 (22:43):
End quote.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
Because not only is that not true, David Irving is
not solely responsible for existing works of scholarship on the
diaries of Joseph Gerbels, 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
(23:07):
department would have clocked it as very inappropriate to drop
this line.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
Quote.
Speaker 2 (23:14):
David Irving's opinion cannot be dismissed easily, as he is
a recognized expert on the third Reich end quote. 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
(23:39):
might have been able to say it with a straight
face in the nineteen sixties. Maybe in the nineteen sixties
you could say David Irving is a recognized expert on
the third Reich.
Speaker 3 (23:50):
Maybe maybe you could still say it in the seventies
into the eighties. 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 eighties, but by two thousand
everyone in the world knew that David Irving was not
a historian. In nineteen ninety three, Jewish history professor Deborah
(24:12):
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 Lipstat discusses, but he in
particular took issue with her criticism of his work, and
(24:33):
so in nineteen ninety six he filed a libel suit
against Deborah Lipstadt 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.
Speaker 1 (24:53):
They just are.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
But even in England, the truth is the best defense
against an act acusation like this. It can't be liable
if it's true, and so Lipstot'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
(25:20):
the help of full time research assistance producing a seven
hundred and forty 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,
(25:42):
in his expert opinion, everything David Irving had ever written
was quote completely worthless as history, because Irving cannot be
trusted anywhere in any of them to give a reliable
account of what he is talking or writing about. If
we mean by historian someone who is concerned to discover
(26:04):
the truth about the past and to give as accurate
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 persistently and deliberately misrepresented and
manipulated historical evidence end quote because he was ideologically motivated
(26:27):
to portray Hitler in a positive light and.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
Deny the Holocaust.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
So he sued Deborah Lipstadt for calling him a Holocaust denier,
saying that was libel, and the judge said, it's not
libel because legally you're a Holocaust denier. So we lost
the libel lawsuit. But even worse for David Irving than
losing the lawsuit and having to pay quite a large
(26:55):
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 this. So all of these
(27:18):
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
(27:42):
no excuse in two thousand and three for citing David
Irving as an expert on the history of the Third Reich.
That's malpractice. But maybe his thesis adviser was in a
hurry when she's still his bibliography, and she didn't notice
that he'd cited David Irvings's book The Destruction of Convoy PQ. Seventeen,
(28:08):
despite the fact that every copy of that book was
withdrawn from the market in nineteen seventy after Irving loss
a massive libel lawsuit. I have to wonder if his
adviser noticed that he cited Irving's Destruction of Dresden, a
book that had been a best seller in the nineteen
sixties but completely fell apart under the slightest scrutiny. The
(28:32):
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
(28:55):
degree in May of two thousand and three, and just
a few months after presenting him thesis to the committee
at Texas A and 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
(29:16):
planned to work part time while enrolled in a history
PhD program at the University of Idaho in Moscow, on
the condition that he attended 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
(29:36):
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.
(30:08):
In two thousand and seven, 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 penn pals with Ernst Zundel, the German born
Canadian whose criminal prosecutions in Germany and Canada had made
(30:29):
him one of the world's most famous Holocaust deniers. Maynard's blog,
The Politically Correct Apostate, was banned by blogspot and word
press 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
(30:55):
content was cross posted on the websites of some big
names in the movement, like David Duke, and John Denugen.
His writing appeared often on the website for Jeff Rentz,
a talk radio guy that I think you could most
quickly describe as a more explicitly Nazi version of Alex Jones.
(31:17):
But you've probably never heard of Jeff Rentz because he
got into a fight with Alex Jones in two thousand
and nine 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 two thousand and seven,
(31:39):
Linder called him quote one of the most active and
powerful of a rising generation of white writers. In July
of two thousand and seven, 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 Minis, a Christian identity church funded by the sale
(32:03):
of Holocaust denile 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
(32:23):
American politics conspiracy theorist Mark Glenn performed an original musical
number about Jewish domination of society with the help of
his five oldest children, and I guess it's for the best.
But I couldn't find any video of that.
Speaker 1 (32:41):
But I don't know. I'm kind of curious.
Speaker 2 (32:45):
But Glenn was proud enough of this performance to include
it in his article about the conference, and the article
mentions Manard 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
(33:06):
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,
(33:31):
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 Promised 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 nineteen ninety six,
(33:59):
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 nineteen ninety nine, a member of the
church named Beauford Furrow shot several people at the Los
Angeles Jewish Community Center before murdering a Filipino mailman as
(34:22):
he fled the scene. Those are both stories that deserve
their own telling. Beauford Furrow, for one thing, was dating
Bob Matthews'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
(34:45):
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 off and by multiple outlets, even appearing in
translation in an Ohio based newspaper run by a group
(35:06):
called the Hungaria Freedom Fighter's Movement. There really is a
community for everything, I guess now. This little newspaper, Sitya Kurt,
was published from nineteen sixty eight until the death of
its editor, Tibor Mayor in twenty ten. Now I'm not
(35:28):
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
(35:50):
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
two thousand and seven issue of citya Kurt, and I
(36:11):
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 two thousand
and seven, 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
(36:31):
Neo not c 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
(36:52):
Lenny Reefinstall's Nazi propaganda films with Hungarian subtitles. So, okay,
I admit it. It 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
(37:12):
decades of issues of the paper itself, issues spanning nineteen
sixty eight till twenty ten, 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
(37:33):
a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in nineteen
eighty one, the Hungarian UN representative referred to them briefly
as a US based neo fascist group dedicated in the
spirit of Ferenz Salashi, the Nazi collaborator installed as the
nation's leader after the German occupation of Hungary in nineteen
forty four.
Speaker 1 (37:54):
There are no.
Speaker 2 (37:56):
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 Aaro Cross party worked directly with
Adolph Eikman to resume the deportation of Hungarian Jews to
the camps, and as Soviet troops closed in on the
(38:18):
Hungarian capital, Arrow Cross 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 nineteen eighty one UN General Assembly meeting,
the Hungarian representative read aloud excerpts from this newspaper. The
(38:43):
Hungaria 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 Faren Salagi, calling him his actions a
brave attempt to save the fatherland and its ancestral honor.
(39:06):
Five years later, in the December nineteen eighty six issue
of Sitiakurt, there is a brief note on the backpage
thanking President Ronald Reagan for his proclamation in support of
the Hungarian freedom fighters, the anti communist heroes of the
nineteen fifty six uprising. Most of what I found were
issues of Sitya Kurt, which is in Hungarian. I did
(39:30):
find a handful of issues of a companion newspaper in
English called The Fighter, and its first issue in nineteen
sixty eight featured a full page front page glowing endorsement
of segregationist George Wallace's presidential campaign, written by Sityakurt contributing
(39:50):
editor Louis Molnar, who was George Wallace's Ohio campaign chair,
and according to his obituary, he personally toppled the statue
Joseph Stalin in the city square in Budapest in nineteen
fifty six. Hard to Say and the first issue of
Sityakurt in Hungarian, also published in nineteen sixty eight, announced
(40:13):
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 Zultan Vasvari, and as I looked through
more issues of Sitya Kurt, most issues in the sixties
(40:34):
and seventies list Zultan Vasvari's home address in New Jersey
in case you want to send a cash donation to
the paramilitary. In an interview about her twenty seventeen documentary
called Cold Warriors, Hungarian American journalist Raka Pigniski said that
the Cross and Sword Movement was not an anti Semitic organization.
(40:56):
They were nationalists, they were patriots. Were some of the
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,
(41:17):
And maybe Zultan Vasvari is.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
A common name. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (41:23):
I've never been to Hungary, so I can't rule out
the possibility that there were multiple Hungarian Army officers in
World War Two 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 Sultan Vasvari's.
(41:49):
A few years ago, Dida's Secrets founder Emma Best won
a foya battle with the federal government, and one of
the thousands of documents made available to the general public
for as a result was a nineteen fifties era CIA
file that contained a seven hundred page book that they
had obtained from the Hungarian Army during World War II.
(42:12):
And the book lists every officer in Hungary's army in
nineteen forty four, every officer by name, rank, date of birth,
which medals they have when they began their service. Seven
hundred pages of Hungarian names, and there is only one
officer named Zultan Basvari and his date of birth is
(42:35):
listed as May thirteenth, nineteen twelve. Now I also found
New Jersey Department of Health records that show that a
Zultanvaswari born May thirteenth, nineteen twelve died in Bergen County
in nineteen ninety. Okay, that set of facts is not
exactly earth shattering. There are interviews with Hungarian Americans who
(42:56):
have fond memories about learning to shoot rifles on a
farm owned by a man they called Uncle Zoli. And
those articles sometimes mentioned that he'd been an officer in
the war, but those fond memories shared in English language
sources sounded like a very different Sultan Vasvari than the
(43:16):
man described in Romanian. In nineteen forty, a Hungarian army
officer named Zultan Baswari gave the order to massacre more
than one hundred and fifty Romanian civilians in the Transylvanian
village of Epe. An interview with Gavriel Bhutkavan, one of
(43:36):
the very few survivors of that massacre, has been transcribed
in the collections held by the Holocaust Museum. He describes
finding his eleven month old sister shot and crushed with
the butt of a rifle in her crib. His eleven
year old brother was shot in the back of the
head running from the soldiers. When the massacre was over,
(44:00):
ordered his soldiers to dig a massive pit, burying the
victims in a mass grave. Most English language sources about
the massacre at Ep say that Vasvari was sentenced to
death for war crimes by the Romanian People's Tribunal at
Cluge after the war, and the source cited for that
(44:21):
does indeed name Baswari among those war criminals who were
sentenced to death at Cluche, but none of the English
language sources I could find mentioned that this Romanian document
also says that he was tried in absentia, and at
the time his sentence was pronounced, his current location was
(44:41):
not known. According to a two thousand and four report
of the International Holocaust Commission in Romania, the People's tribunals
at Cluje and Bucharest sentenced over a hundred war criminals
to death, but it was largely symbolic. In one mass trial,
more than a third of those charged were even accounted for,
(45:03):
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
(45:23):
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.
(45:45):
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 history to talk to about this, because I am
having a hard time believing that a Hungarian war criminal
(46:07):
started a paramilitary organization in New Jersey. Surely there was
some other Zultan Vasfari born in Hungary on May thirteenth,
nineteen twelve. 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
(46:28):
for a war criminals nationalist militia.
Speaker 3 (46:31):
Maybe, but if you're looking.
Speaker 2 (46:34):
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 denile essays
were very popular among a wide variety of the world's
worst people in two thousand and seven. Within the admittedly
(46:59):
small world 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 mail to his divorce attorney, he claims he
(47:21):
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
(47:42):
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 Ernstundel.
Speaker 1 (48:03):
His hard work is starting to pay off.
Speaker 2 (48:06):
He's just on the cusp of being a real figure
in professional racism. But then in December of two thousand
and seven, he 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
(48:28):
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
(48:58):
Weird Little Guys as a product of Cool Zone Media
and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded by me, Mollie Knger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The
show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The
theme music was composed by Brad Dickard. You can email
me at Weird Little Guys Podcast at gmail dot com.
(49:20):
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 Guy's subreddit. Just don't post anything that's going to
make you one of my Weird Little Guys.
Col Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
On the Saturday night before Labor Day in two thousand
and three, charter buses pulled into the lot at Cincinnati's
public landing. Passengers streamed out of the buses, one hundred
and fifty 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,
(00:30):
and they'd spent all day cooped up inside in a
rented ballroom at the Marriotte near the airport. They'd paid
three hundred and seventy five dollars 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
(00:53):
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
(01:15):
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
(01:37):
love of model Trains. Over lunch at the Marriotte 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 Reefenstahl is quote
still going strong at over one hundred and Irving said
(01:59):
that Reefenstahal 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
(02:19):
for Nine to eleven Truth. Before lunch, Charles Pravaan, 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
(02:41):
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 and M University, Curtis Maynard presented
his master's thesis on a lesser known incident from World
War II. The one hundred and four page thesis doesn't
actually mentioned the Holocaust a single time. It's not about that.
(03:04):
It's about a nineteen forty three German air raid on
US naval vessels docked at Bari, Italy. But the old
man 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 resitation of facts about planes
and ships. Either way, in two thousand and three, Curtis
(03:27):
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
(03:48):
ends at the wheel of a nineteen ninety four Lincoln
sedan crash in a ditch with a bullet hole in
his head. I'm Molly Counger, and this is where the
little guys. When I started writing this episode, I thought
(04:22):
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 form thread
about Ron Paul. I think, at its core, this is
(04:43):
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 or shot, gassed and starved to death
by Nazi Germany. I have no interest at all in
(05:06):
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 twenty year
old blog posts and ancient threads on hateful online forums,
(05:30):
about interna scene, 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
(05:52):
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
(06:16):
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.
(06:36):
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,
(06:57):
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
(07:19):
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 processed that violence right there in the same
digital forum they'd spent years chatting. The story they got
(07:43):
me thinking about this particular genre of online conversation is
when I haven't finished. Fraser Glenn Miller murdered three people
in Kansas in twenty fourteen. He died in prison, convicted
of those murders, but he was He was also a
suspect in three other murders in nineteen eighty seven, and
was a central figure in the Greensboro massacre, where Nazis
(08:07):
and klansmen murdered five communist organizers in nineteen seventy nine.
He didn't pull the trigger in nineteen seventy nine, and
nobody ever proved he did in eighty seven, 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
(08:30):
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,
(08:50):
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 Hyle Hitler as officers handcuffed him,
and then someone posted the news footage of that moment
(09:11):
of the shooter yelling Hyle 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
(09:33):
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
(09:56):
both sides, 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,
(10:17):
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
(10:40):
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.
(11:07):
On April twenty first, twenty ten, Curtis Boon 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
(11:28):
any of those texts he sent Melissa Masa that day,
but whatever it was, she was upset enough about the
texts that she'd discussed them with a friend. That afternoon,
at eight twenty pm, Melissa's neighbors heard gunshots. Her middle daughter,
just twelve years old, ran to a neighbor's house with
(11:48):
her two year old sister in her arms. A neighbor
heard the commotion and came outside and saw Melissa, a
thirty four 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.
(12:09):
The neighbor dialed nine when one 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 sixteen year old daughter from a prior marriage inside.
She survived, but she had been shot in the face
by the man who had been her stepfather since she
(12:30):
was a toddler. Curtis Maynard was driving seventy miles an
hour down the highway when police caught.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
Up to him.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
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 on to 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
(13:03):
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?
Speaker 1 (13:16):
Why? Today? Why like this? And there are no answers.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
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
(13:49):
he wanted to be a writer.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
He served briefly in the US.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Army after high school. In nineteen ninety two, at the
age of twenty five, he got his associate's degree in
nursing began working as a registered nurse. In nineteen ninety six,
while he was still married to his first wife, he
started seeing the woman who had become his second wife
and only murder victim, Melissa Mesa was actually still married
(14:15):
to her first husband at the time, but they were separated,
and Maynard would later say he'd believed she was already divorced.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
It's hard to piece together the particulars.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
Of a man's personal life so many years before he
got online, but things were not going well.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
In nineteen ninety seven.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
Just as his divorce from his first wife was finalized,
a judge in Texas issued a bench.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
Warn't for him.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
He'd pled guilty to a dui in nineteen ninety four,
and he.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
Got off easy. He didn't have to go to jail.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
All he had to do was complete the DUI education program.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
But he never did it.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
So maybe he skipped town to avoid the benchwarn't maybe
he was just looking for a fresh start after his divorce.
But just as he was doing court in Corpus Christi, Texas,
he got a job at a hospital in Idaho in
June of nineteen ninety seven, right around the time Melissa
probably would have been realizing she was pregnant with Maynard's daughter.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
He did something he should not have done.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
And I don't mean impregnating a woman who was still
married to another man.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
I don't care about that.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
But according to a decision from the Idaho Board of Nursing,
one vial of demarole and one vial of morphine went
missing from the locked narcotics cabinet at Boundary County Community
Hospital on June twenty eighth, nineteen ninety seven. Missing opiates
are a big deal in a hospital. They're not something
(15:50):
that just gets misplaced and shrugged off. It's not a
lost pen. These things are carefully accounted for.
Speaker 1 (15:59):
These days.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
Every things tracked in a computer system, but even in
the dark ages of the nineteen nineties, 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.
(16:20):
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,
(16:44):
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
(17:05):
the drug test. In fact, he never came back.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
To work at all. The police investigation.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
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
(17:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
And so if he.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
Hadn't slipped up and stolen the vial of demarole, 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
(18:29):
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 nineteen ninety eight, 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.
(18:51):
Maynard never responded. After months of getting no response from Maynard,
the Idaho Board of Nursing got a default order against
him suspend 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
(19:13):
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,
(19:35):
ran several announcements in the summer of two thousand 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.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
I have to.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
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 nineteen ninety nine, Curtis Maynard
(20:12):
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 twenty eight days of residential treatment for substance abuse,
(20:34):
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 and 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
(20:54):
raid on US 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 Irvings's
work while he was researching or was he already familiar
with the work of revisionist historians and hoping to add
his voice.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
To the choir.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
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 two thousand and three, he wasn't just
reading David Irvings's Holocaust denial works. They were corresponding. The
thesis not only lists three of Irving's books in its bibliography,
(21:36):
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
(22:01):
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
(22:26):
Without the works of historians like Elkafrolic 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 doctor Joseph Gerbels today.
Speaker 1 (22:43):
End quote.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
Because not only is that not true, David Irving is
not solely responsible for existing works of scholarship on the
diaries of Joseph Gerbels, 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
(23:07):
department would have clocked it as very inappropriate to drop
this line.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
Quote.
Speaker 2 (23:14):
David Irving's opinion cannot be dismissed easily, as he is
a recognized expert on the third Reich end quote. 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
(23:39):
might have been able to say it with a straight
face in the nineteen sixties. Maybe in the nineteen sixties
you could say David Irving is a recognized expert on
the third Reich.
Speaker 3 (23:50):
Maybe maybe you could still say it in the seventies
into the eighties. 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 eighties, but by two thousand
everyone in the world knew that David Irving was not
a historian. In nineteen ninety three, Jewish history professor Deborah
(24:12):
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 Lipstat discusses, but he in
particular took issue with her criticism of his work, and
(24:33):
so in nineteen ninety six he filed a libel suit
against Deborah Lipstadt 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.
Speaker 1 (24:53):
They just are.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
But even in England, the truth is the best defense
against an act acusation like this. It can't be liable
if it's true, and so Lipstot'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
(25:20):
the help of full time research assistance producing a seven
hundred and forty 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,
(25:42):
in his expert opinion, everything David Irving had ever written
was quote completely worthless as history, because Irving cannot be
trusted anywhere in any of them to give a reliable
account of what he is talking or writing about. If
we mean by historian someone who is concerned to discover
(26:04):
the truth about the past and to give as accurate
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 persistently and deliberately misrepresented and
manipulated historical evidence end quote because he was ideologically motivated
(26:27):
to portray Hitler in a positive light and.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
Deny the Holocaust.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
So he sued Deborah Lipstadt for calling him a Holocaust denier,
saying that was libel, and the judge said, it's not
libel because legally you're a Holocaust denier. So we lost
the libel lawsuit. But even worse for David Irving than
losing the lawsuit and having to pay quite a large
(26:55):
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 this. So all of these
(27:18):
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
(27:42):
no excuse in two thousand and three for citing David
Irving as an expert on the history of the Third Reich.
That's malpractice. But maybe his thesis adviser was in a
hurry when she's still his bibliography, and she didn't notice
that he'd cited David Irvings's book The Destruction of Convoy PQ. Seventeen,
(28:08):
despite the fact that every copy of that book was
withdrawn from the market in nineteen seventy after Irving loss
a massive libel lawsuit. I have to wonder if his
adviser noticed that he cited Irving's Destruction of Dresden, a
book that had been a best seller in the nineteen
sixties but completely fell apart under the slightest scrutiny. The
(28:32):
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
(28:55):
degree in May of two thousand and three, and just
a few months after presenting him thesis to the committee
at Texas A and 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
(29:16):
planned to work part time while enrolled in a history
PhD program at the University of Idaho in Moscow, on
the condition that he attended 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
(29:36):
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.
(30:08):
In two thousand and seven, 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 penn pals with Ernst Zundel, the German born
Canadian whose criminal prosecutions in Germany and Canada had made
(30:29):
him one of the world's most famous Holocaust deniers. Maynard's blog,
The Politically Correct Apostate, was banned by blogspot and word
press 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
(30:55):
content was cross posted on the websites of some big
names in the movement, like David Duke, and John Denugen.
His writing appeared often on the website for Jeff Rentz,
a talk radio guy that I think you could most
quickly describe as a more explicitly Nazi version of Alex Jones.
(31:17):
But you've probably never heard of Jeff Rentz because he
got into a fight with Alex Jones in two thousand
and nine 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 two thousand and seven,
(31:39):
Linder called him quote one of the most active and
powerful of a rising generation of white writers. In July
of two thousand and seven, 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 Minis, a Christian identity church funded by the sale
(32:03):
of Holocaust denile 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
(32:23):
American politics conspiracy theorist Mark Glenn performed an original musical
number about Jewish domination of society with the help of
his five oldest children, and I guess it's for the best.
But I couldn't find any video of that.
Speaker 1 (32:41):
But I don't know. I'm kind of curious.
Speaker 2 (32:45):
But Glenn was proud enough of this performance to include
it in his article about the conference, and the article
mentions Manard 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
(33:06):
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,
(33:31):
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 Promised 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 nineteen ninety six,
(33:59):
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 nineteen ninety nine, a member of the
church named Beauford Furrow shot several people at the Los
Angeles Jewish Community Center before murdering a Filipino mailman as
(34:22):
he fled the scene. Those are both stories that deserve
their own telling. Beauford Furrow, for one thing, was dating
Bob Matthews'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
(34:45):
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 off and by multiple outlets, even appearing in
translation in an Ohio based newspaper run by a group
(35:06):
called the Hungaria Freedom Fighter's Movement. There really is a
community for everything, I guess now. This little newspaper, Sitya Kurt,
was published from nineteen sixty eight until the death of
its editor, Tibor Mayor in twenty ten. Now I'm not
(35:28):
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
(35:50):
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
two thousand and seven issue of citya Kurt, and I
(36:11):
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 two thousand
and seven, 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
(36:31):
Neo not c 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
(36:52):
Lenny Reefinstall's Nazi propaganda films with Hungarian subtitles. So, okay,
I admit it. It 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
(37:12):
decades of issues of the paper itself, issues spanning nineteen
sixty eight till twenty ten, 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
(37:33):
a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in nineteen
eighty one, the Hungarian UN representative referred to them briefly
as a US based neo fascist group dedicated in the
spirit of Ferenz Salashi, the Nazi collaborator installed as the
nation's leader after the German occupation of Hungary in nineteen
forty four.
Speaker 1 (37:54):
There are no.
Speaker 2 (37:56):
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 Aaro Cross party worked directly with
Adolph Eikman to resume the deportation of Hungarian Jews to
the camps, and as Soviet troops closed in on the
(38:18):
Hungarian capital, Arrow Cross 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 nineteen eighty one UN General Assembly meeting,
the Hungarian representative read aloud excerpts from this newspaper. The
(38:43):
Hungaria 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 Faren Salagi, calling him his actions a
brave attempt to save the fatherland and its ancestral honor.
(39:06):
Five years later, in the December nineteen eighty six issue
of Sitiakurt, there is a brief note on the backpage
thanking President Ronald Reagan for his proclamation in support of
the Hungarian freedom fighters, the anti communist heroes of the
nineteen fifty six uprising. Most of what I found were
issues of Sitya Kurt, which is in Hungarian. I did
(39:30):
find a handful of issues of a companion newspaper in
English called The Fighter, and its first issue in nineteen
sixty eight featured a full page front page glowing endorsement
of segregationist George Wallace's presidential campaign, written by Sityakurt contributing
(39:50):
editor Louis Molnar, who was George Wallace's Ohio campaign chair,
and according to his obituary, he personally toppled the statue
Joseph Stalin in the city square in Budapest in nineteen
fifty six. Hard to Say and the first issue of
Sityakurt in Hungarian, also published in nineteen sixty eight, announced
(40:13):
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 Zultan Vasvari, and as I looked through
more issues of Sitya Kurt, most issues in the sixties
(40:34):
and seventies list Zultan Vasvari's home address in New Jersey
in case you want to send a cash donation to
the paramilitary. In an interview about her twenty seventeen documentary
called Cold Warriors, Hungarian American journalist Raka Pigniski said that
the Cross and Sword Movement was not an anti Semitic organization.
(40:56):
They were nationalists, they were patriots. Were some of the
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,
(41:17):
And maybe Zultan Vasvari is.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
A common name. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (41:23):
I've never been to Hungary, so I can't rule out
the possibility that there were multiple Hungarian Army officers in
World War Two 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 Sultan Vasvari's.
(41:49):
A few years ago, Dida's Secrets founder Emma Best won
a foya battle with the federal government, and one of
the thousands of documents made available to the general public
for as a result was a nineteen fifties era CIA
file that contained a seven hundred page book that they
had obtained from the Hungarian Army during World War II.
(42:12):
And the book lists every officer in Hungary's army in
nineteen forty four, every officer by name, rank, date of birth,
which medals they have when they began their service. Seven
hundred pages of Hungarian names, and there is only one
officer named Zultan Basvari and his date of birth is
(42:35):
listed as May thirteenth, nineteen twelve. Now I also found
New Jersey Department of Health records that show that a
Zultanvaswari born May thirteenth, nineteen twelve died in Bergen County
in nineteen ninety. Okay, that set of facts is not
exactly earth shattering. There are interviews with Hungarian Americans who
(42:56):
have fond memories about learning to shoot rifles on a
farm owned by a man they called Uncle Zoli. And
those articles sometimes mentioned that he'd been an officer in
the war, but those fond memories shared in English language
sources sounded like a very different Sultan Vasvari than the
(43:16):
man described in Romanian. In nineteen forty, a Hungarian army
officer named Zultan Baswari gave the order to massacre more
than one hundred and fifty Romanian civilians in the Transylvanian
village of Epe. An interview with Gavriel Bhutkavan, one of
(43:36):
the very few survivors of that massacre, has been transcribed
in the collections held by the Holocaust Museum. He describes
finding his eleven month old sister shot and crushed with
the butt of a rifle in her crib. His eleven
year old brother was shot in the back of the
head running from the soldiers. When the massacre was over,
(44:00):
ordered his soldiers to dig a massive pit, burying the
victims in a mass grave. Most English language sources about
the massacre at Ep say that Vasvari was sentenced to
death for war crimes by the Romanian People's Tribunal at
Cluge after the war, and the source cited for that
(44:21):
does indeed name Baswari among those war criminals who were
sentenced to death at Cluche, but none of the English
language sources I could find mentioned that this Romanian document
also says that he was tried in absentia, and at
the time his sentence was pronounced, his current location was
(44:41):
not known. According to a two thousand and four report
of the International Holocaust Commission in Romania, the People's tribunals
at Cluje and Bucharest sentenced over a hundred war criminals
to death, but it was largely symbolic. In one mass trial,
more than a third of those charged were even accounted for,
(45:03):
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
(45:23):
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.
(45:45):
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 history to talk to about this, because I am
having a hard time believing that a Hungarian war criminal
(46:07):
started a paramilitary organization in New Jersey. Surely there was
some other Zultan Vasfari born in Hungary on May thirteenth,
nineteen twelve. 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
(46:28):
for a war criminals nationalist militia.
Speaker 3 (46:31):
Maybe, but if you're looking.
Speaker 2 (46:34):
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 denile essays
were very popular among a wide variety of the world's
worst people in two thousand and seven. Within the admittedly
(46:59):
small world 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 mail to his divorce attorney, he claims he
(47:21):
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
(47:42):
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 Ernstundel.
Speaker 1 (48:03):
His hard work is starting to pay off.
Speaker 2 (48:06):
He's just on the cusp of being a real figure
in professional racism. But then in December of two thousand
and seven, he 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
(48:28):
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
(48:58):
Weird Little Guys as a product of Cool Zone Media
and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded by me, Mollie Knger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The
show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The
theme music was composed by Brad Dickard. You can email
me at Weird Little Guys Podcast at gmail dot com.
(49:20):
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 Guy's subreddit. Just don't post anything that's going to
make you one of my Weird Little Guys.
Host
Molly Conger
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