Free Wrapped in the Flag by Claire Conner Page A

began to hear a new version of World War II, one in stark contrast to everything I’d learned. Oliver called the Holocaust a “hoax” concocted by the Jews themselves and said numerous times that “there were no gas chambers and there was no ‘extermination.’” 8
    Soon, my parents began to parrot Oliver. The Holocaust that I’d learned about from Mrs. Fishman and my father stopped being so terrible: The death camps turned into detention camps. Jews were taken prisoner because they were traitors to the German government, not because of their faith. The “Final Solution” became fiction, the “Holohoax,” as Oliver called it, and the Nazis were turned into loyal military men following orders. 9 “In wartime, it’skill or be killed,” my father now said.
    I didn’t ask my father about the Jews who were sent to Auschwitz and the gas chambers. I didn’t ask about the photographs and the eyewitness reports of the Americans who liberated the camps. I didn’t ask about the testimonies of those who survived. I didn’t ask about any of it. I thought my parents had lost their minds and that Dr. Oliver had helped them.
    I remember how disappointed I was in my father for having anything to do with the awful Dr. Oliver. To me, it was obvious that he was a vicious, nasty man, and I couldn’t imagine what my father saw in him.
    For the first time, I doubted my dad.

    Revilo Oliver and my father served together in the leadership of the John Birch Society for seven years. During that time, Oliver spent many hours in our living room spewing forth some idea or other while recruiting new members to the society. My parents drank in everything the man said and repeated most of it, almost verbatim, to anyone who would listen. Robert Welch continued to praise Oliver for his outstanding contributions to the cause.
    In July of 1966, Oliver headlined the fourth annual New England Rally for God, Family, and Country, an annual Birch-sponsored festival held in Boston and billed as a reunion for conservative Americans. Scott Stanley, managing editor of the two Birch publications
American Opinion
and the
Review of the News
, was listed as the moderator for Oliver’s speech, “Conspiracy or Degeneracy.” 10 Near the end of his remarks, Oliver talked about “vaporizing” Jews as part of the “beatific vision.”
    Oliver’s shocking statements generated an avalanche of negative press, followed by a month of internal Birch turmoil on how to respond. Finally, in early August, Welch told council members that Oliver was out. 11
    The minute Oliver left the Birch Society, he vanished from my parents’ conversations. I asked what had happened, but neither my mother nor my father would say; they pretended he’d never really been a friend anyway.
    Revilo Oliver lived the rest of his life as a hero to the neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers, who spread his message of hate through their books and magazines. On August 10, 1994, Revilo Oliver died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He was eighty-six.
    In his recently published book, Arthur Goldwag says this about Oliver: “Hateful doesn’t even begin to describe Oliver’s racialism, which is expressed in impolitic, frankly Hitlerian terms that would shock even many a hard-core segregationist. His reflexive use of epithets like ‘sheeny’ and ‘nigger’ alone puthim beyond the pale.” 12
    In addition to his vile ideas and white-supremacist ideology, Oliver also introduced the John Birch Society to its single most essential belief. In his 2009 book
Blood and Politics
, Leonard Zeskind identifies Oliver as “the person responsible for introducing the idea of a conspiracy by the Illuminati into Birch circles.” 13
    Thanks to Revilo, my parents embraced the Illuminati and toyed with denying the Holocaust. Personally, I wish I’d never heard of Oliver. I wish I could forget his creepy smile, slicked-back hair, and vile ideas. And I wish I could say that Oliver was the last Jew-hating, race-baiting,