Mel Mermelstein challenges the Institute for Historical Review in Torrance

Holocaust survivor Mel Mermelstein reads entries on poster boards from the Museum of Tolerance’s traveling Holocaust exhibit, “The Courage to Remember,” on display at Cal State University, Long Beach, on Sept. 9, 2011. (*Daily Breeze* staff file photo by Sean Hiller)

The Feb. 4, 2022, death of Holocaust survivor Mel Mermelstein at 95 brought an end to a life devoted to battling those who sought to deny or minimalize Hitler’s attempts to exterminate the Jewish race during his regime.

Mermelstein made news during the 1980s for his legal battles with Willis Carto’s Institute for Historical Review (IHR), a far right group advocating a revisionist view of the Holocaust.

Carto spent most of his life propagating his side of the story. Born in Indiana in 1926, he received a Purple Heart during World War II after being injured by a sniper’s bullet.

In the 1950s, he embraced conservative Republican politics. After a brief affiliation with the hard-line John Birch Society, he formed his own group, Liberty Lobby, in 1958.

In 1978, Carto, who lived in a condominium in Rancho Palos Verdes at the time, established offices for the IHR at 2539 W. 237th St. in Torrance. The building also housed the Institute’s journal and book publishing arm, Noontide Press.

Noontide printed the IHR’s Journal of Historical Review as well as controversial titles by authors such as Francis Yockey, David Hoggan and David Irving that viewed the Nazi regime in a favorable light. Some of the books claimed that Hitler knew nothing about plans to eliminate the Jews.

The Torrance IHR operation kept a relatively low profile at first. That all changed at the group’s 1979 Revisionist Convention, when its leaders offered a $50,000 reward to anyone offering definitive proof that Jews were gassed to death by the Nazis at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Claiming that no one had met their challenge, the group closed the offer in 1980. But when Mel Mermelstein heard about the group’s offer and had a letter challenging it published in the Jerusalem Post, the group responded by sending him a letter reopening the award offer.

Mermelstein, an Auschwitz concentration camp survivor living in Huntington Beach, sued Carto and the institute in 1981, claiming they reneged on their reward offer after he offered evidence, including from his own incarceration at Auschwitz.

A photo from the Buchenwald concentration camp shows Holocaust survivor Mel Mermelstein’s eyes peering from atop a bunk, top right, rear, on April 16, 1945. (Credit: National Archives and Records Administration)

He won a partial victory on Oct. 9, 1981, when Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Thomas T. Johnson recognized as fact that Jews were gassed at Auschwitz.

Carto and his lawyers countersued for damages in 1983, and continued to fight Mermelstein’s original suit in the courts. The legal battle made headlines nationwide, publicizing the existence of the IHR’s Torrance office in the process.

Thomas Marcellus, director of the Institute for Historical Review, sorts damaged files from the wreckage of the devastating arson attack at its Torrance offices on July 4, 1984. (Credit: Institute for Historical Review)

On July 4, 1984, the 237th St. building was firebombed, probably with a Molotov-cocktail type of device. The fire was reported shortly after midnight, and firefighters battled it for an hour before getting it under control.

Unlike earlier arson attempts in 1981 and 1982 that only caused minor damage, the 1984 blaze resulted in an estimated $400,000 in damage to the IHR and two neighboring businesses. Thousands of its publications were destroyed.

The next day, Jewish Defense League activist Irv Rubin staged a demonstration at the site during which he supported the firebombing, though he disavowed any knowledge of its perpetrators. No one ever was arrested for the blaze.

After the fire, the IHR quietly opened a smaller office on Cabrillo Ave. in Torrance. Rubin countered by opening a JDL office, also on Cabrillo Ave., in an attempt to contest the IHR’s presence there. He would be named national leader of the JDL in 1985.

Irv Rubin and the Jewish Defense League demonstrate in front of the Jewish Community Building in Los Angeles, Dec. 20, 1981. (Credit: Los Angeles Public Library Photo Collection)

In July 1985, after nearly five years of legal wrangling, Mermelstein’s suit was settled out of court two weeks before its trial date. Mermelstein’s attorney, Gloria Allred, announced that the IHR and its corporate parent, the Washington-based Legion for the Survival of Freedom, had agreed to settle the $17 million civil suit by paying Mermelstein $100,000 and issuing him a formal apology.

In February 1986, the IHR abandoned its Torrance presence, closing the Cabrillo Ave. office. The JDL closed its office nearby shortly afterward. The IHR relocated to Orange County, eventually settling in Fountain Valley.

“People were uncomfortable having a group like that identified with the city, if only through their location,” Torrance Mayor Katy Geissert told the Daily Breeze at the time, referring to the IHR. “Their absence is refreshing.”

In 1991, Leonard Nimoy played Mermelstein in the made-for-TV movie, “Never Forget,” based on the Holocaust survivor’s life story. Mermelstein’s antagonist Willis Carto died in Virginia of cardiac arrest in 2015.

Mermelstein continued working to educate others about the Holocaust and its importance up until his 2022 death through his group, the Auschwitz Study Foundation.

After his death, it was announced that the collection of Holocaust-era photos and memorabilia that he’d kept for years in a homemade museum at his Huntington Beach lumber yard would be put on display at the Chabad Center for Jewish Life in Newport Beach.