Revisionist pioneer Udo Walendy (1927-2022)

Udo Walendy – German patriot and pioneering revisionist scholar and publisher – died last night aged 95.

Born in Berlin, he was among the last of the wartime generation, having served as a teenager in the Reich Labour Force, then as a Luftwaffe auxiliary, and finally as a soldier in the Wehrmacht, turning 18 less than four months before the end of the war.

After an early career in education and business, Udo became one of the very first pioneers of revisionist history, publishing the first edition of his book Wahrheit für Deutschland – Die Schuldfrage des Zweiten Weltkriegs (‘Truth for Germany: the guilt question of the Second World War’) in 1964, a decade before the 1970s explosion of revisionist scholarship. This book appeared in many subsequent editions in several languages.

Among his most significant contributions to that scholarship was his long-running series Historische Tatsachen, published latterly by Siegfried Verbeke’s VHO in Flanders.

A major figure on the international revisionist scene, Udo was a long-time board member of the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), and was a witness at both of the groundbreaking trials of Canadian-German revisionist publisher Ernst Zündel, in 1985 and 1988.

When the NPD was formed in 1964 as the main nationalist party in what was then West Germany, Udo Walendy became one of its first members, serving on the party’s federal executive from 1967-73, and as state chairman of the NPD in North-Rhine-Westphalia from 1971-73.

In 1996-97 Udo Walendy served prison sentences under Germany’s notorious debate-denying Volksverhetzung law, and was prosecuted on many other occasions, as well as suffering frequent official harassment and the seizure of his books and magazines.

Until his eyesight failed in his final years, Udo Walendy remained extremely active as a revisionist and as a patriot, standing as mayoral candidate for the NPD in his home city of Mönchengladbach in 2014, when he was already aged 87.

The last of the wartime generation are leaving us, as are many of the pioneering revisionist generation of the 1960s and 1970s. The great intellectual adventure of our times (as Robert Faurisson called it) continues, as the torch is passed to new revisionist leaders such as Vincent Reynouard, now battling extradition to France where a new prison sentence would await him, and then on to a new generation of brave and articulate European intellectuals.

The truth – or as Professor Faurisson preferred to put it, “exactitude” – will never be silenced. Wahrheit macht Frei!