IHR itself has been the target of both legal challenges and terroristic attacks. On July 4, 1984, for example, IHR operations were set back by a fire bomb that destroyed its offices and warehouses in Torrance, California. Its director at the time, Tom Marcellus, claimed in an IHR Newsletter (since discontinued) that due to the arson the organization lost 90 percent of its book and tape inventory. In 1993-94, when IHR was involved in litigation against its founder, Willis Carto, professional staffers laid the blame for this extensive damage on Carto's failure to pay for protection against fire and his unwillingness to purchase an adequate insurance policy to reimburse the organization for its losses.

In August 1986, IHR and Willis Carto filed suit against Mermelstein, claiming that he had libeled them during an interview he gave on a New York City radio station. In February 1988, they voluntarily dropped the charges. In October of the same year, Mermelstein once again filed suit against Willis Carto, et al. This time he charged IHR with filing a malicious prosecution lawsuit against him. Mermelstein's second suit against IHR was dismissed in September 1991.

Legal troubles nonetheless have continued to hound IHR since October 1993 — this time, however, from within the fold of the Holocaust-denial movement. Trouble began for the organization when the IHR professional staff and board of directors voted to terminate its association with Willis Carto. On October 4, 1993, Carto received a letter announcing that he had been "fired." According to both press accounts and legal documents, the feud between Carto and his employees stemmed from a number of factors, including: the purchase of a new Cadillac for Carto's wife, Elisabeth, with IHR funds; Carto's purchase of an insufficient insurance policy prior to the 1984 arson; and his skimping on pay and health benefits for the staff.

Then-director Tom Marcellus also asserted that Carto had planned to reduce Holocaust-denial features in the JHR — the publication's stock in trade — by 80 percent, eventually to abandon the issue, reportedly in favor of more overtly racist subjects. Marcellus thus accused Carto of trying to turn the journal into a "racist" and "Nazi" publication (as if IHR's Holocaust-denial agenda weren't inherently anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi from the outset).

Most significantly, at stake in this controversy was control of an estimated $10 million in stock certificates bequeathed to IHR's parent corporation, The Legion for the Survival of Freedom Inc., by Jean Farrel, an alleged grandniece of Thomas Edison. The summer before Carto's "dismissal," Marcellus had reportedly discovered a $100,000 bank order for Liberty Lobby, Carto's principal group, drawn from the Farrel bequest. According to Marcellus, Carto directed his wife to set up a corporation for the sole purpose of controlling Farrel's money and loaning it back to the Legion — thus making the Legion a less attractive target for potential lawsuits. Because the IHR defined itself as the Legion, the senior staffers demanded control of the money bequeathed to the parent company.

Carto, in response, has denied the allegations against him and insisted that the rebellious staff members were manipulated by "sinister forces," as he expressed it in a letter to IHR editorial advisor Arthur Butz. This letter was included in a mailing from Carto to IHR contributors, and contained attacks on ADL and Mel Mermelstein. Since being fired from — and later physically ejected from the headquarters of — IHR, Carto's efforts to regain control moved into the legal arena. Thomas Kerr, a Carto associate, and Elisabeth Carto filed suit against the Legion for the Survival of Freedom; in turn, the Legion filed suit against another Carto front group, the Foundation to Defend the First Amendment. Lawsuits and countersuits between Carto and IHR currently remain in litigation.

Carto, meanwhile, continues to battle his erstwhile employees for dominance over the Holocaust denial movement. In 1994, Carto launched his own historical revisionist magazine, The Barnes Review, to compete with IHR's JHR. Contributors to The Barnes Review have included veteran hatemongers such as the late Leon Degrelle, a Belgian Nazi sympathizer and ally of Hitler; Ralph Forbes, an Arkansas neo-Nazi, and Eustace Mullins, a long-time anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist. Carto has also promoted the Sons of Liberty — a Louisiana-based clearinghouse operated by James K. Warner, a neo-Nazi activist and "Christian Identity" preacher — as an alternative source for Holocaust-denial propaganda. To further discredit IHR, Carto has accused the organization of falling under the control of the Anti-Defamation League; additionally, Liberty Lobby's The Spotlight newspaper has published news items and readers' letters debating the allegation that Mark Weber has a sister who moved to Israel and converted to Judaism.

IHR, for its part, has suffered greatly from the loss of Carto's support. From a full-time professional staff of seven in 1993, IHR today employs only two individuals, Mark Weber and Greg Raven. Raven, who joined the group in 1992, has devoted most of his energies to establishing an IHR presence on the World Wide Web; additionally, he has been responsible for forwarding unsolicited IHR materials to Internet subscribers and Web sites, including Jewish and legitimate Holocaust-discussion sites.

IHR conferences and publications have also offered evidence of the group's recent decline. In 1994, the first conference organized after Carto's departure was billed as a turning point for the organization, with scheduled participants to include Tony Martin, an Afrocentric Wellesley College professor and anti-Jewish polemicist, and Michael Shermer, an opponent of Holocaust denial who promised to participate in an event which IHR had been planning for years — a debate on whether or not the Holocaust actually occurred. When the actual gathering occurred, however, neither of these individuals appeared, and the conference consisted of the same few activists who had been regulars at such affairs in previous years. (Shermer did, however, participate in a debate with IHR Director Mark Weber at a private meeting in July 1995. IHR has since advertised a videotape of the event by stating that it "dramatically gives the lie to the often-repeated claim that the Holocaust story is 'undebatable."') More recently, IHR announced that its next conference, scheduled for Labor Day Weekend 1996, would be postponed indefinitely. As of late 1997, the conference had not been rescheduled.

IHR publications, similarly, have been produced irregularly, and have consisted mostly of a mix of reprinted columns -- either from previous editions of the IHR or from other sympathetic sources and book reviews, alongside regular appeals for donations. According to Willis Carto, subscriptions to the JHR have fallen since 1993 from more than 6,000 to about 2,000. The few remaining devotees nonetheless remain committed to pursuing their increasingly solitary, persistently hateful propaganda mission. back to part one