Nicholas Kollerstrom


Nicholas Kollerstrom is an English historian of science and author who is known for Holocaust denial and the promotion of conspiracy theories. Formerly an honorary research fellow in The Department for Science and Technology Studies at University College London, he is the author of several books, including Gardening and Planting by the Moon, Newton's Forgotten Lunar Theory, Crop Circles, and Terror on the Tube. He has also written entries for the Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers.
Kollerstrom has been involved in a variety of issues as a political activist. In 1986 he co-founded the Belgrano Action Group after the sinking of the ARA General Belgrano by the Royal Navy during the Falklands War, and has argued that the 7 July 2005 London bombings had not been carried out by the men accused of them. UCL withdrew his fellowship in 2008 after he posted material about the Auschwitz concentration camp on a Holocaust-denial website.

Education and career

Kollerstrom studied Natural Sciences at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge from 1965, specializing in the history and philosophy of science. He obtained his BA in 1968. According to his book Lead on the Brain, he worked from 1971 to 1976 for the Medical Research Council's Air Pollution Research Unit in London, and later as a physics and mathematics teacher. Supportive of the view that gardening by the lunar cycle affects plant growth, he worked on a biodynamic farm in the 1970s, and in 1980 his Gardening and Planting by the Moon was published, the first of an annual series. This was followed by Lead on the Brain, with a preface by Paul Ekins, then Astrochemistry: A Study of Metal–Planet Affinities, which examined astrochemistry and plant growth.
In 1990, Kollerstrom was elected a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, and in 1994 he was awarded a PhD by University College London for a thesis entitled The Achievement of Newton's "Theory of the Moon's Motion" of 1702. He was also awarded a Leverhulme scholarship and an honorary post-doctoral research fellowship in UCL's department of science and technology studies. His book Newton's Forgotten Lunar Theory: His Contribution to the Quest for Longitude was published in 2000. He published research that year in Equine Veterinary Journal on lunar phases and horse breeding and in 2003 in BMC Psychiatry on lunar months and human behaviour. In 2002 his book on the mathematics of crop circles was published, Crop Circles: The Hidden Form.
In 1999, Kollerstrom received a grant from the Royal Astronomical Society to work on the classification of correspondence related to the discovery of Neptune. He and his co-authors concluded in Scientific American in 2004 that the British had wrongly taken credit for it.

Activism

Overview

Kollerstrom was active in political campaigns in the UK throughout the 1980s. In 1985 he co-founded the London Nuclear Warfare Tribunal, which sought to question the legality of nuclear weapons. The following year, he became a founding member of the Belgrano Action Group, set up in protest at the sinking of the Argentine ship the ARA General Belgrano by the Royal Navy during the 1982 Falklands War. The group held an informal public inquiry in November 1986 at Hampstead Town Hall, addressed by Tam Dalyell and Clive Ponting, among others. In 1989 Kollerstrom stood as a Green Party candidate for East Guildford in the Surrey County Council election.
In August 2002, in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War, Kollerstrom became a founding member of the Legal Inquiry Steering Group, a citizens' tribunal in the UK that challenged the legality of the war.
In 2006, he appeared in a video by David Shayler supporting a fringe conspiracy theory that the men accused of the 7 July 2005 London bombings had not carried out the attack. He thought they were "innocent patsies" set up by the secret services of Britain, the United States and Israel. According to the BBC, Kollerstrom found that the Luton–London train on which the bombers were at first said to have travelled had been cancelled, which led the government to correct the official account of the men's movements. The police said the correction had come from them. Kollerstrom's book Terror on the Tube: Behind the Veil of 7/7, An Investigation was published in 2009, and he was interviewed that year for the BBC series The Conspiracy Files.

Holocaust denial and later writing

In 2007, on the website of the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust, a Holocaust-denial group, Kollerstrom argued for a fringe view that the gas chambers in the Auschwitz concentration camp had been used for disinfection purposes only. First proposed by the French fascist writer Maurice Bardèche in 1947, this position has no support among historians. In March 2008, a second article of his on the CODOH site alleged that Auschwitz had had art classes, a well-stocked library for inmates, and an elegant swimming pool where inmates would sunbathe on weekends while watching water polo. David Aaronovitch called this "one of the most jaw-dropping pieces of insulting stupidity" he had ever seen. UCL removed Kollerstrom's honorary fellowship in April 2008 when the articles were brought to its attention.
Responding to the loss of his fellowship, Kollerstrom said he had been accused of "thought crime"; he had no interest, he said, in Nazism and had always belonged to progressive groups such as the Green Party, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and the Respect Party. The following month, he was interviewed by Iran's Press TV, which published another of his Holocaust-denial articles. The historian of science, Noel Swerdlow, suggested in Isis in 2010 that the publishers of the Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers should withdraw it and replace the entries Kollerstrom had written on John Couch Adams, John Flamsteed, and Isaac Newton; Swerdlow wrote that a "line has been crossed that should never be crossed". In 2014, Kollerstrom's book Breaking the Spell: The Holocaust: Myth & Reality was published by Castle Hill Publishers, Germar Rudolf's Holocaust-denial imprint in Sussex, with a foreword by James H. Fetzer, co-founder of Scholars for 9/11 Truth. According to Kollerstrom, the Holocaust did not happen and "the British-American war-myths from Nuremberg are toxic to the soul". It was one of several Holocaust-denial books removed from sale by Amazon.com in 2017.
Kollerstrom's The Life and Death of Paul McCartney 1942–1966: A Very English Mystery supported the "Paul is dead" conspiracy theory, namely, that Paul McCartney died in 1966 and was replaced by a look-alike, while his Chronicles of False Flag Terror suggested that several terrorist attacks in Europe had been false-flag operations. Writing in 2017 about the relationship between conspiracism and historical negationism, Nicholas Terry, an historian at Exeter University, referred to Kollerstrom as a "classic example of so-called crank magnetism".
Around 2017, Kollerstrom co-founded the group Keep Talking, many of whose meetings are dedicated to the promulgation of Holocaust denial and other antisemitic conspiracy theories. The group is a coalition of far-left and far-right activists. People involved in the group include expelled Labour Party member Elleanne Green; Miko Peled; Piers Corbyn ; Gill Kaffash, a Holocaust denier and former Palestine Solidarity Campaign activist; Alison Chabloz, fined for an antisemitic song; and James Thring, who is linked to David Duke.

Selected works

Books
Articles