City high school to screen reformed Holocaust denier’s documentary on visit to Nazi death camp

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This article was published 15/11/2023 (689 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Some people go to Auschwitz for historical reasons. Others go to see the place where family members lost their lives. Tony McAleer went to make amends.

McAleer, a former Holocaust denier who spent 15 years in white supremacist and neo-Nazi movements in Canada, went to that former German-run concentration camp in what is now Poland in 2018 “to make amends and repair relationships… the visit was part of my healing work.”

Today McAleer, who lives in Vancouver, is involved with an organization called Life After Hate, serving as executive director from 2013-2017.

He will be in Winnipeg for the first public showing in Canada of his new documentary, The Cure for Hate: Bearing Witness to Auschwitz.

Sponsored by the Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada, the screening and follow-up discussion takes place at Westwood Collegiate at 2 p.m. on Sunday.

McAleer, 56, became a skinhead as a way to deal with childhood trauma.

“My childhood left me in a place where I craved safety,” he said, adding he decided to trade compassion for others for acceptance from members of the neo-Nazi movement.

“I had a need for approval. I got that in spades from the movement,” he said.

In that movement, he spread and acted on his hate by dehumanizing others — especially Jews.

“In order to commit violence against another group, you first have to dehumanize them,” he said, adding “Jewish people were those I harmed the most.”

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, McAleer rose to prominence in white-supremacist circles in Canada and the U.S., including with the far-right group White Aryan Resistance.

His turnaround began in 1991 with the birth of his child. When he saw his newborn daughter, it was the first time he had connected with another human “since… I couldn’t remember,” he said of that bonding experience.

“It was an intense sensation. I only knew one thing: that moment had changed me,” he said, adding the left the hospital “a different person than I’d entered it.”

It took McAleer about a decade to disengage from the movement; leaving was hard, he said, citing loneliness as the hardest challenge as he cut ties with his former social circles.

“You have to have the courage to let go and be alone,” he said.

Going to Auschwitz was part of his healing journey.

“I needed to go, given my history as a Holocaust denier,” he said, adding that the visit “had a very powerful effect on me, viscerally, emotionally and physically.”

The documentary about that visit, and his life story, “is about the evolution of my journey, about leaving the movement,” he said.

Today McAleer travels around North America sharing his story and urging listeners to find ways to build bridges with other people in their communities.

This includes the ongoing bloodshed involving Israel and Hamas.

“To see anyone harmed is distressing,” he said, adding people need to watch out for those who would like to exploit the conflict to inflame tensions between groups.

“We need to find commonalities,” he said. By talking with others, “we will find we have more in common with each other than we think.”

For Belle Jarniewski, executive director of the Heritage Centre, McAleer’s experience “exemplifies how easily young people can be drawn into a world of hate and radicalism and extremist movements, which are sadly proliferating.”

It also shows that there is a way out of a life of hate. “His story shows us that people have the capacity to turn away from hate and radical views,” she said.

Admission to the documentary screening is free. To register, go to http://wfp.to/67U or call 204-477-7460.

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