A Holocaust survivor who endured Auschwitz before successfully taking deniers of the genocide to court in the 1980s has died aged 95.

Mel Mermelstein was deported from Hungary in 1944 along with his parents, two sisters and a brother to the Nazis’ most prolific death camp in German-occupied Poland when he was just 17 as part of Hitler’s campaign to exterminate the Jews.

Mermelstein was sent on a death march prior to the liberation of Auschwitz in January 1945, but was eventually liberated from Buchenwald in April of the same year.

He was the only survivor of his family after his female relatives were gᴀssed upon arrival at Auschwitz and his male relatives perished from starvation and exhaustion.

Years later, after emigrating to California following the end of World War II, Mermelstein made good on a promise he said he had made to his dying father while held captive at Auschwitz .

In 1985, the former Auschwitz inmate successfully sued an organization which denied that the Holocaust had ever taken place for tens of thousands of dollars in damages in a Los Angeles Court, and convinced a judge to accept the gᴀssing of the Jews as an indisputable fact.

He later told the Los Angeles Times in 1991: ‘I made a promise to my father in the camp that I would tell what happened if I did survive.’

Mermelstein’s daughter Edie told the Washington Post that her father had pᴀssed away as a result of Covid-19 complications.

A Holocaust survivor who endured Auschwitz before successfully taking deniers of the genocide to court in the 1980s has died aged 95. Mel Mermelstein was deported from Hungary in 1944 along with his parents, two sisters and a brother to the Nazi’s most prolific death camp in German-occupied Poland when he was just 17 as part of Hitler’s campaign to exterminate the Jews. (Mermelstein pictured at his Huntington Beach museum exhibit in 1999)

Liberated prisoners of Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar. Picture taken on 16 April 1945 in the barrack 56 of the small camp. Mel Mermelstein is pictured top right with his face partially obscured

After being liberated from Buchenwald, Mermelstein headed for the US and made a home in Huntington Beach, California.

But years later he became involved in a highly publicized lawsuit when he took down an organization of Holocaust deniers in Los Angeles Superior Court after they had baited him.

The Insтιтute for Historical Review was an organization ran by anti-Semite Willis Carto which pushed for a revision of history to show that the Holocaust was nothing more than a fictional ploy designed to manufacture sympathy for Jews, despite overwhelming evidence to suggest otherwise.

Mermelstein was first targeted along with several other Holocaust survivors by the Insтιтute in 1979 when it wrote to the press, publicly announcing that it would award a $50,000 cash prize to anyone able to ‘could prove that the Nazis operated gas-chambers to exterminate Jews during World War II.’

In a particularly obnoxious stunt, the Insтιтute delivered letters to several Holocaust survivors inviting them to participate, but as its members later came to discover, they had ‘picked on the wrong Jew’ in the words of Mermelstein.

Urged on by the promise to his father, the Auschwitz survivor duly accepted the Insitute’s challenge, submitting an account of his experience at Auschwitz and demanded that it paid the $50,000 directly to him.

Holocaust survivor Mel Mermelstein has died 95. In this image, Mermelstein, aged 59, recalls the horrors he experienced as a prisoner of the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944 during a Superior Court trial a member of the Insтιтute for Historical Review, which claims the Holocaust is a myth

When the Insтιтute refused, Mermelstein enlisted the help of a public-interest lawyer sued the group for the $50,000 in prize money and $17 million in damages, alleging they had breached a contract, intentionally inflicted emotional distress on Holocaust survivors, and denied the ‘established fact’ of the Holocaust.

Though Mermelstein did not win his $17 million claim, the parties ultimately reached a settlement in which the Insтιтute paid the full $50,000 plus another $40,000 in damages, and was required to publicly apologize for denying the existence of the Holocaust after a judge issued a ‘judicial notice’ – essentially recognizing it as an indisputable fact.

‘They caved in,’ Mermelstein said.

‘Not only that, but we proved they cannot get away with taking such a barbaric event as I have been through and turn it into a dagger to hurt me with.’

Mermelstein’s legal battles continued after he sued the Insтιтute, but he continued to stand up for the memory of his family and millions of other Jews who were exterminated under the Nazi regime.

In 1986, he was awarded $5.25 million in damages in a lawsuit against Swedish publisher Ditlieb Felderer, a defendant from the Insтιтute who refused to participate in the earlier settlement but who had allegedly continued to torment Mermelstein.

‘Money was never the thing in my mind in the first place,’ Mermelstein declared at the time.

‘No feeling human being in his right mind would try to prove that this didn’t happen. This is like digging up the ᴅᴇᴀᴅ and kicking them around — and the ᴅᴇᴀᴅ include my mother and two sisters.’

Concentration Camp Auschwitz, Hungarian women who have been selected to work at Auschwitz-Birkenau. June, 1944. Their heads have been shaved to control the lice that spreads typhus

The arrival of Hungarian Jews in Auschwitz-Birkenau, in German-occupied Poland, June 1944. Between May 2nd and July 9th, more than 430,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz

Mermelstein returned to Auschwitz in 1967 and made intermittent visits over the course of several years in an attempt to collect a series of artefacts proving the Holocaust had taken place for historical record.

He later built a small museum which still exists in Huntington Beach, California, and founded the Auschwitz Study Foundation which ‘serves local students through art and Holocaust education’.

In 1991, Mr. Mermelstein was portrayed by actor Leonard Nimoy in TV-film dramatization of his story, ‘Never Forget.’

Historian and Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt, author of the 1993 book ‘Denying the Holocaust: The Growing ᴀssault on Truth and Memory,’ said: ‘Mel Mermelstein did a gutsy thing way back in the 1980s when he first took on Holocaust deniers.

‘Many people thought it was a foolhardy thing to do, but he went ahead and did it anyway, and he won.’

He is survived by his wife Emma Jane Nance of Long Beach California, four children, five grandchildren and a great grandson.