Irving v. Lipstadt
Defense Documents
[The Van Pelt Report]: Electronic Edition, by Robert Jan van Pelt
| < X. Auschwitz and David Ir ... |
XI Irving Adrift (1993 -1998)
As the dust generated by the aborted Leuchter lecture began to settle, Irving became again an object of media attention. In the month that preceded the Leuchter lecture debacle, Irving had visited Buenos Aires. A year later, he recalled what had happened then. The pages were transcripts of a series of taped interviews of Eichmann with the Belgian Nazi Willem Sassen, who had also chosen exile in Argentina over justice in his homeland. The Sassen interviews were well known: some pieces of it had been published as early as 1960, while a more substantial part had been edited for publication by the former Nuremberg defense attorney Rudolf Aschenauer and published in 1980 under the title Ich, Adolf Eichmann. A set of transcripts had come into the hands of a former Flemish Waffen-SS volunteer Hugo Byttebier, and he in turn had seen it as his duty to hand them to Irving.
Well when I was in Argentina in October, a man came up to me at the end of the meeting, who had written to me vaguely a couple of years before, mentioning papers that he thought I ought to see. And the next day he came back and he gave me two thick brown paper parcels which turned out to contain the writings of Adolf Eichmann when he was in custody, not in custody, when he was in hiding in Argentina in the 1950s.1010
When phoned in January 1992 by a journalist for a comment on Yehuda Bauer's assessment of the number of victims of Auschwitz, Irving mentioned that he was reading Eichmann's papers. Whatever Irving said, or whatever the journalist heard, is not exactly clear, but within a few days major newspapers carried the story that on the basis of the Eichmann papers Irving had recanted his negationist position. The Times had this to say about it.
The facts Gilbert referred to were the generally accepted account of the Holocaust. Yet he could also have referred to Irving's "discovery" of Eichmann's account of his conversation with Heydrich. After all, it is to be found on page 177 in the 1980 edition of the papers edited by Dr Rudolf Aschenauer: "Around the end of 1941 or the beginning of 1942 Heydrich. The Chef of the SIPO [Security Police] and SD [Security Service], told me in conversation that the Führer had ordered the physical destruction of the Jewish opponent."1012 On the next page, Eichmann mentioned that Heydrich talked about "an order for physical destruction," and quoted once more the Führer order. And on page 229 one can find Eichmann's second thoughts about this conversation, when he determines that it was not Heydrich's idea to kill the Jews, but Hitler's. In other words, Irving's "discovery" was not so much the result of having unearthed new material, but of not having paid attention to a source easily available since 1980.
The most interesting part of the memoirs, Mr Irving said, were these chilling words from late 1941. "Heydrich [Eichmann's superior] said to me: 'I have come from the Reichsführer [Himmler]. Now the Führer has ordered the physical destruction of the Jews.'" Mr Irving said: "That shows that Eichmann believed there was an order from Hitler, though it still does not prove there was one.
Eichmann's family did not want Mr Irving to see the memoirs because Eichmann admits total guilt for sending Jews to their death. In the light of this Mr Irving said his view that Hitler did not give the order will be "open to reassessment." Mr. Irving says that the memoirs are "very disorganised." He is using them, however, to write a biography of Eichmann. "I see him as a desiccated bureaucrat. He was an efficient transport officer rather than a mass murderer."
Martin Gilbert, author of The Holocaust: the Jewish Tragedy, said yesterday: "For many years Mr Irving had denied these facts about the Holocaust and now makes a virtue of finding them."1011
When Heydrich told me, "I come from the Reichsführer; the Führer has henceforth given the order for the phsyical destruction of the Jews," were these
words that were so far-raching in their consequences, that one could not even remotely measure their significance at the moment that they were spoken.1013
I remember exactly the moment that he told me "The Führer has ordered the physical destruction." I heard that word for the first time in my life, and therefore it stayed with me: I may have forgotten much, but this moment I will never forget. Neither [Gestapo Chef] Müller nor [RSHA Chef] Heydrich nor Eichmann nor anyone else of the RSHA were responsible for this, but the decision was made by the Führer and the Reichsführer.1014
Faurisson immediately realized that Irving had stirred a tempest in a teacup. On Sunday, January 12-the very day that the Sunday Telegraph ran the story of Irving's conversion--Faurisson faxed an angry note to Irving. Irving responded that same day, and faxed Faurisson the two newspaper articles, accompanied by a note in which he not only tried to control the damage in his relation with Faurisson, but also give the whole thing a positive spin. In his response, Faurisson stated that he considered "the whole matter as terrible," and challenged Irving to make his reservations public.
As it happens that I know a little bit about the Eichmann topic, perhaps would you be interested to have my position on "Eichmann and the Gas Chambers" (Höttl, Sassen, Aschenauer and, especially, Servatius). I wrote something about
that in my interview of Storia illustrata and in my Response to a Paper Historian. Eichmann had never seen a "Gas Chamber", and, as everyone, had not the slightest idea how it could look like. But, being rather naive and gullible, he would have been ready to believe more or less what Poliakov and Co. had written on the topic. If you need some details, please, tell me.1015
The suggestion that I have E's diaries has unleashed a furore. I have made plain they are only E's "unexpurgated" memoirs and recollections, which were given to me in Buenos Aires. I have also stressed that E's version of what Heydrich said: "ich komme vom Reichsführer; der Führer hat die physische Vernichtung der Juden angeordnet", is interesting but only Hörensagen, not zulässig in even an Amtsgericht as evidence. It shows what Eichmann believed, not what was necessarily true. Also, I have stressed that despite his many visits to Auschwitz he never saw a gas chamber, and that he refutes what Höß, Wisliceny, Höttl said as lies. I agree: he swallowed a lot that he read in Reitlinger, Poliakov, etc. But it is useful publicity, because it brings the whole controversy out into the open. Today, ten newspapers, three television stations, BBC radio etc. How else can we "purchase" such publicity for our real arguments?!1016
Have you sent any fax to those newspapers to say what you are telling me in your fax about Eichmann "only [hearsay]", "not permitted even in a court as evidence", "never saw a gas chamber", "refutes what Höss, Wisliceny, Höttl said as lies",
"swallowed [...]"?1017
It was clear that the Faurisson's original doubts about Irving's reliability as a hard-core negationist had once more surfaced. Also other Holocaust deniers feared that Irving had changed sides. Tom Marcellus of the Institute of Historical Review and Irving had a telephone conversation on January 16, and in a follow-up letter Irving tried to make light of the whole situation as "an object lesson in the worldwide, global, influence of certain media networks." And he added: One day later the Jewish Chronicle ran front-page article about the issue.
My position remains unchanged: that there were certain My-Lai-type atrocities by troops in Russia; that the gas chambers and factories of death are Hollywood legends; that there is no wartime evidence of a Hitler Order; that what Eichmann says in these papers is "hearsay."1018
Holocaust revisionist David Irving this week strongly denied press reports that he has "recanted."
In an exclusive interview, he reiterated his claim that Hitler knew nothing about the Holocaust, called the gas chambers "a legend": and predicted a new, more powerful Germany, and the destruction of Israel within 10 years.
[....]
At his Mayfair flat, surrounded by framed newspapers from Nazi Germany, Mr Irving sat at an antique desk playing with a small swastika flag. Behind him, a figurine proclaimed him to be "the World Greatest Dad."
The Jews are very foolish not to abandon the gas chamber theory while they still have time," he said. He predicted a new wave of anti-Semitism within 18 months, because the Jews "have exploited people with the gas chamber legend."
He also foresaw the rise of "a greater Germany, including Austria and
Slovenia with an economic hegemony over Eastern Europe." He added: "In 10 years, Israel will have ceased to exist and the Jews will have to return to Europe."
Mr Irving said that he had not visited the sites of the death camps in Europe, describing himself as a "field marshal" who would tour the "battlefield" only once the final victory had been achieved.1019
Yet many deniers felt uncomfortable, and in the January 30 issue of his own newsletter Power Zündel felt obliged to address the issue as many of his supporters had approached him about it. He recalled the personal problems he had with Irving in the past, and expressed his considerable unease with the way Irving had accepted the Eichmann papers as genuine. He should have known better. A week or so later, the Institute of Historical Review also expressed its confidence in Irving, claiming that "Irving remains steadfastly Revisionist," and blaming the media for routinely misrepresenting history and sensationally distorting what "prominent Revisionist scholars have to say about the historical record."1021
Irving also knew that the uncritical and gullible press would print just about anything, as long as it supported their version of history. He was right. They ate it up! Suddenly, the "outcast," or "Nazi-historian" or "Parlour-Fascist" as he has been called by the media since he "switched sides" in 1988, became quickly, once again, the darling of the media establishment.
What ever motivated Irving to launch this particular "torpedo", I don't know. Maybe he was lonely? Maybe he had not seen his name in the papers for a while? Maybe he was temporarily swayed by some arguments contained in those 100 pages? I don't know!
[....]
I work with David Irving, because I like his mind and his courage. Sometimes his gruff manner, which can be intolerant of associates, as well as his icy manner, which makes him seem arrogant, infuriate me, like it does others.
[....]
As far as David Irving is concerned, I will "keep the faith" with him, as long as I feel he serves the cause of truth about my own people, even though he might err sometimes, or disappoint me or my friends in some detail. He has courage, good looks, charisma, an ability to think on his feet and to string words
together coherently, like few other people I know.
I am asking you, you who have been so very loyal and supportive of me, for so long, to trust my instincts.1020
Things calmed down, and slowly confidence between Irving and the North-American deniers returned. By mid-summer Irving and Mark Weber of the Institute for Historical Review agreed that Irving would talk about the Eichmann papers at the Eleventh International Revisionist Conference, to be held that Fall in California. Irving promised a talk that would show the potential of the Eichmann document to support and damage the negationist cause. The question remained open, for the time being.
Basically: they contain good and bad; gripping accounts of mass shootings he witnessed; a savage attack on the reliability of the Höß memoirs; data on his dealings with the Zionists--which are presumably the reason the published Eichmann were quietly suppressed by the media; descriptions of inspections tours of Auschwitz which describe everything--but omit any reference to the gas chamber; so why does he casually refer to Jews being "gassed"...?1022
More doubt must have arise about the wisdom of his 1988 conversion when, in the summer of 1992, Irving discovered in the Public Record Office the interrogations of Kurt Aumeier. On June 4, 1992 Irving faxed a letter to Tom Marcellus and Mark Weber of the
negationist Institute for Historical Review. Irving reported that "working in the Public Record Office yesterday I came across the 200pp handwritten memoirs, very similar in sequence, to the Gerstein Report versions, of an SS officer Aumeier who was virtually Höß's deputy." Irving, of course, tried to suggest that the inflation in the death toll and the increasing lurid descriptions were the result of some coaching by his interrogators. And, clutching to the flimsiest arguments in the face of the new evidence he had found that supported the very understanding of the historical role of Auschwitz he had been fighting since 1988, Irving added, "Brute force by interrogators, perhaps."1024
He was held in a most brutal British prison camp, the London Cage (the notorious Lt. Colonel A. Scotland). These mss. are going to be a problem for the revisionists, and they need analyzing now, in advance of our enemies, and answering. I attach my transcript of a few pp., and you'll se why. He becomes more lurid with each subsequent version: first no gassings, then 50, then 15,000 (total).1023
The discovery of the Aumeier material brought Irving in a very difficult position. While publication of it would once more desomnstrate his ability to find interesting new archival, publication would discredit him as an analytical historian. Faced with this dilemma, Irving decided to do nothing. Suppressing his discovery, he buried a reference to it in a footnote of his book on Nuremberg.1025
In 1992 Irving was not willing to break ranks with the other negationists, and he chose to attend the eleventh revisionist conference organized by the Institute of Historical Review. At that occasion, bygones were bygones. In the subsequent chronicle of the event, Faurisson, Butz and Irving were grouped together in a section entitled "The End of the
Auschwitz Story." It claimed that these men dealt directly with the "historiographical demise of the Auschwitz gas chamber imposture, and referred to the effort now underway to transform a pretended historical fact into a vague, non-historical myth of religious veneration. Faurisson "delivered a kind of funeral oration over the prostrate cadaver of the Holocaust-as-history," and Butz not only reviewed his own misinterpretation of the word Vergasungskeller--offering countless other suggestions--but also explained to the participants why the whole Holocaust edifice stood or fell with the issue of the Auschwitz gas chambers. Finally "headline-making" David Irving talked in a speech entitled "The Worldwide Anti-Irving Lobby and the Eichmann Memoir" about the way his opponents made his life miserable, how he had found in Moscow parts of the Goebbels diary, and came clean on the Eichmann Affair that had caused him so much trouble earlier that year by offering what the IHR Newsletter defined as "a controversial assessment of its importance in understanding Germany's wartime Jewish policy."1026
The controversy was certainly not about Irving's attempt to put a negationist spin on whatever would bear it. He explained that whenever Eichmann uses the noun "Endlösung" (Final Solution) he refers to the plan to deport all the Jews to Madagascar, and Irving added that, as far he was concerned "that would have been an ideal solution. The Madagascar solution." It earned him a long applause. Furthermore Irving noted that Eichmann is obsessed with the question "who is behind it, and what is behind it?"
What was behind the Holocaust? And he keeps coming back to the appalling thought "Did they manage to use us? Did they use us? Did the Zionists use us Nazis, in order to further their own ends? Was the Holocaust something that they themselves inflicted on their own body in order to bring about their Zionist cause in the long run?" This was Eichmann's theory at the end, at the end of his life effectively, because a year or two later he was kidnapped, and a year after that he was at the end of a rope in Israel. "Did they manage to use us?" And he keeps on coming back to it, and every time he comes back to it, it becomes more and more plausible to him. And perhaps this is a reason why the Eichmann papers were not
supposed to see the light of day.1027
After having conjured the spectre of the Elders of Zion as those who managed to make the Germans do their bidding by killing some Jews to realize the Zionist ideal, he suggested that, after the war was over, the leader of the World Jewish Congress, through an intermediary, had approached Eichmann to have him confirm that Eichmann had overseen the murder of six million Jews. The Zionists needed this in their negotiations for reparation payments. Irving also recounted how Eichmann thought that, compared to the allied bombings of the German cities, the German treatment of the Jews was nothing. "Compared to what they were planning to do with us this was nothing." Irving quickly admitted that one crime does not justify another crime, "[b]ut this is in the memoirs." And then he gave an interpretation of Eichmann's interpretation of Höss's confessions. So if Leuchter had argued that it would have been "impossible" to gas more than 105,688 and incinerate more than 85,092 people in the crematoria in Auschwitz, Irving (with the help of Eichmann) now added to this the argument that it would have been "impossible" to transport more than a undetermined low number of people to the camp--a suggestion Irving makes whilst he attacks the "straw-man" of 2.5 million deportees to Auschwitz.
And round about 1958 he then gets hold of the Adolf--of the Rudolf Höss memoirs. The so-called memoirs of Rudolf Höss that were published by the Institute of History in Munich in 1958. Rudolf Höss wrote these memoirs while he was in Krakow in Polish captivity. They have always been a problem, let us be frank about it. They have been a problem to Revisionists, the Rudolf Höss memoirs.1028 Eichmann's comments on the Rudolf Höss memoirs are annihilating. At the stage where Rudolf Höss is saying that 2.5 million Jews have been liquidated in Auschwitz, the camp at which he was Commandant, Rudolf Höss comments--Adolf Eichmann comments: "Where does Rudolf Höss believe that he got these 2.5 million Jews from? Not from me. Because to have liquidated 2.5 million decrepit, elderly, unworkable Jews, I must have had to feed to him
three, four, five, six or seven million Jews in that space of time. And from the transport point of view alone, this would have been totally impossible." You see the memoirs of Eichmann are very useful in this respect. He was the transport specialist, whose job it was to round up the Jews of Hungary, Slovakia, and ship them off to Germany for forced labour and for dissipation to the other labour camps. And he knew that shipping off millions of Jews to Germany was not something you do with a snap of your fingers. You had to have meetings and conferences with the railway officials, and the road officials, and with the guards, and the electricity, and everybody else who was going to be involved in all this. You had to provide the food for the transports that were going to be on the roads on the rails for four, or five, or six days. All this had to be prepared and planned with typical German bureaucracy and method and this took meetings and conferences. And Eichmann said if you are going to ship five or six million Jews across Europe at that time to Auschwitz--"Let me tell you how many trains that would have taken." And he worked out how many trains it would have taken because he knew. And he said, "But wait a minute, you are not only going to have trains going that way full of Jews, you are going to have to have empty trains coming back, and you are going to have to have a circulation time, a time where they are unloading at one end, a time where they are loading at another end. You are going to need so many millions of wagons of rolling stock." And he worked out exactly how much rolling stock would have been needed in his memoirs and he said: "This alone proves that Rudolf Höss is talking through his hat. These figures are totally fantastic and what the hell is Höss up to writing this kind of garbage?"1029
The question which must be raised at this point is if Irving provided a reliable account of Eichmann's comment on Höss's testimony. Having checked the published version of Eichmann's memoirs, published in 1980 by Rudolf Aschenauer, I was able to find Eichmann's reaction to Höss's one-time statement that 2.5 million Jews had been brought to Auschwitz. In Aschenauer's edition of the Eichmann memoirs, the passage is as follows: In a different context in the same memoirs, Eichmann did discuss the train-schedules when he challenged the common assumption that over 430,000 Jews had been deported to Auschwitz during the Hungarian Action. I must assume that Irving took these two parts of Eichmann's memoirs--one dealing with Eichmann's refusal to accept the 2.5 million figure and another made in order to lower the number of deported Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz from 430,000 to 300,000--cobbling them together into a completely fictive account to prove that "Höss is talking through his hat." It seems that, at least for Irving, anything goes to solve the "problem" of Höss's confessions!1032
Like the testimony of Hauptsturmführer Wisliceny, also Höss's Nuremberg testimony, that he killed 2.5 million Jews in Auschwitz, seems to have been made under pressure. I knew Höss as a decent comrade, a good family man, decorated in the First World War with the Iron Cross, a man who, because of his national socialist belief, served many years in prison before the Machstübernahme.
Höss told me once that the Reichsführer had inspected the whole process of destruction and that he had said that "the coming generations will not need to fight these battles"--a statement that inspired him to fulfil his difficult duty.
The number of 2.5 million Jews liquidated in Auschwitz I always considered to be beyond belief, because the camp did not have such a capacity. Besides which I have never brought so many Jews to Auschwitz. It is true that I was not the only one who deported [Jews to Auschwitz], but also other authorities like the Sipo (Security Police), but even when we add all up, 2.5 million could not have gone to Auschwitz and certainly not could not have been destroyed. After 1945 the so-called "Auschwitzer" emerged like mushrooms after the rain, and still today hundreds of thousands enjoy a good health, just because they were put to work.1030
It is completely impossible that between earliest the middle of May 1944 and July 8, the day that enemy sources call the date that the last railway transport left
Hungary, that is in 50 days, it wold have been possible to transport 434,000 people (according to the same sources). This would imply that every day, including Saturday and Sunday, 10,000 and more people would have been transported. In addition to that the majority survived.
There was a rule that between 25 and 30 men accompanied every deportation train. I only had 250 men available. If the numbers from enemy sources would be right, I should have had a thousand men at my disposal. This is bloody nonsense! Even the commander of the Order Police in Hungary would have been delighted, if he had had a thousand men at his disposal for such a task. Also it would have been necessary to have many trains in reserve. Because while the first people went on their way, one would have been forced to load the next one. It took two days to go from Hungary to Auschwitz; so two days going and two days returning. I had to struggle constantly to get trains at all, especially in the for the war very important days of the early summer of 1944, when the invasion and the Soviet offensive made it impossible to obtain such a number of trains, even if one calculates that each train would have gone on its way with a maximum of 3,000 people. It is therefore nonsensical what post-war literature had written about the Hungarian evacuation numbers.1031
Irving also mentioned that Eichmann recalled that he visited Auschwitz several times--a point in his lecture where Irving began to conjure up the worst nightmares of Holocaust deniers in order to put them to rest again, with a less than convincing logic and without any attempt to review important corroborating evidence, such as Eichmann's account of his trip to Auschwitz given in Israel.1033
Obviously it will be superfluous to note the manner in which Irving applies his unique hermenautical method to inconvenient evidence. Of course, everyone knows that changing one or two words in a sentence often produces a completely different meaning. Everyone knows, too, that it is the duty of a historian to interpret evidence as it is given, and only when there is no way that one could come a reasonable explanation of the words a they are transmitted, speculate about a possible change that occurred in the transmission. The meaning of the sentence, "The Führer has given the order for the phsyical destruction of the Jews" is straightforward, and is confirmed by the context. But that does not convince Irving. Of course, there is absolutely no evidence at all that Heydrich "actually" said anything different from what Eichmann reports. As I have noted above, Eichmann gave in at least three different places in his memoirs a virtually identical version of the content of Heydrich's message: "the Führer had ordered the physical destruction of the Jewish
opponent;"1037 "the Führer has henceforth given the order for the physical destruction of the Jews;"1038 "[t]he Führer has ordered the physical destruction."1039 Given the fact that Irving has absolutely no evidence to support his point, and given the point that Eichmann seems to insist on the interpretation Irving so stubbornly rejects, there is at least in my mind no doubt that Irving violates the most basic rule of historical scholarship. It is clear that, whatever his claims to the contrary, he is not a historian.
And he describes several grisly scenes. He describes going past an open pit where bodies were being burned. And he says it was an infernal sight the likes of which he would never forget. He describes how the commandant Höss tells him they are doing these things on Himmler's orders and that it is a sacred task that has been imposed on the SS. He describes many things. But what he does not once mention during this vivid description of the visit to Auschwitz is gas chambers.
He does not mention gas chambers.1034 He just mentions the disposal of bodies in open pits by fire, and the comments to him by the commandant, Rudolf Höss. I find that a very significant omission, because Eichmann, let us face it, when you read these papers, he is not exactly being modest about what he has seen. He describes how, in July 1941, if we piece together the actual month and the date, he describes how he is summoned to Berlin, he is summoned to Berlin to visit Reinhard Heydrich, the chief of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt. And Heydrich utters to him the fatal words, "Ich komme von Reichsführer SS"--"I come from the Reichsführer of the SS, Heinrich Himmler." "Der Führer hat den Befehl zur physischen Vernichtung der Juden gegeben"--"The Führer has given the order for the physical destruction of the Jews." And that of course, in quotation marks in the manuscript, is what gave me pause for thought. I have always said that Hitler was not involved,whatever happened. Hitler gave the orders; there is no proof of it. In fact here we have Eichmann writing something very specific. Indeed what is the explanation?
Well if I can digress here and look just at that sentence and say, you have only got to change one or two words and you get a completely different meaning. If it was not "the Führer has ordered the "physische Vernichtung," the physical destruction of the Jews, but the "Ausrottung des Judentums." You have only changed the words by a fraction and yet you have got a totally different meaning and you get something that is much more familiar to those who are familiar with Adolf Hitler's public utterances and speeches. "Ausrottung des Judentums," the destruction of Judaism, is something totally different. You do not do that by gas chambers and the machine gun, anymore than destroying Christianity or destroying usury would be done by the gas chamber and the bullet. It is a different concept. So why should Eichmann have written this and not that?1035
So why should Eichmann have written this, and not that?
Well by 1958 he is well aware that since Höss's memoirs have been published and Eichmann is mentioned on 20 or 30 pages of Rudolf Höss's memoirs, the hue and cry is up. They are out looking for him. He knows that his days may be numbered. And although I am sure that, given his German, decent, bureaucratic mind he is not doing this consciously, the mind has a wonderful synthetic and analytical function. And the mind has a habit of suppressing, and distorting, and embellishing, in a manner in which the owner of that mind would wish. And I am sure that Adolf Eichmann's mind is already lying awake at night, feverishly looking for extenuating circumstances. And what more extenuating circumstances would there be for an Adolf Eichmann than that the Führer has ordered the physical destruction of the Jews. So his mind may well have adapted the sentence that Rudolf Höss, that Reinhard Heydrich actually uttered to him.1036
Perhaps he realized this himself, because as quickly as he had conjured his alterbative interpretation, he went on to say that nothing what Eichmann would have said matters, that all evidence is really irrelevant. The one possible explanation that the Führer order was never committed to paper, and that it was perfectly possible to design a usable gas chamber without writing the word "Gaskammer" or, for that matter, "Vergasungskeller" in the blueprints of the crematoria was, of course, not admissible to Irving.
It is immaterial one way or the other, because we must never overlook one fact. This is a post-war document. And there is no overlooking the basic fact that any historian can now confirm, that nowhere in all the archives of the world has yet been found one wartime document referring to a Führer's order to destroy the Jews, or for that matter one wartime document referring to gas chambers, or gassings. All the documents that refer to Führer's orders and gas chambers are post-war documents. Statements by the people in the dock at Nuremberg, memoirs by commandants at Auschwitz, at Krakow in Poland, and the like. And you can not overlook this basic watershed between wartime and post-war, when you come to look for the documents. If there is no wartime document that says
there was a Führer order, no wartime document talks of gas chambers, then there has to be some explanation for that.1040
At his introduction of Irving, Mark Weber had told the audience that "he has also promised to let us in on some of the new ways he has found to make liberal flesh creep." It is obvious that Irving could neither resist to make negationist flesh creep by mentioning that the Eichmann papers contain a vivid description of a shooting in Minsk which he saw from so close proximity that blood splashed on his coat. Many must have thought that, perhaps after all, the doubts that had been raised in January had not been without justification.
I do not know why he wrote it in his memoirs. It is in the conversations. It is an ugly piece of circumstantial evidence, what a writer calls verisimilitude, it lends credibility and authenticity to the description. It did not surprise me. He also describes, and I have to say this being an honest historian, going to another location a few weeks later and being driven around in a bus and then being told by the bus driver to look through a peep hole into the back of the bus, where he saw a number of prisoners being gassed by the exhaust fumes. So I accept that this kind of experiment was made on a very limited scale, but that it was rapidly abandoned as a totally inefficient way of killing people. What I do not accept is that the gas chambers existed and this is well known.1041
Following the conference, Irving was to make his annual Canadian lecture tour. The Canadian government had told him that he was not welcome, but Zündel (who had
not been allowed into the United States to attend the Eleventh IHR Conference) had told Irving that while he was going to be arrested, it was worth it for the publicity.1042 In fact things worked out as predicted: Irving got arrested, and was thrown out of Canada with much publicity. But the indignity of deportation was more than Irving had expected. The long simmering tensions between Irving and Zündel blew up into a nasty row. Both men felt that they had done everything to accommodate the other, without getting much in return. Zündel sent Irving long letters itemizing all the expenses he had incurred on behalf of the historian, and Irving responded in kind. As far as he was concerned, his life had been perfect until he met Zündel, "on that historic day in October 1987." Yet the two men who had condemned each other continued in to remain each other's company. In the course of 1993, amicable relations were to be restored.
I had few enemies, my publishing basis was intact, my books were reviewed with respect tinged with admiration more usually than with malice. It is fortunate that I met you in private, because I at once realized that you had been grossly maligned by the media moguls, and that--like Hitler--your public persona was very different from the true persona. Accordingly, in April 1988 I unhesitatingly agreed to aid your defence as a witness in Toronto. I would not make the same mistake again. As a penalty for having defended you then, and for having continued to aid you since, my life has come under a gradually mounting attack: I find myself the worldwide victim of mass demonstrations, violence, vituperation, and persecution....1043
While Irving seemed to regret his 1988 "conversion," he was not yet ready to make any attempt to undertake the necessary action to reclaim some of his credibility as a historian and appease the people he had enraged. And the negationists did not want to let Irving go. The first issue of the newly formatted The Journal of Historical Review, which was published in January 1993, showed Irving on the cover. In Mark Weber's introduction
to the new journal, one read that "[i]n recent years, no historian has provoked greater controversy, or has stimulated more people into reassessing stereotypical notions about contemporary history, than David Irving."
The best-selling British historian is also a good friend of the Institute who has delighted attendees at four IHR Conferences.
We are accordingly pleased to begin this premiere issue of the "new" Journal with an essay summarizing Irving's remarkable career and impact. The British historian himself then provides a fascinating and humurous report on the increasingly desperate and sometimes criminal international campaign to silence him and to suppress openness in history.1044
Irving proved himself worthy of the honour, and throughout 1993 he did not disappoint his friends as the Institute of Historical Review, and continued to preach the negationist gospel. When in March 1993 Mark Weber invited him for a revisionist news conference to be held on April 22 concurrent with the dedication of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Irving responded enthusiastically. "I am clearly interested, and you can state that 'David Irving has been invited.'" Yet all was to depend on the availability of a fee for his attendance. In return, Irving predicted that "my presence might break the conference into the real news media, given the worldwide attack on my International Campaign for Real History."1045 In the end Weber and Irving agreed on expenses, a fee of $1,000, and a free notice in The Journal of Historical Review appealing for financial contributions to Irving's "Legal Fighting Fund."1046 Sharing the stage with Robert Faurisson and Mar Weber, Irving performed as requested in the event entitled
"Saying NO to the US Holocaust Museum."
In a lecture entitled "The Search for Truth in History Banned," Irving complained that the "traditional enemy" were using Nazi methods against him. As to the history of Auschwitz, he now claimed that probably 100,000 Jews had died in Auschwitz--"but not from gas chambers. They died from epidemics." Irving broke new ground in his interpretation of history when he dealt with the question why so many Germans believe, nay even witnessed, that Jews were being exterminated. As to the "real" fate of the Jews, Irving reached back to the theme that they had all been killed by allied bombs whilst being evacuated.
Even if we say that of those 100,000 people who died a fraction were murdered, hanged, or shot. Suppose we say a quarter were murdered. 25,000 people murdered in Auschwitz in the three years, if we take that generous figure, then I would say that 25,000 people murdered in Auschwitz in three years is still half the number of people that we murdered in Hamburg, burning them alive in one night in 1943. We are looking at crime and crime. They are both crimes. One crime gets all the publicity. One crime is the only one that is referred to in the media today and the other crime you put up a statue to commemorate the man who carried it out. There is something wrong about that.1047
There is hardly a German who has not been listening clandestinely to the BBC who has not heard talk about the gas chambers. And they begin mentioning it in rumors to each other. From one washerwoman to the next the rumor goes around Germany, until finally they have actually seen about it and their son is working in a unit and he has heard about it too. And that is how the legend gains credibility from the German side too.1048
Many concentration camps, as the Russians approached, were evacuated and set out on the long cold march through the European winter of December 44, January 1945 to the West. The concentration camp inmates arrived in Berlin or in Leipzig or in Dresden just in time for the RAF bombers to set fire to those cities. In Dresden a million-and-a-half people camping out in the streets on the night of February 13, 1945. Nobody knows who they were. Refugees, concentration camp prisoners, citizens of Dresden itself. After the bombers retired, 45 minutes later another wave came, and at then at noon on February 14 the American air force joined in. Over 130,000 people died in that particular air raid The same kind of raids took place on Leipzig, Berlin, Cottbus: refugee centers up and down the center of Germany. Nobody knows how many Jews died in those air raids, nobody knows how many Jews died on the roads of hunger or starvation or just sheer cold. Nobody knows how many Jews then survived World War II in the Displaced Persons Camps. And this is one of the most interesting aspects. It is possible to research it, I suppose, but to my knowledge none of the Holocaust historians have done so. The National Archives in Washington houses a report this thick of the Office of Strategic Services, the American secret service, in which are investigated the activities of the Hagana, the Jewish, Zionist underground organization, in those very Displaced Persons Camps in the first months after World War II. The Hagana went from DP camp to camp scouring them for all the Jews they could find who were still living in these camps, these wretched people, loading them onto trucks and shipping them then with United Nations funds and resources all the way across Europe, through the Middle East to Palestine. So Mr. Goldman, who is found in a camp somewhere in Bavaria, is put aboard a truck with his family, and shipped across the Middle East to Palestine where he is given a new life and a new identity. An Israeli identity with a Hebrew name. Mr. Goldman has vanished and the Hebrew gentleman in the Middle East then starts drawing compensation because Mr. Goldman has vanished. This is the irony, which a lot of the Germans are now beginning to worry about.1049
Irving did not only add new themes to his lecture offerings. He also looked for new publishing initiatives. Years earlier he had announced that he was to write a book on
Auschwitz--his final one--but this project had never materialized. But in 1992 a book entitled Air Photo Evidence had appeared in Canada which formed, together with the Leuchter Report, the book-ends of revisionist obsession with the gas chambers. If Leuchter had tried to prove through the chemical analysis of some wall samples that no gassings had taken place, John C. Ball from Delta, British Columbia thought he could do the same through the study of air photos of Auschwitz and Birkenau taken by allied planes on April 4, May 31, June 26, August 25, September 13, 1944. Ball's reasoning was simple: "Nothing is hidden from air photos. Looking at the air photos will be just as if we went back in time to World War II to take a series of airplane flights over the different areas." His alleged aim was equally simple. "My objective was to analyze World War II German controlled detention camps in Poland for evidence to confirm the claims that mass murders, burials, and cremations had been conducted there"1050--a statement that, given the contents of the book, reminds one of Leuchter's often-repeated assertion that he went to Auschwitz to prove that the gas chambers had been efficient killing mass installations. Of course, like Leuchter, Ball came to the opposite conclusion. "[T]here is no evidence mass murders and cremations occurred at or near the Birkenau crematoriums, which were visible from both inside and outside the camp, or the Auschwitz I or Majdanek detention camps."1051 In fact, as a 16-page insert that accompanied the Ball book declared, the situation was quite opposite to what all witnesses had said: "Auschwitz inmates enjoyed a wide range of healthy activities."1052
Unlike the Leuchter Report, Ball's book, published by the author, had not much of an impact. Yet both Zündel and Irving believed that it had potential. It was exceedingly well illustrated with many seemingly informative air photos from the National Archives in Washington. The problem was the text, which was in fact nothing more than a series of captions to the photos. In 1993 Zündel bought the German rights for the book, but at the same time Irving found a right-wing German publisher who would distribute the book
under Irving's "Focal Point" imprint. The deal was that Irving would write a foreword as he had done for the Leuchter Report and, as he explained to Zündel, make the book understandable. Therefore he suggested that he would edit the captions, "so that the reader is in no doubt at all what Ball is getting at on each page."
The problem with John Ball's book is, as others than I have also said, that the caption texts are too opaque. They needed a good editor to ask Ball questions, which he would then answer. Nobody looking at the book can fail to be impressed by the quality of the job and the layout; but everybody I know has put it down scratching his head and asking, "What was Ball getting at?"1053
Zündel predicted that Ball would not agree. "He is very proud of his work and not willing to merely be the supplier of the pictures,"1054 and therefore suggested that Irving would write a very long foreword, which would become in some way a replacement for the missing text. But a few days later Zündel informed Irving that Ball was not excited about the prospect of surrendering control to Irving, and beyond that there was of course the issue of Zündel's reward if he was to transfer the rights to Irving. In the end, it seems that the whole project collapsed. Ball was not to be another Leuchter, and Air Photo Evidence was not to be another Leuchter Report. As a publisher of path- breaking negationist pamphlets, Irving began to loose his touch.
Irving increasingly began to reap the bitter harvest of the carelessly phrased seeds sown in the years before. He always had taken pride in his prophetic gifts, and in 1991 he had announced that the Holocaust Hoax would have only another two years of life. But in 1994 he had to admit that his prophecy had not been realized, and that "our worldwide Traditional Enemy has pulled every dirty trick he can--short of doing a Tonya Harding to every single revisionist writer--to breathe a few more years of life into the rotting
corpse of his profitable legend."1055 And then, of course, there was the publication of Deborah Lipstadt's Denying the Holocaust, which is the subject matter of this litigation.
Yet he was still welcome at the annual conference of the Institute of Historical Review. At the twelfth conference, held in September 1994, Irving discussed his forthcoming biography of Goebbels, concentrating on Goebbels involvement with the "Final Solution." A few months later he published an adapted version of his talk. In it he stated that "I've gone through the diary with a special interest in the Jewish issue, and particularly the 'final solution.'" Eighteen years after having absolved Hitler from all responsibility for what might have happened to the Jews, Irving presented Dr. Goebbels as his scapegoat, with Albert Speer as his sidekick (both men cooperated in pressing for the deportation of Jews from Berlin in the summer of 1941). There is no need to review Irving's reasonings as to why Goebbels had such a central role. It will suffice to state that by making Goebbels the central character in whatever happened to the Jews, Irving was able to ignore the whole machinery of destruction embodied by the death camps with their gas chambers and, in the case of Auschwitz and Maidanek, crematoria.
There's no question that whatever tragedy befell the Jews in Germany during the Third Reich, Dr. Goebbels himself was the prime moving force behind it. He wasn't just the person who created the atmosphere of hatred, he was also the one who pulled the levers and started the trains in motion. What happened at the other end is still a matter of debate, and this issue is one of the moving causes of revisionism at this moment.1056
Instead of considering Goebbels antisemitism as described by Irving, let us look at Irving's assessment of how it shaped the fate of the Jews. Irving described at one moment in the lecture the massacre of German Jews in Riga in order to introduce his theory,
introduced in his Hitler's War, that Hitler explicitly forbid the killing of Jews, and then continued with his creed: One wonders why those eyewitness accounts may be trusted, and those that described the gassings not....
Here I want to mention something that I'm very adamant about. Although we revisionists say that gas chambers didn't exist, and that the "factories of death" didn't exist, there is no doubt in my mind that on the Eastern front large numbers of Jews were massacred by criminals with guns--SS men, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, whatever--to get rid of them. They were to line up next to pits or ditches, and then shot. The eyewitness accounts I've seen of this are genuine and reliable.1057
Whatever may be the case, Irving ended his talk with a consideration of one of the most damning pieces of evidence about the Holocaust in Goebbels' diaries: the entry of March 27, 1942.
It is unclear to me why Goebbels' diary entry should not be taken literally, given massive corroborating evidence. He mentions not merely that deportation will probably result in many people dying, but that deportation is the pre-amble for the liquidation of those who can not work. Goebbels may have thought this, or not, but what is clear is that Goebbels referred in his diary entry to a systematic policy which has commenced in areas far from those targeted by the RAF, and there is absolutely no evidence at all to interpret the deportations from Poland "eastward" as a response to the air raids.
On March 27, 1942, Goebbels dictates a lengthy passage about another SS document that had been submitted to him, and which appears to have been much uglier in its content. "Beginning with Lublin," he states, "the Jews are now being deported eastward from the General Government (occupied Poland). The procedure is pretty barbaric and one that beggars description, and there's not much left of the Jews. Broadly speaking one can say that 60 percent of them will have to be liquidated, while only 40 percent can be put to work."
It's a very ugly passage, and it's easy to link this diary passage with everything we've sen in the movies and on television since then. He's describing "Schindler's List" here--or is he? I don't know. All he's actually saying here is that the Jews are having a pretty rigorous time. They're being deported, it's happening in a systematic way, and not many of them are going to survive it.1058
The conclusion I draw therefore is that, between them, Speer and Goebbels started a ruthless campaign in 1941 to drive out and deport the Jews from Berlin--Goebbels for political reasons, and out of sheer visceral hatred of the Jews, and Speer for the mundane reasons of real estate and ambition. They didn't really care what happened to the Jews.
Even so, we must put all this in the context of the brutal war being fought on the Eastern front at the time, in which neither side was giving the other any quarter. By this time (March 1942) we British had just begun bombing German towns on a ruthless scale. The devastating aerial bombardment of Lübeck, for example, came just two days after this diary entry. It's not difficult to imagine Dr. Goebbels' attitude: "So what if Jews are being machine-gunned into pits? They had it coming to them. They declared war on us, and this is no time for sympathy and sentiment." That's the way he may well have looked at it.1059
Before I will conclude my discussion of Irving's essay, I would like to make the following observation. While a historian has the responsibility to state clearly "I don't know..." when the evidence does not allow him to establish the facts, he also has the responsibility, when engaged in a historical investigation, to say clearly "This is so..." when the evidence clearly converges towards a (admittedly always provisional) conclusion about the facts. If , for whatever reason, the historian refuses to establish a historical fact when there is sufficient evidence to do so, and when he refuses to propose an (admittedly
always provisional) interpretation of this fact in the context of other facts, he ceases to be a historian. In politics and poker, ambiguity has its use and justification. In history, it has not.
This brings us to the historian's obligation to provide, in the words of the Australian historian C. Behan McCullagh, a fair representation of the past. McCullagh introduced the useful distinction between "true descriptions" of a fact and "fair representations" through a simple example: Fair descriptions of a historical fact must therefore include the predominant feature(s) of that fact. If major features are ignored then a description ceases to be balanced and fair, and becomes misleading. It also ceased to be fair, when the description cease to operate at the same level of generality and with the same degree of detail. For example, in the case of the German attempt to come to a "Final Solution of the Jewish Question," whatever an important leader like Goebbels writes in his diary on March 27, 1942 probably belongs to the same level of generalization as evidence about a meeting of bureaucrats in a villa in Wannsee two months earlier, or the transformation in Birkenau of a peasant cottage into a gas chamber in mid March, or the negotiations held in Bratislava between German and Slovak officials about the deportation of Jews. But the fact that a piece of a press report is marked "secret" or that half of a report marked "secret" was torn off, or the possible thoughts of a stenographer about the sentences he jotted down belong to a different degree of generalization--one that may possibly provide an illustration of the appropriate generalization of one's attempt to reconstruct the facts concerning the German attempt to
come to the "Final Solution," but which cannot provide a substitute for those generalizations.
If I say that my dog has an ear, an eye, a leg and a tail, that statement would be literally true. It has got all of those things. But the statement does not give a fair description of my dog, which has two ears, two eyes, four legs and one tail. As a description of the dog it may be literally true, but it is also misleading for anyone who reads it as providing a fair description of the dog. Normally people do intend their descriptive statements about the world to provide fair descriptions of it, though occasionally that is not their intent.1060
Let us return to the end of Irving's lecture. We left him with his speculation what Goebbels might have thought about the historical justice of deporting the Jews when Germany's cities were about to be bombed. Nothing Irving described in these last paragraphs is patently untrue, but as a whole, it does not add up to a fair description of the facts under consideration.
By this time, ugly rumors were already circulating abroad, fuelled by British propaganda. The London Daily Telegraph quoted Polish claims that seven thousand of Warsaw's Jews were being killed each day, often in what it called "Gas chambers." One of Goebbels' worried civil servants responded by telaxing a request for information to Hans Frank's press office in Krakow and to the propaganda field office in Warsaw. The reassuring reply spoke of the Jews being used to construct defences and roads. Be that as it may, in Goebbels' files the original press report, which had merely summarized the British newspaper item, was rubberstamped Geheime Reichssache "Secret Reich Matter."
How much did Goebbels know? Among his surviving files are papers suggesting a broad general knowledge of atrocities. One is from a large collection of original Goebbels' papers on file at the Jewish Yivo institute in New York.
Reporting to Goebbels on November 11, 1942, his legal expert, Dr. Hans Schmidt-Leonhardt, whom he had sent to inspect conditions in Hans Frank's Polish dominions, noted that the Warsaw police had deemed it too dangerous to visit the ghetto there; in the Krakow ghetto he had found all the Jews put to work; in Lublin the ghetto had already been cleared away, and there were now bloody disturbances. "As a Geheime Reichssache," reported the legal specialist, "Frank related to us the following characteristic recent instance:..." But whatever this was we cannot know, because a shocked member of Goebbels' staff cut off the rest of the page.
This is something that you have to look for, this "top secret" endorsement. By contrast, the Auschwitz documents found in the Moscow archives by French researcher Jean-Claude Pressac have no "secret" classification whatsoever. But this document, with its missing half page, tells me that Goebbels knew damn well that something ugly was probably happening on the Eastern front, and that he didn't want members of his staff asking awkward questions, so
he had part of the page torn off and locked away in his safe.
I sometimes wonder what his stenographer, Richard Otte, must have thought about the man whose words he transcribed day by day for this diary.
So there are the facts about Dr. Goebbels and the "final solution." If we're looking for a culprit, if we're looking for a criminal behind the "final solution" or the "Holocaust," whatever it was, for the man who started it in motion, then it was undoubtedly Dr. Goebbels first and foremost. Not Julius Streicher, nor Adolf Hitler, nor any of the other Nazis. Goebbels was the moving force, and the brain behind it in every sense of the word. We still don't know if he knew what exactly happened at the other end, but then this isn't surprising, because we ourselves don't know either.1061
January 1995 brought the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. In order to mark the occasion, the French magazine L'Express carried a section with articles about the camp. One of these, written by the journalist and historian Eric Conan, concerned the problems of historic preservation, restoration, and presentation.1062 Conan's article provided a solid account of problems the conservator Witold Smerk faced in controlling the decay of the remaining barracks, which had been erected as temporary structures more than 50 years earlier, and the degradation of the hair, shoes, and other exhibits in barracks not equipped with any climate control.1063 And then there was the great problem the museum authorities faced in removing from the presentation the overly communist interpretation of the murders that had taken place at the site--one that had inflated the number of victims, while simultaneously suppressing the Jewish identity of the vast
majority of the those killed. Conan quoted a senior advisor to the museum and the Ministry of Culture who said that there was now a unanimous resolve "to make an end to the nationalist-communist discourse at the place, and find for the genocide of the Jews a central place in the memory of Auschwitz." In the five years since the fall of communism much had been achieved. "The biggest blunders have been rectified but the main discussions are never-ending and far from being settled. I may even say that the essential debates, distressing, and sometimes unexpected, are only beginning."1064
Conan described the ongoing discussions of the museum with people from all over the world of how to improve the presentation, including a short description of a conference that I attended in 1993. And then he turned to two "delicate" subjects: the issue of the hair, which many Jews would like to see removed from the exhibition and buried, and the problem of ill-considered restorations done shortly after the war.
In the 1950s and 1960s, various buildings that had either disappeared or had changed function were reconstructed with great errors, to be presented as authentic. Certain of those, too "new" have been closed to the public. And we do not have to mention the delousing gas chambers sometimes as homicidal gas chambers. These abberations have served the negationists well, who have drawn raw material from this for their fabrications. The example of crematorium 1, the only one in Auschwitz 1, illustrates the problem. The first gas chamber was installed in its morgue. It was in operation for some time, in the beginning of 1942. The gassings necessitated the isolation of the zone where it was taking place, and this disturbed the operation of the camp. Therefore it was decided, at the end of April 1942, to move the homicidal gassings to Birkenau, where they were undertaken on an almost industrial scale, with most of its victims being Jews. Crematorium 1 was then transformed into an air-raid shelter, with an operation room. In 1948, when the Museum was created, crematorium 1 was reconstructed in what one supposed to be its original state. Everything there is wrong: the dimensions of the gas chamber, the locations of the doors, the openings for pouring in Zyklon B, the ovens that were rebuilt according to the recollections of some survivors, the height of the chimney. At the end of the 70s, Robert
Faurisson exploited those falsifications all the better because at that time the Museum officials refused to admit them. An American revisionist has just shot a video in the gas chamber (still presented as authentic): one may see him questioning the visitors with his "revelations" Jean-Claude Pressac, one of the first to reconstruct the exact history of this gas chamber and its modifications during and after the war, proposes to restore it to its state in 1942, using the German blueprints which he found in the Soviet archives. Others, like Théo Klein, prefer to leave it in its present state, explaining to the public the misrepresentation. "History is what it is: this is all that needs to be said, even when it is not simple, it is better than replace one artifice with another." Krystyna Oleksy, who works in the director's office that is housed in the old SS hospital directly opposite the crematorium, does not want to resolve it. "For the time being we are going to leave it in the present state, and not give any specifics to the visitors. It is too complicated. We will see later on."1065
Conan's observations about the problems of the restoration, conservation and presentation of crematorium 1 were perfectly justified. Yet the second part of the paragraph, which talked about the misrepresentations without the context that clearly established the historic functions and its attendant changes that had occurred in 1942 and 1943, would prove excellent raw material for the Holocaust deniers. Indeed: they immediately hailed Conan's article as a breakthrough.1066 Faurisson told anyone willing to
hear that he had been right all along. "[A]lready in 1976 I demonstrated the falsehood of this entire story by questioning Museum official Jan Machalek, and by finding in the Auschwitz Museum files original plans clearly showing that, in fact, the alleged 'gas chamber' was, between October 7, 1941, and August 31, 1943, a room with a single entrance where dead bodies awaiting cremation were stored" And he challenged the museum officials to rebuild the room as it was during the war, which meant that they would have to close the back-entrance adjacent to the place where Höss was executed in 1947. This, Faurisson argued, would provide a problem as the museum officials would not be able anymore to explain how the victims had entered the gas chamber. "I do not think the officials would dare contend that the victims entered by way of the door of the ovens room." Of course, there would have been no need for that: as a plan preserved in the Osobyi archive clearly indicates, there were two doors that gave access to the gas chamber: one from the incineration room, and one from a small ante-room that was directly connected to the vestibule. The victims did not have to go along the ovens to reach the gas chambers.1067
Irving celebrated Conan's article in the May 1995 issue of his Action Report. Remaining silent about Conan's discussion of the war-time history of crematorium 1, Irving defined the "admission by L'Express that 'everything is fake' about the Auschwitz gas chamber" may be defined as "the fourth great triumph for the world-wide revisionist movement"--the other three were the admissions that "there were never homicidal gas chambers in Dachau," that "the soap story was a propaganda lie," and that not four million, but only between one and 1.5 million people had been murdered in Auschwitz. "Now the Auschwitz gas chamber legend is finally crumbling too. Just as the leading revisionists promised that it would."
L'Express: "Tout y est faux"--Everything About It Is Fake
Paris--Braving the risk of prosecution under France's draconic new Fabius-Gayssot Law, the mass circulation national weekly magazine L 'Express has admitted that the gas chamber shown to tourists at Auschwitz is a fake--built by the Polish Communists three years after the War.
This was the claim which British writer David Irving made in Munich in April 1990: a remark for which the German government fined him DM 30,000 ($22,000) and banned him from Germany in 1993.1068