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National Journal, first published: 02/05/2009 |
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Part 1 |
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A young and brilliant historian Hitler's War The Leuchter Report |
Irving vs Lipstadt Jail in Austria Irving's trip to Poland |
My questions to Irving and his reply The missing answer on question four |
David Irving’s evidence for the mass murder Irving's death toll The absurdities do not end |
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The case of the missing murder weapon
The diesel gas chamber story |
The evolution of the extermination legend
The results of the excavations at Treblinka (1945) The results of the archeological drillings at Belzec (1997-1999) Sobibor or the scientific report that never was |
Two important documents Irving deliberately ignores The three Reinhardt camps were transit camps |
Once a "Holocaust denier", always a "Holocaust denier"! A warning to David Irving An advice to David Irving |
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Jürgen Graf , April 2009 David Irving and the "Aktion Reinhardt Camps" A young and brilliant historian The Englishman David Irving has several admirable qualities: 1) He is a tireless researcher who has spent thousands of hours in the archives. 2) He is an excellent historian of the Second World War. Some of his books, such as Hitler’s War and Churchill’s War, will be read as long as there will be people who are interested in this dark and dramatic period of history. 3) He is a master of the English language, both as a writer and as an orator. In the sixties and the early seventies, Irving’s brilliancy was widely recognized. While many establishment historians disliked the young maverick, few of them denied his talent. He was so good that the media grudgingly forgave him his barely concealed sympathies for Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. Even in Germany, he was repeatedly invited to TV discussions where he impressed the public with his historical knowledge and his very fluent German. As to the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question", Irving accepted the official version as a matter of course; however he never wrote a book, or even an article about this subject, but tried to steer clear of it. "Hitler’s War" During his work on Hitler’s War, David Irving studied a huge amount of German war-time documents. With growing amazement he realized that none of these countless documents proved that Hitler had ordered the extermination of the Jews – or, indeed, known that the Jews were being exterminated. At that time, Irving must have been aware that there were researchers who disputed the official version of Jews' fate during World War Two. Arthur Butz’s The Hoax of the Twentieth Century had come out in 1976, a year before Hitler’s War, and I find it very hard to believe that Irving did not learn of the existence of this book, or that he did not have the intellectual curiosity to read it. At any rate, he failed to draw the only logical conclusion from the total lack of documentary evidence for the "Holocaust," but concluded instead that the extermination of the Jews had been ordered and organized by the Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler without Hitler’s knowing. In Hitler’s War, Irving wrote: "By 1942, the massacre machinery was gathering momentum – of such refinement and devilish ingenuity that from Himmler down to the ex-lawyers who ran the extermination camps perhaps only seventy men were aware of the truth." [1] To this wildly implausible thesis, Robert Faurisson raised the following, entirely logical objection: "Borrowing a comparison from David Irving, I can certainly believe that Menachem Begin could have been unaware of the massacre of the Sabra and Shatila camps in Lebanon at the time it was taking place. Over a period of several hours, several hundred civilians were massacred. I do not know when Begin learned of the massacre, but I do know that, like everybody else in the world, he learned about it very quickly. If, however, instead of several hundred men, women and children being massacred in a few hours, we are considering the massacre of millions of men, women and children over a period of three or four years in the very heart of Europe, by which miracle could that heinous crime have been hidden from Hitler, Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt, as well as Germany and all of Europe, except for perhaps only seventy men!" [2] Today, in 2009, this argument is as sound as it was in 1983! The Leuchter report In April 1988, during the second Zundel trial in Toronto, David Irving learned that an American execution technologist, Fred Leuchter, who had been contacted by Ernst Zundel’s advisor Robert Faurisson, had flown to Poland with a small group of helpers in order to examine the alleged homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz I, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek. Upon his return, Leuchter had written a report in which he concluded that these rooms could not have been used as gas chambers for technical reasons. More importantly, Leuchter and his team had taken samples from the walls inside the alleged gas chambers of Auschwitz I and Birkenau where, according to official historiography, huge numbers of Jews had been killed with prussic acid. The samples were subsequently analysed in an American laboratory. The tests revealed either no detection of traces of cyanide or extremely low levels, while a control sample taken from Delousing Facility Nr. 1 at Birkenau contained an exceedingly high percentage of cyanide. [3] The Leuchter report confirmed what David Irving must have suspected, or indeed known, before: The Auschwitz gas chamber story was but a monstruous hoax. Irving now believed that the "Holocaust" story would collapse in the near future, and he decided to jump on the bandwagon. He, David Irving, whose genius the narrow-minded court historians stubbornly refused to acknowledge, would put them all to shame; he would be the first prominent historian to pillory the Auschwitz fraud. Towards the end of the Zundel trial, Irving appeared at a witness for the defense. He endorsed the Leuchter report, which he called a "shattering document." In 1988 and 1989, he made several speeches disputing the existence of homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz: one of these speeches, which he delivered on Austrian soil in 1989, would lead to his arrest and incarceration in Austria sixteen years later. Irving’s hope that the Leuchter report would lead to the immediate collapse of the Auschwitz lie did not materialize: The Jews fought for their gas chambers like a lioness for her cubs, and David Irving was branded a "Holocaust denier." In Jewish-dominated Western society this label is the mark of Cain. Irving was viciously smeared by the media, his books disappeared from the bookshops, and he sustained huge financial losses. |
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