Holocaust Denial Today
In Switzerland there is Mariette Paschoud, a teacher at a
high school in Lausanne. In August 1986, at a press
conference in Paris, she denied that there had been any
gassing of Jews in the Second World War. She has been
stripped of her history course but she still remains in
school teaching French. Students went on a city-wide protest
feeling that the authorities had been over-lenient.
In Germany there is the case of
Wilhelm Staeglich, formerly
a Hambourg judge with a doctorate from the University of
Goettingen. In 1981 he published The Auschwitz Myth. He was
stripped of his doctorate, fined ten percent of the salary
he had received as a judge since 1981, and authorities have
banned his book.
Sweden provided the example of
Ditlieb Felderer. In April,
1983 he was convicted of hatemongering and underwent court-
ordered psychiatric treatment. It seemed to have been of no
avail, since he also twice testified in
Zundel's defence.
In England there is the case of Richard Hawood or Richard
Verrall. He was the editor of the neo-Nazi National Front's
magazine Spearhead. He authored the pamphlet "Did Six
Million Really Die?", for whose publication and distribution
in Canada
Zundel has been twice convicted under the "false
news" section of the Criminal Code. It was first published
in 1974 by "Historical Review Press" which was owned by R.F.
Beauclair. Beauclair is an ex chairman of the Racial
Preservation Society, which subsequently merged with the
National Front.
More notorious than Harwood/Verrall however is
David Irving.
He is an ultra-nationalist Englishman with fascist
sympathies. He is a prolific writer of popular, as opposed
to scholarly, historical works - dozens of them.
In The Destruction of Dresden,
Irving declared that the
Allies were as bad as the Nazis in the commission of
atrocities against civilians. In Hitler's War he argued
that Hitler neither ordered nor knew about the destruction
of the Jews. He in fact offered a reward of one-thousand
pounds to anyone who could produce a written Hitler order to
annihilate the Jews. Until recently
David Irving, in what he
wrote or said publicly, had gingerly straddled the line
between legitimacy and illegitimacy. However he never has
been coy about the company he kept. He has attended
conferences at the Holocaust denying
Institute for Historical Review, for instance. At one convention he is
quoted as proclaiming that "Hitler was probably the biggest
friend the Jews had in the Third Reich, certainly at least
when the war broke out."
Irving, at long last, chose to come out of the Holocaust
denial closet at the second
Zundel trial. In the closing
moments of the case for the defence he was brought out as a
"surprise" witness and he openly declared himself for the
Holocaust denier that he really is.
Under vigorous cross-examination
Irving was confronted with
what he himself had written ten years earlier in his book,
Hitler's War. In that work
Irving did not deny the
Holocaust - far from it. In fact he outlined in detail its
extent and its horrors, ascribing it to
Heinrich Himler
[sic] and his subordinates but insisting that Hitler was
ignorant of it. Repeatedly, when faced by the Crown with
passages from that book which asserted the reality of the
Holocaust,
Irving monotonously countered that "He believed
then but he no longer believed now." When he was asked
whether he had done any research in the last ten years in
this field which led him to change his mind, he candidly
admitted that he had not. When pressed further, as evidence
for his turnaround, he cited the
Leuchter "report".
Fred Leuchter is a self-confessed expert in "execution
hardware" whom
Ernst Zundel found in the United States, and
recruited to go to Auschwitz for him to collect samples of
the soil and off the walls of the gas chambers.
Zundel and
Leuchter had this soil "analyzed" and then, in a "report",
presented "findings" which suggested no evidence for gassing
at
Auschwitz.
Irving would have seen this worthless "report"
no earlier than forty-eight to twenty-four hours before he
took the stand. Yet he pointed to it as a significant
influence in changing his mind away from what he had written
about the Holocaust ten years earlier, in Hitler's War. If
Irving had any credibility as a historian, the a-historical
and indeed anti-historical way in which he dealt with the
facts of the Holocaust while testifying, under oath, in the
Zundel trial reduced his credibility to zero.
Irving frequently visits Canada on cross-country tours
sponsored by various radical right groups.
In the United States there is the case of
Harry Elmer Barnes. He died in 1968 at the age of 79. He was responsible
for translating Rassinier into English.
The
original plaintext version
of this file is available via
ftp.
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