Archive/File: orgs/australian/adelaide-institute/statement-of-collins
Last-Modified: 1998/04/15
                                                    [Page 1]
                                                            
Jeremy Jones and members of the Committee of Management of
the Executive Council of Australian Jewry on Behalf of those
members of the Jewish community of Australia who are members
of organisations affiliated to the Executive Council of
Australian Jewry

                                                 Complainant
                                                            
                             and
                              
Fredrick Toben on Behalf of the Adelaide Institute

                                                  Respondent

Witness Statement: Mr. Doug Collins, 413-606 14th Street,
West Vancouver, B.C. V7T 2R3,  Canada

22 October 1997

To whom it may concern:

Dr. Fredrick Toben has asked me to comment on the Witness
Statement by Mr. Jeremy Jones, which I do herewith.

I am a Canadian journalist of nearly 50 years' experience
who was born in the UK. I have worked for newspapers, radio
and television, and spent many of those years as a columnist
and commentator. I have been employed by the Vancouver Sun,
the Vancouver Province, and The North Shore News, and have
freelanced occasionally for The New York Times, The Times
(London) and the Globe & Mail (Toronto). I have also written
three books, one of which - POW A Soldier's Story Of His Ten
Escapes From Nazi Prison Camps - was published in New York
and London and concerned my war experiences. I retired in
September.

For some years after the Second World War I was a Political
Intelligence Officer with the British Control Commission in
Germany, and assisted with the de-Nazification programme in
that country.

It would be an understatement to say that the Holocaust is a
delicate subject. To criticize in any way the version
favoured by Jewish organisations is to arouse anger and
calumny. 'Revisionists' are called neo-Nazis, racists, and
anti-Semites (vide Mr. Jones). I am something of a
revisionist myself and the Canadian Human Rights Commission
[sic] concerning a column I wrote in 1993 on the movie
Schindler's List, which I dared to call  'Swindler's List'.
Schindler's wife having described him as such. [Enclosure
'A']

A hearing has been held on the case but to date no verdict
has come down. The B.C. Press Council has intervened on
behalf of myself and the North Shore News and the Council's
lawyer put it well when he told the Tribunal that the B.C.
'human rights' laws "are an attempt to stifle speech that is
not criminal"

The case will probably reach the Supreme Court of Canada
because it involves free speech and a free press. The price
of freedom, as John Curran said, is eternal vigilance. And
vigilance involves frankness regarding the attitude of
Jewish organisations (as distinct from that of many
individual Jews).

It is an unfortunate fact that those organisations will
'boycott, hound, persecute and ultimately punish you' if you
cross them, as the Adelaide Institute has reportedly stated.
It is also true that, through government, taxpayers' money
will be used to that end. In my case, the Jewish Congress's
complaint has cost the North Shore News over $200,000, which
is unrecoverable, irrespective of what decision the Tribunal
arrives at. If the case gets to the Supreme Court of Canada
the costs may reach $500,000. All of which is a warning to
publishers to tread carefully.

I need hardly remind Australians that Jewish complaints led
to Mr. David Irving, the British historian, being hounded
out of Australia (i.e., denied entry); or that for the same
reason he was arrested, handcuffed, and deported from Canada
on a farcical immigration pretext. Ernst Zundel, of Toronto,
was before the courts for ten years before the Supreme Court
of Canada struck down a law under which he was prosecuted.
He is now facing costly 'human rights' complaints.

It is frequently stated that the purpose of these actions is
to 'protect the truth'. But as the English columnist Auberon
Waugh has asked, "What kind of truth is it that needs
protecting?"

History - any history - must be open to scrutiny and
comment. If it is not, freedom of speech and press suffers.
That is the situation in today's Germany, where even
scholarly, critical examination of the Holocaust is called
denial and is therefore forbidden on pain of imprisonment.
Such laws can best be described as heresy laws.

The American writer Frank Miele states in his book, Giving
The Devil His Due, that if the Holocaust is to be treated as
a historical event, rather than as an article of religious
faith, it must be subject to critical revision and treated
no differently from the Battle of Waterloo or any other
historical event. But some groups want only their version of
history on the agenda.

I do not dispute the horrors of Hitler's War, or the fact
that large numbers of Jews - and others - died in the camps.
I saw Bergen Belsen in 1945 and have visited Auschwitz. It
must be stated.. though, that horror is not confined. I
think of the massive air raid on Dresden when the war was
nearly over, and of the fate of the millions of Germans who
were pitilessly expelled, with great loss of life, from
their ancient homelands in Eastern Germany and the
Sudetenland. As a member of the Occupation Forces I
witnessed those refugees flooding into the British Zone.

Mr. Jones states that "the primary motivation for most
deniers" is anti-Semitism. I, for one, am not anti-Semitic.
What is at issue in 'revisionism' is not whether large
numbers died in the camps, but whether there was a plan to
exterminate the Jews.

No plan has been produced. Reference is often made to the
Wannsee Conference of 1942, where such a plan is said to
have been hatched. But Dr. Yehuda Bauer, the Israeli
Holocaust scholar, has been quoted in the New York Times as
stating that that is "a silly story".

In 1945, in North Germany I saw many thousands of Jews in
refugee camps in the British Zone of Occupation. Why hadn't
they been exterminated? Why are there still masses of
survivors today? Of interest in that regard is that Anne
Frank died in Bergen-Belsen of Typhus. Her father was put
into hospital and survived. Why? Writer Elie Wiesel, who has
made a fortune from writing about the Holocaust, elected to
leave Auschwitz when the Russians were near. Why did he
choose to do that with his deadly enemies?

Once again, that is not to deny that Jews and others died in
large numbers in the camps, often from hunger, more often
from disease. Forty thousand Russians died in the environs
of Stalag VIIIB after I had escaped from it. Nearly two
millions died elsewhere in Germany. (And nearly two million
Germans died in the USSR.)

Mr. Jones's submission is full of rhetoric. which is a poor
substitute for substance. The "underlying contention" or
[sic] "deniers", he says, is that "Jews are dishonest and
deceitful." That's an opinion, not a fact. What is fact is
that the Holocaust has become a business deplored by many
Jews, including Sir Immanuel Jakobovits ( now Lord Jakvits)
the Chief Rabbi of Great Britain.

Sir Immanuel was reported in the Jewish Chronicle of Dec. 4,
1987, as criticising "the existence of an entire industry,
with handsome profits for writers, researchers, film-makers,
monument builders, museum planners and even politicians".
And it has long been a joke in Israel itself that "there's
no business like 'Shoah' (holocaust) business".

Mr. Jones states that to deny the existence of the gas
chambers is an offence to human decency. That is more
rhetoric. Honest inquiry can only be an offence to those
with an axe to grind, and history is constantly being
revised. To imply that revisionists are inhuman is an
unwarranted generalisation and a libel.

He refers critically to website discussion of the
'Jewish-Bolshevik Holocaust'. But it is true that Russian
Jews played a major part in the Russian Revolution. Trotzky,
Kamenev, Litvinov and Zinoviev are but a few examples. Lazar
Kaganovich directed the campaign against the 'Kulaks' in
Ukraine, which caused millions of deaths.

The fuss in Australia over Helen Darville's book `The Hand
that Signed the Paper' enraged Jewish organisations because
it described how Jewish communists operated in Ukraine. She
described her book as 'faction' - fiction based on fact.

Mr. Jones states that "holocaust denial is as potent a
weapon as witchcraft in the past". which is a ridiculous and
illogical statement. I also find that his references to
revisionists as 'neo-Nazis' and 'racists' are emotional and
illogical. Name-calling settles nothing.

It should be borne in mind, too, that Holocaust critics have
nothing to gain in their search for facts. Professor Robert
Faurisson of France is a prime example. He has been fined,
dismissed from his university and physically attacked to the
point where he nearly lost his life. Other European
academics have lost their employment.

It is useful to read the book `The Holocaust Story and the
Lies of Ulysses' by Paul Rassinier, now deceased, first
published in France, later in the US. M. Rassinier was a
French officer, a professor, a socialist, and a member of
the Resistance who helped Jews to escape to Switzerland. He
was caught and sent to concentration camps in Germany, where
he nearly died. His book is a scholarly denial of the
"planned extermination"' of the Jews, and a denial of the
six million story and the gas chambers. Was he, too, an
anti-Semite and a neo-Nazi?

Post-war, it was frequently reported that gas chambers
existed at Bergen-Belsen and other concentration camps in
Western Germany. Moshe Peer of Montreal, a Jew, has written
a book in which he claimed that as a child he was sent to
the gas chambers in Bergen-Belsen six times, but got out of
them with his life. Having seen that camp, I know there were
no gas chambers there. If there had been, we would be seeing
them all the time on television, the camp having been
captured intact. Many Jewish authorities, including the
Simon Wiesenthal Institute, have acknowledged that there
were none in the former West Germany. Nevertheless, the myth
persists, especially in the case of Dachau. But there were
none there, either.

See `Innocent at Dachau,' a book published in the US in 1992
by Joseph Halow, who for two years was an official court
reporter at the Dachau War crimes Trial. No charges
concerning gas chambers were ever laid against the many
accused; nor were gas chambers ever mentioned. The single
'gas chamber' at Dachau was a delousing room. Similarly, the
claim that Jews were melted down to make soap has been
discredited, as has the 'lampshades out of human skin' myth
.

The article on Donald Watt in `The Weekend Australian' of
March 29-30, 1997, entitled 'Shadow of Doubt'. should be of
interest. Watt wrote a book - Stoker - in which he claimed
to have been a stoker at the crematoria in Auschwitz and
also an escaper. I had already ridiculed his story in a
column ('Rambo Rough And Ready,' Sept. 4. 1996, North Shore
News), in which I pointed out its impossibilities. Six
months later, Jewish authorities world-wide stated his
Auschwitz "experiences" could not have been true. They too
showed that there were no gas chambers at Bergen-Belsen
(which Watt also claimed to have seen). Watt's story was
fiction.

In his book `Why Did The Heavens Not Darken?', published in
1988, Arno Mayer, history professor at Princeton, and
himself a Jew, states "Sources for the gas chambers are at
one rare and unreliable", adding that "certainly at
Auschwitz, but probably overall, more Jews were killed by
natural causes than unnatural ones".

The Holocaust death count keeps changing. The Polish
government has reduced the four million alleged deaths at
Auschwitz to between 1.1 million and 1.5 million.
Jean-Claude Pressac, a 'pro-Holocaust' writer, now places
the figure at around 750,000. David Irving puts it at 75,000
or less. In his six-volume `History of the Second World
War', meanwhile, Sir Winston Churchill never mentioned the
'holocaust'. Nor does he make reference to gas chambers. Yet
he had access to information from the secret Ultra
intelligence system, was writing post-war, and was certainly
no enemy of the Jews, whose persecution by the Nazis comes
in for considerable mention in his memoirs.

The above is, necessarily, no more than a skimpy review of
the revisionist case. As for Mr. Jones, I would make these
points:

Claiming that "holocaust denial" is anti-Semitic does not
make it so, no matter how many fellow Jews he quotes in
support of that contention. Equally weak is his claim that
anyone who "denies" is a neo-Nazi or a racist. Those are
hate terms designed to squelch opinion. What Mr. Jones was
doing during the war I don't know. I spent six years
fighting Hitler, both in Germany and in the field. Yet by
his standards I too would be a "neo-Nazi".
Claiming that "holocaust denial" (or what he sees as such),
is "likely to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate" Jews
is another ill-based assumption. It depends on whether
people like Mr. Jones WANT to see it as an insult. If
someone told me that the Second World War never took place I
would laugh. If Mr. Jones is so sure of his case, why
doesn't he laugh at the 'deniers'?

As for intimidation, it is the critics of Jewish politics
who are being intimidated. I could quote many instances. But
perhaps the example of Australia's Terry Lane will suffice.
An ABC broadcaster and newspaper columnist, he stated in an
article that was reprinted in the Australian Jewish News of
Dec. 4, 1992, that he would never again write on the subject
of Israel or Palestine:

"The Zionist lobby in this country is malicious, implacable,
mendacious and dangerous... What's more, once the expression
anti-Semitic hits the air, or, heaven forfend, the sacred
six million is uttered... we are thrown to the jackals. I
surrender. To the Zionists I say: you win; to the
Palestinians: forgive my cowardice. "

Offence and insult? As a veteran who fought against the
Nazis, I find it insulting that the Jewish Congress
complains to government about a column that in any case they
are at liberty to dispute (and have disputed) via media
channels.

I also find it both tendentious and foolish of Mr. Jones to
associate freedom of speech (see his 'h') with the
"encouragement of terrorism".

So is his suggestion that questioning aspects of the
Holocaust is somehow connected with terrorism, dictatorship
and "the rehabilitating of Nazism". (See his 3.3.5) Surely a
belief of that kind can be likened to witchcraft!

In conclusion, I know nothing about the Talmud or the
Adelaide Institute's comments on it. Nor am I intimately
acquainted with the work of the institute. But opinion is
opinion, and as far as the statements attributed by Mr.
Jones to Dr. Toben are concerned. the latter is every bit as
entitled to his views as Mr. Jones is to his.

Doug Collins

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