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Guardian / Observer
http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk/irving/article/0,2763,129277,00.html
Gas chambers 'that never were'

Special report: the David Irving libel trial

Thursday January 27, 2000

Witness evidence of gas chambers at Auschwitz was "totally demolished"
because there were no holes in the roof through which to insert poison, the
historian David Irving told the high court yesterday.

Mr Irving, the 62-year-old author of Hitler's War, who is seeking libel
damages for being called a "Holocaust denier" and a "falsifier of history",
said that his theory "blows holes in the whole gas chambers story".

"Revisionist" researchers had entered the ruins of crematorium two at
Auschwitz, in which Holocaust historians say 500,000 died, and photographed
the collapsed underside of the roof - but found no holes.

"I do not accept that the Nazis in the last frantic days of the camp, when
they were in a blue funk, would have gone around with buckets of cement
filling the holes that they were going to dynamite."

Mr Irving, who is representing himself, was cross-examining Robert van Pelt,
who has said that there was a "massive amount of evidence" of the camp's use
for mass extermination.

Prof van Pelt has said that the gas chambers were dismantled and then
dynamited when the gassing stopped in November 1944 as the Russians advanced.

Giving evidence for the American academic Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin
Books, who are fighting Mr Irving's action, he says the evidence for gassing
included witness accounts, photographs and drawings from memory of a
sonderkommando - a Jewish inmate selected to work in the crematoria.

He referred Mr Justice Gray to a photograph taken by an SS man in February
1943 which showed openings above ground on the newly completed roof of
crematorium two with a cover on top of them. The defence case is that these
projections were from four introduction columns through which Zyklon B
pellets were passed.

Mr Irving, who says that the gas chambers were only used to de-louse
corpses, claimed the picture was taken in December 1942 during building
works and that the objects were drums of sealant.

Prof van Pelt also relied on an aerial photograph taken by the Americans in
the summer of 1944 which showed "four dots" on the roof of crematorium two.
He said that this showed clearly that there were "introduction devices" on
top of the building.

Mr Irving questioned the authenticity of the photograph and said the dots
were too big for the purpose put forward by the defence.

The hearing was adjourned until tomorrow.


Auschwitz had no gas chambers, says historian
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
Electric Telegraph

Dateline London Jan 27

EYEWITNESS evidence of the existence of homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz
was "totally demolished" because there were no holes in the roof through
which to insert poison, the historian David Irving told the High Court
yesterday.

Mr Irving, the 62-year-old author of Hitler's War, who is seeking libel
damages for being called a "Holocaust denier", said his theory "blows holes
in the whole gas chambers story". He said a number of "revisionist"
researchers had entered the ruins of Crematorium Two at Auschwitz, in which
Holocaust historians say 500,000 died.

They photographed the collapsed underside of the roof but found no holes. He
said: "I do not accept that the Nazis, in the last frantic days of the camp,
would have gone around filling the holes that they were going to dynamite."

Mr Irving, who is representing himself, made the comments while
cross-examining Prof Robert van Pelt, who has said that there was a "massive
amount of evidence" of the camp's use for mass extermination. Prof van Pelt
has said that the gas chambers were first dismantled and then dynamited when
the gassings stopped in November 1944 as the Russians advanced.

He was giving evidence for the American academic Deborah Lipstadt and
Penguin books, who are fighting Mr Irving's action. He said the evidence for
gassing included eyewitness accounts, photographs and drawings from memory
of a sonderkommando - a Jewish inmate selected to work in the crematoria.

He referred Mr Justice Gray to an SS photograph taken in February 1943 which
showed openings on the roof of Crematorium Two with a cover on top of them.
The defence case is that these projections were from four introduction
columns through which Zyklon B pellets travelled. Mr Irving, who says that
the gas chambers were used only to de-louse corpses and objects, claimed
that the picture was taken in December 1942 during building works and that
the objects on the roof were drums of sealant.

Prof van Pelt also relied on an aerial photograph taken by the Americans in
the summer of 1944 showing "four dots" on the roof of Crematorium Two. He
said that this showed that there were "introduction devices" on top of the
building. Mr Irving questioned the authenticity of the photograph and said
that whatever the dots were, they were too big for the purpose put forward
by the defence.

Prof van Pelt also cited the drawings, undertaken in 1945-46, of a
sonderkommando David Olere, which showed openings for the introduction of
the pellets into the gas chamber at Crematorium Three. Mr Irving argued that
the inclusion in the sketches of nubile naked women meant that they were
intended to be marketable and were therefore unreliable.

Mr Irving is suing over Prof Lipstadt's 1994 book, Denying The Holocaust:
The Growing Assault On Truth And Memory. Accused by the defendants of being
"a liar and a falsifier of history", he depends on a 1988 report by a man
called Fred Leuchter, who had taken samples from ruins at Auschwitz and
concluded that there were never homicidal gas chambers there. Mr Irving says
Prof Lipstadt's book has generated "waves of hatred" against him.

Mr Irving said the defence's "so-called" eyewitnesses were a relatively
small number for the large proposition at stake. Apart from that, he said,
there was not "a single document of any credible worth" which explicitly set
out the defence case in all the "hundreds of thousands" of papers in the
Auschwitz museum and the Moscow archives. He submitted that his position on
the Holocaust was justifiable and not perverse.


ASSOCIATED PRESS

Wednesday January 26 6:10 PM ET
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20000126/wl/britain_holocaust_suit_2.html

Also in Thursday's New York Times  01.26.00.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-Britain-Holocaust-Suit.html

Writer: Auschwitz Lacked Gas Vents

LONDON (AP) - A British writer disputed historically-accepted witness
accounts that thousands were poisoned to death at Auschwitz, saying
Wednesday that the crematoriums at the notorious Nazi concentration camp had
no openings to introduce gas.

David Irving, 62, is suing American academic Deborah Lipstadt in the High
Court over her 1994 book, ``Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on
Truth and Memory,'' which he says maintains he denies the Holocaust and
distorted statistics.

Irving has outraged Jews and other Holocaust survivors by saying the
Holocaust has been exaggerated and by challenging the number and manner of
Jewish concentration camp deaths under Adolf Hitler's regime. He is the
author of several books on the academic fringe, including ``Hitler's War.''

Lipstadt, holder of the Dorot Chair in Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies
at Emory University in Atlanta, and the publishers Penguin deny libel.

Under British law, a libel claimant only needs to prove that his reputation
has been damaged. Truth is not necessarily a defense.

Irving said researchers who photographed the collapsed roof of Auschwitz's
Crematorium Two - destroyed by the Nazis as Russian troops approached -
found no holes for inserting gas.

But Prof. Robert van Pelt, a historian who gave evidence for Lipstadt and
Penguin, cited ``massive amounts'' of witness accounts, photos and the
drawings of a sonderkommando, a Jewish inmate selected to work at the
crematoria that proved the camp was used for mass murder.

He referred to several photos, including one taken by an SS man in February,
1943 which showed openings on the new roof of Crematorium Two that he said
fed deadly Zyklon B pellets into the crematorium.

Irving has addressed neo-Nazi groups in Austria and Germany. In 1992, German
authorities fined him for claiming the historically-accepted accounts of
German gas chambers was British ``propaganda.'' He is banned from Germany,
Canada and Australia.

The case, which began on Jan. 11, is expected to last 12 weeks.



Meeting: Improve Holocaust Education
By The Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-Sweden-Holocaust-Conference.html

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) -- In the first such international gathering of its
kind, world leaders and activists came together Wednesday to keep the memory
of the Holocaust alive in the face of rising neo-Nazism.

Prompted by a lack of awareness among youth, the Swedish government
organized the forum as part of a Holocaust education campaign in its own
country. Six million Jews and 5 million others -- including Gypsies and
homosexuals -- were killed during World War II at the hands of Nazi Germany
and its supporters.

``In another few years, the generation of the Holocaust, the living
witnesses, will be gone,'' Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Barak told some 600
delegates. ``Even now, Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis ... are operating in
the open.''

As he spoke, three neo-Nazis were on trial in the southern Swedish city of
Helsingborg, charged with distributing racist videos and compact discs.

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said that education was imperative ``so
that ordinary people shall never again ... turn ordinary places into
execution chambers.''

Schroeder, speaking in German, warned against the spread of Neo-Nazism in
Europe and said increased international cooperation and the use of police
and the judiciary were needed to fight racism.

The three-day conference opened with Holocaust survivor Tana Ross, who read
a poem about the need to speak out.

The meeting was the first of its kind to bring together world leaders and
activists to discuss the Holocaust, and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel suggested
Sweden make it an annual event.

``Why not declare that this is only the first,'' he said. ``From now on have
an annual Stockholm conference on humanity and conscience.''

Swedish Prime Minister Goeran Persson, who was applauded by the forum for
inroads he has made in World War II education, agreed to work to create an
annual forum.

``The danger lies in our failure to learn from history; our failure to see
the connection,'' Persson said.

The conference comes at a time when Sweden is reevaluating its wartime role
and confronting increasingly visible neo-Nazi activity. A 1997 survey showed
that nearly one-third of youths between the ages of 12 and 18 did not
believe the Holocaust happened. However, questions have been raised recently
about the survey's numbers and the way it was conducted.

The forum coincides with Holocaust Remembrance Day -- marked on Thursday in
several countries -- and ceremonies were to be held at Stockholm's largest
synagogue and in parliament.

The World Jewish Congress ended two days of meetings in Stockholm on
Wednesday that focused on the distribution of funds from legal settlements
over slave labor for Holocaust survivors and their relatives.

The congress honored Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who saved up to
20,000 Jews in Budapest, Hungary, from deportation to Nazi death camps.

Wallenberg's sister, Nina Lagergren, accepted a human rights award on his
behalf. Wallenberg was arrested in 1945 by the Soviet Red Army on suspicion
of being a spy. He allegedly died of a heart attack in prison, but the cause
of death has been disputed and World Jewish Congress President Edgar
Bronfman called on Russia to open its archives on the matter.

***

Jewish Telegraphic Agency

Holocaust revisionist dismisses evidence of Auschwitz gas chambers
By Douglas Davis
http://jta.virtualjerusalem.com/index.exe?0001281

LONDON, Jan. 27 (JTA) =97 A Holocaust revisionist who is suing a U.S.
historian for libel has dismissed eyewitness accounts, drawings and
photographs of Auschwitz gas chambers that showed vents in the roof through
which lethal gases were introduced.

David Irving, who is suing Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of Jewish studies
at Emory University in Atlanta, and her British publisher, Penguin Books,
for libel, insisted at his trial this week that there were no such vents and
that their absence "totally demolished" evidence that the gas chambers were
used to kill inmates at Auschwitz.

He asserted that the Nazis used the Auschwitz gas chambers solely for the
purpose of delousing corpses and their clothing.

The comments by Irving, who is representing himself, came in the course of
cross-examining Auschwitz expert Robert Van Pelt.

Irving, who is seeking damages, claims to have been professionally ruined
after being described as a Holocaust denier and a distorter of historical
data to conform with his own ideological disposition in Lipstadt's 1994 book
"Denying The Holocaust: The Growing Assault On Truth And Memory."

Van Pelt, a Dutch historian who works at the University of Waterloo in
Canada, served as adviser to the Auschwitz authorities on the reconstruction
of the site, which was demolished by the Germans in late 1944 and early=
 1945.

Van Pelt referred to an SS photograph taken in February 1943 that showed
openings on the roof of Crematorium II at Auschwitz through which lethal
Zyklon-B pellets were introduced into the gas chambers.

But Irving, who is defending himself, claimed that the picture was taken
during building works in December 1942 and that the objects on the roof were
drums of sealant.

Van Pelt also produced an aerial photograph taken by the Americans in the
summer of 1944 that showed "four dots" =97 which he described as=
 "introduction
devices" =97 on the roof of Crematorium II.

But Irving questioned the authenticity of the photograph and said that the
dots were too big for such a purpose.

Irving also said the testimony of Henryk Tauber, a Jewish inmate forced to
work in Crematorium II, stretched "a reasonable historian's credibility."

He dismissed as "lurid" Tauber's eyewitness accounts of how he saw the SS
set one Jew on fire and throw another into a pit of boiling human fat =97=
 and
he rejected Tauber's description of how he had helped to incinerate the
corpses of up to 2,500 Greek, French and Dutch Jews a day in Crematorium II.

He also rejected Tauber's contention that he had seen cyanide pellets poured
into the gas chambers through small "chimneys."

He was unmoved, too, by an account of a "field of ashes" from human remains,
some of which was spread on icy roads to assist the passage of vehicles.

According to Irving, a number of revisionist researchers had entered the
ruins of Crematorium II, where Holocaust historians have determined that
500,000 people were slaughtered.

The revisionists, said Irving, photographed the collapsed underside of the
roof but found no vents, which, he contended, "blows holes in the whole gas
chambers story."

"I do not accept that the Nazis, in the last frantic days of the camp, when
they were in a blue funk, would have gone around with buckets of cement
filling the holes that they were going to dynamite," he told the High Court
in London.

Irving has denied that the gas chambers at Auschwitz were used for human
extermination, and he has insisted that fewer than 100,000 Jews died =97
mostly of natural causes =97 at Auschwitz, which he has sought to portray as=
 a
particularly brutal labor camp.

But Van Pelt told the court there was "a massive amount of evidence" that 1
million Jews were systematicallly exterminated in the death camp by the=
 Nazis.

He said the accumulated evidence and corroborating testimony that had
emerged since World War II made it a "moral certainty" that the gas chambers
were the main instruments of murder at Auschwitz between the summer of 1942
and the fall of 1944.

"It will be clear that, by early 1947, there was a massive amount of
evidence of the use of the camp as a site for mass extermination," said Van
Pelt.

"This evidence had become slowly available during the war as the result of
reports by escaped inmates," he said. "It had become more substantial
through the eyewitness accounts by former Auschwitz inmates immediately
after their liberation, and was confirmed in the Polish forensic
investigations undertaken in 1945 and 1946.

"Finally," he said, "this evidence was corroborated by confessions of
leading German personnel employed at Auschwitz during its years of=
 operation."

Confessions given by leading German personnel at the camp included that of
SS officer Pery Broad, who testified to gassings and burning of corpses, and
former camp commandant Rudolf Hoess.

The court also learned that there was also evidence from the 1961 Eichmann
trial in Jerusalem, documentary evidence of the construction of the camp,
including workers' time sheets, plans, photographs and scientific studies of
cyanide compounds in the walls of the gas chambers.

"In short," Van Pelt said, "it has become possible to assert as moral
certainty the statement that Auschwitz was an extermination camp where the
Germans killed around 1 million people with the help of gas chambers."

Questioned by Irving, Van Pelt said he had been "more than deeply moved" by
his experience of visiting Auschwitz.

"I was frightened," he said. "I don't believe in ghosts. I have never seen
any at Auschwitz. But it is an awesome place and an awesome responsibility
as an historian."

Asked by Irving about the dangers of conducting historical work at
Auschwitz, Van Pelt responded, "One's duty is to be unemotional and
objective but to remain human in the exercise."

===

Irving says chambers `had no holes for gas'
Severin Carrell 01/27/2000
The Independent - London
http://www.independent.co.uk/
(Copyright 2000 Newspaper Publishing PLC)

CLAIMS THAT 500,000 Jews were gassed at Auschwitz were "totally demolished"
by the fact that no one had shown how the gas was injected into the
chambers, the historian David Irving said yesterday.

Mr Irving told the High Court that several "revisionist" historians who
questioned the scale of the Holocaust had photographed the ruins of the
Auschwitz gas chambers without finding any evidence of holes in the roof
used to insert poison gas. That evidence, based on visits to Crematorium
Two, "blew holes in the whole gas chambers story", he claimed. Mr Irving,
62, was speaking as he continued his libel action against an American
academic, Deborah Lipstadt , and Penguin Books, over her accusations in a
book published in 1994 that he is a "Holocaust denier".

Mr Irving said: "I do not accept that the Nazis in the last frantic days of
the camp, when they were in a blue funk, would have gone around with buckets
of cement filling the holes that they were going to dynamite," he said. Mr
Irving, who is representing himself, cross-examined Professor Robert van
Pelt, appearing for Ms Lipstadt and Penguin, over his insistance that there
was a "massive amount of evidence" of the camp's use for mass extermination.
During detailed debate yesterday over atrocities committed at Auschwitz,
Professor van Pelt argued that the gas chambers were first dismantled and
then dynamited when the gassings stopped in November 1944 as the Russians
advanced.

The evidence included eye-witness accounts, aerial photographs taken by US
surveillance flights in 1944 and drawings from memory of a sonderkommando -
a Jewish inmate selected to work in the crematoriums. One photograph by an
SS man in February 1943 also showed openings above ground on the newly
completed roof of Crematorium Two with a form of cover on top. The defence
claims these projections were from four introduction columns through which
Zyklon B pellets travelled.

Mr Irving, who says that the gas chambers were used only to de- louse
corpses and objects, claims the picture was taken in December 1942 during
building works and that the objects on the roof were drums of sealant. But
Professor van Pelt said drawings from 1945-46 by the sonderkommando, a very
experienced draughtsman called David Olere, showed openings for injecting
the pellets into the gas chamber at Crematorium Three. The case continues.


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