 David
Irving:
Introduction
to The Leuchter Report [Click
for German
translation]
[Click
for French
translation] UNLIKE
THE WRITING OF HISTORY chemistry is an exact
science. Old fashioned historians have always
conducted endless learned debates about meanings
and interpretations, and the more indolent among
them have developed a subsidiary Black Art of
dreading between the lines", as a substitute for
wading into the archives of World War II documents
which are now available in embarrassing abundance.
Recently,
however, the more daring modern historians have
begun using the tools of forensic science --
carbon-dating, gas chromatography, and simple
ink-aging tests -- to examine, and not infrequently
dispel, some of the more tenaciously held myths of
the twentieth century. Sometimes
the public is receptive to the results, sometimes
not. The negative result of the laboratory analysis
of the ancient Shroud of Turin is one example: it
is not a deliberate fake, perhaps, but nor was it
nearly as old as the priests would have had
centuries of gullible tourists believe. It
is unlikely that the world's public will be as
receptive, yet, to the results of the professional
and dispassionate chemical examination of the
remains of the wartime Auschwitz concentration camp
which is at the centre of this report. Nobody
likes to be swindled, still less where considerable
sums of money are involved. (Since 1949 the State
of Israel has received over 90 billion Deutschmarks
in voluntary reparations from West Germany,
essentially in atonement for the "gas chambers of
Auschwitz".) And this myth will not die easily: Too
many hundreds of millions of honest, intelligent
people have been duped by the well-financed and
brilliantly successful postwar publicity campaign
which followed on from the original ingenious plan
of the British Psychological Warfare Executive
(PWE,) in 1942 to spread to the world the
propaganda story that the Germans were using "gas
chambers" to kill millions of Jews and other
"undesirables". As
late as August 1943 the head of the PWE minuted the
Cabinet secretly that despite the stories they were
putting out, there was not the slightest evidence
that such contraptions existed, and he continued
with a warning that stories from Jewish sources in
this connection were particularly suspect.
As a
historian I have, on occasion, had recourse to
fraud laboratories to test controversial documents
for their authenticity. In the late 1960s I
discarded certain diaries of Vice Admiral
Wilhelm Canaris, offered to myself and the
publishers William Collins Ltd., since Messrs.
Hehner & Cox Ltd. of the City of London advised
me that the ink used for one signature did not
exist during the war years. It was I who exposed
the "Hitler Diaries" as fakes, at Der
Stern's famous international
press conference
in Hamburg in April 1983. And
yet I have to admit that it would never have
occurred to me to subject the actual fabric of the
Auschwitz concentration camp and its "gas
chambers"--the holiest shrines of this new
Twentieth Century religion--to chemical tests to
see if there was any trace of cyanide compounds in
the walls. | 
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