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George Vel asks questions about sketches of Auschwitz, Sunday, October 10, 2004

David Olere's drawing

 

David Olere's drawings of Auschwitz

Have you a comment on the drawing above. It can be found on this website:

http://forisrael.narod.ru/history/holocaust/vsesojjenie.htm

Also, please, let me know if you have ever seen the second picture, the photo (below). It is captioned, "On route to the gas chamber"

George Vel [reply] [further comment]

children at unidentified camp

 
Our dossier on Auschwitz
 
Rebuttal evidence in the Lipstadt Trial
The Olere sketches | David Hebden suggests that Olère really was at Auschwitz
Critique of Auschwitz photo of two women leading a troop of kids 'to the gas chambers'

 

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David Irving

David Irving comments

BOTH pictures are well known. I have no comment on the above photo, perhaps other website experts will write.

The Auschwitz "gas chamber" sketch -- which is now oddly reminiscent of the famous picture of US soldier Ms. Lyndie England dragging an Iraqi prisoner on a leash -- was done in 1946 (i.e. postwar, allegedly "from memory") by French artist David Olère.

(For further Olère pictures, see my draft document book for the Lipstadt Trial, and pages 60 et seq of the pdf file.)

I am not sure whether this particular drawing featured in the gallery of such semi-pornographic sketches produced by Lipstadt's defence witness Professor Robert Jan Van Pelt as irrefutable evidence for the disputed existence of the Nazi mass-factories of death (my trial records were seized by the British authorities along with all my other possessions in May 2002).

Those who followed the Lipstadt trial will recall with what fervor the defence expert Van Pelt introduced half a dozen of the Olère sketches, and with what relish they were seized on by the Court.

We are however entitled to inquire whether Olère was ever in fact at Auschwitz. Among this series of sketches, which he evidently produced for a lucrative and prurient market in France and Israel in the first years after the war, were several sketches allegedly showing the inside of a gas chamber (the cross-hatching shaded in the background of one was interpreted by Pelt as being one of the "wire mesh" column through which the SS guards dropped their cyanide pellets -- an allegation which ran up hard against the familiar "concrete-evidence" problem: the necessary holes in the roof described by the "eye witnesses" do not exist).

Another Olère sketch showed the exterior of an Auschwitz gas chamber, with rolling hills in the middle distance; but if Olère had ever actually been in the camp, he would have known that the camp was sited on an alluvial plain between two rivers, and was in a region of Silesia flatter than Florida, and flatter even than Calista Flockhart.

As we pointed out to the court at the time, it was no coincidence that the Olère sketches featured nubile young females in their twenties or thirties, obligingly facing the artist frontally as they passed by, guarded by SS men with whips, cudgels, and guns and all the other ritual items of boulevard pornography.

In short, the answer is: Make of the Olère sketches what you will. I made one thing, and the highly paid expert witness Van Pelt and Mr Justice Gray willingly made another. "So be it," as Their Lordships have a habit of saying in their summing up to a jury.

 

© Focal Point 2004 David Irving