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Unless correspondents ask us not to, this Website will post selected letters that it receives and invite open debate. |
Orest
Slepokura
of Alberta,
Canada, writes Friday, January 26, 2001
Jews as dots
IT IS always interesting watching from the sidelines to note an historical observation made one place contradicted elsewhere. A case in point, the statement by Jacques Mandelbaum in Le Monde copied on your website, both in its original French and (here) in English translation:
"Aerial photos of a [concentration] camp taken from an altitude of 7,000 meters, on April 4, 1944, by American reconnaissance planes, where the readers can make out all the mundane details, except the presence of gas chambers."
It mirrors one made by Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk in his opus Pity the Nation [Andre Deutsch: London, 1990, p. 404], with one important difference:
"At Yad Vashem, there is a large aerial photograph of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, taken from a US aircraft during the Second World War. It shows not only the compounds, barracks and railhead, but even a party of Jews making their way from the selection ramp to the gas chambers for liquidation."
Yet Mandelbaum informs readers that a major photo exhibit of Jewish life in wartime is, eerily, unable to display the sort of revealing picture of Jews in process of being exterminated Fisk claims to have seen on display at Yad Vashem.
Orest
Slepokura
Strathmore, Alberta
Canada
DAVID
IRVING writes:
WE have always admired Robert Fisk's powers of perception, but his ability to make out the religion of a line of dots on a photo taken from 35,000 feet is truly remarkable; particularly as there is much evidence to sustain the belief that those dots were applied to the negative by a CIA official's airbrush.
See the aerial photos taken of Auschwitz Birkenau on December 21, 1944 on page 15 of The Holocaust Revisited, the book published by Dino A Brugioni of the CIA. Significantly, he later published a book entitled Photo Fakery: The History and Techniques of Photographic Deception and Manipulation. [See our website item on this.]
David Irving