June 23, 2003 (Monday)
London - South-West UK -- London

I SPEND the morning on cheque-book stubs and calculations; seems like we may just squeak through this month.

More speakers agree to come to this year's Cincinnati weekend. A good one signs on today, with an unusual and little-known topic, the British poison gas cargo ship which the Luftwaffe sank in the harbour at Bari, Italy, in December 1943. Winston Churchill himself was baffled, and asked his chiefs of staff what on earth a shipload of a thousand tons of poison gas was doing there. It killed hundreds, and worse: the ships that fled the disaster docked at other Adriatic ports, and the disaster was repeated.

AUSCHWITZ MUSEUM OFFICIALLY ADMITS GAS CHAMBER IS A "RECONSTRUCTION"

THE official website of the Auschwitz Museum has bowed down before Revisionists and has finally admitted officially that the gas chamber and Crematorium No. 1, which is shown to visitors as evidence, was built after the war.    This dramatic admission can be found on the Auschwitz museum's web page where the following passage has now been inserted: "After the war, the Museum carried out a partial reconstruction. The chimney and two incinerators were rebuilt using original components, as were and several of the openings in the gas chamber roof."    The photograph on that page shows clearly that the "chimney" of the alleged crematorium, is not even connected to the building.

I drive all afternoon down to south-western England, where our old printers are. We (that is Parforce UK Ltd) hope to reprint Nuremberg, the Last Battle this year, and Apocalypse 1945: the Destruction of Dresden too -- though the missing photos for the latter are a problem: seized by the government's Trustee in May last year along with all my other possessions, and not returned.

It looks more and more to me as though the Trustee appointed to do the job is also accepting commissions from other bodies on the side: why else would he have attempted stolidly to trip me up, seizing all my working files and archives, all my private and family correspondence, etc? Since I have become immersed in the thousands of pages of the diaries of Guy Liddell, chief of MI5's wartime B Section, a lot of my earlier naïveté about how governments work has been stripped away. I intend to post a thousand pages of extracts from the Liddell diary on the website within a month.

I arrive in the south-western English city at lunch time, and drive around for half a hour, quite lost: for the first time I see two Black faces down here -- in London there are three million or more, and native Englishmen, i.e. Whites, will soon be the ethnic minority; but I thought the stain of this twenty-first century slave trade had not yet spread this far.

The car, a borrowed Land Rover, suffers a sudden puncture, and I learn to my cost that it has no spare wheel: the space where it should be stowed, in a well in the boot (trunk) of the car, is taken up with a tank of LPG instead. Fortunately the puncture has occurred at the very entrance to a tyre-repair firm; most fortuitous. One might almost suspect some chicanery here too: perhaps they have the same standards of probity as the Government's Trustees.

BACK in London by tea time, after an eight-hour round trip. Several e-mails alert me to an announcement -- in the circumstances, rather ironic -- issued by the Auschwitz state museum. They have finally conceded on their website, i.e. admitted in public, something that their staff knew all along but were forbidden by their former communist chief Franciszek Piper, under pain of instant dismissal, to inform visitors: the fact namely that the "gas chamber" that they have been showing to tourists since 1945 is a Madame-Tussaud's-type fake, built by the Polish Communist government several years after the Second World War.

Millions of European school children have been bussed to that site, and obliged to shudder in the cold, impersonal chamber, believing that similar millions of human beings had died within its walls. (More than a few of them are even taught that Anne Frank was killed there too: she didn't, she died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen).

Perhaps now people will understand what I was getting at when I said, quite truthfully, as it now turns out, that more women died on the back seat of Senator Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddik than were ever put to death by the Nazis in that gas chamber. The same can be said for most of the contraptions of death on view in the Chamber of Horrors at Tussaud's.

The Chappaquiddick jibe was a line which particularly irked Deborah Lipstadt's counsel, Richard Rampton, who defended Lipstadt at her trial for having smeared me. He kept reverting to it again and again (and, in case that failed to ensure victory, he played the race card, accusing me of racism and anti-semitism, although neither such allegation was made even by Lipstadt in her odious book; the Judge should have ruled such matters right out of court or at least totally disregarded them in his Judgment).

Judge Gray would not however allow me even to raise the matter of the fake gas chamber, stating -- at my only attempt to do so, in cross-examining their witness Robert Van Pelt -- that the court was not concerned with what had or had not been done to the structures at Auschwitz after the war.

That rather stymied me. I had prepared a modest piece of theatre for the court's benefit (and for the press gallery's too, of course): Under cross-examination, Van Pelt would inevitably dismiss the post-war gas chamber as a "reconstruction", not a fake. That was always his escape. To him, there was a difference.

So I had prepared a fake Canadian 50 dollar bill, using digital-trickery to replace Mackenzie King's kindly old features with those of Monica Lewinsky; I had it on my pulpit in the court room; I was going to hand it to the learned witness and invite him to give me ten fivers for it, since he would surely agree that on his evidence it was not a fake either.

Alas, Judge Gray's ruling made this impossible. The fake bill remained on my pulpit in the courtroom, unmentioned; it returned to my office, and it was seized last May by the Trustee along with everything else.

I hope he tries one day to pass it off. If people object, tell 'em its not a fake, just a "reconstruction". That should do the trick, I think.