| [Images
and some links have been supplied by the fpp website. Kamm's
original hyperlinks have been incuded; we regret that he did
not include our links in the passages he quoted from our
website] 
SO
MANY innocents were killed in the 1945 British air raid
on Dresden that the German authorities had to cremate the
bodies on mass funeral pyres on the Altmarkt. Mr Irving
was the first to publish these photographs in the west.
When he produced one of them, enlarged to poster size,
during the Lipstadt trial in the British High Court in
2000, Defence Counsel Richard Rampton QC sneered,
"So what!" --- MR RAMPTON: Can we forget Dresden
for the moment, Mr Irving?
- MR. IRVING: I can never forget
Dresden.
[Transcript,
DJC Irving vs Penguin Books Ltd & Lipstadt,
Day
7, January 20, 2000,
page 170; copyright photo, taken on Feb 25, 1945, from
Apocalypse 1945: the Destruction of
Dresden]
[Preserved
from the Internet "blog" of Oliver Kamm]London, Monday, April 16, 2007
April 16, 2007 Irving accuses by Oliver Kamm  I
won't provide a link to his website, but I ought to record
that the Holocaust denier
David Irving takes
strong exception to the reference to him in my
article for The Times this weekend about
the late Kurt Vonnegut. He hypothesises that the
article was commissioned by the newspaper after pressure had
been exerted upon it by an
external body whose identity (or at least ethnicity) you
will be able to guess immediately [Website note: we
are not so coy -- the Board
of Deputies of British Jews].
It ought not to need saying, but I am in a position to
know that Mr Irving's speculations are unfounded. The
judgements expressed in the article are mine alone; they
were not dictated to me by anyone else. It is perhaps worth
commenting -- purely for the record, and not because Mr
Irving's remarks have any merit -- briefly on the
complaint. Irving accuses me of "smearing" him by referring to his
1963 book The
Destruction of Dresden as discredited. In
addition, he accuses me of "real holocaust-denial"
(his italics) for stating that there were not 135,000 deaths
in the firebombing of Dresden. He states further:  "My
"number," as Kamm calls it, came from Hanns Voigt,
after February 1945 the director of the Dead Person's
Section of Dresden's Missing Persons Bureau. That might
seem a not unreasonable source.TRUE,
Professor Richard "Skunky" Evans, another
historian who lives by the smear, ignorantly
dismissed Voigt in his High Court evidence (on oath) as
being a "virulent
fascist".
What else could he say? In fact we now know that Voigt
was a trusted, highly esteemed, and much decorated,
member of East German society in the 1950s and was
allowed by the Communist regime to emigrate without
difficulty upon his retirement to West Germany. These
true facts on Voigt will be another dossier on this
website, later."
 David Irving
comments: MANY thousands of people every day reach and
read my pages.
Unimportant therefore whether
"neutral journalist" Oliver Kamm, who was appointed
a Times columnist by Daniel
Finkelstein, provides a link to my website or
not.
In fact it may seem telling that he does not --
just as the German
Wikipedia entry on me lists at its end all the
hostile websites including Kamm's favourite, the
ADL-financed
Nizkor,
but adds "we do not provide a link to Mr Irving's
website for legal reasons" [David Irvings
Homepage wird von de.Wikipedia.org aus rechtlichen
Gründen nicht verlinkt].
Former Dresden mayor Walter
Weidauer had no reason to like my source, Hanns
Voigt; he himself had written a book -- quite a
good one -- on the Dresden air raids without the
assistance of Mr Voigt.
The niece of Herr Voigt reports that
Voigt was a music teacher, directed the Sachsenwerk
works orchestra and elevated it to third place in
the DDR in 1954. An unlikely profile for a
"virulent fascist".   APOCALYPSE
1945: THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN. A new edition
(above) is in print in April 2007 (£27.90),
fully
illustrated in colour for the first
time,
and fully corrected and updated. The text is also
available as a free download at http://www.fpp.co.uk/books/Dresden |
Irving's writings on Dresden were considered at length
in the trial of
Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books for libel, in the
case brought against them by Irving seven years ago. The
defendants presented them as evidence that Irving distorts
historical facts in order to make them conform to his
ideology. The judgement is reproduced in its entirety
here,
on the Nizkor website, and the section on Irving's book
about Dresden is here.The
Judgement is a rewarding and important read.
[Website: Readers will find our
unabridged pdf version, which is illustrated and annotated,
more useful than the turgid Nizkor
version]. I will not try to summarise
what is already a cogent and succinct statement of the
issues, but would direct you in particular to paragraph
13.126. There Mr Justice Gray states: "In
my judgment the estimates of 100,000 and more deaths
[at Dresden] which Irving continued to put about
in the 1990s lacked any evidential basis and were such as
no responsible historian would have made." A few sentences earlier in the judgement, he says: "[Irving]
relied on the estimate of Hanns Voigt ... that 135,000
had been killed. But, as stated in paragraph 13.126
below, none of this material casts significant doubt on
the accumulation of evidence that the true death toll was
within the bracket of 25-30,000." Further: "Voigt's
evidence was uncorroborated and unlikely to be correct in
the light of the number of deaths recorded on the
official cards [that tallied victims according to
garments, personal belongings, personal papers and
wedding rings recovered from the corpses]. In my
view, Irving should not have quoted numbers based on this
evidence."  Incidentally,
Professor Richard
Evans, who was the principal expert witness for the
defence, does indeed cite the phrase "virulent fascist"
concerning Voigt in his book Lying
About Hitler (2001, p. 152) -- but it
is not Evans's own description.
Evans is explicitly quoting the judgement of the Mayor of
Dresden (in what was then the GDR) in 1962, Walter
Weidauer, and he clearly warns the reader that "this was
typical of the language the Communists used for people who
proved a nuisance to them". That example on its own is a nice illustration of the
difference between a scrupulous historian such as Evans and
a man who, in the words of the Court judgement, "has for his
own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately
misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence". Photo
above (click to enlarge): In 1961, while writing his book on
the Dresden
raid, Mr Irving interviewed Sir Arthur Harris, who commanded
RAF Bomber Command 1942-5. Below: The victims are burnt in
public, hundreds at a time. Oliver Kamm denies it was a
Holocaust. 
Our
index on the Dresden raids-
More
on Prof Richard "Skunky" Evans and Hanns
Voigt
-
David
Irving writes a letter to The Times, July
1966,
on new documents on the Dresden death roll
-
David
Irving, a Radical's Diary: Writer
in The Times attacks him and sets the record
straight
|
The
death of writer Kurt Vonnegut
How
much was Professor Richard "Skunky" Evans (right) paid
for his neutral opinion on Mr Irving?-
Forward
Forum: Deborah Lipstadt: 60 Years Later, Dresden Bombing
Claims Another Victim: Memory
-
 Oliver
Kamm does not tolerate comment on his Internet blog.
He explains why here.
His email address is [email protected]
|
write
to David Irving