THIS was one of the David Olère pictures not shown to the Court during the Lipstadt Trial. Note the striped prisoner costume; the industrial-size hypodermic syringe protruding from the doctor's pocket; and the SS guard at left, significantly holding a bottle of poison (it has a skull & crossbones motif) in one hand; and don't overlook the little scene enacted beyond him, a camp guard beating prisoners carrying corpses toward a crematorium conmplete with the (non-existent) smoking-chimney.

Our website readers have spotted the errors: among them, the SS guard at left has breasts(?); there are SS-runes on his collar-tabs (only German SS men got to wear those); the eagle badge is on the wrong side of his tunic; the Feldgrau SS uniform had a special SS eagle sewn on the sleeve of a slightly different pattern, not on the tunic; and the "doctor" is wearing a black peaked (Allgemeine SS) cap -- not used since 1939.

In his Judgment, Mr Justice Gray professed himself profoundly impressed by the evidentiary quality of the Olère sketches, in the absence of any other hard documentary evidence of the atrocities committed at Auschwitz.

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