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Edwardo
of the United
Kingdom, writes on Monday, September 24, 2001
Hitler and the Holocaust
Dear Mr. Irving,
I am currently studying Modern European History in my last year of High School and am focusing on the Holocaust debate as my major study.
- 1 Did Hitler give specific orders to carry out the "Final Solution"?
- 2 How many Jews died as a result of the Holocaust?
- 3 Did the Nazis have the capabilities to carry out an extermination of the estimated size?
David Irving answers:
- Nobody has ever found any specific order issued by Hitler to exterminate Europe's Jews. In 1977 I offered a $1,000 reward for any genuine wartime document showing that he was even aware of such a programme, and nobody has yet claimed it. The reward offer still stands.
- Nobody knows for sure. Various people have made various estimates, but these are coloured depending on whether the author of the figure is Jewish or non-Jewish, conformist or revisionist. There is no certain basis for making a calculation, as it depends on the existence of census figures taken at the same time in each country concerned, which don't exist; and on knowing for certain what is meant when we speak of Jews (even the Jews can't agree among themselves on who is technically a "Jew"). Certainly a lot of Jews were killed in many ways during world War II: by shooting squads on the eastern front, and millions died by other means -- including of course the same means that killed non Jews, like starvation, epidemic, bombing, execution, exhaustion, hypothermia, old age, -- i.e. most if not all the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
- Good question. The Nazis, who were good architects, built no state-of-the art execution facilities on slaughterhouse lines. The current version has the Nazis crudely adapting state of the art crematorium facilities, e.g. Crematorium II at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which had been very expensively built as such, into killing centres. But this raises logical questions: If the killing order was issued in the winter of the Wannsee conference, 1941/2, and the construction of Crematorium II did not commence until the following winter, 1942/3, why was it not designed and built as a purpose built killing centre, instead of (allegedly) being converted into one only then, in February 1943 (by knocking Zyklon-B insertion holes through the roof, and installing the famous gas tight door with peephole which convinced Mr Justice Gray, the post-war-generation British judge who had never seen an anti-gas air raid shelter in his life, that this was proof of a homicidal intent). As for the killing squads in the East, Field Marshal Erich von Manstein's defence counsel, R T Paget QC, pointed out at his British-zone war crimes trial in the late 1940s that the motor transport and other logistics available to the SS-Einsatzgruppen concerned would not have been nearly sufficient to conduct a killing campaign on the scale that was alleged (see R T Paget, Manstein, His Campaigns and Trial). So it seems likely that the figures are substantially less than the conformist historians now tout around.
David Irving