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Unless correspondents ask us not to, this Website will post selected letters that it receives and invite open debate. |
Alan
Heath
writes from Warsaw, Poland, on Saturday, October 30, 1999
UNLIKE Mr Irving I have been to Auschwitz on many occasions.
There has never been any suggestion that the gas chamber at the base camp was a anything but a reconstruction of the one that was destroyed by the Nazis.
The four other chambers at Birkenau were not reconstructed but II and III can be seen quite well from their ruins and IV and V are more difficult to make out.
It is of no surprise that the wife of a former commandant should choose to forget something that was happening only a couple of hundred metres in front of her home in 1943-44.
[The reference is to a letter from the daughter of the hanged Auschwitz commandant Liebehenschel, now resident in California.]
David Irving
replies:
I HEAR what you say. Many years ago I predicted that when the walls finally came tumbling down, no credit would be given to the revisionists for this modest victory; instead those who had lied for fifty years would suddenly proclaim, "We have been saying this all along."
It is nonsense for Alan Heath to suggest that the faking at Auschwitz was not concealed for fifty years; even Prof Jan van Pelt laments this fact in his notable book Auschwitz 1270 to the Present, commenting: "There are no signs to explain these restitutions, they were not marked at the time, and the guides remain silent about it when they take visitors through this building that is presumed by the tourist to be the place where it happened". I myself was fined DM30,000 (around $25,000) by a Munich court in Jan. 1993 for stating in a public speech that the gas chamber shown to tourists for fifty years at Auschwitz is a post-war fake built by the Poles; which, as Heath states, they now concede -- though not to paying visitors to the site.
David Irving