Dear Sir

Documents on the Fight for Real History

David Irving

[Photo by Michael Hentz for The New York Times ]

Letter to the Editor
The Times

September 9, 1989

not published

FOR THE IMMEDIATE ATTENTION OF JOHN WALSH, Fax 01-7825658
Book Section, Letters to the Editor
Sir,
It is pure mischief-making for Oren Gruenbaum (Letters, Sept.17 [1989]) to state that in my Los Angeles lecture I said that "the Holocaust never happened at all."[1] Had he been there, he would have heard me describe from unfamiliar, once-secret British records the appalling atrocities that the SS and other units did commit on the eastern front. I do however refuse to swallow the whole Holocaust package that is now on offer.
There were probably no gas chambers at Auschwitz at all, notwithstanding either the testimony of several eye-witnesses since 1945 that there were, or the laboratory tests purportedly carried out in December 1945 by the Communist regime in Warsaw.
Why should this surprise us? In 1945 there were also reported to have been gas chambers at Dachau, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, and other camps liberated by the Allies. This is now officially accepted not to have been so, and so it will probably soon be with Auschwitz too.
Recent laboratory tests -- as momentous as those on the Shroud of Turin, and perfectly capable of being replicated or refuted -- found no significant residues of cyanide compounds in the buildings popularly identified as cyanide-gas chambers at Auschwitz; the same tests detected notable cyanide residues, of over 1000 mg per kilogram, in parts of the clothesdisinfestation chamber.

This discovery has evidently vexed the international Jewish community (not to mention the lazier historians of the inter-reliant, mutual-quotation school.) They are unable to debate it.
Last Saturday (Sept.16) a terrorist group identifying itself to the French media as "Sons of the Memory of the Jews" assaulted Professor Robert Faurisson, 60, the controversial French historian who published the laboratory findings in a report to which I contributed a historical Introduction. They poured acid into his eyes and fractured his upper and lower jaws so badly that he is now unable to see or speak.
To this surely self-defeating violence are added Mr Gruenbaum's rather more dilute vitriol (calling me "a crude Nazi apologist"). and the hidden Jewish pressure on my (fortunately incorruptible) publishers Macmillan to terminate their several outstanding publishing contracts with me. [2]
If the forensic tests are disproved, I shall of course recant; until then, I refuse to knuckle under. The tide is already turning. Professor Arno Mayer of Princeton, to the anger of other Jews, has declared in writing that more Jews died of natural causes at Auschwitz than from any others. There is material in our Public Record Office showing that the "Nazi gas chambers" story was a brilliant propaganda coup contrived by our political warfare people during the war years. Now we have the laboratory results. As an independent historian I should be negligent to ignore them.
Yours sincerely
David Irving

1: Your headline, "Denying the Holocaust," adds to the defamatory effect; the video record shows it is totally untrue.
2: Jewish Chronicle headline, June 30: "IRVING PUBLISHERS WON'T DROP HIM."