David Irving portrait

David Irving

[Photo by Michael Hentz for The New York Times ]


Letter to the Editor
The Weekend Australian


January 17, 1994

Reader's Letter

Dear Editor,

I just read Beatrice Faust's article on the Holocaust. As the "Nazi historian" (your odious phrase) at the centre of the controversy, can I comment as follows? --

BEATRICE Faust (Jan.15 -16) has fallen for much of the mythology of the Holocaust.

Can I take up one point? "The fact that Zyklon-B was used in small quantities as a pesticide is hardly evidence that it was not also used in large quantities for the gas chambers." In fact even Jean-Claude Pressac, the Holocaust historians' own tame historian and expert on the technique of gas-chambers, states that 95% of the Zyklon-B delivered to Auschwitz was used as a pesticide.

Zyklon-B canistersAs for the bills of lading for shipping the Zyklon to SS Obersturmführer Kurt Gerstein, to which Ms. Faust refers, I checked a few months ago on the surviving originals at the National Archives in the United States -- a country I can still freely travel to.

These bills of lading run from Feb.16 to May 31, 1944 and reveal an odd thing: the cases of cyanide crystals (Zyklon) are numbered in sequence (Nos. 50,053 to 50,210), so none is missing; each shipment consisted of thirteen cases, totalling 195 kg (not "2 1/2 tons"); and identical shipments -- six each -- went to Auschwitz and Oranienburg concentration camps, although nobody has ever suggested there were gas chambers at Oranienburg.

Yours sincerely

David Irving
International Campaign for Real History

Further notes:
  1. We shall publish images of the Bills of Lading elsewhere on this site.

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