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Friday, January 07, 2005- The wrong kind of
history lessons
Many seek to
disprove the Holocaust or, failing that, to
strip away its Jewish character  by
Abraham Cooper and Harold Brackman
National Post
ABRAHAM
COOPER IS "ASSOCIATE DEAN" OF THE SIMON
WIESENTHAL CENTER IN LOS ANGELES ACCORDING to a new poll, 62%
of Germans are tired of hearing about the six
million Jews killed during the Second World War,
while 52% believe that Israel's treatment of the
Palestinians is not fundamentally different from
the Nazis' treatment of Jews. These troubling
results are proof enough as to why education
about the Holocaust is still needed. Around the world, museums, monuments and
educational curricula testify to the truth of
the Nazi genocide. For survivors, contemporary
society's embrace of their painful legacy has
provided a measure of solace. But that solace is
eroding in the face of twin threats: organized
movements that seek to prove the Holocaust did
not exist or, failing that, to strip away its
Jewish character.  David
Irving comments: RABBI COOPER IS worried about people
learning "the wrong kind of history
lessons." Aren't we all. Hour after
hour on British BBC television for the
last week we have been bombarded by
advertising clips promoting their
forthcoming mini-series in
Auschwitz.
I offered my
assistance to Laurence Rees, the
producer. No reply. Pity, they would
spare themselves embarrassment. The
sinister interior of the "gas chamber"
they are showing in the film clips is
in fact the building at "Auschwitz I,"
which the Poles (!) have
admitted they built in 1948,
i.e., a fake.What a bore the
whole subject is.
HERE for the record is the letter
that I wrote to Laurence Rees,
editor of the forthcoming Auschwitz
mini-series, on April 2, 2004: Dear
Laurence, BBCtv
reconstruction of
Auschwitz.
I was most interest to read in The
Guardian of the BBC project to make
a film about Auschwitz.
Are you willing to hear also critical
voices on this historical sensitive
issue? I am prepared
to bet a large sum that one of your
sources will be Prof
Robert Jan van
Pelt
who wrote the first excellent book on
the subject. You may not know that in
his severe Judgment*
at the end of my unsuccessful
libel
action against Lipstadt & Penguin
Books,
at which Pelt was a star witness, even
Mr Justice Gray remarked that he
found the evidence on Auschwitz to be
of astonishingly thin quality. Here are
his words (which you may not have seen
reported in the press at the
time): "I have to
confess that, in common I suspect with
most other people, I had supposed that
the evidence of mass extermination of
Jews in the gas chambers at Auschwitz
was compelling. I have, however, set
aside this preconception when assessing
the evidence adduced by the parties in
these proceedings." And:
"Vulnerable though the individual
categories of evidence may be to
criticisms of the kind mentioned in the
preceding paragraphs, it appears to me
that the cumulative effect of the
documentary evidence for the genocidal
operation of gas chambers at Auschwitz
is considerable." And:
"[Irving] is right to point
out that the contemporaneous documents,
such as drawings, plans, correspondence
with contractors and the like, yield
little clear evidence of the existence
of gas chambers designed to kill
humans. Such isolated references to the
use of gas as are to be found amongst
these documents can be explained by the
need to fumigate clothes so as to
reduce the incidence of diseases such
as typhus. The quantities of Zyklon-B
delivered to the camp may arguably be
explained by the need to fumigate
clothes and other objects."
I.e., hardly
the kind of evidence that would hang a
man even in the good old days. The best
evidence in my view is, in this order,
1: The Bletchley Park intercepts; 2.
The (unamended) aerial photos; and 3:
The evidence of Kurt Aumeier,
who was commandant of Auschwitz for a
while.
I discovered this
evidence in the Public Record Office in
June 1992, you might like to note, and
have posted it in its entirety
on
my
website,
both the handwritten originals and
transcriptions which I commissioned. In
my view there were limited-scale
gassings in the two "Bunkers"
(converted farmhouses) outside the
perimeter fence, but not at the huge
underground crematory facilities of
which Pelt waffles. (Look at his
difficulties over whether there were
holes
in the
roof
-- to insert the cyanide -- or
not).
I am, as you may
know, a great fan of your projects so
far, and Producer W-- J--, who has done
work for the BBC, will be able to give
you comments on my work too. Your
experts might like to keep my huge
dossier
on the Auschwitz
facilities
under review.
Do not fall for the
over-simplified computer reconstruction
of "Krema II" which Pelt introduced in
court in the Lipstadt libel action. It
is full of errors. The building, like
most other such structures in Germany
and Poland, was being readied for use
as an emergency air raid shelter (with
the usual gastight doors used in such
shelters).
It is important that
the BBC produces a film on which Mr
Justice Gray would not be able to pass
such equivocating comments as those
cited above!
Yours
sincerely, 
David
Irving * PS: You can
find our printed and illustrated
version of Gray J's Judgment (with
facsimiles and photos in pdf form at
http://www.-fpp.co.uk/trial/judgment)
-- far better than the printed Penguin
version. You may also wish to use the
corrected version of the
transcripts.
- To: "Timewatch" Programme,
BBCtv
- - attn: Editor, Laurence
Rees -
- BBCtv
- Kensington House
- Richmond Way,
- London W14 0AX
As
of Sunday, January 9, 2005, Rees has
not replied. |
Of course, the revisionist "historians" and
hatemongers who deny the existence of the
Holocaust, influential as they are in some
marginal circles, operate outside respectable
discourse. But the same is not true of those who
seek to drain the Holocaust of its Jewish
component. Imagine, if you will, a Holocaust
commemoration that Jews were not allowed to
attend. Oslo witnessed such an event on Nov. 9,
the 66th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Third
Reich's state-orchestrated pogrom against
Germany's Jews. Norwegian authorities, not
wanting any trouble from Muslims, forbade the
display of Jewish symbols, including the Star of
David and the Israeli flag. The evening news
showed a group of Jews who wanted to take part
in the commemoration being told by a policeman
to "please leave the area."The Oslo outrage echoed what occurred in 2000
when the Dutch Committee of the Jewish
Resistance cancelled a public event out of fear
of disturbances caused by Arab youths. While
Amsterdam municipal authorities supported a
memorial meeting commemorating Kristallnacht,
they insisted -- over the objections of Jewish
survivors -- that an Arab speaker could use the
occasion to attack Israel. In Belgium and
France, meanwhile, teachers are increasingly
unwilling or unable to teach mandated sessions
on the Holocaust because of ugly disturbances by
Arab students. In Raoul Wallenberg's homeland, Sweden, a
third of young people recently polled were
skeptical that the Holocaust really happened.
Similar skepticism was reported in Greek
newspapers -- before, during, and after last
year's summer Olympics. And a recent report from
the largest Dutch Jewish community organization,
the Ashkenazi Orthodox NIK, noted that "there is
less and less knowledge of the fact that six
million Jews were murdered in the Second World
War," and raised the question "whether this is
the natural result of the passage of time, which
leads to distance from the Holocaust, or whether
this is the result of government policy." What's going on here is worthy of George
Orwell: the theft of Holocaust remembrance by
revisionists and their unwitting allies.
Increasingly, Europeans decry genocide by
reference to Rwanda and Sudan, while passing
over the even greater atrocity that took place
on their own soil. Among left-wing thinkers, the favoured
recasting of Hitler's Final Solution deflects
the spotlight from the wartime destruction of
European Jewry to the postwar travails of the
Palestinians. In this perversion, Israel --
attacked by the Arabs in five wars since its
founding in 1948 and still under constant
terrorist barrage -- is no longer the haven for
Hitler's Survivors, but the perpetrator of
"ethnic cleansing," "apartheid" and abundant
other slanders. Meanwhile, the atrocities
committed by Arab suicide bombers are passed
over lightly as the desperate acts of
"militants" driven to rage by Israeli cruelty.
While it is still fashionable for European
leaders to shed a tear for the victims of
Auschwitz, they are dry-eyed when it comes to
the mass murders of those victims'
offspring. Just days before 9/11, the United Nations'
World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South
Africa, showed how the global human rights
agenda could be hijacked by bigots. The only
panel on the four-day program dealing with
anti-semitism was disrupted by pro-Palestinian
zealots who insisted that "anti-semitism" be
redefined as "anti-Arab sentiment" because Arabs
-- not Jews -- are "the real Semites." It is a
common theme in the Muslim world. In the United
Arab Emirates, the executive director of an Arab
think-tank recently explained that Israel has no
right to exist because Jews "have nothing to do
with Semitism or Palestine." Where Jews are concerned, the 21st century is
witnessing the emergence of an unholy alliance
between Muslim extremists and left-wing fellow
travellers. A recent report by the European
Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia,
initially suppressed by the EU, documented the
trend that recycles Jew hatred from Europe to
the Mideast and back again -- finding its
greatest echo among disaffected Muslim youth
across the continent. As an antidote, the report
recommended that "the governments of the EU
Member States should undertake initiatives ...
to mobilise the support of political and social
leaders to foster Holocaust education,
remembrance and research." But if what happened on Nov. 9 in Oslo is any
indication, Holocaust "remembrance" is being
compromised by the very disease it seeks to
cure. Left unchecked, this new pathology could
pave the way for a yet another dark chapter in
the relationship between Europe and the Jewish
people. - Rabbi Abraham Cooper is associate dean
of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Dr. Harold
Brackman is a historian and consultant to the
Center.
© National
Post 2005
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