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A S Marques
of Portugal has spotted, Saturday, April 16, 2005, how BBC producer Laurence Rees faked what a German
“eye-witness of gas chambers” actually said

What
Gröning actually said

I HAVE just read the article
“The fight against Holocaust denial” by Raffi Berg, quoted by your site from BBC News. In that article, we read the following:

“The fear that deniers could gain the
upper hand led an SS camp guard, Oskar
Gröning, to break a lifetime of silence
earlier this year in a BBC documentary,
Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final
Solution. ‘I saw the
gas chambers. I saw the crematoria. I saw
the open fires.

I was on the ramp when the
selections [for the gas chambers] took
place,’ said Mr Gröning, now in his 80s. ‘I
would like you to believe these atrocities
happened — because I was there.’ “

Mr. Berg’s quote is intriguing. I happen to have not only watched, but also tape-recorded, the BBC documentary he mentions, when it was broadcast last
March 8 [2005] on the Portuguese channel
RTP-2, in its original English version subtitled in
Portuguese, and I was struck by the contradiction between the subtitles and the actual words one can hear in the film.

They differ in one important detail from what one can distincly hear, both in the German words spoken by Gröning and their superposed English translation.

The Portuguese subtitles, like Mr. Berg’s quote, follow what I gather to be the BBC-distributed text that one can find here (Gröning speaking):
http://www.pbs.org/auschwitz/about/transcripts_6.html

“I see it as my task, now at my age, to
face up to these things that I experienced and
to oppose the Holocaust deniers who claim that
Auschwitz never happened. And that’s why I am
here today. Because I want to tell those
deniers: I have seen the
gas chambers, I have seen the crematoria,
I have seen the burning pits – and I want you to
believe me that these atrocities happened. I was
there.”

Now here are the actual words one gets in the English superposed commentary, which is a faithful translation of the German words one is also able to hear beneath the English:

“I see it as my task, now at my age, to
face up to these things that I experienced and
to oppose the Holocaust deniers who claim that
Auschwitz never happened. And that’s why I am
here today. Because I want to tell those
deniers: I have seen the crematoria, I have seen
the burning pits – and I want you to believe me
that these atrocities happened. I was there.”

Spot the difference.

Tough luck. Back to Höss’s “confessions” (never mind Richard Baer or Arthur
Liebehenschel) and, of course, the Germans that also confessed to have seen the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth: Hans Stark
(10 years for gassing Jews, under juvenile law due to his age, in the Frankfurt 1963-65 “Auschwitz
Trial”) and Pery Broad (5 years, same trial)…

A. S.
Marques
Lisbon, Portugal

On Sunday, April 17, 2005
this correspondent as a postscript draws attention to this BBC website item:

Pictures
from Buchenwald

“If you go to the 6th photo, you’ll notice that apparently, everything is being recycled all over again: lampshades, shrunken heads etc. (on the table, on this once well-known photo that lately used to be, well, not too frequently on display in serious places).

“I mean this is 2005 and it’s the BBC. I don’t know whether to laugh myself silly or simply go on staring in disbelief. Better get ready for the human soap. Should be here again anytime now…”

Our dossier
on Auschwitz

BBC News Sixty
years since liberation of Nazis’ Bergen Belsen
concentration camp — Mr Irving seems
somehow to blame, and comments

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