David Irving replies:

GOOD question. We often see that kind of “bulldozer newsreel footage,” usually shown accompanied by a voice-over, in the course of which something far more preposterous is being alleged. That is how propaganda is rigged.

We are usually not told that the drivers are British soldiers; the implication is left that they are Nazis bulldozing their victims. Not so.

The
British Army were so appalled at the dangers of the spreading epidemic, which did in fact also carry off many of their own officers and men liberating the camps, including women interpreters brought in from Bletchley
Park who died of the disease, that they burned down all the buildings and bulldozed everything that was believed to be contaminated into pits as fast as they could. I would have done the same.

Yes, the Americans captured
Buchenwald, near Weimar and Dachau, near Munich, and the British captured Bergen-Belsen, near Hannover, all scenes of horror and of mass prisoner-deaths which had had occurred in the last weeks of the war.

In fact the deaths continued long after: at Dachau, tens of thousands more died in the first weeks after liberation, in US hands, from the same cause — typhus and malnutrition.

At Bergen-Belsen, the deaths were augmented by the general chaos of defeat (as witness
Iraq now); Heinrich Himmler — whose camps they were, and whose biography I am now researching in great depth — complained in his last days that he had done all he could to turn the camps over in an orderly and regular fashion to the advancing British and Americans.

The Americans acted approximately as they are acting now in Iraq — where they have set up large detention camps of their own, of course — i.e., in a generally unhelpful way. They made much propaganda mileage of their “own” captured camps —
taking US Senators on a guided tour of Buchenwald, and even stringing up a corpse on a gallows for the visitors to see.

Have a look at the diaries of General George
Patton, published by Martin Blumenson, for a vivid account (Patton displayed no sympathy whatever for the Jews he saw in them, regarding them, as he wrote, as vermin).

Look closely at all the photos and snapshots of Buchenwald that are published — I have collected many from official and private sources: how many different corpses do you see? I only ever see the same heap, of around twenty clearly emaciated and disease ridden victims, stacked up like cordwood beneath a hut window. There were probably more, but these were the only ones used for photo opportunities.

PS: I expect to be near Australia early 2004, speaking on Churchill and Hitler, and I shall invite you and everybody else in your country who wants to hear me to come and listen.

[Register interest]