Reader’s Hate-Mail to David Irving’s website (September 2004)

Reader’s your index to readers’ letters George Brennan of Wales has some doubts, September 3, 2004, and questions about Holocaust history. Norway and the Holocaust A WEB-browsing student has demanded with some passion that I account for the disappearance of the Norwegian Jews deported to Auschwitz in late 1942 and early 1943. My name was connected thereto because Mr Irving’s response to one David Kosher provoked a Ms Kelley Snowden ( Letters, February 22 ) to denounce me as a luminary.

Incidentally my name [Brennan] is shared by many other luminaries. I mention this in case some Nizkorite is planning to send my publisher a vigilant and informative letter about my neo-Nazi past. Some other George Brennan is Spartacus.

But I hope Kelley Snowden is the Dr Kelley Snowden who was suspended from teaching geography at Longview High for what her rabbi called “political correctness run amok” (she called a black child “a wicked little monkey”) We all must sympathise with someone whose livelihood has been threatened by a meddlesome ethnic lobby. Ms SNOWDEN was indignant because David Irving felt no obligation to investigate the fate of the vanished Norwegian Jews.

Notice that if he had wished to dodge the issue he could simply not have printed Mr Kosher’s letter — or her own. The politics of David Irving are to me almost as disagreeable as the politics of Zionism, but unlike his adversaries Irving does seem willing to let a hundred flowers bloom. Nothing untainted by propaganda has ever been written by anyone about the Nazi holocaust, but Irving’s website is the one place known to me where certain matters can be discussed without sectarian feeling.

Horrifying crimes should be viewed with horror. Evidence of horrifying crimes should be viewed with agnostic curiosity. I myself do not know what became of the Norwegian Jews. The primary sources are in Norwegian, which I could not read even if I had access. It would take months of research.

My own guess — no more — would be that the employable forty per cent (or whatever) were selected and registered for work somewhere in the Auschwitz industrial complex and the rest were transported further east to be “liquidated” in some barbaric manner, as hinted at in Dr Joseph Goebbels’s famous diary entry of March 27, 1942. That entry, vague though it is, is so incriminating that revisionists were inclined to suspect that it was a forgery.

But Mr Irving has very creditably reported the negative results of his own tests; and testimony against bias carries strong authority. It surprising that Mr Kosher counts only 12 survivors, as was widely claimed in 1946. A morning of Googling shows that the respectable number nowadays seems to be thirty. As a pious grandson, Mr Kosher must have researched this matter very carefully; he will perhaps explain to us why he regards the accepted figure as an exaggeration.

But he is surely right, in these areas, not to take any number on trust. Perhaps these thirty Jewish survivors include stateless refugees and Norwegian citizens who did not actually