Real History and Television Docudramas

Posted Sunday, October 29, 2000

Revisionist Friedrich Berg's challenge to PBS

Re the Made for TV Movie "Holocaust on Trial"

Sunday, October 29, 2000

Friedrich Berg has written to the production company Nova on October 27, 2000

I LOOK forward to your program on October 31 entitled Holocaust on Trial. For me it will be of great interest to see how far PBS goes to distort the overwhelming evidence about Auschwitz which shows that no one was ever killed there in gas chambers.

That you intend to distort is clear already from your pre-broadcast website. For example, on your website you include the following words:

"To back up his [meaning David Irving's] claim that the Nazis used Auschwitz's gas chambers only to fumigate corpses..."

Without having read every word of Irving, I dare say that neither he nor any other revisionist has ever made such a claim. It was not "only" corpses which were fumigated as your website implies is the revisionist position; every serious revisionist knows that it was clothing and barracks, bedding and personal articles which were routinely fumigated with cyanide at Auschwitz in order to keep people, including Jewish prisoners, alive and healthy.

Your intention is obviously to put words in the mouth of Irving which can then be the object of ridicule. The wording you have falsely attributed to Irving and others is probably libelous -- but it also typical of the distortions that defenders of the gassing hoax routinely use to obscure arguments and evidence when they can not simply suppress them.

The gas chambers at Auschwitz for fumigations are well known to Irving and were a major subject of his trial and of revisionist research in general. Routine fumigations were an important reason for why the vast majority of inmates at Auschwitz "survived"-- but there were many other reasons as well. If the Nazis had wanted people like Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Anne Frank, or the mother of Norman G. Finkelstein, as well as countless multitudes of other Jews who passed through Auschwitz to "die" instead, they certainly would have been able to arrange it -- even without gas chambers -- but the Nazis obviously did nothing of the kind. The so-called "survivors" all survived because the Nazis never intended to kill them in the first place; they "survived" because the Nazis wanted them to "survive."

To this end the Nazis went to enormous lengths to provide the exact same housing given to German soldiers, clean lice-free (fumigated) clothing, food, medical care with large specialized hospital wards and Jewish doctors, excellent sanitation. They even enforced strict hygienic standards, even against the will of many Jews, including the shaving of hair and the taking of showers. Typically, even such obviously therapeutic and beneficial measures are portrayed as just the opposite.

To the small but rapidly growing number of Holocaust revisionists like myself who have studied the evidence critically, it is clear that no one was ever killed in any gas chambers or gas vans anywhere by the Nazis. But if it should emerge at some future time that we and our arguments are wrong, there is still no reason for Americans to feel righteous in comparison to the Nazis.

If the Nazis had committed mass murder of millions of innocent people in gaschambers--as horrific and criminal as that would truly be, it would still have been relatively humane, and painless and civilized compared to the mass murder by incineration that the US inflicted deliberately upon well over a million civilians.

That more were not murdered in America's incendiary and nuclear attacks was certainly not for lack of trying nor from any lack of popular support -- even to this day. The truly horrible scenes at Bergen-Belsen and elsewhere in Germany at the end of World War 2 are falsely and routinely presented as if they were typical of conditions in Germany's wartime concentration camps; they were not typical at all -- far from it. On the contrary, they were a direct, albeit unintended result of American and British bombing of German civilian targets. The real wartime mass murderers were the Americans -- aided and abetted especially by people like yourselves at PBS who continue, even to this day, to provide the moral rationalization.