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Irving Tells Outright Lies
Goebbels' diary on the Jews:
...the greater the number of Jews liquidated, the more
consolidated will the situation in Europe be after this war.
Joseph Goebbels,
March 6, 1942
The procedure is a pretty barbaric one and not to be described
here more definitely. Not much will remain of the Jews. On the whole
it can be said that about 60 per cent of them will have to be
liquidated whereas only about 40 per cent can be used for forced
labor.
Joseph Goebbels,
March 27, 1942
Short shrift is made of the Jews in all eastern occupied
areas. Tens of thousands of them are liquidated.
Joseph Goebbels,
April 29, 1942
Irving on Goebbels' diary:
I am very familiar with the Goebbels diaries... There is no
explicit reference either implicit in these documents or legible in
these documents to liquidation of Jews.
David Irving,
April 22, 1988
(in sworn testimony!)
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For quotes from the Goebbels diary, and others in the same vein,
see our collection
In the Nazis' Words
or the
Nizkor
website.
The Irving quote is from his
sworn
testimony
as quoted on the "revisionist" Zundelsite. Irving said:
"I am very familiar with the Goebbels diaries insofar as they
have been publicly available..."
Did those sources - the Posen speech, the Goebbels diary, the Wannsee
Conference and the letter of July 31, 1941 - indicate any plan to
exterminate European Jews?, asked Christie.
"No," said Irving. "There is no explicit reference either
implicit in these documents or legible in these documents to
liquidation of Jews. They are all equally applicable to any other
solution. Of course, relocation of the Jews in the middle of a war was
a radical solution but it is not what is described as the 'Holocaust.'"
Obviously Irving is lying when it comes to the Goebbels diary.
I quoted it here because it makes the contrast most clear, using the same
word "liquidation" as Irving uses.
But I could have used some of the other documents he names, as well.
The Wannsee conference and the July 31 letter referencing it use
cloaked language to refer to extermination, so the contrast would not
be striking without making use of later testimony about Wannsee from,
say, Eichmann:
The discussion covered killing, elimination, and annihilation.
Eichmann was present at Wannsee. Irving was not. Whom should we
believe? (Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution, 1984,
p. 92.)
(Text of the Wannsee minutes reproduced.)
I could also have used
the Posen speech:
I am talking about the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination
of the Jewish people. It is one of those things that is easily
said. "The Jewish people is being exterminated," every Party
member will tell you, "perfectly clear, it's part of our plans, we're
eliminating the Jews, exterminating them, a small matter". [...]
We have the moral right, we had the duty to our people to do
it, to kill this people who would kill us. We however do not
have the right to enrich ourselves with even one fur, with one Mark,
with one cigarette, with one watch, with anything. That we do not have.
Because we don't want, at the end of all this, to get sick and die from
the same bacillus that we have exterminated.
Regarding the March 27 entry of Goebbels diary, where he says that
"60 per cent of them will have to be liquidated," Irving has commented
elsewhere:
All he's actually saying here is that the Jews are having a pretty
rigorous time. They're being deported, it's happening in a systematic
way, and not many of them are going to survive it.
I cannot improve on
Dr.
Michael Shermer's reply:
Say what?? A "rigorous time?" "Deported?" This has to be the most
conservative interpretation of the word "liquidate" I have ever read.
(Quote from Irving's book Goebbels; unrelated to the March 27
diary entry or the Posen speech.)
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Irving Tries to Mislead
Between 1,000,000 and 1,500,000 people, mostly Jews, were killed at
Auschwitz. Almost all of them were cremated in ovens fueled by coke.
Irving said in a radio interview, on November 8, 1996:
...what happened to those one million people? Were they cremated?
The answer is you couldn't have cremated them, there wasn't sufficient
crematorium capacity, there wasn't enough coke. It would have
taken forty thousand tons of coke...
He claims it takes 80 pounds of coke to cremate each body, thus,
very few people could have been killed at Auschwitz.
This is mendacious.
Just as meat burns on a barbeque when the fire gets hot enough, the
fuel for cremating a corpse can be the corpse itself. Burning a pound
of flesh gives off 1,000 BTU of heat. Once the oven is heated
enough with coke, it stays hot, and many corpses can be burned in a
row.
The Nazis' own operating instructions for the Auschwitz ovens read:
After each incineration, the temperature rises in the
furnace. For this reason, care must be taken that the internal
temperature does not rise above 1100°C (white heat)...
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There is an enormous wealth of information on the Auschwitz ovens
and on cremation in general, all of which the deniers would prefer we
ignore.
We know the ovens operate as described, because we have:
- captured documents showing the plans for the cremation ovens;
- instructions for their use;
- documents which show the evolution of progressively-more-efficient
ovens starting in the 1930s;
- testimony from the people who ran the ovens that no coke was
needed for the second corpse in a row and very little for the third;
- a 1950 patent application based on a similar design;
- and, of course, the ovens themselves.
The interested reader should consult Gutman et al., Eds.,
Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, 1994, essays 6, 7,
and 8. In particular, the section on pp. 185ff. shows the progression
of the oven design. We see that even in 1937:
Müller claimed that there was a direct relation between
increased use and increased economy. If the cold furnace required 175
kilograms (kg) of coke to start up a new incineration, it needed only
100 kg if it had been used the day before; a second and third
incineration on the same day would not require any extra fuel, thanks
to the compressed air; and those that followed would call for only
small amounts of extra energy. 4
4. Archive of the Memorial Place Dachau, files 943 and 2111.
The source for the 1,000 BTU figure is an
interview
with the president of a crematory oven manufacturing company (it's
unrelated to the Holocaust):
According to B&L President Steve Looker, who designed the
Phoenix II, the average body gives off a modest 1,000 Btu per pound of
meat (burning wood, by comparison, gives off 6,000 Btu). But an
extremely obese corpse ... can run to 17,000 Btu. "That's like burning
kerosene," says Looker.
Simonds
Manufacturing agrees:
Human and animal remains, consisting of carcasses [...] These waste
consist of up to 85% moisture and 5% incombustible solids with a
heating value of 1000 BTUs per pound as fired.
The effect of increasing temperature is described in the
Internet
Cremation Society FAQ:
...in the retort we operate, the first cremation of the day takes
about two hours and the second takes about an hour. That is because
the retort already has a high internal temperature at the beginning of
the second cremation.
(The time of one hour is for a commercial crematory, and includes
the time to fully incinerate even the largest bones. The Auschwitz
ovens were operated faster.)
The source for the Auschwitz oven operating instructions is
Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers,
Jean-Claude Pressac, 1989, p. 136, as
quoted
by Mark Van Alstine.
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A Speaker to Neo-Nazis
On September 20, 1996, David Irving was the featured speaker at a
meeting of the National Alliance.
The National Alliance is "the largest neo-Nazi group in America,"
according to Klanwatch. It gained notoriety when its leader's book
The Turner Diaries, which is a battle plan for race war,
was Exhibit A in Timothy McVeigh's trial. Its membership handbook
talks about using National Socialism (Nazism) to recruit:
The recruiter who is working with the right sort of member ... can
use the National Socialist idea ... for opening the mind of his
prospect to the Alliance message.
But in an Australian radio interview just two months later, Irving
said "I don't give speeches to neo-Nazis." And he has threatened a
lawsuit to keep a recording of his secret speech off the internet.
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Irving's speech to the National Alliance is described -- but not
transcribed, under threat of lawsuit -- by
Annie
Alpert, who attended with her tape recorder.
"Largest neo-Nazi group in America": Peggy O'Crowley, staff writer,
Bergen Record, September 18, 1996,
quoting
Richard Baudouin of Klanwatch.
Membership handbook: not published openly, but
quoted
on a white-supremacist mailing list in February 1996.
Radio
interview
with Julie Posetti of 2BL Radio in Sydney, Australia, November 8, 1996.
Irving threatened a lawsuit in his
letter
to Annie Alpert of September 23, 1996:
...all my remarks at the private lecture which you attended on
September 20 are what is known in law as "intellectual property", and
that any unlawful dissemination of either the tape recording which you
were observed to make or of any unauthorised transcript thereof will
constitute an infringment of my Copyright and will be treated
accordingly, and damages will be sought for breach of copyright.
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Questions to Ask Irving
In 1994, he said 600,000 Jews died in the Holocaust. In
July 1995 it was four million. In 1996 it was back to
600,000 or one million. Why can't this expert make
up his mind?
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The first 600,000 figure comes from a 1994
interview
with Michael Shermer:
Irving (1994) believes that the number of Jews killed "is wrong by
an order of magnitude. In other words, 500,000 to 600,000 instead of
five to six million."
The four million figure was from a July 1995
interview
with Ron Casey
in Australia:
Casey: What is your estimate of the number of Jews who died at
the hands of Hitler's regime in the war years? What number - and I
don't like using this word - what number would you concede were killed
in concentration camps?
Irving: I think, like any scientist, I'd have to give you a
range of figures and I'd have to say a minimum of one million, which is
a monstrous crime, and a maximum of about four million, depending on
what you mean by killed. If putting people into a concentration
camps where they die of barbarity and typhus and epidemics is killing
then I would say the four million figure because, undoubtedly, huge
numbers did die in the camps in the conditions that were very evident
at the end of the war.
Casey: I'm finding this more and more surprising as we go
along, Mr. Irving.
Irving: Yes.
Casey: No, hold on. Because I've always been told that you
deny the Holocaust, you deny the persecution of the Jews to the extent
to which the Jewish community would have us believe but here you have
just now admitted that you would go to a high figure of four million.
[...]
Irving: There's been a lot of hard lying about me ever since
this unfortunate business began. ...I'm very grateful to you for
allowing me to speak, in fact...
[...] If you include everybody who died by whatever means, then
you could probably go as high as four million but an awful lot of
people died in World War Two...
The return to the 600,000 figure comes on
August 3, 1996:
I think the figures have been magnified by an Order of Magnitude.
And in an
interview
in November 1996,
again with Ron Casey:
Casey: ...you did say to me that the figures of the victims
of the Holocaust was higher than you had previously admitted.
Irving: I think the real figures probably are about a
million or less.
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Is he a Holocaust "revisionist"? If not, can he name anyone
other than a revisionist who agrees with his views?
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There are several well-known writers and historians who agree that
Irving is a thorough researcher and prolific writer -- but to my
knowledge, no one except Holocaust-deniers expresses agreement with
his views.
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Is he an antisemite? His usual answer is "not yet" -- what does
that mean?
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If he believes in free speech, why is he
suing Americans for libel in England? (England has the most draconian
libel laws in the world.)
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David
Irving's Action Report #13:
David Irving is also suing Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of
religion at Emory College, Atlanta, for libel...
(Information on libel suit.)
The British court system is renowned for its harsh laws against
libel, laws which would surprise those used to U.S. First Amendment
protections. There is no presumption of innocence.
Probably the best-known suppression of free speech through British
libel law was the so-called
"McLibel"
case, where the McDonald's
corporation sued two unemployed activists for handing out leaflets
protesting the company's environmental record. In most cases, the
defendants would quickly settle, and be banned from handing out further
leaflets. This case became famous only because the activists fought the
charges; the trial lasted for over two years because they were required
to prove the truth of each and every statement made in their pamphlets.
As their website
reads:
...libel cases rarely even make it to court because defendants face
years of long, drawn out, complex and archaic proceedings, all costing
an absolute fortune: and Legal Aid is not available for libel cases.
Anyone defending a libel action also has to prove, from primary sources
of evidence, every single word which has been challenged - the
prosecution can just sit back smugly and wait for the almost inevitable
victory.
In many
other
cases,
the British High Court, or the threat of it, has been enough for
McDonald's to censor its opponents.
In January 1999, Irving
hinted
he might sue
the director of the Nizkor website, for saying he had "lied." This,
for once, appears to have been an
empty threat.
When a film was made that contained a short scene where the cover of
one of Mr. Irving's books was shown in a context considered
unflattering, he
called it
"prima facie libellous" and demanded that the film company:
...either ... excise the scene concerned completely, or at very least
... place an electronic smudge over the title and jacket of the book THE
TRAIL OF THE FOX throughout its appearance, rendering it totally
illegible and unrecognisable, during each and every transmission of
this movie within the jurisdiction of the British courts.... If I do
not receive this ... I shall instruct solicitors to commence
injunction and if need be defamation proceedings in the High Court....
Irving is proud of his bullying tactics, and there seems to be no
end to them. One Chicago resident, who was overheard using the word
"odious" to describe Irving on a radio program, was tracked down and
received an angry letter. In it, Irving
expressed
dissatisfaction
with the way that the U.S. Constitution protects personal opinion:
I understand that on July 16, in your morning talk show on WGN, you
bestowed upon me the adjective "odious". Such language is protected by
the First Amendment in your country, of course; over here, where
Deborah Lipstadt has tried using the same kind of language, she is
finding it is a costly business indeed -- in our High Court.
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The National Alliance is one of the nation's leading neo-Nazi
hate groups. Why did he speak at a National Alliance meeting on Sept.
20, 1996?
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Why did he then say, on Nov. 8, 1996, "I don't give speeches to
neo-Nazis"?
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To my knowledge, he has not addressed this contradiction.
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If he believes in free speech, why did he threaten to sue if
the unedited tape of that speech was released?
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Has he done any more research on the Listerine®
anti-German conspiracy?
(From Irving's May 1995 Newsletter: "there's currently a black and
white newsreel-type Listerine commercial showing on American
television with a sinister man intoning the message, 'They're Germs --
show no mercy!' and slurring the G-word so it sounds like something
else. Watch for it. And learn.")
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This does not seem to be a joke. Mr. Irving was suggesting that
anti-German catchphrases were hidden in Listerine advertisements. We
cannot explain this.
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