Dr. Robert FAURISSON, September 6, 2004

Fritjof Meyer withdraws from the public debate

In May of 2002 Fritjof Meyer, editor-in-chief of the magazine Der Spiegel,
published in the monthly Osteuropa, whose editorial commission is headed by Rita
Süssmith, former president of the Bundestag, an article (p. 631-641) entitled
“Die Zahl der Opfer von Auschwitz. Neue Erkenntnisse durch neue Archivfunde”
(“The number of victims of Auschwitz. New figures through the discovery of
new archives”). Rejecting the figure of 4,000,000 victims (the official one
until 1990) and that of 1,500,000 (no less official, but steadily revised since
1995), he boldly proposed the “presumed” figure of 510,000 dead, of whom probab
ly 356,000 killed by gassing. He stated that this “genocide” had “most
likely” been perpetrated “predominantly”(überwiegend) outside the camp, in the
“White Farm” or “Bunker I” and the “Red Farm” or  “Bunker II”. For the
guardians of the holocaustic faith this latter assertion contravened the dogma holding
that the gassings had been carried out, very predominantly, in the four great
crematories of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

From July 2002 revisionist publications announced this spectacular revision
coming from an author who in his study had condemned what is called Nazi
barbarism. In November The Journal of Historical Review presented an account by Mark
Weber on pages 24-28 of its issue dated May-August of that year. In February
2003 the first issue of Germar Rudolf’s The Revisionist carried an essay on
the subject by Carlo Mattogno (p. 30-37). In Germany itself, the review Nation
und Europa launched and maintained a long revisionist campaign on the theme of
F. Meyer’s “revisionism”. Wieland Körner dealt with the matter in a brief
work entitled Die neue Sicht von Auschwitz (“The New View of Auschwitz”),
January 2004, Durchblick-Bücher, PF 33 04 04, D 28334 Bremen.

Some orthodox authors indeed found it necessary to break the silence at their
end. In Die Welt of 28 August 2002 Sven Felix Kellerhof opened fire by
bemoaning the fact that a “key witness of the liberal left” had lost his way and
gone to the aid of the “Holocaust deniers”. There followed a controversy, with
F. Meyer protesting his good intentions and “antifascist” convictions. In
turn Franciszek Piper, the Polish communist and former curator of the Auschwitz
Museum, entered the fray. F. Meyer made a rejoinder. The affair began to grow
nasty. Certain revisionists cleverly forced the German judicial authorities to
explain their failure to prosecute F. Meyer. Their answer: the author had
doubtless come forth with reduced figures but he had done so without minimising
the gravity of the crime (for the full text of the Lüneberg public prosecutor’s
reply, see Recht und Wahrheit, n° 11 & 12, p. 16-17, published in Tenerife).

Eventually, with the business nonetheless taking a more and more irksome turn
for him, the editor-in-chief of Der Spiegel preferred to throw in the towel.
In a short piece dated 12 February he stated that, in view of the profit that
the revisionists had garnered from his article and their intention in future
to persist in “instrumentalising” his arguments, he preferred to withdraw from
the public debate. In closing, he called for a mobilisation against fascists
wherever they might be. He confided his decision to the “Information Service
against Rightwing Extremism” (Informationsdienst gegen Rechtsextremismus)
directed by Albrecht Kolthoff who, for his part, in a text of 23 February, said
that, although he understood F. Meyer’s decision, he lamented it.

http://www.idgr.de/texte/geschichte/ns-verbrechen/fritjof-meyer/meyer-040212.php


===================================

Institute for Historical Review

http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v21/v21n3p24_weber.html

New ‘Official’ Changes in the Auschwitz Story
Mark Weber

Since the end of World War II, authoritative claims about the character and
scope of killings at the Auschwitz concentration camp have changed drastically.
One particularly striking change concerns the various “official” estimates
of the number of victims — a number that since 1945 has been steadily
declining.

Today, more than half a century after the end of the war, the process of
“establishment” revisionism still continues. It finds recent expression in a
lengthy article, “The Number of Auschwitz Victims,” published in the May 2002
issue of the scholarly German journal Osteuropa, issued by the prestigious Society
for Eastern European Studies. The article is written by Fritjof Meyer, a
respected foreign policy analyst, author of several books, and managing editor of
Germany’s foremost weekly news magazine Der Spiegel. 1

Drastic Reductions

The Auschwitz camp complex, located in what is now south-central Poland, was
set up by German authorities in 1940. Large numbers of Jews were deported
there between 1942 and mid-1944. The main camp, or Stammlager, was known as
Auschwitz I. Birkenau, or Auschwitz II, is regarded as the main extermination center.

At the postwar International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (1945-1946), the
victorious Allied powers charged that the Germans exterminated four million
people at Auschwitz. This figure, which was given in a report produced by a
Soviet government commission, was uncritically accepted for many years, and often
appeared in major American newspapers and magazines. 2

Other figures, both higher and lower, were sometimes also claimed during the
decades after the end of World War II. 3

One of the most widely read books on the German wartime camp system is a
detailed study written shortly after the end of the war by former Buchenwald
inmate Eugen Kogon. This much-praised work, published in the United States under
the title The Theory and Practice of Hell, reports that at Auschwitz alone there
were “at least 3,500,000 victims, probably 4,500,000.” 4

The 1955 French documentary film “Night and Fog,” which is still widely
shown in France, and has been seen by many in the United States, claims that nine
million people lost their lives in Auschwitz. 5

In his Osteuropa article, Meyer writes that Gerald Reitlinger, a prominent
Jewish specialist of this subject, estimated in his 1953 book The Final Solution
, that a total of one million people perished in Auschwitz, of whom as many as
750,000 were murdered by gas. 6


Until 1989, notes Meyer, it was forbidden in eastern Europe to dispute the
official finding that four million were killed at Auschwitz. At the Auschwitz
State Museum, staff members who expressed doubts about this figure were
threatened with disciplinary measures. In 1989 Israeli Holocaust historian Yehuda
Bauer said that it is time to finally acknowledge that the familiar four million
figure is a deliberate myth. 7 In July 1990 the Auschwitz State Museum, a
Polish government agency, along with Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Center,
announced that altogether perhaps one million people (both Jews and non-Jews) died at
Auschwitz. 8


Franciszek Piper, director of the Auschwitz State Museum, in an essay
published in a semi-official 1994 American anthology, put the number of Auschwitz
victims at 1.1 million. 9 More or less consistent with that, prominent American
newspapers in recent months have been telling readers that “more than a
million” Jews lost their lives at Auschwitz. 10

In a book published in 1994, the French anti-revisionist writer Jean-Claude
Pressac estimated 631,000 to 711,000 deaths at Auschwitz, of which 470,000 to
550,000 were from gassing. 11

In his recent Osteuropa article, Fritjof Meyer presents a further revision
downwards. He writes: “These considerations are the basis for the conclusion
here that in Auschwitz half a million people were murdered, about 356,000 of them
with gas.” Similarly, Meyer ends his article by concluding that 510,000 lost
their lives in Auschwitz, of whom 356,000 “probably” were killed by gas.

The Höss ‘Confessions’

For decades key evidence cited for mass killings at Auschwitz has been the
postwar testimony of Rudolf Höss, who was commandant of the camp from May 1940
until December 1943, and again between May and July 1944. Since the end of the
war, his statements of March and April 1946, and his testimony in April 1946
as a witness at the main Nuremberg trial, have been widely cited in numerous
history books, newspapers, and magazine articles. 12 In those statements, and in
that testimony, he declared that three million died at Auschwitz, of whom two
and a half million were killed “there by gassing and burning.” 13

In a detailed 1985 essay, Prof. Robert Faurisson established that the Höss
“confession” is a false document that was extracted under torture. 14 Fritjof
Meyer, echoing arguments and points made 17 years earlier by Faurisson, writes
that Höss’ “confession” was wrung out of him after “three days of sleep
deprivation, torture, beatings after every answer, being held naked, and forcibly
intoxicated,” and, finally, with the use of a whip.

Martin Broszat’s Deceit

In his Osteuropa article, Meyer refers to the deceit of Martin Broszat, one
of Germany’s most prominent postwar historians. From 1972 until his death in
1989 Broszat was deputy director, and then director of Germany’s semi-official
Institute for Contemporary History in Munich. “The unreliability of Höss’
million-large figures,” writes Meyer, “is so serious that Martin Broszat simply
left out some of them in the publication of the Höss papers that he edited.”

Specifically, Meyer notes, Broszat deleted from Höss’ “memoir” statements
about millions of non-existent Jews who were scheduled for extermination,
including “about four million Jews from Romania,” as well as “an estimated two and
a half million Jews from Bulgaria.” In fact, Meyer writes, in 1940 there were
only about 342,000 Jews in Romania altogether, and the total number of Jews in
Bulgaria, according to more or less reliable estimates, was between 48,000
and some 63,000. Höss had exaggerated the actual number of Jews in Romania by
more than ten times, and in Bulgaria by about 50 times.

So far, anyway, no public outcry has arisen against Dr. Broszat, who
consciously falsified an important historical document, or against the prestigious
scholarly institute he directed. Similarly, no one has yet apologized for this
deception — or even demanded that an apology be made.

Downplaying the Birkenau ‘Kremas’

For decades it has been authoritatively claimed that mass killings of Jews
were carried out at Auschwitz — above all, by poison gas in semi-underground
cellars adjacent to the Birkenau crematory structures (Kremas). This has been the
view, for example, of Robert Jan van Pelt, a Jewish scholar who is regarded
as an authority on Auschwitz and who was a key witness against British
historian David Irving in the headline-making Irving-Lipstadt trial of January-March
2000. In his testimony in the trial, van Pelt referred to Krema II at Birkenau
as “the most lethal building of Auschwitz,” the place where “more people lost
their lives than any other place on this planet. Five hundred thousand people
were killed.” 15

In his Osteuropa article, Meyer discounts the importance of these “lethal
buildings.” In a significant revision of the familiar Auschwitz story, he shifts
the focus of gassings from Birkenau Kremas II and III to two “farm houses” or
“bunkers,” which were also known as the “white house and the “red house.”
Meyer writes: “The actual genocide that was carried out probably took place
mostly in the two reconstructed farm houses outside of the camp; the foundations
of the first, the ‘White House’ or ‘Bunker I,’ were recently discovered.”

Meyer unhelpfully does not explain what he means here by “probably” and
“mostly.”

Unsystematic Mass Killings?

Meyer also calls into question another important aspect of the familiar
extermination story. According to the “standard” story, in the summer of 1941 or,
at the latest, in the summer of 1942, Hitler ordered the systematic
extermination of all the Jews of Europe under German control. In keeping with that, SS
chief Heinrich Himmler supposedly ordered Commandant Höss to carry out
systematic killings of Jews at Auschwitz, which was to serve as a central killing
center. Only employable Jews who could be “worked to death” were to be
temporarily spared.

This story is not accurate, Meyer suggests. Several months after the end of
the war in Europe, he relates, former SS officer Hans Aumeier testified that in
November 1942 Höss received an order from Himmler to gas all weak, sick or
otherwise unemployable Jewish prisoners as a measure to prevent further spread
of disease in the camp. 16 Aumeier’s testimony, which Meyer accepts as valid,
suggests that Jews were killed at Auschwitz not as part of an comprehensive
extermination program systematically to kill all European Jews, but rather as an
exceptional measure to curb the horrific epidemics that were ravaging the
Auschwitz I and Birkenau camps. 17

A Dubious Document

Meyer also takes a skeptical look at a document that has been cited for years
as a key piece of evidence for mass killings at Auschwitz: a June 28, 1943,
letter from SS officer Karl Bischoff, head of the Auschwitz camp central
construction department, to the WVHA center in Berlin. In this letter, Bischoff
reports that all the crematory ovens in the Auschwitz main camp and in Birkenau
could process as many as 4,756 corpses every 24 hours. This document is cited,
for example, in the semi-official book, Nazi Mass Murder, in a section headed
“the Perfected Gas Chambers at Birkenau.” 18

But as long ago as 1989, the French anti-revisionist researcher Jean-Claude
Pressac expressed doubt about the figures given in this document. In a detailed
book published that year, he expressed the view that the true cremation
figures may perhaps have been one-half or one-third of those given in the Bischoff
letter. 19 Noting that some years ago Pressac had characterized this document
as “an internal propaganda lie” of the SS, and that even van Pelt has cut in
half the figures in the Bischoff letter, Meyer writes of the “entirely
permissible doubts about the authenticity of the document.”

Meyer also discounts the familiar image of “factory like” crematories at
Birkenau, operating day and night and continually belching smoke. He points out
that these crematories operated only fitfully, and often broke down. He cites,
for example, Birkenau’s crematory facility (Krema) II, which went into
operation on March 22, 1943. Cracks in the chimney were already visible on April 3,
and by mid-May the crematory was no longer operational. Because Birkenau’s
crematories could not possibly have “processed” as many corpses as has been
claimed, Meyer concludes that between December 1942 and March 1943 tens of
thousands of corpses were cremated there in the open air.

Meyer does not consider an obvious problem inherent in this claim: If
Birkenau had really been a center for a well-planned, systematic extermination of
hundreds of thousands of Jews, why did the authorities in charge fail to arrange
for the construction of adequate crematory facilities to process the
anticipated numbers of victims? To put it another way, cremation of tens of thousands
of corpses in makeshift open-air pyres cannot be reconciled with Birkenau’s
supposed role as a center where, on the basis of orders from the highest level, a
program of systematic extermination was carried out.

It is largely on the basis of his understanding of cremation capacity in the
camp, and his estimate that a total of perhaps 433,000 corpses were cremated
at Auschwitz (including Birkenau), that Meyer concludes that some 500,000
people perished there.

Conclusion

Compared to the recently “authoritative” figure of approximately one million
Auschwitz deaths, Meyer has reduced the number of Jewish victims there by at
least 450,000. If he were held the legal standards that are routinely applied
to revisionist skeptics, he would be prosecuted for violating Germany’s law
against “relativizing” or “denying” Jewish deaths.

Meyer seems vaguely aware of this. In an apparent effort to provide a
“politically correct” justification for his “denial” and “relativizing,” he
pompously writes: “Accordingly, the dimension of the breach of civilization becomes
conceivable and, for the first time, is a convincing portent for those born
afterwards … This result does not ‘relativize’ the barbarism, but rather
verifies it — and serves as a severe warning against a new shattering of
civilization.”

Meyer’s article is subtitled “New Revelations through new archival
findings.” In fact, Fritjof Meyer and Osteuropa journal affirm the decades-old
skepticism of the “deniers,” embracing even some of the same “physical” or
“forensic” arguments presented for years by revisionists such as Robert Faurisson. 20
Meyer unintentionally affirms that the skeptics were right to reject the
“official” story, which — as his article shows — is still changing.

Notes:

1.  Fritjof Meyer, “Die Zahl der Opfer von Auschwitz: Neue Erkenntnisse durch
neue Archivfunde,” Osteuropa: Zeitschrift für Gegenwartsfragen des Ostens,
52. Jg. 5/2002, Mai 2002, pp. 631-641. (Osteuropa is published by the Deutsche
Gesellschaft für Osteuropakunde.)
Fritjof Meyer, managing editor (leitender Redakteur) of Der Spiegel, was born
in 1932. He holds several certifications of expertise: Dipl. DHP,
Dipl.-Politologe, Dipl.-Kameralist. He is the author, for example, of Weltmacht im
Abstieg: der Niedergang der Sowjet-Union (München: C. Bertelsmann, 1984).
A leading German daily has reported on the impact of Meyer’s comment on the
impact of, or response to, Meyer’s Osteuropa article. See: Sven Felix
Kellerhoff, “Der Fall des angesehenen Journalisten Fritjof Meyer,” Die Welt, August
28, 2002. (This text is posted on David Irving’s web site.) See also:
“Auschwitz: Die Wahrheit,” National-Zeitung (Munich), No. 30, July 19, 2002, pp. 1, 5.

2.  Nuremberg document 008-USSR (May 6, 1945). International Military
Tribunal, Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal
(Nuremberg: 1947-1949; IMT 42-vol. “blue series”), Vol. 39, pp. 241, 261;
C.L. Sulzberger, “Oswiecim Killings Placed at 4,000,000,” The New York Times,
May 8, 1945, and, The New York Times, Jan. 31, 1986, p. A4.

3.  Robert Faurisson, “Combien de morts a Auschwitz?,” Dec. 18, 1995, in
Écrits Révisionnistes (1999), vol. 4, pp. 1730-1740.
German translation: R. Faurisson, “Wieviele Tote gab es im KL Auschwitz”?,”
Viertelsjahreshefte für freie Geschichtsforschung, Sept. 1999 (3. Jg., Heft
3), pp. 268-272. Note also Faurisson’s comment on Auschwitz figures in The
Journal of Historical Review, Jan.-Feb. 1995 (Vol. 15, No. 1), p. 24.

4.  Eugen Kogon, The Theory and Practice of Hell (New York: Farrar, Straus,
1950; and, New York: Berkley, 1984 [pb.]), p. 253. The original German edition
was entitled Der SS Staat.

5.  “Night and Fog” (“Nuit et Brouillard”) is a film by Alain Resnais
(distributed by Classic Releasing, 1993). Approximately 55 seconds from the end, as
the grounds of Auschwitz are panned, the English subtitle reads: “Nine
million dead haunt this landscape.” See also Robert Faurisson’s mentions of this
film in The Journal of Historical Review, Jan.-Feb. 1994, p. 24, and in Écrits
Révisionnistes (1999), vol. 4, pp. 1730-1731 (incl. footnote), 1738.

6.  In the second edition of The Final Solution, Gerald Reitlinger estimated
that altogether perhaps 700,000 to 900,000 people (Jews and non-Jews) perished
at Auschwitz. See: G. Reitlinger, The Final Solution: The Attempt to
Exterminate the Jews of Europe (London: Sphere Books, pb., 1971. 2nd edition), pp.
500-501.

7.  Y. Bauer, “Fighting the Distortions,” The Jerusalem Post (Israel), Sept.
22, 1989.

8.  “Auschwitz Deaths Reduced to a Million,” The Daily Telegraph (London),
July 17, 1990; “Poland Reduces Auschwitz Death Toll Estimate to 1 Million,”
The Washington Times, July 17, 1990.

9.  F. Piper, “The Number of Victims,” in Y. Gutman and M. Berenbaum, eds.,
Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, 1994), p. 71.

10. Recently The Wall Street Journal told readers that at Auschwitz “more
than one million people [were] murdered here, 90 percent of them Jews.” See:
“Burden of History: Auschwitz Repairs Force Tough Debate over Preservation,” The
Wall Street Journal, Aug. 14, 2002, p. A1. Similarly, Prof. John K. Roth, in a
review of a new book by two prominent Jewish Holocaust historians, wrote that
“more than a million Jews perished” in Auschwitz-Birkenau, “most of them
gassed to death.” See: Los Angeles Times “Book World,” Sunday, Sept. 22, 2002,
p. 4.

11. Jean-Claude Pressac, Die Krematorien von Auschwitz: Die Technik des
Massenmordes (Munich: Piper, 1994), p. 202.

12. Höss’ testimony is described as “crucial” and of “critical importance”
in Y. Gutman, M. Berenbaum, eds., Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum,
Washington, DC, 1994), p. 29.

13. Höss statement, March 14 (or 15), 1946. Nuremberg document NO-1210
(749-D); Höss statement, April 5, 1946. Nuremberg document 3868-PS (Exhibit
USA-819). International Military Tribunal, Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the
International Military Tribunal (Nuremberg: 1947-1949; IMT 42-vol. “blue
series”), Vol. 33, pp. 275-279. This latter Höss statement, including its figures
of Auschwitz deaths, was quoted by the Nuremberg Tribunal in its final
judgment. See IMT “blue series,” Vol. 1, pp. 251-252.

14. Robert Faurisson, “How the British Obtained the Confessions of Rudolf
Höss,” The Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1986-87 (Vol. 7, No. 4), pp.
389-403. (http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v07/v07p389_Faurisson.html) The original French
text was first published in Annales d’Histoire Revisionniste (Paris), No. 1,
spring 1987, pp. 137-152. It was also reprinted in: R. Faurisson, Écrits
Révisionnistes (1999), vol. 2, pp. 657-669.

15. “David Irving’s Final Address in the London Libel Trial,” The Journal of
Historical Review, March-April 2000 (Vol. 19, No. 2), pp. 37-38. Together
with Deborah Dwork, Robert Jan van Pelt is author of Auschwitz: 1270 to Today
(New York: Norton, 1996), and, most recently, also with Dwork, Holocaust: A
History (New York: Norton, 2002).

16. Source cited by Meyer (in note No. 8 of his Osteuropa article): CIA
Special Collections, Reference Coll., Box 3; Bericht von BB-175 über Aumeiers
Vernehmung im Gefängnis Akerhus, Norwegen, vom 29.10.1945.
See also the report on the interrogation of Kurt Aumeier of August 10, 1945,
posted on David Irving’s web site
(http://www.fpp.co.uk/Auschwitz/Aumeier/100845.html). Source cited by Irving: National Archives (Washington, DC), RG.319 -
IRR - XE.003245 Hans Aumeier. According to this report, Aumeier stated that
in November 1942, he was told in strictest confidence of an order from Berlin
“that all Jewish prisoners who were infirm, sick or incapable of work were to
be gassed in order to prevent further spreading of diseases.”

17. On epidemics at Auschwitz, see: Y. Gutman and M. Berenbaum, eds., Anatomy
of the Auschwitz Death Camp (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, with the
US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, 1994), pp. 27, 214, 328, 381,
388. See also: M. Weber, “High Frequency Delousing Facilities at Auschwitz,”
The Journal of Historical Review, May-June 1999 (Vol. 18, No. 3), pp. 4-12, esp.
pp. 2-8.

18. Eugen Kogon, and H. Langbein, A. Rückerl, and others, Nazi Mass Murder: A
Documentary History of the Use of Poison Gas (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ.
Press, 1994), p. 157. Original German edition: Nationalsozialistische
Massentötungen durch Giftgas (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1986), p. 219.
This document is also cited, and reproduced in facsimile, in a six-page
article in Der Spiegel, No. 40/ 1993, Oct. 4, 1993, pp. 151, 156. More recently,
Prof. John K. Roth, in a review of a new book by D. Dwork and R. J. van Pelt,
wrote that the four crematory structures at Birkenau, which “included eight gas
chambers, 46 ovens and the capacity to dispose of 4,416 corpses a day.” This
calculation is from the June 28, 1943, Bischoff letter (4,756 minus 340 for the
crematory in the Auschwitz I main camp). Los Angeles Times “Book World,”
Sunday, Sept. 22, 2002, p. 4.

19. J.-C. Pressac, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers
(New York: B. Klarsfeld, 1989), pp. 244, 247.

20. See, for example, “Faurisson’s Three Letters to Le Monde (1978-1979),”
The Journal of Historical Review, May-June 2000, pp. 40-46.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
From The Journal of Historical Review, May-August 2002 (Vol. 21, No. 3-4),
pages 24-28.

=====================================

Institute for Historical Review
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v21/v21n3p29_irving.html

A commentary by historian David Irving, issued in Sept. 2002, on Fritjof
Meyer’s May 2002 Osteuropa article:

So, Who Was Right, Then?

In January 1995 the French news magazine L’Express reported that Auschwitz
staff now admitted that the gas-chamber known as “Krema [Crematorium] I” (the
one still shown to visitors) had in fact been erected in 1948 by Polish
communists for the foreign tourists’ benefit. Fred Leuchter had already demonstrated
the deception in 1988.

British historian David Irving (The Destruction of Dresden) spread word of
this extraordinary admission in 20,000 postcards mailed to German notables by
his worldwide circle of friends. This endeavour earned him yet another mention
in dispatches by Berlin’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution (he had
already been outlawed from Germany “in the German national interest” in
November 1993).

In his January 2000 London libel action against the US history teacher
Deborah Lipstadt, Mr. Irving adopted the following positions — strongly differing
from those of Germany’s conformist historians: The real number of Jews dying in
Auschwitz (“four million”) had been exaggerated tenfold; none whatever had
been gassed in the big underground Kremas II and III; and key historical records
had been faked.

For this “incorrigible falsification of history” his case was dismissed by
Mr. Justice Gray with an annihilating Judgment. On May 21, 2002, Irving’s final
appeal was denied, and pursuant to the English legal system his home of 34
years and his entire property and records were seized two days later.

Now the cruel irony: That same month, May 2002, buried deep in the learned
journal Osteuropa (president: former German Parliamentary Speaker Dr. Rita
Süssmuth) there appeared a lengthy paper by the leftist historian Dr. Fritjof
Meyer, a managing editor of Der Spiegel for 34 years (title: “The death-toll at
Auschwitz. New facts from new archival finds.”)

Says Meyer, in accord with Lipstadt’s chief expert witness Prof. Robert Van
Pelt: “The actual genocide probably took place outside the camp site, in two
converted farmhouses.” Moreover: The figures had been exaggerated — as recently
as 1989 Auschwitz staff were threatened with instant dismissal if they
expressed doubts about them. And: To cover up “discrepancies” the late Prof. Martin
Broszat had rewritten and doctored vital sentences in the memoirs of executed
camp commandant Rudolf Höss before his Institute of Contemporary History
officially published them. (Broszat of course had neither his home nor his
property seized).