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Crossing
the Line
Until 1988 Irving refrained from supporting the deniers' outlook
explicitly. The event which caused him to cross the line and join
the deniers' camp was the publication of The Leuchter Report.
Fred Leuchter, who claimed to be a specialist in constructing and
installing execution apparatus in US prisons, was hired by the Canadian
Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel to be an expert witness at his trial.32
Before the trial, with Zündel's financial assistance, Leuchter traveled
to Poland where he visited Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek and
illegally collected "forensic samples" for chemical analysis. In
his published findings, he claimed that the facilities in these
camps were not capable of mass annihilation.33
The allegation that the gas chambers in Nazi concentration camps
in general and in Auschwitz in particular were used only for disinfection
purposes was not new, having been raised already a few years after
the war by one of the first European Holocaust deniers, the French
fascist Maurice Bardèche,34
and from then on it appeared in numerous Holocaust denial publications.
For Holocaust denial writers, however, Leuchter's report was significant.
It was introduced as a major breakthrough for those who were "seeking
the truth"; now their claim had allegedly been proved scientifically.35
"For myself, shown this evidence for the first time when called
as an expert witness at the Zündel trial in Toronto in April 1988,
the laboratory reports were shattering. There could be no doubts
as to their integrity," wrote Irving in his introduction to The
Leuchter Report, which was published in the United Kingdom by
Irving's publishing house Focal Point Publications.36
Irving's thesis was complete. When working on Hitler's War
he had found no proof that Hitler knew about the Final Solution;
now he attributed this to the fact that no systematic operation
to exterminate European Jewry had ever been planned or implemented.
"Too many hundreds of millions of honest intelligent people have
been duped by a well–financed and brilliantly successful postwar
publicity campaign," wrote Irving.37
In the new edition of Hitler's War, all references to the
extermination camps were removed.38
Thirty years after he had begun working as an "independent historian,"
as he frequently described himself, presenting revisionist concepts
in regard to World War II, and ten years after he had published
his most popular book Hitler's War, he no longer refrained
from explicitly denying the systematic annihilation of the Jewish
people. At the beginning of the 1990s, Irving concluded his thesis on the
fate of the Jewish people during the war. While denying the existence
of homicidal gas chambers, he claimed that there was sufficient
evidence to prove the mass murder of Jews by firing squads in the
occupied territories of the Soviet Union. Following his basic thesis
in Hitler's War, Irving has continued to emphasize that Himmler
and Heydrich knew of and approved the executions in the East, while
Hitler remained in ignorance. The mass shootings as well as maltreatment,
disease, air raids and hunger caused hundreds of thousands of Jewish
causalities, he asserted.39
On October 1992 Irving chose to present his completed thesis at
the eleventh conference of the IHR. A year before he announced that
he had succeeded in acquiring the typescript of Eichmann's monologues,
transcribed in the 1950s by the Flemish Nazi journalist Willem Sassens.40
In his lecture to the IHR, as well as in other statements that he
made in 1992, he refuted reports worldwide that reading Eichmann's
monologues had changed his revisionist views on the Holocaust, as
well as about Hitler's role in the atrocities committed against
the Jews.41
Eichmann's memoirs, claimed Irving, were an important confirmation
of the true distinction that should be made between the "legend
of the gas chambers" and "certain My-Lai-type atrocities" by German
troops, mainly in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union.
Eichmann admitted he had witnessed executions and cruel actions
against the Jewish population. Moreover he even maintained that
"some prisoners" were executed by exhaust fumes, but that "this kind of experiment"
was rapidly abandoned. Nevertheless, while he failed to mention
the gas chambers, even in his "vivid description of his visit to
Auschwitz," he did not hesitate to depict the disposal of bodies
in open pits by fire; thus, claimed Irving, had the Germans used
gas chambers, Eichmann would undoubtedly have referred to them.
Moreover, for Eichmann, claimed Irving, the words "Final Solution"
meant only the evacuation of European Jews to Madagascar, "where
they couldn't bother any of their neighbors and where none of their
neighbors could bother them" -- which for Irving "would have been
an ideal solution to the perennial world tragedy."42
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