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would help sell the book." The court labeled Irving's conduct
as "outrageous and shocking."
Irving's misrepresentations did not end with the publication of
his book. According to Cesarani, in 1979 a German publisher
had to pay compensation to the father of Anne Frank after
printing the German edition of Irving's book, Hitler's War. Irving
had claimed that Anne Frank's diary was a forgery.
* Correct as written. Without consulting me, the
Ullstein Verlag publishing firm, part of the
pro-Israeli Axel Springer Group) made some
unspecified payment to Otto Frank at his demand. I
had already halted production and publication of
the book for other reasons (tampering by Ullstein
with my text). The German Bundeskriminalamt
found that parts of the diary had been written in
(post-war) ballpoint ink-paste, which made its
authenticity problematic. My opinion on it now is
ambivalent: it is unimportant, not a historical
document of any value.
Irving claims that according to his "research", the Holocaust is
greatly exaggerated.
* Correct. I think the figures have been magnified
by an Order of Magnitude. Events in Auschwitz
alone suggest that I am right:: here the figure has
been effortlessly brought down from 4 million to 1
million, and now to even less.
(He was recently quoted in the K-W Record as saying that the
number of Jews who died in concentration camps was "of the
order of 100,000 or more.")
* Incorrect. Do you really believe all the
newspapers say? I may have said "killed", not
"died".
But during the 1988 trial of pro-Nazi publisher Ernst Zundel,
he was forced to admit under cross-examination that he hadn't
even read all of Eichmann's 1960 trial testimony. (In this
testimony, Eichmann admitted that Nazi leaders discussed
the so-called "Final Solution to the Jewish
problem"--extermination, in 1942.)
* Incorrect. I have Eichmann's manuscript
memoirs, given to me in Buenos Aires in
November 1991. He states that to him Final
Solution always meant the Madagascar Solution.
Anyway, do you really want to base your case on
the utterances of a Nazi war criminal?
In November 1991, a reporter from The Independent showed
that Irving omitted crucial lines from a translation of Goebbels'
diaries--lines that would have contradicted his theory that
Hitler knew nothing about the extermination of the Jews.
* Incorrect. Which "crucial lines" am I supposed to
have omitted?
Irving's record is clear: he is not an historian, and he has
made false statements and been forced to apologize for them.
As Andrew Cohen, reporter for the Financial Post, has said,
"David Irving should be denied credibility."
* Well, that really wants to make me hang up my
shingle: namely, that a shyster from a money-rag
doesn't believe me. What a waste of kilobytes,
when there are megabytes of reputable historians
saying precisely the opposite about me.
Yours sincerely,
David Irving
Focal Point Publications
Professor Jeffrey Shallit
Associate Professor
Computer Science Department
University of Waterloo,
Waterloo, Ontario
Canada
The following is the full text of the article by Mr. Shallit that Mr.
Irving quotes in the preceding letter.
LIES OF OUR TIMES
by Jeffrey Shallit
How the Words of the Holocaust Deniers and Their Allies
Show Them For What They Are
1. Background
Canada has a long tradition of tolerance and multiculturalism.
That's why many residents of the K-W area were shocked and
saddened to learn that a stereo store on King Street in
Kitchener was displaying posters advertising a talk by David
Irving, a self-described historian who says that the estimates
of six million Jews killed by the Nazis during World War II are
greatly exaggerated. Inside the store, according to the K-W
Record, one can find for sale a book by Fred Leuchter that
claims that the gas chambers at Auschwitz were never used
for mass killing. After local protests, the store owner retaliated
by putting up posters about the banking system based on the
writings of anti-Semite Eustace Mullins. Subsequently, these
posters were taken down by the store owner, but one explicitly
anti-Semitic flyer still remains. The Kitchener-Waterloo
Record recently carried a letter to the editor by Paul Fromm,
director of "Canadian Association for Free Expression, Inc.".
This letter defended neo-Nazi publisher Ernst Zundel, saying,
"Zundel was dragged through the courts for nine years ...
MERELY for his UNPOPULAR views." [emphasis mine]
Who are Michael Rothe, David Irving, Fred Leuchter, Eustace
Mullins, and Paul Fromm, and what do they stand for?