Letters to David Irving on this Website

Unless correspondents ask us not to, this Website will post selected letters that it receives, and invite open debate.

A S Marques comments, Wednesday, May 18, 2005, on a Berlin eyesore, Lea Rosh, Holocaust posters, and mountains of shoes

Holocaust "did happen"

IT'S true that Lea Rosh put up across Germany an ironical poster, proclaiming "the Holocaust did not happen", next to an impressive mountain that did happen, much like the mountains of shoes in the camps, one presumes [see panel below].

But the image is incomplete. The original poster used to feature a comment, in rather small print, claiming that, in fact, the Holocaust had happened. Very confusing indeed for all of us, slightly retarded, historical revisionists.

Please find (above) a picture where the original poster can be found. Those people in the forefront of my picture were connected to the poster campaign (from left to right): Klaus Wowereit, Berlin's ruling mayor at the time; Sibyll Klotz, then fraction leader of the Greens in the Berlin Parliament; Lea Rosh herself, chairwoman of the initiative for the Berlin monument; and Boleslaw "Pablito" Casimirovski, the well-known South-American explorer and Nuremberg IMT star witness.

Yes, the folks are slightly doctored in the picture, but the poster is absolutely correct.

Best wishes,

A S Marques
Portugal

 

Our dossier on Auschwitz

 

BBC News Sixty years since liberation of Nazis' Bergen Belsen concentration camp -- Mr Irving seems somehow to blame, and comments

Free download of David Irving's books Bookmark the download page to find the latest new free books

David Irving comments:

GOOD THAT you mention those mountains of shoes. We have no real idea where the ones on display at the Auschwitz tourist center came from, forensically speaking.

We do know that outer clothing including footwear was routinely removed from the bodies of German air raid victims, including thirty tons of clothing from those killed in the Dresden air raid alone, and turned over to recycling agencies.

As for the mountains of shoes of Holocaust victims, these figured prominently in the alleged report of SS officer Kurt Gerstein, of which Professor Christopher Browning tried to introduce doctored quotations in his evidence in the Lipstadt Trial. His first version of his expert evidence omitted the statistics like those below altogether, I wonder why? Here are the relevant extracts from my cross examination of him, in the verbatim transcripts, and my closing speech to the Court in March 2000:

Day 017: David Irving cross examining Prof. Browning. "The following day Gerstein drove to Treblinka where the gassing facilities were larger and he saw, you quote, veritable mounds of clothing and underwear 115 to 130 feet high.""

I pointed out of the Court Rooom window, and invited Browning to guess how high the adjacent Court building was, and to state whether he really uncritically believed that the mound of shoes could be taller than that.

Day 029: "Even the Gerstein report that you have, which is an alleged eyewitness account, had, of course, a '130 foot high mountain of shoes.'"

Day 032, closing speech: "The fictional elements in their statements - your Lordship will remember the "130 foot high mountain of clothes" which Professor Browning in his first draft skipped over, the "electrocution chambers" and the "steam chambers", the deliberately inflated death rolls which would otherwise shriek their warnings to critical researchers - are either ignored or suppressed in order to maintain appearances."