A self-trained “historian” claimed in district court here last week that neo-Nazi propagandist Ernst Zundel forced people to prove that the Holocaust actually occurred.
David Irving, a British writer, testified for the defense in the retrial of Zundel, who is charged with spreading false news calculated to arouse racial hatred. Zundel published a Canadian edition of the booklet “Did Six Million Really Die?”, a denial of the Holocaust written years ago by British fascist Richard Harwood.
His earlier conviction was overturned on a technicality and a new trial was ordered.
According to Irving, Zundel’s publication of the booklet, with an introduction and summation of his own, “has provoked and irritated” people and “forced them to prove what they have been maintaining.”
Irving, who has no formal training as a historian but wrote a two-volume biography of Hitler, said his “research” found “no documents whatsoever indicating the Holocaust had occurred” and no evidence that Hitler knew of an extermination of Jews.
Under cross-examination by Crown Attorney John Pearson, Irving admitted he had not read through all of Adolf Eichmann’s testimony in his 1960 trial in Israel, where Eichmann admitted that the “Final Solution” was discussed by the top Nazi leadership at the 1942 Wannsee conference.
The defense presented two other “expert” witnesses earlier in the week. Fred Leuchter of Boston, a consultant on execution devices, said the gas chambers at Auschwitz and other death camps were too leaky and poorly equipped for killing purposes.
Bill Armontrout, an American prison warden, said he had witnessed three gas chamber executions and that there would have been a risk to attendants in the use of cyanide gas in a room the size of the Birkenau gas chambers.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
