Australian Jewry was shocked and angered by a top-rated radio broadcaster in Perth, Western Australia, who gave air time and credibility to an American propagandist claiming scientific proof that the Holocaust never occurred.
Howard Sattler, who writes a weekly opinion column in Perth in addition to his radio show, interviewed Fred Leuchter, a self-described engineer from Boston.
Leuchter has been peddling a report which disputes the overwhelming eyewitness evidence that Jews were gassed to death at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek and other death camps.
He claimed on Perth radio that they “died of malnutrition” and that the deadly Zyklon-B gas was used “for disinfecting bed linens, delousing.”
Sattler ended the interview by telling his audience, “The story we just covered relates to the so-called Holocaust, where we have been told that millions of Jews suffered in the concentration camps, the Nazi camps during World War II.”
Sattler went on in his breezy way, saying, “We’ve got the man who’s produced a report lobbed on my desk” who “said that he’s an engineer.”
Sattler admitted he didn’t know where Leuchter had an engineering degree, and Leuchter has previously admitted under cross-examination that he has no such degree.
Nevertheless, Sattler told his audience that Leuchter has “been over there and had a look” at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek, and determined that the gas chambers “could not have been used as gas chambers.”
Holocaust survivors among Perth’s Jewish community responded to the interview with personal testimonies of the suffering they had witnessed and endured.
The independent newsletter Australia-Israel Review observed that Sattler is the first Australian journalist to give air time to a piece of neo-Nazi propaganda that has been making the rounds of the country for months.
Leuchter’s allegations were widely circulated here last year by lawyer John Bennett, who heads the Australian Civil Liberties Union, a group that devotes itself to debunking the Holocaust.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
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.
