Holocaust denier David Irving was shown on Italian television claiming there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz. During a program that aired last Friday, Irving was shown at the former German Nazi death camp in Poland, which he apparently visited recently. During the Italian documentary, Irving explains that engineering techniques at the time weren’t sufficient to allow the Nazis to gas people en masse. A spokesman for the Auschwitz museum, Jaroslav Mensfelt, said Irving likely visited there a week or two ago, but without the knowledge or consent of museum officials. “He is a persona non grata here,” Mensfelt said. “It would be best if he never came here. Such people desecrate the place and are not welcome,” he told The Associated Press.
Irving was released from jail in Vienna in December after serving 13 months of a three-year sentence for Holocaust denial. In an interview with Sky TG24 earlier this year, Irving said the Nazis did kill millions of Jews, but that mass killings did not take place at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
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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.