Holocaust Denier Repeats Claims in an Italian Magazine Article

British Holocaust revisionist David Irving, who recently gained notoriety when the Sunday Times of London hired him to transcribe the diaries of Nazi propagandist Josef Goebbels, reasserted in an interview published here his view that the Holocaust did not take place.

Irving was deported from Italy last month when he arrived to address a neo-Nazi meeting in Rome.

He said in the interview published in the magazine section of the newspaper La Repubblica, that had he been allowed to speak, he would have said what he has been saying for 20 years.

“What is called the Holocaust or the Final Solution, that is, the physical liquidation of the European Jews, was never ordered or scientifically planned by Hitler,” he said in the interview.

Irving, a historian, said that what happened was probably the result of two forces: initiatives adopted by local authorities in the invaded territories, and a misinterpretation of the regime’s anti-Jewish regulations by the leadership of the SS.

“There does not exist one single document that establishes a direct link between Hitler and the so-called Final Solution,” he added.

Italian journalist Miriam Mafai, herself a Jew, quoted Irving as saying that if he had known she was Jewish he would not have agreed to be interviewed by her.

He denied the existence of extermination camps and gas chambers. If they had existed, he claimed, he would have found documentation, because “the Germans were extremely precise” and it was “improbable” that documents had been destroyed.

As for documents which did show the commander of Auschwitz ordering large quantities of Zyklon B, Irving said “We cannot exclude that this was used in the crematoria where bodies were incinerated. Not for gas chambers.”

German Jews, he said, were not Germans, adding that “Goering and Goebbels did everything they could before the war so that the Jews themselves would leave Germany.”