Jewish groups are appalled at a decision by the Sunday Times of London to appoint a Holocaust revisionist the task of transcribing the diaries of Nazi propagandist Josef Goebbels.
The diaries have recently been uncovered in a Moscow archive.
Large crowds in front of the London Times offices this past weekend protested the paper’s choice to assign the task to David Irving, a oncemainstream British historian who has turned all his efforts to trying to disprove that there were gas chambers used to kill Jews during World War II.
The choice was deemed “outrageous and grotesque” by the Anti-Defamation League, which called on the Sunday Times to reverse its decision.
“It’s like using the fox to guard the chicken coop” said Kenneth Jacobson, ADL’s director of international affairs.
The ADL, in its publication “Holocaust Revisionism — Reinventing the Big Lie,” exposed Irving as a pseudoscholar.
His “findings” include the charge that Adolf Hitler neither ordered nor knew about the policy to exterminate the Jews.
Irving has also called the diary of Anne Frank, a Jewish teen-ager hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam, a forgery.
In Ottawa, B’nai Brith Canada’s Institute for International Affairs sent a letter to Sunday Times Editor Andrew Neill challenging the paper’s arrangements with Irving.
B’NAI BRITH ‘ASTOUNDED AND DISMAYED’
“We were both astounded and dismayed” to learn about the decision, wrote Gabriel Nachman, B’nai Brith Canada national president.
“David Irving has used his historical research to a wrong end.
“We believe it to be most unfitting of the Sunday Times to contribute to Irving’s financial well being and claim for respectability through arrangements as reported. The people of Britain have already paid enough to push back the scourge of Nazism,” he wrote.
Irving has been commissioned to copy and translate the Goebbels diaries from glass photographic plates in Moscow’s Central Government Archives.
B’nai Brith also wrote to Russian Ambassador Alexander Belonogov, urging the Russian government to deny Irving access to its archives.
In Brussels, at a conference convened by the World Jewish Congress to deal with anti-Semitism, WJC President Edgar Bronfman called the London Times’ decision “unbelievably disgusting.”
However, the choice “does serve a certain purpose,” said Bronfman.
“It keeps the memory alive. Every time one person says it didn’t happen, that makes 20 others say it did,” he said.
In 1977, Irving’s book “Hitler’s War,” which was published by Viking Press in New York, said that Hitler “didn’t know” about the “Final Solution” to eliminate the Jews.
In his book “Churchill’s War,” published in Australia in 1987, he wrote that Churchill, not Hitler, had been to blame for the death of millions of civilians and Allied soldiers, ADL reported.
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.
