1992: Polish gov. insists Auschwitz I gas chamber is original

In December 1991, the Daily Post newspaper of Liverpool, England, published the following letter by David Irving:

EILEEN TAYLOR (Daily Post, November 30) implied that I am among those historians according to whom "concentration camps, like Auschwitz' didn't actually exist".

Credit me with some intelligence please: any of your readers can see from my biography Hitler's War, that I print one two-page photograph of Auschwitz and another of Jews being deported from Stuttgart to the East.

My position is simply defined: as the Poles themselves now admit, the "gas chambers" on display at Auschwitz were built after the war for tourists to look at.

David Irving, London.

Daily Post (Liverpool, England; 3 a.m. edition), Monday, December 16, 1991, p.14.

The following month the paper published a response to Irving's letter written by the press attaché of the Polish Embassy in London:

I WAS sure that the statement of Mr David Irving (Letters, December 16) that "as Poles themselves now admit, the gas chambers on display at Auschwitz were built after the war for tourists to look at" was absolute nonsense.

Nevertheless, I took the trouble to verify from which source he might have obtained his information.

I must say that neither the government officials nor members of political parties and social organisations, journalists, academics, virtually everybody I approached on the subject had ever heard anyone publicly expressing such an absurd opinion.

Janusz Dluzynski,

Embassy of the Republic of Poland, London.

David Irving in row with Poles over Holocaust

By BERNARD JOSEPHS 

DIPLOMATIC EDITOR

Revisionist historian David Irving was under fire this week from Polish diplomats over his claim that the gas chambers at the site of a Nazi death camp were fakes, built as attractions for tourists. 

Mr Irving's allegations were contained in a letter published in the Liverpool Daily Post, in which he wrote: "As the Poles themselves now admit, the 'gas chambers' on display at Auschwitz were built after the war for tourists to look at." 

In a reply to the paper, a Polish Embassy official described Mr Irving's statement as "absolute nonsense." The official said he had checked with government, political and academic sources in Poland, and "virtually" all of them said they had never heard "such an absurd opinion." 

He added: "I think that only a mentally unstable person could have said the words which Mr Irving attributes to 'Poles.'" 

Mr Irving. who wrote the foreword to the Leuchter Report, a pamphlet by an Amefican engineer claiming that there was no evidence of mass gassing of Jews in Auschwitz, declined to name his source. But he added: "All I can say is that the person who made the statement was the person best suited to know." 

Jean-Claude Pressac had admitted in his 1989 book that the gas chamber was reconstructed after the war (pages 123 and 150). His book was heralded by the world's press as being the complete refutation of Holocaust revisionism, but clearly no one from the JC, the Polish embassy in London, nor the plethora of Polish movers and shakers the press attaché claimed to have asked about the issue had bothered reading it. 

Eight months after the JC article, a young Jewish-American revisionist named David Cole famously got the curator of the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum to admit on camera that the Auschwitz I gas chamber was reconstructed by the communists after the war.