Denier plans death camp tours
HOLOCAUST DENIER David Irving is planning to provide guided tours of some of the most notorious Nazi sites, including extermination camps at Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Belzec, in what has been described as a “grotesque insult to the dead”.
Irving, who lost an infamous libel suit brought against Professor Deborah Lipstadt in 2000 after the academic accused him of being a Holocaust denier, falsifier and bigot, is promoting the tour via his website, Real History.
He is offering a “week-long guided tour” in September, which will include “Hitler’s headquarters and other historic SS locations” in Poland, Latvia and Lithuania.
The site offers people the opportunity to reserve a place on the tour for a refundable deposit of $600.
On a similar trip in September 2013, Irving, who has frequently denied that the Nazis used gas chambers to murder Jews and has served time in prison in Austria, where Holocaust denial is a crime, took 27 people on a tour of sites including the Wolf’s Lair (Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia) and the Majdanek and Sobibor Camps.
He wrote at the time that his “guests” on the trip “voiced interest in… anomalies in the disinfestation chambers (now re-labelled as ‘gas chambers’), which have wartime blue Zyklon stains on the walls, postwar wire-reinforced glass in the windows, and carbon-dioxide cylinders still on display in the ‘poison gas’ store.”
Irving has published videos online of him speaking at the sites on past tours. They appear with the message: “Viewers in some countries may find these movies inaccessible, as Jewish groups hostile to Real History have blocked them, disagreeing with your right to see the locations and make up your own mind”.
The Chief Executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, Karen Pollock, said: “David Irving is a proven Holocaust denier. His forthcoming ‘tour’ can serve no purpose other than to insult the memory of Holocaust victims and survivors. This cannot be allowed to happen, and we will be working with our partners across Europe to assess appropriate next steps”.
On Wednesday, Naftali Bennett, Israel’s Minister of Diaspora Affairs, called on the Polish government to refuse entry to Irving.