Irving bid to recant Nazi line

British historian David Irving now acknowledges Nazi gas chambers existed, and admits some of his past statements could be interpreted as denying people were gassed. On the day before Irving faces a court hearing, his lawyer Elmar Kresbach said the historian had “changed some of the views he is so famous for”. “He told me: ‘Look, there was a certain period when I drew conclusions from individual sources which are maybe provocative or could be misinterpreted or could be even wrong’,” Mr Kresbach said.

Prosecutors this week charged Irving, 67, with denying the Holocaust, which is a crime under Austrian law. The charges stem from two speeches Irving gave in Austria in 1989 in which he reportedly denied the existence of the Nazi gas chambers. He faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted.

In explaining Irving’s change of heart, Mr Kresbach said yesterday that additional research the historian carried out after Soviet archives were opened to scholars had persuaded him his former beliefs were “not really worthwhile to hold up”. But Irving’s new position was met with scepticism by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, which works to track down former Nazis before they die. “It’s an admission designed to extricate himself from imprisonment and in no way truly reflects his views,” said Efraim Zuroff, director of the centre, based in Los Angeles. Dr Zuroff said Irving had learned from his previous legal battles and was “trying to minimise the danger”. Under Austrian law, Irving cannot be interviewed while he is in custody.

But in the past, Irving has claimed Adolf Hitler knew nothing about the systematic slaughter of 6 million Jews, and has said there was “not one shred of evidence” the Nazis carried out their “Final Solution” to exterminate the Jews. He is the author of nearly 30 books, including Hitler’s War, which challenges the extent of the Holocaust and looks at the conduct of World War II from Hitler’s perspective. Mr Kresbach said Irving was now “correcting himself”, insisting that the historian “sees himself as somebody who can influence marginal groups who have difficulty believing in the Third Reich”. He said he would argue at a custody hearing overnight that Irving should be released on bail. No date for the trial has been announced.

In Austria, suspected violations of the law banning attempts to publicly diminish, deny or justify the Holocaust are heard in court by an eight-person jury and three judges. Irving’s arrest won praise worldwide. Earlier this week, Lord Greville Janner of the Britain-based Holocaust Educational Trust praised the Austrians “for doing what our law should but does not permit”. In 2000, Irving brought a libel case against US academic Deborah Lipstadt, who described him as a Holocaust denier. But the case, heard in London, backfired when the judge ruled against Irving, leaving him bankrupt with huge legal bills.

http://theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,17367449%255E2703,00.html

Posted by jonjayray on Saturday, November 26, 2005 at 05:43 AM in That Question Again
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Comments:

Posted by j fitzgerald on November 26, 2005, 08:21 AM | #

Calm down John, your getting carried away with what (you think) Irving acknowledges. Maybe your ‘libertarian soul” should show some compassion for a sixty seven year old historian incarcerated for something he may or may not have said fifteen years ago.

http://www.adelaideinstitute.org/Dissenters1/Irving/recants.htm
Judge Dr. Seda’s War

After a half a dozen calls through the court systems in Vienna one arrives to the office of Judge Dr. Peter Seda. He is the Judge who is willing to take the responsibility for locking up the best living historian on planet earth today.

The calls are routed around and placed on hold time and time again in a manner that indicated a desperate try for the tracing of the source. In my case the calls are looped again and again – they seem to have difficulties tracing a call originating from an IBM laptop, sitting behind a few layers of firewalls.

Finally one arrives to the secretary and it all seems so easy: “If you wish to visit Mr. Irving please come to our office between 9:00 and 12:00AM in the morning on Monday or Wednesday. We will give you a visitor’s permit and you can talk to Mr. Irving.”

I arrive at 11 Landesgericht Strasse close to the center of Vienna from another country, after many hours of traveling. The building is one of those century old huge structures with three feet thick walls, reflecting on the past glorious days of the country when it was Austrians who set their laws, foreign policies and even controlled their own monetary system.

At the entry the metal detector is busy, they take my camera, my metallic ballpoint pen and anything else that can kill, maim or terrorize the deputies who are running around with their side arms.

A friendly woman takes me to the half mile long hallway on the second floor, toward room #2080, at the end. As we are walking toward the room she points out Judge Dr. Seda. He is rather short, dark eyes, with some sort of slight physical disability that shows in his walking, the type who realized at an early age that the ultimate security is in the power of a government position. Judge Seda is a veteran champion for the cause of the Austrian Jews. He is on record for tracking internet thought criminals for at least ten years for “anti-Semitic expressions”, “denial of the Holocaust” and “spreading revisionist literature”. He is also a choice of the establishment for politically sensitive cases: He handled the Austrian investigation into the poisoning of Victor Yuschenko, then a candidate in the elections of The Ukraine, who was poisoned and was treated in Vienna. (2004)

Judge Dr. Seda seems to be a dream came through for the none-too-popular Jewish community in Vienna.

The woman who is leading me realizes that she made a mistake, apologizes and leaves. Judge Dr. Seda tells me to walk to his office and wait there. The secretary is around thirty, long blond hair, blue eyes, with a little extra weight that is normal in her profession. Her face is actually pleasant and I can easily track the ways of her mind as she takes me through a routine that she must have played many times before. As she fills out the half a page sized paper she asks questions: My relation if any to Mr.

Irving. How long did I know him? What year was he born? How did I learn about his arrest? Is there a big publicity about the arrest in other countries? Am I also a writer?

When I ask about the type of charges filed against Mr. Irving, I’m told: “That is not public information.” And so is the bail information.

When Judge Seda arrives in the room he signs the paper, they send me to room #1011 for the paper to be stamped on the first floor. Another half mile in the long hallways, a rather useless exercise since the woman in the room does not ask any questions, simply stamps the paper.

The jail is in the very same building complex. The visiting area is on the ground level. (In Europe they do not count the “first floor” as such, they count it as “ground level” and they number the floors above that.)

The officer behind the window explains it to me that Mr. Irving can have only one thirty minute visit per week and he already had one on Monday.

“Can I call Mr. Irving?”

“No.”

“Can Mr. Irving call me?”

“No.”

“Can I leave some books for Mr. Irving?”

“No, he does not have a permit from the judge.”

“But yes, I can come again next Monday morning and try to be the first…”

“But then Mr. Irving will not be able to see his own family members if they show up…”

I think every one of the players in this tragic-comedy believes that he is normal. They play their parts in this totally insane drama with the true believe that everything is A1, Ok around them but one can actually sense the suffering on the over-controlled faces. These people need help and it will be our job to provide this help for them one day. They need to be freed from the forces of evil that are literally and visibly all around them.

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Posted by Calvin on November 26, 2005, 09:09 AM | #

Frederick Tobens GPR study of the “mass graves” of Treblinka show no trace of soil disturbance. No establishment historian has bothered to provide their own study indicating the location of the mass burials. The self same “gas chamber” doors supposedly installed in the former morgues of Auschwitz have been found in bomb shelters in France. The toxicity of Zyklon is indeterminate. I myself have books poblished in the fifties which testify to mas execution by steam. If I go about announcing that Stalin was a great leader and the Ukranian famine was a myth will I be chased accross four continents and be prosecuted under circumstances in which the truth is not deemed to be admissable as evidence? Cui Bono?

Posted by harryj on November 26, 2005, 07:42 PM | #

Whatever this man has written or said, it is only his view. Why is he persecuted so determindly by all the Western governments, most of whom profess to tolerate free speech. If you don’t agree with him then give him your arguments. There is no doubt but that he really knows his stuff though. A law against “Holocaust Denial” is really fatuous. The truth will always be the truth, whatever it is.

Posted by John J Ray on November 26, 2005, 11:36 PM | #

I certainly know of no-one who has such in-depth knowledge of pre-war Germany as Irving.
I have been studying it off and on for over 40 years and I am an utter amateur compared to him.

But I also think I know what has happened to him. Hitler has literally seduced him. Just Mein Kampf alone is a very persuasive book in may ways. So in studying Nazism he fell in love with it and so endeavours to excuse what it did.

Posted by john fitzgerald on November 27, 2005, 12:38 AM | #

I doubt if Irving has done more than skimmed Mein Kamph,
in the london court he said he doesn’t read books. He has stated that “Table Talk” is a more reliable book.
I think I know what happened to you John, you attribute bad intentions to anyone who doesn’t conform with your world view. But I think no revisionist has bad intentions, and all and everyone of them would honorably change their opinions, if facts pointed towards a different conclusion.

Posted by friedrich braun on November 27, 2005, 12:41 AM | #

Question the ludicrous claims below and face a jail/fine in free and democratic Europe.

6. Examples of Absurd Claims Regarding the Alleged National Socialist Genocide[355]

child surviving six gassings in a gas chamber that never existed;[356]

woman survived three gassings because Nazis kept running out of gas;[357]

fairy tale of a bear and an eagle in a cage, eating one Jew per day;[358]

mass graves expelling geysers of blood;[359]

erupting and exploding mass graves;[360]

soap production from human fat with imprint “RIF “ – ‘Reine Juden Seife’ (pure Jewish
soap), solemn burial of soap;[361]

the SS made sausage in the crematoria out of human flesh (‘RIW’– ‘Reine Juden Wurst’?);[362]

lampshades, book covers, driving gloves for SS officers, saddles, riding breeches, house slippers, and ladies handbags of human skin;[363]

pornographic pictures on canvasses made of human skin;[364]

mummified human thumbs were used as light switches in the house of Ilse Koch, wife of KL commander Koch (Buchenwald);[365]

production of shrunken heads from bodies of inmates;[366]

acid or boiling-water baths to produce human skeletons;[367]

muscles cut from the legs of executed inmates contracted so strongly that they made the buckets jump about;[368]

an SS-father potshooting babies thrown into the air while 9-year old SS-daughter applauds and shrieks: “Papa, do it again; do it again, Papa!"[369]

Jewish children used by Hitler-Youth for target practice;[370]

wagons disappearing on an incline into the underground crematoria in Auschwitz (such facilities never existed);[371]

forcing prisoners to lick stairs clean, and collect garbage with their lips;[372]

injections into the eyes of inmates to change their eye color;[373]

first artificially fertilize women at Auschwitz, then gas them;[374]

torturing people in specially mass-produced “torture boxes” made by Krupp;[375]

torturing people by shooting at them with wooden bullets to make them talk;[376]

smacking people with special spanking machines;[377]

killing by drinking a glass of liquid hydrogen cyanide (which, scientifically considered, evaporates quickly and would endanger those who pouring it into said glass);[378]

killing people with poisoned soft drinks;[379]

underground mass extermination in enormous rooms, by means of high voltage electricity;[380]

blast 20,000 Jews into the twilight zone with atomic bombs;[381]

killing in vacuum chamber, hot steam or chlorine gas;[382]

mass murder in hot steam chamber;[383]

mass murder by tree cutting: forcing people to climb trees, then cutting the trees down;[384]

killing a boy by forcing him to eat sand;[385]

gassing Soviet POWs in a quarry;[386]

gas chambers on wheels in Treblinka, which dumped their victims directly into burning pits; delayed-action poison gas that allowed the victims to leave the gas chambers and walk to the mass graves by themselves;[387]

rapid-construction portable gas chamber sheds;[388]

beating people to death, then carrying out autopsies to see why they died;[389]

introduction of Zyklon gas into the gas chambers of Auschwitz through shower heads or from steel bottles;[390]

electrical conveyor-belt executions;[391]

bashing people’s brains in with a pedal-driven brain-bashing machine while listening to the radio;[392]

cremation of bodies in blast furnaces;[393]

cremation of human bodies using no fuel at all;[394]

skimming off boiling human fat from open-air cremation fires;[395]

mass graves containing hundreds of thousands of bodies, removed without a trace within a few weeks; a true miracle of improvisation on the part of the Germans;[396]

killing 840,000 Russian POWs at Sachsenhausen, and burning the bodies in 4 portable ovens;[397]

removal of corpses by means of blasting, i.e., blowing them up;[398]

SS bicycle races in the gas chamber of Birkenau;[399]

out of pity for complete strangers – a Jewish mother and her child – an SS-man leaps into the gas chamber voluntarily at the last second in order to die with them;[400]

blue haze after gassing with hydrogen cyanide (which is colorless);[401]

singing of national anthems and the Communist International by the victims in the gas chamber; evidence of atrocity propaganda of Communist origin;[402]

a twelve-year old boy giving an impressive and heroic speech in front of the other camp children before being ‘gassed’;[403]

filling the mouths of victims with cement to prevent them from singing patriotic or communist songs.[404]

http://vho.org/GB/Books/dth/fndvalue.html

Posted by Christophe on November 27, 2005, 02:56 PM | #

Another Holohoax lie,

Article,

http://www.heretical.com/miscella/dwarfs.html

Book,

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0786713658/002-2278064-6576801?v=glance&n=283155&v=glance

dwarfs

Posted by James Bowery on November 28, 2005, 06:24 PM | #

Determining the veracity of the Holocaust dogma has never much interested me for a simple reason:

It should be obvious to the most casual observer that what has been made of the Holocaust dogma is a state religion that denies self determination to people who wish not to adhere to the state religion.

This means the authorities enforcing the state religion of what can properly be called “Holocaustianity”, have lost their right to life just as assuredly as the slave traders and slave owners of the Confederate South lost their right to life by denying self determination to their slaves.

Holocaustianity is the faithful acceptance of the dogma of the Holocaust as the proper mythic narrative of 20th century history.

You may count yourself among the faithful if you accept the following:

* 6 million Jews were deliberately exterminated by the Nazis during WW II.
* The choice of this event as the dominant mythic narrative of the 20th century, relegating to obscurity other events, such as the deliberate starvation of 8 to 15 million Ukranian farmers by a largely Jewish Soviet the year before Germans hysterically elected Hitler to power, is not an affront to reason and decency.

You may judge your acceptance of these dogmas by your gut reaction to actions of people who are compared to Nazis vs your gut reaction to people who are compared to Commies. This “still small voice” within you is your guide.

Posted by A Quarefellow on February 13, 2006, 01:39 PM | #

On the subject of “The Cartoons” and free speech, according to the apologists for the Jew who commisioned the sketches, he was exercising his right to free speech; It strikes me as rather odd therefore that no such “rights” seem to have been accorded to David Irving

Posted by Allison Fulthrop on November 07, 2007, 08:46 PM | #

i think that he is very brave for suviving the holocaust. The reason he is probably denying the fact that the holocaust ever exsisted is because they cant believe that any human being could evber do such a harmful thing to another. it is common for a lto of people to deny the holocaust in fear of rememberance. Although it did happen and we should not forget that. I feel as if the world just sat here and let this happen we had the power. One country against hundreds of countries, i believe we sould have over ruled hitler. Over 6 million people were killed because no one would stand up. What kind of example are we setting for our children today? they nees to know thery shoudl stand up for what they believe in no matter what the caust.