From: dzk@cs.brown.edu (Danny Keren)
Subject: Re: URGENT: Need info about David Irving
Organization: Brown University Department of Computer Science
Date: Fri, 9 Oct 1992 04:32:29 GMT

Gavriel, here is some stuff I put together on the IHR, Irving,
and their little fuehrer. Other stuff I collected consists of
the following:

1) Transcripts of original Nazi documents regarding gassing and
   extermination of Jews by other means.
2) A rebutall to the "Leuchter report" and other pseudo-scientific
   claims the Holocaust deniers make.
3) A letter from the most prestigious "Institute of Contemporary
   History" in Munich, regarding the dimensions of the Holocaust.
   IMHO it can serve as a good summary of the issue for the novice
   reader when Holocaust denial comes up.
4) Rebutalls for various claims often made by the deniers.


Let me note that these people(?) have a rather limited arsenal
of claims that they repeat again and again. Once you know
these claims you can easily thrash them in a debate.

Good luck,

-Danny.

Ps - feel free to correct typos and/or ask me about the material
     included below.


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Some facts about the neo-Nazi hierarchy:

at the head of the pyramid is the Liberty Lobby, probably the
biggest racist, white-supremacist, and antisemitic organization
in the US. It is headed by the elusive Willis Carto, a long time
Nazi and Hitler admirer who wrote:

"Hitler's defeat was the defeat of Europe. And of America. How
 could we have been so blind? The blame, it seems, must be laid
 at the door of the international Jews... if Satan himself, with
 all his superhuman genuis and diabolical ingenuity at his command,
 had tried to create a permanent disintegration and force for the
 destruction of nations, he could have done no better than to
 invent the Jews".

(quoted by the late Washington columnist Drew Pearson in October
 1966).

An offshoot of Carto and the "Liberty Lobby" is Noontide press,
a publishing form dedicated to spreading neo-Nazi, white supremacist
and antisemitic literature. Among their publications are:

        "Our Nordic race"
	"The Biology of the Race Problem"
	"The International Jew"
	"The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion"
	"The Testing of Negro Intelligence"

In 1984, the _Wall_Street_Journal_ referred to the "antisemitic,
far-right Liberty Lobby". The organization sued the newspaper for
50 million dollars. the suit was kicked out of court when a federal
judge ruled that no reasonable jury could find the antisemitism
description false. The decision was upheld in 1988 by the US court
of appeals for the District of Columbia, and the court's opinion
was summarized by Judge R.H. Bork: "We tend to agree with a district
court that if the term 'anti-Semitic' has a core, factual meaning,
then the truth of the description was proved here".

In 1979 Carto founded the IHR, or "Institute for Historical Review",
whose goal is to prove that "the Holocaust is a hoax". The editor
of the _IHR_Journal_ is one Mark Weber, who was for many years
associated with the white supremecist group "The National Alliance".

An offshoot of the IHR is the "Committee for open debate
on the Holocaust", headed by one Bradley Smith, a 62 year old
with a high-school education, who has published Holocaust denial
ads in some college newspapers. Smith best sums up his skills
in his autobiography, where he writes: "I never liked intellectual
work; it takes too long".

In 1981, the IHR offered $50,000 to anyone who could prove that
Jews were gassed in Auschwitz. This cruel offer backfired when
the institute had to pay the $50,000 plus $40,000 in pain and
suffering caused to Mel Mermelstein, an Auschwitz survivor who
lost his family in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Here is the
relevant part of the ruling:

     "WHEREAS, on October 9, 1981, the parties in dispute in the litigation
filed cross-motions for summary judgment resulting in the court, per the
Honorable Thomas T. Johnson, taking judicial notice as follows:
  "'Under Evidence Code Section 452(h), this court does take judicial
  notice of the fact that Jews were gassed to death at the Auschwitz
  Concentration Camp in Poland during the summer of 1944'" and "'It just
  simply is a fact that falls within the definition of Evidence Code Section
  452(h).  It is not reasonably subject to dispute.  And it is capable of
  immediate and accurate determination by resort to sources of reasonably
  indisputable accuracy.  It is simply a fact.'"

 
In an attempt to give Holocaust denial a "scientific foundation",
the defense in the trial of the Canadian neo-Nazi Ernest Zundel
(co-author of _The_Hitler_We_loved_and _Why) who was charged of
Holocaust denial, hired a certain Fred Leuchter, who undertook
a "forensic examination" of Auschwitz, and "proved" no gassing
ever took place there. Leuchter, whose formal education consists
of a BA in History, 1964, was ridiculed in court when he proved
to be unaware of the most basic facts concerning HCN, the lethal
gas used in executions in some US states. HCN is released from
Zyklon-B and was used to murder more than a million people at
Auschwitz. Leuchter must have considerable psychic powers, for
he can look at the gas chambers and Krematoriums which were
completely demolished by the SS before they fled Auschwitz, and
tell that they "didn't have air extraction systems to ventilate
the gas out" etc. The fact that numerous SS correspondances 
about the air-extraction system were captured, and that the lower
ventilation grills are still visible in the ruins of the chambers,
does not bother Leuchter at all.

A recent addition to the Holocaust deniers camp is British
author David Irving, a long time Hitler apologist who used
to claim Hitler was not aware of the "Final Solution" and now
claims there was no "Final Solution" at all. Irving is a big 
hero of the neo-Nazi movement in Europe. Recently, he was fined
10,000 Marks in a German court for "defaming the dead", and
there is a warrant for his arrest in Austria, where denying the
Holocaust is illegal. This is what the British House of commons
had to say about Irving in a 20th June 1989 Motion:

"That this house, on the occasion of the reunion in London of
 1,000 refugees from the Holocaust, most of whose families
 were killed in gas chambers or otherwise by Nazi murderers,
 is appaled by the allegation by Nazi propagandist and long
 time Hitler apologist David Irving that the infamous gas
 chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka and Majdanek didn't exist".
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