Sometimes the public is receptive to the results, sometimes not. It is unlikely that the world's public will be as receptive, yet, to the results of the professional and dispassionate chemical examination of the remains of the wartime Auschwitz concentration camp which is at the centre of this report.
Nobody likes to be swindled, still less where considerable sums of money are involved.
As late as August 1943 the head of the PWE minuted the Cabinet secretly that despite the stories they were putting out, there was not the slightest evidence that such contraptions existed, and he continued with a warning that stories from Jewish sources in this connection were particularly suspect. As a historian I have, on occasion, had recourse to fraud laboratories to test controversial documents for their authenticity. Nor, as the report's gruesomely expert author makes plain, could the design and construction of those buildings have made their use as mass gas- chambers feasible under any circumstances. There could be no doubt as to their integrity. But it is now up to them to explain to me as an intelligent and critical student of modern history why there is no significant trace of any cyanide compound in the building which they have always identified as the former gas chambers.