London, August 12, 1992

READER’S LETTER

Dear Sir,

EXTERMINATION OF THE JEWS

Your reader David Syme (August 7) asks why I am not impressed by the “confessions” of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess that he gassed two million people in the camp between June 1941 and the end of 1943. I have many reasons, but let me just list these: Hoess told fellow prisoners he was brutally tortured by both his British captors and the Poles, who had forced him to write the “confession”. Even the present Auschwitz archives would not dream of claiming “two million” — so why did he!

Hoess’s own daily statistical reports to his chiefs in Berlin, enciphered in top secret S.S. Enigma code, were read regularly by the British codebreakers: they refer to the horrifying death toll from epidemics (hence the tons of Zyklon pesticide shipped to the camp), and to a few executions by hanging and shooting, but “there is no reference to any gassings” (as the British Official Historians themselves point out.) Moreover, Hoess’s dates are quite impossible. Any historian who uncritically relies on Hoess’s “confession” needs to be defrocked.

Yours sincerely,

DAVID IRVING

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1. See the December 1998 dossier by Samuel Crowell on this problematical source document

©Focal Point 1998    write to David Irving