FOR THE IMMEDIATE ATTENTION OF JOHN WALSH, Fax 01-7825658Book Section, Letters to the Editor
Sir,
It is pure mischief-making for Oren Gruenbaum (Letters, Sept.17 [1989]) to state that in my Los Angeles lecture I said that “the Holocaust never happened at all.”[1] Had he been there, he would have heard me describe from unfamiliar, once-secret British records the appalling atrocities that the SS and other units did commit on the eastern front. I do however refuse to swallow the whole Holocaust package that is now on offer.
There were probably no gas chambers at Auschwitz at all, notwithstanding either the testimony of several eye-witnesses since 1945 that there were, or the laboratory tests purportedly carried out in December 1945 by the Communist regime in Warsaw.
Why should this surprise us? In 1945 there were also reported to have been gas chambers at Dachau, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, and other camps liberated by the Allies. This is now officially accepted not to have been so, and so it will probably soon be with Auschwitz too.
Recent laboratory tests — as momentous as those on the Shroud of Turin, and perfectly capable of being replicated or refuted — found no significant residues of cyanide compounds in the buildings popularly identified as cyanide-gas chambers at Auschwitz; the same tests detected notable cyanide residues, of over 1000 mg per kilogram, in parts of the clothesdisinfestation chamber.