Oświęcim, Poland – It’s a Holocaust denier’s delight.
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For just £2000 (about $2,900), Holocaust deniers and like-minded people can experience a so-called “unforgettable journey of a lifetime” with notorious Holocaust denier David Irving acting as a personal tour guide through four concentration camps in Latvia and Poland, including, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, and Majdanek, as well as Hitler’s headquarters referred to as “Wolf’s Lair” in Ketrzyn.
The ad for the trip reads, “Forget the phony allures, mass-tourism, and “reconstructions” of modern-day Auschwitz – the erstwhile slave-labor camp turned into a tourist attraction complete with hot-dog vendors and souvenir stands!”
As part of the nine-day tour, Irving, 77, promises prospective guests that they will have a chance to “make up your own mind about the truth.” Following the visit to the camps, Irving will lecture about Himmler, the leader of the SS, who is also the topic of Irving’s not-yet-published book, according to a report by the Daily Mail (http://dailym.ai/1JxK66m). Irving still contends that Hitler had no knowledge of the Holocaust.
While Irving admits that hundreds of thousands of people, mostly Jewish, were murdered at Treblinka, he has repeatedly downplayed the massacre that took place there, saying he would prefer to murdered in “this beautiful forest setting, with birds twittering” than at the Communist Party headquarters in Budapest in 1956.
Several organizations have denounced the planned Irving tour saying it is “insulting the memory of Holocaust victims and survivors.”
“This discredited and repellent figure must not be allowed to organize these tours in Poland,” the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism said through a spokesman. “He has already been banned from attending certain sites connected to the Holocaust. Many continental countries where the Holocaust took place have laws limiting hate speech. We question whether the Polish authorities are applying their own laws to their fullest extent if they allow Irving to go ahead with this tour.”
In a statement, the Anti-Defamation League said, “Irving has made a career out of charging people money to listen to his pseudo-historical fantasies. This latest excursion led by Irving to the sites where millions of Jews and others were systematically murdered is another disgusting example of his appalling desecration of the memory of those who perished at the hands of the Nazis.”
In response to criticism that he is profiting off of the death camps by running these tours, Irving has said, “I urge you not to listen too closely to these Schmierfinken [a German word for “hacks”]. What do they know? Have they ever taken the trouble to visit these sites?”
In 1996, Irving filed and lost a £2 million lawsuit against historian Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books for calling him a Holocaust denier. Following the suit, a judge found Irving to be an “active Holocaust denier” who is “anti-Semitic and racist.”
“No objective, fair-minded historian would have serious cause to doubt that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz,” Mr Justice Gray said of Irving. In 2006, Irving served three years in an Austrian prison following a conviction for Holocaust denial. Since being discredited as a historian, Irving has continued to write books and lecture to mainly neo-Nazi and other extremist groups sympathetic to his views.
Mamash nuts!!!
At his age there won’t be many tours.