Well, of course they didn’t, but some Holocaust revisionists say the Nazis were accused of using an atomic bomb on 20,000 Jews at the Nuremberg Trial.
In Auschwitz: Myths and Facts Mark Weber wrote, “At the Nuremberg Tribunal chief US prosecutor Robert Jackson charged that the Germans had used a “newly invented” device to instantaneously “vaporize” 20,000 Jews near Auschwitz “in such a way that here was no trace left of them”. “
In his book Lectures on the Holocaust Germar Rudolf lists several claims about the Holocaust which “the Germans have been forced to unquestioningly accept as “common knowledge” since the end of the war.” (Germar Rudolf, Lectures on the Holocaust, Theses and Dissertations Press,Illinois, 2005, p 435). These include, “Instant obliteration of 20,000 Jews near Silesia using atomic bombs; alleged at IMT” (p 438)
In the 1992 video “David Cole interviews Dr Franciszek Piper”, which I have discussed here, Cole says, “In an almost inconceivable charge it was claimed that the Nazis exterminated Jews with an atomic bomb.” (43 mins)
Jurgen Graf writes “Thus at the Nuremberg trial, US prosecutor Robert Jackson falsely denounced the Germans to former German armaments minister Albert Speer for having blown up 20,000 Jews with an atom bomb at Auschwitz.” This was “confirmed by ‘eye-witness reports’ and ‘perpetrator confessions’. ” (Jurgen Graf, The Giant with Feet of Clay, Theses and Dissertations Press, Alabama, 2001, p 50).
In an article “The Value of testimony and Confessions Concerning the Holocaust”, Manfred Kohler implies that eyewitnesses had said the Nazis killed 20,000 Jews with an atomic bombs (Ernst Gauss (editor), Dissecting the Holocaust, Theses and Dissertations Press, Alabama, 2001, p 129).
These revisionist claims are based on the 21 June 1946 session of the Nuremberg trial, which can be read here, when the Chief US Prosecutor Justice Robert Jackson asked the defendant Albert Speer, Reich Minister for Armaments and War Production about Nazi atomic energy research,
“MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: And certain experiments were also conducted and certain researches were conducted in atomic research, were they not?
SPEER: We had not got as far as that, unfortunately because the finest minds we had in atomic research had emigrated to America, and this had thrown us back a great deal in our research, so that we still needed another year or two in order to achieve any results in the splitting of the atom.
MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: The policy of driving people out who didn’t agree with Germany hadn’t produced very good dividends, had it?
SPEER: Especially in this sphere it was a great disadvantage to us.
MR JUSTICE JACKSON: Now, I have certain information, which was placed in my hands, of an experiment which was carried out near Auschwitz and I would like to ask you if you heard about it or knew about it. The purpose of the experiment was to find a quick and complete way of destroying people without the delay and trouble of shooting and gassing and burning, as it had been carried out, and this is the experiment, as I am advised. A village, a small village was provisionally erected, with temporary structures, and in it approximately 20,000 Jews were put. By means of this newly invented weapon of destruction, these 20,000 people were eradicated almost instantaneously, and in such a way that there was no trace left of them; that it developed, the explosive developed, temperatures of from 4000 to 5000 [?] [degrees] centigrade and destroyed them without leaving any trace at all.
Do you know about that experiment?
SPEER: No, and I consider it utterly improbable. If we had had such a weapon under preparation, I should have known about it. But we did not have such a weapon. It is clear that in chemical warfare attempts were made on both sides to carry out research on all the weapons one could think of, because on did not know which party would start chemical warfare first.
MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: The reports, then, of a new and secret weapon ere exaggerated for the purpose of keeping the German people in the war?
SPEER: That was the case mostly during the last phase of the war. From August, or rather June or July 1944 on I very often went to the front. I visited about 40 front-line divisions in their sectors and could not help seeing the troops, just like the German people, were given hopes about a new weapon coming, new weapons and wonder-weapons which, without requiring the use of soldiers, without military forces, would guarantee victory. In this belief lies the secret why so many people in Germany offered their lives, although common sense told them the war was over. They believed that in the near future this new weapon would arrive. “ (Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 1947, Vol. 16, p 529-530)
Jackson asked Speer if this report was true. Speer said no. It was probably only Nazi propaganda to encourage the troops. That is all. The subject was dropped and they moved on. There were no eyewitnesses who claimed the Nazis killed 20,000 Jews with an atomic bomb in Auschwitz. The Allies did not torture any Nazis into confessing they had blown up Jews with an atomic bomb, as revisionists have to claim they did to German witnesses to the gas chambers.Speer was free to say it did not happen. In fact, the weapon was not even referred to as an “atomic bomb”, although it sounds like one.The Germans have not been forced to unquestioningly accept it as common knowledge as Germar Rudolf alleges.
On the other hand, Germar Rudolf claims that the Nazis really did test “nuclear bombs” in March 1945 and several hundred people were killed, including some inmates from the Ohrdruf concentration camp (Lectures on the Holocaust, p 438). If the Nazis did have atomic bombs, one would have thought they would used them on the Russians who were about to overrun Berlin. I assume Rudolf believes this because it would make the Nazis look intelligent.
An alternative title to this blog could be “Why some Holocaust revisionists need to read a book” because I have noticed that many of those who deny the Holocaust happened do not seem to know much about the Holocaust. I wonder if some of them have ever read any conventional history books on the subject.
I discussed an example of this in my last blog Holocaust revisionists and the “fake gas chamber’ in Auschwitz I when I quoted the British revisionist David Irving in his 1993 video “The Search for Truth in History” in which he defined the Holocaust as, “Adolf Hitler ordered the killing of 6 million jews in Auschwitz”. Irving then claims that the gas chamber is a fake, implying that 6 million jews could not have been gassed in it. Nobody with a basic knowledge of the Holocaust believes 6 million Jews were killed in Auschwitz. About 1.1 million Jews were killed in Auschwitz. Around 2 million were killed in the other extermination camps of Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. Between 1 to 2 million were shot by the Einsatzgruppen on the Eastern Front and others died from disease and starvation in concentration camps and ghettos.
Likewise, the gas chamber in Crematorium I in Auschwitz I is not a fake, but a reconstruction. it operated from 1941 to 1942 and around 10,000 people were gassed in it (Jean-Claude Pressac, Auschwitz:Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, New York, 1989, p 132).
During 1942, around 100,000 Jews were gassed in the provisional gas chambers Bunkers I and II at Birkenau or Auschwitz II. The majority of the Jews who were gassed in Auschwitz were killed in the four gas chambers in Crematoria II, III, IV and V in Birkenau which operated between 1943 and 1944.
Only people, who do not know these basic facts about Auschwitz, have been persuaded by Irving’s video.
Map of Auschwitz showing the locations of Auschwitz I and Auschwitz-BirkenauMap of Birkenau showing the locations of the four crematoria
Some Holocaust revisionists do not know how many gas chambers there were and they base their arguments against the Holocaust on their ignorance. One of the first Holocaust deniers was Paul Rassinier (1906-1967) who has been called the father of Holocaust revisionism. In his book The Real Eichmann Trial he wrote about the plans for the crematoria, “The first two are construction plans for four crematory ovens at Auschwitz-Birkenau, numbered II-III-Iv and V, which leads one to suppose that I has not been found, at least to my knowledge” (Paul Rassinier, The Real Eichmann Trial or The Incorrigible Victors, Historical Review Press, Warks, 1979, p 96).
The s0-called father of Holocaust revisionism did not know Crematorium I was in Auschwitz I.
In his book Auschwitz: A Judge Looks at the Evidence another revisionist Wilhelm Staeglich (1916-2006) writes, “There actually may have been one crematorium in Birkenau, not four” (Wilhelm Staeglich, Auschwitz: A Judge Looks at the Evidence, Institute for Historical Review, California, 1990, p 172), He also describes how a person looked around Birkenau but he could not find the remains of Crematoria IV and V (p 49).
A lot of other Holocaust revisionists understand there were four crematoria in Birkenau, they just deny there were gas chambers inside them. Staeglich knew so little about Auschwitz, he was not sure how many crematoria there were, but he thought he could write a book saying there were no gas chambers.
The person, who couldn’t find Crematoria IV and V could have just gone to the Auschwitz museum shop and bought a guide book with a map.
Remains of Crematorium IV in Birkenau. It’s not find to hard.
In his 1995 book Stoker former Australian POW Donald Watt claimed to have worked in Crematorium II in Birkenau. In a speech “False Memories” at the Adelaide Institute’s 1998 International Revisionist Symposium Peter Richards said,
“It is interesting to note that the only detail Watt provides about the alleged gas chambers is to state that they were located underground … Of course the alleged gas chamber that is shown to the gullible tourists visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau is located very much above ground.” (Adelaide Institute Newsletter, No. 90, p 3)
Stoker has been exposed as a hoax, however Peter Richards still did not know what he was talking about. Watt falsely claimed to have been in Crematorium II in Auschwitz-Birkenau which is underground. Richards is referring to the above-ground gas chamber in Crematorium I in Auschwitz I, not Auschwitz-Birkenau. This is pretty basic stuff, which someone who thinks they are qualified to speak at an “international symposium” should know.
Model of Crematorium II in Birkenau showing the underground gas chamber
Also in The Search for Truth in History David Irving argues that the fact that so many Jews survived Auschwitz suggests that it could not have been an extermination camp, “Tens of thousands of Jews survived Auschwitz, which we are told was an extermination camp,where the Nazis were killing every Jew they could lay their hands on, isn’t there something a bit paradoxical here?”
Another Holocaust revisionist Hans Schmidt made a similar argument, “If Hitler had given the order to murder all the Jews within Nazi reach, then there would not have been millions of so-called “Holocaust survivors”.” (Hans Schmidt, End Times/End Games, Hans Schmidt, Florida, 1999, p 229)
Only those, who do not know what the Holocaust was, would find this argument convincing. The Holocaust was not a pogrom in which the Nazis killed every Jew they could find. No Holocaust historian has ever said that it was. In general, some Jews, who were fit enough, were kept alive and used for slave labour, while unfit Jews were killed outright. Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels explained their intentions in a well-known passage in his diary dated March 27, 1942,
“Beginning with Lublin, the Jews are now being deported eastward from the Government-General. The procedure is pretty barbaric, and one that beggars description, and there’s not much left of the Jews. Broadly speaking one can probably say that sixty percent of them will have to be liquidated, while only forty percent can be put to work.” (David Irving, Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich, Focal Point, London, 1996, p 388)
When the Jews arrived in Auschwitz, they underwent a selection process. Fit Jews were admitted into the camp, registered and used as slave labour where many of them died of disease and exhaustion. The unfit Jews were gassed and never registered. 1.3 million people were transported to Auschwitz, but only 400,000 were registered as inmates. The other 900,000 were gassed on arrival. Revisionists claim they were not gassed, but they cannot tell us what happened to them instead. Around 200,000 of the 400,000 registered inmates survived. Revisionists point to these 200,000 survivors and claim they prove Auschwitz was not an extermination camp, but they are silent about the fate of the other 1.1 million people. (Franciszek Piper, “The Number of Victims”, in Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum (editors), Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1998, p 61-72)
Photo of the selection process of Hungarian Jews arriving in Birkenau in 1944
The Nazi concentration camps actually held more non-Jews than Jews. Peter Black writes,
“The majority of the prisoners in the Reich camps in 1942-44 were Slavs, primarily Poles and Russians; after these came the resistance fighters and forced labourers from western Europe; Italian labourers, who arrived in the camps after the Italian surrender on September 8, 1943; and finally German political and criminal prisoners.” (Peter Black, “Forced Labor in the Concentration Camps 1942-1944” in Michael Berenbaum (editor), A Mosaic of Victims, L.B. Tauris, London, 1990, p 56)
Some Holocaust revisionists seem to think that the camps only contained Jews. An article “Himmler to the SS: Don’t let the Jews Die” in The Barnes Review (January-February 2001, p 49) gives the impression that Himmler did not want the Jews killed, which does not sound like an extermination policy. However, this article is refering to a directive given by Hmmler on Deecemebr 28, 1942, which can be read at the bottom of this link PS-2171. Himmler never said, “Don’t let the Jews die.” He wanted the overall death rate in the camps reduced so there would be more inmates for slave labour, most of whom were not Jews.
As I mentioned in my previous blog post, there was a water storage tank for the fire brigade in Auschwitz I which was used as a swimming pool by some privileged inmates. There was also a brothel in Auschwitz and some other camps. Some revisionists want us to think that the Jewish inmates could use the pool and brothel, Auschwitz sounds like place for Jews to have spent the war. They do not understand that there was a hierarchy of inmates in the camps. Aryan criminal and political prisoners had more rights and privileges and were treated better, and some could use the brothel and pool, while the Jews were at the bottom and treated a lot worse, and of course could not use the brothel or pool. (Lawrence Rees, Auschwitz, The Nazis and the Final Solution, BBC Books, London, 2005, p 249-254, Wolfgang Sofsky, The Order of Terror, The Concentration Camp, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1997, p 117-129)
Pool in Auschwitz I
While Auschwitz was both a concentration and extermination camp, where some Jews were kept alive to work and others were gassed, there were also the “pure” extermination camps of Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, where the Nazis were “killing every Jew they could lay their hands on”, and only a handful were kept alive. Around 2 million Jews were sent to these camps and about 110 survived (Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1985, p 287, 502). To use David Irving’s argument, the fact that there were not thousands of survivors from these camps shows they were extermination camps.
Holocaust revisionists claim these extermination camps were really transit camps and the Jews, who were sent there, went somewhere else, but they cannot show us where. They have no evidence.
Some revisionists do not seem to understand that Jews were killed in both Auschwitz and other extermination camps of Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. They think these are different versions of the Holocaust. This can be seen in Brandon Lewis’ review of Less Than Slaves: Jewish Forced Labor and the Quest for Compensation by Benjamin Ferencz published in the Journal for Historical Review. Lewis writes,
“According to the author, Jews not fit for work in the Krupp and other plants at Auschwitz would be packed off to Birkenau(Brzezinka) for gassing. The camps of Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Chelmno (Kulmhof-an-der-Neer) were the only camps purely for extermination … The “revised” exterminationist view of Ferencz tallies rather closely with that of Gitta Sereny’s version of Holocaust mythology in the New Statesman of 2 November 1979. They place the exterminations at the four camps Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka and Sobibor, although Ferencz adds Birkenau and the mysterious Latvian camp, Jungfernhop. Could it be that there is some collusion here, whereby the Exterminationist high priests have got together to get their stories straight. Perhaps they realize that the game is up as far as Auschwitz and the old Reich camps are concerned,and now they are trying to salvage whatever they can find from the rapidly crumbling Holocaust house of cards? They haves ought refuge in the only possible canon, which is to maintain that the exterminations took place at camps which have been obliterated without trace, and that the function of Auschwitz and the western camps was to work people to death.”
Brandon Lewis was a pseudonym for David McCalden, founder of the institute for Historical Review, the biggest Holocaust revisionist organisation in the United States. He thought that revisionists had disproved Auschwitz, yet he did not know that Birkenau was part of Auschwitz.
Similarly, in 2003 in Australia Andrew Zielinski published a book Conversations with Regina about his mother’s expereinces in Sobibor. The Adelaide Institute Newsletter, June 2003, No. 197, suggested Sobibor was a “new gas chamber location”. It looks like the Adelaide Institute,the main revisionist organisation in Australia, was unaware before 2003 that there was an extermination camp called Sobibor.
The extermination camps of Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka are not new versions of the Holocaust. The Allies knew about them and Auschwitz as early as 1942-43 (Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies, Michael Joseph/Rainbird, London, 1981,William Laqueur, The Terrible Secret, Owl Books, New York, 1998). Their role is discussed in the first major history books on the Holocaust The Final Solution by Gerald Reitlinger, published in 1953, and The Destruction of the European Jews by Raul Hilberg, published in 1961. There is nothing new here.
Likewise, the New Statesman article of Gitta Sereny which Lewis mentioned, was called “Men Who Whitewash HItler” about Holocaust deniers and is reprinted in her book The German Trauma, Penguin , London, 2000, p 135-146. She mentioned both Auschwitz and the other camps Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, but she did not propose any new version of the Holocaust. She only repeated what historians already knew. I have no idea what Lewis was thinking. Holocaust revisionists are saying there are new versions of the Holocaust, historians have to change their minds because revisionists have disproved the Holocaust, when they simply do not know what they are talking about.
In 1996 Daniel Jonah Goldhagen published a controversial book Hitler’s Willing Executioners which focused on the mass shootings of Jews behind the Eastern Front. In Holocaust or Hoax? Jurgen Graf claimed this book was a new version of the Holocaust, “This “new, improved” version is apparently intended to replace the version which has so far placed the central emphasis on the gas chambers as the instrument of the mass extermination of the Jews.”
Goldhagen did not propose a new version of the Holocaust. Like every other Holocaust historian he knew that Jews were both killed in gas chambers in Auschwitz and other extermination camps and others were also killed in mass shootings on the Eastern Front. He just focused on the shootings (Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Little, Brown and Co., London, 1996, p 157, 523).
Some Holocaust revisionists cannot get their heads around the idea that some Jews were gassed (and not all in the same place) and others were shot, and think it has to be either/or when every Holocaust knows it was both. Like Auschwitz and the other extermination camps, these are not different versions of the Holocaust. Revisionists just need to read more books.
There were three camps in Auschwitz – the original main camp, Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II or Birkenau, and Auschwitz III or Monowitz. The first gassings in Auschwitz took place in a gas chamber in Auschwitz I during 1941 and 1942. It has been estimated that less than 10,000 people were gassed there (Jean-Claude Pressac, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, New York, 1989, p 134). The majority of the Jews who were gassed in Auschwitz were killed in Birkenau or Auschwitz II. Some Holocaust revisionists or deniers have been claiming that the Auschwitz museum authorities have admitted that the gas chamber in Auschwitz I is a fake.
One of the main sources for this claim is this 1992 video featuring David Cole, a Holocaust revisionist of Jewish background (yes, there is such a thing) and his trip to Auschwitz.
Cole hired a private tour guide Alicia who “had to take a class and memorize a spiel” in which Cole claims the Auschwitz museum authorities such as Dr Piper and the tour guide supervisor “teach their tour guides to say things they know aren’t true” (10 mins).
Inside Auschwitz I’s gas chamber Cole shows that one of the doors is an ordinary wooden door with a glass pane which is clearly not gas-tight, while there is no door at all connecting the gas chamber to the crematorium room, internal walls have been removed and holes in the roof through which the Zyklon B was dropped were added later (16-18 mins).
When Cole asks Alicia, she says that the gas chamber is in its original condition, including the roof holes. She gets flustered and confused when Cole shows her where the internal walls clearly used to be (18-19 mins).
Alicia sent for the supervisor of tour guides who explains that the roof holes are not original but were added after the war and suggests Cole make an appointment with Dr Franciszek Piper of the Auschwitz State Museum (20-21 mins).
Piper explains that the gas chamber in Auschwitz I stopped operating in December 1942 while the crematorium in the same building continued until July 1943. In 1944 the building was converted into an air raid shelter, walls were added and the roof holes were blocked up. After the war the internal walls were removed and the roof holes were added again (24-28 mins).
Cole claims that this is a “clear deception” because “the gas chamber is shown to tourists as being in its original state even though the museum officials know better” (28 min).
It is not a deception at all. Alicia had taken “a class”, she was not an expert and English was clearly not her first language. She was being asked questions she did not know the answers to. She should have just admitted she did not know. The more senior officials had no problem explaining that it is not in its original condition. There is no cover up.
You can read Franciszek Piper’s opinion of the interview here.
Furthermore, Piper’s statement, that the Auschwitz I gas chamber is not original but a reconstruction, is not a new revelation. In 1989 Jean-Claude Pressac wrote in Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers that the building had been converted from a gas chamber into an air raid shelter in 1944 and restored after the war (p 132-133).
(The question of the location of the original insertion holes in Crematorium I in Auschwitz I and Crematorium II in Birkenau is examined in Daniel Keren, Jamie McCarthy and Harry W. Mazal, “The Ruins of the Gas Chambers: A Forensic Investigation of Crematoriums at Auschwitz I and Auschwitz-Birkenau”, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring 2004, p 68-103. The section concerning Auschwitz I’s gas chamber can be read online here.)
In 1993 after David Irving had been banned from entering Australia, he released a video The Search for Truth in History.
In this video Irving defines the Holocaust as, “The Holocaust, with a capital H, is what’s gone down in history in this one sentence form, so to speak, “Adolf Hitler ordered the killing of 6 million Jews in Auschwitz” (21 min). A few minutes later, Irving says that in 1989 (before Cole’s interview of Piper), Professor Bernd Martin of the University of Freiburg told him that Piper had told him “the gas chamber, the one they show tourists in Auschwitz is in fact a fake, built after the war by the Poles” (27 min).
Nobody who knows anything about the Holocaust thinks 6 million Jews were killed in Auschwitz. As the David Cole video explains, about 1.1. million Jews died in Auschwitz. The rest died in other camps, ghettos or were killed in mass shootings behind the Eastern Front. Instead, Irving gives his listeners the impression that all the Jews in the Holocaust were killed in Auschwitz and then says the gas chamber in Auschwitz is a fake, so they could not have been gassed in a fake gas chamber. He does not even tell them that most of the Jews who were gassed in Auschwitz were not killed in the supposed fake gas chamber in Auschwitz I, but in the gas chambers of Auschwitz II or Birkenau. The only people, who would be convinced by Irving’s argument, would know nothing about the Holocaust in the first place.
This video Judea Declares War on Germany by Frederick Toben of the Adelaide Institute in Australia is dated 2004, but I saw it around 1997.
Toben also argues that the Auschwitz I gas chamber could not have been a gas chamber because it has an ordinary wooden door which is not gas-tight (3 min, 51 min). However, he also says that the 1996 book Auschwitz 1270 to the Present by Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt said the Auschwitz I gas chamber “is nothing but a fraud” (1:06 min).
Toben cannot have it both ways. If the building is not in its original wartime condition, he cannot argue that its current condition means it could not have been a gas chamber.
David Irving would also accuse van Pelt of saying the gas chamber is a fake, “You quote Broad on pages 301-2 describing, in a 1991 book of memoirs, the “effective gas chamber which could hold 900 people” in the main camp (i.e. Auschwitz I), but on pages 363-4 you confirm that there never was a gas chamber at Auschwitz I, and that the one shown to the tourists since the war is a fake built by Polish Communists.” (Robert Jan van Pelt, The Case for Auschwitz, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2002, p 120)
Van Pelt did not “confirm there never was a gas chamber at Auschwitz I”. He said there was one (Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Auschwitz 1270 to the Present, W.W. Norton, New York, 1996, p 301-302). He did not say the gas chamber is a fake, but a reconstruction (p 363-364).
Other monuments, such as the Parthenon, Angkor Wat and the Great Wall of China, have been restored. They are not fakes. These revisionists are dishonestly equating a reconstruction with a fake. They are not the same thing.
Revisionists know the difference. Around 7 minutes into another video about his trip to Auschwitz, David Cole and Canadian revisionist Ernst Zundel stand in front of the swimming pool in Auschwitz I which Cole says is a reconstruction, it has been restored to its original state.
Unlike the reconstructed gas chamber, Cole does not suggest the reconstructed pool is a fake.
Yes, there was a water storage tank which was also used as a pool in Auschwitz I. Revisionists get really excited about it because they want us to believe Auschwitz was actually a nice place, but only some of the more privileged non-Jewish inmates were allowed to use it (Lawrence Rees, Auschwitz, The Nazis and the Final Solution, BBC Books, London, 2005, p 253-254).
Likewise, the barb wire at Auschwitz is not original. It loses its tenacity after a few years and has to be replaced. That does not mean the barb wire fences are fake.
The Auschwitz I gas chamber is not a serious attempt to deceive the tourists. As revisionists point out, it has a wooden door and no door connecting the gas chamber to the oven room. If the Auschwitz authorities had really wanted to deceive people, they would have done a better job and put some proper gas-tight doors in.
After a few years on the Holocaust revisionist circuit Cole lost interest in Holocaust revisionism. He changed his name to David Stein and went on to make several documentaries saying the Holocaust happened. His IMDb page is here. He founded a group called Republican Party Animals which threw wild parties for conservative celebrities and politicians until an ex-girlfriend exposed his past in 2013. His autobiography Republican Party Animal can be read here.
Malcolm Nicholson 