Holocaust denier David Irving to begin leading tours of Auschwitz next week

[Behind the Aegis]

Source: Ha'aretz

Holocaust denier David Irving will begin leading tours of the former Nazi death camps of Auschwitz and Treblinka next week.

The British historian is also scheduled to lead a group of American and British tourists in the former Warsaw ghetto. His tour brochure promises an experience far removed from the "tourist attractions of Auschwitz". He will charge the tour participants $2,650 each.

The plan has led Jewish organizations in London to express "deep concern".

Last Friday, the Daily Mail quoted Irving as saying that Polish authorities have turned the site of the former Nazi death camp Auschwitz into a "Disney-style" tourist attraction.


Read more: http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/holocaust-denier-david-irving-to-begin-leading-tours-of-auschwitz-next-week-1.314014

[Kurt Remarque]

1. truly bizarre

[Starry Messenger]

2. wtf??

That creep shouldn't be allowed anywhere near there, let alone charging money for tours. Barf.

[Behind the Aegis]

3. Makes you wonder what is next...tours of Laramie, WY by Fred Phelps?!

I know, a Black history class taught by David Duke at Howard University or a lecture on the sanctity of marriage by Newt Gingrich!

[Starry Messenger]

5. Exactly!

You put it better than I did. I just had a mental image of his unctuous face rolling about, lying about his bullshit while strolling about the camps enriching himself. :evilfrown: There really ought to be laws against this. This is horrifying on so many levels.

[David__77]

4. And the fascist Polish authorities allow this...

Poland is a cesspool of backwardness, a scene of utter depravity. A country that has brought forth geniuses like Rosa Luxemburg... may it reform itself.

[boppers]

6. Marie Curie is my favorite Polish genius.

Such great highs, such low lows....

[David__77]

7. Well, that Poland exists as a country is a testament to its strength.

The heroic resistance of its working people against the German occupiers and their local enforcers was a great contributions to Poland and the people of the world. Danzig/Gdansk and other areas were their "prize" given them for their anti-fascist stand.

[boppers]

10. Oh, it's been going on for many, many, *hundreds* of years.

The WWII thing was just another in a long, long, series.

[proteus_lives]

11. Don't forget their decades long struggle against the Russian occupiers and their local lackeys.

[RZM]

14. Your post reads so much like a 1940s Pravda article

that I almost think you cut and pasted an English translation . . .

The 'recovered territories,' as they are called, were given to Poland to compensate for their eastern territory seized by the Soviets in Sept. 1939 and officially rechristened 'Western Urkaine and Western Belorussia' shortly after. Stalin never wavered from his position that after the war, the Soviet Union be allowed to keep the territory they seized in collusion with the Germans, including also the Baltic states and portions of Romania, despite the fact that they lost control of these areas in the opening phase of Operation Barbarossa. The Western powers eventually acquiesced and also endorsed the large-scale ethnic cleansing that was deemed necessary to turn Eastern Germany into Western Poland. Your post is remarkable for its accurate reproduction of the exact type of language you saw in the Soviet press as well as the press in 'People's Poland' at the time.

[Name removed]

15. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[RZM]

16. I've never seen that logo

nor did I have any idea what it means (I had to google it). Are you trying to imply something?

[LostinVA]

28. Sure you don't

[LostinVA]

21. uh huh

[pnorman]

22. "...seized by the Soviets in Sept. 1939 "

That territory was originally Russian (pre WW1 border), and the inhabitants were predominantly Russian (Ukranian). By ethnicity,it was Russian, followed by Jewish, and third was Polish.

Without getting into a discussion of Stalinism, or even "Bolshevism", that border adjustment was close to "the self-determination of peoples" that Wilson preached.

[RZM]

25. That's not entirely correct

You are certainly right in claiming that Poles were a minority in the 'kresy,' as they called their eastern borderlands. The 1931 Polish census showed showed the most numerous group in the region being Poles, followed by Ukrainians, Belorussians, and Jews (there actually weren't very many people who spoke Russian as their first language in the region). However, it's generally agreed that the Polish authorities had fudged the data to inflate the number of Poles and justify their claim to the territory. Probably Ukrainians (who were overwhelmingly rural and peasant and had no power at all in the Polish state) were most numerous, followed by the other groups, though most of the political and economic power was held by Poles. Not all of the territory had belonged to the Russian Empire either, a large chunk of the southern portions had been under the rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before WWI.

I'll admit I'm a bit of an agnostic as to who 'deserved' this territory. But the official Soviet justification for the invasion of Sept. 17, 1939 (yes it was an invasion -- though there wasn't much fighting, since the Poles had their hands full with the Germans at the time -- but hundreds of thousands of Red Army troops were used) was that the Soviets' Ukrainian and Belorussian 'blood brothers' had been 'utterly abandoned to their fate' by the disintegration of the Polish state, which had fallen apart due to its 'internal contradictions' and that Soviet intervention was necessary in order to protect these populations. That's pretty lol-worthy, seeing as the Polish state collapsed due to the German and Soviet military invasions, their respective spheres of influence determined by the infamous 'secret protocols' of the Nazi-Soviet pact. It's certainly true that much of the non-Polish population initially welcomed the Soviets, due to the Polish state's harsh treatment of the non-Poles and official anti-Semitism, though of course many Jews were just relieved that they were spared living under the Nazis. As an aside, many of those the Soviets deemed 'Belorussians' had little to no conception of ethnic identity or identification with other groups, preferring to see themselves as 'locals.'

However, the subsequent transformation of this territory into 'Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia' from 1939-1941 was a crime, no matter how you slice it. As one author puts it, the region became the 'center of gravity of Soviet repression' during this period, with hundreds of thousands of people either deported, imprisoned, or shot (in terms of numbers, in that order). The Soviet goal was to more or less decapitate Polish civil society, to ensure that an independent, anti-Soviet Poland could never again emerge and to take care of anyone else deemed 'anti-Soviet' while they were at it. Those with connections to the Polish state (administrators, police, teachers, lawyers, journalists etc.) were arrested en masse from the beginning of the process. Other groups targeted for deportation included prostitutes, resettled veterans of the Polish-Soviet war of 1920-21, the families of the aforementioned arrested, Ukrainian nationalists, Zionists (including a young Menachem Begin), and even Jewish refugees who fled Nazi-occupied Poland (ironically for these folks, the deportations saved their lives, since most Jews who remained in the region were wiped out in the holocaust). This is just a short list of some of the most numerous repressed groups, there were plenty more, including even Esperantists and stamp collectors!?!?

Soviet documents show about 300,000 people deported from this region from 1939-1941 (mostly ethnic Poles), but the real number is certainly higher -- in August 1941, shortly after the Soviets and Polish exile government signed an agreement in the wake of Barbarossa, over 400,000 Poles in the Soviet interior were 'amnestied' (their crimes being belonging to one of the aforementioned repressed groups). A good portion of deportees were women and children and I'm sure everybody is familiar how awful living and transport conditions were for these people and the millions of others moved around against their will during Stalin's rule.

[Name removed]

26. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[RZM]

29. Your post is the most shocking I've ever seen here on DU

Your accusation is very serious and I find it incredibly insulting -- I also find it irritating that I'm forced to defend myself against this crap (nobody, in real life or in the internet, has ever leveled this kind of accusation, or anything REMOTELY like it against me, ever). But nonetheless, here I go . . .

First off, I did NOT alert the mods to the earlier post, though I probably should have and I was glad to see this morning that it was deleted. My handle comes from an abbreviation of a gibberish word I made up and used as an email address years ago. DU is actually the first place I have ever used the letters 'RZM' in any way (I find it hard to think of snappy handles and rather than use the old email address, I opted for something slightly related).

I am an historian, not a collector of military memorabilia. I had no idea that RZM stood for the German military quartermaster -- why the hell would I? I read documents and books -- I don't go to military collector's shows. I actually do enjoy military memorabilia and I hope to own more some day (currently all I have is a helmet that once belonged to an American soldier in Vietnam, which I purchased about 10 years ago for $25). But that's it. I've never really felt the desire to spend money on memorabilia, but if in the future I have more disposable income, I'd think about it (though I'll bet the price of most WWII stuff would be still be prohibitively high). But I have no special attraction to Nazi memorabilia; I find it no more or less interesting than materials from the other combatants in the Second World War.

I also had no idea that RZM is the name of a neo-Nazi organization. Again, why would I? I do not travel in those circles nor do I have any interest at all in holocaust denial (other than to be familiar with their arguments in order to better refute them). I find holocaust deniers despicable (those who know me know that I'm very hostile to most conspiracy theories). I've read piles of materials about the Second World War over the years -- though my focus is more the Soviet side of things, obviously I've read many materials on German crimes and I'm very familiar with their scale and horror. To think somebody would EVER think I have the slightest sympathy for such things makes me simultaneously sad and furious.

And as far as your assertion that my 'posts and comments on Poland are well-known memes in neo-fascist circles,' you're clearly clueless on the current state of the scholarship. Well-known historians such as Timothy Snyder, RC Raak, Jan Gross, Keith Sword, Katherine Jolluck, and many others have written extensively on this subject and have advanced arguments similar to mine. Much of what I say would qualify as 'orthodoxy' in the English-language historiography -- again, I'm not familiar with the memes of 'neo-fascist circles' (though I suspect that what I and these other historians argue does not match up with it is as much as you claim) but I'll leave that to you, since you are clearly much more familiar with these groups than I am

I would appreciate it if you would retract your statement and issue me an apology ('off-list' on the private email is fine). Congrats on making me angrier than I've been in a very long time.

*Edit* -- I hope the mods do not delete your post, so people can see it and my refutation and decide for themselves

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

31. This is getting interesting.

:popcorn:

I'd like to see LostinVA respond to this rebuttal.

[LostinVA]

32. Then you haven't been reading DU very long, have you?

I said my piece, you said yours. I'm not engaging anymore, and didn't allow PMs from you for this very reason.

[RZM]

33. Long-term reader, short term poster

Been reading since 2002 (with frequent breaks). You took the presence of THREE LETTERS (you do realize there's only 26 right, and a combination of any three could very well match up with any number of historical acronyms) and WELL ACCEPTED argument about the issue of shifting borders in WWII to call me a neo-Nazi. Yet now, when you're being proven wrong, you don't want to talk about it anymore. Do you understand that this matters to me? For you, this is just a smear tossed out with little thought -- for me, it's an incredibly vile misrepresentation of what I stand for. There's really nothing worse you can call somebody. I'm intimately familiar with what went on during this period and I will not accept being associated with approval of it.

This is not the same as calling someone a freeper or a troll. Please retract your statement.

[RZM]

30. I have plenty more I'd like to say to you

But it appears you don't allow private messages. Why not?

How about lifting the restriction for a moment so we can correspond.

[pnorman]

35. Thanks for the detailed fill-in, but it dioesn't really alter my point.

That disputed territory was NOT a "clear cut case of naked aggression by the Soviets". Along with people of Polish ethnecity, Russians (Ukranians) also had a very valid claim to iit. That the total claims might amount to over 200% should come as no great surprise. That situation is repeated throughout the world, time and time again, but with no satisfactory solution in sight.

Once more, "Stalinism" and/or "Bolshevism" should remain out of this discussion, as well as whether or not Ukraine (Byelorussia) really "belongs" to Russia.

[CJvR]

37. Not?

How much clearer can you get?

Two thugs decide on mugging someone and agree that one should have watch and the other the wallet and you don't think this is clear cut?

[pnorman]

40. Agreed that it was blatant thuggery!

It was not my intent to whitewash that infamous Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact (with the secret clauses), and I regret not not having made that clear. But Poland did NOT have a clear and indisputable claim to that that disputed territory. Russia had an even better claim to it.

[CJvR]

41. Based on?

Where in history do you draw the line and say this is the original righteous state of the world?

[RZM]

38. Well . .

First, I don't recall ever saying 'clear case of naked aggression,' though it clearly was (peace one day, pact with Hitler the next, German invasion one week after, Soviet invasion 16 days after that) But it's really tough to argue that you can talk about these events without discussion of 'Stalinism and/or Bolshevism'. That was the whole point, to make the territory they got Soviet, which is the necessary first step in the process of integration. Of course the pre-WWI claims to the territory were important, for ethnic/patriotic as well as political/security reasons, but that's far from being the whole story. A favorite area of debate about Stalin's policies is the 'was he a Red Tsar?' question. How Bolshevik, how traditional in this and that area of policy. I think the consensus is of course both, but also that he certainly was a 100 percent dedicated Communist whose decisions were frequently colored by his radical bedrock world view, which he genuinely cherished. He was very 'Red' and that played into the policy motivations -- I imagine plenty of people inside the party and out really believed they were 'liberating' their 'blood brothers' next door. And that process required a lot of repression in a very short period of time, which is the real story anyway.

Of course you're right that border disputes happen everywhere and are frequently violent, but the ways in which they are framed and justified matter in what happens.

[pnorman]

42. "Naked aggression" is how it's generally described, and with much justice.

But as I tried to explain, there was most likely enough valid reason for that new border. A Stalinist acquaintance "explained" to me that Hitler-Stalin Pact was a necessary "breathing space", for Russia to prepare for the inevitable war with Germany. He may have been right, as it was damn close in that first year.

[RZM]

44. Nobody's arguing that point

From Stalin's perspective, the pact was the best option available. In the stroke of a pen he gained long-coveted territory and stayed out of the war while the capitalists beat up on one another (few people foresaw the quick collapse of France the next year). The Western powers were offering war with no guarantee of territorial gains. It was a no-brainer. Even the soon-to-be-assassinated Trotsky was fairly supportive of the decision. But I'm not sure what that really tells us other than the state of power politics at the time and that the two sides had failed to come together at all on an anti-Hitler policy earlier in the 1930s, for which they both share blame.

Maybe there is a decent case for the new border, like I said earlier, I'm an agnostic on that, but there certainly is no decent case for the policies the Soviets pursued toward their new subjects the moment they set foot in these disputed borderlands.

[pnorman]

48. I offer no "decent case" for the Soviet policies either.

We probably don't differ all that much, as I too am "an agnostic" on this. And that's NOT a safe position among fire-breathing zealots!

Another thing to bear in mind is that time, almost ALL the eastern nations on Russia's border were not only anti-Soviet, but one-party authoritarian government. And most were growing very close to Nazi Germany. Quite openly, they were described as a "Cordon Sanitaire", and focused directly at the USSR.

[RZM]

49. True indeed

Security was an important factor in all of this. But to be fair as a small country sharing a border with a huge revisionist power who's open about wanting your territory, it's probably hard not to be anti-Soviet. Too often these states were caught between a hammer and an anvil. Part of the problem too was that small nations were frequently thrown under the bus in the run-up to the war as Hitler and Stalin took what they wanted, with few wanting to risk repeating the carnage that had resulted from getting involved in the dispute between Austria-Hungary and Serbia in 1914. The sad lesson is that by waiting too long to get tough, things were worse as a result. Of course this led many to draw conclusions that have been trotted out frequently over the years, not the least in Vietnam and Iraq.

[pnorman]

50. I recall reading a long time back, a 3 volume book on the Cold War.

It was by Fleming, who seemed to be slightly "pro-Soviet", but still a competent historian. Right after the Munich Agreement, the USSR was feeling out the western powers on joint action against Nazi Germany. Reportedly, England sent a "nobody" without any power to negotiate anything. And he was sent by BOAT! But the Nazis dispatched Ribbentrop(?), and by plane! Stalin quickly "got the message" and responded accordingly. Foreign Minister Max Litvinov with good connections in England and France was promptly replaced by Molotov! Litnivov, a Jew with a British wife, stood for "Collective Security, while Molotov was formerly the chief prosecutor of the Moscow Trials. A LOT of "shared values" between the two!

This is all memory work, so I'm going to have to do some serious Googling on all this!

[pnorman]

51. "THE COLD WAR AND ITS ORIGINS 1917-1960" BY D. F. FLEMING

http://www.questia.com/read/58123387?title=The%20Cold%20War%20and%20Its%20Origins%2c%201917-1960%20-%20Vol.%202

I've been a Questia`subscriber for several years, so I just checked and it's there! But that will be a looong read! Are you familiar with D. F. Fleming, and if so, how do you rate him?

[RZM]

53. Not familiar with that particular work though I have heard of him

Though the facts of this period are pretty well established (a lot of the sources have been floating around since the time), people still argue about the interpretations, mainly as to how 'serious' Stalin was about collective security. I have no idea myself. I think by the late 1930s he knew war was coming (part of the reason for the Great Terror) and that he couldn't stay out forever, but wanted to do so for as long as possible and then perhaps intervene on the winning side at the decisive moment, part of the reason the Germans got the drop on him in 1941.

[pnorman]

55. "the facts of this period are pretty well established"

Not all "facts" can be assumed to be "pretty well established". To me. only only those that can hold up in open (but brisk) dialog, can be assumed to be valid. That's largely what I see here on DU, and why I spend so much time here. And if enough people contribute to a given thread, and with reasonable civility, I can walk away from it with the feeling that I've learned something valuable. Quite frequently, I then introduce them in venues a LOT more "hostile" than DU. Never (so far) do I end up with egg on my face!

[RZM]

52. The story of politics in the 30s is interesting

Collective Security was a big Soviet policy flip-flop in 1934, but it never got off the ground, largely because the two sides never really trusted each other and Spain and the Soviet exclusion from Munich drove the point home. Even as late as the outbreak of the war, the largest network of Soviet spies/informers was in Britain. It's too bad too. Perhaps the world would be a very different place had left, right, and center managed the proper cooperation and foresight to contain Hitler before he got rolling -- undoubtedly there's a lesson there too.

[pnorman]

56. "Soviet exclusion from Munich"

That's hew to me, so I'll have to hit Google!

[pnorman]

57. One of my first Google 'hits' was the below time line and comments:

.
.
.
Conclusion: the Nazi-Soviet Pact as Second Munich Agreement

A typical counter-argument to the above narrative is Seventy Years of Shame by Craig Pirrong, encompassing all possible criticisms for the Pact and reiterating all the necessary ideological foundations for waging a New Cold War against Russia.

For instance, the allegation is made that the Soviet Union hedged its way out of any firm commitments to Germany’s East-Central European neighbors, and that Stalin wanted, and did everything he could, to embroil the “imperialist powers” in a war – according to his August 19, 1939 Politburo speech:

We must accept the proposals of Germany and diplomatically discard the British and French delegation. The destruction of Poland and the annexation of Ukrainian Galicia will be our first gain. Nonetheless, we must foresee the consequences of both Germany’s defeat and Germany’s victory. In the event of a defeat the formation of a Communist government in Germany will be essential . . . . Above all, our task is to ensure that Germany be engaged in war for as long as possible and that Britain and France be so exhausted that they could not suppress a German Communist government.

Both points make sense and are probably true. But the exact same applies to the Western Powers, which according to the evidence brought forth in the timeline above a) wanted to tie up Germany and the USSR in a war, regarding the latter as the greater threat to Western civilization, and b) did not treat Soviet proposals for joint inter-Allied obligations against German aggression seriously. The point is that both sides were engaged in a brutal game of Realpolitik – the West wanted the two totalitarian powers to duke it out, while the USSR would have much preferred the capitalist powers to destroy themselves in yet another World War One-like struggle of attrition. In other words, there was a fundamental symmetry between the West and Russia prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, which is now being adamantly denied by the former and asserted by the latter.

As such, the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact cannot be construed as a crime – everybody was in on the game, its just that the USSR played it more skilfully than most, at least until Operation Barbarossa. It was a cause of Second World War, but no more than Munich previously, and as such ascribing the USSR joint responsibility for starting the Second World War, as recently done by OSCE, is just one more example of hypocritical Russophobia and “double standards” – cliche though these terms might be, that does not mean they do not apply. And if it really were the case that the Soviet Union shares guilt with Germany for the outbreak of the Second World War, then so do Britain, France and Poland, each in equal measure. Where are the self-righteous condemnations of their antebellum conduct?.
.
.

http://www.warandpeace.ru/en/analysis/view/40833/

Much to study here, although it's all well off the OP. I have no history "creds" per se, but I've come to the belief that to a Russian, history IS important. I expect that even during the worst period of Stalinism, much valuable work was produced (but almost exclusively in the Samizdats.)

[pnorman]

58. Also from the above timeline:

.
.
.
19 November, 1937 – During his visit to Obersalzburg, Lord Halifax suggests making an agreement between the Four Powers (excluding the USSR): he says, “I and the other members of the British government are under the impression that the Fuhrer not only achieved a lot in Germany, but with his extirpation of Communism in his own country, he blocked its advance into the rest of Western Europe, and as such Germany can rightfully consider itself as a bastion of the West against Bolshevism”.

End-April, 1938 – Halifax informed the German representative Kordt that Great Britain would not commit to additional military obligations to France, let alone Czechoslovakia.

18 May, 1938 - The president of Czechoslovakia, Edvard Beneš, told the English ambassador: “If Western Europe should lose interest in Russia, Czechoslovakia will lose it too “.

20 September, 1938 – In reply to his pleas, the Soviet government answered Beneš that it would assist Czechoslovakia, should France join in. However, Poland categorically refused the passage of Soviet armies through its territory, even at the request of France. .

21 September, 1938 - At 2am an Anglo-French ultimatum to the government of Czechoslovakia, demanding acceptance of the German demands, was issued. After the signing of the Munich Agreement, the US President sent congratulations to Chamberlain. Neither the USSR not Czechoslovakia was consulted about any of this.

.
.
.

http://www.warandpeace.ru/en/analysis/view/40833/

I have a dim recollection of all that from that Fleming book. In any event, I have enough to Google later on, as well as search within that book.

[RZM]

63. Gerhard Weinberg is a great place to go for the diplomacy

He's written a number of books on the war and politics in the 1930s. Don't remember all of the titles (one is 'A World at Arms' or something like that) but I've looked at a few. He may even have some focused exclusively on the 30s. He was actually a Jewish German whose family fled after Hitler came to power and ended up in America. I think that during/after the war he took part in German document retrieval as a US serviceman. He's written tons of good stuff.

As for Russians and history. I agree. Maybe I'm biased because I love history so much, but it's a lot more important to a lot more people than many Americans realize, since we have such a young and somewhat unique history we forget this - and this is a common flaw in many US policies abroad. Unfortunately the current regime in Russia is meddling in historical affairs, taking steps against free expression with harassment and laws regarding historical writing and its effects on the 'reputation of Russia,' including during the Soviet period. As an aside, samizdat as we know it is a later phenomenon, dating from the postwar years when Stalinism was somewhat relaxed and more ideas seeped in from abroad. In Stalin's time society was more or less 'atomized,' as it's been put, and even self-publishing was way too risky.

[pnorman]

65. Gerhard Weinberg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Weinberg

Thanks! I'll check him out on the web as well as Questia.

I too am deeply interested in history, and have been all my adult life. I find that it's sometimes necessary to be (temporarily) "morally neutral" when going into the subject. That position has already angered at least one other on this thread, and I sincerely hope that he understand my position.

[pnorman]

67. A World at Arms, by Gerhard L. Weinberg

.
.
.
But Weinberg is more than an academic historian bombarding his reader with facts and references. He brings to this study a point of view, and a methodology. He is, for one thing, morally outraged at the events that occurred between 1939 and 1945; though for the most part his feelings are tempered by a clear, cool judgment, anger simmers beneath the surface. Equally telling is Weinberg's decision to focus on the individuals who conducted the war; unlike historians besotted with the workings of impersonal bureaucracies or the supposedly determinative movements of unnamed “forces,” Weinberg refuses to minimize the role of individuals in causing and shaping events. Foremost among these, of course, was Adolf Hitler, whose ideas exercised a terrible hold not only on German politics, but, as Weinberg shows, on German strategy and even on German operational decision-making.

Thus, Weinberg departs from the current tendency in historical analysis to regard the whole period from 1914 to 1945 as a single continuum: the European Civil War. Such an approach does offer advantages, but, Weinberg argues correctly, it also holds pitfalls, the principal one being that it obscures the major difference between World Wars I and II.
.
.
.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/a-world-at-arms--by-gerhard-l--weinberg-8257

Hopefully, it'll be available in Questia or perhaps excerpted in Google Books. And thanks for the info

[pnorman]

68. Here it is at Google Books:

http://books.google.com/books?id=xlsrAxuWekQC&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22a+world+at+arms%22&hl=en&ei=yuiTTLm8IIaksQPdgs3lCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCcQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

On edit: There appears to be enough excerpted to be worth reading it on-line

[David__77]

60. I will take that as a compliment.

No, it was certainly not cut and pasted from anything. Absolutely, the Polish People's Republic was far and away better than anything that came before it on Polish soil. Women's right were advanced, racism and anti-Semitism were banned (through they didn't go nearly far enough), and the old lords were thrown in prison where they belonged. Things have gone backward the past 20 years. The post-war border between East Germany and Poland was a border to secure peace in Europe, and the rightists in the west reluctantly admitted this eventually. The German refugees were treated much better than they deserved. Very few Germans who did not flee or engage in armed struggle were not complicit in the crimes of the fascist reich.

[RZM]

62. Not sue I entirely agree, though

As a poster below pointed out, it's certainly true that interwar Poland had a slew of problems, not the least of which its anti-Semitism, though it's certainly not an enviable position to be caught between two rapacious revisionist powers that both covet your territory. Was People's Poland the best government ever in the territory? I don't really think so, but I guess you could make that argument. People's Poland was a repressive, authoritarian state that had very little popular support. It improved somewhat after Gomulka's restoration in the 1950s but I think it's hard to argue that any government that lacks popular support and exists because it's backed up by outside military force is the best option. It certainly wasn't the only option, just the only one that Stalin was willing to countenance, hence the reprehensible Soviet conduct during the Warsaw Uprising, when the Red Army mysteriously stopped outside of the city for several months, allowing the Germans to brutally suppress the revolt (totally leveling the city and killing 200,000 people in the process). Anti-Semitism did remain alive and well during the communist period though, even receiving some official endorsement, as the 1968 party purges showed, so it's a little disingenuous to claim that 'racism and anti-Semitism were banned,' since the authorities were clearly playing a double game here.

As for the expulsions of Germans, that's another tricky question. If you want to make the argument that 'they were treated much better than they deserved' I guess you can, but I have to ask what you think should have happened to them? Of the roughly 12 million Germans expelled from their homes at the end of the war and after, I think about 7 million came from territory that was given to Poland. It was a pretty rough process -- people were uprooted from their homes and packed on trains (sometimes in the freezing cold) and simply dumped in Germany. A lot of those people were women, children, and the elderly and plenty of them had to perform forced labor before they were booted. I guess it all depends on your conception of German guilt and the merits/efficacy of ethnic cleansing. One problem I have with it though, is the reason it happened, which is what started this whole exchange. The 'recovered territories' were given to Poland because Stalin would only accept a restoration of his 1941 borders after the war -- including the territory the Soviets had seized by force in collusion with the Germans in 1939-40 (though the Baltics and Bessarabia were not seized in military campaigns like eastern Poland was, it was still strong-arm tactics that brought those places into the Soviet orbit). Though the Poles understandably had no mercy for Germans after the war and no problem with deporting millions of people, that was a justification for the process, not the real reason it happened. The perennial problem with ethnic cleansing is that it's not about guilt or innocence. The good, bad, and the neutral are all treated the same and that troubles me, even in the case of ethnic Germans after the war (and yes, I agree, Hitler's regime had plenty of popular support, though there's more than just that to the question of complicity in the general public in Germany). But from the perspective of the time, everybody remembered that one of the reasons WWII happened was that the shifting of borders after WWI had left plenty of minorities outside of the borders of their 'home' countries. So this time, rather than moving the borders, the people were moved instead and that's never pretty.

[Marengo]

47. Why "working people"?

Why not just people?

[COLGATE4]

39. Don't forget that pre-war Poland was one of the most

anti-semitic countries in Europe, and during the Nazi occupation the Nazis had no problem finding lots of willing collaborators, particularly when it came to 'dealing with the Jews'. After the war the Polish government essentially confiscated lots of Jewish-owned property and made it clear to survivors that the were not welcome. A shit hole.

[Behind the Aegis]

45. Didn't stop after the war.

Kielce pogrom

The Kielce pogrom was an outbreak of violence against the Jewish community of Kielce, Poland on July 4, 1946. It was perpetrated by a mob of local townsfolk<1>, including police and soldiers. Following a false tale of child kidnapping, including allegations of blood libel<2> which led to a police investigation, violence broke out which resulted in 42<3> dead (39 Jews and 3 non-Jewish Poles), and 40 more injured.

Polish courts tried and condemned nine people to death for their crimes. The communist government of Poland sought to lay blame on Polish nationalists, especially the anti-communist partisans backing Colonel Anders and the Polish government-in-exile.<4>. Further investigation into the circumstances of the pogrom were inhibited by the communist government until the era of Solidarnosc, when in December 1981 an article was published in the newspaper Tygodnik Solidarność (Solidarity Weekly).<5> However the return of repressive government meant that files could not be accessed for historical research until after the fall of communism in 1989, by which time many eye-witnesses had died. It was then discovered that many documents relating to the pogrom had been destroyed by fire (in unclear circumstances) or deliberately by military authorities.<6>

For these reasons debate about the origins of the pogrom has remained controversial. Some claim it was a deliberate provocation by the communists to discredit the nationalists. Some claim that it was an anti-semitic event that was later exploited by the Government. Others accuse the Polish Roman Catholic hierarchy of passivity during the pogrom and its aftermath. The fact that a number of Jews held important positions in the Polish communist party also affected popular sentiment. The absence of clear documentary evidence complicates analysis.<7>

The deadliest pogrom against Polish Jews,<8> the incident was a significant point in the post-war history of Jews in Poland. The Kielce event took place only a year after the end of World War II and the Holocaust, shocking Jews in Poland, many Poles, as well as the international community. It has been considered a catalyst for the flight of most Jewish survivors from Poland.

[RZM]

46. Didn't stop there either

There was also the 1968 anti-Semitic purge of the Polish Communist Party too. National and anti-Semitic appeals had to substitute for popular support for communism all over the bloc in the postwar years. I also remember hearing once that Spielberg's crew was sometimes heckled while filming 'Schindler's List' on location though I've never confirmed that.

[devilgrrl]

54. They don't seem to have changed much since.

That is one place that seems better off with their old government. Much like Iraq.

[Alamuti Lotus]

8. WTF?!

There's so many things wrong with just the first sentence that I could barely reach the "tourist attractions" bit.

[boppers]

12. I can explain the perspective if you want...

I'll pick three issues that come up a lot:

1) The current Auschwitz "gas chambers" were actually built post-war.
2) The Auschwitz "death toll" plaque has been revised to reflect the historical knowledge of the day.
3) Auschwitz was not a death camp.

So, how true is all of this?

1) True. The "de-lousing" chambers were destroyed, when people visit, they're seeing buildings built after the war.
2) True. It's changed, to the tune of millions.
3) True. Auschwitz is a name for the region, when people visit "the site", they aren't actually visiting the whole of the camps, and the many (45+) satellite camps, they are visiting a museum, created and designed to portray a composite between labor camps, medical camps, work camps, admin camps, crematoria, etc.

Deniers like to take the facts and spin a story that "if the museum is portraying history, it is not authentic history". I'll grant them that when history is re-created, and modified, it's not as accurate, but where they go off the rails is when they think that *their* version of history is somehow more accurate.

[Ian David]

18. Mexico must not really exist, because the Mexico Pavilion at EPCOT isn't really Mexico! n/t

[newscott]

36. So they kind of Stonehengefied it?

[boppers]

61. It's hard to keep an on-site museum authentic.

Stonehenge looks nothing like it did when it was built, and over the years, the grounds have changed to accommodate traffic.

[boppers]

9. The sad part is that the public is so uneducated.

To paraphrase Irving's own words from the Zündel, trial, "about 90% of what Irving says is true".

It's the other 10%, and how the initial 90% is *spun*, that causes so much friction.

That being said, having worked on the wikipedia Holocaust related pages for many years, I continue to be surprised by how many outright myths and bizarre over- and under-statements get tossed around as "facts".

[Oldtimeralso]

13. Holocaust denier David Irving's uncle died there!

Slipped and fell from a guard tower and broke his neck.

[LeftishBrit]

17. HORRIBLE man.

And worrying that Poland are letting him do this.

[Codeine]

19. "And over here you'll see the area where nothing at all happened. . ." nt

[LostinVA]

20. Disgusting

[iandhr]

23. disgusting

[yurbud]

24. so he thinks the Warsaw Ghetto wasn't that bad either?

[Nikki Stone1]

27. He's a piece of work apparently

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Irving

[proteus_lives]

59. What a bastard.

I hope the Polish government puts a stop to these "tours".

[bullwinkle428]

34. $2650 for a disgusting & twisted interpretation of history?

Is he on crack?

[JNelson6563]

43. Why? I don't get it.

So he can show them all the evidence of what he denies and tell them it's all fake, like a movie set or something? And people are paying of 2,600.00 for this?

This is like 10 kinds of crazy.

Julie

[provis99]

64. remember what Begin said about the Poles,

They ingest antisemitism with their mother's milk.

[Rhiannon12866]

66. This is so messed up that it boggles the mind...

What does this POS think happened there?! Oh, right, the thousands who died were just "collateral damage" from Allied raids... They shouldn't let him near the place. What a sicko... x(

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

69. I'll say it. I want things to happen that are not exactly within the law.

And I'll leave it at that.