Holocaust-denying historian David Irving has sparked widespread fury by organizing ‘disgusting’ tours of concentration camps costing £2,000 for each participant.
The disgraced academic, who is a self-confessed fascist, is leading a tour group to sites in Poland such as Treblinka, Sobibor and Hitler’s ‘Wolf’s Lair’ headquarters.
Holocaust memorial groups have accused Irving of insulting the memory of those killed in the Second World War by spreading ‘pro-Nazi propaganda’ on the tours.
And a leading historian claims that the holidays are marketed towards other Holocaust deniers – adding that it ‘surely cannot be right’ for Irving to be allowed to market them.
Irving, 77, is notorious for his attempts to play down the extent of the Holocaust, and his insistence that Hitler was unaware of the plan to exterminate the Jews.
He was publicly exposed after his failed bid to sue author Deborah Lipstadt for calling him a Holocaust denier, prompting a trial in which his revisionist views were laid bare.
Next month, Irving is to take a group of ‘international guests’ to Latvia and Poland, where they will visit four concentration camps as well as the fortress built to be Hitler’s headquarters on the Eastern Front.
The nine-day tour, which starts and ends in Warsaw, will stop at Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec and Majdanek, as well the ruined ‘Wolf’s Lair’ near the town of Ketrzyn.
The all-inclusive tour costs $2,900 (£1,850) per person, plus an extra $300 for a two-day stay in Riga, the capital of Latvia, before the main trip.
In promotional material, Irving promises customers the opportunity to ‘make up your own mind about the truth’ during ‘the unforgettable journey of a lifetime.’
Irving does not deny that hundreds of thousands of people – nearly all of them Jewish – were killed at Treblinka, but in a video filmed on a previous trip to the camp he appeared to downplay its horrors.
In the clip, he implied that he would rather be murdered in ‘this beautiful forest setting, with birds twittering’ than at ‘the wall of the Communist Party headquarters in Budapest in 1956’.
Multiple charities told MailOnline that Irving should be banned from leading his tour holidays, accusing him of ‘insulting the memory of Holocaust victims and survivors.’
‘This discredited and repellent figure must not be allowed to organizing these tours in Poland,’ a spokesman for the Campaign Against Antisemitism said.
‘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.’
Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, said: ‘David Irving is a proven Holocaust denier. His forthcoming “tour” can serve no purpose other than to insult the memory of Holocaust victims and survivors.’
The Never Again Association, which led a successful campaign to have Irving banned from the Warsaw Book Fair in 2007, accused him of trying to ‘whitewash Nazi crimes’ with his ‘shameful’ revisionism.
A spokesman said: ‘We think his pro-Nazi propaganda must be exposed and opposed whenever possible.’
The Anti-Defamation League added: ‘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.’
Sir Richard J. Evans, the Cambridge professor considered the world’s leading expert on the Third Reich, compared Irving to two British teenagers who were recently caught trying to steal objects from Auschwitz on a school trip.
‘They were roundly condemned in the British press for the lack of respect they showed to the victims of the Nazi genocide carried out there,’ Sir Richard told MailOnline.
‘Mr Irving shows infinitely less respect, yet he is allowed to conduct these tours without hindrance. That surely cannot be right.’
He added: ‘Those who go on these tours are almost without exception people already sympathisers of, or believers in, Holocaust denial, so I do not think the tours will help Mr Irving convert anyone to his views.
‘However, I do not think it is appropriate for tours of these places to be conducted by someone who does not accept the overwhelming historical evidence that they were the sites of mass extermination carried out by the Nazis.’
Read more at THE DAILY MAIL.
Maybe, just maybe this will backfire on him, and the sheer evil in the air in these places will penetrate the people who are with him and they will feel the truth.
I wonder when these Holocaust remembrance organizations will realize that they are by far the ones who give the most free advertisement to these crackpots ,time for them to get a life