Holocaust row bishop returns to Britain
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REUTERS/Jens Falk/Files
Bishop Richard Williamson pictured at Frankfurt airport in this February 2007 file photo
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A British-born Roman Catholic bishop who was asked to leave Argentina after making "deeply offensive" comments about the Holocaust arrived back in Britain today.
Bishop Richard Williamson flew into London's Heathrow airport from Buenos Aires where he was met by a crowd of international media and an armed police guard.
The bishop, who was given 10 days to leave Argentina by the country's government, declined to answer questions from the press as he was taken to a waiting car by police officers.
Those meeting the bishop, including other Roman Catholic priests, also declined to comment before the vehicle sped away.
The bishop had been resident in Argentina until this week at the St Pius X seminary in the capital.
But after remarks he made in a Swedish television interview were broadcast, the government branded his view "deeply offensive".
He claimed in the interview last month that historical evidence was "hugely against six million having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler ... I believe there were no gas chambers."
He added: "I think that 200,000 to 300,000 Jews perished in the Nazi concentration camps but none of them in gas chambers."
The Vatican has ordered Bishop Williamson to retract his comments and the Catholic Church in England and Wales has said he must do so before he can "enter into full communion with the church".
The bishop would not discuss his plans now he has returned to the UK and no one from the Catholic Church was available to comment on whether he would be allowed to work.
The church and Pope Benedict XVI has come under severe criticism for the decision - taken before the comments were broadcast - to lift an excommunication on him.
He was ordained in the late 1980s by renegade French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and has angered many groups with his hard-line traditionalist views on women and the direction of the church.
The Catholic bishops of England and Wales have already condemned Bishop Williamson's views on the Holocaust as "totally unacceptable" and have stressed that the lifting of his excommunication was for unrelated matters.
A spokesman for the Catholic bishops conference of England and Wales said today that he had "absolutely no idea" where Bishop Williamson was going following his arrival in Britain.
He said: "He does not fall into the jurisdiction of any of the England and Wales bishops because he is not in full communion with the Catholic Church.
"He will have to make his own arrangements, whether that is with a Catholic priest or with somebody else.
"From the hierarchy's perspective, he has got nothing to do with the bishops of this country."
Also there to meet the bishop was documentary-maker Michele Renouf, who said she wanted to represent and support him in getting his views across to the public.
She said: "The Holocaust has become a religion and to deny its central tenets and saints is blasphemy."
She said it was "a disgrace" that there could be no reasoned debate on the issue in this country.
The former socialite has become increasingly known in recent years for an association with those who deny the Holocaust and supported historian David Irving during his trial in Vienna for Holocaust denial.
Last year she helped put together a legal team for Australian academic Frederick Toben after he was arrested at Heathrow airport.
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Comments
How can you deny something that has never been proven? Auschwitz has
changed the number of people killed from 3 million to 1.1 million. Yet
we are stll told to believe that 6 million died?
Asking questions is not denial.
Denial is not looking for the Truth.
As for the Bishop, what an arse.
As for history, I'd love to learn it, but sadly in Europe it is illegal to reaserch this time in history if the findings contradict the given doctrine. Especially if you mention the Red Cross study in 1974, or the fact that after WW1 it was claimed 6 milion jews died as well.
If your small mind can remember one thing. Remeber this. History is written by the winners. We only know what we are told.
There we are: 10:03 and they're already crawling out from beneath their flat stones.
So what would you accept as proof, my friend? No, I'll answer that question for you: there's NOTHING you and your kind would ever accept as proof: not tonnes of documents; not the testimony of tens of thousands of eye witnesses; not even the depositions of several of the death-camp functionaries themselves. Like Creationism and Flat-Earthing, Holocaust Denial is a classic example of a crank theory in that it's not based upon any evidence but rather upon an overpowering a priori belief which the evidence is then arranged to fit: in this case that the Nazis were not a gang of thuggish mediocrities who ended up as mass murderers but rather a decent and honourable set of chaps who never hurt anyone except in self-defence. It couldn't have happened: therefore it didn't happen: therefore the mountain of evidence proving that indeed it did happen must be a fabrication (...and the only way to prevent such lies being spread in future is to make a more thorough job of it next time).
As for Bishop Williamson, there's nothing very surprising there: the Lefebvrist movement sprouted from the post-Vichy remnants of the French ultra-Catholic Right and has always been saturated with a peculiar antiquated brand of anti-semitism reaching back to Edward Drumont and the Dreyfus affair. Their thesis has always been that the Catholic Church has been taken over by (as they put it) "Jews, Freemasons and Bolsheviks", so you'd hardly expect much sanity in that quarter. But even they seem to have realised that this looks very, very bad to the rest of the world and have booted the man out.
If the truth that you are looking for is that the Nazi Endlosung never happened, then you are a denier. All sane people (and David Irving) agree that between 1939 and 1945 between 5.2 and 7 million European Jews met untimely deaths, and juggling this figure between deaths in the ghettoes, deaths from forced labour, deaths from pit-shootings and deaths in the gas chambers in no way affects the overall enormity of what went on: effectively the entire population of Denmark being deliberately wiped out.
The debate among historians about the Holocaust is not about WHAT happened: it's about WHY it happened.
The scepticism that some advance may be due to the fact that the systematic slaughter is generally portrayed as Jewish centred. I remember as a youth in the Sixties reading extensively about the period leading upto and including the Second World War. The estimated loss of life from the Nazi "untermensch" program was put at 15 million. Some six million of these were Jews who died in a variety of nasty ways from simple starvation through experimentation to gassing. Some three million were Russian PoWs who went into camps never to be seen again. Then there were the gypsies, the disabled, homosexuals etc etc. There but for the grace of God.
There's a (small) measure of truth in that: the Jews were the first and the principal victims of the Nazi Racial Hygiene programme, but there were others - and no doubt if the Germans had won the war several inconvenient ethnicities would have been lined up for extinction: Gentile Poles; Serbs; people of mixed Jewish-Aryan ancestry; just about anyone who didn't fit Himmler's identikit picture of the ideal human being. When a pest control company has got rid of all the rats it's usually bad news for the mice and the voles.
When I hear Holocaust Deniers saying that Auschwitz-Birkenau camp complex was built in the late 1940s by the Poles at the behest of the Elders of Zion in order to discredit Nazism I always laugh, because I have a Polish guide book from 1968, at which time the Polish Communist Party was going through a spell of anti-semitism in pursuit of its own internal power struggles. In the extensive entry on the camp the word "Jews" is mentioned only once in passing (...because of course what they did was to count most of the Jewish victims as Polish citizens in order to bump up the numbers of their own dead).
To put it mildly. And reasoned debate isn't what you'd get. Instead you'd have serious historians being obliged to confront the usual rancid collection of Nazi-apologist cranks and treat their customary jumble of lies and half-truths as though they were a serious attempt to examine the past. The "truth-seekers" would demand evidence - then ignore any evidence presented to them or denounce it as obviously fabricated (...because it proves something which by definition couldn't have happened, QED). The historians would wipe the floor with them as usual and rebut each of their whoppers in turn, and they'd leave the hall covered in rotten tomatoes. But it wouldn't matter, because as with Creationists and evolutionary science the point is to have the debate not to win it. The Creationists witness for Jesus: the self-styled Revisionists witness for Hitler.
Personally I'm not in favour of a UK Holocaust Denial law: historical and scientific truth are well able to stand on their own two legs, and protecting particular truths by law seems to imply that they can't. But denialist claptrap still needs to be combatted with the utmost vigour whenever it comes out into the open.
It first appeared at the Nuremberg trials in 1946. The war had only just ended and the whole of Europe was in chaos, and although the Allied prosecutors knew that an awful lot of people had been murdered they couldn't say exactly how many: not least because the Cold War was beginning and the USSR (which held much of the evidence) wasn't being terribly co-operative. In fact though the six-million figure seems to have been a pretty good guess. I understand that the irreducible figure is just over 5.2 million (that is to say, named individuals who were alive in September 1939 but were dead or missing by May 1945). But given that much of Europe's 1939 Jewish population was in eastern Poland and the western USSR, and that the figures for that region are very hard to come by for a number of reasons, the toll could have been as high as 6.5 or even 7 million. Even the SS didn't send in detailed weekly returns (the job was too big for that) and we shall never know for certain.
Anyway, if it was "only" three million would that make it only half as atrocious a crime? This was the most organised, most determined, most ruthlessly single-minded attempt at genocide there has ever been and you really do have to wonder about the mental health of people who, by denying it, are really seeking to justify it.
No it wouldn't. Genocide is Genocide.
It would however put into question the amount of money European countries and the USA, have paid Israel in reparation payments, for 'allowing it to happen'.
The awful pictures we see of Belson are all of Typhus victems. Overcrowding and a breakdown in food supply in april and May of 1945 led to this. Not one of the people in those dreadful pictures had been gassed.
So now we have a myth which is powerful and against the law in most countries in Europe to challenge.Even today Horst Mahler an attorney is jailed in Germany for 6 years for pointing out the emperor has no clothes. All we want to know is the truth.
Speaking your mind is illegal.
You must now believe what you are told or else.
Turkey denies the Armenian holocaust but who cares ?
Did the recent Gazza holaucast we all watched on TV really happen ? Does Israel Deny it ?
Heaven help us.
Get off your little Islam-loving cloud you hypocrite and stop wearing a kafiya while you're at it.
Having a debate about the WWII Holocaust is like expecting a reasoned debate on the Dreyfuss Affair, King Henry VIII's serial marriages, evolution vs creationism, or other historical events.
It seems that there is a serious lack of education and accurate information regarding the history of Jews in Europe before and during WWII. The Holocaust becomes an emotional, ill-informed argument because people just get stuck in a moral stance with or without taking the time to educate themselves, or for their schools to educate them, about the facts.
I read that Bishop Williamson said he has not been shown any evidence to convince him of the gas chambers. Yet, if he has been shown the footage of the films made by the U.S. Army when they liberated some of these camps he must be in a serious state of denial of the facts.
If that is the case, who can possibly have a "reasoned debate" with him or other deniers?
Quite the contrary: there's a wealth of it nowadays. The one good consequence of Holocaust Denial (which really began with the notorious booklet "The Hoax of the 20th Century" in 1976) is that it spurred historians of the period on to make a really detailed study of the whole hideous episode, providing the most meticulous chapter and verse in the full knowledge that the survivors and onlookers were growing old and that Nazi apologists would one day try to profit from their disappearance by questioning the whole thing, using the standard crank's methodology of slicing the tree into matchsticks and then snapping each of them in turn. For starters I refer you to the works of Martin Gilbert and Lucy Dawidowicz.
"Yet, if he has been shown the footage of the films made by the U.S. Army when they liberated some of these camps he must be in a serious state of denial of the facts."
The man is plainly in serious denial about a lot of things. But the film footage from Buchenwald and Belsen, though horrible in the extreme, isn't actually of the extermination camps. Those (Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor) were discretely located in the forests of eastern Poland and had finished their work by late 1943. Little remains of them now, because as the Soviets advanced in 1944 the installations were destroyed and the bodies dug up and burnt, some of the saner Nazis having realised that Germany was losing the war and that retribution was in prospect. The wretches liberated in western Germany in April 1945 were just what was left over: the slave labourers; the late-war deportees; the inmates of other camps evacuated westward. But it was still ghastly enough and deeply marked all who saw it. So to maintain that it was all concocted at Pinewood Studios in 1946 is an opinion which is scarcely conducive to reasonable debate.
For the bishop to say there were no gas chmbers is as ridiculous as saying the Roman Church is LIBERAL. Balbrubrox has said it all in great detail, unfortunateley men like my cousin who liberated the camps and saw the piles of emaciated corpses and dying people are mostly now dead. But
even the Nazis kept records and even used scarce rail transport for the Jews at the expense of their soldiers in Russia, such was their obsession with the Final Solution
The British made secret recordings of captured German officers talking about it so it was not a secret!
Most people knew especially those who lived near the camps. There were even prisoner of war camps
close to some of the concentration camps. I suggest Hitlers willing executioners by D J Goldhagen on the subject.
I do not know what Renouf Williamson Irving et al get out of their denial but there are plenty of current serious problems for them to think about
Each team would be allowed to ask 10 questions to the other team - 5 questions would had been submitted in advance and 5 would be submitted directly before the audience.
Each team would have the same amount of time to answer questions.
Then we would have a debate. And finally each team will get a same amount of time to conclude. Who speaks first and last would be tossed by a coin.
Would 'The Independent' be willing to organise such a debate please?
As for the gas chambers well at Nuremburg the US claimed they were at Dachau but now Yad vasheen says nobody was killed in a gas chamber at Dachau. Of course there is no evidence of foul play at Treblinka though it is claimed 750,000 were gassed with diesel smoke from a submarine engine. They were then buried and then dug up and burnt to leave....no remains! Ground radar studies have shown no evidence to confirm this huge number were buried then burned, the soil has not been disturbed.
Yes this story need thorough forensic investigation..pity this is illegal and punished with five years jais for suggesting this in most of Europe.
If there were 9M Jews in the whole of greater Europe in 1939.
How can 6M+ Jews have been killed by the Germans?
It does not compute!
The term "holocaust denial" is the wrong phrase to use, who created the phrase?
Hold on, must have been the zionists!
Does Williamson think these places were built as tourist attractions, and that the locals who were involved there during the war are lying?
If the Catholic Church is a responsible organization - Williamson should be fired.
Immediately.
Is that not enough?
Is that not enough?
As an overall figure for the murders of innocent including all the other minorities 6,000,000 is acceptable,remember too the Russians were in control of large areas and they (the Russians ) were indeed somewhat economical with the truth as a pursuit to their own ends.
Coupled with the propoganda from the U.S and Britain along with the vociferous Jewish mandate proponents and the influx of the Jews to the newly created state of Palestine one of the biggest propoganda coups in history was pulled off and it is still happening now.The world is made to feel guilty for the misery of the Jewish victims of the era yet the Zionist clique happily pursue the same policies in their assault upon the Palestinain's with the same zeal the Gestapo used against them in the 1930-1945 years.
The good Bishop speaks the truth and the majority of people agree with his comments.If one examines the role of the catholic church in W.W.2 .it is indeed questionable regarding the policy on the Jewish question.
The 'proof' of the Holocaust seems to consist of repeated assertions that there are volumes of evidence for the 'most thoroughly documented event in history' and that anyone who would question it is either a lunatic or hates Jews. Yet when you actually look at the evidence it distills down to the conflicting testimony of less than two dozen witnesses worldwide who claim to have seen gassings and the confessions of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoss and Untersturmfuhrer Kurt Gerstein who both the British and Polish authorities admit were horribly tortured.
Saying that the Germans documented everything they did is true, but it proves the negative. No order from Hitler, no plan, no budget or disbursement records for this purpose and no blueprints for homicidal gas chambers. (The recent splash made about finding them in Berlin are now admitted to be plans for a de-lousing facility at Auschwitz.) We are supposed to believe this massive industrial scale genocide was all done with a wink and a wave.
The Holocaust Dogma is bigger than Jewish desire for reparations money or martyrdom; it goes to the heart of allied conduct in WWII. The fire bombing of German civilians, the nuking of Japan after all hope of victory was gone were war crimes of the highest order. It was the New World Order destroying the old in the most savage fashion. The Holocaust is used to justify the injection of the Israeli fly in the Mid-East ointment leading to war and ultimately NWO dominance over the Islamic States.