Then & Now

1945: Patrick Gordon-Walker broadcast to the US from the Nazi concentration camp at Belsen - the first to be liberated by the Allies - where 37,000 prisoners died from starvation, disease and overwork:

'When I went to the camp, five days after its liberation, there were still bodies all around. I saw about a thousand. In one place, hundreds had been shovelled into a mass grave by bulldozers; in another, Hungarian soldiers were putting corpses into a grave that was 60ft by 60ft and 30ft deep. It was almost half full.

Five thousand people died since we got into the camp. People died before my eyes, scarcely human, moaning skeletons, many gone mad. Bodies were just piled up . . . There were a very large number of girls, mostly Jewesses from Auschwitz. They have to be healthy to survive. Over and over again I was told (of) parades at which people were picked out arbitrarily for the gas chambers and the crematorium, where many were burnt alive. Only a person in perfect health survived . . . People at Auschwitz were saved by being moved to work in towns like Hamburg and were moved back to Belsen as we advanced.

'That night, when I got back at about 11 o'clock very exhausted, I saw the Jewish padre again and talked to him . . . Suddenly he broke down completely and sobbed. The next morning I left this hell- hole. As I left, I had myself deloused and my recording truck as well. To you at home this is one camp. There are many more. None of this is propaganda. This is the plain and simple truth.'

1992: David Irving, historian and Nazi sympathiser is transcribing Goebbels' diaries. He says the Holocaust was a hoax.