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        'In order to grasp the mystery of the 'historical', I must have a sense of it and history as something that is deeply mine, that is deeply my history, that is deeply my destiny.'

                                                                                                                                                                                        — Nicolas Berdyaev,

        The Meaning of History

        In a criminal court in Vienna in Austria, a few days ago, right wing British historian David Irving pleaded guilty to criminal charges of denying the Holocaust and conceded that he erred in contending that there were 'no Nazi gas chambers for the extermination of Jews at Auschwitz'. Irving, aged 67, told reporters that he now acknowledges that 'the Nazis systematically slaughtered Jews during World War II'.

        In his trial in a Vienna Court, he told an 8-Member Jury and a panel of 3 Judges that 'history is like a constantly changing tree'. In his controversial book 'Hitler's War', Irving had challenged the very basis of the existence of Holocaust and had come to the conclusion that Hitler was in no way responsible for the slaughter of Jews during World War II. David Irving was sentenced to three years in prison for the crime of Holocaust denial in Austria. In this context, historian Deborah Dwork of Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, U.S.A. has stated: 'outspoken deniers receive admiration and financial support from other deniers. Some people become Holocaust deniers because they long for the authority and governance of the Nazi regime. The Nazi regime seems like a wonderful period to these people, if it weren't for the Holocaust and there are people who wish for that sort of dictatorship'.

When the Nazis under Hitler gained power in Germany early in 1933, they initiated legalistic attacks against Jews, which included firing Jews from Civil Service jobs and restricting their access to public clubs, sports facilities, and other places. On May 10, 1933, Jewish books and books by non-Jewish opponents of Nazism were destroyed in huge public bonfires. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 provided the racist standards for defining Jewishness; all people with any Jewish ancestry within at least three generations were declared as outcasts. By 1938, most Jews had been deprived of economic means of existing, having been expelled from the professions, arts, schools, and unions. Business, marriage, real estate and other legal obligations between Jew and non-Jew could be legally broken whenever the non-Jewish partner wished to do so. November 9 & 10, 1938 signaled the beginning of the Holocaust. In what has come to be known in history as Kristallnacht, the 'night of the broken glass', the Nazis encouraged rioters in Germany and Austria to destroy synagogues and Jewish shops and businesses. More than 100 synagogues were destroyed and hundreds more were damaged. 20,000 Jews were arrested and taken to concentration camps, and hundreds more were killed and 7500 shops and businesses were smashed and looted. There were no guarantees for survival in Hitler's Europe, especially for Jews.

They stand condemned before the bar of history.

        On September 1, 1939, Hitler took the first steps towards his building a 'Master Race'. The German attack on Poland on September 3, 1939 which started the World War II was the first step in the slaughter of Jews outside Germany. On that very day within Germany itself, the authorized 'mercy killing' of deformed and mentally ill persons began. Almost 80,000 were murdered, until protests from Protestant and Catholic leaders stopped the killing. But when detailed plans were drafted on January 20, 1942, for the so-called Final Solution, there were no official protests. The Jews were to be exterminated. This was no simple job.

        It required systematic planning, coordination of many organizations, among them the Gestapo, S.S., Police, Army, Government Agencies and Nazi Party Leadership Groups. As country after country fell to the Germans, Jews all over Europe were concentrated in ghettoes and systematically starved. Those who survived were sent to slave labour camps or to gas chambers at mass killing centres whose names have come to stand for the most hellish constructions of mankind: Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek, Belzec and Auschwitz. More than two thirds of Europe's Jews were murdered in this way. Even towards the end, when Germany was losing the war on all fronts, railroad cars, manpower and materials desperately needed in theatres of war continued to be focused instead on the killing of Jews.

        Against this background, it is quite surprising as to how a British historian like DAVID IRVING could have come to the conclusion that the Holocaust was just a figment of imagination of the Jews and most historians of the period. Here are a few quotations from his coloured writings founded on prejudice against and hatred of the Jews:

        'I don't see any reason to be tasteful about Auschwitz. It's baloney, it's a legend. Once we admit the fact that it was a brutal slave labour camp and large numbers of people did die, as large numbers of innocent people died elsewhere in the war, why believe the rest of the baloney?'

        'I say quite tastelessly, in fact, that more women died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz.'

        'Oh, you think that's tasteless, how about this? There are so many Auschwitz survivors going around, in fact the number increases as the years go past, which is biologically very odd, to say the least. Because I'm going to form an Association of Auschwitz survivors, survivors of the Holocaust and other liars, or the ASSHOLS.'

        One of the most portentous images to emerge from Germany in the years leading up to World War II was of roaring bonfires being stoked in city squares with piles of condemned books. The world knows now, of course, that the targets singled out for destruction went well beyond ideas to include human beings. 'The Diary of Anne Frank' is by far the best known domestic journal to survive World War II intact, but the larger reality of the Holocaust was that any Jew caught keeping a record of life under the Nazis faced the prospect of immediate execution. That young Anne's diary was not destroyed proved once again how artifacts that seem most perishable are sometimes the ones that endure. Tossed aside by a German Officer impatiently searching a brief case for valuables, Anne Frank's writings were scooped up by a Dutch woman who had helped the family while they hid in the Amsterdam Annex, and were thus saved for posterity.

        Another diarist whose recollections were discovered after the war at the Auschwitz death camp in Poland had written this plea: 'Dear finder, search everywhere, in every inch of soil. Tons of documents are buried under it, mine and those of other prisoners, which will throw light on everything that was happening here'. The man who wrote this passage was Salmen Gradowski. He was one of several members of a concentration camp confederation known as the Sonderkommando whose clandestine scribblings were discovered hidden beneath the ashes of cremated victims. About these scribblings discovered after World War II underneath the ashes in the cemeteries, David Patterson wrote these most evocative lines which move us and shake us out of our conscienceless consciousness: 'Entrusted to us by these dead Jews who were killed by the State of Nazi Germany, these diaries line up in a funeral procession that has no limit, no end. And where does the procession lead? Into the soul of the reader'.

        The Nazi regime under Hitler developed a sophisticated combination of the traditional and the modern, a remarkable governing system that made itself attractive to the majority of non-Jew German citizens even as it was deploying vicious mass murder. Consequently for 5 years, non-Jew Germans were able to tell themselves that the systematic discrimination against the Jews was a half way legitimate move designed to Germanize the economy.

        If jobs were to be created by Germans for Germans, then Germans had to take command of their own economy and finances. They turned a blind eye to the measures that restricted Jewish rations, that forbade them to shave, that made of them not only second class citizens, but also desperate, marginalize figures scrambling to survive. The Night of Broken Glass (Kristallnacht) on November 9-10, 1938, however, showed that the Nazis could be satisfied only with the total uprooting of Jewish culture from Germany, with their elimination, with the re-writing of history. And, in allowing mob rule, even for a night, the Nazi regime showed that the whole force of the judicial and political system would be turned against Jews.

        I would conclude by saying that history is not something of mere academic interest. George Orwell in his world famous book called '1984' (published in 1949) envisaged a totalitarian world to be born in 1984, a morally corrupt Government which will maintain absolute power by systematically depriving its subjects of their identities and by denying them any hope of a cultural legacy. As George Orwell wrote in his book called '1984', 'Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.'