Lawyer Warned of Holocaust Revision Tuesday November 14, 2000 10:00 pm
WASHINGTON (AP) - A former Nuremberg prosecutor warned the FBI in 1969 that
he feared Holocaust revisionist author David Irving planned to tamper with
transcripts or tapes of the Nazi war crimes trial in U.S. archives. The
British historian visited the National Archives numerous times. The agency's
retired expert on World War II records said Tuesday he knows of no evidence
that Irving mishandled records he examined. A letter that the late Robert
M.W. Kempner, who prosecuted Nazi war crimes suspects in the postwar
Nuremberg trials, wrote to then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was among
documents released by the FBI and the National Archives and Records
Administration. Irving, who has outraged death camp survivors and most
historians by questioning the scope of the Holocaust, lost a British libel
suit in April. The judge branded him ``an active Holocaust denier'' and
``anti-Semitic and racist.'' Irving's office in England said Tuesday he was
traveling in the United States and does not return phone calls. He also did
not immediately answer an e-mail seeking comment. In the March 1969 letter,
released in a wide-ranging government declassification program, Kempner wrote
that Irving had told him he planned to visit the Washington archives to
research his contention that the official record of the Nuremberg trials was
falsified. Kempner said he was suspicious because of that accusation and
others Irving made during a conversation they had. ``I am sure if he shows up
at the National Archives (probably a Mr. Wolfe is in charge of the division
concerned) someone will be able (to) watch in the proper way what this
`scholar' is doing,'' Kempner wrote Hoover. ``Maybe this research is only a
pretext for some other activities,'' he wrote. ``Mr. Wolfe'' is Robert Wolfe,
for decades the archives expert on World War II records. The now-retired
Wolfe told The Associated Press on Tuesday that he does not recall that the
letter resulted in special security for Irving visits. ``They may have
contacted us to alert us, but I knew who he was anyway,'' said Wolfe. ``And
we watch everybody.'' Wolfe said Irving visited the archives many times,
adding that ``he's a good researcher - his bias is what throws him off.'' He
said Irving usually was treated as other researchers were; that is, he was
given access to public materials. ``But Irving's reputation went with him -
though I've seen worse deniers than him,'' said Wolfe. ``He was treated with
the same regime as others, perhaps a touch more alertness.'' Irving, who has
written some 30 books, disputes that millions of Jews were systematically
slaughtered in gas chambers at Nazi concentration camps. He argues that it
would have been logistically impossible and claims more people died in Allied
bombing raids than in concentration camps. He also has tried to cast doubt on
other pieces of evidence from the Holocaust, including the diary of Anne
Frank, and contends that Adolf Hitler knew nothing about the plan to
eliminate the Jews until 1943. ^--- On the Net: National Archives and Record
Administration: http://www.nara.gov
http://www.guardian.co.uk/breakingnews/International/0,3561,549726,00.html
