Sir, I am afraid that it is misleading to refer to the International Tracing Service at Bad Arolsen, in Germany, as a “Holocaust archive” (report, Feb 21).

The tracing service was set up in 1945 to help UNRRA and the Red Cross to locate relatives of the displaced persons, many of them children, in their DP camps. When I was an UNRRA child welfare officer, Arolsen’s brilliant cross-reference section helped me and my colleagues to reunite parents with many children between the ages of 2 and 12 who had been stolen by the Nazis, primarily in Eastern Europe.

The younger ones, if sufficiently “Aryan” looking, were “Germanised” by being settled with good German families where in the course of time they largely forgot their past and, of course, their native language. The older ones, if found malleable, were reorientated in specially selected families or benign institutions or sent to work. To the Nazis this was in no way a punitive, but a strictly anthropological, project to which they devoted immense human and financial resources.

While many children could eventually be returned to their parents, a not inconsiderable number of them — another tragedy of the time — refused to leave the German foster parents that they had come to love and thus were twice lost to the parents who loved them.

Also, the postwar movement of populations made finding hundreds of displaced parents extremely difficult — this was one of the important roles of the Arolsen tracing service which dealt with almost unimaginable human havoc but perhaps not, as your headline implies, the specific one that has come to be called the Holocaust.

GITTA SERENY
London W14

Sir, The gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz and the deliberate Nazi policy of exterminating European Jewry are not matters of opinion: they are matters of historical fact. Residing in the archives are tens of thousands of documents detailing the application of the Final Solution — of the architects’ blueprints for the Auschwitz crematoria showing changing rooms and gas chambers; memos from Reich security police conducting round-ups of Jews in cities all over Europe; railway timetables detailing a steady stream of transports from these cities, destination Auschwitz; and even a substantial set of records of these transports arriving at Auschwitz, which escaped the frenzied burning of camp documents. We also have the transcripts of important war crimes tribunals in which documentary and eyewitness evidence was used to convict some of the perpetrators. We have the memoirs of the Auschwitz Lagerführer, Rudolf Höss. We have masses of photographic and film evidence. And we have volumes of survivor testimony so detailed and compendious that its veracity is compelling.

Any man claiming to be a historian who chooses to ignore compelling archive evidence in a futile attempt to rewrite history that matches his prejudices is a bad historian and should be exposed as such. Having been so exposed, if he continues to claim the earth is flat, he should be allowed to do so. We don’t have to buy his books or take him seriously in any way. Let him eke out his disgraced reputation on the fringes of society rather than giving him and those of like mind the argument that he was censored, so he must have been right.

JEREMY CRICK
Wolstanton, Staffs

Sir, We Austrians helped to build the death camps for the extermination of the Jews and anyone who says otherwise will be imprisoned . . . Actually, imprisoning a dissident was what caused the trouble in the first place.

W. S. BECKET
Deiniolen, North Wales

Sir, In this bicentenary of John Stuart Mill’s birth, a year with immense pressures on free speech and, indeed, free cartooning, I am surprised that Mill’s excellent defence of humanism and liberty is hardly mentioned.

With the David Irving sentence before us, let us recall Mill’s point that, even when the received opinion (in this case, concerning the Holocaust) is the whole truth, it is still good for it to be vigorously contested — otherwise it will lapse into a sleeping dogma, lacking all efficacy.

PETER CAVE
London W1

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