Secret service to monitor Irving's death camp tour
The Polish secret service will be monitoring Holocaust denier David Irving's planned tour of Treblinka this month.
Irving, who lost a libel case against Deborah Lipstadt in 2000 after she called him a Holocaust denier, was described by the judge in 2000 as "associating with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism".
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He is also giving eight lectures in the UK over the next two weeks including in Manchester, Edinburgh and Bradford.
A spokesperson for the Polish Embassy in London said: "The secret services in Poland and the UK are aware of the visit and that he has previously visited Treblinka, and the visit at the end of September will be under strict observation by the Polish authorities. However, because there's no warrant out for his arrest by either the British or any other EU state there's nothing else we can do and therefore he’s free to visit Poland and Treblinka."
She added: "The Republic of Poland shares the concerns of the British Jewish community on this matter."
Spokesman for the Community Security Trust, Mark Gardner said: "We are aware of these latest attempts to revive his career. He is, however, disgraced and discredited. Nevertheless, his planned trip to Poland appears to be particularly offensive and one can hardly imagine what he will have to say about the fate of Polish Jewry and the Warsaw Ghetto."
Linda Paterson, chief executive of Yad Vashem UK says she had hoped the Polish authorities would "disallow the visit".
She added: "For a known Holocaust denier to take people around a concentration camp is totally inappropriate and confrontational."
Karen Pollock, the Chief Executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, described the week-long tour as, "insulting the memory of Survivors".
She added: "David Irving is a racist and a Holocaust denier who serves no purpose but to further provoke far-right extremists and those who would insult the memory of Holocaust victims and Survivors".
Irving has been quoted in the past as saying that: It isn't right for Tel Aviv to say 'David Irving is talking nonsense and of course Adolf Hitler must have known about what was going in Auschwitz and Treblinka.'"
He has also said that, "Hitler was the biggest friend the Jews had in the Third Reich" and that, "The Jews are the architects of their own misfortune".
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