Soldiers and inmates in Bergen Belsen in 1945
Dr. Russell Barton
[Dr. Russell Barton was the third witness called by the defence. He testified on
Wednesday, March 9, 1988.]
Dr. Russell Barton testified that he was the same Russell Barton referred to in Did Six
Million Really Die? and confirmed that the quotes from his article in Purnell's History
of the Second World War (vol. 7, no. 15) dealing with his experiences as a medical
student at Belsen camp after its liberation were correct and consistent with his
recollections of the event.
Barton testified that he arrived at Belsen concentration camp on May 2, 1945. He had
the view of most people at the time regarding Belsen; that it was a camp in which
people had been ruthlessly exterminated and deliberately starved to death. The impression of the camp he first gained was one of "horror"; some inmates were
dead and piled up outside the huts, others were in various stages of dying, disease and
dehydration. In one hut, the inmates were in relatively good condition, they could get
up and walk. In other huts, there was the pervasive smell of feces, vomit
and decay. People were crying for doctors. Many could not feed themselves.
The death rate when Barton first came was about 300 to 500 people a day. The
inmates pushed dead people out of the huts because the lice which carried typhus left
dead bodies and went to the living.
Everybody was terrified of getting typhus,
including the British. The bodies were in a state of severe malnutrition, and very few
were clothed. A fire burned constantly at Belsen, upon which the clothes of the dead
were thrown to burn the lice. Other garbage was also thrown into the fire, as there was
no garbage collection. A dreadful smell permeated the camp which could be smelt
about three miles away.
Barton testified that typhus was a febrile disease which was caused by the bite of the
human louse. The louse bite the skin, which itched. When the individual then
scratched the itch, he scratched into the spot the feces which the louse had defecated
onto the area where it had bitten. It was like a bacteria, but not quite a bacteria. It then
spread throughout the body. It was essentially a disease of the blood vessels. The
bacteria ate away within the lining of the blood vessels, thereby causing symptoms.
For example, they often hit the blood vessels in the brain, causing a very severe
headache. It sometimes caused pneumonia and often, gangrene.
Victims of typhus lost
weight very rapidly because of nausea. The individual felt terribly tired and
exhausted. Other symptoms were pneumonia and skin falling off. In 1945, there was
no cure for typhus. Today, there was; chloramphenicol was fairly specific.
Typhoid was a different disease. It was caused by salmonella, an organism which
affected the guts and the gall bladder, causing diarrhea, dysentery, and so forth, but it
didn't interfere with the blood vessels in the way typhus did. Many of the inmates died because the British soldiers gave them food and their
stomachs burst; the medical students were giving them a mixture of glucose and flour
and milk powder which made the inmates vomit. When they vomited, they often
inhaled and died because they were so weak.
Later they fed them a
powdered milk gruel. Although the vast majority of the inmates were emaciated, some were quite plump
and well-fed, and this puzzled Barton from the first day. He asked
questions to determine the reason for this and was told that if there were a majority of
Poles or French or Russians in one hut, that group would command all the food which
was left outside the door of the hut.
They would take what they wanted and leave the
rest for distribution among the rest of the inmates. There was no overseeing by the
camp staff and there hadn't been since before Christmas of 1944. Before that time, the
food had been distributed reasonably and everybody was getting a fair share. "It was a
terrible internal tyranny that...developed," said Barton.
He got the impression that at least 50 percent of the inmates were Jewish because of
the prayers and religious exercises they carried out. Barton was made an unofficial dietitian and found the camp had a kitchen set up with
450-kilo vats that were steam heated. There were four in one room and four
in another. He also found record books listing the food that had been cooked and
distributed going back to about 1942. Each of the different hut's larders listed the
amount of food that had been sent in the big churns for distribution. He mentioned to
his colleagues that if there had been a deliberate policy of extermination, why should
there be this elaborate kitchen equipment? This, however, was not a popular view. Barton made inquiries with inmates, including Jewish doctors, who told him that
Belsen had not been too bad until the autumn of 1944. Then, as the Russian armies
were advancing, they said they had been given the choice of remaining in the camps
about to be overrun by the Soviets or being repatriated back to Germany. Many chose
to return to Germany. As a result, from the autumn of 1944 to early 1945, some
53,000 people were moved into Belsen, which had room for only 3,000 inmates. The
overcrowding was gross and the staff at the camp resented it. Josef Kramer, the
commandant of Belsen, felt he had a responsibility to his 3,000 inmates but was
apparently angry about the 53,000 that were dumped into the camp. Dr. Klein, the
medical doctor at the camp, didn't know what to do.
Barton spoke to his superior, Dr. Meiklejohn, about the way the camp had been run.
Meiklejohn felt it was best not to look into these things too deeply, that in the time of
"fervour and distress" Barton's views would not make him very popular. This proved
to be correct. Barton testified that on May 21st, it was decided to burn the camp down and to have
the scene filmed for the purpose of showing the British to be "white knights" coming in to clear up the dreadful situation. Everything was arranged; work stopped for the
whole of that morning. The flame throwers were ready in the tanks but the film
makers hadn't got their cameras rolling yet. Suddenly, one of the tank commanders, in
apparent enthusiasm, blew a flame into the hut that was to be burned, resulting in
"tremendous consternation." They had to rush and put the flames out and start over
again. That was but one example of what went on; there was the arranging of scenes
that were pictured.
Barton felt such artificial filming of the camp was
the presentation of something which had no real purpose because the facts spoke for
themselves; what worried him more, as he got towards the end of his stay at Belsen on
June 1st, was the lack of integrity in dealing with the situation as it really was.
He believed the old view that Belsen was an "extermination camp" was now largely
corrected, but it depended to whom one spoke.
A.J.P Taylor, the English historian,
realized it when Barton talked to him after the furor came with the Purnell article. Barton was asked to contribute the article to Purnell's. He wasn't "keen" to do it, but it
didn't seem to be a very big magazine so he did what he thought was the correct thing:
to write without fear or favour.
Having experienced the results of writing as he did on
the subject, however, Barton testified that he would not do it again for publication in
his lifetime. He was dubbed "Belsen-Not-So-Bad Barton" by Scientology magazine, and this name
continued to be quoted.
The London Times used the inflammatory headline "Belsen
Not So Bad, says Psychiatrist." There were letters to the Times criticising
him. He wrote letters rebutting the more stupid and accusatory letters; there
were television interrogations and other debates. The matter was "hot and furious. Years later, when he was on a talk show in America, speaking on Scientology, one of
the ministers of the church charged: "This man killed 15,000 Jews." It was an attempt
to discredit what Barton was saying but it nevertheless had repercussions. Even today,
when he gave evidence in murder trials, the lawyer on the opposing side would often
attack him collaterally by bringing up the Purnell article or alleging that: "He agrees
he killed 15,000 Jews.
He agreed that nothing he had ever said or written
had caused him as much injury as had the Purnell article.
His objective in writing the article was simply to give his evidence, not about the
whole of Germany or people in Germany, not about all concentration camps, but
about what he had actually seen and the conclusions he thought a reasonable person
might come to. It was a terrible outbreak of typhus and the death of, he thought, some
30,000 people. He didn't think that it was going to be a public issue. Barton was also qualified as an expert in the field of psychiatry, specifically
brainwashing and mass hysteria. There was such a psychiatric phenomenon as
brainwashing, said Barton; usually it was used for political purposes. He described the
brainwashing process of small groups but stated that brainwashing could
affect whole societies. He never thought the whole of Nazi Germany was
brainwashed, although he thought some were brainwashed thoroughly such as the poor, maladjusted people who hadn't got jobs and hadn't much prospect of getting
jobs. These were brought into meetings characterized by songs and music and torch
light parades and were rewarded by being given places to live; usually places taken
from previous owners. That's why people were pushed into concentration camps, so
that their houses could be given to people who really wouldn't have lived at that
standard. There was the brainwashing that there was the Aryan race that was superior
to all others and that the other races were of no consequence. He thought this was the
minority of German people, although he really hadn't any idea, but he thought a
"tremendous number" of Germans hated Hitler and the loss of their freedoms. Barton believed he wasn't that suggestible, but noted that in the business of life one
didn't really sit back and think. If a person was confronted with a convenient story in
the newspaper, the tendency was to believe it. People only began to look into things
when they themselves were threatened or when something seemed so grossly unfair
and dreadful that the common decency of most people said: "This is wrong."
Barton
testified that this was what happened to him during the month he was at Belsen. When he was in Germany, the fashionable belief among the British was that all
Germans were bad people who bombed helpless civilians in cities and who
exaggerated their personal problems into the most terrible crusades of murder and
extermination of people they thought were inferior. This belief system affected their
willingness to accept what Barton had said. When a dogma had been accepted, it was
a rare man who would challenge it. He stated that confessions could be obtained which were false by means of coercive
measures and thought that the German people that were being examined after the war
had to follow the new current line of thought. Barton believed that this was a tragedy
for the German people. He thought the Germans were brainwashed after
the war with respect to their guilt. The "pressures on them were tremendous."
On cross-examination, Barton testified that probably a substantial majority of people
could resort to barbaric activities if the circumstances were right. He agreed it had
nothing to do with nationality.
He believed the leaders of Nazi Germany, such as Adolf Hitler and Goebbels, were
masters at propaganda and agreed that they elevated it to a new science. He agreed
that part of the propaganda message was that the Jews were the cause of Germany's
problems, that they used a variety of techniques to convince the populace that that
was the case, that they used very graphic and insulting publications like Der Stürmer
which parodied the archetypal Jew and had cartoons of Jewish people. He thought it
was not parody, but an attempt to increase the hatred against one group by giving
them qualities they didn't have, such as race. It was destruction of reputation, which in
his opinion, was entirely unwarranted. It was easy to satisfy it in the minds of less
intelligent people, the less critical people, because intelligence and criticism weren't in
the same dimension.
Barton agreed that techniques of propagandists and politicians included the "Big Lie"
that a group of people, because of nationality or race, all had an identifiable
characteristic, such as greed. He agreed that prior to the Second World War in
Germany popular newspapers painted a distorted picture of the Jews, followed by the
preventing of Jews from following their professional callings such as medicine or law,
and pushing them out of the civil service; he agreed that legislation was then passed
confiscating their property and that such property was given to the party faithful.
Christie objected at this point in the cross-examination on the grounds that Barton had
not been qualified as a historian, and asked whether Crown counsel was going to
prove the allegations of fact made in his hypothetical questions. Judge Thomas
overruled the objection: "This man served his country at the time of the Second World
War. He experienced it. He lived it. He was involved in it. There are no hypothetical
questions being asked here. The questions that are being asked are questions that this
man indicates he has knowledge of, personal knowledge of. Proceed." (21-5186)
Barton was shown Exhibit 91, the cartoon published by Ditlieb Felderer, and agreed
that the cartoon had the characteristics of the Nazi version of what a Jew looked like
and attempted, by implication, to undermine his credibility. It was making fun of a
great tragedy, he agreed. He further agreed that this was the type of
cartoon published in Der Stürmer to identify Jews as an inferior people without rights. He agreed that if people were conditioned to view people as sub human, it
would give them an excuse not to treat them like humans, and that this technique
worked with quite a number of people. He agreed that the goal of the Nazi regime was to force the Jews out of Germany; that
when the war began, Hitler was initially successful militarily; that the Nazi empire
expanded at a great rate; that the number of Jews who fell under Nazi domination
increased significantly; that while the Nazis were successful on land, militarily, the
British navy still controlled the seas; that this prevented the shipment of Jews to
Madagascar; that the Jews were then rounded up and put in concentration camps
along with other races and nationalities; that Nazi racial theory wasn't concerned only
with Jews; that the Slavs and Poles were considered sub-human by the Nazis along
with anybody else that had any property they wanted, including Whites; that the Jews
occupied the bottom rung, however, and were the main scapegoat at one time
(although Barton pointed out, there were Jews such as Einstein who were exceptions);
that the Jewish community in Germany, prior to 1943, was a very vibrant community;
that it made great contributions to German culture; that it resulted in there being many
people whom the Nazis needed who were Jews; and while the Nazis had a racial
theory that placed the Jews on the bottom rung, they were quite prepared to use the
genius of the Jewish race when it suited them; that these people were used by the
Nazis (Barton added that some died rather than be used); that Jewish doctors, while
they didn't like working for the Nazis, felt they had a professional obligation to stay
even though in their hearts they may have wanted to leave; that there were German
doctors who stayed and wanted to help the dying and the sick.
He agreed that all he could really tell the court about was Bergen-Belsen; that it was
the camp where the Nazis kept the people that they wanted to trade; that before the
influx of 1945, the people who were captive at Bergen-Belsen were viewed by the Nazis as a commodity; he agreed that they were hostages to be traded as a way of
getting money, getting equipment to continue the war with; he agreed it made sense
for the Nazis to keep people they were going to trade in relatively good condition; he
agreed that could explain why the facilities in Bergen- Belsen were relatively good
because if one was going to trade somebody, one had to keep them well-fed, although
he thought, like everyone else when he was in Belsen, that they had been put there to
be exterminated. He agreed that if these people were to be traded and they had arrived in the United
States in an emaciated condition, it would have looked bad for the Nazis; he agreed
that it was entirely in the interests of the Nazi regime to keep these people they were
trading in good condition; he agreed that 53,000 people who had arrived in Belsen in
1945 came from the east as a result of evacuations of the Polish camps; he agreed the
trip for these people from the eastern camps to Bergen-Belsen was horrendous and
had been told that thousands died; he agreed these were, in effect, death marches, but
he had never seen any of them arriving; the evacuations ended by the very beginning
of 1945. Some marched, some were in cattle trucks that were sent out to the Eastern
front. He stated that the inmates had told him they wanted to come west rather than be
"liberated" by the Soviets.
Most people were very worried about the way the Russian
soldiers were behaving. He had no direct knowledge of what happened in the eastern
camps such as Auschwitz, although he heard horror stories from the former inmates. Barton agreed that one of the functions of propaganda in the Nazi regime was to incite
racial hatred; he agreed that a certain percentage of the population of any country
would be susceptible to that type of propaganda; he agreed that many factors could
have a bearing on the impact of such propaganda; he agreed that people who were not
susceptible during good economic times could become susceptible during bad
economic times; he agreed that the group picked as a target for propaganda would
also affect how successful the propaganda was; that a group different from the mean
would improve the chances of the propaganda succeeding; differences including
colour, religion. He agreed that people under psychiatric care would not admit that they had a problem;
that some people who underwent psychiatric care viewed the psychiatrist as being part
of a conspiracy against them (although Barton added that sometimes such a view was
justified.) He agreed that they would often point to external things as being the reason
why they were in psychiatric care, such as the "Zionist conspiracy," through the use of
projection, the attributing to other people of things that were denied in themselves.
Barton had never read Did Six Million Really Die? right through, but he believed 6
million Jews did die. Nevertheless, he did not think it was pursuant to a policy of
extermination. He thought there were many causes, including typhus and tuberculosis
at Belsen. He admitted that on the topic of whether or not there was an official policy
of extermination he could not give evidence as it was not his area of expertise. He
himself saw thousands die. He did not know that his work was going to be published in Did Six Million Really
Die?. Asked if it was misleading for the author to include Barton's observations in a
booklet whose thesis was that millions of Jews didn't die, Barton replied that it was if
"we're just discussing did they die or not." He believed each person was valuable, that
the figure might have been 6 million or 5 million or 8 million; he didn't think anybody
really knew the number and that there never would be any way of knowing.
He did not know enough to say whether the Holocaust was an invention to extort
moneys from Germany. He accepted the figure of 6 million but did not know whether
or not it was a deliberate policy. He knew it wasn't a deliberate policy of the German
people. He didn't think he was brainwashed about the 6 million figure. He agreed that
it was the generally accepted view that millions of Jews died during the Second World
War under Nazi control and agreed he was not suggesting that everyone had been
brainwashed into believing it. He agreed that former inmates of Nazi concentration camps might well be outraged
by Did Six Million Really Die?. He agreed it was possible that someone might
conclude, from the inclusion of Barton's material in Did Six Million Really Die?, that
he supported its thesis. When asked if it was unfortunate for him that Harwood chose
to use his observations in his booklet, Barton replied that it was "unfortunate for me.
It's brought me here again, but... I think what I said is honest, and I stand by it. That's
why I'm appearing here." Asked again if he thought it was misleading for Harwood to use his observations,
Barton replied: "Well, it is misleading because I believe they did die. I believe 6
million, give or take, did die, but I don't necessarily connect in the causal chain of
events that there was a policy of extermination.
I don't know that all Germans were
bad. I don't know. I don't think they were, and so on and so forth. So I have
reservations, but when one makes a statement, I think one has to have it used against
one." He stated that if his observations were being used in Did Six Million Really Die? to
make people take a second look at whether or not there was a deliberate policy of
extermination by all German people, then it was a "good thing" it had gone in.
He
agreed he would have preferred if his views as expressed in the court had gone in
instead and that it would have been less misleading. He stated that people would not have gotten the typhus to the same extent if they had
not been in the camp. It was the placing of people together with poor sanitary
conditions which brought the lice. He testified there was a neutral area around the
camp guarded by Hungarian soldiers, the idea being to contain the typhus from
spreading all over Europe, possibly all over the world. The soldiers were not
emaciated and Barton agreed that rations were probably issued on a scale of human
worth. He didn't think the inmates were worthless to the Germans; they were a
potential source of income. Asked if the Holocaust was not the major indictment against Adolf Hitler and the
Nazi regime, Barton replied that the Holocaust was really something that developed in
the late 1950s and 1960s. People didn't talk of the Holocaust in the 1940s and 1950s.
393
He thought it had become trivialized and sensationalized, that a dogma had
developed, which was unfortunate since it did not get to the real cause of why one
group could suddenly behave so viciously and thoughtlessly to another. Barton was asked if it was fair to say that A.J.P. Taylor, the eminent British historian,
believed that historical study required that one look very objectively at events and
attempt to denude them of nationalistic overtones; to look at history as objectively as
possible.
Barton replied that what Taylor stated was: Don't try and fit the facts into a
preconceived hypothesis but try and look at the facts and from them abstract the cause
or hypothesis. Asked if he would ever suggest that A.J.P. Taylor would falsify history,
Barton replied that he wouldn't suggest it, but would never trust anybody 100 percent
either. Said Barton: "Judicious distrust and benign skepticism are the sinews of
understanding." Barton felt that unless we doubt we begin the slippery slopes of
getting lost. He agreed that the researcher must be honest with the facts and approach matters
objectively with no hidden agenda. He pointed out, however, that it was usually the
victors who wrote history and the vanquished who had to accept whatever views the
victors put across.
He therefore liked the attempt of revisionism to look at historical
events from all sides. Asked if none of that involved falsifying history or denying the
facts, Barton replied that he had to say yes and no, that people reinterpret facts, and
when they play down one fact and play up another they were making their thesis
rather than dealing with what had actually happened. To some extent, one always had
to be suspicious if facts were being falsified to put a point of view across. Barton testified he didn't think Hitler was right but didn't know if he exterminated
millions of Jews either. It happened but was it Hitler? Was it the thugs in the SS? Was
it Himmler, a man who was a beast of the first order? How in the name of God could
it ever happen?, asked Barton. Who decided that large masses of people could be
shoved into concentration camps and neglected or abandoned? Who would allow the
beastly bullying of the sort of little man, the lower man in the immediate day-to-day
contact with the prisoners? Who would allow that to go on without disciplining them
and so forth? He didn't know where it started. He agreed that this was the stuff of historical debate; he stated that it was not only
what happened and how it happened, but most importantly, could we stop it again? The idea of the Aryan elite, the superior people, was the primary racism of Germany;
the idea that Germany had a special role in the world and the rest of the people were
peasants and peons to be controlled and used for their glory. The anti semitic business
was not their primary purpose but a very convenient way of getting scapegoats and
uniting hundreds of people, thousands of people, who had lost their savings, who
didn't have jobs.
It was a dreadful use of the destruction of reputation. Barton was shown a sentence in Did Six Million Really Die? under the heading "The
Race Problem Suppressed." It read: Thus any rational discussion of the problems of Race and the effort to preserve
racial integrity is effectively discouraged.
Asked if the proposition being put forward in the booklet was that the deaths of
millions of Jews effectively discouraged discussions of race, Barton disagreed. He
couldn't see that it did discourage it and thought that the very fact that this could
happen was a reason to look at the problem of race and ask: why? Superficial
concepts of race had to be looked at much more closely, and he did not know that this
statement in Did Six Million Really Die? was valid. He agreed that there was a great lesson to be learned from the deaths of millions of
Jews during the Second World War, and agreed further that the lesson was that people
should not adopt racist attitudes.
Nevertheless, Barton felt it was no good denying
racism. The fact had to be faced that many people felt a kinship with others which
was irrational and very damaging and destructive, if not to themselves, to another
group whom they thought was different from them. It was only by understanding that
"there is this basic beastliness to be with people like one and to disparage and to
dislike those who don't fit in within the pattern" that people would be able to come out
of this morass, this mess, this emotional miasma. If one said that the baser instincts
were not there and that everybody was really nice and happy together, then this was
not facing reality.
The goal was to acknowledge the instincts that one had in oneself
against someone of another country, and so on, and to regard such instincts as one
would regard all misleading passions that sweep the human mind, and say, 'Well, I
feel this way, but it is not right to act on it. Barton turned at this point to Judge Thomas and apologized for appearing to lecture.
Thomas replied: "No, no. I'm grateful for the manner in which you are answering.
Thank you." Asked if it wasn't true that one of the greatest lessons of the Second World War was
that, under the leadership of a "particular regime," the things talked about by Barton
were not recognized, Barton agreed and stated they were not only denied but were
promoted. "Tolerance was almost a dirty word, as I understand it. On re-examination, Barton agreed that not only the Nazis were good at propaganda
but the British also. He testified that a dogma seemed to be established concerning the
"Holocaust" for the purpose of establishing a general belief. Asked what happened to
anyone who denied the general belief he answered: "Mr. Christie, it is very difficult to
remain on either side. You make enemies on both sides and few friends on either." The best antidote to brainwashing was the reaffirmation of the basic principles that
were necessary in the affairs of human beings, namely, fair play and compassion. The "Holocaust" should be looked at under light, rather than heat. When
people's feelings began to run high, then the light was gone and people became
enlisted into one course of action or one group or one camp.
The most important
faculty human beings had was the ability to doubt and not to be enlisted. Barton derived his knowledge of Nazi racial theory from readings done for an article
on the subject by the National Association of Mental Health. Barton had never read Der Stürmer, although he had seen copies of it. He couldn't
read German but he had seen that type of cartoon in publications of the Nazi period. Barton based his opinion that millions of Jews died on population studies of the
various countries before the war and the estimates of the numbers of people in the
camps from whatever records were left. He admitted such records were not that good
and that he had never looked at them himself. He nevertheless felt that people had
looked into this matter very carefully and made an estimate. It was certainly not a 100
million; it was certainly not a 100,000, but there were different strands of evidence
suggesting that it was in the neighbourhood of 5, 6 or 7 million. Barton agreed that he never at any time had any objections to being quoted by
anybody. He testified that there had to be dissent on all issues apart from the need for dissent.
Unless people could subject their beliefs to reason, and to adversarial procedures
which were designed to get at the truth and not score personal points, people would
begin to accept dogmas and be led down the pathways chosen for them by charismatic
leaders.
He did not believe the court process was satisfactory for the resolution of historical
issues. In history, one was not dealing with facts which could be delineated or
defined. The courts on the other hand were to a large extent set up to deal with
concrete facts. It was more satisfactory for people with well-tuned minds to discuss
historical issues and to avoid the temptation to exaggerate their own personal
problems into crusades, taking sides, either side. People had to learn to stand aside
and be independent but in the busy practical affairs of mankind people took a lot of
things for granted and made a lot of decisions that they hadn't really looked into. Barton admitted he did not know very much about the reparations paid by Germany to
Israel. He stated that people who had been brainwashed usually didn't know it. He knew of
no other historical event or figure that was more frequently discussed than the
"Holocaust" and the "6 million." The discussion concerning this event had increased
with time. He personally was not enraged by Did Six Million Really Die?. He thought the
discussion contained in it was necessary. He himself did not believe the Holocaust
was a hoax to get money out of people but if it was a point of view that was genuinely
held by someone, it could not be dismissed out of hand. One had to look at the
evidence, weigh it up and then dismiss it.
He did not believe he could dismiss what
someone else thought peremptorily, without at least according them some
intelligence, some inductive reasoning, some ability to arrive at solutions and
conclusions as they saw it, and he did not think one could ever deprive or want to
396
deprive another person of this ability. When people arrived at wrong conclusions, one
could say to them: "I'm holding the mirror up to you. These are the choices you've
made. These are the conclusions you've reached. These are the attitudes that seem to
be overriding. Is that how you want to go on?" He did not think one could go much
further than that. One could not coerce people into thinking or believing. Other people were enraged by his own writings but that was not a reason not to
publish. He did not think his critics were looking at his writings objectively. He
believed A.J.P. Taylor would not want to silence those who took views contrary to
his. The way to deal with racial problems was not suppression but ventilation. Issues had
to be brought out and discussed. Things could not be suppressed for long and
inevitably there would be protests leading to countermeasures and so on. The better
way was the more reasoning way.
After his experiences at Belsen, he did not think it possible for an objectively truthful
history of events to emerge. Nevertheless, he thought that did not relieve people of the
obligation to try and arrive objectively at true belief.
Truth required courage in the
first place and "we are not always courageous.