“Terror on the Tube” — an interview with Nicholas Kollerstrom

Short interview with Nick Kollerstrom

Nick Kollerstrom
Author of “Terror on the Tube”

You have become controversial in the eyes of the public because of an article about the Auschwitz “gas chambers” and reports in the press, such as The London Evening Standard. I would like to pose a few questions about them to clarify your position.

First, the Evening Standard included this paragraph in a story about you it published on 6 October 2008:

“Dr. Kollerstrom was last month stripped of an honorary research fellowship at University College London after it emerged he had written a paper entitled The Auschwitz ‘Gas Chamber’ Illusion on a far-Right website—claiming it was like a holiday camp where inmates sunned themselves by an ‘elegant’ swimming pool and listened to orchestras.”

Is this an accurate summary of your position and, if not, what is not right?

 (a) The paper was indeed partially the cause, but I suspect my being filmed by the BBC for “Conspiracy Files” was the main reason. They did not formally give a reason.

 (b) It is wrong to call http://www.codoh.com (CODOH, the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust) “a far-right website.” I have experience of its banning ‘far-right’ (specifically, racist or pro-Nazi) views.

 (c) I never said “it was like a holiday camp”, which is a poisonous lie from Rachel North. She gave it to the Evening Standard and anyone else who will listen.

 (d) There were some amenities provided, for example, orchestras, as portrayed in the American film, “Playing for Time”; yet the main recollections we have of life in this camp seem to involve horror and despair. So for me the swimming pool there expresses a paradox.

 (e) I find it bizarre that people seem to suppose that the existence of a swimming pool there was some odd view of mine – see in particular the Cannes film of a few years ago, “The Swimming Pool of Auschwitz” or articles that are accessible via google, such as http://www.rense.com/general24/controversy.htm.

Second, the article the Standard cites, “The Auschwitz ‘Gas Chamber’ Illusion”, which you authored and published in 2008, begins with the following sentences:

“As surprising as it may sound, the only intentional mass extermination program in the concentration camps of WWII was targeted at Germans. From April, 1945 five million Germans were rounded up after surrendering, and deliberately starved until well over one million had died, in French and American-run concentration camps[1] – an event soon erased from the history books. There was, in contrast, never a centrally-coordinated Nazi program of exterminating Jews in Germany. Lethal gas chambers did not function in German labour-camps, that’s just an illusion.”

Do you hold the same opinions today and, if so, how do you justify them?

 (a) I have deleted that statement nearly two years ago, (see my CODOH essays http://www.codoh.com/author/kollerstrom.html), realising (i) I was not competent to have an opinion on this matter — I’m a science historian with no general familiarity with European WWII history — and (ii) it was not relevant to my main argument.

 (b) It remains my view that there exist no authentic Nazi documents indicating an intention to exterminate Jews. That said, I don’t doubt that the latter did take place.

 (c) I remain intrigued by the duality of whether the WWII Zyklon gas chambers were hygenic (delousing clothes, protecting against typhus) or homicidal. It seems to me that science historians ought to be interested in this question of how delousing was done before DDT was invented in 1945. Residual wall cyanide can here be a guide.

 (d) There is thus only one point where my opinions concerning “The Holocaust” are of any particular value, and it concerns the following axiom: If any chamber in the German labour camps of WWII had been repeatedly exposed to hydrogen cyanide gas, then the remains today must have significantly elevated levels of iron cyanide in the brickwork and mortar. This is a function of chemistry.

 (e) My mother was a chemist and the permanence of the iron-cyanide bond over sixty years is the primary reason for my involvement in this controversial subject. As it happens, the two independent chemical investigations into wall-cyanide at Auschwitz — by Leuchter and by Rudolf — appear to be in agreement: it (the iron-cyanide residue) isn’t there. Science begins where replication of data is achieved.

Third, the article in the Standard, “7/7 was an MI5 plot, Holocaust denier claims in BBC film”, also includes the following paragraph:

“Dr Kollerstrom believes the four bombers who murdered 52 people almost three years ago were ‘innocent patsies’, set up by a combination of the British, US and Israeli secret services.”

Is it possible that the authorities are eager to tarnish your reputation for political purposes because your views, including those published in your new book, TERROR ON THE TUBE, contradict the “official account” of 7/7?

 (a) Those are indeed my conclusions. And, certainly, they did that very well.

 (b) I don’t think there can be much doubt that the British government is not keen to have its black ops exposed. Maud’Dib in “7/7 Ripple Effect” did a great job of ripping the cover off of this one.

 (c) While I do not agree with all of Maud’Dib’s conclusions, my book, “Terror on the Tube”, arrives at very similar findings about what was going on that day, including the use of a “terrorist drill” as camouflage for the real attack and the use of four young Muslim men as “patsies”.

 (d) It was an unconscionable act and those who were responsible need to be exposed and brought to justice. And I also appreciate your efforts own to expose falsehoods and reveal the truth of 9/11 and of 7/7.