Anti-racist groups have called for the British historian David Irving to be banned from visiting Poland, where he plans to lead a guided tour of Holocaust sites.
Irving, who has written a number of revisionist histories of the Second World War, and who was convicted of denying the Holocaust by an Austrian court in 2006, plans to hold a guided tour of sites including that of the Nazi death camp at Treblinka. His week-long tour will begin on 21 September in Warsaw and is expected to attract a number of far-right sympathisers from across Europe. Irving told the Daily Mail he was not a Holocaust denier and claimed Treblinka was a real death camp site, as opposed to Auschwitz, which he described as a “Disney-style” tourist attraction.
A joint statement issued by the anti-racist group Searchlight and its Polish counterpart Nigdy Wiecej (“Never Again”), called on the Polish government to ban Irving from visiting the country. However, a spokesman at the Polish embassy in London said that although Irving’s movements would be closely monitored by the country’s secret services, he could not be stopped from entering Poland, as he is not currently on any countries’ wanted lists.
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