GERMANY | 18.01.2006 "Germany Condemns Proposed Iranian Holocaust Conference""The Iranian government announced last weekend that it is planning a conference on the Holocaust and intends to invite academics such as German neo-Nazi Horst Mahler, the Israeli journalist and Christian convert Israel Shamir and the historian David Irving -- all of whom are Holocaust deniers -- as guest speakers.". . . "Green party chief Reinhard Bütikofer said that the planned conference was further evidence that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was pursuing an "unrestrained policy of anti-Semitic indoctrination" in Iran. President Ahmadinejad has called the Holocaust a "myth" and has questioned the right of Israel to exist."http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,1860064,00.htmlI'm currently reading Martha Gellhorn's "The Face of War" (Granta Books, London, 1993) having put aside temporarily Deborah LIbstadt's "Beyond Belief" (The Free Press, New York, 1986). Before this I had read Professor Lipstadt's "History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving" (an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, New York, 2005) and "Denying the Holocaust: The Grown Assault on Truth and Memory" (Plume, New York, 1994). I've went to Martha Gellhorn's book now because of its description of Dachau which existed for 12 years from 1933 to 1945. She entered this concentration camp a couple days after its liberation and was so horrified by what she saw that it changed her life completely as described in Caroline Moorehead's biography "Martha Gellhorn: A Life" (Chatto and Lindus, London, 2003). Martha Gellhorn has a chapter about Dachau in "Face of War" along with another chapter containing a description of a Dutch town whose 1200 Jews were placed in a camp nearby before being transported to a death camp. An SS guard who accompanied the train to death came back to the town and described exactly what happened. While moving up Italy with the advancing armies, she described what three Poles had told her about the Nazi occupation of Poland during their fight in Italy back to their country. What the Nazis did to occupied countries and the Jews along with undesirables beggars belief. The incredible horror of the systematic exclusion of the Jews from national life by legislation in Germany during the 1930s followed by a policy to transport them to death camps for total extermination in Poland in the 1940s reflects mass genocide against a specific group of people the world has never seen. At the same time Poles were taken to Germany for slave labour. Denying the Holocaust represents a rebirth of the foundation of antisemitism which the Nazis carried out. This is resurrecting itself on a national basis by the likes of Iran. Germany and Austria have criminalised such claims that deny the reality of what the Nazis did. The world should take a lesson from these and seven the other countries who have likewise criminalised such historical revisionism which cannot be sustained at all. There is no discussion whatsoever on any grounds about the existence of the Holocaust. It is a fact of history.