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| Auschwitz to bar entrance to Iranian probe team
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Polish officials vowed Friday to bar access to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp to a team that Iran allegedly plans to send to Europe to investigate the true scale of the Holocaust.
"People who deny that people died in the gas chambers, who profane the memory of the victims of the Holocaust, will not be admitted to
Auschwitz-Birkenau," the management of the museum that was set up in 1947 at the site of the most grimly efficient of the Nazi German death camps, in southern Poland, said.
Poland’s Rzeczpospolita newspaper reported Friday that Tehran planned to send a group of experts to Auschwitz and the sites of several other former Nazi German death camps in Poland, to assess the true scale of the Holocaust.
Auschwitz was the largest death camp built by the Nazis and historians estimate that around 1.1 million men, women and children, a majority of them Jews from Germany and Nazi-occupied countries, died there between 1940 and 1945.
Also exterminated there were 85,000 non-Jewish Poles, 20,000 gypsies, 15,000 Soviet citizens and 12,000 others.
Polish Foreign Minister Stefan Meller said the government should bar the Iranians from conducting their probe into the Holocaust in Poland.
"My view is that we should, on no account, allow this to happen.
Researching or even discussing such matters goes beyond all imaginable standards," Meller said.
But, he added, the affair was no more than "virtual reality" at present, as his ministry has not been contacted by Iran on the matter.
On Tuesday, Iran’s ambassador to Portugal Mohammed Taheri in an interview on public radio called into question the number of victims of the Holocaust, which historians have estimated claimed the lives of some six million Jews, half Europe’s Jewish population.
"To incinerate six million people, you’d need around 15 years," Taheri said on Portuguese radio.
He added that he had visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp when he was posted in Poland, and, based on what he saw there, did not see how six million Jews could have been killed during WWII.
Taheri also said that a conference planned by Iran to assess the scale of the Holocaust, which Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad rejects as a myth, could take place as early as this spring.
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