According to an article in the extremist leftist Guardian newspaper in Britain, historian David Irving has backtracked on his earlier views about the Holocaust myth and now accepts that the Nazis engaged in mass extermination of Jews in certain camps.

Irving says that his views on the Holocaust have crystallized rather than changed. He says that he believes the Jews were responsible for what happened to them during the Second World War and that the "Jewish problem" was responsible for nearly all the wars of the past 100 years: "The Jews are the architects of their own misfortune, but that is the short version A-Z. Between A-Z there are then 24 other characters in intervening steps."

He says that a document, which he is 80% sure is genuine, suggests that 2.4 million Jews were killed in Poland, but goes on to claim that the gas chamber at Auschwitz was fake. "It was not the centre of the killing operations - it has only become a focus because it is the site that is best preserved. Much of what is shown the tourists there is faked postwar - watchtowers, even the famous gas chamber."

He added: "In my opinion now the real killing operations took place at the Reinhardt camps west of the Bug river. In the three camps here [Sobibor, Belzec, and Treblinka] Heinrich Himmler's men (mostly Ukrainian mercenaries) killed possibly as many as 2.4 million in the two years up to October 1943. There is now nothing to be seen of the Reinhardt camps, neither stick nor stone, so few tourists go there. I have visited all four sites earlier this year."

Pressed as to whether this change undermined his previous stance, Irving replied: "It is a crystallization of my view." Asked if he now accepts there had been a Holocaust against the Jewish people he said he was "not going to use their trade name".

He added: "I do accept that the Nazis quite definitely, that Heinrich Himmler, organized and directed a program, a clandestine program, for the liquidation of European Jews ... and that in 1942-43 alone over 2.5 million Jews were killed in those three camps." He added that Hitler was "completely in the dark" about the program.

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