Auschwitz blueprints highlight Netanyahu’s UN riposte to Iran president’s Holocaust claims

Netanyahu hits back at Iran Holocaust claims

UNITED NATIONS — Waving the blueprints for Auschwitz and invoking the memory of his own family members murdered by the Nazis, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered his most passionate and public riposte yet to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s questioning of the Holocaust.

The documents he brought to the podium of the U.N. General Assembly Thursday also included the protocol of the meeting where the Nazis decided on the Final Solution.

Netanyahu tied the Holocaust issue to Iran’s nuclear program and Ahmadinejad’s rejection of Israel’s right to exist, and seemed to tacitly draw a parallel between the world’s treatment of Iran today and its failure to act against Hitler in time to head off World War II and save European Jewry.

The Israeli leader came armed with original documents handed to him last month when he visited Germany, and launched into an angry denunciation of Ahmadinejad’s comments on the Holocaust, most recently in a speech in Tehran last week in which he spoke of “twisted propaganda plots” to depict Jews as oppressed, and said the Holocaust needed “research … to clear up facts.”

Holding up the protocol of the 1942 conference at Wannsee, outside Berlin, where top Nazis decided on the destruction of European Jewry, Netanyahu asked: “Is this protocol a lie?”

Then he held up the blueprints including gas chambers and crematoria for Auschwitz-Birkenau, the death camp where more than 1 million Jews were murdered.

“Those plans are signed by Hitler’s deputy, Heinrich Himmler himself. Is this, too, a lie?” he asked.

Six million Jews were killed during World War II, one-third of all world Jewry. In Europe, nearly every family was affected — including Netanyahu’s own.

“What of the Auschwitz survivors whose arms still bear the tattooed numbers branded on them by the Nazis?” he asked. “Are those tattoos a lie?”

“My wife’s grandparents, her father’s two sisters and three brothers, and all the aunts, uncles and cousins, were all murdered by the Nazis. Is that also a lie?” Netanyahu asked.

To those who remained at the General Assembly on Wednesday when Ahmadinejad spoke, he asked: “Have you no shame? Have you no decency?”

In an interview Wednesday with The Associated Press, Ahmadinejad turned aside the subject of his questioning of the Holocaust. Instead he argued that since the Holocaust was perpetrated by Europeans, the Palestinians should not have had to pay the price by accepting a Jewish state in their midst.

Netanyahu went on to warn that Iran’s nuclear program could evolve into another world catastrophe.

“The greatest threat facing the world today is the marriage between religious fanaticism and the weapons of mass destruction,” he warned.

The most urgent challenge facing the U.N. is to prevent “the tyrants of Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons,” he said.

The Iranians deny they are producing such weapons, but Israel, the U.S. and other world powers don’t believe them. Iran so far has refused to stop enriching uranium, a process that could be used to make bombs. Israel considers Iran to be its greatest threat.

There has been much speculation Israel might launch a military strike against Iran’s nuclear sites as it did against an unfinished Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981. This week, Netanyahu said again that “all options are on the table” and Israel “reserves the right of self-defense.”

Netanyahu questioned whether the U.N. was up to the task of standing up to Tehran — and strongly denounced its report accusing Israel of war crimes in its winter war against Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip.

(This version CORRECTS RECASTS top with more color, quotes, corrects that more than 1 million died at Auschwitz. For global distribution.)