Alan Heath

Alan Heath is a British publisher and writer, chiefly noted as a Holocaust historian.

Heath was born in Chelmsford, Essex on 9 November1961. His childhood was spent in Lanchester and Consett, County Durham and he went to school at Lanchester EP School and Greencroft Comprehensive School where he developed his interest in history. From 1983 to 1987 he studied French and Spanish at the University of Westminster specialising in translation theory.

Heath has run various businesses including founding Polish Business News [ [http://www.pbn.com.pl Polish Business News ] ] in Gdansk, Poland in 1997. He is currently the publisher of Central and Eastern European Packaging [ [http://www.ceepackaging.com Ceepackaging ] ] .

He is best known as a historian of the Holocaust, specialising in the death camps in Poland. He is a close friend of Michael Tregenza who is currently working on books of the Belzec death camp and Operation Reinhard overseer Christian Wirth as well as Holocaust denier David Irving [ [http://www.fpp.co.uk Welcome to the World of Real History ] ] .

Heath has become one of the first historians to use web two services to produce video essays on the internet on sites similar to You Tube with a variety of productions of camps such as Chelmno [ [http://youtube.com/watch?v=eOrSv8iN5GU YouTube - The Nazi death camp at Chelmno nad Ner ] ] , Belzec [ [http://www.holocaust-history.org/denial/nym.shtml What's in a nym? ] ] , Treblinka [ [http://youtube.com/watch?v=qdBd2lsKoQw YouTube - The route to Treblinka ] ] , Sobibor [ [http://youtube.com/watch?v=LJj6DMHNwX4 YouTube - The walk of death at Sobibor ] ] , Majdanek [ [http://youtube.com/watch?v=cBe_kc9RYpY YouTube - Majdanek ] ] and Auschwitz [ [http://youtube.com/watch?v=FjSEUIA6QQA YouTube - Krematorium 2 at Auschwitz-Birkenau ] ] . He has also produced film evidence of a number of ghettos and other historic sites related to the Holocaust [ [http://youtube.com/alanheath YouTube - alanheath's Channel ] ] . Heath has sought out witnesses to the murder operations perpetrators by the Nazis throughout Poland. He claims to have been influenced by French director Claude Lanzmann whose ground breaking 1985 work Shoah [ [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090015/ Shoah (1985) ] ] was a major contribution to understanding of the Holocaust.

Although he initially ignored the Holocaust denial, he has become an important voice in refuting it. He spoke at David Irving's Real History conference in Cincinnati, USA in 2000 [ [http://www.fpp.co.uk/cinc/2000/prog.html REAL HISTORY COMES TO CINCINNATI, SEPTEMBER 24 - 26, 1999 ] ] , only a few months after Irving lost a libel case against American academic Deborah Lipstadt [ [http://www.holocaust-history.org/irving-wrong/ Where did David Irving go Wrong? ] ] . Irving had alleged that Lipstadt had referred to him as a denier amongst other accusations. On internet fora, Heath openly challenges Holocaust deniers to produce evidence to back up claims. He notes that nearly every Holocaust denier has to used forged evidence [ [http://www.holocaust-history.org/denial/nym.shtml What's in a nym? ] ] . Thus he coined the term denier liar to describe a person who deliberately falsifies evidence and a naive or gullible denier as someone who willingly believes this falsified evidence. He argues that it is not fair to place both denier liars and naive deniers in the same camp as the latter may not be aware that evidence has been falsified.

In March 2007, Heath accompanied Holocaust denier David Irving on a tour of the death camps in Poland [ [http://www.fpp.co.uk Welcome to the World of Real History ] ] . Irving had then been only out of prison in Austria for three months on charges of denying the Holocaust. After this journey Irving admitted to the deaths of up to 2.4 million Jews in the Reinhardt camps - a figure most historians would consider to be an exaggeration.

Heath is also a linguist speaking English, Polish, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese, Russian and Yiddish.

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