A parish councillor in Cornwall has been caught on a recording saying that he thought the Holocaust was “exaggerated”.
Peter Lawrence, a councillor in Mylor, near Falmouth, was recorded making the inflammatory comment at an anti-government protest last weekend.
The representative of the far-right British Democrats party, who is also known as Farmer Pete, was asked by counter-protesters whether he thought antisemitism existed in the UK. He replied: “Well, it depends. Technically, no, because the people that you don’t like aren’t actually Semites”.
In a video posted to local news site Cornwall Live, asked what Hitler’s problem was with Jews, Lawrence responded by saying that: “World Jewry declared war on Germany, they declared war. They were bankrupting them from the Treaty of Versailles, they were blockading the food and everything, they were starving them out." He went on: “The Jews, who are communist and were responsible for a lot of problems in the Weimar Republic, were frustrating the effort of the restoration of German people to have self-determination and be ruled by the Germans”.
Lawrence, who stood as an independent candidate for parliament in the 2024 general election, went on to say: “Hitler did not have a beef with the Jews, he just didn’t want them to disrupt what was going on and they continued to do so." Questioned about whether Hitler was right to kill so many Jews, Lawrence responded: “From what I’ve read and the revisionist historians I’ve read, (they) cannot find a single order from Adolf Hitler calling for the execution of the Jews.”
He was then asked: “Do you believe in the Holocaust?” To which he responded: “The Holocaust has been massively over-exaggerated".
The theory that Hitler never directly ordered the Holocaust has been central to the work of revisionist historians such as David Irving, who was proven in a British court in 2000 to be a Holocaust denier.
Newly discovered recordings of interrogations with a senior Nazi official have seemingly weakened this argument even further, with one of the Holocaust’s chief administrators saying it had been confirmed to him that the mass murder of Jews was a direct order from the Führer.
One Jewish resident who spoke to the JC anonymously said he was “disgusted” by Lawrence’s comments, which he considered to be “appalling antisemitic rhetoric”.
When the JC contacted Lawrence for comment he responded: “Footage of parts of my conversation with members of the communist group Cornwall Resists have been shared online and I wish to state it was not my intention for any of my words or opinions to cause offence.
“The content has, of course, been framed in a way that is beyond my control, nonetheless, I wish to apologise for any upset caused by my involvement in the incident.”
