IT SEEMS hardly possible to express a heterodox opinion these days without offending someone (Letters, April 7).

I accept visitors to the Nazi death camps learn something valuable to themselves, because they say so.

However, when one of those visitors insists I should be compelled to join them on their gruesome pilgrimage (The Press, March 31), I demur. The horrors of the death camps are well chronicled. Besides numerous histories, we have the memoirs of survivors. We have among us still, the refugee children of parents whose unknown fate is as distressing and tragic as deaths faithfully recorded.

For me this is horror enough. I resent the charge that I am thereby deficient in sensibility.

My letter of April 5 questioned why one site of unspeakable cruelty should be utterly destroyed as abhorrent, while another is preserved as a shrine.

The Nazi episode was but one entry in a vast catalogue of man’s wickedness.

Since I recommended a study of past horrors as well as present examples, I think it unfair of Alan Roberts to say that I did not.

History demonstrates to what depths of depravity humankind may sink. As to what it teaches, philosophers are divided.

William Dixon Smith, Welland Rise, Acomb, York.

• William Dixon Smith’s flippant remark about the “frightfulness” of Nazi-Germany and modern-day “frightfulness” is on the same level of offence as the utterance by Children’s Commissioner Dr Maggy Atkinson, when she, referring to the murder of Jamie Bulger as being “exceptionally unpleasant”.

Comparing the mass-slaughter of millions of Jews at the various death-camps by the Nazi regime in the Second World War to Fred West is offensive and bizarre.

Your correspondent attributes the collapse of Nazi-Germany to the Nazis’ obsession with the annihilation of the Jewish race. I would say it was more to do with the fact that Nazi Germany was being beaten by superior forces.

I do agree with Mr Dixon-Smith about the on-going slaughter in various countries around the world.

I’m sure Mr Dixon-Smith is aware that Auschwitz and Belsen are preserved as memorials to the millions of Jews, and others, who were put to death there and not, as Mr Dixon-Smith hinted, as tourist attraction.

Philip Roe, Roman Avenue South, Stamford Bridge.