The Case for Auschwitz

Evidence from the Irving Trial

Robert Jan Van Pelt

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780253028846
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'Olocausto

From January to April 2000 historian David Irving brought a high-profile libel case against Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt in the British High Court, charging that Lipstadt's book, Denying the Holocaust (1993), falsely labeled him a Holocaust denier. The question about the evidence for Auschwitz as a death camp played a central role in these proceedings. Irving had based his alleged denial of the Holocaust in part on a 1988 report by an American execution specialist, Fred Leuchter, which claimed that there was no evidence for homicidal gas chambers in Auschwitz. In connection with their defense, Penguin and Lipstadt engaged architectural historian Robert Jan van Pelt to present evidence for our knowledge that Auschwitz had been an extermination camp where up to one million Jews were killed, mainly in gas chambers. Employing painstaking historical scholarship, van Pelt prepared and submitted an exhaustive forensic report that he successfully defended in cross-examination in court.

One

The Negationists’ Challenge to Auschwitz

When the surrounding world, which remembers the Armenian atrocities (against which it could have intervened), takes offense at tortures, which required more imagination to think them up than to invent them, it gets as an answer: “Believe us, the lack of understanding that our measures often meet with saddens us all.” They don’t mean it like this, but always otherwise. They feel it a violation when they are thought capable of the very acts they commit. Such acts they then describe as “alleged”—a brief but efficient formula based on the resolve not to engage such things and derived from the indisputability of a political morality based on allegations of what has not happened. In order to win the incompetent a position, the pickpocket accuses the civil servant of greed, and as one prefers to send this person to a concentration camp instead [of] to the courts, the suspicion hardens that he who was so capable in his position was capable of anything. In that way the alleged becomes real, and the real alleged, and exactly marks the breakthrough to a new civilizatory type, which writers describe: that the murderer, who also lies, has not murdered, and that the very cowardice of the murder gives him a hero’s stature. It is the principal camouflage which the little word “alleged” generates—the little word that crops up again and again in the comments on current events.

—Karl Kraus, Die Dritte Walpurgisnacht (1933)

“I don’t see any reason to be tasteful about Auschwitz. It’s baloney. It’s a legend.” These provocative words, first spoken by David Irving in 1991, were echoed nine years later in the Royal Courts of Justice in London by barrister Richard Rampton QC. The occasion was Rampton’s opening statement for the defense in the libel case of David John Cawdell Irving versus Penguin Books Limited and Deborah Lipstadt. Continuing to read from Irving’s speech, which was given in Calgary, Alberta, Rampton noted that Irving’s Canadian audience had been sympathetic. There had been laughter when Irving remarked that when he was called a “moderate fascist,” he strongly objected to the adjective “moderate.” Irving’s pronouncements about Auschwitz made clear why. Rampton quoted from Irving’s lecture:

Once we admit the fact that it was a brutal slave labour camp and large numbers of people did die, as large numbers of innocent people died elsewhere in the war, why believe the rest of the baloney? I say quite tastelessly in fact that more people died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy’s car in Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz.

Turning to Mr. Justice Charles Gray, who heard the case alone without a jury, Rampton emphasized the important issue of the libel case:

My Lord, this is obviously an important case, but that is not however because it is primarily concerned whether or not the Holocaust took place or the degree of Hitler’s responsibility for it. On the contrary, the essence of the case is Mr Irving’s honesty and integrity as a chronicler—I shy away from the word “historian”—of these matters, for if it be right that Mr Irving, driven by his extremist views and sympathies, has devoted his energies to the deliberate falsification of this tragic episode in history, then by exposing that dangerous fraud in this court the Defendants may properly be applauded for having performed a significant public service not just in this country, but in all those places in the world where antisemitism is waiting to be fed.¹

With this statement the first day of the trial came to an end.

Rampton’s decision to quote one of Irving’s many tasteless remarks about Auschwitz and Auschwitz survivors at the end of his short opening statement reflected the central importance of Auschwitz in the case. Irving’s libel action against the American academic Deborah Lipstadt, the author of Denying the Holocaust, and her publisher, Penguin Books Limited, touched on a number of issues: Irving accused Lipstadt of libeling him by labeling him a Holocaust denier, accusing him of falsifying history in order to put Hitler in a more favorable light, and charging that he had stolen documents from a Moscow archive. Irving agreed with none of these accusations. In his own opening statement he submitted that Lipstadt’s charge that he was a Holocaust denier was intolerable. “For the chosen victim, it is like being called a wife beater or a paedophile,” Irving said. “It is enough for the label to be attached for the attachee to find himself designated as a pariah, an outcast from normal society. It is a verbal yellow star.”² Both sides agreed that Holocaust denial—revisionism, as Irving calls it, or negationism, as I prefer to call it—stood at the center of the case, and both parties accepted that at the center of Holocaust denial was Auschwitz, the largest of the extermination camps.

Richard Rampton

Irving dramatized the centrality of Auschwitz to the trial during his cross-examination of myself, the expert witness for the defense for matters concerning Auschwitz. He had constructed an argument that assumed that the evidence for the function of Auschwitz as an extermination camp ought to be the presence of an underground gas chamber in Crematorium 2, and that the evidence for that gas chamber ought to be the presence of some holes in the remains of the concrete roof of that space. According to eyewitnesses, the SS had introduced the gas into the gas chambers through those holes, which connected to hollow wire-mesh columns in the gas chambers that allowed for the gas to disperse. In my own expert report to the court, I had stated that “today, these four small holes that connected the wire-mesh columns and the chimneys cannot be observed in the ruined remains of the concrete slab.” However, my report continued:

Yet does this mean they were never there? We know that after the cessation of the gassings in the fall of 1944 all the gassing equipment was removed, which implies both the wire-mesh columns and the chimneys. What would have remained would have been the four narrow holes in the slab. While there is not certainty in this particular matter, it would have been logical to attach at the location where the columns had been some formwork at the bottom of the gas chamber ceiling, and pour some concrete in the holes, and thus restore the slab.³

Developing a line of argumentation easily summarized by negationist Robert Faurisson’s pet expression “No holes, no Holocaust,” on the eleventh day of the trial, Irving offered to abandon his libel suit against Penguin and Lipstadt if I could show archeological evidence of those holes. I responded that this was impossible, as the concrete roof of the gas chamber was too badly damaged. Yet Irving did not give up, trying to get me at least to accept the principle that a causal chain existed in which the holes would prove the gas chamber, the gas chamber would prove the use of Auschwitz as an extermination camp, and the use of Auschwitz as an extermination camp would prove the Holocaust.

[Irving]: “And do you accept, do you not, that if you were to go to Auschwitz the day after tomorrow with a trowel and clean away the gravel and find a reinforced concrete hole where we anticipate it from your drawings, this would make an open and shut case and I would happily abandon my action immediately?”

[Van Pelt]: “I think I cannot comment on this. I am an expert on Auschwitz and not on the way you want to run your case.”

[Irving]: “There is my offer. I would say that that would drive such a hole through my case that I would have no possible chance of defending it any further.”⁴

Irving’s obsession with Auschwitz was a reflection of the general negationist creed that Auschwitz was indeed the linchpin of the so-called Holocaust Hoax. The reasons for the negationist preoccupation with attacking Auschwitz are many. Here it suffices to mention the most important and at the same time most paradoxical one: the presence of overwhelming eyewitness evidence and substantial documentary evidence for the history of Auschwitz as an extermination camp.

First of all, one of the very few full confessions given by any German official involved in a key role in the Holocaust is the comprehensive explanation made by Auschwitz Kommandant Rudolf Höss. Other key figures in the Holocaust either died before the end of the war (Reinhard Heydrich), committed suicide immediately after the German defeat (Heinrich Himmler), or made less than full confessions (Adolf Eichmann). Höss acknowledged the central role of Auschwitz in the Holocaust, and he described the organization, development, procedures, and problems of the extermination program in great detail on various occasions. For example, in his interrogation at Nuremberg, Höss gave a detailed account of the numbers of Jews who had arrived in Auschwitz: 250,000 from Poland, 65,000 from Greece, 100,000 from Germany, 90,000 from Holland, 110,000 from France, 90,000 from Slovakia, 20,000 from Belgium, and 400,000 from Hungary. When asked how he could accommodate all these people in a camp designed to hold 130,000, Höss answered: “They were not supposed to be employed in work there, but they were supposed to be exterminated.”⁵

In an affidavit which he corrected and ultimately signed, Höss admitted that he had overseen the extermination, “by gassing and burning,” of at least two and a half million human beings—mostly Jews:

Rudolf Höss (facing the camera, middle), attending to a conversation between Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler (left, with glasses) and IG Farben engineer Max Faust (right, in civilian attire). Auschwitz, July 17, 1942. Courtesy Archive Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Oswiecim.

6. The “final solution” of the Jewish question meant the complete extermination of all Jews in Europe. I was ordered to establish extermination facilities at Auschwitz in June 1941. At that time there were already in the general government three other extermination camps; BELZEK, TREBLINKA and WOLZEK.⁶ These camps were under the Einsatzkommando of the Security Police and SD. I visited Treblinka to find out how they carried out their exterminations. The Camp Commandant at Treblinka told me that he had liquidated 80,000 in the course of one-half year. He was principally concerned with liquidating all the Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto. He used monoxide gas and I did not think his method was very efficient. So when I set up the extermination building at Auschwitz I, I used Cyclon B, which was crystallized Prussic Acid we dropped into the death chamber from a small opening. It took from 3 to 15 minutes to kill the people in the death chamber depending upon climatic conditions. We knew when the people were dead because their screaming stopped. We usually waited about one-half hour before we opened the doors and removed the bodies. After the bodies were removed our special commandos took off the rings and extracted the gold from the teeth of the corpses.

7. Another improvement we made over Treblinka was that we built our gas chambers to accommodate 2,000 people at one time, whereas at Treblinka their 10 gas chambers only accommodated 200 people each. The way we selected our victims was as follows: we had two SS doctors on duty at Auschwitz to examine the incoming transport of prisoners. The prisoners would be marched by one of the doctors who would make spot decisions as they walked by. Those who were fit for work were sent into the Camp. Others were sent immediately to the extermination plants. Children of tender years were invariably exterminated since by reason of their youth they were unable to work. Still another improvement we made over Treblinka was that at Treblinka the victims almost always knew that they were to be exterminated and at Auschwitz we endeavoured to fool the victims into thinking that they were to go through a delousing process. Of course, frequently they realized our true intentions and we sometimes had riots and difficulties due to that fact. Very frequently women would hide their children under the clothes but of course when we found them we would send the children in to be exterminated. We were required to carry out these exterminations in secrecy but of course the foul and nauseating stench from the continuous burning of bodies permeated the entire area and all of the people living in the surrounding communities knew that exterminations were going on at Auschwitz.⁷

On Monday, April 15, 1946, the affidavit was read out in court. Under cross-examination by American prosecutor Colonel John Harlan Amen, Höss confirmed that he had signed it voluntarily.⁸ After he was extradited to Poland, Höss provided extensive explanations of the operation of Auschwitz during his trial, wrote a long essay on the Final Solution as it affected Auschwitz, composed his memoirs, and produced a great number of smaller essays on individual SS men with whom he had worked.

Höss was an important witness, and therefore any attempt to refute the Holocaust must engage and refute Höss. Furthermore, our knowledge of Auschwitz is based not only on Höss’s testimony but also on a powerful convergence between eyewitness accounts, physical remains of the camp, the extensive building archive of the Auschwitz Central Construction Office (which survived the war), and various other archival sources. The evidence for the role of Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor—sufficient as it may be to come to a moral certainty about the wartime history of those places—is much less abundant. There are very few eyewitnesses, no confession that can compare to that given by Höss, no significant remains, and few archival sources.

Given this situation, negationists decided that it made strategic sense to concentrate their energies on debunking the Höss account and showing that Auschwitz could not have accommodated an extermination program. In 1982, the well-known American negationist Arthur R. Butz explained that impartial scientific, forensic, and scholarly analysis of the evidence would reveal that Auschwitz had not been a center of extermination. “It follows,” Butz argued, “that the basic tactic of the defenders of the [extermination] legend, in controversies to come, will be to attempt to make claims that cannot be tested by the normal method of placing them as hypotheses in appropriate historical context and seeing if they cohere.” According to Butz, those who maintained that the Holocaust existed despite evidence to the contrary would prefer to discuss extermination camps such as Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka—places of which little remained in terms of physical or archival relics and knowledge of which is largely based on witness testimony of survivors s...