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The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial
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.
570 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2002
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170 people want to read
About the author
Robert Jan Van Pelt
22 books13 followersUniversity Professor at the University of Waterloo, Pelt is a widely recognized authority on the planning and construction of Nazi concentration camps and the author of two books about Auschwitz.
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January 18, 2023
I once attended a talk given by an Anglican minister who said that every time you hear the word Auschwitz you should feel like a cloud has passed over the sun, dimming the light of all humanity. It is hard to grasp that such a place could ever have existed, but it did exist, in all its horror and depravity. It is a struggle even to read about the camp, but we must understand what happened so that we can prevent it from ever happening again, because otherwise it will happen again, on some dark and terrible day that shames every member of the human race.
The existence of Auschwitz as an extermination camp is thoroughly attested, from the testimony of survivors and perpetrators, and from documents, photographs, and wartime intelligence sources, so it is almost inexplicable that some people continue to deny the facts. They claim that it was just another concentration camp, and that no one was ever gassed there because the gas chambers never existed. They say that the crematoria were there only to handle the bodies of inmates who died of normal causes – normal in this case meaning beatings, starvation, overwork, and vile medical experiments in addition to the toll from typhus and other diseases.
They don’t just deny, they mock the survivors and the dead. David Irving, who started as a fairly well respected author who wrote a best selling book about World War II, became a committed “revisionist” after reading an engineering analysis of the crematoria which was later proven to be not worth the paper it was written on. “Irving advised the survivors that, ‘if you want to go and have a tattoo put on your arm, as a lot of them do, I am afraid to say, and claim subsequently that you were in Auschwitz, you have got to make sure a) that it fits in with the month you said you went to Auschwitz, and b) that it is not a number which anyone has used before.’” The very idea that he would accuse people of getting fake Auschwitz tattoos is despicable. A decent human being would cross the street to avoid meeting David Irving.
In 1993 Deborah Lipstadt published Denying the Holocaust, which mentioned Irving’s denialist position. In 1996 he sued her and her publisher for libel in the British court system, which is far more favorable to plaintiffs that the the American system. One of the expert witnesses for the defense was the author of The Case for Auschwitz, Robert Jan Van Pelt, an architectural historian who also wrote a 700 page analysis of the camp, concentrating on the construction and use of the five crematoria and the gas chambers, some which were inside the crematorium buildings, and some in converted farmhouses. This book recounts his experiences before and during the trial and goes into great detail about what happened in the camp, who carried it out, and how it was covered up.
Van Pelt is a trained professional historian, and part of the interest in this book is his discussion of the craft of historiography, how facts from numerous sources are sifted and analyzed to arrive at a plausible, defensible explanation of past events. Needless to say, David Irving wrote history but is not a historian, and this book recounts many examples where he would pick and choose details, eliding over inconvenient facts to make a point.
The facts are gruesome but we need to confront them. How many people died at Auschwitz? For a long time the figure of four million was used, but it was based on a rushed assessment made just after the war and based on the theoretical capacity of the crematorium ovens. However, the ovens were only used when there were bodies to burn, and the transports did not arrive every day.
When a transport did arrive, the fittest men and women were separated from the rest. The SS would decide who from each group was healthy enough to work, and send them into the camp. The rest of the people, the vast majority from the transport, were immediately sent to the gas chambers.
This means that only those who were sent into the camp were registered, tattooed, had their heads shaved, and were issued prison clothing. The rest of the people from the transport vanished into the gas chambers, and the Nazis went to great lengths to ensure no records were kept of how many there were. Nevertheless, researchers have poured over the remaining documentation from train schedules, calculating the average size of a transport, and over time an estimate has emerged which is accepted by most historians of the Holocaust.
A total of about 400,000 inmates were registered during the years in which Auschwitz operated, and this group included Jews, who represented about 205,000 of the total, as well as political prisoners, criminals, Soviet POWs, and Romani. About half of the 400,000 can be accounted for, “190,000 were transferred to other concentration camps—most of them after the death marches of January 1945. A total of 8,000 inmates were liberated by the Red Army on January 27, 1945, some 1,500 inmates were released, and some 500 escaped.” The other 200,000 must have died in the camp, and since half of them were Jews, the best estimate is that 100,000 Jews died after having been registered and admitted into the camp.
Based on the transport statistics, “Given the facts that 1,095,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz and 205,000 were registered as inmates in the camp, it follows that 890,000 Jews who arrived were not registered. Of these some 25,000 would have been [transferred to other camps], which leads to the conclusion that 865,000 Jews were killed on arrival.”
Add the number of Jews who died after being registered to those who were killed on arrival, and the best estimate of Jewish deaths in Auschwitz is around 960,000. In addition, 74,000 Poles, 21,000 Romani, 15,000 Soviet prisoners, and 12,000 from all other categories died, bringing the total butcher’s bill to 1,082,000.
And Auschwitz was only one piece of the Final Solution.
When the Maidanek camp was liberated by the Russians in July 1944, it was captured almost intact, with its horrors for all to see. “Bill Lawrence, correspondent for NY Times, 30 Aug 44: ‘After inspection of Maidanek, I am now prepared to believe any story of German atrocities, no matter how savage, cruel and depraved.’” After this the Nazis were determined to do a better job hiding their crimes. Direct mention of the murders was prohibited. In official reports terms such as “treated specially” (wurden sonderbehandelt), or “specially lodged” (gesondert untergebracht) were used. As the Russians approached Auschwitz, records were destroyed and the crematoria and gas chambers dynamited, but they overlooked the documents in the camp’s construction office, which contained extensive correspondence between the camp and the government, SS, and contractors, and drawings showing the details of the buildings where the murders took place. Even here special terminology was used, and only one, apparently accidental, notation about a “gas cellar” remained.
The revisionists seized on this to assert that the lack of direct evidence was tantamount to proof that the gas chambers never existed. However, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. One of the main revisionist arguments is that the Holocaust never occurred at all, and that blaming the Germans for what happened was simply an extortion racket by Israel to extract billions in reparation payments. Revisionist arguments are easily demolished by real historians, but the kind of people who are susceptible to historical revisionism are not the ones who are going to respond well to facts and logic.
In many ways their arguments are similar to those of Creationists arguing against evolution:
To his credit, David Irving defended his position well during the trial. He devised clever arguments that seemed plausible, at least until the real historians, marshaling real facts, set the record straight. In the end the judgment was for the defendants, so Irving lost his case and, in accordance with British law, was liable for the millions of dollars the defendants had spent in their defense.
As a final note, this book was published in 2002. In 2013 Will Storr published The Unpursuadables, about people who maintain untenable beliefs in spite of logic and reason. It includes a chapter on Irving, whom the author followed as he gave guided tours of the concentration camps to neo-Nazi tourists, and who was still maintaining that the gas chambers were a hoax. Some people never learn, unpursuadable indeed.
The existence of Auschwitz as an extermination camp is thoroughly attested, from the testimony of survivors and perpetrators, and from documents, photographs, and wartime intelligence sources, so it is almost inexplicable that some people continue to deny the facts. They claim that it was just another concentration camp, and that no one was ever gassed there because the gas chambers never existed. They say that the crematoria were there only to handle the bodies of inmates who died of normal causes – normal in this case meaning beatings, starvation, overwork, and vile medical experiments in addition to the toll from typhus and other diseases.
They don’t just deny, they mock the survivors and the dead. David Irving, who started as a fairly well respected author who wrote a best selling book about World War II, became a committed “revisionist” after reading an engineering analysis of the crematoria which was later proven to be not worth the paper it was written on. “Irving advised the survivors that, ‘if you want to go and have a tattoo put on your arm, as a lot of them do, I am afraid to say, and claim subsequently that you were in Auschwitz, you have got to make sure a) that it fits in with the month you said you went to Auschwitz, and b) that it is not a number which anyone has used before.’” The very idea that he would accuse people of getting fake Auschwitz tattoos is despicable. A decent human being would cross the street to avoid meeting David Irving.
In 1993 Deborah Lipstadt published Denying the Holocaust, which mentioned Irving’s denialist position. In 1996 he sued her and her publisher for libel in the British court system, which is far more favorable to plaintiffs that the the American system. One of the expert witnesses for the defense was the author of The Case for Auschwitz, Robert Jan Van Pelt, an architectural historian who also wrote a 700 page analysis of the camp, concentrating on the construction and use of the five crematoria and the gas chambers, some which were inside the crematorium buildings, and some in converted farmhouses. This book recounts his experiences before and during the trial and goes into great detail about what happened in the camp, who carried it out, and how it was covered up.
Van Pelt is a trained professional historian, and part of the interest in this book is his discussion of the craft of historiography, how facts from numerous sources are sifted and analyzed to arrive at a plausible, defensible explanation of past events. Needless to say, David Irving wrote history but is not a historian, and this book recounts many examples where he would pick and choose details, eliding over inconvenient facts to make a point.
The facts are gruesome but we need to confront them. How many people died at Auschwitz? For a long time the figure of four million was used, but it was based on a rushed assessment made just after the war and based on the theoretical capacity of the crematorium ovens. However, the ovens were only used when there were bodies to burn, and the transports did not arrive every day.
When a transport did arrive, the fittest men and women were separated from the rest. The SS would decide who from each group was healthy enough to work, and send them into the camp. The rest of the people, the vast majority from the transport, were immediately sent to the gas chambers.
This means that only those who were sent into the camp were registered, tattooed, had their heads shaved, and were issued prison clothing. The rest of the people from the transport vanished into the gas chambers, and the Nazis went to great lengths to ensure no records were kept of how many there were. Nevertheless, researchers have poured over the remaining documentation from train schedules, calculating the average size of a transport, and over time an estimate has emerged which is accepted by most historians of the Holocaust.
A total of about 400,000 inmates were registered during the years in which Auschwitz operated, and this group included Jews, who represented about 205,000 of the total, as well as political prisoners, criminals, Soviet POWs, and Romani. About half of the 400,000 can be accounted for, “190,000 were transferred to other concentration camps—most of them after the death marches of January 1945. A total of 8,000 inmates were liberated by the Red Army on January 27, 1945, some 1,500 inmates were released, and some 500 escaped.” The other 200,000 must have died in the camp, and since half of them were Jews, the best estimate is that 100,000 Jews died after having been registered and admitted into the camp.
Based on the transport statistics, “Given the facts that 1,095,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz and 205,000 were registered as inmates in the camp, it follows that 890,000 Jews who arrived were not registered. Of these some 25,000 would have been [transferred to other camps], which leads to the conclusion that 865,000 Jews were killed on arrival.”
Add the number of Jews who died after being registered to those who were killed on arrival, and the best estimate of Jewish deaths in Auschwitz is around 960,000. In addition, 74,000 Poles, 21,000 Romani, 15,000 Soviet prisoners, and 12,000 from all other categories died, bringing the total butcher’s bill to 1,082,000.
And Auschwitz was only one piece of the Final Solution.
According to Raul Hilberg’s rather conservative figures, which I hold to be the most reliable estimate of total Jewish deaths, the Holocaust claimed 5.1 million Jewish lives. Of this number, over 800,000 Jews died as the result of ghettoization and general privation, over 1.3 million were murdered in open-air shootings, and up to 3 million died in the camps. Of these, Auschwitz had the highest mortality with 1 million Jews, followed by Treblinka and Belzec with 750,000 and 550,000 Jews respectively.
When the Maidanek camp was liberated by the Russians in July 1944, it was captured almost intact, with its horrors for all to see. “Bill Lawrence, correspondent for NY Times, 30 Aug 44: ‘After inspection of Maidanek, I am now prepared to believe any story of German atrocities, no matter how savage, cruel and depraved.’” After this the Nazis were determined to do a better job hiding their crimes. Direct mention of the murders was prohibited. In official reports terms such as “treated specially” (wurden sonderbehandelt), or “specially lodged” (gesondert untergebracht) were used. As the Russians approached Auschwitz, records were destroyed and the crematoria and gas chambers dynamited, but they overlooked the documents in the camp’s construction office, which contained extensive correspondence between the camp and the government, SS, and contractors, and drawings showing the details of the buildings where the murders took place. Even here special terminology was used, and only one, apparently accidental, notation about a “gas cellar” remained.
The revisionists seized on this to assert that the lack of direct evidence was tantamount to proof that the gas chambers never existed. However, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. One of the main revisionist arguments is that the Holocaust never occurred at all, and that blaming the Germans for what happened was simply an extortion racket by Israel to extract billions in reparation payments. Revisionist arguments are easily demolished by real historians, but the kind of people who are susceptible to historical revisionism are not the ones who are going to respond well to facts and logic.
In many ways their arguments are similar to those of Creationists arguing against evolution:
The negationists claim to be revisionist historians, but they have yet to produce a history that offers a credible, “revised” explanation of the events in question….They attacked the inherited account on the unproven assumption of some general conspiracy, but they had not been able, or willing, to even begin writing a single piece of investigative journalism (let alone produce one product of serious revisionist historiography) that gives us the origin and development of this conspiracy.
To his credit, David Irving defended his position well during the trial. He devised clever arguments that seemed plausible, at least until the real historians, marshaling real facts, set the record straight. In the end the judgment was for the defendants, so Irving lost his case and, in accordance with British law, was liable for the millions of dollars the defendants had spent in their defense.
As a final note, this book was published in 2002. In 2013 Will Storr published The Unpursuadables, about people who maintain untenable beliefs in spite of logic and reason. It includes a chapter on Irving, whom the author followed as he gave guided tours of the concentration camps to neo-Nazi tourists, and who was still maintaining that the gas chambers were a hoax. Some people never learn, unpursuadable indeed.
July 1, 2022
I suggest everyone to read Carlo Mattogno's response. He basically belies every single affermation of this book, making evident his limits. As not an Holocaust denier, I have to admit that Mattogno's work is far superior to this one, which is basically a rip off from Jean-Claude Pressac studies.
January 3, 2016
The Case for Auschwitz is a massive book, 551 pages not counting the index, and larger than an average hardback. I almost didn't buy it when I found it at the used bookstore because it was so intimidating, but I am very glad I did, because I was richly rewarded.
This is a book about the historiography of Auschwitz. As such, and because it is about the libel trial brought by David Irving against Deborah Lipstadt, it is also about Holocaust deniers. Holocaust deniers call themselves Revisionists; van Pelt calls them negationists, and after a while I came to see why he did so, and to agree with him. Negationists are first of all committed to proving a negative: that the Holocaust, or some part of the Holocaust, did not happen. Secondly, they forget with distressing regularity the axiom Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And thirdly, their answer to any piece of evidence that contradicts their ideas is to negate it: to deny its validity, whether by trying to claim that eye-witnesses are liars or that a document is a forgery or similar strategies. Moreover, as van Pelt points out, their activity consists of saying no to the historical theories of others; they have no coherent narrative to offer in place of the one they deny. They are not re-visioning history; they are trying to negate it, to deny that it took place.
In reading about negationist arguments, I was reminded of my valiantly windmill-tilting and sorely missed friend, Jay Lake, and his efforts to argue with Creationism and what he called faith-based reasoning. Like Creationism, Holocaust denial is, at its first principles, motivated by something that can be stated as I don't like this idea. Therefore, it is not true. But beyond that, both Creationism and Holocaust denial are fundamentally about a refusal to accept and/or understand the way a particular discipline works. I had the same feeling reading about negationists that I do in reading about Creationists: Why are we even HAVING this argument?
And we're having this argument for reasons Hitler would have understood: demagoguery. We aren't having this argument because Holocaust denial can be defended rationally--or can even mount a plausible opposition. It can't, and van Pelt proves that over and over and over again. We're having this argument because (1) there are people who want to believe that the Holocaust didn't happen; (2) and are willing to follow faith-based reasoning rather than use critical thinking; (3) and don't understand how historiography works and what historians do, in the same way that Creationism relies on a fundamental misunderstanding of the theory of evolution--both the evolution part and the theory part; (4)--as my parallel structure falls apart--a preference for conspiracy theories over the inconvenient, painful, and chaotic reality (conspiracy theories have the advantage that you can cast yourself as the victim, which is always preferable); (5) the distrust of and contempt for experts which characterizes a large segment of Western society; (6) certain unscrupulous persons who are willing to exploit this situation for their own benefit and gratification; and (7) like many other right-wing groups, they are prepared to loss-lead indefinitely. That is, they will keep shouting no matter how many times they are rebutted, no matter how many different ways they are proven to be wrong, because they know that the people they want to reach are the people who will believe, "No smoke without a fire." The mere fact of the shouting will be enough.
That's the thing. They--negationists and Creationists--will not give up. Their argument is not predicated on rationality and therefore rational arguments against them will never succeed. Facts make no dent in their armor. The only solution is to ignore them, rather than engaging with them, and even that is merely more fuel for their smoke machine, as they can claim that mainstream historians are afraid to engage with them. And they always have the anti-elitist conspiracy theory rhetoric of victimhood to fall back on: The Man doesn't want you to know the truth. The eggheads are blinded by their liberal bleeding-heart consciences. They're lying to you, but you know better.
I find these tactics infuriating as well as reprehensible, especially from people who are using them knowingly and deliberately, not because they believe what they're saying, but in order to secure an advantage for their "side"--or for themselves. The outcome of the libel trial brought by Irving against Lipstadt was the legal judgment that he was, in fact, knowingly misrepresenting documents and evidence in order to claim that Auschwitz was not an extermination camp.
After I finished The Case for Auschwitz, I went back and reread the chapter on David Irving in Ron Rosenbaum's excellent Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil (1998), which is a book less about Hitler himself than about the historiography of Hitler. Rosenbaum captures a snapshot of Irving at a point along his slide into extremist negationism--a point where it's clear he is consciously making choices about the ideological uses of history:
"Let me ask you about that," I said. "You know historians often speak of you as someone who's dug up a remarkable number of important documents, speak of that with great respect, but--"
"Then they say, 'Pity he flipped?'" he asked me almost plaintively.
"Well, they probably do say that in one way or another, but aren't you uncomfortable with the kind of people who are drawn to support you, many of whom are not interested in evaluating this objectively but are flat-out anti-Semites who would--"
"Yes--" he began as our voices overlapped.
"--would, if there was no Final Solution, have wanted one anyway?"
To my astonishment, he said, "You're absolutely right. The word 'uncomfortable' I think is an understatement. I find it odious to be in the same company as these people. There is no question that there are certain organizations that propagate these theories which are cracked anti-Semites."
He then proceeds to make another amazing assertion: He's only using these "cracked anti-Semites" cynically. He plans to jettison them as soon as he can for more respectable forums.
"What else can I do?" he said, but speak at the gatherings of these "cracked anti-Semites" for the moment. "If I've been denied a platform worldwide, where else can I make my voice heard? As soon as I get back onto regular debating platforms I shall shake off this ill-fitting shoe which I'm standing on at present. I'm not blind. I know these people have done me a lot of damage, a lot of harm, because I get associated then with those stupid actions."
Fascinating: association with cracked anti-Semites experienced by Irving as the minor discomfort of ill-fitting footwear. Fascinating as well his candor (if that's what it was) about the manipulation he claims to be practicing upon the cracked anti-Semite allies he plans to discard like an ill-fitting shoe. He'll use them, these vile true believers, use them, manipulate them to give him a platform for his views and then when he--it's not clear how--becomes respectable again, he'll drop them. [...]
I must admit I found Irving's reasoning difficult to take seriously: it didn't make sense either as cynical, calculating opportunism (it seemed too pitifully transparent and inept to succeed) or as genuine, heartfelt rationalization of his behavior. I could not even find a Bullock-like synthesis of calculation and sincerity to make this argument seem coherent, especially (or because) he was confiding it to one of the "traditional enemy." ("Traditional enemy" is Irving's name for Jews in his Action Report newsletters, which seem to cater to his "temporary" cracked anti-Semite allies and Holocaust deniers.) (Rosenbaum 233-34)
So regardless of how one interprets Irving's confession to Rosenbaum (a sincere statement of conflict or a cynical attempt to manipulate the "traditional enemy"), it's clear that he knows what he's doing, that he is choosing to ally himself with the Holocaust deniers, not out of conviction (both Rosenbaum and van Pelt show that Irving edges into Holocaust denial by logic chopping and willful obtuseness, not by outright statements of belief; he's trying to quibble the thing to death, which is not what you do when you actually believe something is untrue), but because he can get more attention. Also notice the circular logic of victimhood: Irving is speaking to "cracked anti-Semites" because he's been "denied a platform worldwide," but insofar as he's been "denied a platform worldwide" (and I have to say, I'm not quite sure what he means by that), it's not because his ideas are unpopular (the Man doesn't want you to know the truth) but because they're unsupportable special pleading in defense of Hitler. [ETA: he may be referring to his being barred from entering Austria--more details in his wikipedia entry, which is as far as I'm going to go in researching the subject; if that's what he means, it's clear he's talking about personal appearances; I was thinking in terms of publication.]
A good portion of The Case for Auschwitz is taken up in tracing the convergent careers of negationism and Irving. (I was mortified to learn that one of the roots of negationism is firmly sunk in New Criticism, as the idea that you treat the text as an object in itself, taken in reductio ad absurdam, is a principal method of negationist argument.) Another chunk deals with the evidence van Pelt assembled in his expert opinion, and the rest describes the trial itself, with a focus on van Pelt's testimony and Irving's cross-examination. I was fascinated by the way Irving--who, remember, was the plaintiff--kept trying to mobilize the rhetoric of victimhood, describing himself as enduring "a public flogging" (van Pelt 452) for example, and I admit I cheered for the way Justice Gray kept shooting him down. In fact, one of the problems I had in reading was the fact of my own partisanship; I felt like I should try to be objective, open-minded, and fair to both sides, but the negationist standpoint is so reprehensible to me in its own right, and supported by such utterly shoddy argumentation, that I couldn't help thinking of them as the enemy--and was further disturbed by this echo of Irving labelling Jews the "traditional enemy," and also his habit of reappropriating anti-Semitic images like blood libel and well-poisoning, casting himself and his followers in the position of the oppressed party, i.e., the Jews. This kind of field reversal--endemic also to Nazi thought--seems to have had a kind of miasmatic effect; van Pelt quotes James Dalrymple, an observer of the trial for the Independent:
Irving gave him [van Pelt] little leeway, and by late afternoon, with another verbal flourish, he suddenly produced what might be the main witness for his case. Not a human being--but something as mundane as the single lift-shaft connecting the "alleged" gas chamber with the crematorium ovens above. He called it the bottleneck. Or, as he put it, the bottleneck in the glass timing jar. The bottleneck that would blow holes in the Auschwitz story.
[...] Irving now demanded that van Pelt do the arithmetic of nightmares. How much could the lift carry? 750 kilos, 1,500 kilos, 3,000 kilos? How many bodies would that be at, say 60 kilos a body? were they in gurneys or were they just squeezed in, like people squashed into a telephone box? How long to take each batch up to the ovens? Ten minutes, or more, each batch? Twenty corpses at a time, or 25?
Van Pelt entered into the exercise reluctantly, and his answers were unclear. It was not helpful to count the numbers of lift journeys, but rather the time it took to burn each batch. In the end, no conclusion was reached on this point. Nobody came up with a pat figure that would make such a logistics exercise possible or impossible during the years the crematorium was operational. But Irving repeated his phrase over and over again. The Bottleneck.
And on the way home in the train that night, to my shame, I took out a pocket calculator and began to do some sums. Ten minutes for each batch of 25, I tapped in. That makes 150 an hour. Which gives 3,600 for each 24-hour period. Which gives 1,314,000 in a year. So that's fine. It could be done. Thank God, the numbers add up.
When I realized what I was doing, I almost threw the little machine across the compartment in rage. (Dalrymple, qtd. in van Pelt, 471)
We become grateful that the Holocaust was logistically possible--that is what negationism does; Dalrymple describes it as a place "where great truths can be tainted and wounded by small discrepancies, where millions of dead people can be turned into a chimera. And where doubt can be planted like seed in the wind, to grow and fester as the screams of history grow fainter with the years" (qtd in van Pelt, 471) If you engage with it at all, you quickly find yourself arguing lethal absurdities, like the idea that Auschwitz's gas chambers cannot have been gas chambers because they did not follow the rubrics of American gas chambers of the '30s, or the idea that the gas chambers were used to delouse corpses, or that crematoria a mile and a half from the SS barracks in Birkenau were intended as an air-raid shelter. The list goes on and on. And even if you win, as Lipstadt and Penguin won, van Pelt's occasional quotes from Irving's Action Reports make clear that negationists will twist and misrepresent until they can claim that they won--or that your victory is just another symptom of the conspiracy against them.
The Case for Auschwitz has what one might call a happy ending: the forces of good are triumphant. But the forces of evil are far from defeated. And nothing we say, no matter how loudly we shout, can change the terrible things that were done by the Nazis to Jews, Romani, Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Germans . . . The list goes on and on. We can't redeem their suffering. And the fact that we argue about it is a terrible indictment of the human race, above and beyond the terrible indictment of the Holocaust itself.
This is not happy reading, but it is a brilliant book.
This is a book about the historiography of Auschwitz. As such, and because it is about the libel trial brought by David Irving against Deborah Lipstadt, it is also about Holocaust deniers. Holocaust deniers call themselves Revisionists; van Pelt calls them negationists, and after a while I came to see why he did so, and to agree with him. Negationists are first of all committed to proving a negative: that the Holocaust, or some part of the Holocaust, did not happen. Secondly, they forget with distressing regularity the axiom Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And thirdly, their answer to any piece of evidence that contradicts their ideas is to negate it: to deny its validity, whether by trying to claim that eye-witnesses are liars or that a document is a forgery or similar strategies. Moreover, as van Pelt points out, their activity consists of saying no to the historical theories of others; they have no coherent narrative to offer in place of the one they deny. They are not re-visioning history; they are trying to negate it, to deny that it took place.
In reading about negationist arguments, I was reminded of my valiantly windmill-tilting and sorely missed friend, Jay Lake, and his efforts to argue with Creationism and what he called faith-based reasoning. Like Creationism, Holocaust denial is, at its first principles, motivated by something that can be stated as I don't like this idea. Therefore, it is not true. But beyond that, both Creationism and Holocaust denial are fundamentally about a refusal to accept and/or understand the way a particular discipline works. I had the same feeling reading about negationists that I do in reading about Creationists: Why are we even HAVING this argument?
And we're having this argument for reasons Hitler would have understood: demagoguery. We aren't having this argument because Holocaust denial can be defended rationally--or can even mount a plausible opposition. It can't, and van Pelt proves that over and over and over again. We're having this argument because (1) there are people who want to believe that the Holocaust didn't happen; (2) and are willing to follow faith-based reasoning rather than use critical thinking; (3) and don't understand how historiography works and what historians do, in the same way that Creationism relies on a fundamental misunderstanding of the theory of evolution--both the evolution part and the theory part; (4)--as my parallel structure falls apart--a preference for conspiracy theories over the inconvenient, painful, and chaotic reality (conspiracy theories have the advantage that you can cast yourself as the victim, which is always preferable); (5) the distrust of and contempt for experts which characterizes a large segment of Western society; (6) certain unscrupulous persons who are willing to exploit this situation for their own benefit and gratification; and (7) like many other right-wing groups, they are prepared to loss-lead indefinitely. That is, they will keep shouting no matter how many times they are rebutted, no matter how many different ways they are proven to be wrong, because they know that the people they want to reach are the people who will believe, "No smoke without a fire." The mere fact of the shouting will be enough.
That's the thing. They--negationists and Creationists--will not give up. Their argument is not predicated on rationality and therefore rational arguments against them will never succeed. Facts make no dent in their armor. The only solution is to ignore them, rather than engaging with them, and even that is merely more fuel for their smoke machine, as they can claim that mainstream historians are afraid to engage with them. And they always have the anti-elitist conspiracy theory rhetoric of victimhood to fall back on: The Man doesn't want you to know the truth. The eggheads are blinded by their liberal bleeding-heart consciences. They're lying to you, but you know better.
I find these tactics infuriating as well as reprehensible, especially from people who are using them knowingly and deliberately, not because they believe what they're saying, but in order to secure an advantage for their "side"--or for themselves. The outcome of the libel trial brought by Irving against Lipstadt was the legal judgment that he was, in fact, knowingly misrepresenting documents and evidence in order to claim that Auschwitz was not an extermination camp.
After I finished The Case for Auschwitz, I went back and reread the chapter on David Irving in Ron Rosenbaum's excellent Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil (1998), which is a book less about Hitler himself than about the historiography of Hitler. Rosenbaum captures a snapshot of Irving at a point along his slide into extremist negationism--a point where it's clear he is consciously making choices about the ideological uses of history:
"Let me ask you about that," I said. "You know historians often speak of you as someone who's dug up a remarkable number of important documents, speak of that with great respect, but--"
"Then they say, 'Pity he flipped?'" he asked me almost plaintively.
"Well, they probably do say that in one way or another, but aren't you uncomfortable with the kind of people who are drawn to support you, many of whom are not interested in evaluating this objectively but are flat-out anti-Semites who would--"
"Yes--" he began as our voices overlapped.
"--would, if there was no Final Solution, have wanted one anyway?"
To my astonishment, he said, "You're absolutely right. The word 'uncomfortable' I think is an understatement. I find it odious to be in the same company as these people. There is no question that there are certain organizations that propagate these theories which are cracked anti-Semites."
He then proceeds to make another amazing assertion: He's only using these "cracked anti-Semites" cynically. He plans to jettison them as soon as he can for more respectable forums.
"What else can I do?" he said, but speak at the gatherings of these "cracked anti-Semites" for the moment. "If I've been denied a platform worldwide, where else can I make my voice heard? As soon as I get back onto regular debating platforms I shall shake off this ill-fitting shoe which I'm standing on at present. I'm not blind. I know these people have done me a lot of damage, a lot of harm, because I get associated then with those stupid actions."
Fascinating: association with cracked anti-Semites experienced by Irving as the minor discomfort of ill-fitting footwear. Fascinating as well his candor (if that's what it was) about the manipulation he claims to be practicing upon the cracked anti-Semite allies he plans to discard like an ill-fitting shoe. He'll use them, these vile true believers, use them, manipulate them to give him a platform for his views and then when he--it's not clear how--becomes respectable again, he'll drop them. [...]
I must admit I found Irving's reasoning difficult to take seriously: it didn't make sense either as cynical, calculating opportunism (it seemed too pitifully transparent and inept to succeed) or as genuine, heartfelt rationalization of his behavior. I could not even find a Bullock-like synthesis of calculation and sincerity to make this argument seem coherent, especially (or because) he was confiding it to one of the "traditional enemy." ("Traditional enemy" is Irving's name for Jews in his Action Report newsletters, which seem to cater to his "temporary" cracked anti-Semite allies and Holocaust deniers.) (Rosenbaum 233-34)
So regardless of how one interprets Irving's confession to Rosenbaum (a sincere statement of conflict or a cynical attempt to manipulate the "traditional enemy"), it's clear that he knows what he's doing, that he is choosing to ally himself with the Holocaust deniers, not out of conviction (both Rosenbaum and van Pelt show that Irving edges into Holocaust denial by logic chopping and willful obtuseness, not by outright statements of belief; he's trying to quibble the thing to death, which is not what you do when you actually believe something is untrue), but because he can get more attention. Also notice the circular logic of victimhood: Irving is speaking to "cracked anti-Semites" because he's been "denied a platform worldwide," but insofar as he's been "denied a platform worldwide" (and I have to say, I'm not quite sure what he means by that), it's not because his ideas are unpopular (the Man doesn't want you to know the truth) but because they're unsupportable special pleading in defense of Hitler. [ETA: he may be referring to his being barred from entering Austria--more details in his wikipedia entry, which is as far as I'm going to go in researching the subject; if that's what he means, it's clear he's talking about personal appearances; I was thinking in terms of publication.]
A good portion of The Case for Auschwitz is taken up in tracing the convergent careers of negationism and Irving. (I was mortified to learn that one of the roots of negationism is firmly sunk in New Criticism, as the idea that you treat the text as an object in itself, taken in reductio ad absurdam, is a principal method of negationist argument.) Another chunk deals with the evidence van Pelt assembled in his expert opinion, and the rest describes the trial itself, with a focus on van Pelt's testimony and Irving's cross-examination. I was fascinated by the way Irving--who, remember, was the plaintiff--kept trying to mobilize the rhetoric of victimhood, describing himself as enduring "a public flogging" (van Pelt 452) for example, and I admit I cheered for the way Justice Gray kept shooting him down. In fact, one of the problems I had in reading was the fact of my own partisanship; I felt like I should try to be objective, open-minded, and fair to both sides, but the negationist standpoint is so reprehensible to me in its own right, and supported by such utterly shoddy argumentation, that I couldn't help thinking of them as the enemy--and was further disturbed by this echo of Irving labelling Jews the "traditional enemy," and also his habit of reappropriating anti-Semitic images like blood libel and well-poisoning, casting himself and his followers in the position of the oppressed party, i.e., the Jews. This kind of field reversal--endemic also to Nazi thought--seems to have had a kind of miasmatic effect; van Pelt quotes James Dalrymple, an observer of the trial for the Independent:
Irving gave him [van Pelt] little leeway, and by late afternoon, with another verbal flourish, he suddenly produced what might be the main witness for his case. Not a human being--but something as mundane as the single lift-shaft connecting the "alleged" gas chamber with the crematorium ovens above. He called it the bottleneck. Or, as he put it, the bottleneck in the glass timing jar. The bottleneck that would blow holes in the Auschwitz story.
[...] Irving now demanded that van Pelt do the arithmetic of nightmares. How much could the lift carry? 750 kilos, 1,500 kilos, 3,000 kilos? How many bodies would that be at, say 60 kilos a body? were they in gurneys or were they just squeezed in, like people squashed into a telephone box? How long to take each batch up to the ovens? Ten minutes, or more, each batch? Twenty corpses at a time, or 25?
Van Pelt entered into the exercise reluctantly, and his answers were unclear. It was not helpful to count the numbers of lift journeys, but rather the time it took to burn each batch. In the end, no conclusion was reached on this point. Nobody came up with a pat figure that would make such a logistics exercise possible or impossible during the years the crematorium was operational. But Irving repeated his phrase over and over again. The Bottleneck.
And on the way home in the train that night, to my shame, I took out a pocket calculator and began to do some sums. Ten minutes for each batch of 25, I tapped in. That makes 150 an hour. Which gives 3,600 for each 24-hour period. Which gives 1,314,000 in a year. So that's fine. It could be done. Thank God, the numbers add up.
When I realized what I was doing, I almost threw the little machine across the compartment in rage. (Dalrymple, qtd. in van Pelt, 471)
We become grateful that the Holocaust was logistically possible--that is what negationism does; Dalrymple describes it as a place "where great truths can be tainted and wounded by small discrepancies, where millions of dead people can be turned into a chimera. And where doubt can be planted like seed in the wind, to grow and fester as the screams of history grow fainter with the years" (qtd in van Pelt, 471) If you engage with it at all, you quickly find yourself arguing lethal absurdities, like the idea that Auschwitz's gas chambers cannot have been gas chambers because they did not follow the rubrics of American gas chambers of the '30s, or the idea that the gas chambers were used to delouse corpses, or that crematoria a mile and a half from the SS barracks in Birkenau were intended as an air-raid shelter. The list goes on and on. And even if you win, as Lipstadt and Penguin won, van Pelt's occasional quotes from Irving's Action Reports make clear that negationists will twist and misrepresent until they can claim that they won--or that your victory is just another symptom of the conspiracy against them.
The Case for Auschwitz has what one might call a happy ending: the forces of good are triumphant. But the forces of evil are far from defeated. And nothing we say, no matter how loudly we shout, can change the terrible things that were done by the Nazis to Jews, Romani, Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Germans . . . The list goes on and on. We can't redeem their suffering. And the fact that we argue about it is a terrible indictment of the human race, above and beyond the terrible indictment of the Holocaust itself.
This is not happy reading, but it is a brilliant book.
December 14, 2014
Revealing . . . and terrifying! It is an outstanding work; the material is hard to digest (makes me wonder about humanity!) but this is crucial reading.
November 1, 2018
The Holocaust was imagined by the Nazis as a horror for which not a word of would survive. Their goal was to annihilate an entire race of people, and to ensure that the horror which they perpetrated would be forgotten by history. This book is apart of the concerted effort by historians to make sure that never happens.
This is a mammoth of a work and very unpleasant to read. Learning about the systematic murder of people is hard enough, doing so within the context of addressing those who seek to deny historical fact in pursuit of sanitizing the same political beliefs which motivated the holocaust as apart of a concerted effort to revitalize that hate is even more unsettling.
A brief history on how this book came to be. In 1993 at the suggestion of some colleges, Professor of Jewish history, Deborah Lipstadt, published her research on Anti-Semitism titled Denying the Holocaust. In it she outlined a growing movement of holocaust deniers who sought (and still seek) to diminish the horrors of the Holocaust in order to present the actions of the Nazi regime as morally equivalent to that of the allies, all with the end goal of making Nazism as well as Fascism a viable political option in the marketplace of ideas. What is especially unsettling is that many of these movements chose to try and distance themselves from carrying swastikas and throwing heil-hitler salutes in order to gain mainstream appeal(notice the innocuous name of the anti-semitic journal 'The Historical Review'). As an example of poor scholarship which had acquired traction with the public she pointed to David Irving and the success of his book Hitler's War , a work which clearly sought to exonerate Hitler and the Nazis through employing frequent misrepresentations, fallacy ladened logic, and downright lies. A single error is a mistake, consistent error is bad scholarship, but a hodgepodge of falsehoods all pointing in one direction is ideology replacing fact. Instead of challenging her accusations like a real scholar, David Irving sued her and Penguin books for Libel (how's that for free speech?).
Lipstad's team decided that in order to prove that what she said about Irving was true, they would have to pick apart his scholarship on various fronts and reveal it for the sham it was. This is where the author of this book comes into the picture. Robert Jan Van Pelt is an architect and a scholar who specializes on Auswitch, and he presented an expert opinion for the court outlining much of the historical consensus on the subject. This book is the outline and summary of the forensic, testimonial, and historical evidence that around one Million people (mostly Jews) were systematically and horrifically murdered in Auschwitz. It also is an indictment of the claims made my Irving and those like him.
This book is important because it summarily puts a nail in the coffin of the holocaust denier position(Pelt calls them negationists but I won't dignify them with the term) by taking apart Irving's claims. He must have been the best they had to offer, because most of the claims rebuked by Pelt are today repeated by contemporary holocaust deniers online. If you want to observe a museum of bad ideas, scroll to the one star reviews given to this book on both Amazon and here on Goodreads. There you will observe people trodding out the same tired falsehoods which this book rejects.
For example, you might hear people reiterate the "No Holes, No Holocaust" argument popularized by holocaust denier Robert Faurisson which have been repeated since roughly the 1980s. Had these people made a sincere effort to read the book which they are criticizing past the first 50 pages they would have realized the following: First, it would have been impossible for anyone to observe the holes where Zyklon-B was introduced into the gas chambers at Crematorium II with the naked eye because the ceiling of the building was destroyed by retreating Germans in an effort to cover up the holocaust. Second, they would have realized that to focus on this one issue is to ignore the mountain of evidence provided by eye witness accounts, German Records, and forensics. Third, they would have realized how silly this all looks given that these holes were discovered with the help of engineering, computer, and photographic techniques ( see "The Ruins of the Gas Chambers: A Forensic Investigation of Crematoriums at Auschwitz I and Auschwitz-BirkenauKeren", et al.; 2004).
There are a couple reasons you may want to read this book. Often I find that as a society we come to accept certain facts as obvious. The benefit of this is that we manage to push out certain morally repugnant positions from public discourse and the promotion thereof is rendered dead on arrival. However, the downside to this phenomena is that if you ever encounter someone who holds these beyond-the-pale beliefs you may be poorly equipped to address their claims. This lends itself to a kind of debate blitzkrieg, whereby those who are in fact wedded to ideology and poor scholarship are able play off their ideas as bold or apart of a tradition of Liberal Skepticism. If you go your whole life just accepting the plain fact that the earth is round you might be caught off guard by a flat-earther. While keeping these beliefs outside the scope of acceptable discourse some may find it helpful to be prepared specifically to deny holocaust deniers that rhetorical strategy. To that end, this work gives a great summary of the evidence Historians have used to reach the current consensus on Auschwitz. Of particular interest to me is the historiography of the death toll of 1.4 million.
For those of you who don't make it a habit of arguing down holocaust deniers there is some other uses for this book. It outlines the beliefs of other holocaust deniers, and leaves one better equipped to spotting neo-nazi dog whistles. Lastly, it is an interesting piece on one of the great courtroom dramas of the century. If you are interested in getting a more complete picture of how the case itself unfolded, I recommend the more accessible work by Lipstadt History on Trial .
This is a mammoth of a work and very unpleasant to read. Learning about the systematic murder of people is hard enough, doing so within the context of addressing those who seek to deny historical fact in pursuit of sanitizing the same political beliefs which motivated the holocaust as apart of a concerted effort to revitalize that hate is even more unsettling.
A brief history on how this book came to be. In 1993 at the suggestion of some colleges, Professor of Jewish history, Deborah Lipstadt, published her research on Anti-Semitism titled Denying the Holocaust. In it she outlined a growing movement of holocaust deniers who sought (and still seek) to diminish the horrors of the Holocaust in order to present the actions of the Nazi regime as morally equivalent to that of the allies, all with the end goal of making Nazism as well as Fascism a viable political option in the marketplace of ideas. What is especially unsettling is that many of these movements chose to try and distance themselves from carrying swastikas and throwing heil-hitler salutes in order to gain mainstream appeal(notice the innocuous name of the anti-semitic journal 'The Historical Review'). As an example of poor scholarship which had acquired traction with the public she pointed to David Irving and the success of his book Hitler's War , a work which clearly sought to exonerate Hitler and the Nazis through employing frequent misrepresentations, fallacy ladened logic, and downright lies. A single error is a mistake, consistent error is bad scholarship, but a hodgepodge of falsehoods all pointing in one direction is ideology replacing fact. Instead of challenging her accusations like a real scholar, David Irving sued her and Penguin books for Libel (how's that for free speech?).
Lipstad's team decided that in order to prove that what she said about Irving was true, they would have to pick apart his scholarship on various fronts and reveal it for the sham it was. This is where the author of this book comes into the picture. Robert Jan Van Pelt is an architect and a scholar who specializes on Auswitch, and he presented an expert opinion for the court outlining much of the historical consensus on the subject. This book is the outline and summary of the forensic, testimonial, and historical evidence that around one Million people (mostly Jews) were systematically and horrifically murdered in Auschwitz. It also is an indictment of the claims made my Irving and those like him.
This book is important because it summarily puts a nail in the coffin of the holocaust denier position(Pelt calls them negationists but I won't dignify them with the term) by taking apart Irving's claims. He must have been the best they had to offer, because most of the claims rebuked by Pelt are today repeated by contemporary holocaust deniers online. If you want to observe a museum of bad ideas, scroll to the one star reviews given to this book on both Amazon and here on Goodreads. There you will observe people trodding out the same tired falsehoods which this book rejects.
For example, you might hear people reiterate the "No Holes, No Holocaust" argument popularized by holocaust denier Robert Faurisson which have been repeated since roughly the 1980s. Had these people made a sincere effort to read the book which they are criticizing past the first 50 pages they would have realized the following: First, it would have been impossible for anyone to observe the holes where Zyklon-B was introduced into the gas chambers at Crematorium II with the naked eye because the ceiling of the building was destroyed by retreating Germans in an effort to cover up the holocaust. Second, they would have realized that to focus on this one issue is to ignore the mountain of evidence provided by eye witness accounts, German Records, and forensics. Third, they would have realized how silly this all looks given that these holes were discovered with the help of engineering, computer, and photographic techniques ( see "The Ruins of the Gas Chambers: A Forensic Investigation of Crematoriums at Auschwitz I and Auschwitz-BirkenauKeren", et al.; 2004).
There are a couple reasons you may want to read this book. Often I find that as a society we come to accept certain facts as obvious. The benefit of this is that we manage to push out certain morally repugnant positions from public discourse and the promotion thereof is rendered dead on arrival. However, the downside to this phenomena is that if you ever encounter someone who holds these beyond-the-pale beliefs you may be poorly equipped to address their claims. This lends itself to a kind of debate blitzkrieg, whereby those who are in fact wedded to ideology and poor scholarship are able play off their ideas as bold or apart of a tradition of Liberal Skepticism. If you go your whole life just accepting the plain fact that the earth is round you might be caught off guard by a flat-earther. While keeping these beliefs outside the scope of acceptable discourse some may find it helpful to be prepared specifically to deny holocaust deniers that rhetorical strategy. To that end, this work gives a great summary of the evidence Historians have used to reach the current consensus on Auschwitz. Of particular interest to me is the historiography of the death toll of 1.4 million.
For those of you who don't make it a habit of arguing down holocaust deniers there is some other uses for this book. It outlines the beliefs of other holocaust deniers, and leaves one better equipped to spotting neo-nazi dog whistles. Lastly, it is an interesting piece on one of the great courtroom dramas of the century. If you are interested in getting a more complete picture of how the case itself unfolded, I recommend the more accessible work by Lipstadt History on Trial .
August 7, 2016
At the trial prof. Van Pelt confirmed that there are no Zyklon B introduction holes in the roof of Krema II, the central place of Holocaust and his study. He went there many times, he is an architect and historian, and as a expert for the defence he surely didn't have a motive to conceal his findings, if there was the slightest trace of such openings. I really don't understand - are this people so corrupt or so delusional?
"MR IRVING: We are right at the end, my Lord. And I will just say, another 20 seconds and then we can adjourn.
(To the witness) You have not seen any holes in the roof, have you, in the -- when you went there? You have not found any holes?
[Professor Robert Jan van Pelt] I have not seen the holes for the columns, no.
[Mr Irving] Not for the introduction of the cyanide?
[Professor Robert Jan van Pelt] No.
...
MR IRVING: I will not press the matter further, my Lord. On that issue I will abandon (and I am sure the Defence will be grateful) the question of the holes in the roof which are central to my case.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: How do you mean, you are going to abandon them?
MR IRVING: I will abandon the discussion on the holes in the roof point, my Lord.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: I see. Bring it to an end."
http://www.hdot.org/en/trial/transcri...
It really looks like Irving made some kind of a deal with Lipstadt & co. Why on earth would he abandon "the question whis is central to his case"...?
"MR IRVING: We are right at the end, my Lord. And I will just say, another 20 seconds and then we can adjourn.
(To the witness) You have not seen any holes in the roof, have you, in the -- when you went there? You have not found any holes?
[Professor Robert Jan van Pelt] I have not seen the holes for the columns, no.
[Mr Irving] Not for the introduction of the cyanide?
[Professor Robert Jan van Pelt] No.
...
MR IRVING: I will not press the matter further, my Lord. On that issue I will abandon (and I am sure the Defence will be grateful) the question of the holes in the roof which are central to my case.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: How do you mean, you are going to abandon them?
MR IRVING: I will abandon the discussion on the holes in the roof point, my Lord.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: I see. Bring it to an end."
http://www.hdot.org/en/trial/transcri...
It really looks like Irving made some kind of a deal with Lipstadt & co. Why on earth would he abandon "the question whis is central to his case"...?
January 2, 2015
This is a very intense book in the construction of the has chambers at Auschwitz. Dr. Van Pelt lays out a bullet proof case that the has chambers were built to murder those who want in. After the fall of communism in Europe, the blueprints for Auschwitz became available to scholars. This book puts to rest negationist history of Auschwitz. The text and visuals complete a full circle of evidence as to the a Nazi atrocities.
Read
August 17, 2016"It was my task to help the defense convince the judge that no serious historian who had considered the evidence would have serious cause to doubt that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz.” Review by Jack Fischel for the Jewish Book Council.
June 21, 2022
A hard book to read. After reading, one wonders how people can deny the holocaust. It is well put put together. It puts all the facts out there along with drawings. It is a great source for study.
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