Jan Van Pelt
University of Waterloo
In the libel case brought by David Irving against Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books both plaintiff as well as the defendants paid considerable attention to the evidentiary basis of our knowledge about Auschwitz as a death camp where more than a million of people, mostly Jews, were murdered, mostly in gas chambers. The centrality of Auschwitz in the case was a direct reflection of the centrality of Auschwitz in Irving's development as a Holocaust denier. "You can sum up my case on the Holocaust in the following nut shell," he proclaimed in a lecture given in Toronto in 1989. "More people died on the back seat of Senator Edward Kennedy's motor car in Chappaquiddick than died in the gas chamber in Auschwitz." The question was if statements such as these showed Irving to be a Holocaust denier (as Lipstadt had claimed in her book Denying the Holocaust), or if it could be justified as a legitimate academic position (as Irving proposed).
Irving's engagement with Auschwitz followed the path gone by the French academic Robert Faurisson. In the early 1970s, Faurisson came to believe that study of the ruins of the Auschwitz crematoria would reveal not only errors in the testimonies of witnesses, but also the scientific "impossibility" of the mass gassings and the incinerations, and that this would prove that Auschwitz had not been not an extermination camp, but a mere slave labour camp, and that by implication the Holocaust did not happen. In 1978 Faurisson went public with his thesis that "(1) Hitler's 'gas chambers' never existed," and that therefore "(2) The 'genocide' (or: the 'attempted genocide') of the Jews never took place; clearly, Hitler never ordered (nor permitted) that someone be killed for racial or religious reason."
In tying denial of the Holocaust to Hitler's reputation, Faurisson anticipated a link between his own position and that of Irving, who had published his massive Hitler's War in 1977. In this book, he had tried to whitewash Hitler's guilt for the Holocaust by claiming that the genocide of the Jews had happened behind his back.
Faurisson's and Irving's positions merged in 1988 in a Canadian trial held in Toronto. The defendant was a certain Ernst Zündel who was accused of publishing material which, amongst other things, denied the existence of homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz. In defence of this charge, Zündel engaged Faurisson to coordinate his defence, and Faurisson recruited a man called Fred Leuchter, who made his living as a consultant in the design of execution facilities in the USA. Leuchter was duly dispatched to Auschwitz to seek evidence of the use, or otherwise, of homicidal gas chambers. He took some samples from various parts of the remains of Auschwitz which he later had analysed for residual cyanide content, and then wrote a report that concluded that "none of the facilities examined were ever utilized for the execution of human beings and that the crematories could not have supported the alleged work load attributed to them."
Zündel introduced Leuchter's interpretation of the ruins of the Auschwitz crematoria in the Toronto court, and while it did not convince the judge, the so-called Leuchter Report did "convert" Irving who, as an expert witness for the defence, endorsed it.
With Irving's endorsement of Leuchter' conclusions he had publicly become a Holocaust denier--the first historian to do so. From the moment that he left the courtroom Irving began to aggressively trumpet his own conversion as a world-historical event. Irving bought from Zündel the right to publish the British edition of the Leuchter Report through his own publishing venture "Focal Point." He now became the most vocal advocate of the idea that the Auschwitz ruins proved that the camp had never been an extermination camp.
This kind of language earned him the attention of Lipstadt, who described Irving's 1988 "conversion" in some detail in her Denying the Holocaust. In her eyes it was a clear example of Irving's habit of bending historical evidence to make it conform with his ideological leanings and political agenda.
When Irving responded by suing Lipstadt and her British publisher Penguin for libel, the defendants had to prove that Irving had indeed betrayed his vocation as a historian by endorsing, amongst other things, Leuchter's conclusions, ignoring massive evidence that Auschwitz had been an extermination camp equipped with gas chambers and crematoria. The defence would have to demonstrate that Irving had misrepresented the historical record concerning Auschwitz. In order to determine the instances that he had engaged in special pleading, suppression of evidence, or even the invention of evidence as it related to that camp, the legal team that was assembled needed an expert on the history of Auschwitz. As co-author (with Debórah Dwork) of Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present (1996), I accepted their invitation to act as an expert witness.
I began work in the Spring of 1998. By the time a year had passed, I had written a more than 700 page expert report that aimed to offer an analysis of the evidentiary basis for our knowledge that Auschwitz was an extermination camp, and that Irving had willfully ignored that evidence, and as such betrayed his vocation as a historian, when he endorsed Leuchter's conclusions. I considered the many eye witness reports and what the French historian Marc Bloch had labelled "non-intentional evidence," or the "evidence of witnesses despite themselves." I anticipated that while Irving might try to attack the credibility of the testimonies given by eyewitnesses after the war, the major engagement would concern the non-intentional evidence. I expected that he would argue on the basis of analysis of the remaining ruins of the crematoria, the lack of cyanide traces in the walls of the gas chambers, wartime German construction documents that did not show the designation "gas chamber" in the blueprints, English radio intercepts of SS communications that failed to mention gassings, and aerial photos taken by American bombers that did not seem to show hectic killings in Auschwitz, that the position he had adopted in a Toronto court room in 1988 was perfectly reasonable, and that therefore his endorsement and publication of the Leuchter Report could not be seen as a the manipulation of historical evidence to conform to some political agenda.
The centrality of the non-intentional evidence for Irving's case derived from the fact that he could not rely on eyewitness evidence to make his case. A big problem inherent in Holocaust denial is the fallacy of negative proof -- which means that a factual proposition (for example "Auschwitz was not an extermination camp . . . ") cannot be proven merely by negative evidence ( ". . . because a few German eyewitnesses did not see killings taking place"). With regard to eyewitnesses, the obvious choice for deniers is to dismiss all eyewitness evidence as irrelevant, and turn to the brick, cyanide traces, documents and photos that cannot protest attempts of manipulation, misconstruction and falsification.
With all these instances of "non-Intentional" evidence, they have had two choices. The first one is to commit the fallacy of negative proof. In 1988, Irving had shown himself willing to accept negative evidence (the alleged absence of residual cyanide in the walls of the gas chambers) as positive evidence for the nonexistence of the gas chambers. In the years that followed, Irving continued to rely on negative evidence when he claimed on various occasions that it was clear that Auschwitz was not purposefully operated as an extermination camp because there are no official German wartime documents that prove that Auschwitz was purposefully conceived and operated as an extermination camp. Neither argument is legitimate because every historian knows that most evidence does not survive, and that the reconstruction of any historical event is based on accidentally preserved relics which may or may not be a document or significant traces of cyanide. Because the variety of historical evidence is infinite, one should not expect that a particular historical question can be proved only by a one particular piece of evidence. This explains why the the issue of negative evidence is so problematic.
The other approach is to "turn" the evidence, and argue that what seem to be clear-cut German wartime evidence attesting to the presence and operation of a genocidal machinery of death had in fact, a more innocent meaning. The underground gas chambers of crematoria 2 and 3 would have been gas-proof air raid shelters, and the excessive capacity of the Auschwitz ovens could be explained by the Germans' fear for typhus epidemics, and so on.
In my expert report, I dealt with all these issues in great detail, subjecting surviving German documents such as blueprints and construction documents, and the ruins of the crematoria, to detailed analysis. I showed that there was more than sufficient convergent evidence in the surviving correspondence and drawings to prove that the crematoria had been equipped with gas chambers, and also showed that Leuchter had looked for the wrong chemical compound when he looked for residual cyanide in the crumbling walls of the gas chambers, and that his whole reasoning was based on a wrong premise. I showed that, contrary to Leuchter's assertion, the gas chambers had been equipped with a ventilation system powerful enough to quickly reduce, after gassing, the cyanide concentration in the gas chambers to harmless levels, and that the crematorium ovens did indeed have a capacity that far exceeded even the worst-case scenario.
I submitted my report in June of 1999, and seven months later I defended it under cross-examination in the British High Court in London. Irving acted as his own advocate, and attacked the archeological and documentary evidence of the crematoria. The center of his case, as he was to state during my cross examination, was an issue which Holocaust deniers summarize in the slogan "No Holes, No Holocaust." It is based on the assumption that the Holocaust centred on Auschwitz, and that the most important extermination installation of Auschwitz was crematorium 2, and that the most important part of crematorium 2 was the gas chamber, and that the essential detail of the gas chamber were the introduction devices for the gas, the so-called "holes" in the concrete slab that covered the gas chamber.
Irving tried to convince the judge, and the press gallery of the validity of this argument. Declaring the holes in the roof to be the "cardinal linchpin of the Defence in this action," Irving repeated the assertion that the fact that the holes were invisible now proved that all "eyewitness evidence collapses," and that the people who had testified that these holes existed "are exposed for the liars they were." Irving continued to incant variations of the "no holes, no holocaust" formula as if casting a spell. Falsely claiming that it was a common ground between the plaintiff Irving and the defendants Lipstadt and Penguin that "the whole story rises and falls on the existence of holes," Irving expressed his astonishment that Holocaust scholars like myself had not been "frantically looking for those holes to prove us wrong." (Remarkably enough, Irving's challenge to find the holes did have a positive effect: in the aftermath of the trial members of the The Holocaust History Project [see www.holocaust-history.org] located the remains of three of the four holes in the crumbled remains of crematorium 2.)
In response, I argued that the slab in question was in such a bad state that it was very difficult to arrive at any positive or negative conclusion as to the presence of holes, or not. More importantly, I presented much convergent evidence that the holes had existed: both eyewitness talked about them, and there was one photo taken in early 1943 showing the roof of morgue 1 before the Germans covered it with a layer of earth. It showed square objects on the roof which were clearly the small chimneys that provided access to the holes. And then there were the aerial photos taken in 1944 that showed four dots on the roof of morgue 1 of both crematorium 2 and 3. These dots were the holes.
In the end, Irving failed to convince Mr. Justice Gray. In his lengthy judgment, Gray determined that "the various categories of evidence do 'converge' in the manner suggested by the Defendants," and that the totality of the evidence that Jews were killed in large numbers in the gas chambers at Auschwitz was so strong that "it would require exceedingly powerful reasons to reject it." The Leuchter Report did not provide "sufficient reason for dismissing, or even doubting, the convergence of evidence on which the Defendants rely for the presence of homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz." As to the holes, Gray had this to say: "I consider that an objective historian, taking account of all the evidence, would conclude that the apparent absence of evidence of holes in the roof of the morgue at crematorium 2 falls far short of being a good reason for rejecting the cumulative effect of the evidence on which the Defendants rely."
Having faced defeat on Auschwitz, Irving had lost what he himself had defined as the core of his case. Lipstadt and Penguin prevailed. It had been hard work. The trial once again reminded the world, as The Guardian put it, that "truth is no shining city on a hill," but the result of painstaking consideration of all the evidence, avoiding casual inference and thin deduction. It also showed that the credibility of those who claim to express the truth is critical. And the editorial concluded that, "There is now no room for doubt, despite the false trails and the lacunae left by a Nazi bureaucracy as assiduous about destroying the signs of its crimes as realising the final solution."
Robert Jan van Pelt has taught at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture since 1987, and held appointments at many institutions of higher education in Europe, Asia and North America, including the Architectural Association in London, the Technical University in Vienna, the National University of Singapore, the University of Virginia, Clark University, and MIT. He is the recipient of many academic honors, including the National Jewish Book Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has published seven books and contributed chapters to more than 20 books. His most recent books are Flight from the Reich: Refugee Jews, 1933-1946, co-authored with Deborah Dwork (Norton, 2009), The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial (Indiana University Press, 2002), and Holocaust: A History, co-authored with Deborah Dwork (Norton, 2002). At this time he is preparing a biography of David Koker, a young Dutch victim of the Holocaust who left a remarkable diary of life in the Vught concentration camp. An internationally recognized authority on the history of Auschwitz, van Pelt appeared in Errol Morris’s film Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter Jr. and contributed to the BBC/PBS series Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State. Van Pelt chaired the team that developed a master plan for the preservation of Auschwitz, and served as an expert witness for the defense in the notorious libel case Irving vs. Penguin and Lipstadt (1998-2001).
University of Waterloo
In the libel case brought by David Irving against Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books both plaintiff as well as the defendants paid considerable attention to the evidentiary basis of our knowledge about Auschwitz as a death camp where more than a million of people, mostly Jews, were murdered, mostly in gas chambers. The centrality of Auschwitz in the case was a direct reflection of the centrality of Auschwitz in Irving's development as a Holocaust denier. "You can sum up my case on the Holocaust in the following nut shell," he proclaimed in a lecture given in Toronto in 1989. "More people died on the back seat of Senator Edward Kennedy's motor car in Chappaquiddick than died in the gas chamber in Auschwitz." The question was if statements such as these showed Irving to be a Holocaust denier (as Lipstadt had claimed in her book Denying the Holocaust), or if it could be justified as a legitimate academic position (as Irving proposed). Irving's engagement with Auschwitz followed the path gone by the French academic Robert Faurisson. In the early 1970s, Faurisson came to believe that study of the ruins of the Auschwitz crematoria would reveal not only errors in the testimonies of witnesses, but also the scientific "impossibility" of the mass gassings and the incinerations, and that this would prove that Auschwitz had not been not an extermination camp, but a mere slave labour camp, and that by implication the Holocaust did not happen. In 1978 Faurisson went public with his thesis that "(1) Hitler's 'gas chambers' never existed," and that therefore "(2) The 'genocide' (or: the 'attempted genocide') of the Jews never took place; clearly, Hitler never ordered (nor permitted) that someone be killed for racial or religious reason."
In tying denial of the Holocaust to Hitler's reputation, Faurisson anticipated a link between his own position and that of Irving, who had published his massive Hitler's War in 1977. In this book, he had tried to whitewash Hitler's guilt for the Holocaust by claiming that the genocide of the Jews had happened behind his back.
Faurisson's and Irving's positions merged in 1988 in a Canadian trial held in Toronto. The defendant was a certain Ernst Zündel who was accused of publishing material which, amongst other things, denied the existence of homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz. In defence of this charge, Zündel engaged Faurisson to coordinate his defence, and Faurisson recruited a man called Fred Leuchter, who made his living as a consultant in the design of execution facilities in the USA. Leuchter was duly dispatched to Auschwitz to seek evidence of the use, or otherwise, of homicidal gas chambers. He took some samples from various parts of the remains of Auschwitz which he later had analysed for residual cyanide content, and then wrote a report that concluded that "none of the facilities examined were ever utilized for the execution of human beings and that the crematories could not have supported the alleged work load attributed to them."
Zündel introduced Leuchter's interpretation of the ruins of the Auschwitz crematoria in the Toronto court, and while it did not convince the judge, the so-called Leuchter Report did "convert" Irving who, as an expert witness for the defence, endorsed it.
With Irving's endorsement of Leuchter' conclusions he had publicly become a Holocaust denier--the first historian to do so. From the moment that he left the courtroom Irving began to aggressively trumpet his own conversion as a world-historical event. Irving bought from Zündel the right to publish the British edition of the Leuchter Report through his own publishing venture "Focal Point." He now became the most vocal advocate of the idea that the Auschwitz ruins proved that the camp had never been an extermination camp.
This kind of language earned him the attention of Lipstadt, who described Irving's 1988 "conversion" in some detail in her Denying the Holocaust. In her eyes it was a clear example of Irving's habit of bending historical evidence to make it conform with his ideological leanings and political agenda.
When Irving responded by suing Lipstadt and her British publisher Penguin for libel, the defendants had to prove that Irving had indeed betrayed his vocation as a historian by endorsing, amongst other things, Leuchter's conclusions, ignoring massive evidence that Auschwitz had been an extermination camp equipped with gas chambers and crematoria. The defence would have to demonstrate that Irving had misrepresented the historical record concerning Auschwitz. In order to determine the instances that he had engaged in special pleading, suppression of evidence, or even the invention of evidence as it related to that camp, the legal team that was assembled needed an expert on the history of Auschwitz. As co-author (with Debórah Dwork) of Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present (1996), I accepted their invitation to act as an expert witness.
I began work in the Spring of 1998. By the time a year had passed, I had written a more than 700 page expert report that aimed to offer an analysis of the evidentiary basis for our knowledge that Auschwitz was an extermination camp, and that Irving had willfully ignored that evidence, and as such betrayed his vocation as a historian, when he endorsed Leuchter's conclusions. I considered the many eye witness reports and what the French historian Marc Bloch had labelled "non-intentional evidence," or the "evidence of witnesses despite themselves." I anticipated that while Irving might try to attack the credibility of the testimonies given by eyewitnesses after the war, the major engagement would concern the non-intentional evidence. I expected that he would argue on the basis of analysis of the remaining ruins of the crematoria, the lack of cyanide traces in the walls of the gas chambers, wartime German construction documents that did not show the designation "gas chamber" in the blueprints, English radio intercepts of SS communications that failed to mention gassings, and aerial photos taken by American bombers that did not seem to show hectic killings in Auschwitz, that the position he had adopted in a Toronto court room in 1988 was perfectly reasonable, and that therefore his endorsement and publication of the Leuchter Report could not be seen as a the manipulation of historical evidence to conform to some political agenda.
The centrality of the non-intentional evidence for Irving's case derived from the fact that he could not rely on eyewitness evidence to make his case. A big problem inherent in Holocaust denial is the fallacy of negative proof -- which means that a factual proposition (for example "Auschwitz was not an extermination camp . . . ") cannot be proven merely by negative evidence ( ". . . because a few German eyewitnesses did not see killings taking place"). With regard to eyewitnesses, the obvious choice for deniers is to dismiss all eyewitness evidence as irrelevant, and turn to the brick, cyanide traces, documents and photos that cannot protest attempts of manipulation, misconstruction and falsification.
With all these instances of "non-Intentional" evidence, they have had two choices. The first one is to commit the fallacy of negative proof. In 1988, Irving had shown himself willing to accept negative evidence (the alleged absence of residual cyanide in the walls of the gas chambers) as positive evidence for the nonexistence of the gas chambers. In the years that followed, Irving continued to rely on negative evidence when he claimed on various occasions that it was clear that Auschwitz was not purposefully operated as an extermination camp because there are no official German wartime documents that prove that Auschwitz was purposefully conceived and operated as an extermination camp. Neither argument is legitimate because every historian knows that most evidence does not survive, and that the reconstruction of any historical event is based on accidentally preserved relics which may or may not be a document or significant traces of cyanide. Because the variety of historical evidence is infinite, one should not expect that a particular historical question can be proved only by a one particular piece of evidence. This explains why the the issue of negative evidence is so problematic.
The other approach is to "turn" the evidence, and argue that what seem to be clear-cut German wartime evidence attesting to the presence and operation of a genocidal machinery of death had in fact, a more innocent meaning. The underground gas chambers of crematoria 2 and 3 would have been gas-proof air raid shelters, and the excessive capacity of the Auschwitz ovens could be explained by the Germans' fear for typhus epidemics, and so on.
In my expert report, I dealt with all these issues in great detail, subjecting surviving German documents such as blueprints and construction documents, and the ruins of the crematoria, to detailed analysis. I showed that there was more than sufficient convergent evidence in the surviving correspondence and drawings to prove that the crematoria had been equipped with gas chambers, and also showed that Leuchter had looked for the wrong chemical compound when he looked for residual cyanide in the crumbling walls of the gas chambers, and that his whole reasoning was based on a wrong premise. I showed that, contrary to Leuchter's assertion, the gas chambers had been equipped with a ventilation system powerful enough to quickly reduce, after gassing, the cyanide concentration in the gas chambers to harmless levels, and that the crematorium ovens did indeed have a capacity that far exceeded even the worst-case scenario.
I submitted my report in June of 1999, and seven months later I defended it under cross-examination in the British High Court in London. Irving acted as his own advocate, and attacked the archeological and documentary evidence of the crematoria. The center of his case, as he was to state during my cross examination, was an issue which Holocaust deniers summarize in the slogan "No Holes, No Holocaust." It is based on the assumption that the Holocaust centred on Auschwitz, and that the most important extermination installation of Auschwitz was crematorium 2, and that the most important part of crematorium 2 was the gas chamber, and that the essential detail of the gas chamber were the introduction devices for the gas, the so-called "holes" in the concrete slab that covered the gas chamber.
Irving tried to convince the judge, and the press gallery of the validity of this argument. Declaring the holes in the roof to be the "cardinal linchpin of the Defence in this action," Irving repeated the assertion that the fact that the holes were invisible now proved that all "eyewitness evidence collapses," and that the people who had testified that these holes existed "are exposed for the liars they were." Irving continued to incant variations of the "no holes, no holocaust" formula as if casting a spell. Falsely claiming that it was a common ground between the plaintiff Irving and the defendants Lipstadt and Penguin that "the whole story rises and falls on the existence of holes," Irving expressed his astonishment that Holocaust scholars like myself had not been "frantically looking for those holes to prove us wrong." (Remarkably enough, Irving's challenge to find the holes did have a positive effect: in the aftermath of the trial members of the The Holocaust History Project [see www.holocaust-history.org] located the remains of three of the four holes in the crumbled remains of crematorium 2.)
In response, I argued that the slab in question was in such a bad state that it was very difficult to arrive at any positive or negative conclusion as to the presence of holes, or not. More importantly, I presented much convergent evidence that the holes had existed: both eyewitness talked about them, and there was one photo taken in early 1943 showing the roof of morgue 1 before the Germans covered it with a layer of earth. It showed square objects on the roof which were clearly the small chimneys that provided access to the holes. And then there were the aerial photos taken in 1944 that showed four dots on the roof of morgue 1 of both crematorium 2 and 3. These dots were the holes.
In the end, Irving failed to convince Mr. Justice Gray. In his lengthy judgment, Gray determined that "the various categories of evidence do 'converge' in the manner suggested by the Defendants," and that the totality of the evidence that Jews were killed in large numbers in the gas chambers at Auschwitz was so strong that "it would require exceedingly powerful reasons to reject it." The Leuchter Report did not provide "sufficient reason for dismissing, or even doubting, the convergence of evidence on which the Defendants rely for the presence of homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz." As to the holes, Gray had this to say: "I consider that an objective historian, taking account of all the evidence, would conclude that the apparent absence of evidence of holes in the roof of the morgue at crematorium 2 falls far short of being a good reason for rejecting the cumulative effect of the evidence on which the Defendants rely."
Having faced defeat on Auschwitz, Irving had lost what he himself had defined as the core of his case. Lipstadt and Penguin prevailed. It had been hard work. The trial once again reminded the world, as The Guardian put it, that "truth is no shining city on a hill," but the result of painstaking consideration of all the evidence, avoiding casual inference and thin deduction. It also showed that the credibility of those who claim to express the truth is critical. And the editorial concluded that, "There is now no room for doubt, despite the false trails and the lacunae left by a Nazi bureaucracy as assiduous about destroying the signs of its crimes as realising the final solution."
Robert Jan van Pelt has taught at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture since 1987, and held appointments at many institutions of higher education in Europe, Asia and North America, including the Architectural Association in London, the Technical University in Vienna, the National University of Singapore, the University of Virginia, Clark University, and MIT. He is the recipient of many academic honors, including the National Jewish Book Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has published seven books and contributed chapters to more than 20 books. His most recent books are Flight from the Reich: Refugee Jews, 1933-1946, co-authored with Deborah Dwork (Norton, 2009), The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial (Indiana University Press, 2002), and Holocaust: A History, co-authored with Deborah Dwork (Norton, 2002). At this time he is preparing a biography of David Koker, a young Dutch victim of the Holocaust who left a remarkable diary of life in the Vught concentration camp. An internationally recognized authority on the history of Auschwitz, van Pelt appeared in Errol Morris’s film Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter Jr. and contributed to the BBC/PBS series Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State. Van Pelt chaired the team that developed a master plan for the preservation of Auschwitz, and served as an expert witness for the defense in the notorious libel case Irving vs. Penguin and Lipstadt (1998-2001).
