Mr. Death
Auschwitz wasn’t built in a day. In their book Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt identify ten different stages in the camp’s existence starting in 1940, when Auschwitz functioned as both a concentration camp to aid in subduing the area’s Polish population and as the site of the German Earth and Stone Works, an SS-owned enterprise which turned sand and gravel from the Sola river into building materials for the Reich. The camp was also home to an experimental farm, intended to serve as the center of a vast agricultural empire providing food and employment for the ethnic German migrants Himmler planned to settle in the Lebensraum made available by the ethnic cleansing of the local population.
Another aspect of this same project—Himmler’s development of the German east into a racial utopia—was the construction of the IG Farben “Buna” synthetic-rubber plant at Auschwitz–Monowitz. To lure Farben to his site, Himmler promised the company a slave-labor pool of 100,000 Soviet prisoners of war—a byproduct of the expected conquest of the Soviet Union—to build and work in the plant. These prisoners would also be used to construct an enormous company town, which could in turn house the other enterprises Himmler planned to bring to the area. In return, Farben agreed to finance and provide building materials for Himmler’s Germanization project inside the SS’s surrounding 15-mile-square “Zone of Interest.”
By early 1942, when it was becoming clear that Soviet prisoners would not be in such plentiful supply, Himmler decided Jews would take their place. Although the mass murder of Jews by the Einsatzgruppen was well underway, Himmler was still committed to his racial utopia. His plans required laborers, and when, in January 1942, Hermann Goering directed that Soviet POWs be sent to work in German armament factories, Himmler used the powers given to Heydrich and himself by the recent conference on a “Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” held in the lakeside resort of Wannsee, to order the transport of Jews to Auschwitz.1
As the crown jewel in Himmler’s empire, Auschwitz was intended as a showpiece. And up to this point, say Dwork and van Pelt, “construction” predominated over “destruction.” There had been executions at Auschwitz from the beginning, both of concentration-camp inmates and of other Poles condemned by the Gestapo Summary Court in Katowice. But the numbers were comparatively small: 3,000 from the court, fewer from the camp. The camp’s high security and relative isolation, and the presence of crematoria for disposing of the bodies, made Auschwitz a convenient site for executions, and soon condemned Soviet POWs starting arriving as well.
Birkenau, an area several miles from the main camp, was originally intended to house Soviet POWs or, in their absence, healthy young slave laborers. But when the government of Jozef Tiso, the Catholic priest installed as dictator of Slovakia, arranged to furnish Slovak Jews to work at Auschwitz in the place of Slovaks who had been promised for labor in Germany, the Slovaks realized they would then be left with those Jews deemed unfit for work by the SS. The Slovaks complained to Adolf Eichmann, and eventually the SS agreed to take the other Jews off their hands for a fee of 500 Reichsmark per Stück (which the Slovaks more than made back by expropriating the property the deportees left behind). Anticipating their arrival, Himmler ordered a peasant cottage at Birkenau transformed into a gas chamber. And on July 4, 1942, the first transports of Slovak Jews were subject to selection on arrival, with those deemed fit for work admitted to the camp and the rest gassed.
Yet even then, say Dwork and van Pelt, “systematic extermination of Jews was still [merely] an auxiliary function of the camp,” which throughout this period continued to serve as a pool of forced labor for various German factories located nearby, as well as a transit camp for those few Jews, mostly skilled laborers, selected for work in the Reich. Their history of the site traces a crooked path with many turnings before it arrives at Auschwitz as a synonym for mass death. (In doing so they offer the strongest possible rebuttal to Goldhagen’s bizarre and unsupported assertion that “the road to Auschwitz was not twisted.”2)
In presenting his case, Rampton will have to re-trace that crooked path with the aid of van Pelt’s report, while Irving, who offered no witness of his own on Auschwitz, attempts to detour the discussion. But before that process can begin, Rampton needs to establish certain premises.
The three balls Rampton must keep in the air are system, scale, and method. Its evolution may have been haphazard, but Auschwitz as an extermination camp emerged from an approach to the “Jewish Question” that was, whatever its origins, bureaucratic in its organization. Some of Rampton’s stress on Hitler’s knowledge, for example, may seem directed at Irving’s contention that Hitler remained ignorant, and hence innocent, of the murder of the Jews. But no one claims the gas chambers were Hitler’s idea.*
Scale is connected to system, indeed implies system, since not even David Irving believes that a bunch of disorganized thugs in uniform could manage to kill between five and six million people. Scale also implies method, and it is down this road that Rampton sets off for Auschwitz. He begins by tracing the consequences of Hitler’s decision, in the fall of 1941, that the Altreich or Old Reich territory of pre-1939 Germany, and the annexed Czech territories, “be cleansed and rid of Jews.”
Rampton reads out a letter from Himmler to Arthur Greiser, Gauleiter (governor) of the Warthegau (those portions of Poland which were to be incorporated into Germany), conveying the Führer’s wish. Initially, the deported Jews would be housed in the ghetto at Lodz, which was in Greiser’s territory. Irving, who quotes from the letter in Hitler’s War, agrees: “Yes, Hitler has taken the initiative and has ordered the emptying out.”
Rampton then produces a letter of May 1942 from Greiser to Himmler, informing him that “special treatment . . . of about 100,000 Jews in my district . . . could be completed within the next two to three months”; followed by a June 1942 message from the Gestapo in Lodz reporting “we have now generated enough space for about 55,000 Jews in the ghetto.”
“That must mean that about 55,000 Jews more or less have been moved out somewhere?” asks Rampton.
“Yes,” says Irving, “assuming that the ghetto had not been expanded at that time.”
Rampton directs Irving to a heading in the same document: Ausgesiedelt (“out-settled” or taken away). “The first of the two columns in the middle says ‘nach Kulmhof,’ does it not?”
“To Chelmno, yes.”
“If you total up the figures in that column, they come, I can tell you, to 54,990.”
“Yes.”
“So that is where, using a reasonable degree of intelligence and interpretive wisdom, Mr. Irving, those 55,000 Jews in this Gestapo report have gone, is it not?”
“I will accept that as an interpretation, yes.”
At which point Rampton asks: “Do you know anything about what was at Chelmno?”
“There were these gas trucks,” Irving replies, “that were disposing of people at some time during the war, but whether they were operating in these five months, I do not know. I notice that Chelmno is on the border to the East, and an equally plausible interpretation would be that they had been sent there as the first stepping stage to go somewhere East. I am not saying this is what happened.”
“Chelmno?” asks Rampton.
“Yes.”
“No, no!” Rampton insists. “Chelmno—you are quite mistaken. Chelmno is in the Warthegau. It is about 40 kilometres west-north-west of [Lodz].”
Irving seems baffled, but Mr. Justice Gray, for whom this exercise is intended, immediately sees what Rampton is driving at. “The odd thing,” says Gray, “is that they [the Lodz Jews] are going West rather than East.”
“That point obviously does stand out,” Irving says.
And then, with the air of a man not quite ready to lay down his last card, Rampton changes the subject. His manner changes as well, any notion of patience forgotten as Rampton badgers Irving to accept that, his many speeches on the subject notwithstanding, Belzec, Sobibór, and Treblinka—those “little villages in the middle of nowhere”—were indeed Todesfabriken, factories of death.
“Do you accept or do you not accept—because if you do we can go on to something else, Mr. Irving—that hundreds upon thousands of Jews were from, let us say, the spring of 1942 and in Chelmno earlier . . . deliberately killed in Sobibór, Treblinka and Belzec?”
“I think, on the balance of probabilities, the answer is yes,” says Irving. “But I have to say ‘on the balance of probabilities’ because the evidentiary basis for that statement is extremely weak, even now, 55 years later. The Russians captured the camps, they captured the documentation of many of these camps, and we are still short of the actual smoking gun, shall I say.”
Given Irving’s many public statements casting doubt on the possibility that more than a handful of Jews were killed in gas chambers, this looks like a significant concession, wrung from Irving by his need to appear reasonable in front of the judge. But Irving also has his public to worry about—the young neo-Nazis who look to him for leadership and the elderly right-wingers in Britain and the United States who donate to his “Fighting Fund.” So when Rampton rephrases it, referring to the three extermination camps as part of Operation Reinhard, Irving balks.
“No, I do not accept that,” says Irving. “I say that Operation Reinhard was frequently . . . only a sub-operation. It was the looting part, the looting element, and the recycling element, which is where the name originally came from.” Once again Irving has put his finger on a real, if inconsequential, disagreement among historians, some of whom say that Aktion Reinhard was named in memory of Reinhard Heydrich, assassinated by Czech patriots in May 1942, while others disagree. But Irving’s pedantry about the name has a purpose, allowing him to step back from his apparent concession on what happened at those camps without formally resiling—a legal term for retracting.
In the ensuing confusion, Irving reiterates his position that the use of gas chambers to kill people was a British fabrication, not a German fact. “British propaganda,” he says, “invented the story of the gas chambers or invented stories of gas chambers which were broadcast into Nazi Germany during the war years. There is any amount of evidence of this in the BBC monitoring reports, in the German radio monitoring reports, in the memoirs of people like Thomas Mann, the famous German novelist, who worked for British propaganda agencies, in their private diaries and so on.”
Irving offers no evidence to support this assertion. (Later in the trial, “any amount” turns out to be a scant two pages of extracts from talks by Thomas Mann, with no indication on whose behalf the broadcasts were made. At the time, however, the effect of Irving’s remarks is to distance him still further from his apparent concession.)
With Irving’s semi-retraction perhaps in mind, the following day Rampton again takes up the fate of the Jews at Chelmno. He first asks Irving to identify Viktor Brack.
“Viktor Brack, I believe, was Number Two in the Führer Chancellery under Philipp Bouhler.” As Irving has already told the court, Bouhler was in charge of the Nazi Euthanasia Program, known as T-4 from its address at Tiergartenstrasse No. 4, in Berlin.
Rampton continues: “One of the means used—I do not know whether it was the most frequently used—was carbon monoxide gas from bottles, was it not?”
“I believe that is correct, yes,” Irving replies.
Rampton then shows Irving a letter from Eberhard Wetzel, Jewish Affairs expert at the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, conveying Brack’s willingness “to aid in the construction of gassing apparatus” for use on Jews. “We have no misgivings,” the letter adds, “if those Jews who are not capable of working are disposed of using Brack’s methods.”
Rampton next asks Irving to reflect on his remarks at the Leuchter report press conference, when he’d said: “I am prepared to accept that local Nazis tried bizarre methods of liquidating Jews. I am quite prepared to accept that, and that they may have experimented using gas trucks, because I have seen one or two documents in the archives implying that there was a roll over from the use of those methods of killing, the same people who created the euthanasia program.”
“I think that is a very fair summary of the state of my knowledge at that time,” says Irving. “Killing people in gas wagons is an extremely inefficient way of doing it.”
At last, and with mounting irritation, Rampton returns to Chelmno, where, according to a report from the motor pool section of the RSHA (Main Office for Reich Security), they were having a minor problem with some trucks. The report proposed installing “a strongly protected light that would operate during the first minutes, so the ‘cargo’ would not make a bolting of the door difficult by pressing against the back door in panic when plunged into darkness.” Even so, “since December 1941, for example, 97,000 were processed by three trucks in action, without any defects in the vehicles being encountered.”
“Shall we go straight to the bottom line,” Irving answers, “and say, yes, I fully accept the innuendo you are placing on that document.”
“Innuendo?” Rampton demands.
“It is not stated clearly,” says Irving, “but quite clearly 97,000 people have been liquidated in these trucks.”
“In three trucks,” Rampton practically shouts.
“Over the months concerned.”
“No,” Rampton corrects him, “it is actually just about a month and a week. Ninety-seven thousand people in three trucks in the course of five weeks?”
“It is a very substantial achievement,” says Irving, “when you work it out with a pocket calculator.”
At this, Mr. Justice Gray intervenes. “Is it very limited and experimental?”
“My Lord,” says Irving, “I did not have this document at the time I said that. I had this document five or six months ago.”
“Answer the question even so,” Gray insists. “Would you describe it as very limited and experimental?”
“Not on this scale. This is systematic.”
This time, Rampton leaves no room for ambiguity. “It is systematic, huge scale, using gas trucks to murder Jews?”
“Yes. No question at all.”
Moving much more quickly through the documents, Rampton takes up an April 1942 letter from the head of the military administration in Serbia: “Already some months ago I had everything that could be got hold of in the way of Jews in this land shot, and had all the Jewish women and children concentrated in a camp and at the same time, with the help of the SD,* procured a ‘delousing vehicle’ that will now finally have carried out the clearing of the camp in some 14 days to 4 weeks.”
Rampton looks up. “Well now,” he says, “that is obviously code.”
“Yes,” says Irving.
“For some idiotic reason, he has put it in inverted commas, which rather gives the game away, does it not?”
“It does, yes.”
“That is code for gassing truck, is it not?”
“Yes.”
“Which camp is being referred to?” asks the judge.
“Semlin, outside Belgrade,” Rampton answers.
“This is quite clearly a very sinister document,” says Irving.
“Do you now accept therefore,” asks Rampton, finally laying down his last card, “that statements that you have made to the effect that ‘Oh, yes, they used gas trucks on a very limited scale for experiments’ were just plain wrong?”
“Yes.” Irving has now conceded both system and scale. Method will be harder. The gas trucks have given Rampton an opening, but to fully make his point he’ll need to get to Auschwitz.
At the very end of the day, Rampton explains the defense case on Auschwitz: “I am not here to prove that Auschwitz had gas chambers, homicidal gas chambers. I do not need to do that. If you . . . have an open mind and you look at the convergence of evidence—eyewitness testimony from victims, perpetrators, and the contemporaneous documentary evidence and the archeological remains—you are going to conclude, as a matter of probability at the very least, that indeed what the eyewitnesses tell us is true. I am not here to persuade your Lordship of that, save as a preliminary first step to two things.
“Mr. Irving, on the back of a piece of so-called research which is not worth the paper it is written on, jumped up and said he was perfectly certain that there were never any gas chambers at Auschwitz. And he has made that statement repeatedly in circumstances where it is apt to excite the hostility towards Jews of people who are likely to be anti-Semitic—which is the political side of this case which we will get to later on. As an insight into Mr. Irving’s credentials as a so-called historian, it is extremely illuminating, and that is the whole of my argument.”
It is about 300 miles from Semlin to Auschwitz, 130 miles from Chelmno to Auschwitz, but Rampton is on his way.
“Let me ask you this question,” the judge says to Irving the next morning. “If I were to come to the conclusion that there is a whole range of formidable evidence of one kind and another—camp officials, eyewitnesses, scientific evidence, evidence of construction at the gas chambers and the like—all of which was there, but you paid no attention to it. Is that something you would accept? Is that the way you put your case? That you went for broke on the Leuchter report.”
“It depends upon the degree of intensity which would have been appropriate,” says Irving. “If I was intending to go on, for example, a BBC talk show, and I was likely to be asked about Auschwitz, should I therefore spend $5 million on sending researchers into archives around the world?”
Gray is still trying to keep history out of the court. “If your case is that Mr. Irving deliberately shut his eyes to that corpus of evidence,” he says to Rampton, “and his case is, ‘Well, I was not an Holocaust historian. Maybe I knew that some of that evidence was there, but I did not think it was any part of my function to go and trawl through it,’ then—”
“Then he should have—” Rampton breaks in.
“Then we do not need to trawl through it in this trial, do we?” Gray asks hopefully.
“My Lord, [only] if he will accept that his denial is false,” says Rampton.
“I am not sure,” says Gray with a certain amount of petulance, “whether I see why you are now saying, rather contrary to what you have been saying before, that we have to make a finding of fact as to what happened in Auschwitz.”
Rampton hastens to reassure him: “No, absolutely, I have never said that. I am not saying that.” But he did. And he is.
So far as we know, Auschwitz was the only camp to use Zyklon-B to kill large numbers of people. Although it wasn’t only a death camp, more people were killed at Auschwitz than at Majdanek* or Belzec or Sobibór or Treblinka or any other camp. Perhaps most importantly, Auschwitz–Birkenau is the only death camp with more than a tiny handful of survivors. Their accounts of what they saw and heard—confirmed by the confessions of perpetrators like camp commandant Rudolf Höss or Pery Broad, who worked in the camp’s Political Department—are indeed at the core of our understanding of the Holocaust. So the question of whether those accounts are credible—not free of error, but credible—is an issue that is both at the center of this trial and, however uncomfortable it makes the judge, cannot be decided without reference to what actually happened.
Rampton knows this. In fact he put it as well as anyone a couple of days earlier. “Auschwitz,” said Rampton, “in Mr. Irving’s utterances and certainly in our eyes is at the center of Holocaust belief. It is therefore at the center of Holocaust denial.” Pretending otherwise—pretending that this trial is only about historiography—is the defense’s version of special pleading.
Irving, too, is well aware of what is at stake. On the one hand, he protests even more vociferously than Rampton that the court should restrict itself to the material actually consulted or cited by him in his books, and the question of whether or not he deliberately misrepresented that material. Indeed Irving goes so far as to ask the judge to rule that “any evidence regarding Auschwitz, with which he was unfamiliar” and may have studied only to prepare for the trial, be excluded both from his cross-examination and from being presented by the defense.
But when Rampton confronts Irving with the transcript of one of his speeches, in which he’s claimed “The biggest lie of the lot, the blood libel on the German people (because people were hanged for this), as I call it, is the lie that the Germans had factories of death with gas chambers in which they liquidated millions of their opponents”—Irving doesn’t plead ignorance. Nor does he try to pass off his comment as a purely rhetorical exaggeration. No, what Irving says is: “Truth is an absolute justification of that remark, of course.”
This leaves Mr. Justice Gray little choice. In a formal, written ruling about what evidence will be allowed in relation to Auschwitz, he says, “It is, in my judgment, legitimate for Mr. Rampton to deploy evidence about what happened at Auschwitz, even if it is Mr. Irving’s case that he was unaware of it at the time he made his various pronouncements.”
On the morning that Robert Jan van Pelt appears in court as an expert witness for the defense Irving tries to show another video. In order to set up his cross-examination, Irving wants the court to hear van Pelt commenting on the ruins at Auschwitz, which in the clip Irving wants to show van Pelt describes as “like the Holy of Holies.” As the camera dollies in, we are meant to see a grass- and dirt-covered mound, the remains of the subterranean gas chamber known as Leichenkeller 1, or Morgue 1, of Krema 2 (Crematorium 2) at Auschwitz–Birkenau. The camera points down into an opening in the mound, and we are again meant to hear van Pelt’s voice: “In the 2,500 square feet of this one room, more people lost their lives than in any other place on this planet. Five hundred thousand people were killed. If you would draw a map of human suffering, if you create a geography of atrocities, this would be the absolute center.”
But someone has cued up the film to the wrong segment, and what we see instead is a nerdy-looking man in a parka scrambling over some snow-covered rubble, pausing every now and again to pick up a piece of brick or a fragment of concrete and put it in the kind of plastic bag you use for freezing leftovers. Van Pelt is a Dutchman, but the voice we hear is pure suburban Boston, with the flattened vowels of a man yelling “Beeaah heeaah!” in Fenway Park. The name of the film is Mr. Death, and though both van Pelt and Irving have supporting roles, the man we see and hear is Fred Leuchter, former expert witness for Ernst Zündel and author of the report which persuaded David Irving that the gas chambers were a hoax.
A pathetic character who seems to be fascinated with the mechanics of killing people, Fred Leuchter is the eponymous star of Mr. Death, the latest film by the investigative documentarian Errol Morris. In The Thin Blue Line Morris so thoroughly discredited a Dallas police investigation that a man wrongly jailed for murder had his conviction overturned. In Mr. Death Morris’s camera casts an equally cold eye on Leuchter, revealed as the kind of man who takes his new bride to Auschwitz for their honeymoon. Morris shows that some of Leuchter’s “samples” may have come from structures rebuilt after the war, and he tracks down the technician whose analysis of the samples supposedly turned David Irving into a “hardcore disbeliever.” In the film, the technician explains that because he wasn’t told what the material was for, he simply ground everything up—diluting many thousands of times any traces of cyanide that might have been on the surface. “I don’t think the Leuchter results have any meaning,” he told Morris.
In the United States, where Mr. Death was released over the summer of 2000, Fred Leuchter had become something of a sick joke. Indeed, viewers who saw David Irving interviewed on camera, and knew him only as the man who exposed the “Hitler diaries,” might well have wondered how someone so adept at spotting forgeries could have been so easily gulled. Part of Irving’s strategy in using the film may have been to neutralize it by giving it his own spin. And the clip he intended to show is also probably the handiest way for Irving to acquaint his audience—on the bench and in the press seats—with the terrain at the center of his claim about Auschwitz.
“My Lord, this is not the part I wanted,” says Irving, who stops the film. Whether the columns of numbers at the end of the Leuchter report—which, as Rampton has established, Irving saw only the night before he announced his conversion at the Zündel trial—really were the reason Irving joined forces with Faurisson and Zündel, or whether the Leuchter report was merely the pretext for a move he had already decided to make, is impossible to say. Certainly, however, Irving has been Leuchter’s most important publicist. Now that Leuchter has become a liability, Irving is in the delicate position of needing to distance himself without looking like a dupe.
He does this by suggesting he knew all along. “If you read the correspondence,” he tells Rampton, “there are letters between me and Mr. Zündel and other people saying that engineers have now drawn attention to the serious flaws in the Leuchter report, and we have to address them.”
So Rampton reads from the correspondence. He hands the judge two documents from Irving’s discovery. One is a critique of the Leuchter report sent to Irving by a man named Colin Beer. Much of the critique is technical, a rebuttal of Leuchter’s claim that the quantity of gas needed to kill human beings in the numbers attributed to the Auschwitz gas chambers would have poisoned the executioners as well as their victims—or required elaborate ventilation arrangements. But there are two points which, though stunningly simple, and totally devastating to Leuchter’s credibility, had evidently escaped Irving’s notice. One was that Leuchter had explicitly stated his calculations were based on the belief that it takes much more gas to kill human beings than lice (Zyklon-B was originally developed as an insecticide, and was indeed used by the Germans for delousing operations at some concentration camps). In fact the reverse is true, and though Leuchter had assumed a concentration of 3,200 parts per million of hydrogen cyanide—described by Beer as the “one-gulp-and-you’re-dead” dose used in American prison gas chambers—a dose of 300 parts per million would be sufficient to be fatal. Indeed, said Beer, given the many eyewitness accounts of victims taking as long as 30 minutes to die, the concentration could have been as low as 100 parts per million—a concentration so low no ventilation at all was required. Making the victims undress allowed the gas to enter through the skin as well as the lungs—another factor suggesting lower concentrations were used.
At these low concentrations, Beer continued, “I would expect NO DETECTABLE CONCENTRATION” in any samples from sites exposed to weather, as those at Birkenau had been. Yet Leuchter had found small traces of cyanide in some samples. Far from proving these buildings had never been used as gas chambers, according to Beer the levels of cyanide residue shown in “the Leuchter report, when taken in the context of the times and in full consideration of all other evidence is consistent with that other evidence and together strongly supports both the fact and the scale of the massacres in the gas chambers of Birkenau.”
The second document Rampton gives the judge is Irving’s January 1990 letter to Beer. “I agree, in fact, with many of your . . . criticisms,” wrote Irving, “and ascribe most of the shortcomings to the fact that engineers, like trade unionists, do not share the facility of expressing themselves in English that writers and poets have.”
Except in his opening statement, Rampton never calls Irving a liar. Day after day he works at showing Irving distorting evidence, or quoting documents in a way designed to mislead his readers, but when Irving makes an improbable statement on the stand all Rampton says is “That is as may be.” So it is perhaps significant that when Irving claims he has other studies which vindicate Leuchter’s results, and that, in any case, “the whole purpose of the report was to put the ball in the court of the other side so they could come back and convince us,” it is not Rampton, but Mr. Justice Gray who responds: “That is as may be, but I am interested to know what it was that emerged that told you that Leuchter was right, because at the moment it seems to me there is a fundamental problem with his report.”
If Irving ever planned to “go for broke” on the Leuchter report he certainly knows better now. He does make a few references to a document he calls the “Rudolf Report”—a later attempt by the German chemist Germar Rudolf to duplicate Leuchter. At one point he even hands the judge an English version, published by Irving’s Focal Point imprint. Rampton protests this should have been exchanged in discovery; Irving claims it was. But when Rampton points out that the document Irving has produced is only 20 pages long, and itself offers for sale a German version which is 120 pages long, Irving admits this is not the full report, which he promises to produce later in the trial. He never does. Instead Irving goes into the forensic equivalent of four-wheel drift, sliding past Leuchter’s limitations and once again bearing down on Auschwitz.
The first hazard in his path is yet another lab report, this one from Cracow and dated 1945. The objects under analysis were ventilator gratings taken from Morgue 1 of Crematorium 2—the same gas chamber described by van Pelt in the film.* The Poles found the gratings were covered with cyanide; they also found a January 1943 letter from Karl Bischoff, the camp’s chief architect, referring to Morgue 1 as a Vergasungskeller—a gassing cellar. And they found orders for gasdichte Türen—gas-tight doors. These explicit references, or “slips,” are extremely rare in the archival record. But in 1989 a French pharmacist, Jean-Claude Pressac, a one-time follower of Faurisson who’d gone to Auschwitz on a Leuchter-like mission but became convinced by what he found in the camp archives that Faurisson was mistaken, collated them in a book.3 Irving knows he will have to account for them.
“I will concede,” he says, “that they found in the ventilator grating taken from Morgue 1 of Crematorium 2 remains of cyanide.”
“Yes,” says Rampton. “How do you account for that, Mr. Irving?”
“Because that particular room was used as a Vergasungskeller, as a gassing cellar.”
“Yes. Gassing what?”
“I think the evidence is clear that it was used as a gassing cellar for fumigating objects or cadavers.”
“Fumigating cadavers?” Rampton asks.
“Yes.”
Rampton’s disbelief is obvious. “What makes you say that?”
“That is what that room was for,” Irving replies blandly. “That is what mortuaries are for. In mortuaries you put cadavers.”
“That is news to me, Mr. Irving. What is the evidence for that?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“What is the evidence that they used that [room] for gassing corpses?”
“That is what it was built for.”
“I am sorry,” Mr. Justice Gray interrupts, “this seems a crude question, but what is the point of gassing a corpse?”
“Because they came in heavily infested with the typhus-bearing lice that had killed them.”
“So why,” asks Rampton, “would it need a gas-tight door with a peep hole with double eight-millimeter-thick glass and a metal grill on it?”
Irving’s answer launches a whole new hypothesis. “At this time in the war,” he says, “most of Germany was coming under the—it was feeling the weight of Royal Air Force Bomber Command forays. We were bombing all over Eastern Europe. Our bombing raids were extending further and further into Central Europe. You will see from the Auschwitz construction department files an increasing concern about the need to build bomb-tight shelters and gas-tight shelters because of the danger of gas attack.”
“Now it is an air raid shelter, is it?” Rampton asks sarcastically.
“I beg your pardon?”
“In early 1943, Mr. Irving? The first bombing raid anywhere near Auschwitz was not until late ’44?”*
Once again Irving promises to provide documentation. “I will tomorrow produce to you an index of all the documents in the Auschwitz construction department files from late 1942 onwards dealing with the necessity to build air raid shelters, gas-tight air raid shelters and other similar constructions on the Auschwitz compound.” And once again, the promised evidence never appears.
In the meantime Rampton is still trying to make sense of Irving’s first suggestion: “If they were used for gassing corpses, I wonder if you can help me to understand the point, because shortly after they were in the mortuary they went to be incinerated?”
“Yes.”
“What would be the point of gassing a corpse that was shortly going to be incinerated?”
“The corpses arrived . . . fully clothed. Before they were cremated they were undressed, and various other bestialities were performed on them. I believe the gold teeth were taken out and other functions were performed. As the corpses cooled, the lice that may have been on the body crawled off the body because lice were seeking heat.”
“Where?” asks Rampton.
“I am not sure, saying this off the top of my head. Mr. Rampton, I have taken advice on this.”
If a witness doesn’t answer, repeat the question. Rampton repeats the question. “Where would the infestation problem arise, Mr. Irving?”
“Anywhere between the place of death and the Leichenkeller.”
“No. You were talking about gassing corpses in Leichenkeller 1, beside which is a lift straight up to the incineration chamber?”
“Yes.”
“Think about it. Why would you gas a corpse that was going straight up to be cremated?”
“I thought I gave the explanation.”
But Rampton doesn’t think so. Unfortunately for Irving, neither does Mr. Justice Gray. “I do not understand the explanation,” he says, “because, as I understood it, the undressing took place before the gassing.”
Now Rampton is puzzled as well. “The undressing took place before the gassing?”
“That is not the evidence that I gave, my Lord,” says Irving.
“I thought it was,” says the judge. “Tell me if I am wrong.”
Irving points out, “We have not had any evidence as to that, my Lord.”
“No, but I have read the report,” says the judge, meaning van Pelt’s expert report on Auschwitz. “Am I wrong about that?”
“I shall certainly be questioning—”
Rampton can contain himself no longer. “You are absolutely right, my Lord. On the evidence, if one can look at the evidence rather than at some bizarre version of it, the bigger room is the undressing room. They are then shepherded through into the smaller room where they are gassed. When they are dead, they are taken out through double doors that open outwards on to the lift and up into the crematorium, to put it crudely.”
Irving protests: “I am having difficulty, my Lord. I have not been given a chance to comment on this rather global presentation of what Mr. Rampton alleges to have happened.”
“Comment now,” says the judge. “Now is your chance.”
“Now is your chance,” says Rampton.
Irving declines. “My Lord, we need to know what basis the evidence is put on. I apprehend that this is based on eyewitness evidence and I shall have something to say about each of the eyewitness reports on which Mr. van Pelt bases his statement. I think the proper place to do that is in the cross-examination of Professor van Pelt.”
Van Pelt, who teaches at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, will not arrive until the next day. In the remaining minutes of the afternoon, Rampton goes back to the gas-tight doors. These doors pose two problems for Irving. First, Leuchter claimed they didn’t exist. “‘There is no provision,’” says Rampton, reading from the Leuchter report, “‘for gas-fitted doors windows or vents.’ That as a matter of history is just wrong, is it not, Mr. Irving?”
“I do not know. I have never been to Auschwitz.”
“No, the documents—” says Rampton. “There are repeated references . . . to the need for a gas-tight door with a peep hole.”
“Yes. In the Auschwitz documents there are repeated references to this, yes.”
“So that is a piece of Leuchter which has no foundation in history?”
“I think what he is saying,” Irving replies, “is that nothing was to be seen when they inspected on-site.”
Leuchter, who never saw the Auschwitz blueprints which are the foundation of Dwork and van Pelt’s book, also claimed the doors had opened inwards. But as Rampton points out, the plans show the doors opening outwards. “All doors opened outwards,” he says, “which is why they are not air raid shelters.”
Irving doesn’t even hesitate. “Air raid shelters’ doors always open outwards.”
“Why? What if the rest of the building tumbles down outside and you cannot get out?”
“The reason,” says Irving confidently, “is because the blast from a bomb exploding outside will blow the door in if it opens inwards. Air raid doors always open outwards.” This, too, will apparently have to wait for van Pelt. But before Rampton calls it a day, there is something else about Irving’s air raid proposal that bothers him.
“Who were they for?” he asks.
“I have no idea,” says Irving.
“For the inmates?”
“I have no idea.”
“If this is for the SS, this air raid shelter, it is a terribly long way from the SS barracks, is it not? They would all be dead before they ever got there if there was a bombing raid. Have you thought about that? It is about two and a half miles?”
“I remember during the war,” says Irving, “when we got air raid warnings half an hour, an hour, before the planes arrived.”
“And you went down to the bottom of the garden, just as I did, and hid in your Anderson shelter, or whatever it was called?”
“We had a Morrison.”
“We had one of those first and then we got grand and had an Anderson!”
“Well, that is enough reminiscing,” says the judge, who was born in 1942 and may not remember his own wartime experiences. Rampton points out plans have been found for converting Crematorium 1, in the main camp, into an air raid shelter for the SS, whose barracks was nearby. He doesn’t say, however, when these plans were drawn and if the shelters were ever built. Neither does Irving.
“Yes, well,” says Irving, “I did not say this was for the SS.”
“They could pop out of their living quarters into the air raid shelter,” Rampton continues. “Do you really see a whole lot of heavily armed soldiers running two and a half or three miles from the SS barracks to these cellars at the far end of the Birkenau camp? I mean, Mr. Irving!”
It has been a long day, but Rampton is not quite finished. Every trial lawyer knows that the end of the day is the best time to spring a surprise. Your opponent is liable to be worn down, and the jury—or judge—are more likely to remember the details if they come just before the recess. Irving claims that the massive expansion in crematorium capacity at Auschwitz–Birkenau, far from evidence of genocidal intent, is explained by the typhus epidemic which ravaged the camp in the spring and summer of 1942. Rampton begins by trying to pin down the numbers, which he says were about 8,000 dead from the disease.
“Do you accept that?”
“Not necessarily.”
Irving supplies no alternative figures, however, nor does he dispute the fact that the total prisoner population of Auschwitz–Birkenau (those actually living in the camp) never exceeded 150,000.
Rampton then produces a June 1943 letter from Bischoff, the camp architect, to Kammler, head of the Waffen SS supply department in Berlin, “setting out . . . the theoretical capacity of each of five crematoria at the time when he writes in a 24-hour period. Have I got it right?”
“Yes.”
The judge does some quick calculation. “So that is 4,756 corpses in 24 hours?” he asks.
“That is 4,756 people—corpses,” says Rampton. “I must not suggest they were alive: 4,756 corpses to be incinerated by these five installations in a 24-hour period. If you multiply, Mr. Irving, 4,756 by 7 you get something like 33,000 in a week; and you if multiply that by 4 you get something like 130,000 a month; and if you multiply that by 12 you get about 1.6 million in a year. What, Mr. Irving, did they need that kind of capacity for?”
“Can we discuss the document first?”
“By all means.”
“This is one of the few documents whose integrity I am going to challenge.”