Auschwitz
Although his expert report runs to 767 pages, the examination-in-chief of Robert Jan van Pelt takes less than an hour. It starts with a misunderstanding. In every courtroom in Britain there is a printed card giving the “forms of oath” for the clerk to use when swearing in witnesses. Church of England members swear on the Revised Version of the New Testament, Catholics on the Douai Bible, Jews on the Tanach or Hebrew bible, Muslims on the Koran, and so forth. As van Pelt, a boyish-looking man with a brush of light-blond hair and wearing a boxy tan suit, walks to the front of the courtroom, Rampton says, “Professor van Pelt has a family bible which has been in his family since before the war. May he swear on that?”
“Of course,” says the judge, who turns to van Pelt. “It is in English, is it? Or Dutch?”
“It is in German,” says van Pelt, who is then duly sworn. Since no one enquires further, nothing emerges now or later during the trial to disturb the impression of a Dutch architectural historian whose interest in the Holocaust is purely academic. But van Pelt’s family bible is the famous translation of the Tanach by Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig. Published in Germany three years after Hitler came to power, it is the monument of a culture, and a people, whose extinction is the subject of this trial.
The bible, van Pelt will tell me afterwards, belonged to his grandfather and had accompanied the family when they went into hiding from the Nazis. “What virtually no one knew,” he added “was that when I was on the stand I had in my pocket my grandmother’s yellow star, and right in front of me on the lectern the last two letters of her brother Robert Hanf, who was killed in Auschwitz in 1944. I was named after him.”
Only an anti-Semite would argue that a Jew is somehow less qualified to give expert evidence on the Holocaust—or less capable of reporting to the court in the unprejudiced manner the law requires of expert witnesses—than a non-Jew.* Yet it had been widely remarked that, in a field where most of the prominent scholars are Jews—Hilberg, Martin Gilbert, Richard Breitman, Bernard Wasserstein, Yehuda Bauer—the defense had somehow assembled a team consisting of two Germans, a Dutchman, a Welshman, and an American Protestant. After the trial Richard Evans, the Cambridge professor who co-ordinated expert testimony for the defense, said this had been deliberate: “We didn’t want to feed [Irving]’s anti-Semitic paranoia.”†
In the report he prepared for this trial, van Pelt approaches the issue obliquely. Noting that he has opposed the criminal prosecution of “Holocaust deniers like Zündel in Canada, Faurisson in France, and Irving in Germany,” he writes that “if Irving had been the defendant in this case, I would not have consented to” assist the prosecution. Where the other expert reports merely include the boilerplate pledge of impartiality required by law, van Pelt says: “While I wrote this report as an amicus curiae without prejudice for the defendant and against the plaintiff, I do declare my loyalty with the victims of Auschwitz and against their murderers.”
Knowing van Pelt’s history might have made some of his statements seem less melodramatic. Asked if he had been “deeply moved to visit the actual location where these atrocities had occurred?” he answers: “More than moved. I was frightened. I—”
“Ghosts of the dead were still all around?”
“No, I do not believe in ghosts,” he replies, “and I have never seen ghosts in Auschwitz, but it is an awesome place in many ways, and it is also an awesome responsibility one takes upon oneself when one starts to engage with this place as a historian. For many years I felt I was not up to that task. It was only after very careful preparation that I finally decided to go there and to start work in Auschwitz.”
Unfortunately, apart from the lawyers, the judge, and the principals, very few people have read van Pelt’s report. For those of us who haven’t, his cross-examination by Irving—the climax of the dispute over Auschwitz—is almost impossible to follow. And though perhaps no more deliberate than the confusion over van Pelt’s choice of bible, this skewed perspective may have consequences that are far more serious.
In a jury trial, an expert like van Pelt would be taken by the hand by the lawyers who engaged him and led slowly through his evidence. Those who have seen him with students say van Pelt is a charismatic and effective teacher, and his professorial manner might have impressed a jury. But since it is presumed that the judge has already digested his report, van Pelt, like all the defense witnesses, is basically asked to confirm that he wrote it and believes it to be true before being turned over to cross-examination. Instead of a tutorial on Auschwitz, all the press and the public get from van Pelt is a sense of how he bears up under Irving’s attack.
Unaware of van Pelt’s family background, Irving begins instead by accusing him of posing as an architect. He first softens his target with flattery: “What a great pleasure I had in reading your book on Auschwitz. For what it is worth, it is one of the few books that I have read from cover to cover.” Then he asks about van Pelt’s appointment, eliciting the following: “My appointment is kind of confusing. I am in the Department of Architecture and hence I am officially a Professor of Architecture. Your title as Professor depends on the department you are in. However, I teach in what we call the Cultural History stream, so normally, in order to prevent confusion in ordinary usage, I would call myself Professor of Cultural History because, both in my background, my Ph.D. and my teaching duties, I teach cultural history in the architectural school.”
Noting that on his expert report van Pelt identifies himself as “Professor of Architecture,” Irving asks, “Are you familiar with the fact that it is illegal in England to call yourself an architect unless you are registered with the Royal Institute of British Architects?”
Van Pelt replies that the same is true in Holland, but that he never had any reason to register, “since I never studied in an architectural school.”
“In other words,” says Irving, “your expertise, as an architect, is the same as Mr. Leuchter’s expertise as an engineer?” Van Pelt replies defensively that he has taught design classes, and served on architectural juries, and advised architects. . . .
Irving cuts him off: “So if I am called a pseudo historian, then you are a pseudo architect, if I can put it like that?”
“Yes,” says van Pelt, “except I have never claimed to be either an architect or a pseudo architect.” Seemingly disconcerted by Irving’s smiling insinuations, van Pelt concedes: “I agree that my formal qualifications are exactly the same as yours.”
Irving’s next question takes his campaign to suggest something shifty in van Pelt a step further: “Your report is unusual in one respect, and your Lordship may have noticed it, it has a copyright line on page 2. In other words, you claim copyright in this document. Now, remembering you are on oath, would you tell the court if you have any intention eventually of publishing this?”
Again, van Pelt’s answer is defensive: “At the moment I do not have. I think it is an unpublishable document.” This is unnecessary.* And as Irving manages shortly to establish, it isn’t quite the whole truth.
“Very well,” says Irving. “I will take your statement that you have no intention of publishing this ever, as you have now told the court. My Lord—”
As traps go, this was a small one. But van Pelt walks right into it: “May I just come back to this?” he interrupts. “I said ‘in this form’ . . . I did not write this with publication in mind as such.”
Irving’s misadventure with the video player follows, introduced by what the adherents of Sigmund Freud would doubtless consider a lapsus linguae, when Irving refers to Morris’s film as “Mr. Truth— Mr. Death.”
In order to make the point he’d hoped to make with the video, namely that if you want to deny the existence of homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz, Crematorium 2 is the place to do it, Irving strides over to the easel on the right side of the courtroom. He takes down one of the large aerial photos of Auschwitz which have been stacked there since the first day of the trial, and, pointing to an indistinct shape, asks: “This [Crematorium 2] was the center of the atrocity?”
“Yes,” says van Pelt.
“So if I am to concentrate a large part of my investigation in this cross-examination on that one building and, in fact, on Leichenkeller 1—the one arm of the crematorium—this is not entirely unjustified if I am trying to establish that the factories of death did not exist as such?”
“No. I think that the obvious building to challenge would be Crematorium 2.” For the next few days, at least, the pretense that this trial is about historiography alone is abandoned.
“You are familiar, no doubt,” Irving asks, “with the book written by Professor Arno Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?, in which this professor of Princeton University, who was himself Jewish, and who cannot be called a Holocaust denier presumably, said that most of the deaths at Auschwitz in his opinion were from what he called natural causes, and that a very small percentage had been criminally killed in the accepted sense.”
Van Pelt says he thinks Irving’s précis is wrong; he wants to see the text before he answers. Irving hasn’t got it with him. What Mayer actually said cuts both ways. “There is a distinction,” Mayer wrote, “between dying from ‘natural’ or ‘normal’ causes and being killed by shooting, hanging, phenol injection, or gassing. But quite apart from the vital importance of not allowing this distinction to be used to extenuate and normalize the mass murder at Auschwitz, it should not be pressed too far.” Like Mayer’s critics, Irving has conveniently forgotten this portion of Mayer’s remarks.
But he—and they—have rightly focused attention on the sentences that followed: “The Nazis’ leaders decided to transport frail and sick Jews, and Gypsies, to Auschwitz in full awareness of the perils they would face, and they continued to do so once there was no ignoring and denying the deadly conditions there, including the endemic danger of epidemics. Besides, from 1942 to 1945, certainly at Auschwitz, but probably overall, more Jews were killed by so-called ‘natural’ causes than by ‘unnatural ones.’”
This was indefensible, as even Vidal-Naquet, who wrote the preface to the French edition of Mayer’s book, pointed out. But Mayer attracted just as much criticism for another sentence: his claim that “sources for the study of the gas chambers are at once rare and unreliable.”1 Mayer may have been mistaken, but in 1988, when his book was published—before Western researchers gained access to Soviet archives, before Pressac, before Dwork and van Pelt—that sentence was at least defensible.
Van Pelt’s task is to show that this is no longer the case, and hasn’t been the case for some time. On the stand, though, the question hardly comes up. Instead Irving offers a series of hypotheses, most of them aimed at establishing not just that Auschwitz wasn’t a place where roughly a million people were gassed to death and then incinerated, but that it couldn’t have been.
Once again referring to his easel, Irving points to a coal bunker. “I have not got equipment here for measuring the size of that bunker, but it appears to be about 10 feet square, in other words a very small space.”
“It seems to be a bit larger to me from what I remember,” says van Pelt, “but, again, 10 feet, 13 feet square, whatever. It is not a very large bunker.”
“Not a very large bunker for holding the fuel supplies for fueling a mass incineration program, I believe Mr. Rampton would have called it, for incinerating hundreds of thousands of bodies?”
“May I remind you, Mr. Irving, that also in the crematorium itself was a very large coke storage space right next to the incineration building.”
“Yes, I am familiar with the position of that in the drawings of the building. Not very much larger than that little hut outside?”
“I think it will be probably possible to establish the size of that when we consult a plan, and I am happy to consult the plans in my trial bundle.”
Though van Pelt appears disinclined to take it seriously, Irving’s argument seems to have reached the judge, who asks: “Was there a coke bunker in each crematorium or just one?”
“Each crematorium has its own coke bunker, yes,” says van Pelt, and there, for the moment, he leaves it.
Irving next turns to a blown-up photograph of Morgue 1 of Crematorium 2 “on which we have now zeroed in.”
“Was this building destroyed by the Nazis,” he asks, “or by the Russians?”
“The evidence,” van Pelt says, “points to the fact that the Nazis destroyed this building in two phases, and specially Morgue 1. First of all, when the gassing ceased in late 1944 we have the testimony of Sonderkommando* and others that the gas chambers were dismantled, which means that the actual installation within Morgue number 1 of Crematorium 2 and number 3,† which had been created to adapt this room into a gas chamber, was removed, and that later the shell of the room, so to speak, was destroyed by dynamiting. It was a very detailed account of one Sonderkommando, how they actually made holes in the columns. Dynamite is put in it and ultimately, in the case of Crematorium 2, all the columns collapsed, with the exception of one. In Crematorium 3 they were more successful and virtually everything collapsed there. So what you have now in Crematorium 2 is . . . the remains of a concrete roof, which is basically collapsed on the floor.”
“It is pancaked downwards?”
“It is pancaked downwards. One column is still there and in some way it has folded over that one column.”
“So there are reinforced steel bars inside the roof?”
“Reinforced steel bars in the roof, yes, and there is a hole right next to the column, and that is the hole through which Fred Leuchter climbed into that space at a certain moment. It is a very tiny space under that roof.”
“Is it not extraordinary,” says Irving, “that the Nazis in their ruthless efficiency would go round destroying buildings and removing incriminating equipment which might have helped us very much today in this courtroom otherwise, but at the same time they allowed the Red Army to capture the entire construction files without the slightest murmur?”
Van Pelt explains that when the Auschwitz construction office closed at the end of 1944 the architects were all “drafted back into the SS to fight on the Eastern Front.” Also, the office was located some distance from the camp itself, and contained the architect’s archive. A set of drawings kept in the camp had been destroyed, but the duplicate set, which formed the basis for van Pelt’s book, had been overlooked.
“So the Nazis remembered to destroy the buildings and remembered to take out every nut and bolt which might have helped us today, but they allowed the Russians to capture all the incriminating paperwork, except that it is not very incriminating either?”
“Mr. Irving,” says Mr. Justice Gray, “I have a feeling there is a suggestion lurking there and I want to try and put my finger on it. Are you suggesting that what the Russians captured were not authentic documents, or what the Russians had produced were not authentic documents?”
“No, my Lord, totally the opposite. I am sorry I am being so frightfully obtuse in my cross-examination.”
“No, you are not,” the judge reassures him. “You are doing very well but I want to understand the suggestion.”
“I am indebted to my Lord. The reason I am asking this is for two reasons. I am laying a bit of a trap, if I may put it like that, which will be sprung either before or after lunch.”
Irving’s trap remains unsprung until the end of the day. Meanwhile, he suggests that the growth in the camp’s crematorium capacity was a response to the typhus epidemic that killed about a third of the camp’s inmates in the summer of 1942. Van Pelt responds that if this were true, one would expect at most a capacity of 50,000 bodies a month—a third of the camp’s projected population. Instead, the Nazis built crematoria with a capacity of 120,000 bodies a month.
“If we are to believe these figures,” Irving replies, “then the SS, or whoever, were planning to wipe out over three-quarters of the entire camp population and incinerate them—which seems a rather pointless exercise as this is a slave labor camp.”
Van Pelt makes two points: first, that most of the Jews gassed at Auschwitz were never registered in the camp, and were never counted as part of the labor-camp population. When the trains halted at Birkenau, the SS first separated the men from the women and children, then “selected” those fit for work, who were marched to the camp, where they were registered and tattooed for identification. The rest were taken directly to the gas chambers.
His second point is that only two of the five gas chambers, those attached to Crematoria 4 and 5, were designed for this purpose. The others, and in particular the “morgue” in Crematorium 2, were converted from other intended uses during the construction process. The blueprints and planning records of this “adaptive re-use” are the basis of van Pelt’s research. When he keeps to these, van Pelt is unshakable. But Irving has no intention of fighting him on his own ground.
Instead, he takes him back to the mortality numbers. Van Pelt argues that since the planned cremation capacity was “four-fifths of the total projected population of the camp” the “Germans would have had to ship 120,000 people to Auschwitz every month in order to keep ahead of—or even with—the typhus epidemic. It is absurd to use typhus as an excuse to explain the incineration capacity of the crematoria.”
Irving doesn’t repond directly. Instead he asks van Pelt if it is not equally absurd to imagine the camp capable of disposing of so many people in such a short time. “So we get an idea what we are talking about here, that is four times Wembley stadium, that is 12,000 tonnes of people, 12,000 tonnes of cadavers, that you are going to have to cremate with these very limited installations?”
“I do not think after you have you been in Auschwitz very long you weigh 100 kilograms,” says van Pelt.
“OK. Say 12 people per tonne if you want to cavil,” says Irving agreeably, “you are still going to end up with 10,000 tonnes of bodies to dispose of. This is bringing it home to you the size of the figures you are talking about there. That brings home to you the absurdity of the document you are relying on: 10,000 tonnes of bodies.
“If you will take it from me,” Irving continues, “that it takes 30 kilograms of coke to incinerate, as you say, one body, can you work out how many tonnes of coke we are going to put into those tiny coal bunkers that you can see on the aerial photographs to destroy—to incinerate, to cremate—120,000 bodies? We are talking about train loads, if not ship loads of coke are going to have to go into Auschwitz, and there is no sign of the mountains of coke on the photographs, do you agree? There is no sign of the mountains—”
“We have two documents,” says van Pelt. “One which talks about incineration capacity, and one which talks about the coke use. It is about the same buildings. On the basis of that . . . we can calculate the amount of coke which is going to be used per corpse—which is not a happy calculation, I must say—but the bottom line is you come to three and a half kilos of coke per corpse.”
At this, Irving picks up a clear plastic water bottle from the table in front of him. “Do you really, sincerely believe,” he asks, holding the bottle aloft, “that you can burn one corpse with enough coke that you could fit in one of these water bottles? Is that what you are saying?”
“I would like to point out there are two documents which support this,” van Pelt says gamely.
“Can you just pause for a second?” Irving’s water bottle full of coke seems to have caught Mr. Justice Gray’s imagination. “Three and a half kilos of coke per corpse,” he says doubtfully, “one has to put it. . . .”
“That is when the—”
“That is assuming,” says the judge, “a rate of incineration equivalent to that in the document of 28th June 1943 which Mr. Irving challenges?”
“Yes.”
Irving turns next to the question of how the gas got into the gas chambers. “Did you rely on a woman called Bimko?” he asks van Pelt. “I mentioned Miss Bimko” in my report, says van Pelt, but “I did not rely on her to come to a conclusion about the incineration capacity in the crematoria.”
After a few further exchanges designed to make van Pelt look evasive, Irving reads a portion of the deposition Bimko, a Polish-Jewish physician and prisoner at Auschwitz, gave to investigators, but which van Pelt did not quote in his report: “In a corner of the room were two large cylinders. The SS man told me the cylinders contained the gas which passed through the pipes into” the gas chamber.
As van Pelt observes, Dr. Bimko was describing a visit to the gas chamber at Crematorium 4. The SS man, he argues, was teasing Bimko, pretending that the ventilation pipes were used to introduce gas, when in reality the gas came in pellets of Zyklon-B, which were tossed through gas-tight shutters on the side of the building.* “How do you expect a person who has no technical education to distinguish one pipe from another pipe?” asks van Pelt.
But Irving isn’t really interested in Bimko. He just wants to plant the idea in the judge’s mind that van Pelt relies on eyewitnesses, and that eyewitnesses aren’t to be trusted. Irving’s real target is Henryk Tauber, a Sonderkommando who actually worked in Crematoria 2 and 4, and whose testimony before the 1945 Polish-Soviet joint commission to investigate Auchswitz offers a detailed account of the layout and operation of the gas chambers:
In the undressing room, there were wooden benches and numbered clothes hooks along the walls. There were no windows and the lights were on all the time. . . . From the undressing room people went into the corridor through a door above which was hung a sign marked Zum Bade [to the baths] repeated in several languages. . . . From the corridor they went through the door on the right into the gas chamber. . . . At about head height for an average man this door had a round glass peephole. On the other side of the door, that is on the gas-chamber side, this opening was protected by a hemispherical grid. The grid was fitted because the people in the gas chamber, feeling they were going to die, used to break the glass of the peephole.
Van Pelt, who quotes Tauber at length in his report, reads from Tauber’s description of the inside of the gas chambers: “The roof of the gas chamber was supported by concrete pillars running down the middle of its length. On either side of these pillars there were four others, two on each side. The sides of these pillars which went up through the roof were of heavy wire mesh.”
Irving stops him. “What does it mean,” he asks, “when it says ‘the pillars went up through the roof’? Went up to the roof, presumably?”
“Yes, but they popped out above the roof,” says van Pelt.
“The pillars popped out?”
“Yes, so the pillars went through a hole in the roof and then they went in through, basically, the earth which was assembled on top of the roof, and then there was a little kind of chimney on top of that.”
“What was the purpose of that, architecturally speaking?”
“Because these were hollow pillars and these were the pillars where Zyklon-B was inserted into the gas chamber.”
Irving asks a few more questions about these pillars. How big were they? What were they made of? How many layers of wire? Where exactly were they located? As van Pelt answers, he consults a large yellow plan of the crematorium.
“You have drawn in those wire mesh columns, have you not?” Irving asks.
“I mean the whole thing is a drawing by one of my students of the whole building.”
“Yes, but the wire mesh is an addition,” Irving says, rather than asks. “It is not based on any drawings or blueprints, is it?” It takes another couple of minutes before Irving gets the answer he wants. “When Tauber starts talking about, for example, either the gassing procedure or the incineration procedure,” says van Pelt, “of course, then that is not in the blueprints—and very important, the wire mesh columns are not in the blueprints either.”
Van Pelt has now sprung Irving’s trap. But he is too deep in explanation to notice. The gas chamber in Crematorium 2, says van Pelt, was originally intended to be a morgue. But work on the roof didn’t begin until December 1942, “by which time the modification of the building into a genocidal extermination machine had already been decided on. . . . The roof was not yet complete at the time.”
The judge remarks on the lateness of the hour, and Irving says: “My Lord, you may apprehend that the trap is now sprung and it would be a pity to put the mouse back in its cage.”
“The trap is what you have just asked?”
“Precisely it, my Lord. There are no holes in that roof. There were never any holes in that roof. All the eyewitnesses on whom he relies are therefore exposed as liars.”
Irving asks van Pelt to read a passage from his report: “Today, these four small holes that connected the wire-mesh columns and the chimneys cannot be observed in the ruined remains of the concrete slab. Yet does this mean they were never there? We know that after the cessation of the gassings in the fall of 1944 all the gassing equipment was removed, which implies both the wire-mesh columns and the chimneys. What would have remained would have been the four narrow holes and the slab. While there is no certainty in this particular matter, it would have been logical to attach at the location where the columns had been some formwork at the bottom of the gas chamber ceiling, and pour some concrete in the hole and thus restore the slab.”
“Hold it there,” Irving says gleefully. “So what you are saying is with the Red Army just over the River Vistula ever since November 1944 and about to invade and (as we found out earlier this morning) the personnel of Auschwitz concentration camp in a blue funk and destroying their records and doing what they can, some SS Rottenführer has been given the rotten job of getting up there with a bucket and spade and cementing in those four holes—in case after we have blown up the building they show?”
Irving’s tirade continues for some time, and while van Pelt is able to answer some of his points, he clearly wasn’t expecting this. “My Lord,” says Irving, winding down, “it is four minutes to four. Unless Mr. Rampton wishes to say something to repair the damage at this point—”
“My Lord, may I respond to this?”
“Yes,” says Mr. Justice Gray, “but not until 10:30 tomorrow morning.”
When van Pelt returns to the witness box he brings a set of photographs of Crematorium 2 taken by a worker in the Auschwitz construction office. One of them shows four objects or projections on the building’s still unfinished roof. Van Pelt says these are the “chimneys” down which the gas pellets were poured; Irving says the objects might just as easily be drums full of water-proofing for the roof.
This is followed by a reprise of the previous day’s argument about holes. Irving again remarks on “the implausibility of the story, that before putting in packs of dynamite beneath the building to blow everything up so that the Red Army does not find any criminal traces, they send in workmen with buckets of cement and trowels and tell them to make good the holes in the roof. This sounds, I must say, totally implausible to me, and we know now that it never happened because the roof is there and there is not the slightest trace of such patchwork having been done on the concrete.”
“My Lord,” says van Pelt, “it is at the moment impossible to see because of the state of the roof if there was patchwork or not. The roof is fragmented. The roof has weathered very, very badly over 50 years, and the color of concrete in the roof is of a motley quality . . . and there is a lot of growth [that] has been on the roof. It is impossible to tell one way or another.”
“It is impossible to tell.” Van Pelt’s answer is honest, but it does the defense little good. “Can we hear what other evidence you have,” asks Irving, “that this building here, Leichenkeller No. 1, of Crematorium No. 2, was a homicidal gas chamber, apart from the eyewitnesses and apart from the smudges on the roof?”
“These are the two images which confirm the eyewitness reports, and then there are a number of drawings made by a survivor.”
Van Pelt’s two images are Allied reconnaissance photos taken in August 1944. In one of them a set of four box-shaped shadows is visible on the roof of Morgue 1 of Crematorium 3. The drawings were made by David Olère, a Sonderkommando who actually lived inside the crematorium, and who, before the war, had worked in Paris designing posters and film sets. Olère’s artistic skills saved his life. The paintings he did for the SS guards kept him from being killed with the other Sonderkommando, and when he returned to Paris after the war he did a number of works based on what he’d seen, including a very detailed plan of the crematorium showing the hollow columns coming through the roof. Though the reconnaissance photos were classified for decades afterwards, the holes in Olère’s drawings, said van Pelt, showed precisely the same alignment as those in the photo.
Irving’s response is to treat Olère as simply another form of eyewitness (which he was), and to remind van Pelt (and the judge) of some of the more lurid claims made by eyewitnesses. With one eye firmly on the clock, Gray cuts him short: “Mr. Irving, will you just listen? We are taking Professor van Pelt through his evidence for saying that Crematorium No. 2 was used as a gas chamber, evidence apart from the eyewitnesses. We have seen the photographs. We have now seen the Olère drawings. Can we move on and see whether there is any other evidence he relies on; if not, you can move on.” Though Irving pretends to look contrite, van Pelt does not look happy. The implication of Gray’s “any other evidence” isn’t lost on either of them.
Van Pelt has better luck later in the day, when Irving describes a trip to Lodz in September 1942 “for the purpose of inspecting the experimental station for field kitchens for Operation Reinhard.”
“I think your translation is wrong, there, Mr. Irving.”
“Yes. Tell—”
“The Die Feldöfen in this case,” says van Pelt, “are ‘field ovens,’ and we know there is . . . quite an extensive documentation on this particular trip which was made by [Auschwitz] Commandant Höss and . . . they were going to Litzmanstadt [Lodz] to see the extermination site there, to actually look at the incineration grid, the incineration installation created . . . to get rid of corpses which had been buried as a result of the killings in Chelmno. So this has nothing to do with kitchens, these Feldöfen, but with incineration ovens to burn, to incinerate, corpses.” It is a tiny reminder that under the Nazis even ordinary words took on sinister meanings.
Van Pelt then produces some material on Zyklon-B deliveries to Auschwitz, which Irving counters by drawing attention to the fact that deliveries of Zyklon were also made to the concentration camp at Oranienburg, where there was no large-scale gassing. The problem for the defense is that every inconclusive exchange favors Irving.
The same thing happens when Irving claims that the elevator from the gas chamber to the crematorium was too small and too slow for the number of bodies van Pelt says passed through it.
“You appreciate, do you not, that the lift shaft was the bottleneck,” says Irving, using the 1940s slang for an obstacle in war production, “through which all the victims . . . had to go.”
“The bottleneck in an hour glass is only a bottleneck if you want all the sand to go down simultaneously,” says van Pelt. “If you want the sand to go down in an hour it is not a bottleneck.” The point behind van Pelt’s metaphor is simple: the crematoria could only handle a small fraction of the gas chamber’s capacity at any one time. In his report, he wrote: “Incineration capacity and not gassing capacity was the bottleneck.” But on the stand, he seems flustered by Irving’s request for a “back of an envelope” calculation. “It is going a little fast for me, my Lord, right now. I am happy to come back to this on Friday.
“I would of course be quite pleased,” van Pelt adds almost plaintively, “if somebody who knows—if we got some more specific data about, you know, how long it would take for this elevator to come up, because obviously if we are 50 percent wrong, then we suddenly have the bottleneck.”
Van Pelt’s last day is his best. In order to make sense of the architectural evidence, he has temporarily transformed the courtroom into a lecture theater, and as he stands in front of a portable screen, the remote control from the slide projector in his hand, van Pelt regains some of the authority he seemed to lose under Irving’s barrage.
“I am first going to actually walk you through the building, around the building [Morgue 1 of Crematorium 2], in a reconstruction made on the basis of the blueprints.
“Here is the grade level. We have here the underground morgue and we see actually the staircase going down. Basically, the soil has been cut away with the entrance right here going into this little vestibule.” As van Pelt flips through his slides, it is almost as if he is the project architect, and we are his clients. This bizarre sensation is heightened when, “walking us” into the undressing room, he says: “I am very sorry for the way the lighting has been depicted. This has been, basically, standard 1999 kind of light fixtures, and this is certainly not how . . . these light fixtures would have looked, but one gets a sense of how much light would have been in this room.”
Most of van Pelt’s points have already been made in his responses to Irving’s questions. But he does use the drawings to good effect in showing that while in the original design the doors in Morgue 1 opened inwards, at the last minute they were altered to open out. And he shows that a ramp for carrying bodies down into the morgue, included in the original plan, has also been deleted.
“A convenient system for bringing in people who died outside the building [the ramp] has been removed,” he explains, “and a new convenient system [staircase] has been installed in order to bring down people who have not yet died.”
When the lights come up Irving asks: “Professor van Pelt, you have been to Auschwitz in connection with your researches how many times? Once or twice?”
“No. I have been there yearly since 1990. Sometimes twice or three times yearly.”
“Have you frequently visited this roof of the alleged factory of death, the mortuary—?”
“Yes, I have been there, yes.”
“Have you never felt the urge to go and start scraping just where you know those holes would have been because you know approximately where, like a two or three foot patch of gravel to scrape away?”
Van Pelt is appalled. “I have authored a report already in 1993 for the Poles in which I actually argued that they needed very, very strict preservation standards, and the last thing I would ever have done is start scraping away at the roof without any general plan of archeological investigations.”
“You do accept, do you not, that if you were to go to Auschwitz the day after tomorrow with a trowel and clean away the gravel and find a reinforced concrete hole where we anticipate it would be from your drawings, this would make an open and shut case and I would happily abandon my action immediately?”
Irving repeats the offer at the end of the day, before wishing van Pelt “a pleasant flight home.”
In his re-examination, Rampton takes up the question of coke consumption, referring to patent application T 58240 for a “Continuous Operation Corpse Incineration Furnace for Intensive Use,” filed by Topf on November 5, 1942. He asks van Pelt to read from an engineering report on the application prepared for the Auschwitz Museum:
After . . . pre-heating the oven will not need any more fuel due to the heat produced by the corpses. It will be able to maintain its necessary high temperature through self-heating. But to allow it to maintain a constant temperature, it would have become necessary to introduce at the same time so-called well-fed and so-called emaciated corpses, because one can only guarantee continuous high temperatures through the emission of human fat.
Rampton also takes van Pelt through numerous calculations regarding the capacity of the gas-chamber elevator. This time, van Pelt makes his point. “Certainly,” he says, “I think the elevator could keep up with the ovens.”
“Yes,” says Rampton. “That is much more neatly put than I could have put it. Thank you.”
Some of the damage has been repaired. But as court adjourns, the correspondent for Time magazine, who has been sitting next to me, turns and says: “It seems like this business of the holes ought to be easy to get to the bottom of—one way or the other.”
The truth is that nothing about Auschwitz is easy, even today. The sheer scale of killing is difficult for the mind to grasp. The site of that killing is, as Dwork and van Pelt make clear, a palimpsest of intentions, actions, adaptations, and evasions. Thanks to their careful peeling back of all these layers we now have a good understanding of the Nazis’ methods. But since those victims gassed on arrival were never counted, we will probably never know their exact number. While the post-war Soviet estimate of four million has long been discarded, the gap between Dr. Franciszek Piper, chief historian of the Auschwitz Museum, who gives a figure of 900,000 Jews gassed, and Jean-Claude Pressac’s estimate of about 800,000 may never be closed.
Auschwitz is the scene of an enormous crime, yet many of the criminals were never punished. As Irving reminded van Pelt, Walther Dejaco, the SS lieutenant who drew the designs for the gas chambers—and who accompanied Höss on his trip to inspect the “field ovens” at Lodz—was never convicted of any crime. Neither was his fellow architect Fritz Ertl. Raul Hilberg observed that at Auschwitz, history was destroyed at the same time as history was made. And if one effect of this destruction was to diffuse responsibility for the crime, this, says Pierre Vidal-Naquet, is no accident.
“Who is the murderer?” he asks. “The doctor who carries out the selections? The Häftling who directs the crowd of those condemned to die? The SS who take the Zyklon-B to the gas chamber?”2 The crime can be denied, says Vidal-Naquet, because it is anonymous.
In his testimony, David Irving sometimes describes Hitler as operating via a “Richard Nixon kind of complex,” making known his intentions while carefully preserving his own deniability. The history of Auschwitz poses another Nixonian question, a variation on the Watergate prosecutor’s query: What did we know, and when did we know it?
To respond adequately to the interpretive and evidentiary problems posed by Auschwitz in the space of a few days’ testimony was a doomed venture; to try and do so under hostile cross-examination was quixotic in the extreme. “To remain human in the exercise,” as van Pelt told the court, is certainly a necessary condition for any investigator. But the complexity of Auschwitz demands not merely a presentation of evidence, but an archeology of evidence. Any genuine expertise must be based not just on a body of knowledge, but on a whole sociology of knowledge. The absence of these deeper structures of understanding during van Pelt’s cross-examination meant that too often the discussion seemed reduced to dueling assertions, a stichomythia whose outcome rested entirely on the judge’s whim.
Unlike his testimony, van Pelt’s expert report more than meets this demanding brief. The report is divided into chapters, with an epigraph before each chapter. Van Pelt’s self-consciously literary style can sometimes grate, and in the light of how much sheer cognitive effort went into the task, at least one of his quotations seems spectacularly ill-chosen: “There is something no less in the reality of the death camps that denies the attentions of thought. Thinking and the death camps are incommensurable.”3 Van Pelt’s scrupulous interrogation of facts and interpretations, his admirably lucid account of how the raw materials of history have been turned into myth as well as history, and his patient picking apart of the one from the other, quickly put paid to such reservations.
He begins with a robust statement of what is known about Crematorium 2:
Today we know who designed the building: Georg Werkmann, Karl Bischoff and Walther Dejaco. We know who constructed the furnaces: the Topf and Sons Company in Erfurt. We know the power of the forced-air system (over 4 million cubic feet per hour) to fan the flames. We know the official cremation capacity (32 corpses) per muffle* per day. We know that it was Bischoff who took the decision to change the larger morgue into an undressing room, and the smaller one into a gas chamber. We know that Dejaco drafted the plan that transformed a mortuary into a death chamber. We know the specifications of the ventilation system that made the room operable as a site for mass extermination: seven horsepower is required to extract the Zyklon-B from the gas chamber in 20 minutes. We know that the building was brought into operation on 13 March 1943 and 1,492 women, children and old people were gassed. We know about the difficulties the Germans had getting everything just the way they wanted. We know who paid the bills and how much was paid.
“We know all of that,” his report continues. “But we understand very little about many issues central to this machinery of death.” This is not false modesty. Nor is this purely a consequence of distance—either temporal or professional—from the events described.
“If I now take my own experience,” writes Vidal-Naquet, “as the son of two French Jews who died in Auschwitz, I would say that for several years I did not make a real distinction between concentration camps and extermination camps.” Yet as the distance increased, so did the difficulty in understanding what was happening. In 1943 the New York Times correspondent Bill Lawrence filed a story on the disappearance of 50,000 Jews from Kiev two years previously. This occurred during an Einsatzgruppen action, but van Pelt cites Lawrence’s inconclusive report as emblematic of one factor that influenced the news from Auschwitz:
On the basis of what we saw, it is impossible for this correspondent to judge the truth or falsity of the story told to us. It is the contention of the authorities in Kiev that the Germans, with characteristic thoroughness, not only burned the bodies and clothing, but also crumbled the bones, and shot and burned the bodies of all prisoners of war participating in the burning, except for the handful that escaped, so that the evidence of their atrocity could not be available for the outside world. If this was the Germans’ intent, they succeeded well, for there is little evidence in the ravine to prove or disprove the story.4
And if Lawrence’s skepticism—too early in the war to be a product of anti-Communism—is probably just a wised-up newsman’s reluctance to believe what he’s told, van Pelt doesn’t shy away from darker explanations: “In April 1940, [when] the British Foreign Office received a fully corroborated account of Jewish life in German-occupied Poland, Assistant Under-Secretary Reginald Leeper dismissed the report. “As a general rule Jews are inclined to magnify their persecutions,” Leeper commented.5
Van Pelt’s description of mass murder at Auschwitz is suitably restrained, almost austere. His quotes from survivor accounts are vivid, even graphic, but never descend into the lurid or sensational. Nonetheless these sections make extremely uncomfortable reading.
Yet so, in a different way, does van Pelt’s account of the contemporary evidence for the genocide. Set alongside the latest work of scholars like Richard Breitman, van Pelt’s narrative of clues neglected, testimony ignored, and pleas unanswered makes it clear that anyone who remained ignorant about the fate of Jews sent to Auschwitz did so because they didn’t want to know. In November 1941—before the conversion of Crematoria 2 and 3, when the number of Jews and Soviet POWs gassed at Auschwitz could still be counted in hundreds— “the Polish Fortnightly Review, an English-language newspaper published by the Polish government-in-exile, carried a . . . long article entitled ‘Oswiecim Concentration Camp.’ It described the camp as the largest concentration camp in Poland, and provided much detail about its extraordinarily violent regime.”
By the following July, the Polish Fortnightly Review reported gassings of Poles and Russian POWs; in December the paper carried Polish underground fighter Jan Karski’s account of his visit to Belzec disguised as a Latvian policeman. Up to this point, says van Pelt, Auschwitz did not play a significant role in the destruction of Polish Jewry, who were more likely to be shot by Einsatzgruppen or killed at an Action Reinhard camp.
Karski never went to Auschwitz, but in November 1942 he did reach London, where he met with Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden. Eden listened to Karski’s report on the situation in Poland, but when Karski recommended dropping leaflets to warn Jews, and asked the Allies to threaten the Germans with retaliatory bombing, Eden cut him off.6 Karski also met Arthur Koestler, who published an account of Karski’s experiences in Horizon, and H.G. Wells, who was moved to wonder “why anti-Semitism emerges in every country the Jew resides in.”7
In July 1943 Karski went to Washington, where Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter refused to believe him.8 He also spoke with President Roosevelt. If nothing else, Karski’s travels should have prepared the ground for the reports by a Polish prisoner, Jerzy Tabeau, and two young Slovak Jews, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, who had escaped from Auschwitz. Their accounts, which reached London and Washington in the summer of 1944—as the Nazis were shipping hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz—were vouched for by Roswell McClelland, a representative of the War Refugee Board in Berne. By then, says Breitman, the British, who had been reading German army, police, and railway codes, had no shortage of information about Auschwitz.9
Vrba and Wetzler’s report did not generate immediate headlines in the United States; the New York Times ran a 22-line story entitled “Czechs Report Massacre,” reporting the death of 7,000 Czech Jews. Two weeks later the paper ran a longer story, “Inquiry Confirms Nazi Death Camps,” and two weeks after that the soldiers of the Soviet Eighth Guards Army reached the Lublin suburb of Majdanek. This time Bill Lawrence could see for himself, and his description of the gas chambers and furnaces as “a veritable River Rouge for the production of death,” made the paper’s front page. But Lawrence was the exception. And by then it was too late to make a difference to the fate of Europe’s Jews.
The story of how the world learned about Auschwitz is complex, and riddled with paradox, and van Pelt tells it superbly. But he is even better on the not quite identical subject of what we now know about the camp, and how we came to know it. On January 27, 1945 the Red Army liberated Auschwitz. At Monowitz, they found 600 sick prisoners from the IG Farben rubber plant. In the main camp, 1,200 prisoners had been too ill to join the 60,000 sent on the death march to the west; at Birkenau, 5,800 inmates remained. Hoping to avoid the propaganda disaster that followed the discoveries at Majdanek— where in addition to the gas chambers the Russians found 820,000 shoes—the Nazis had dismantled the gas chambers, blown up the crematoria, and burned 32 storage huts to the ground.*
“All that was left,” writes van Pelt, “in the four storage barracks that were not completely destroyed at Birkenau were a mere 5,525 pairs of women’s shoes and 38,000 pairs of men’s shoes—and 348,820 men’s suits, 836,255 women’s garments, 13,964 carpets, 69,848 dishes, huge quantities of toothbrushes, shaving brushes, glasses, crutches, false teeth, and seven tons of hair.”
Van Pelt shows how mistrust of the Russians kept the story off Western front pages; he reports the lack of interest shown in the Auschwitz trial, held in Cracow in 1947. But he also shows how well the work of Jan Sehn, the Polish judge who led a year-long forensic and historical investigation leading up to the trial, has stood the test of time. Johann Paul Kremer, an SS doctor at the camp, was one of the defendants. An avid diarist, Kremer’s record of his descent into horror meets every test for contemporary documentary evidence. On September 2, 1942, he writes: “Was present for the first time at a special action at 3 a.m. By comparison Dante’s Inferno seems almost a comedy. Auschwitz is justly called an extermination camp!”
At the trial he explained: “These mass murders took place in small cottages situated outside the Birkenau camp in a wood. The cottages were called ‘bunkers’ in the SS-men’s slang. All SS physicians on duty in the camp took turns to participate in the gassings, which were called Sonderaktion [special action].”
Kremer’s diary also showed that the typhus epidemic made little impact on the pace of the genocide:
October 12, 1942. (Hössler!) The second inoculation against typhus; strong reaction in the evening (fever). In spite of this was present at night at another special action with a draft from Holland (1,600 persons). Horrible scene in front of the last bunker! This was the 10th special action.
If Kremer’s diary reflected little knowledge of the gassing process, that was remedied by the testimony of SS-Unterscharführer Pery Broad, an officer in the camp’s Political Department. In June 1945 Broad, who was in British captivity, wrote an account of what he’d seen at Auschwitz for his employers in the British counter-intelligence unit, where he worked as a translator. Broad’s office was adjacent to Crematorium 1, and he witnessed the first gassings there. In a way, though, his testimony about the limits to what can be known was just as important:
Nobody could learn anything in Auschwitz about the fate of a given person. The person asked for “is not and never has been detained in camp,” or “he is not in the files”—these were the usual formulas given in reply. At present, after the evacuation of Auschwitz and the burning of all papers and records, the fate of millions of people is completely obscure. No transport or arrival lists are in existence any more.
Though Broad himself did not testify at the Cracow trial, his deposition was made available to the Polish judge Sehn. And in May 1946, a month after his confession at Nuremberg, Rudolf Höss was extradited to Poland. Knowing he had no chance of acquittal, Höss decided to co-operate, and wrote 34 separate statements about “The Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Concentration Camp Auschwitz”—as he titled the first of these essays.
The detailed picture that emerged from these perpetrator witnesses was then supplemented and revised in light of testimony from the victims. Among them were the escaped Sonderkommando Henryk Tauber and Szlama Dragon, and Alter Feinsilber (alias Stanislaw Jankowski), a veteran of the Spanish Civil War who’d been deported from France, and had worked in Crematoria 1 and 5. All of their accounts were tested against the mass of evidence Sehn had already accumulated.
“The only piece [of Henryk Tauber’s deposition] for which there is no corroboration in the archives,” writes van Pelt, “are the metal columns in the gas chamber of Crematorium 2 [which] . . . allowed for the introduction of the Zyklon.” As van Pelt testified, these columns do not appear on the blueprints. But his report points out, with much greater clarity than emerged at the trial, that Tauber’s account of these wire-mesh columns was confirmed for Sehn by Michael Kula, a Roman Catholic mechanic imprisoned in Auschwitz since August 1940 and the man who actually made them. Kula and his colleagues in the camp metal shop also made the trucks for inserting the corpses into the ovens, as well as all the hooks, shovels, and utensils to run the crematoria. It was Kula who alerted Sehn to the zinc ventilator covers, which were retrieved from the rubble of Crematorium 2 and found to be covered with cyanide.
Despite his protestations at the trial, van Pelt’s report is worth reading for this digest of the evidence alone. For the first time, the facts about Auschwitz are presented not only in the order they emerged, and in the contexts they emerged, but divested of the various filters—ideological, institutional, national—that prevent or impede their proper interpretation.
Van Pelt begins his report with an account of the death of two Hungarian Jews, a small girl and her grandmother, as told by the girl’s aunt, Sara Grossman-Weil, who is also the aunt of Debórah Dwork, the co-author of van Pelt’s book on Auschwitz, and who witnessed the events described. Noting her interchangeable use of “gas chambers” and “crematoria,” van Pelt comments: “Half a century later, Sara Grossman was not precise.” Nor is her testimony the sole source for van Pelt’s account. Here, and in the pages that follow, van Pelt’s fidelity to the witnesses never overpowers his commitment to the facts. His presentation of what can be known about Auschwitz fills his first six chapters. But it is in the five chapters that follow that he earns his expert’s fee.
Here van Pelt’s subject is Holocaust denial. And here he offers not just an explanation of why Auschwitz is the principal target—the “Battleship Auschwitz” in Irving’s phrase—of Holocaust denial. And not just a devastating demolition of the Leuchter report. And not just a patient and persuasive exposé of Butz, Faurisson, and their epigones as intellectual bankrupts. Though it accomplishes all these things, van Pelt’s report goes further, beyond the mere refutation of Holocaust denial to what might be called a hermeneutics of Holocaust denial.
What he finds is a kind of crazed positivism. “The assumption that the discovery of one little crack will bring the whole building down,” he writes, “is the fundamental fallacy of Holocaust Denial.”
Van Pelt compares the fake revisionism of the deniers with the genuinely subversive aim of the late French critic Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1976), a history of penal reform which argued “that the Enlightenment ascent from the world of explicit judicial violence enacted on the body had been, in fact, a descent into a closed universe of total surveillance and unrelenting discipline, a world ruled by some cunning, shadowy and ultimately sinister power.” Note that this contrast is independent of whether Foucault was right. In other words, by proposing a genuine “revision,” a comprehensive explanation of events that seeks to overturn received wisdom, Foucault changes the way we see the events he writes about even if he doesn’t persuade us to see them his way. This, says van Pelt, is precisely what the so-called “Holocaust revisionists” signally fail to achieve—or even attempt.
“We read Discipline and Punish today more . . . as a representative of the intellectual climate of the 1970s than for its value as history of the Enlightenment,” says van Pelt. “Yet the fact remains that in its time it offered a revisionist interpretation of the history of punishment that was plausible and therefore was taken seriously.
“Up to today,” he writes, “Holocaust deniers have been unable to produce, in forty years of effort, a counter-narrative to the inherited history of Auschwitz. The deniers claim to be revisionist historians, but they have yet to produce a history that offers a plausible, ‘revised’ explanation of the events in question.”
What they have produced instead, says van Pelt, is a series of excuses, variations on a nihilist theme. Since all of these excuses surface at one point or another as part of David Irving’s argument, their deconstruction—to call the process by its proper name—by van Pelt is a great service to Deborah Lipstadt’s case. It must also be said, however, that the catholicity of reference and interpretive flair he brings to the task are something of a rebuke to Deborah Lipstadt’s book.
Irving’s insistence that Auschwitz was merely a labor camp, for example, comes from Thies Christopherson, a soldier at one of the satellite camps near Auschwitz and author of a pamphlet entitled The Auschwitz Lie. Though the killing installations were off limits to anyone not assigned there, as an SS officer Christopherson was able to visit the rest of Birkenau, where he said, “I also saw families with children. It hurt to see them, but I was told that the authorities felt it kinder not to separate children from their parents when the latter were interned.”10
Manfred Roeder, a lawyer who wrote the introduction to Christopherson’s book, is the source of the argument that there was not enough fuel “in the entire sphere of German influence to burn just a fraction of so many human bodies.” Another former soldier, Wilhelm Stäglich, a Hamburg judge who’d served with an anti-aircraft battery near Auschwitz, came up with the idea that the Vergasungskeller in Bischoff’s letter “was intended for the fumigation of clothing and other personal effects, a common practice in all concentration camps.”11 This explanation, van Pelt notes in passing, displays “a total ignorance of the circumstances. The rooms designed for fumigation of clothing and other objects were always constructed in such a way that they had two doors: one entrance and one exit. The entrance door opened to the unreine (unclean) side, the exit door opened to the reine (clean) side. This arrangement conformed not only to common sense, but also to specific SS regulations.”
Stäglich also originated the notion that the gas-tight door on Morgue 1 was evidence, not of a gas chamber, but of an air raid shelter. In his report van Pelt is briskly dismissive: “Stäglich’s speculation is nonsensical. First of all if, as he assumed, Morgue 1 was used as a mortuary, then the problem arises about the protocol during an air raid. Would the living join the putrefying dead for the duration of the alarm?”
Finally, says van Pelt, Irving’s claim that reports of gas chambers originated as the figment of Allied atrocity propaganda, or psychological warfare, is itself not the fruit of Irving’s own research, but originated in the brain of Dr. William Lindsey.12 A former DuPont chemist and witness at the first Zündel trial, Lindsey is a frequent contributor to “revisionist” journals, where he is given to fevered pronouncements on “Franklin D. Roosevelt and his proto-United Nations conspirators.” When Zündel recruited witnesses for his second trial, says van Pelt, Lindsey was not asked to return.
Oddly enough, Irving’s only argument whose provenance van Pelt doesn’t trace and demolish is the “no holes, no Holocaust” which seemed to give him so much trouble at the trial. Yet this is just as second-hand as the rest of Irving’s case, originating with Faurisson and like many of the Frenchman’s conjectures offered in complete disregard of the facts (even if Morgue 1 was intended for gassing clothing or cadavers, the gas had to get in somehow) or the record (testimony by Tauber, Kula, and Broad; Olère’s drawings).
Van Pelt does provide an excellent account of the ways in which the Auschwitz of history—complicated, ambiguous, overdetermined—becomes the Auschwitz of memory, the Auschwitz that we think we know.
By the late 1970s, other genres of knowledge had been grafted on the original evidence: memoirs of survivors, interpretation of writers, evocations by filmmakers, symbolic monuments designed by architects and sculptors, public rituals of commemoration, theological speculation, and so on. In other words, by the late 1970s, knowledge of “Auschwitz” became transmitted as a mixture of learning and second-hand memory, shaped by public political discourse and private anxiety.
The refashioning of “Auschwitz” by all these actors is, to van Pelt, the byproduct of an inevitable process of appropriation. The resulting artifact—an “Auschwitz” at once different from the Auschwitz of history and yet dependent on it—can be used for any number of ends: as a spur to conscience, an icon of suffering, a challenge to theodicy, a lever for Zionism, a stick with which to beat Germans or Poles. Like many of us, the deniers confuse this “Auschwitz” for the Auschwitz of history. And though he has had much to say about their means, regarding their ends, the possible uses of their anti-Auschwitz—this question van Pelt leaves for others.