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David Irving vs. Deborah Lipstadt Libel Trial in London England
Part Two - January 18 - 25, 2000
Dates and sources are listed at the end of each respective report
Denial, Denial
"Senior editors at...publishing houses still welcome me warmly as a friend, invite me to lunch in expensive New York restaurants and then lament that if they were to sign a contract with me on a new book, there would always be somebody in their publishing house who would object." Thus the English historian David Irving, famous for his histories of Nazi Germany. He made these remarks last week in the opening statement to the lawsuit that he has brought against Penguin Books and Prof. Deborah Lipstadt of Emory University.
He claims that Lipstadt fatally damaged his career and jeopardized his livelihood by labeling him a "Holocaust denier" in her 1993 book Denying the Holocaust. "Irving is one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial," she wrote there. "Familiar with historical evidence, he bends it until it conforms with his ideological leanings and political agenda."
Irving refuses to accept the "Holocaust denier" label. He does not dispute that Jews were murdered on a massive scale by the Nazis. He does question the numbers involved as well as the means used. "By virtue of the activities of [Prof. Lipstadt] and of those who funded her and guided her hand," Irving argues, "I have since 1996 seen one fearful publisher after another falling away from me, declining to reprint my works, refusing to accept new commissions and turning their backs on me when I approach." To be called a "Holocaust denier," he says, is "like being called a wife-beater or a pedophile. It is enough for the label to be attached, for the attachee to find himself designated as a pariah, an outcast from normal society."
Irving is a scholar of enormous energy and dedication. He has published innumerable works, most of which have been praised by leading historians of the period. He is a controversialist who refuses to accept the orthodox doctrine on anything. To many this makes him a hateful figure.
John Keegan, however, has written that "Irving is a historian of formidable powers, having worked in all the major German archives, discovered important deposits of papers himself, and interviewed many of the survivors or their families and intimates no historian of the Second World War can afford to ignore Irving. His depiction of Hitler...is a key corrective to the Anglo-Saxon version, which relates the war's history solely in terms of Churchillian defiance and of the Grand Alliance."
This cuts no ice with our cultural vigilantes who would spoon-feed us what information they think we need. Back in March 1996, St. Martin's Press was looking forward to bringing out his book, Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich. Irving had been the first historian to get access to the 75,000 pages of Goebbels' diaries that had been lying unread in the Red Army's archives in Moscow since 1945. Irving was one of the few people in the world capable of deciphering the Nazi propaganda minister's handwriting, not to mention his peculiar elliptical references.
The book would have been a fascinating read. But it was not to be. Abraham H. Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League led the charge of the pious bullies. He fired off an angry letter to St. Martin's: "Surely you must know that Mr. Irving is a well-known Holocaust Denier and an apologist for the Nazi regime. A pseudo-scholar, he has no academic credentials as a historian and his writings on Hitler, Nazis and the Holocaust have been consistently shown to be replete with errors, oversights, poor research and fantasy."
The usual crowd of smelly little orthodoxies immediately chimed in. Frank Rich announced in The New York Times that publishing Irving's book would be "the willing execution of the truth." Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post declared that Irving "has the right to speak his mind in whatever dingbat fashion strikes his fancy, but no one is obliged to listen to him, much less to give him a pulpit from which to preach." Tina Rosenberg wrote that the "issue is not one of censorship... David Irving...is not just wrong, he appears to be engaging in deliberate distortion. Worse, he is a sneak; the uncautioned reader will absorb a version of history exonerating Hitler and minimizing the evil of the Holocaust without knowing it."
And Lipstadt herself made the sonorous announcement: "In the Passover Hagadah, it says in every generation there are those who rise up to destroy us... David Irving is not physically destroying us, but is trying to destroy the memory of those who have already perished at the hands of tyrants." The onslaught in the media was followed by death threats to the publisher.
Inevitably, St. Martin's caved and withdrew the book from publication. Irving is right to be upset that an influential minority with a political agenda succeeded in destroying his career. It is one thing if people do not want to buy your books. It is something else if people are denied the chance to buy your books. Irving is also right to be outraged by the promiscuous use of the phrase "Holocaust denial." As Lipstadt uses the term, it means whatever she wants it to mean.
If you believe that fewer than six million died, are you still a Holocaust denier? Are you a Holocaust denier if you have questions about the precise means of death? In "Denying the Holocaust," Lipstadt wrote that Pat Buchanan's "attacks on the credibility of survivor' testimony are standard elements of Holocaust denial." Yet, a few years ago the director of Yad Vashem,s archive told a reporter that most of the 20,000 testimonies it had collected were unreliable: "Many were never in the places where they claim to have witnessed atrocities, while others relied on secondhand information given them by friends or passing strangers." Is he also then a "Holocaust denier"?
We now know that many of the most lurid stories of the Holocaust are not true. Jews were never made into soap. Jewish skin was not used to make lampshades. Deaths at Auschwitz, once estimated at around four million, have been scaled back to about 1.1 million. There were no gassings at Dachau. Holocaust scholars no longer accept the six-million-Jewish-dead figure; two leading figure - Raul Hilberg and Robert Jan van Pelt - believe the figure is probably closer to 5.1 million. Is this Holocaust denial or merely addition to our knowledge? While Irving's motives repeatedly come under scrutiny, his factual claims stand unchallenged.
For instance, in his opening statement Irving declared: "We now know that the gas chamber shown to the tourists at Auschwitz is a fake built by the 1995."
Whether Irving wins or loses his libel case, we will probably find out that our current knowledge of the Holocaust is much flimsier than we had believed. Today, David Irving is banned from entering Canada, Australia and Germany. If our politically correct globalists have their way, he will probably be banned here and everywhere else as well soon. Why? Irving is a scholar, not a criminal. There is something contemptible about democracies terrified of anyone challenging their prevailing pieties. Outlawing him only serves to make him look good and our rulers shabby.
Source: George Szamuely, New York Press, January 18, 2000
Irving insists that Hitler did not order the Holocaust
The historian David Irving refused to accept yesterday, Jan. 18, that hundreds of thousands of Jews had been sent to concentration camps as part of Hitler's plan to exterminate them.
His denial that the liquidation of Jews was part of a plan personally approved by the Führer came during a sharp exchange with Richard Rampton, QC, during a libel case at the High Court in London.
Referring to the transportation of Jews from Warsaw and other towns and cities to the villages of Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec, near the Russian border, Mr Rampton suggested that "only a fool and a liar" would suggest that they were being sent there for their health.
No sensible person, Mr Rampton said, would conclude from all the evidence that thousands of Jews were being shipped to the three villages close to the Russian border for benign purposes.
Mr Irving, 62, who is conducting his own case, replied: "There could be any number of convincing explanations, from the most innocent to the most sinister."
He added: "During World War II large numbers of people were sent to Aldershot but no one believes that there they were put into gas chambers."
In another exchange, Mr Irving said he could not accept that 1.2 million Jews had been deliberately murdered at the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Mr Irving, who maintains that the gas chamber at Auschwitz was built by the Poles after the war as a tourist attraction, said: "I don't accept that and I have good reason not to."
He indicated that he would justify his belief about what occurred at the infamous camp when he cross-examines Holocaust experts who are to appear in court during the course of the trial, which is expected to last for more than two months.
Speaking from the witness box in Court 73, in front of a packed public gallery in which there were many Jewish people, Mr Irving maintained that Hitler had not been aware of the mass slaughter of the Jews. He said that in the records of the so-called "table talks" between Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, and Joseph Goebbels, his Propaganda Minister, there was no evidence that the Führer knew of the "Final Solution".
Even in 1942, Mr Irving said, Hitler was talking in terms of shipping the Jews to the island of Madagascar to begin new lives but that operation could not be carried out because of the naval war.
Hitler, he said, did not want the Jews transported to Siberia, which would merely toughen up the strain of the Jewish "bacillus". He wished them to be removed totally from the Greater Reich.
Mr Irving said that during the conversations, at which Hitler and his henchmen had discussed the course of the war, there was no suggestion that the Jews should be systematically killed.
Mr Irving, who accepts that hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered but denies that the killings were part of a systematic programme of extermination, accused Mr Rampton of disregarding evidence which did not concur with his case.
During the trial, Mr Irving has been branded a "falsifier of history and a liar" for questioning the massacre of six million Jews by the Nazis. He has been accused of denying the Holocaust and Hitler's role in it.
Mr Irving is suing Deborah Lipstadt, an American academic, and Penguin Books for claiming in her book Denying the Holocaust: the growing assault on truth and memory that he was a "Hitler partisan" who had twisted history.
Source: The Times of London, Jan. 19, 2000
Irving 'ready to eat humble pie' over gassing of Jews
David Irving, the historian seeking damages over a claim that he is a "Holocaust denier", said yesterday that he was "willing to eat humble pie" if he had made a mistake over the number and way Jews were gassed in the Second World War.
Under cross-examination by Richard Rampton, QC, over statements he made that the Nazis used gassing trucks "on a very limited scale to experiment," Mr Irving agreed that he had been "quite plainly wrong". He told the High Court where he is representing himself in a libel action against Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt, the American author and academic, that what he had said in the past about the scale and number of the gas trucks deaths was based on his knowledge at the time.
But he admitted his error after Mr Rampton, appearing for Penguin and Prof Lipstadt, author of Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, referred him to a document showing that 97,000 Jews were gassed in three trucks in the course of five weeks.
Mr Justice Gray, who is hearing the case without a jury, asked Mr Irving if he would describe that as "very limited and experimental". Mr Irving, 62, of Mayfair, who said he did not have the document when he made the original remark, replied: "No, this is systematic."
Mr Rampton claimed that the statements about the trucks flew "in the face of the available evidence". He said: "I am suggesting a man in your position does not enter the arena waving flags and blowing trumpets unless he has taken the trouble to verify what he is proposing to say, particularly when what he is proposing to say is something of great sensitivity and importance to millions throughout the world."
Mr Irving denied flag-waving and said the comment was made in response to a question at a press conference in 1989. He said: "I am not a Holocaust expert. I am a Hitler expert." Mr Rampton: "Then why don't you keep your mouth shut about the Holocaust?" Mr Irving: "Because I am asked about it. It obsesses people."
He found the phrase "Holocaust denier" repugnant and said he never claimed that the crime did not take place. But he did question the number of Jews who died and denied that there was a systematic extermination of Jews in concentration camp gas chambers.
He denied Mr Rampton's suggestion that he bent evidence to exculpate Hitler or that he suppressed documents. He claims that Prof Lipstadt's book alleges he distorted documents and statistics to reach historically untenable conclusions and serve his ideological claims. She and Penguin Books deny libel.
Source: The Daily Telegraph, Jan. 20, 2000
Historian accused of right-wing extremism
David Irving, the historian, was accused yesterday of being a right-wing extremist who made statements deliberately designed to feed virulent anti-Semitism still prevalent in the world.
During highly charged exchanges in the High Court, Richard Rampton, QC, accused Mr Irving of being a holocaust denier who based statements on the flimsiest evidence.
Mr Irving is suing Deborah Lipstadt, an American academic, and Penguin Books for claiming in her book Denying the Holocaust: the growing assault on truth and memory that he is a "Hitler partisan" who has twisted history.
Wounded by Mr Rampton's allegation, Mr Irving, conducting his own case, accused him of playing to the press by making slurs. Ignoring Mr Irving's protest that the allegation was serious, Mr Rampton continued: "Our case against you is that you consort with deeply anti-Semitic people."
Mr Irving, he said, had dignified himself as an historian who had lent his considerable weight to making statements denying that the Holocaust had taken place. "He has done so," he said, "because of his sympathies and attitudes. He is a right-wing extremist."
Source: The Times of London, Jan. 21, 2000
Blair's pledge on Holocaust denial law abandoned
Plans to make denial of the Holocaust a criminal offence have been dropped by the Government less than a week before ministers are due to announce a British memorial day for victims of the Nazis.
A Holocaust denial law was supported by (British Prime Minister) Tony Blair before the general election. He said there was "a very strong case" for such a measure. But Mike O'Brien, the Home Office minister, told MPs (Members of Parliament) in a written Commons answer yesterday that legislation could not easily "strike a balance between outlawing such offensive statements while ensuring that freedom of speech is not unduly restricted".
He added: "Therefore, while the Government are following carefully the current debates on this issue within the Jewish community and elsewhere, we have no immediate plan to introduce legislation." Holocaust denial is an offence in several European countries, including Germany, Austria and Lithuania.
In Germany two months ago, a historian, Frederic Toben - who claimed that Auschwitz prisoners enjoyed cinemas, a swimming pool and brothels - was sentenced to 10 months in jail. Last year, Gary Lauck, an American, was released after serving three years of a four-year sentence for distributing anti-Holocaust material in Germany.
During his current High Court libel action, the historian David Irving has said that he was fined "a substantial amount" by German authorities in 1992 for breaking Holocaust denial laws. In Britain, legislation is based on the 1986 Public Order Act, which makes incitement to racial hatred an offence. But Jewish groups say that the law has proved ineffective and there have been very few prosecutions. While material denying the Holocaust may be offensive and untruthful, prosecutors say it is difficult to define incitement.
But while Jewish organisations were disappointed with the Government's decision, they expect ministers next week to confirm plans for an annual Holocaust memorial day on Jan 27. The formal announcement will be made by Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary, at a 40-nation Holocaust conference in Sweden next week. January 27 is the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in 1945. It is already marked in Germany and Sweden and is established as the European Union genocide remembrance day.
The Government says that it will provide a national mark of respect for all victims of Nazi persecution and represent a continuing commitment to oppose racism, anti-semitism and genocide.
Source: Daily Telegraph, Jan. 21, 2000
Defender of Hitler Sues Critics --And Puts Holocaust on Trial
London -- At times, the two men seem to be conducting an academic discussion, searching for shards of historical truth in a scholarly, courteous exchange marked by occasional flashes of humor. Then there are moments when they wield verbal stilettos, while maintaining an exterior show of politesse.
"Adolf Hitler never used derogatory terms like 'the Chosen People.' "
"No, he called the Jews parasites and bacilli."
"Yes, yes, it's all fanciful on your part."
British historian David Irving, who has sought to absolve Hitler from responsibility for the Holocaust, stands in the witness box in Room 73 of the Royal Courts of Justice jousting with attorney Richard Rampton.
Irving is suing Penguin Books and professor Deborah Lipstadt of Emory University in Atlanta for libel because she has written that he is a Holocaust denier and a "Hitler partisan" who has distorted history to try to exonerate the German dictator.
In her book "Denying the Holocaust," Lipstadt cites the generally accepted view that the Nazis killed 6 million Jews, vast numbers of them in extermination camps built for that purpose in Poland. Most historians believe the decision to carry out a systematic slaughter of Jews was decided at a conference held in a villa beside the Wannsee, a Berlin lake, on Jan. 20, 1942. The conference was attended by leading Nazi officials, but Hitler was not present.
Irving, a gray-haired, broad-shouldered man of 62 who looks and sounds the part of a mildly querulous academic, has nothing to lose in this case except his bank balance.
His professional reputation already is in tatters, and he has been barred from Germany and other countries that he says are essential to his historical research. It is not the first time Irving has come to court because of his Holocaust views. At a meeting in Munich, Irving dismissed reports that the Nazis used gas chambers to kill millions as a "propaganda story."
Denying the Holocaust is a crime in Germany, and Irving was charged, found guilty in May 1992 and heavily fined. But should he win this libel case, he could walk away with millions and claim a victory for himself and those who share his views about the Third Reich.
Even his critics acknowledge that Irving is the most scholarly of the Holocaust deniers, and few people have searched the wartime archives as thoroughly--and benefited as well from the recollections and diaries of old Nazis whom he befriended.
His memory is prodigious. Rampton produces relatively obscure archival documents, and Irving rattles on at length about minor Nazi bureaucrats mentioned in them, or says with great confidence this is a document he has never seen.
The trial, which began last week, is expected to continue for three months and soon will move, briefly, to the site of the Nazi extermination camp at Auschwitz. Irving has never been there, but he contends its gas chambers were built by the Poles after the war as a tourist attraction.
He does not deny the Nazis killed Jews and other civilians on a large scale. But he does deny it was official policy and contends Hitler knew nothing about it until October 1943. "If the killing had been systematic, it would have been done with more efficient means," he told the court.
Rampton: "The Germans were acting in a random, haphazard way?"
Irving: "Yes . . . It was a totally ramshackle operation, a total lack of system."
While evidence of the systematic nature of the Holocaust is overwhelming, the basis of Irving's suit is that he has been falsely accused of denying the Holocaust, so he accepts the term freely in court.
"I'm not an expert on the Holocaust and don't intend to become one for the purposes of this trial," he says when Rampton asks what happened in one of the Nazi camps. Rampton repeatedly reads documents referring to the deportation of thousands of Jews to the camps and asks Irving to accept that any reasonable person would conclude they were sent there for extermination. Irving resolutely insists he will not draw inferences from documents that do not specifically support that conclusion.
Rampton asserts that Irving has no evidence to contradict the possibility that Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec were built as extermination camps. "That's a very fair statement," Irving replies.
Throughout, he denies Hitler ordered the Final Solution, and says that no document has surfaced directly tying Hitler to the extermination efforts. Nevertheless, reputable scholars have no doubt that he was informed and gave ultimate approval for the Holocaust. Even in 1942, Irving says, Hitler was talking of shipping the Jews to Madagascar to begin new lives, but the operation could not be carried out because of the naval war. In Hitler's "table talks" with his Nazi henchmen, Irving says, there was never any suggestion Jews should be systematically killed.
At one point Irving, referring to the lack of an extermination order from Hitler, tells Rampton: "I have to remind you of the basic principle of English law that a man is innocent until he is proved guilty. Am I right?"
During one break in the proceedings, a woman accosts him and says her parents were gassed at Auschwitz.
"You may be pleased to know that they almost certainly died of typhus, as did Anne Frank," Irving replies.
Rampton sometimes betrays a lack of familiarity with the historical record. The trial almost certainly will become more interesting when Irving, who is acting as his own attorney, cross-examines expert witnesses assembled by the defense.
The son of a British naval commander who served in both world wars, Irving has been a Germanophile since his teens. He dropped out of university and spent a year as a steelworker in the Ruhr while learning German.
He came to prominence with a book on the bombing of Dresden and biographies of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess.
His most controversial book, "Hitler's War," was published in 1977 and sought to absolve Hitler from responsibility for the mass murder of Jews. Irving offered a cash reward to anyone who could find a document directly linking Hitler to the Final Solution.
In the book he said a handwritten note by Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, quoted a Hitler order of Nov. 30, 1941, that there was to be "no liquidation" of Jews. As late as October 1943, he said, Hitler was still forbidding liquidation of Jews but was disobeyed by the SS.
Irving contended that, despite his public image, Hitler was a weak political leader who lost control over those serving under him.
In 1979 Irving's German publisher apologized for printing in "Hitler's War" that Anne Frank's diary was a forgery and paid compensation to her family.
After "Hitler's War," Irving wrote a biography of the Nazi propaganda chief Josef Goebbels [published in 1996], which won praise from leading British historians.
But from the mid-1980s Irving regularly addressed enthusiastic neo-Nazi audiences in Austria and Germany.
In 1988 he went to Toronto to testify on behalf of Ernst Zündel, a Canadian on trial for denying the Holocaust. He also has attended conferences in the U.S. of the Institute of Historical Review, a leading forum for those who deny the Holocaust.
His twin brother, a British civil servant, changed his name to avoid being identified with him.
Source: Chicago Tribune, January 23, 2000
'Cyanide was used to kill lice' claims Irving
Irving: disputes use of gas chambers traces of cyanide in human hair recovered from Auschwitz and on metal ventilation grilles over the concentration camp's gas chambers were evidence of a delousing programme by the Nazis and not of mass extermination, David Irving, the Hitler historian, said yesterday (Jan. 24).
Mr Irving told a High Court judge that the SS used the gas chambers simply to fumigate bodies and clothing and hair shorn after death from inmates of the Polish concentration camp in the face of a plague of lice.
He accepted that, according to a report by a forensic laboratory in Krakow in December 1945, residual traces of hydrogen cyanide were found by scientists. Subjects for analysis included a 55lb bag of hair thought to have been taken from about 500 young Jewish women. Mr Irving said: "Corpses arrived in a fully clothed state. As a corpse cooled, the lice crawled off the body, so you had an infestation problem. These were not homicidal gas chambers. They were used to delouse clothing and cadavers. The Germans processed human hair as part of hygiene methods." Told that experts on Auschwitz would give evidence that what was happening there was mass gas extermination, Mr Irving, 62, said: "That is the conclusion of a closed mind."
The historian was beginning his third week under cross-examination by Richard Rampton, QC, during his libel action against Deborah Lipstadt, the American academic, and Penguin Books, which published her work Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. He is suing both for damages over the claim that he is a Holocaust-denier who has twisted history.
Mr Irving, who is accused of trying to exonerate Hitler for what happened to the Jews, claims that he is the victim of an international conspiracy to ruin his reputation as an historian. Yesterday, he went on to claim that the chambers, which were fitted with a door consisting of a peephole and thickened glass, were used as bomb shelters by the SS.
Mr Rampton, counsel for the defendants, has told the court that between the first edition of his book, Hitler's War, in 1977 and its second in 1991, Mr Irving's views had undergone a big change. In the later edition, all traces of the Holocaust as an historical truth had disappeared and Auschwitz had been "transformed from a monstrous killing machine into a mere slave-labour camp".
Yesterday Mr Irving said that he stood by the man whose work had persuaded him that mass extermination never took place at Auschwitz. Fred Leuchter, a consultant in the design of execution facilities in America, had visited the camp in 1988 on behalf of a German, Ernst Zundel, who was on trial in Canada for publishing material that denied the existence of homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz.
In a report, Mr Leuchter recorded only very small traces of cyanide in the gas chamber remains and relatively large traces in the delousing remains - concluding that the camp had not been used for extermination.
The report was condemned as "flawed rubbish" by Mr Rampton, but Mr Irving responded: "It was pioneering work, even though it has been superseded. Leuchter was barking up the right tree."
Source: Times of London, Jan. 25, 2000
Holocaust skeptic admits use of flawed evidence: But he denies any falsification
London -- A controversial historical writer who denies as a "big lie" that Jews were slaughtered in gas chambers at Auschwitz admitted in court Monday (Jan. 24) that the study upon which he originally based his contention was substantially flawed.
Nevertheless, David Irving said he still believes no Jews were gassed at Auschwitz because he is unimpressed with evidence supporting the traditional account.
"We are entitled to at least one unambiguous, not read-between-the-lines, document that would give us a clear smoking gun," Irving testified Monday. "That document does not exist."
Irving is suing Emory University professor Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin Books, for alleged libel over assertions made about him in her 1994 book, "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory."
Lipstadt portrayed Irving, 62, as a prominent and dangerous "Holocaust denier," who believes the systematic murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis during World War II never took place. She also depicts him as an extremist who manipulates, distorts and falsifies history for his own purposes.
Lipstadt's attorneys are trying to prove that Irving either has lied or ignored evidence available to him when he has denounced accepted accounts of the Holocaust.
When asked about the overwhelming body of documents, physical evidence and eyewitness accounts of the mass killings at the infamous Nazi concentration camp, Irving said he did not accept the conclusion that Nazis systemically killed as many as 2 million Jews in gas chambers at the camp and then burned their bodies in specially built furnaces.
"No, I don't agree with this," Irving said. "There are other arguments that are just as plausible."
Irving, who has never visited Auschwitz, said it was more likely the structures identified as gas chambers were used as air raid shelters or as places to administer poison gas to corpses to kill typhus-carrying fleas and lice.
Irving bases his assertions about Auschwitz on a 1998 report by Fred Leuchter, an American with expertise in execution facilities.
Leuchter concluded that residual traces of hydrogen cyanide --- the killing agent in the Zyklon B pellets used by the Nazis --- in the buildings identified as chambers were too low to support the contention that people were put to death inside. He also noted that hydrogen cyanide levels were much higher in the nearby de-lousing chambers.
Leuchter studied Auschwitz to provide evidence in a Canadian court case of a man accused of publishing material that denied the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz.
The judge in the Canadian case disallowed the report because he ruled Leuchter lacked the necessary qualifications. Defense attorney Richard Rampton, who is representing Lipstadt and Penguin, dismissed the Leuchter report as "bunk." Rampton argued that it would be expected that residual levels of hydrogen cyanide in the gas chambers would be lower than in de-lousing rooms because it takes 22 times more cyanide to kill lice than it does to kill people.
Subsequent analyses of the Leuchter report have attacked the study's methodology as well as its conclusions, he said. Rampton said Irving has persisted in basing his assertions on the Leuchter report, even though the historian knows it is faulty.
Irving acknowledged that the report was seriously flawed, but he said he still believes that its findings about the poison residue marked an important breakthrough. "I accept that the Leuchter report was flawed, but its findings have been replicated," he said. "It's been superseded." The trial is expected to last until March.
Meanwhile, a new study shows that claims attacking the Holocaust have reached a widespread audience but have so far failed to convince many people.
The American Jewish Committee on Monday released a survey of 11 countries. The report said that interpretations of World War II events varied from country to country but few people denied the Holocaust.
The most recent survey, conducted in Sweden in December, found that 86 percent of 1,000 people had heard these claims but only 1 percent believed it possible the mass slaughter of Jews during World War II never happened.
The highest proportion of people who said it seemed possible the Nazi extermination of 6 million Jews never happened was in East Germany, with one out of every 10 believing this.
Seven percent of Britons and Austrians, 5 percent of French, 4 percent of Australians, 2 percent of Russians and 1 percent of Americans and Poles said it was possible the Holocaust did not happen.
Source: The Atlanta-Journal Constitution, Jan. 25, 2000
Irving Cross-Examines Van Pelt
January 25, 2000: From 10:30 a.m., I had Professor Jan van Pelt under cross examination. I began with his qualifications and extracted from him the admissions (on record) that (a) if I am a pseudo historian, then he is a pseudo architect; (b) that he has as an architect the same qualifications that Leuchter had as an engineer; (c) that he is not, and has never studied as, an architect; (d) that if he were to describe himself as an arhcitect in his native Holland, he would be liable to arrest.
I then carefully laid the trap, as I candidly informed the judge around lunchtime; I buttered him up as a Rommel of the Holocaust historians, I showed him the pictures of Auschwitz with the "tourists" massing around the Krema II, -- he himself identified them as "tourists" -- which was he agreed where the "500,000" or "millions" had died.
I asked him to identify by name the eye witnesses on which he had based his belief that Krema II was an instrument of death, operating as a gas chamber, with the SS men pouring pellets through the roof: the SS nen had removed the concrete covers with both hands. He named Bimko, Broad, Tauber, and another.
I asked him to estimate the size of the wire mesh columns. Then having talked quietly to him for six hours I challenged loudly, "But Prof. Van Pelt, you know perfectly well that there are no holes in that roof, and there never have been. You have said that in your expert report. Your eye witnesses are liars."
I asked him if the SS had given some luckless corporal a bucket of cement and a trowel as the Red Army tanks were thundering towards them, with instructions to make good the "holes" before they blew up the whole building! After we took him through the fact that fair-face finish concrete cannot be simply repaired or patched, as he had waffled in his report, and that the "wooden blocks" referred to by Tauber in his statement as having been set in the concrete room to screw the "shower heads" onto, can also not be seen, it was five minutes to four p.m.
The judge had agreed that we would stop at 3:45 p.m. He said, "Mr Irving, do you wish to stop your cross-examination there? Would that be a good point?" I said, "Unless Mr Rampton wishes to have the remaining four minutes to repair the damage that I have done!" Van Pelt said, "Can I respond, my Lord?" The judge said: "Yes, Professor: tomorrow at ten-thirty a.m.!" The timing could not have been better.
Source: David Irving, Radical's Diary, Jan. 25, 2000
Auschwitz death chambers 'a moral certainty'
An expert on Auschwitz told a High Court judge yesterday (Jan. 25), that overwhelming evidence had accumulated after the war to show that a million Jews were exterminated there by the Germans.
Robert Van Pelt, a Dutch historian, said that a convergence of testimony made it a "moral certainty" that the gas chambers were the main instrument of murder between summer 1942 and autumn 1944.
Professor Van Pelt was giving evidence in the libel trial brought by the Hitler historian David Irving, who denies the existence of homicidal gas chambers at the Polish camp.
Mr Irving is suing Deborah Lipstadt, an American academic, and Penguin Books, which published her work Denying the Holocaust: the Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. He is seeking damages over a claim that he is a Holocaust-denier who has twisted history, which he says has ruined his reputation as an historian.
Professor Van Pelt told the court: "It will be clear that, by early 1947, there was a massive amount of evidence of the use of the camp as a site for mass extermination. This evidence had become slowly available during the war as the result of reports, by escaped inmates, had become more substantial through the eyewitness accounts by former Auschwitz inmates immediately after their liberation, and was confirmed in the Polish forensic investigations undertaken in 1945 and 1946.
"Finally, this evidence was corroborated by confessions of leading German personnel employed at Auschwitz during its years of operation." He added: "It is highly implausible that knowledge about Auschwitz was a wartime fabrication by British propagandists. In short, it has become possible to assert as moral certainty the statement that Auschwitz was an extermination camp where the Germans killed around one million people with the help of gas chambers."
The main source of his evidence had been from witnesses, but there was documentary evidence which showed that, although the numbers of Jews transported to the camp were known, it was also known that many were not given registration numbers there - an indication that they were murdered upon arrival.
Eyewitness evidence, the court was told, had been given by prisoners including Stanislaw Jankowski, Shlomo Dragon and Henryk Tauber, on gassings in the five crematoriums.Others had given evidence of how the gas chambers were demolished in late 1944 and January 1945 to destroy evidence.
Confessions given by leading German personnel at the camp included that of Pery Broad, an SS officer who testified to gassings and burning of corpses, and Rudolf Höss, the former camp commandant.
There was also the evidence from the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961, documentary evidence of the construction of the camp, including workers' timesheets, plans, photographs and scientific studies of cyanide compounds in the walls of the gas chambers.
Mr Irving, who maintains most of the deaths at Auschwitz were from natural causes and is conducting his own case, was told about a "field of ashes" from human remains, some of which had been thrown across icy roads to help the passage of vehicles.
Robert Van Pelt, who is attached to the University of Waterloo in Canada and served as adviser to the Auschwitz authorities on the reconstruction of the site, said under cross-examination that he had been "more than deeply moved" by his experience. "I was frightened. I don't believe in ghosts. I have never seen any at Auschwitz. But it is an awesome place and an awesome responsibility as an historian." Asked about the dangers of subjective analysis of Auschwitz history, he said: "One's duty is to be unemotional and objective but to remain human in the exercise." In a map of human suffering, he added, Auschwitz would be at the centre.
Source: Times of London, Jan. 26, 2000
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