The enduring battle for truth: Auschwitz and the architecture of denial

“ The Holocaust was no accident of history. It occurred because too many governments cold-bloodedly adopted and implemented hate-fueled laws, policies, and practices to vilify and dehumanize entire groups of people, and too many individuals stood by silently. Silence is complicity. As my late friend and Holocaust survivor Tom Lantos so frequently reminded us: “The veneer of civilization is paper thin. We are its guardians, and we can never rest.” ”

“ As a result of the efforts of the defendants and their confederates, this book poisoned a generation and distorted the outlook of a whole people.
As the SS General Von dem Bach-Zelewski indicated yesterday, if you preach for years, as long as 10 years, that the Slav peoples are inferior races and that the Jews are subhuman, then it must logically follow that the killing of millions of these human beings is accepted as a natural phenomenon.
From Mein Kampf the way leads directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz and the gas chambers of Maidanek. ”

“ The younger generation is guiltless. It grew up in an anti-Semitic state, ruled by anti-Semitic laws. Our youth was bound by these laws and saw nothing criminal in racial politics. But if anti-Semitism and racial laws could lead to an Auschwitz, then Auschwitz must mark the end of racial politics and the death of anti-Semitism. Hitler is dead. ”

“ What, today, does the name of Auschwitz convey to you?
VON SCHIRACH: It is the greatest, the most devilish mass murder known to history. But that murder was not committed by Hoess; Hoess was merely the executioner. The murder was ordered by Adolf Hitler, as is obvious from his last will and testament. The will is genuine. I have held the photostat copy of that will in my hands. He and Himmler jointly committed that crime which, for all time, will be a stain in the annals of our history. It is a crime which fills every German with shame.
The youth of Germany is guiltless. ”

“ HOESS: Yes. In the summer of 1941 I was summoned to Berlin to Reichsführer SS Himmler to receive personal orders. He told me something to the effect—I do not remember the exact words—that the Führer had given the order for a final solution of the Jewish question. We, the SS, must carry out that order. If it is not carried out now then the Jews will later on destroy the German people. He had chosen Auschwitz on account of its easy access by rail and also because the extensive site offered space for measures ensuring isolation. ”

“ The case advanced by the Defendants can by simply summarised: they contend that there is a substantial body of evidence, from a variety of different sources, which should demonstrate to any fair-minded objective commentator that gas chambers were constructed at Auschwitz and that they were used to extermination Jews on a massive scale. This case rests upon what the Defendants contend is abundant evidence, both contemporaneous and more recent, which amounts to convincing proof that Auschwitz played a pivotal role in the Nazi scheme to exterminate European Jewry. ”

“ The overall question which I have to decide is whether the available evidence, considered in its totality, would convince any objective and reasonable historian that Auschwitz was not merely one of the many concentration or labour camps established by the Nazi regime but that it also served as a death or extermination camp, where hundreds of thousands of Jews were systematically put to death in gas chambers over the period from late 1941 until 1944. ”

“ Those present at the conference must have carried away the impression that the objectives were the extermination of the Jewish people.” (2645-PS)
The deportation of Jews into concentration camps was part of the program for slave labor. Jews not fit for work were screened out at extermination centers, such as Auschwitz, and the remainder were taken into concentration and work camps. The orders were issued by Himmler and passed through the Chief of the Security Police and SD, Kaltenbrunner (formerly Heydrich) to Mueller, Chief of the GESTAPO, and then to Eichmann for execution. ”

“ You are perhaps the only one who can throw some light upon certain hidden aspects, and who can tell which people gave the orders for the destruction of European Jewry, and can further state how this order was carried out and to what degree the execution was kept a secret.
THE PRESIDENT: Dr. Kauffmann, will you kindly put questions to the witness.
DR. KAUFFMANN: Yes.
[Turning to the witness.] From 1940 to 1943, you were the Commander of the camp at Auschwitz. Is that true?
HOESS: Yes.
DR. KAUFFMANN: And during that time, hundreds of thousands of human beings were sent to their death there. ”

“ The extrinsic facts on which he relies in support of the innuendo meanings are in essence as follows:
(i) that a Holocaust denier is someone who wilfully, perversely and in disregard of the evidence denies the mass murder by whatever means of the Jewish people ”

“ He contends that the Defendants’ book is part of a concerted attempt to ruin his reputation as an historian and he seeks damages accordingly. The Defendants, whilst they do not accept the interpretation which Irving places on the passages complained of, assert that it is true that Irving is discredited as an historian by reason of his denial of the Holocaust and by reason of his persistent distortion of the historical record so as to depict Hitler in a favourable light. The Defendants maintain that the claim for damages for libel must in consequence fail. ”

“ I believed that millions of people had been killed in factories of death. I believed in the gas chamber. I believed in all the paraphernalia of the modern Holocaust. But 1988, when I came to Canada and gave evidence in the trial of Ernst Zündel, as an historian, I met people who knew differently and could prove to me that that story was just a legend. I changed my mind and I’ve now revised the Hitler book so that all reference to Auschwitz and the gas chamber and the factories of death have now been totally removed and eradicated’ (p4) . ”

“ Jews did not invade Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Holland, France and Russia. German troops on the order of Adolph Hitler and the Nazi's did. To state that the Jews created the Second World War is not only historically inaccurate it attempts to make Jews, who were the victims of Nazi atrocities, the actual parties responsible for the death of millions and millions of people throughout Europe, North Africa and the Soviet Union and to suggest such is outrageous but to conclude that Jews willingly caused the death of six million other Jews during the Holocaust is obscene. ”

“ We must pass the history of the Holocaust on to our grandchildren and their grandchildren in order to keep real the promise of “never again.” That is how we prevent future genocides. Remembering the victims, heroes, and lessons of the Holocaust is particularly important today as Holocaust deniers and minimizers are growing louder in our public discourse. But the facts are not up for question, and each of us must remain vigilant and speak out against the resurgent tide of anti-Semitism, and other forms of bigotry and intolerance, here at home and around the world. ”

“ When hatred goes unchecked, and when the checks and balances in government and society that protect fundamental freedoms are lost, violence and mass atrocities can result. The United States will continue to champion justice for Holocaust survivors and their heirs. We are committed to helping build a world in which the lessons of the Holocaust are taught and in which all human lives are valued. ”

“ The Defendants’ response to Irving’s argument in relation to the documentary evidence
7.127 The Defendants accept that there are few overt references to gas chambers at Auschwitz in contemporaneous documents but suggest that the absence is readily understandable. I have already alluded to the evidence of Ertl, the architect employed at the Auschwitz Central Construction Office, that he was told by Bischoff that no reference should be made to gassing and that such terms as “special action” or special measure” should be used instead. ”

“ Whilst Longerich was prepared to concede that some of the words in question may be used in a non-genocidal sense in the years leading up to 1941, he argued that from about that date onwards the words are invariably used in a sinister sense to connote killing on a major scale. For instance he contends that when, in a document dated 20 February 1942 the Reichsicherheitshauptamt (RHSA) use the term Evakuierung in connection with the issuing of guidelines for the implementation of the evacuation of Jews to Auschwitz, the word is being used in a genocidal sense. ”

“ Hirt should be provided with all necessary material for his research work. I have already reported to the Reich Leader SS that for some anthropological studies 150 skeletons of inmates or Jews are needed and should be provided by the Auschwitz concentration camp. It is only necessary for the Reich Security Main Office to be furnished now with an official directive by the Reich Leader SS ”

“ For these experiments Auschwitz is in every respect better adapted than Dachau, for the climate is colder there and, as the camp area is larger, less attention will be attracted. The victims yell when they are being frozen. ”

“ This figure represents about 70 or 80 percent of all persons sent to Auschwitz as prisoners, the remainder having been selected and used for slave labor in the concentration camp industries; included among the executed and burned were approximately 20,000 Russian prisoners of war (previously screened out of prisoner-of-war cages by the Gestapo) who were delivered at Auschwitz in Wehrmacht transports operated by regular Wehrmacht officers and men. ”

“ The letters ‘A’ or ‘M’ on the escorting instruction documents indicated Auschwitz or Majdanek; it meant that the passengers were to be gassed. * * * Regarding Hungarian Jews the following general ruling was laid down in Auschwitz: children up to the age of 12 or 14, older people above 50, as well as the sick, or people with criminal records (who were transported in specially marked wagons) were taken immediately on their arrival to the gas chambers. ”

“ The remainder of the total number of victims included about 100,000 German Jews, and great numbers of citizens, mostly Jewish, from Holland, France, Belgium, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Greece, or other countries. We executed about 400,000 Hungarian Jews alone at Auschwitz in the summer of 1944. ”

“ He had certain jurisdiction, as well, in relation to the notorious extermination camp Auschwitz, to which Poles from the General Government were committed by his administration, although the camp itself lay outside the boundaries of the General Government. In February 1944, Ambassador Counsellor Dr. Schumberg suggested a possible amnesty of Poles who had been taken to Auschwitz for trivial offenses and kept for several months. ”

“ Many of the deported and enslaved laborers joined the victims of the concentration camps, where they were literally worked to death in the course of the Nazi program of extermination through work. We propose to show that this Nazi combination of the assembly line, the torture chamber, and the executioner’s rack in a single institution has a horrible repugnance to the twentieth century mind. ”

“ The case for the Defendants in summary
7.6 Auschwitz was not, on the Defendants’ case, either the first or by any means the only extermination camp where gas chambers were employed to kill Jews. However, according to the Defendants, the evidence establishes that more more deaths occurred at Auschwitz than in all the other extermination camps put together. ”

“ Dresden - 13 February 1990 (no tape or transcript, but see Irving’ s speech at 10th IHR Conference as reported in JHR)
‘..the holocaust of Germans in Dresden really happened. That of the Jews in the gas chambers of Auschwitz is an invention. ”

“ He advanced a variety of arguments for discrediting the evidence relied on by the Defendants. He relied heavily on the argument that the roof of morgue 1 at crematorium 2 (which is where on the Defendants’ case in excess of 500,000 Jews were gassed to death) shows no sign of the wire-mesh columns through which the Defendants maintain that the gas was introduced into the chamber below.
7.11 In the course of the trial Irving modified his position: he was prepared to concede that gassing of human beings had taken place at Auschwitz but on a limited scale. ”

“ He emphasised that amongst the voluminous documentary material relating to Auschwitz, there is only one document which contains what might be regarded as a reference to the genocidal use of the crematoria. Irving argues that the lack of (as he put it) incriminating documents is extraordinary, if indeed gas chambers were in operation on the scale alleged by the Defendants. ”

“ The German fascist executioners, perfectly aware of the unbounded bestiality of their crimes, attempted to conceal by all possible means the traces of the atrocities committed. They especially endeavored to camouflage the burial sites of the Soviet prisoners of war. Thus, for instance, on the cross of Grave Number 623, only eight surnames of persons buried were indicated, whereas upon excavation 32 bodies were actually found in that grave. Such, too, was the case when Grave Number 624 was opened up. In other graves, layers of earth were placed between several rows of corpses. ”

“ It is full of hundreds of thousands of survivors of the Holocaust if not, in fact, millions by now. The numbers of survivors seems to grow these passing years, it defies all laws of natural deceased and all laws, now the number of survivors is growing. And I said isn’t the existence of so many survivors in itself an indicator, something doesn’t, it doesn’t fit. If the Nazis had this dedicated programme to exterminate the Jews, how come so many of you have survived, were the Nazis sloppy or what? ”

“ She knows that the people who are questioning her about Auschwitz want to hear about the crematoria and the gas chambers and after a time she describes the crematoria and the gas chambers, because human pride demands that she not have been in one of the other barracks, perhaps five miles away from the crematorium but right next door to it. It’s a matter of human pride and we can’t really begrudge these people for placing themselves and their recollections so close to the event, so close to the heart of the particular trauma. ”

“ He lies like an eye-witness, he lies like an eye-witness’ (pp13-14) .
‘And I’m in deep trouble for saying this around the world, that the eye-witnesses in Auschwitz who claim, like Eli Wiesel to have seen the gassings going on and the subsequent cremations, that they are liars... [page 14/15] ...He’s a liar. And so are the other eye-witnesses in Auschwitz who claim they saw gassings going on because there were no gas chambers in Auschwitz, as the forensic tests show. ”

“ And the more they come to have taken part in a traumatic experience themselves, the more they are persuaded that they were right centre stage. They are the bride at every funeral and the corpse at every wedding, I think somebody once said’ (pp14-15) .
‘And there are so many survivors of Auschwitz now, in fact, that I get very tasteless about all of this. I don’t see any reason to be tasteful about Auschwitz. ”

“ It’s baloney, it’s a legend. Once we admit the fact that it was a brutal slave labour camp and large numbers of people did die, as large numbers of innocent people died elsewhere in the War, why believe the rest of the baloney? I say quite tastelessly, in fact, that more women died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz. [Laughter] Oh, you think that’s tasteless, how about this? There are so many Auschwitz survivors going around, in fact the number increases as the years go past, which is biologically very odd to say the least. ”

“ But he made clear that those figures included those who died otherwise than by being gassed, for example in epidemics. Deaths outside the gas chambers accounted for about 100,000 deaths, leaving 800,000 to 900,000 murders by gassing. Longerich made clear that he regarded all the deaths as genocidal since the conditions in the camp were deliberately prepared by the Nazis.
8.24 It is the contention both van Pelt and Evans on behalf of the Defendants that Irving has consistently under-estimated the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust and more particularly at Auschwitz. ”

“ Arno Meyer, the Professor in Princeton, a Jewish Professor in fact, who published a book called ‘Why Did the Heavens not Darken?’, he revealed in his book that of all the people who died in the concentration camps, including Auschwitz, by far the greatest part died of natural causes, whatever one could call ‘natural causes’ in wartime, I admit, natural causes in wartime are not what you or I would call natural causes today in Victoria. ”

“ They're are saying, “This is just going to nourish the neo-Nazi stereotype of the Jew - grasping, gold hungry, greedy, inconsiderate, vengeful; all these anti-semitic stereotypes that the neo-Nazis have are just being nourished by this latest clamour about the Swiss gold.”’
‘Well, they have been dining on Auschwitz. Auschwitz is a big tourist site now. They have millions of visitors every year. It’s like Hitler’s mountain top retreat in Berchtesgaden. They have half a million visitors a year there too. They make money out of it. Auschwitz has become a major money-spinner, the Holocaust. ”

“ That the (Claimant) after attending Zundel’s trial in 1988 in Toronto having previously hovered on the brink now denies the murder by the Nazis of the Jews;
(viii) That the (Claimant) described the memorial to the dead at Auschwitz as a “tourist attraction”.
(ix) That the (Claimant) was branded by the British House of Commons as “Hitler’s heir” and denounced as a “Nazi propagandist and long time Hitler apologist” and accused by them of publishing a “fascist publication” and that this marked the end of the (Claimant’s) reputation in England. ”

“ But he has also minimised the number of those killed by means other than gas at Auschwitz and elsewhere. Having grossly underestimated the number who lost their lives in the camps, Irving is prone to claim that a greater number than that were killed in Allied bombing raids on Dresden and elsewhere. He has, moreover, repeatedly claimed that the British Psychological War Executive ingeniously invented the lie that the Nazis were killing Jews in gas chambers in order to use it as propaganda. ”

“ We have a moral imperative to recognize the pain survivors carry, support them, and ensure that their memories and experiences of the Holocaust are neither denied nor distorted, and that the lessons for all humanity are never forgotten. ”

“ The Congress of the United States established the United States Holocaust Memorial Council to create a living memorial to the victims of the Nazi Holocaust. Its purpose: So mankind will never lose memory of that terrible moment in time when the awful spectre of death camps stained the history of our world. ”

“ In places like Auschwitz, evidence of the horror of the Holocaust has been preserved to help the world remember the past. We must never forget the cruelty of the guilty and the courage of the victims at Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps.
During the Holocaust, evil was systematic in its implementation and deliberate in its destruction. The 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz is an opportunity to pass on the stories and lessons of the Holocaust to future generations. The history of the Holocaust demonstrates that evil is real, but hope endures. ”

“ During this week in 1945, American and Allied forces liberated the concentration camp at Dachau and other Nazi death camps, laying bare to the world the unconscionable horror of the Holocaust. We must remain vigilant against hateful ideologies and indifference. Every generation must learn and apply the lessons of the Holocaust so that such horror, atrocity, and genocide never again occur. It is our solemn obligation to reaffirm our commitment to respecting the fundamental freedoms and inherent dignity of every human being. ”

“ At the Auschwitz concentration camp, evil found willing servants and innocent victims. For almost 5 years, Auschwitz was a factory for murder where more than a million lives were taken. It is a sobering reminder of the power of evil and the need for people to oppose evil wherever it exists. It is a reminder that when we find anti-Semitism, we must come together to fight it. ”

“ Holocaust survivors and their descendants—and each child, grandchild, and great-grandchild of those who lost their lives—are living proof that love and hope will always triumph over murder and destruction. Every child and grandchild of a survivor is a testament to resilience, and a living rebuke to those who sought to extinguish the future of the Jewish people and others who were targeted. ”

“ The United States stands shoulder to shoulder with the survivors of the Holocaust, their families, and the descendants of those who were murdered. We support the Jewish diaspora and the State of Israel as we fulfill our duty to remember the victims, honor their memory and their lives, and celebrate humanity's victory over tyranny and evil. Holocaust survivors, despite scars from history's darkest days, continue to inspire us to remember the past and learn from its lessons. ”

“ Pass it on to children and grandchildren. So that when we get to the next round of the spiral of civilizational development, we have no crossroads. So that we all have one path - the path of human, which we will all choose with deep respect for the memory of all the victims of Babyn Yar, the Holocaust, the Second - and I believe - the last world war. For the peaceful and happy future of our children. For the peaceful and happy future of our children's children... Of all future generations on the planet Earth. ”

“ Today, we join together with people from nations around the world to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day by remembering the 6 million Jews, as well as the Roma and Sinti, Slavs, disabled persons, LGBTQ+ individuals, and many others, who were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Shoah. We must never forget the truth of what happened across Europe or brush aside the horrors inflicted on our fellow humans because of the doctrines of hatred and division. ”