The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial

By Robert Jan Van Pelt

From January to April 2000 historian David Irving brought a high-profile libel case against Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt in the British High Court, charging that Lipstadt's book, Denying the Holocaust (1993), falsely labeled him a Holocaust denier. The question about the evidence for Auschwitz as a death camp played a central role in these proceedings. Irving had based his alleged denial of the Holocaust in part on a 1988 report by an American execution specialist, Fred Leuchter, which claimed that there was no evidence for homicidal gas chambers in Auschwitz. In connection with their defense, Penguin and Lipstadt engaged architectural historian Robert Jan van Pelt to present evidence for our knowledge that Auschwitz had been an extermination camp where up to one million Jews were killed, mainly in gas chambers. Employing painstaking historical scholarship, van Pelt prepared and submitted an exhaustive forensic report that he successfully defended in cross-examination in court.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Release date: Mar 23, 2016
• ISBN: 9780253028846

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Reviews for The Case for Auschwitz

[Richard kaczmarek · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I could not enlarge it to be readable so I bought the book. Eye witness descriptions and architectural drawings were convincing.
The main point was " where are the holes in the roof through which Xyclon B was deposited ? This was proved.

[cpg_7 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Well worth the moneyShermer and Grobman's _Denying History_ whetted, but did not completely satisfy, my appetite to learn more about the historical evidence for the Holocaust, so I bought and read van Pelt's book. I know that in this book van Pelt covers only a portion of the information that was in his reports for the Irving trial, but it was certainly enough to convince me that Judge Gray's verdict was the proper one. This book covers a lot of technical information that would possibly be hard to digest or be boring if it were presented by another author, but van Pelt writes very well, and I had trouble setting his book down. The author comes across as a very reasonable figure who is able to resist the urge to over-rely on either sentimentality or sarcasm. Perhaps I will need to read something else to internalize the horror that was the Holocaust, but I don't need to read anything else to see that it really did happen.Finally, let me say that I was unprepared for what a big, handsomely bound, handsomely typeset book this would be. (I know that talking about the attractiveness of a book about the Holocaust is probably as bad as Jerry Seinfeld making out during "Schindler's List", but I figured that there might be some other bibliophiles out there who care about such things.)