UBC: The Case for Auschwitz

[truepenny]

van Pelt, Robert Jan. The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.

with an assist from:

Rosenbaum, Ron. Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of his Evil. 1998. New York: HarperPerennial, 1999.

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Long, ranting in parts, depressed in others.


The Case for Auschwitz is a massive book, 551 pages not counting the index, and larger than an average hardback. I almost didn't buy it when I found it at the used bookstore because it was so intimidating, but I am very glad I did, because I was richly rewarded.

This is a book about the historiography of Auschwitz. As such, and because it is about the libel trial brought by David Irving against Deborah Lipstadt, it is also about Holocaust deniers. Holocaust deniers call themselves Revisionists; van Pelt calls them negationists, and after a while I came to see why he did so, and to agree with him. Negationists are first of all committed to proving a negative: that the Holocaust, or some part of the Holocaust, did not happen. Secondly, they forget with distressing regularity the axiom Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And thirdly, their answer to any piece of evidence that contradicts their ideas is to negate it: to deny its validity, whether by trying to claim that eye-witnesses are liars or that a document is a forgery or similar strategies. Moreover, as van Pelt points out, their activity consists of saying no to the historical theories of others; they have no coherent narrative to offer in place of the one they deny. They are not re-visioning history; they are trying to negate it, to deny that it took place.

In reading about negationist arguments, I was reminded of my valiantly windmill-tilting friend, jaylake, and his efforts to argue with Creationism and what he calls faith-based reasoning. Like Creationism, Holocaust denial is, at its first principles, motivated by something that can be stated as I don't like this idea. Therefore, it is not true. But beyond that, both Creationism and Holocaust denial are fundamentally about a refusal to accept and/or understand the way a particular discipline works. I had the same feeling reading about negationists that I do in reading about Creationists: Why are we even HAVING this argument?

And we're having this argument for reasons Hitler would have understood: demagoguery. We aren't having this argument because Holocaust denial can be defended rationally--or can even mount a plausible opposition. It can't, and van Pelt proves that over and over and over again. We're having this argument because (1) there are people who want to believe that the Holocaust didn't happen; (2) and are willing to follow faith-based reasoning rather than use critical thinking; (3) and don't understand how historiography works and what historians do, in the same way that Creationism relies on a fundamental misunderstanding of the theory of evolution--both the evolution part and the theory part; (4)--as my parallel structure falls apart--a preference for conspiracy theories over the inconvenient, painful, and chaotic reality (conspiracy theories have the advantage that you can cast yourself as the victim, which is always preferable); (5) the distrust of and contempt for experts which characterizes a large segment of Western society; (6) certain unscrupulous persons who are willing to exploit this situation for their own benefit and gratification; and (7) like many other right-wing groups, they are prepared to loss-lead indefinitely. That is, they will keep shouting no matter how many times they are rebutted, no matter how many different ways they are proven to be wrong, because they know that the people they want to reach are the people who will believe, "No smoke without a fire." The mere fact of the shouting will be enough.

That's the thing. They--negationists and Creationists--will not give up. Their argument is not predicated on rationality and therefore rational arguments against them will never succeed. Facts make no dent in their armor. The only solution is to ignore them, rather than engaging with them, and even that is merely more fuel for their smoke machine, as they can claim that mainstream historians are afraid to engage with them. And they always have the anti-elitist conspiracy theory rhetoric of victimhood to fall back on: The Man doesn't want you to know the truth. The eggheads are blinded by their liberal bleeding-heart consciences. They're lying to you, but you know better.

I find these tactics infuriating as well as reprehensible, especially from people who are using them knowingly and deliberately, not because they believe what they're saying, but in order to secure an advantage for their "side"--or for themselves. The outcome of the libel trial brought by Irving against Lipstadt was the legal judgment that he was, in fact, knowingly misrepresenting documents and evidence in order to claim that Auschwitz was not an extermination camp.

After I finished The Case for Auschwitz, I went back and reread the chapter on David Irving in Ron Rosenbaum's excellent Explaining Hitler (1998), which is a book less about Hitler himself than about the historiography of Hitler. Rosenbaum captures a snapshot of Irving at a point along his slide into extremist negationism--a point where it's clear he is consciously making choices about the ideological uses of history:

"Let me ask you about that," I said. "You know historians often speak of you as someone who's dug up a remarkable number of important documents, speak of that with great respect, but--"

"Then they say, 'Pity he flipped?' he asked me almost plaintively.

"Well, they probably do say that in one way or another, but aren't you uncomfortable with the kind of people who are drawn to support you, many of whom are not interested in evaluating this objectively but are flat-out anti-Semites who would--"

"Yes--" he began as our voices overlaped.

"--would, if there was no Final Solution, have wanted one anyway?"

To my astonishment, he said, "You're absolutely right. The word 'uncomfortable' I think is an understatement. I find it odious to be in the same company as these people. There is no question that there are certain organizations that propagate these theories which are cracked anti-Semites."

He then proceeds to make another amazing assertion: He's only using these "cracked anti-Semites" cynically. He plans to jettison them as soon as he can for more respectable forums.

"What else can I do?" he said, but speak at the gatherings of these "cracked anti-Semites" for the moment. "If I've been denied a platform worldwide, where else can I make my voice heard? As soon as I get back onto regular debating platforms I shall shake off this ill-fitting shoe which I'm standing on at present. I'm not blind. I know these people have done me a lot of damage, a lot of harm, because I get associated then with those stupid actions."

Fascinating: association with cracked anti-Semites experienced by Irving as the minor discomfort of ill-fitting footwear. Fascinating as well his candor (if that's what it was) about the manipulation he claims to be practicing upon the cracked anti-Semite allies he plans to discard like an ill-fitting shoe. He'll use them, these vile true believers, use them, manipulate them to give him a platform for his views and then when he--it's not clear how--becomes respectable again, he'll drop them. [...]

I must admit I found Irving's reasoning difficult to take seriously: it didn't make sense either as cynical, calculating opportunism (it seemed too pitifully transparent and inept to succeed) or as genuine, heartfelt rationalization of his behavior. I could not even find a Bullock-like synthesis of calculation and sincerity to make this argument seem coherent, especially (or because) he was confiding it to one of the "traditional enemy." ("Traditional enemy" is Irving's name for Jews in his Action Report newsletters, which seem to cater to his "temporary" cracked anti-Semite allies and Holocaust deniers.)
(Rosenbaum 233-34)

So regardless of how one interprets Irving's confession to Rosenbaum (a sincere statement of conflict or a cynical attempt to manipulate the "traditional enemy"), it's clear that he knows what he's doing, that he is choosing to ally himself with the Holocaust deniers, not out of conviction (both Rosenbaum and van Pelt show that Irving edges into Holocaust denial by logic chopping and willful obtuseness, not by outright statements of belief; he's trying to quibble the thing to death, which is not what you do when you actually believe something is untrue), but because he can get more attention. Also notice the circular logic of victimhood: Irving is speaking to "cracked anti-Semites" because he's been "denied a platform worldwide," but insofar as he's been "denied a platform worldwide" (and I have to say, I'm not quite sure what he means by that), it's not because his ideas are unpopular (the Man doesn't want you to know the truth) but because they're unsupportable special pleading in defense of Hitler. [ETA: he may be referring to his being barred from entering Austria--more details in his wikipedia entry, which is as far as I'm going to go in researching the subject; if that's what he means, it's clear he's talking about personal appearances; I was thinking in terms of publication.]

A good portion of The Case for Auschwitz is taken up in tracing the convergent careers of negationism and Irving. (I was mortified to learn that one of the roots of negationism is firmly sunk in New Criticism, as the idea that you treat the text as an object in itself, taken in reductio ad absurdam, is a principal method of negationist argument.) Another chunk deals with the evidence van Pelt assembled in his expert opinion, and the rest describes the trial itself, with a focus on van Pelt's testimony and Irving's cross-examination. I was fascinated by the way Irving--who, remember, was the plaintiff--kept trying to mobilize the rhetoric of victimhood, describing himself as enduring "a public flogging" (van Pelt 452) for example, and I admit I cheered for the way Justice Gray kept shooting him down. In fact, one of the problems I had in reading was the fact of my own partisanship; I felt like I should try to be objective, open-minded, and fair to both sides, but the negationist standpoint is so reprehensible to me in its own right, and supported by such utterly shoddy argumentation, that I couldn't help thinking of them as the enemy--and was further disturbed by this echo of Irving labelling Jews the "traditional enemy," and also his habit of reappropriating anti-Semitic images like blood libel and well-poisoning, casting himself and his followers in the position of the oppressed party, i.e., the Jews. This kind of field reversal--endemic also to Nazi thought--seems to have had a kind of miasmatic effect; van Pelt quotes James Dalrymple, an observer of the trial for the Independent:

Irving gave him [van Pelt] little leeway, and by late afternoon, with another verbal flourish, he suddenly produced what might be the main witness for his case. Not a human being--but something as mundane as the single lift-shaft connecting the "alleged" gas chamber with the crematorium ovens above. He called it the bottleneck. Or, as he put it, the bottleneck in the glass timing jar. The bottleneck that would blow holes in the Auschwitz story.

[...] Irving now demanded that van Pelt do the arithmetic of nightmares. How much could the lift carry? 750 kilos, 1,500 kilos, 3,000 kilos? How many bodies would that be at, say 60 kilos a body? were they in gurneys or were they just squeezed in, like people squashed into a telephone box? How long to take each batch up to the ovens? Ten minutes, or more, each batch? Twenty corpses at a time, or 25?

Van Pelt entered into the exercise reluctantly, and his answers were unclear. It was not helpful to count the numbers of lift journeys, but rather the time it took to burn each batch. In the end, no conclusion was reached on this point. Nobody came up with a pat figure that would make such a logistics exercise possible or impossible during the years the crematorium was operational. But Irving repeated his phrase over and over again. The Bottleneck.

And on the way home in the train that night, to my shame, I took out a pocket calculator and began to do some sums. Ten minutes for each batch of 25, I tapped in. That makes 150 an hour. Which gives 3,600 for each 24-hour period. Which gives 1,314,000 in a year. So that's fine. It could be done. Thank God, the numbers add up.

When I realized what I was doing, I almost threw the little machine across the compartment in rage.
(Dalrymple, qtd. in van Pelt, 471)

We become grateful that the Holocaust was logistically possible--that is what negationism does; Dalrymple describes it as a place "where great truths can be tainted and wounded by small discrepancies, where millions of dead people can be turned into a chimera. And where doubt can be planted like seed in the wind, to grow and fester as the screams of history grow fainter with the years" (qtd in van Pelt, 471) If you engage with it at all, you quickly find yourself arguing lethal absurdities, like the idea that Auschwitz's gas chambers cannot have been gas chambers because they did not follow the rubrics of American gas chambers of the '30s, or the idea that the gas chambers were used to delouse corpses, or that crematoria a mile and a half from the SS barracks in Birkenau were intended as an air-raid shelter. The list goes on and on. And even if you win, as Lipstadt and Penguin won, van Pelt's occasional quotes from Irving's Action Reports make clear that negationists will twist and misrepresent until they can claim that they won--or that your victory is just another symptom of the conspiracy against them.

The Case for Auschwitz has what one might call a happy ending: the forces of good are triumphant. But the forces of evil are far from defeated, as the murder of Stephen Tyrone Johns last year is one small piece of evidence to demonstrate. And nothing we say, no matter how loudly we shout, can change the terrible things that were done by the Nazis to Jews, Romani, Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Germans . . . The list goes on and on. We can't redeem their suffering. And the fact that we argue about it is a terrible indictment of the human race, above and beyond the terrible indictment of the Holocaust itself.

This is not happy reading, but it is a brilliant book.