van Pelt, Robert J.

British historian David Irving was viciously smeared by the media after his testimony at the 1988 Ernst Zündel false-news trial in Toronto. As part of the smear campaign against Irving, Deborah Lipstadt writes in her book Denying the Holocaust that “on some level Irving seems to conceive himself as carrying on Hitler’s legacy.” David Irving filed a libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt in British courts to attempt to end these and other similar statements. Canadian-Jewish architectural historian Robert Jan van Pelt was hired by Lipstadt’s defense team to act as an expert witness for Lipstadt’s defense. Van Pelt wrote for this trial a 700-page report addressing the historical and forensic evidence for the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau. He subsequently wrote the book, The Case for Auschwitz, which presents the bulk of the evidence he submitted in his expert report for this trial. This article discusses some weaknesses in van Pelt’s research which was designed to discredit David Irving’s views of the “Holocaust.”

The Case For Auschwitz, by Robert Jan van Pelt, Indiana University Press Bloomington, IN 2002. 570 pp., with notes, bibliography, indexed. It is strange that an event, or rather a series of events that have marked the history of the 20th century perhaps more strongly than any other with the possible exception of the annihilation…