Yes, It Really Happened, Part 9

A Dutch Architecture Professor, a British photo-interpreter turned actor, and sums on a pocket calculator

Looking like a design school student, Robert Jan van Pelt took the stand. In British courts – and I presume those of the Commonwealth – witnesses take oaths in the Bibles of their religion. Jan van Pelt took his oath on a Jewish Tanach that his grandfather had hidden all during Nazi captivity. He also had his grandmother’s yellow star in his pocket, and her last letter from the Westerbork concentration camp where Dutch Jews were held before going to their ghastly fate.

Before Jan van Pelt could testify, Irving complained about the historian testifying early in the trial, because he had a “Holocaust junket to Stockholm,” a previously scheduled Swedish lecture. Claiming he was facing “powerful (and) wealthy litigants,” Irving said he was being treated unfairly, as he was representing himself.

Rampton’s chief assistant, the brilliant Heather Rogers, whipped out the first day’s transcript. It showed that Irving had agreed to this arrangement.

Judge Gray said he would not adjust the schedule, but he was making an effort to look out for Irving’s interests, as he was representing himself.

Rampton had a hard answer for that one, saying, “True it is there is an inequality of resources; true also it is, however, that my clients are defending a suit brought by Mr. Irving. It reminds one of the old French proverb: ‘These animals are very naughty. They defend themselves when they are attacked.’”

Irving whipped on Rampton: “That proverb cuts both ways, Mr. Rampton.”

The judge cooled the rhetoric, saying, “Yes, well, that is enough of that.”

Jan van Pelt had prepared an outstanding report – he later published it and you can find it on Amazon Kindle – that demolished Irving’s claims about Auschwitz, with everything from German documents, camp administrator letters, bills of lading, to work orders. It was a dazzling display of how historians differ from mystery writers, in that it’s not about the “smoking gun,” but the convergence of evidence.

I provide the plug here.

Irving started off by challenging Jan van Pelt’s credentials, saying that he was not an architect nor registered as one, and he could be prosecuted for pretending to be one. Irving was trying to demolish Jan van Pelt, saying he was leaving people with the impression he was an expert on the subject, “and yet you have never studied it and you have never qualified and you are not registered as such.”

Jan van Pelt retorted by saying he was a professor of cultural history, held an appointment as professor of architecture, and “I am going to give evidence…on the history of Auschwitz – and the architectural documents are a very important historical source. I think we both agree on that. I think, as a historian, you can talk about the various forms of evidence and architectural documents are one of these forms of evidence.”

That satisfied Judge Gray, but Irving later wrote on his web page that he’d scored “direct hits” on Jan van Pelt, adding, “Lipstadt’s chief architectural witness admitted he was an unqualified unregistered charlatan, who would be arrested if he stepped outside the courtroom and called himself an ‘architect.’” That sally probably amused Irving and his followers, and I wondered why Irving didn’t call the cops and try to have Jan van Pelt arrested, if he really believed that.

Irving then tried to make Jan van Pelt look like a wimp. You were deeply moved to visit the actual location where these atrocities had occurred?” Irving asked.

“More than moved. I was frightened,” Jan van Pelt answered.

“Ghosts of the dead were still all around?”

“No, I do not believe in ghosts and I have never seen ghosts in Auschwitz, but it is an awesome place in many ways, and it is also an awesome responsibility one takes upon oneself when one starts to engage this place as a historian. For many years, I felt I was not up to that task. It was only after very careful preparation that I finally decided to go there and to start work in Auschwitz. As with many things in life, it became easier to work on it as I was there, as you actually start confronting what the place is.”

Judge Gray seemed amused, so Irving changed his tactics. He argued that if the Auschwitz crematoria had been used to burn bodies, where were the mountains of coke used as fuel? It would be four times the capacity of London’s legendary Wembley Stadium. Jan van Pelt pointed out that each crematorium had its own storage bunker, and it took a lot of coke to burn a body.

This nauseating discussion was followed by an unpleasant one. Irving attacked the affidavits in Jan van Pelt’s report presented by a survivor named Ada Bimko, who had worked at Auschwitz’s medical block. On one occasion, she was sent to a gas chamber to retrieve the blankets women who had been gassed had worn on their way to their deaths. While there, an SS guard gave Ms. Bimko an erroneous explanation of how the gas chamber worked.

Ms. Bimko gave her account to British war crimes investigators, and now Irving dismissed it a pure invention, something the British needed to hang SS men. Jan van Pelt saw it differently. Ms. Bimko thought she was in Crematorium 2, she was actually in Crematorium 4 or 5, which had a different arrangement.

Holocaust deniers seize on these details to “prove” that survivors haven’t got their facts straight. In addition, while pretending to deny the horrors of the Holocaust, they are actually quite fascinated with it, and research it intensely. That’s because these anti-Semites and neo-Nazis want to be linked, even if remotely, to the actual Nazis.

That makes the keyboard commandos in mommy’s basement suddenly capable, even if only for the hours they’re on their computer, members of the SS. They can – at least in their own minds – strut down the main street of their home town in that shiny black uniform, brandishing a bullwhip, bottle of booze, and a blonde, dispensing bonhomie and brutality as they go.

Anyway, Jan van Pelt’s defense of Ms. Bimko played well with the judge. It also played well with Professor Lipstadt. President Carter appointed Ms. Bimko to the US Holocaust Council. She was present when the designer of the Holocaust Museum in Washington – a must-see – showed off the plans that would make visitors walk through an actual boxcar that delivered prisoners to Auschwitz.

Ms. Bimko catapulted to her feet and declared in no uncertain terms that nothing on Earth could compel her to enter a boxcar like that ever again. Embarrassed faces all around. The display area was re-designed. When it was opened, and ever since, visitors can walk around the boxcar.

If anyone is wondering, I walk through it. I have to. I have no doubt that my relatives rode in that very car or one just like it, to their deaths.

Anyway, despite the truth and facts of Ms. Bimko’s statement, Irving wasn’t satisfied. He called her statement “a bit of spice,” and bemoaned the “unfortunates” who were hanged on the basis of her testimony.

That annoyed Professor Lipstadt and angers me. Among the “unfortunates” who got the rope from Ms. Bimko’s testimony was Josef Kramer.

Josef Kramer is forgotten now, which is almost as it deserves, because he was known to his prisoners at Belsen concentration camp as the “Beast of Belsen.” As an SS Hauptsturmfuehrer (Captain), he oversaw the gassings at Auswchitz from May to November 1944. In December, he took over Belsen, a camp to which we have been introduced.

When my relatives and their fellow Tommies in the 11^th Armoured Division liberated the camp in 1945, they were flattened by the sight and stench, as I discussed. Among the liberating officers was Maj. Brian Urquhart, an intelligence officer who warned his superiors that the 1944 planned airborne invasion of the Netherlands, Operation Market-Garden, was headed for disaster. He was right. He asked for and got a transfer to T-Force, responsible for locating German scientists and military technology.

When he arrived in Belsen, the punctilious Kramer gave the disgusted Urquhart the $5 tour of the camp. After it was over, one of the British officers – it may have been Urquhart – said to Kramer, “When they hang you, I hope you die slowly.”

Five things resulted: First: Kramer did get the rope. Albert Pierrepoint, the legendary British hangman, did the honors in Hamelin after verdict. Second, British actor Timothy Spall (seen in Harry Potter movies) played Pierrepoint in a film on the hangman. Third, Mr. Spall also played David Irving in a movie about the trial I am writing about. Fourth, Urquhart was so upset by what he saw that he dedicated his life to peacekeeping efforts at the United Nations, earning high positions in the organization, going into the field to end civil and other wars. Urquhart was even kidnapped by Kantanga rebels, brutally beaten, and nearly killed. He was made a Knight Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George in 2006, died in 2021 at age 101, and his wife died the next day.

Fifth, none of this material had any impact on Irving, who seemed to regard Kramer as a victim, not a sadist.

Anyway, Irving now got to the main point of the entire trial for him, the 1943 design and 2000 condition of Crematorium 2. It was nearly 4 p.m., closing time.

Jan van Pelt explained the building’s design. It had four holes in its roof. At an appointed time, an SS officer in a gas mask would drop Zyklon B pellets into a wire-mesh column, close the cover, and wait for the poison to do its job.

Irving threw back his shoulders, looked up from his papers, and loudly asked, “Professor van Pelt, we are wasting our time really, are we not? There were never any holes in the roof. There are no holes in that roof today. There were never four holes in that roof. They cannot have poured cyanide capsules through that roof. The concrete evidence is still there. You yourself have stood on that roof and looked for those holes and not found them. Our experts have stood on that roof and not found them. The holes were never there. What do you have to say to that?”

Van Pelt answered, “I would just say why do we not put up the picture of the roof and look at the roof in the present condition? The roof is a mess. The roof is absolutely a mess. A large part of the roof is in fragments. The concrete has many different colors. You pretend that you are talking about a piece, which is intact. It is not.”

Irving turned to the judge, with only minutes left: “My Lord, you may apprehend that the trap is now sprung and it would be a pity to put the mouse back in its cage.”

“The trap is what you have just asked?” Judge Gray responded.

“Precisely it, my Lord. There are no holes in that roof. There were never any holes in that roof. All the eyewitnesses of whom he relies are therefore exposed as liars,” Irving said.

“I am just identifying the trap,” Gray said.

“Now, if I am sitting in the trap I will take a little longer to look for the information, because…” Jan van Pelt said. At least he saw the humor in the bizarre situation.

“Take as long as you like,” Irving said.

“I prefer to remain in the trap and eat the cheese while it lasts!” Jan van Pelt continued.

He found the page and told the court that after gassings ended in fall 1944, the equipment was removed as well. The SS had poured concrete into the holes. It was part of the Auschwitz staff’s effort to destroy the camp and its records, all of which were prima facie evidence in inevitable war crimes trials.

Irving sneered, “Some SS Rottenfuehrer has been given the rotten job of getting up there with a bucket and spade and cementing in those four holes, in case after we have blown up the building they show?”

“I would like to point out that the gas chamber was removed in November 1944,” Jan van Pelt said.

Irving had sprung his trap, but had little time to capitalize on it, as the day’s session was ending in a few minutes. No matter. He was playing to the media as much as the judge. He declared that as the holes did not exist, anyone who said they did were liars, mass exterminations did not take place at Auschwitz, Hitler was a rather decent chap, and Irving had indeed been libeled.

It was dreadful for Professor Lipstadt to take. She was concerned that the judge would be moved by this, as well as the press. Anthony Julius said to her, “It doesn’t matter. It’s one day’s testimony. The judge won’t be affected by it. And the press really doesn’t matter.”

However, next morning, Professor Lipstadt found that it mattered to the media, which once again showed that understanding history is not a job requirement for a reporting job, unless you’re covering the White House, 10 Downing Street, or the Kremlin.

The same thing is true of science, which is why science is so badly covered. Reporters just want to know if there’s really alien life, and if those UFOs are mutilating cattle at Area 51 in return for giving us iPhones. After all, space aliens MUST have built the Pyramids, the Easter Island statues, the Nazca lines, and the Woolworth Building.

The Times headlined “Irving Disputes ‘Lurid’ Atrocity Stories.” The BBC said that eyewitness evidence had been “totally demolished.” It added that Irving “blows holes in the whole gas chamber story.” Only the Guardian backed Jan van Pelt, saying, “Author Tells of Massive Proof for Gas Chambers.

After reading all this the following morning, Professor Lipstadt followed the good advice of Deuteronomy 4:9, which says, “Above all, take utmost care and scrupulously watch out for yourself.” She hit the treadmill and lifted weights. I don’t think Deuteronomy knew about cardio programs, but he would approve.

In court, Irving promised that no more traps would be spring. “I am sure the Professor will appreciate advance notification,” Irving said. “There are no more hidden booby-traps or mines.”

Anyway, Irving continued his attack. Jan van Pelt cited American reconnaissance air photographs of Auschwitz taken from the belly of a B-17 or B-24 in 1944, which clearly showed the holes.

When such photographs were analyzed at RAF Medmenham at the time, the photo-interpreters had no idea of how the Holocaust was operating. However, they did understand military behavior and parlance. A line of bodies all headed together in the same direction was an army “chow line.” However, the line of bodies all headed together in the same direction at Auschwitz were actually Jews headed to their deaths.

The Medmenham analysts at that time included Sarah Churchill Oliver, the Prime Minister’s daughter, and an Army Captain named Derek van den Bogaerde. Charming, elegant, with good looks, he did photo-interpretation work at Medmenham, saying later, “I loved the detail, the intense concentration, the working out of problems, the searching for clues, and above all, the memorizing.” Bogaerde worked on the planning for Field Marshal Montgomery’s Operation Market-Garden, his airborne invasion of The Netherlands, in September 1944. Once Monty hurled three divisions of paratroopers into combat, Bogaerde and his team were near the front, and he had a box seat for the dreadful battle, losing numbers of friends.

Bogaerde’s boss was a lean, hawk-like Guardsman who had founded the British airborne forces, Lt. Gen. Sir Frederick Browning. This is relevant because after the war, Bogaerde anglicized his name to Dirk Bogarde, and became one of Britain’s most popular actors for the next three decades.

In 1976, Bogarde played his old boss, Gen. Browning, in the star-heavy movie “A Bridge Too Far,” about Market-Garden. The Browning family complained bitterly that Bogarde got Browning wrong, making him the villain of the movie, trying to get the operation started, even though it was a colossal blunder, and not making him as tough as the real general.

For those who care, when the real general’s glider landed on the Dutch-German border, Browning dashed out of it under German fire, ran over to the fence, and took a whiz. He told his glider pilot he wanted to be the first Allied general to urinate in Germany. Once his jeep was unloaded and his flag tied to it, Browning drove off under German fire, showing the British officer’s contempt for the enemy.

Browning’s family begged his later wartime boss, Earl Mountbatten of Burma, not to attend the film’s London premiere, in protest, but Dickie Mountbatten went anyway…Browning had been his chief of staff at the end of the war, and proceeds from the premiere were going to a veteran-related charity.

However, there’s a scene in the movie where an Irish actor playing Brian Urquhart (he was an intelligence officer under Browning) shows Bogarde reconnaissance photographs of parked German tanks near Arnhem. Bogarde/Browning walks up to the projections to evaluate them. In short, Bogarde does his old job. Art imitates life.

However, neither Bogarde nor Sarah Churchill studied those photos. They were overwhelmed with shots of German camps across Poland. They were put away until 1979, when the CIA found them during some routine housekeeping.

Anyway, back in court, Irving claimed that the negatives and photos had been altered. Jan ban Pelt said that Nevin Bryant, the supervisor of cartographic and image processing at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, who enhanced the photos for the trial, had found no alterations.

Irving suggested the photos of the holes were shadows.

Jan van Pelt cited drawings by a Sonderkommando named David Olère, who survived Auschwitz and sketched the gas chambers. These sketches were fully corroborated by the plans in the Auschwitz Central Construction Office and the aerial photos.

Irving suggested the sketches could have been influenced by photographs that were “splashed all over the press.” Jan van Pelt asked Irving to prove that canard. He couldn’t. So he kept going.

Irving asked if Olère had “a prurient interest in the female form?” Jan van Pelt couldn’t believe his ears.

“In almost every single one of these pictures he has drawn…there are naked women full frontal…and there is no reason whatsoever that he should have made these pictures in that way unless he intended to sell them. Is it likely that nearly all the female who became victims of the bestialities of the Nazis in Auschwitz were nubile, young, and attractive?” Irving asked.

Jan van Pelt’s face reddened with anger. “No, it is not very likely.” A stunned Professor Lipstadt looked at her copy of the pictures, realized what she was dong, and shut the file.

I wondered what Irving was trying to insinuate, project, or suggest in that line of questioning. I guess he was trying to suggest that Olère was a perverted pornographer, trying to capitalize on human tragedy.

Actually, Nazis, presumably lacking loving relationships with real women that do not involve commercial transactions, are heavily into pornography, worshipping the non-existent pure-blooded Aryan goddess, who is supposed to cook brilliant sausages in the kitchen, be a maid in the living room, a nanny in the nursery, and a tart in the bedroom.

Irving stated that Holocaust scholars like Jan van Pelt “have not bothered to scrape off the rubble on the top to look for the evidence on top of the holes. They have not bothered to make any kind of survey clearing aside this brick mess underneath, digging deeper in, looking for evidence that these holes exist. Frankly, my Lord, I cannot accept the notion that the Nazis, in the last frantic days when we heard yesterday they were in a blue funk, blowing up buildings, taking out the equipment, dismantling everything nut and bolt, that they would have gone round with a bucket of cement filling in the holes of the buildings they were about to dynamite.”

Jan van Pelt had trouble keeping his temper. So did a British journalist in the courtroom, James Dalrymple, covering the trial for the Independent. Dalrymple wrote: “At the lunchtime interval, wandering the court buildings and trying to come to terms with what I was seeing and hearing, I felt like a man in some kind of Kafkaesque dream. What was going on here? Was this some kind of grotesque Monty Python episode? Everybody seemed to be in such good spirits. As if they were taking part in some kind of historical parlor game. Spot the gas chamber for 20 points.”

Judge Gray wasn’t happy with the situation, either. Once again, Irving was wasting the witness’s and the court’s time on tiny little points about whether or not the gas chambers at Auschwitz were designed to kill millions and did so, rather than addressing the big question – had Professor Lipstadt’s book defamed him.

Now Irving was trying to prove that the Auschwitz gas chambers were delousing or disinfecting chambers, based on a report he presented, from an architect who was anonymous architect. Irving was keeping the man’s name out of court, supposedly to prevent retaliation. I think it was because the man was as much an actual architect as I’m a giant blue chicken.

Judge Gray put a stop to this time-wasting quibbling, asking, “Are you accepting it was a gas chamber in the sense that it had the facility for gas to be inserted by whatever means, but contending that humans were never killed by gas in that chamber?”

Irving agreed, but insisted that the chamber was not used for the mass killing of humans by gas. Judge Gray and Irving went back and forth on this surreal point, with Irving sticking to his assertion.

Now Jan van Pelt was ready to shoot back at Irving, doing so with slides of the crematoria and its blueprints. Unfortunately for him, the courtroom had no projector. As Jack Hawkins said so well in “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” “There is always one more thing.”

Delayed by technology, Irving resumed trying to nibble at Jan van Pelt, discussing the “tool of revenge.” That “tool” was the anonymous architect’s report, which critiqued Jan van Pelt’s report’s section about the corpse elevator.

The architect to be named later claimed that the elevator used to haul corpses out of the crematoria had a capacity of 200 kilograms, and therefore could not carry large numbers of people – living or dead – up to the furnaces.

Jan van Pelt wrote that the information the anonymous architect had given was wrong. The elevator’s capacity could handle up to 1,500 kilograms.

Irving sneered, “You appreciate, do you not, that that lift shaft was the bottleneck through which all the victims of the Holocaust had to go, if we follow the standard version?
          Uh, no. “I think that most of the victims in the Holocaust died outside Auschwitz,” Jan van Pelt answered.

“These 500,000 you talk about?” Irving continued.

“These people who went through that lift, that would have been a bottleneck between gassing and incineration,” Jan van Pelt said.

He was trying to make it clear, at least to the judge, that the only bottleneck was how quickly the Sonderkommandos could incinerate bodies in those ovens.

A note for the reader: Sonderkommandos were prisoners who burned the corpses. After they did this horrible job often enough, they got the gas chamber themselves. That kept them from being in a position to survive and talk.

However, Irving won his point. Judge Gray accepted the 1,500-kilo capacity and asked Jan van Pelt how many corpses that lift could carry. About 20 to 25 was the answer.

Irving had the usual contemptuous response: “The same question of course is how many people you can pack into a telephone box, but packing them in takes time. It would be difficult to envisage having a working lift system with people piled four or five or six or seven high, because quite simply the doors would not close.”

Jan van Pelt had another properly-researched answer for that. “There were no doors. It was simply a platform which went up and down.”

Irving sniffed, “That would be worse then. The bodies would presumably get jammed against the side of the lift shaft if they piled them too high. I am just looking at practicalities here, that although technically the final version of the lift, and I emphasize that, was going to have the 1,500 kilogram capacity, in theory, when was that lift actually installed?”

Jan van Pelt responded that when the building was finished, it had a lift capacity of 750 kilos and the camp’s bosses asked for it to be doubled to 1,500.

Irving demanded to know how long it would take this elevator to make a round-trip, doing a “back-of-an-envelope” calculation and the best Jan van Pelt was suggest 10 minutes.

After that, everyone was done for the day. Rampton gave a ruminating Professor Lipstadt a pat on the shoulder. Jan van Pelt felt disgust and anxiety. I don’t feel like going to Irving’s web page to share how he felt.

Dalrymple, however, wrote a memorable reaction in Sunday’s Independent.

“Irving gave him 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 knows the value of a strong phrase, and the silence in Courtroom 73 seemed to deepen as he said it. We all knew this was coming. Even the judge murmured that he could see where this was leading. How could 500,000 bodies – the number estimated to have died in that crematorium – be transported up a single lift-shaft, only about nine feet square. Irving demanded that van Pelt now 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 on 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.

“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.”