Robert Jan van Pelt

An award-winning historian recounts the libel trial in which he supplied evidence proving Auschwitz was a Holocaust death camp.

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, 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.

“The bulk of the book is the methodical and chilling presentation of materials presented at the trial . . . interwoven with Irving's testimony and defense. Van Pelt has arranged an enormous amount of complex material succinctly and to great effect. Read as a whole, the book is a stunning courtroom drama and a vital document of historical evidence. This is an important addition to Holocaust literature and 20th-century history.” ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Worth reading for its explanation of how and why Auschwitz became central in the Irving-Lipstadt trial, as well as why the gas chambers have become so important for Holocaust denial.” ―Jewish Book Council

Indiana University Press

The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial

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