The Nazi Lies Podcast Ep. 7: The Holohoax I: Auschwitz

The Nazi Lies Podcast

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Mike Isaacson: Welcome back to The Nazi Lies Podcast. This episode, we’re lucky enough to have Robert Jan Van Pelt, Architectural Historian at the University of Waterloo and chief curator of the traveling Holocaust exhibit Auschwitz: Not Long Ago, Not Far Away. He’s the author of several books including Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present and The Case for Auschwitz where he specifically takes on Holocaust deniers or as he calls them negationists. Thanks for coming on the podcast Dr. Van Pelt.

Robert Jan Van Pelt: Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here with you today.

Mike Isaacson: Thank you. So today, we're lucky enough to have a guest who's actually familiar with the Nazi lies he's debunking. So his book, The Case for Auschwitz, documents the testimony in the David Irving libel trial. So before we discuss who they are, why do you call them negationists?

Robert Jan Van Pelt: The term was actually coined in the mid-19th century by a Scottish philosopher, his name is Patrick Edward Dove, in a book called The Logic of the Christian Faith. And basically, he refers to negationist as a German idealist like Immanuel Kant or Wilhelm Fried Hegel, who basically said that physical reality doesn't exist, or at least it's not relevant, that everything is in the mind. And so he talks about them as people who are negating, who are denying, actually the existence of the world as we experience it every day. And so, the term has a philosophical background, but in the 19, late 1980s, early 1990s, it became to be applied by a number of philosophers both in France and also in the United States-- Thomas Nagel is one-- to people who we normally call Holocaust deniers. Now, when I got involved in the struggle against Holocaust denier, so negationist, I was intrigued by, let's call it the philosophical aspects of this whole thing. You can of course say, these are all crazy people or they're bad people, they're anti Semite, blah, blah, blah. All of these guys passed judgment on it. But I was always fascinated by what it takes to actually deny reality. And of course, today, when we're in the middle of many denials that are around; from vaccine denial to COVID denial to climate denial and so on, I think that one of the interesting aspects of Holocaust denial is that it was a trial run that occurred in the 1980s 1990s of actually what we're seeing today. Trial, almost like a laboratory experiment, of how do people deny, what does it take to deny, what actually does it take to actually establish reality in a narrative?

And so when I was asked to join the case, the defense team of Deborah Lipstadt who was being sued by David Irving, a English Holocaust denier, for libel in a British court, I basically took a year off of sabbatical to basically research this phenomenon. I very much went back also to the great what we might call epistemological questions, the questions of how do we know what we know? And going back to 17th century philosophers who talk about skepticism, can we have radical skepticism, under what conditions can we actually challenge a particular motion, when is it okay to accept something going back to legal theory? When actually do we have enough certainty to convict a man or a woman and chop his or her head off? Questions about negotiating a world in which in principle, we can always say, I don't believe this, I don't believe that. But then if we never have any certainty about anything, that we really cannot move forward, either individually or collectively. So I was interested in those questions. So in my choice of the term negationist, I in some way, try to show that larger context in which I was operating. And also, I wanted to connect back to a discourse, an argument that had been made first in the 1950s, by the Jewish German and later American philosopher, Hannah Arendt, who in 1941, ends up in New York after having fled from a German concentration camp or a French concentration camp controlled by Germans. And in a very famous book called The Origins of Totalitarianism, she basically says that one of the central characteristics of fascism, that is also national socialism, and she also puts it totalitarian communism in the statement, is that they basically attempt to acquire control over people and are successful in it for a considerable time, at least, they were in the 1920s and 30s, and 40s, by shaking the belief of people that they actually can understand reality to make everything into a question mark. And of course, in English, we have the term gaslighting for that. This idea is that nothing is sorted anymore. And so when people are put in a position in which everything might be a lie, ever say might be just a fiction, then in some way they become, as she said, the perfect raw material for a fascist state. And so again, by moving the focus a little bit away from the denial of the Holocaust, per se, to denial of reality, I thought that my work might have a somewhat larger relevance.

Mike Isaacson: Okay, so now on to the negationists, who are these people that we're talking about?

Robert Jan Van Pelt: Now, they're not the people who one would expect. If we talk about common parlance Holocaust about negationists who denied the Holocaust, one would first expect that the people who would have denied the Holocaust were Germans who were involved in the Holocaust, and who found themselves in front of allied courts after the war, and who were pleading for their lives. Now, they did plead for their lives, of course, but they didn't say that the Holocaust didn't happen, and hence, they were not guilty of any involvement in the Holocaust, like the shooting of two civilians, or putting them on transports to death camps, and so on. What they said, yes, it happened but that I only had a very minor role in it, or I wasn't there, or you really got the wrong man. So generally in the 1940s, and the 1950s, when these trials happened, and even later, the 1960s, the general statement of these perpetrators was, yes, it happened but it happens to be that I had no role in it or that my role was not that important. When we talk about Holocaust deniers, we have a different phenomenon. They actually say that it never happened, that it's all a fiction, that it is all basically created, in the case of Irving by the British Secret Service as a piece of war propaganda in the 1940s, during the war, and that it was basically a piece of atrocity propaganda, and that this atrocity propaganda got a second life after the war. Now, then the question is, who are the people who basically are carrying that message? And it's a very kind of motley crew, they are people from different backgrounds and I've always found this very interesting. When we look at the 1950s at the first Holocaust deniers, they actually come from the extreme left. And they come out of a particular French situation, many of them are Frenchmen. And the denial itself in the beginning isn't that much related to the Holocaust, but it is actually related to the Soviet concentration camps. The Soviet Union was in the 1930s, the 1920s and 30s, and also the 1940s. Of course, for many communists in France, and also elsewhere, it was utopia realized, especially after 1941, when the Red Army had an incredibly important role in ultimately crushing the Third Reich and defeating Marxism. In 1945, the Soviet Union was seen by many in the West as a heroic nation, a nation that that could be credited, and rightly so, with an incredible contribution to the defeat of Hitler. Many people say that around 90% of all of the soldiers who died in the second world war on the Allied side were Soviet soldiers. And so in 1945, and 46, in France, communism was a very popular political choice. It was a choice that expressed gratitude of people who were anti fascists, and rightly so, for the achievement of the Soviet Union. And it showed the promise of a new world. What happened was that, in the late 1940s, stories started to circulate about the good luck. That, in fact, the old system of camps that had existed at Sarris times and then also later in the 1930s, had not disappeared. And a Soviet defector came to the United States and started basically giving an account of all the Soviet camps, his name was Kravchenko. And many communists, especially in France, said, this is all made up, they don't exist, these concentration camps don't exist. They are a piece of CIA propaganda, because of course, it took place during the Cold War. And it very much served American propaganda interests to show that the Soviet Union, especially Europe, that the Soviet Union was a horrible state that nobody ever should vote communist. And so the discourse of a concentration camp system being a complete fiction, created, in this case by a malicious agent, that is the CIA, began in France. And then it didn't take that much at a certain moment for in hindsight, or in a second interpretation of this discourse for the concentration camp system to become the German concentration camp system, that this was as much a fiction as the Gulag was, or had been as much of fiction that the survivors were liars, so that had been created by Allied propaganda. And once that was set in motion, that idea, you get a number of people who, for different reasons, start to become members of that in-group, members of a group of people who are interested in working out in some way that narrative that denies first a concentration camp system. And a number of them were actually concentration camp survivors, interestingly enough, most important one, French Michael [unintelligible 13:45:12], who had been in a concentration camp as an inmate, but he had never seen anything that resembled gas chambers and crematoria. And he said, "The camps were bad, but certainly they were not extermination machines, they were not factories of death, of murder." And then you've get a sociological phenomenon of groups of people who bond over this common course, and attract then, in the 1970s, what I would call the intellectuals, a number of people who could join this movement, especially in France again. So it doesn't start in Germany, it starts in France. And the most important of men who in some way then starts to supply a theory and a whole body of work is a professor of literature, whose name is Robert Faurisson and who teaches literary theory at the University of Lille in France.

Mike Isaacson: There were some other names in your book that you gave, you gave Arthur Butz. Who else? There was a guy...Staglich?

Robert Jan Van Pelt: I would say there are many people who will start to make a contribution. I worked with Errol Morris on a movie, Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred Leuchter, Jr. and we were discussing and making the movie, and actually I'm quoted in the movie, how do these people get together? What is their motivation? And I said, "Some way it is like a club because like the rotary club or the Freemasonry, you get into it, you don't really know what you're getting into it. But once you get into it, you get really committed to it because it becomes part of your social life." Arthur Butz, professor of electrical engineering at Northwestern University, got interested. People get interested in the argument, they get interested in the nuts and bolts of the series. You have many buffs, you have many people who are interested in history, and their history buffs. And what makes a history buff, at a certain moment, different from a historian, is that a history buff always focuses on the detail and gets completely fascinated by the detail. And that can be a detail of the uniform, of the correct uniform of a civil war and actor. And of course, there are many of them in the United States, and that's all perfectly innocent. But sometimes there are history buffs who get focused on a detail like Sherlock Holmes. They see themselves as a Sherlock Holmes, and they think that there is a hidden reality that is not being stated, that is being hidden from the world. And that by focusing on the detail in the way that Sherlock Holmes does that in his of course, fictional investigations, that is, in some way, the way to the truth. And it has to do to with the CSI effect, which is idea of the fact that history can be recovered, can be, in some way, unveiled by the study of a detail. And of course, that makes incredibly good television. So a person like Butz, I think, gets interested in all kinds of what seemed to be very obscure details of the accounts of for example, the gas chambers or the crematoria is very suspicious, doesn't believe that the reality as told is really reality as it happened. And then gets interested in analyzing these details in such a way that this whole new world in some way is revealed once the detail is unmasked as a lie. And so it takes a certain mindset of people who in some way fall for the myth of Sherlock Holmes, or want to be Sherlock Holmes, but of course that is not normally the way that reality can be discovered even not, I would say in a criminal investigation.

Mike Isaacson: Okay, so now let's talk about Auschwitz. Why Auschwitz? What about Auschwitz makes it command some attention?

Robert Jan Van Pelt: So it commands a lot of attention, both for Holocaust deniers, they focus most of their attacks on the evidence of Auschwitz. But also, they do that because in some way many Holocaust story and some people who think about the Holocaust, if you hear the word Holocaust, and you ask an ordinary person in the street, does any name come to mind when you hear the word Holocaust of the place? Most people will say Auschwitz. In 1945, in the west, in Europe, they probably would have said American Belton. But since the 1970s, that is certainly Auschwitz. And there are very legitimate reasons for that. And I can just name a few of them. The first is that Auschwitz is the single largest place where Jews were massacred not only Jews, but also separatists normally, or Soviet prisoners of war. Also, other victims group in the Holocaust, one could say, and of course, also Polish non-Jewish patriots who were murdered there. Now, if we just accept for a moment to rough estimate of 6 million Jews victims of the Holocaust, then 1 million of them were murdered in Auschwitz. So that's the first thing. It is the largest of the extermination camps, the second largest Treblinka had a death toll of around 850,000, and then it goes down. So it is the biggest. The second, which is very important, is that Auschwitz is a place for which victims came from all over Europe. So, quite often, extermination camps that were very important in the Holocaust, and I give one example, Belzec that had 550,000 victims, but Belzec which was at that time in eastern Poland, it's still in eastern Poland today, it had a reasonable function. The victims came from around 200 miles 150 miles from around Belzec. It was a very densely settled area with Jews. Traditionally, it was the heartland of the Jews, around Lviv today in the Ukraine. But Auschwitz had victims coming from all over Europe, from Greece, from France, from the Netherlands, from Germany, from Italy, from Poland, and so on. So basically, when we talk about the Holocaust as a pan-European phenomenon, something that touched almost every European nation, that was either occupied or ruled by Germany. Then Auschwitz talks about that pan-European dimension of the Holocaust. The third thing is that Auschwitz is unique in that it doesn't have only gas chambers, and the word homicidal or genocidal gas chambers in Belzec, in Treblinka and Sobibor, in Majdanek and Kamno, but the gas chambers were actually part of crematoria. There were buildings in which the victims were brought into the building, they were then murdered in the gas chamber and their corpses were incinerated in that very same building. And you did not have that combination in the other camps, that is that if you have gas chambers in Treblinka, then after the murder, the corpses of the victims were taken out of those gas chambers and originally they were buried to mass graves, and later the bodies were incinerated on open pyres. So, what happens when you get a gas chamber that is in a building that has very complicated ovens, I mean ovens in the case of crematoria two and three that have the incineration capacity of almost 1500 corpses per day, you get actually a very complex building. Architects get involved, engineers get involved, a lot of money gets involved, because the buildings need to be constructed. Which means also that there is going to be a lot of evidence. We have no designs for the gas chambers in Treblinka, they didn't survive, they probably were drawn up on the proverbial back of an envelope or on a napkin. This is how architects quite conceive of their projects. But in the case of Auschwitz, because these were expensive buildings, it took time to build, they took resources, financial and also in building materials, there's a lot of evidence about that. And in this case, also, that's important, because when you have to commit a lot of resources in a crime, the crime of genocide, then it becomes very clear that it's intentional. And just to go back for a moment, in 1941 or 42, around 2 million Russian Jews were murdered in the then occupied Soviet Union, that would be today's Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic countries mainly, and a little bit of today's Russia also. They were murdered with men having rifles, by execution platoons, and so on. But those machine guns and those rifles had not been created to murder civilians, they had been created to be used in battle.

So in that case, if you go to the smoking gun in those massacres, those killings, like the one in BabynYa in Kiev, that 80th anniversary will be happening in two months in the beginning of October, then you have the smoking gun, so to speak, you never can say this gun was actually made for the purpose of killing civilians. But if you go to a homicidal gas chamber in Auschwitz, and then you basically see it in relationship to the crematoriums that are in the same building, it's very easy to move the corpses from the gas chambers to that crematorium often, then basically, you have an installation that can only make sense in terms of a genocide, in terms of killing innocent civilians, civilians who cannot resist. Those gas chambers have no possible imaginable role in a battle. Now, you cannot, in some way, trick armed soldiers to go into a gas chamber and then you close the door and you bring in the gas. So in the case of Auschwitz, the fact that we have these very sophisticated expensive buildings that basically can only be explained from the perspective of genocide, actually, of which there were two is very important because the Auschwitz crematory and gas chambers are undeniable in that sense, as tools of genocide. And then the last reason is that actually, there's still a lot of stuff left enough. It's not only in terms of ruins, the ruins of this crematoria, but also there is a lot of paperwork preserved in the archives. And then finally, unlike these other camps, these extermination camps, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec, Belzec had only two survivors, extremely effective extermination camp. Sobibor around 250, Treblinka around 200, but around 100,000, people actually left Auschwitz alive. Because Auschwitz was not only an extermination camp, but it was also a slave labor camp. And so this is why you have in Auschwitz, these selections upon arrival of the Jews where basically those who can't work are sent immediately to the gas chambers. And those who can work are basically worked to death or until they are moved somewhere else. And so what you have in the case of Auschwitz is enormous amount of eyewitness evidence. Not necessarily what happens right inside the gas chamber, it's impossible to have eyewitness evidence of that in a squared nature of the killing in the gas chamber, but eyewitness evidence of these buildings, the chimneys, the smoke. And then also in the case of the two slave workers that worked in the crematoria. A lot of eyewitness evidence was produced by them after the war, there were enough survivors of them to give evidence immediately after the war. And even a number of them had some good abilities to draw what they had seen. So there's also drawn evidence. So all in all, Auschwitz is in some way the crown jewel, in a sense, in the case that the Holocaust did happen, because of the nature of the evidence and the amount of the evidence that we have about the place. And that is exactly the reason that Holocaust deniers or negationists attack Auschwitz, because they want to attack that evidence.

Mike Isaacson: So Irving's principle claim is that far fewer people die at Auschwitz in the Holocaust in general, than is the general consensus among historians. So you mentioned that a million people died at Auschwitz. How did we arrive at that number?

Robert Jan Van Pelt: The number has evolved over time. And that actually is one of the reasons that in about 1990, the Holocaust deniers said you can never trust any number. When the Soviet, the Red Army, arrived on the 27th of January 1945 in Auschwitz, they had to make an informed guess immediately about a number of people that had been murdered in Auschwitz. And their first guess was around 5 million. And they didn't define who these people were. These were citizens of European nationals, they said. The Soviets were always very hesitant to actually divide the victims into groups. These were 5 million troops or 1 million troops, whatever like that, they never really wanted to go in there. They didn't want to separate the troops out. Then, the first forensic committee that was working there, reduced it to 4 million on the basis of almost no extra evidence, basically talking about the cremation capacity of the ovens. And said the ovens would have cremated so many bodies per day, these ovens existed in these four buildings for so many days, we assume that they were in operation 80% of the time, so they came to 4 million. Already at that time, basically, Jewish demographer said this is impossible. And they basically put the number closer to 1.5 million. They said, "Where would all those people have come from?" And in 1946, Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz from 1940 to 1943, he was then relieved of his duty, was arrested and ultimately tried. He testified first in Nuremberg as a witness and then was tried in Poland. And he wrote his memoirs while he was in prison before he was executed. And he also testified, he said, "The 4 million figure is absolutely obtainable. My calculations are that we murdered around 1.1 million people in Auschwitz during my reign as commandant." So he didn't have the whole period, but he had long enough. And by implication, if we then also take the murder rates during the time of his successor, this would have meant that the total number that he would agree to as a commandant, as a witness, as a person around the place, around 1.6 million. And he gave a detailed accounting of where those victims would have come from. He said, "The only way that you can really look at it, is to look at the transports. Which transports of Jews arrived in Auschwitz, at what time, how many people were in each transport, and how many of the transport were killed on arrival. And so there were really two numbers by, let's say, 1950. The first number was based on Hoess' testimony. And that was somewhere one and a half million. And then the second number was the official number that was fixed by the Russians. It was the Cold War. Of course Auschwitz was in Poland, it was being ruled by the communists. That was the official number of 4 million, but it didn't give any details of where those 4 million people would have come from. And so at the memorial in Auschwitz in the 1950s 60s 70s, and 80s, that said, 4 million people were murdered here, but it didn't give a breakdown of that number. However, at the Auschwitz Museum, which was a very professional Museum, it is basically the organization, the institution that preserves the Auschwitz site, it's a Poland State Museum, the historical department had already started to work on a detailed analysis of transports, and of course, the Germans had destroyed much of the evidence, and they had to come to the conclusion that the total number of people who had been deported to Auschwitz was 1.3 million. And the total of number of people that had been murdered in Auschwitz was 1.1 million. And that number still stands, by and large. When they used to say murdered in Auschwitz, the question is how? Because even if you were to say, "Okay, we accept the figure, 1.1 million people died in Auschwitz." then the question, of course, remains did they die of natural deaths or that were they actually murdered? People died in Auschwitz in all different ways. People were murdered in gas chambers. Majority of people were murdered as they did slave labor, they were beaten to death on the site by overseers. People were murdered during torture sessions in the camp, the [unintelligible 33:37:22], people were murdered when they were ill, when they were seen that they could work anymore, they were given an injection in the heart, which was poison. But also people died as a result of infectious diseases, for example, typhus, or they died as a result of starvation. And so the question now is, how did people die? And can we "blame" the Germans for all of those deaths? So one of the things that deniers like Irving did early on, is to say, "Okay, we accept that Auschwitz and also other camps are really deadly places. But almost everyone died as a result of typhus, as infectious diseases." And we might say that the Germans were not acting wisely by bringing so many people together in the place. But ultimately, typhus happens also in other places. So we can't really say that the deaths as a result of typhus are part of a genocidal programme. They might be more part of mismanagement by the camp, or they are the result and this is actually blaming the allies now, turning the finger to the allies, they are the result of the terrible conditions created in Germany as the result of the Allied bombings. And in that case, the deniers point actually to Bergen-Belsen, which in 1945 was liberated by the British Army. And that became the symbol of the German death camps because of a lot of news, men arrived to the British troops in Bergen-Belsen on the 15th of April 1945. And what you saw in Bergen-Belsen, that camp had never had any gas chambers, they had never had any crematoria. It was, for most of its history, a relatively good camp to be. If you look at all of the options in the German concentration camp system, it was one of the better camps.

But what the Allied soldiers saw in 1945 was the result of the typhus epidemic. And the typhus epidemic, according to Holocaust deniers, was the result basically the disintegration of the German economy and the German system to supply the camps with food and so on. And they ultimately decided if you have to blame anyone for the situation in Bergen-Belsen, these are the Allied bombardments which have destroyed the food and other infrastructure of Germany. And so, this is where many deniers are. They are in this grey zone. What they will say is that, "Okay, we agree that people died, they didn't die because a number of SS men put them in a gas chamber, and then supplied the chamber with cyanide, they died as a result of typhus." And this is in that discourse in the early 1990s, when actually an American historian at Princeton, basically endorsed this vision, his name was Arno Mayer in a book Why did the heavens not darken? that man like Irving was very much encouraged to take the position which he took, which he said, "This is all a big misunderstanding really. Auschwitz was not a good place to be but blame the bacteria, don't blame the Germans."

Mike Isaacson: Okay, so moving along. Robert Faurisson has an infamous line, “No holes, no Holocaust.” So, what does that line mean, and what is the significance of the holes?

Robert Jan Van Pelt: Yeah. So this goes back to the idea of show me the smoking gun, show me the evidence. Now, the two of the major gas chambers in Auschwitz, two of the crematoriums, which were the largest factories of deaths, they were underground gas chambers. And so now the question is, how did the gas enter into the gas chambers? Was it removed after the gassing, but also how did it enter? Now, people hear the word gas, they think that gas would have been pumped into a gas chamber through a system of pipes. But that actually was not the case in these Auschwitz crematoria. The gas that was used in Auschwitz was actually a delousing product, a cyanide delousing project that came in a tip. And it was really to use in ships of the Navy, it was also to use to kill vermin in grain silos because of course, all kinds of vermins would be eating the grain, it would be used on the front in the battlefield to delouse the uniforms of soldiers. Lice is everywhere where we have a lot of people who are camped wash and spent a lot of time together. So, what happened was that in the First World War, the German army had developed a delousing agent, that basically consisted of cyanide and that was commercially marketed since the 1920s. It was liquid cyanide that is soaked in either gypsum like substance or in paper discs. That happens in factory conditions. And then these paper discs or this gypsum full of cyanide is then packed in a tin, ordinary tin like canned tomatoes or something like that. In that tin, the cyanide has a shelf life of over six months. And so those tins can be shipped to whoever ultimately needs delousing job. And then what happens is that if you need to delouse, let's say a tom of clothing, then you put this in a room, seal the room, the windows and so on, and the doors, but keep one door that you can open and close, go into the room with a gas mask, open the tin with an ordinary tin opener, and then throw the contents on the floor, in this case the gypsum or the paper discs with the cyanide in it. What happens is that the cyanide will start to de-gas from the substance in it with a soak. And it will do so for around 24 hours. It de-gases very slowly because it needs not only to destroy the vermin, but also their eggs. And that takes a long time, it takes 24 hours. And immediately after the soldier or the medic has put all of that stuff on the floor, he walks out of the room and then closes the door, tapes the door so that it is sealed, takes off his gas mask and then you have to wait for 24 hours until the degassing has stopped and all of the vermin and the eggs basically are destroyed. This was the way that in Auschwitz, lethal gas was used gas chambers.

Now, the problem with homicidal gas chamber is that you cannot simply put people in a room and then have a medic come in with a gas chamber with a gas mask, and then open a couple of tins, throw the contents on the floor and then walk out. That's not going to work. You need to introduce the gas in a different way. So the construction that the Germans used was that they had holes in the roof. In the case of those crematorium two and three, they had four holes in the roof. And in the first incarnation of a gas chamber, now if it was a crematorium two, they had to open the cover and then they dumped the contents of the tin inside the room. So that fell on top of the people who were crowded in tight room and then they closed the cover again and waited for 24 hours. And then opened the doors and started airing the place until people could come in and take the corpses out. That worked well until daily transport started to arrive of which people needed to be murdered. Now, the problem was the cyclone B as it was being shipped to Auschwitz, that it had this 24 degassing cycle. The degassing is very slow from the material in which the cyanide soaked. And if you're in a hurry, and the SS was formed late 1942 in Auschwitz in a hurry because of the daily arrival of train, so you needed to have the gas chamber available relatively quickly after it had been used and you needed to burn the corpses of the people who had been killed basically within the next 24 hours before the next train arrives with victims, you couldn't afford any more to wait for the 24 hours for the degassing to stop. The moment that everyone was murdered, and that mostly happened after 10 15 minutes, you wanted to basically be able to enter the gas chamber and then start cleaning up the gas chamber. Taking out the corpses you take out the gold off the teeth and so on, and then bring the corpses to the ovens. So the key to that operation was that you now had to remove the still degassing cyclone from the room 15 minutes after you had introduced it. That was the technical problem. And the technical solution was to actually lower now with let's call it a little basket. Put all of the contents of the tin in the basket, lower that basket into the room, basically murder everyone within the first 15 minutes because that's the time it takes with that cyanide concentration, and then hoists the basket out of the room through that same hole in which you have lowered it and discard the still degassing cyclone on the roof of the building. The problem of course, is that if you simply have a dive basket going down into a room, the victims can interfere with it. So the solution to prevent the interference of the victims with that lowering of the cyclone into the room was to create a wire mesh column, a cage around it, so it is lowered in the center of a cage. And the victims can see it. And through the cage, all of the cyclone material, the cyanide can drift into the room, but they cannot actually interfere with it. And so four of those cages existed in crematorium two and the gas chamber in four and crematorium three. The problem in terms of evidence is that we have a lot of eyewitness evidence of these cages, these columns as they're called, these gas columns. We have evidence of the man who made it in 1942, we have evidence of people who worked in those gas chambers, cleaning it up afterwards, and who survived the war. We have evidence even by Rudolf Hoess, but none of these cages survived because they were taken out before the destruction of the crematoria at the time that Auschwitz was evacuated at the end of the war. So first of all, we don't have those cages anymore, those columns.

Second of all, we don't have drawings, we don't have original drawings, we don't have blueprints, because they were added into the building after the building was almost completed. And so Holocaust deniers, and especially Robert Faurisson, have said, "Because you cannot show me those cages, because you cannot show me the original blueprints, they'd never existed." And on top of that, those cages connected to the outside world through a hole because at the top of the cage was a hole and the cyclone was lowered through that hole in the cage. So they said, "If you cannot show me those holes in the concrete roof of the gas chamber, if there are no holes there at the alleged place where they were, then you can never say that actually there was any means of introducing the cyclone into those underground spaces." The problem with such roofs is that they were dynamited at the end of the war by the SS. And so they were destroyed, they're basically in pieces. So, how do you now show into a dynamited concrete slab in which there are many holes? No, the whole steps were purposely created to allow for the introduction of the cyclone. And a friend of mine, the late Harry Marcel, actually solved that problem in the year 2000 at a time of the Irving trial when he went to some forensic archaeological expedition to Auschwitz, and actually was in the case of crematory two, able to locate three of the four holes by looking actually at an important design detail. They said when you create a hole in the concrete slab, you have to do something with the rebar because if a rebar would probably run through that hole in some way, you cannot have that, otherwise the hole doesn't function. So what you do before you pour the concrete, you cut the rebar at the point and you bend to the end of the rebar back 180 degrees. And those kinds of details are still visible in the slab of that covered gas chamber of crematorium two. So in that sense, we have the forensic evidence, the physical material forensic evidence for the existence of those holes.

Mike Isaacson: Okay, another thing I’ve seen negationists take aim at is the lack of insulation on the lights in the gas chambers. So, according to them cyanide is explosive and would have ignited in such a room. So, why is this a lie?

Robert Jan Van Pelt: This the argument might be right, cyanide can be explosive, but the question is what concentration? Chemical substances behave very differently and behave at different concentrations. And the Auschwitz cyanide gas chambers operated at a very low concentration, it doesn't take that much to murder people. It takes around 500 600 parts per million and then you will be dead in 10 minutes. So the argument is derived from high concentration of cyanide into gas chambers. I certainly have not replicated the thing in a lab, so I must say that in this case, I need to lean on the authority of others. But basically, I have been taught that this can be all explained because of the low concentration of cyanide used in the Auschwitz gas chambers.

Mike Isaacson: Right. So one of the strongest pieces of supposed evidence comes from Fred Leuchter, who claimed to have illegally taken a brick from Auschwitz to run some forensic tests. So, what can we say about Leuchter’s tests?

Robert Jan Van Pelt: Now, of course, the strongest piece of supposed evidence that the Auschwitz gas chambers would never use these gas chambers. In 1988, he went to Auschwitz to take samples of the walls of the homicidal gas chambers, and also of the walls of delousing chambers, that used cyclones. And so he did a compare and contrast method. One of the big differences, and in the case of the walls of the homicidal gas chambers, he said there's very little cyanide in there. And in the case of the level of cyanide in the delousing chambers, he said, "When we take samples, there's a very high concentration of cyanide." Now, there were many different problems. First of all, there were problems, this is basic assumptions. And if you go into delousing chambers, you see actually that the walls are blue, that these are originally whitewash walls that became blue. And this is Prussian blue, and it actually indicates the pigment is the result of binding of cyanide molecules with iron, basically the result is ferro ferricyanide, and that creates a blue pigment. Now, why do you get that cyanide deposit in the wall that creates this blue stain? The first reason is typically, in these delousing chambers, cyanide could be used in high concentration, it would be used over a long period of time, that is typically 24 hours at a time and this were also used continuously. And in order for Prussian blue, for ferro ferricyanide to form, it can only form when there is actually a low level of carbon dioxide in the room. And this actually has been replicated forensic labs in Poland. However, when you have a relatively high level of carbon dioxide in the room, as when you have also the cyclone material, the carbon dioxide prevents the formation of this pigment, prevents the binding of the cyanide with the iron atom. And this is why in homicidal gas chambers, you typically will not find this blue pigment, unless that homicidal gas chamber was also used for delousing. So this is one line of explanation. The second thing has to do with the fact that the homicidal gas chambers were basically destroyed. What Leuchter did was take samples of bricks that had been exposed to the elements by the time he came there for 35 years. The plaster that had covered the brick didn't exist anymore. It was very few samples, so that he took actually, the samples from the brick. That brick had not been exposed to cyanide at all because it had been covered by plaster. So the problem is his samples that he took from the homicidal gas chambers is that we actually do not know if they were ever exposed to cyanide because they would have been covered. And also then he took samples, we don't really know how much of the dilution of the sample material. We don't know how deep he went. So none of these things was ever recorded. So ultimately, chemists who have looked at his methods say this has no value whatsoever. This is the most amateurist forensic investigation. And certainly, the argument also of the complete different chemical conditions that exist in a homicidal gas chamber. That is especially because of the high level of carbon dioxide, the results of the breathing of the victims before they die, and the absence of a heightened level of carbon dioxide in delousing gas chambers provide enough evidence to show that Leuchter's results are worse.

Mike Isaacson: Okay, so like I mentioned earlier in the show, you’re the chief curator of Auschwitz: Not Long Ago, Not Far Away. What does Auschwitz have to teach the public today?

Robert Jan Van Pelt: Yeah, there's no simple lesson. Some people will say what hatred can do. I'm a professor in an architecture school, for me, when I talk with my students about places like Auschwitz, I like to look at the macro level, at the role of professionals, of architects of people who get involved in creating these places, and who do this without really asking themselves any questions of what they're making. Or if they ask those questions, who do not really care how things are going to be used. Nowadays, bureaucrats, engineers, all of us, many of us have an incredible amount of power of ability to influence the lives of other people for good or for evil. And, of course, we find it very much right now on a very individual level when we're talking about vaccines, and masking and so on. And, in many ways, for me Auschwitz, it's not a story of a number of evil geniuses who are plotting to create hell on earth, certainly, that was a part of it. Certainly, there are moments in the history of that camp where you can say, "This is one of the major crimes in history that is being planned here." But it's also a story of a hell of a lot of people who with great thoughtlessness get themselves involved in this, and then at a certain moment, don't have the backbone to pull out. And, as a historian, I went into the research of this camp because so much evidence is there, in order to find in some way that diabolical dimension. And in the end, yes, the result is diabolical. But for the rest, I became actually fascinated by the incredible importance of mediocrity, of lies, of people lying to themselves, of where they are and what they're doing. And in that sense, I think that Auschwitz is in many ways, also a good metaphor of the situation we find ourselves in today.

Mike Isaacson: Yeah, I believe Arendt called it the banality of evil, right?

Robert Jan Van Pelt: Evil is not banal. Obviously, evil is not banal, but it's banal dimension to evil. And very few people do bad things because they want to do bad things. But most of us end up doing bad things because we're lazy, because we're intellectually lazy, because we do not basically ask for the truth. Because we're willing to basically make empty slogans into a convenient truth for ourselves so that we do not have to look in the mirror and do have to face very inconvenient facts. And we are right now clearly in many different ways, both climatalogically but also socially and politically on the crossroads. And when you have to make decision on what road you want to go, you have to ask tough questions to yourself. And certainly none of the people who were involved with Auschwitz between 1940 and 45 asked any of those tough questions.

Mike Isaacson: All right, Dr. Van Pelt, thank you so much for coming on the podcast to debunk the Holocaust negationists. To learn more about Auschwitz and its detractors, check out The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial. Thanks again.

Robert Jan Van Pelt: Thanks very much. It was wonderful to be with you.

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