Proving The Truth Behind The Holocaust

[Music] holocaust denial is an assault on memory it's assault on a memory embodied in holocaust survivors there are very few holocaust survivors and especially auschwitz survivors left we are in some way considering what will be the future of holocaust memory without the survivors we're here at the royal ontario museum and we're at the entrance of the evidence room my name is robert john von pelt and i'm a professor at the school of architecture at the university of waterloo the evidence room has its origin in a trial that was held in the year 2000 in england it was a libel trial in which the holocaust denier david irving sued a holocaust historian deborah lipstadt deborah lipstadt had accused david irving of being a falsifier of history a holocaust denier irving decided in 1996 to sue her in a british court irving had converted to holocaust denial in 1988 here in toronto when he attended as a witness the trial of holocaust denier and zundol during this trial a american engineer named fred leuchtter presented evidence that the gas chambers in auschwitz could not have worked the testimony by lorchter in the ur zundel trial had convinced david irving that indeed the holocaust was a lie that if auschwitz had not been an extermination camp that none of the evidence could be trusted about the mass killings of jews in german occupied europe and he became the main propagator in europe but also in north america of the thesis that the holocaust was in fact a ploy first by british intelligence and later by zionists to swindle the germans out of billions of marx and the palestinians out of a homeland i was asked to join this trial and to testify about the evidence about auschwitz i had to show that the evidence presented by leuchtter was basically not worth the paper it was written on and so here we have a model of crematorium number three this is one of the four gas chamber equipped crematoria it consisted of an underground undressing room with the victims and entering at the far end this was a very large room it was over 250 square meters large once the victims were undressed they were herded into a underground gas chamber the underground gas chambers had gas columns through which the gas was introduced in the space and after everyone was killed their corpses were brought into a little elevator which brought the corpses up to the main floor and there were 15 ovens in five triple triple arrangement that could incinerate the corpses in 24 hours now what holocaust deniers say is that these buildings were not really killing machines that yes there are a lot of ovens but that these ovens had the capacity the latch capacity they say they had the 1500 corpses per day to deal with the victims of typhus epidemics [Music] the gas column became in the trial the key piece of evidence that was challenged by irving what were these gas coins the gas came in tints the tins were commercially available tins of the lousing agency called zyklon or cyclone now when the germans started using this product this toxin on human beings they discovered very quickly that when people were exposed to a concentration of around 300 parts per million they would die within 5-10 minutes however the degassing of the cyanide would continue for another 23 and a half hours this was not a problem when you were involved in in occasional killing let's say every week or so but when trains started arriving on a 24-hour basis at auschwitz and the germans wanted to kill people on a 24-hour cycle in which within 24 hours people arrive are selected brought to the undressing room into the gas chamber killed and then their corpses are being incinerated before the next transport arrives the continuous degassing of the pallets of cyclone was a real problem so this is why they created this gas column so this gas column has the purpose not so much of introducing the gas introducing the cyclone into the space but even more importantly to take it out after 15 minutes so that this 24-hour hour cycle of killing and incineration could be maintained then after that the ventilators could be turned on and the zonder commandos the slave workers who had to clean the gas chamber would after 10-15 minutes be able to enter the gas chamber and start the gruesome work of removing the corpses retrieving dental gold and so on and then bring them up to the incinerators now holocaust deniers and also irving have made the existence or non-existence of the columns in some way the key to their argument they say no halls no holocaust and the whole they're referring to are the holes that existed in the concrete roof of the gas chamber through which the central column connected to the outside world when the ss left auschwitz in january 1945 they dynamited the gas chambers and this meant that the roof collapsed on the floor of the gas chamber and we were in the trial able to prove to the satisfaction of the judge that indeed these whole sex existed these purposely made holes that existed in the ruined slab of the uh of that covered the gas chamber one of the pieces we see in this room is a door a gas door this door basically has two sides this is the place that the we call it the perpetrator side and we see here two latches that are used to close the door when the gas table will be brought in operation to close the door after all the victims have been brought in one of the latest moves can be closed and this is the last thing that 2 000 people would have heard before the gas would be introduced now holocaust deniers say that this gas door actually had not a genocidal function that airaid shelters have gas doors because during an air raid one could also have all kinds of toxic gases that are being produced by the bombing and so a normal piece of equipment in a gas in an air raid shelter is a gas type door now why is this not a door for an airaid shelter first of all the question is if you walk into this space that is protected by the door you wouldn't want to be inside with somebody on the outside being able to close the door like this and you would have no means from the inside to open the door again you are going to be locked in always somebody on the outside will have to open the latches to allow the door to open again but when we go to the other side of the door and we look now at the door as it would be from the inside we see also that for an aerated shelter this door would really not have worked the first thing which is very clear is that there is no hint that there is no way on the inside to actually manipulate this door there's no way to open it there's no handle so once you're inside and somebody has closed the door on the outside you're locked in this we call the victim's side of the door people were pushed in this room 10 people per square meter and when the gas was introduced a panic would happen the panic was such that we have eyewitness reports that the victims tried to break the glass of the peephole that was the only agency they still had left in this panic and therefore the germans created this protective half sphere made out of steel over the peephole in some way it is this protective device that in some way gives an indication of the terrible conditions that were inside that gas chamber if the only thing that you can still do is try to break the glass in that people as the gas enters it really means that you have no agency no options whatsoever after a trial that lasted 33 days in court irving was declared the loser by the judge this case was very important because for the first time both holocaust denial and the theories that support holocaust denial as well as the evidence in this case for the killings in auschwitz had been subjected to a judicial review and a judge who presided over the case without the jury had come to the conclusion that the holocaust indeed had taken place and that the key place in the holocaust auschwitz had been an extermination camp in which more than a million people had been killed in gas 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Channel: The Agenda | TVO Today

Views: 418,530

Keywords: The Agenda with Steve Paikin, current affairs, analysis, debate, politics, policy, Holocaust, WWII, Mass Murder, Genocide

Id: InKifJC13s4

Length: 11min 31sec (691 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 01 2017