Irving v. Lipstadt

Irving came to Holocaust denial late, and through the backdoor. In his Hitler's War (1977), he developed the startling theory that while the Holocaust had happened, it had been enacted by Himmler behind Hitler's back and not only without his permission, but even in violation of his express wish that the Jews would be spared. In the original edition of the book, Irving made a number of references to the role of Auschwitz as an extermination camp. Writing about the spring of 1942, Irving stated that the Germans began to round up Jews in France, Holland, Belgium and Slovakia. A few paragraphs later Irving noted in the summer of 1942 Himmler threw the "murder machinery into top gear."   Writing about the Hungarian Action in 1944, when more than 400,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz, Irving noted that "[i]n Auschwitz, the defunct paraphernalia of death--idle since late 1943--began to clank again as the first trainloads from Hungary arrived."828 Yet this time the policy of concealment was to fail. "Himmler's ghastly secret was coming out, for two Slovak Jews had escaped from Auschwitz extermination camp, and their horrifying revelations were published in two reputable Swiss newspapers in early July."829

Hitler's War attracted the attention of Holocaust deniers. In July 1978, John Tiffany, editorial assistant of the Noontide Press (the book-publishing arm of the Institute for Historical Review), wrote Irving that he considered Irving's "tremendous" book a "tour de force," and that therefore the press had ordered a quantity for resale. Tiffany recommended the press's other offerings to Irving's attention, offering him a free copies of The Myth of the Six Million, Butz's Hoax of the 20th Century, and Rassinier's Debunking the Genocide Myth.830 In early 1980 Irving received an invitation from the director of the Institute for Historical Review, Lewis Brandon, to speak at the 1980 Revisionist Conference, which was to be dedicated to the memory of Paul Rassinier.831 Enclosed with the invitation was the programme of the 1979 conference, which included lectures by Arthur Butz, Udo Walendy, and Robert Faurisson.832 Irving hesitated. In his reply, he stated that "I would have to condition my acceptance of your very kind invitation on   knowing who else would participate."

Brandon replied enthusiastically: neither Butz nor Walendy were going to be invited, but Faurisson was mentioned as a back-up speaker. Irving had doubts. He scribbled behind Faurisson's name "on Auschwitz track à le Butz."834 In the end, Irving did not attend the conference.

One of those who did was a certain Mark Weber, who held a master's degree in central European history from Indiana University, and who worked as a freelance translator in the Washington DC area. In the years that followed, he was become one of the central figures on the revisionist scene. Weber was at the time working on a book entitled The Final Solution: Legend and Reality. In a working outline, dated May 1981, Weber proposed a book that was to have as its central thesis: "There was no official German policy to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Six million Jews not killed."835 If completed, the ten chapter book was to provide the most coherent attempt to write a negationist counter-account of the Holocaust. Most importantly, the outline mentioned under the heading Forward {sic!]: "David Irving has conditionally consented to write this."836

While Irving was not (yet) prepared to be too publicallly associated with well-   know Holocaust deniers, he did establish an ungoing commercial relationship with the Institute for Historical Review. The institute became the American distributor of some of Irving's books, and from one thing came another: finally, in 1983, Irving caved in and agreed to attend the by now International Revisionist Conference--sharing the platform with, among others, Robert Faurisson and Wilhlem Stägich.. In his lecture entitled "On Contemporary History and Historiography," Irving presented the thesis he had developed in his Hitler's War. Hitler was "so busy being a soldier that he didn't really pay too much attention to what crimes may or may not have been going in in various far-flung parts of the Reich." And he added the following remark: At this time Irving was not yet prepared to state that the gaschambers of Auschwitz were built by the Poles, after the war.

At the 1983 conference, Irving met Faurisson for the first time, before his lecture. After Irving's lecture, Faurisson challenged Irving to prove the fact that a Holocaust had happened, but behind Hitler's back. A journalist who was present wrote this about it. Therefore Faurisson was forced to communicate to Irving through the Journal for Historical Review. In an article entitled "A Challenge to David Irving," Faurisson observed that Irving had been willing to share his opinions on historical matters he admitted not to have studied. For once, it is not difficult to agree with Faurisson. The latter proceeded with attacking the various statements Irving had made in which he had admitted to various liquidations done at various locations by various criminal elements of various ethnic backgrounds without direct orders from above. As to Irving's account of the extermination procedures, Faurisson observed that it contained "too much metaphysics, not enough materialism."840 And thus Faurisson counselled that it was time for Irving to begin at the beginning. The latter has remarked that he suspected "there was some kind of major crime going on at the   initiative of the local criminals on the sport." This is what Faurisson had to say about it.

Faurisson's intellectual argument proved not sufficient by itself. As with so many others, the Zündel case, which was to unite Faurisson's agenda with Zündel's showmanship, was to provide the catalyst in Irving's conversion to Holocaust denial. Irving came in contact with Zündel in 1984 when the latter began to prepare for his first trial. Zündel sent Irving material, and asked if he were prepared to testify. Irving responded that he was following the development of the case with interest, and that he could be persuaded to go. In the end Zündel did not take up Irving on his offer.

In a pioneering study on Holocaust Denial written at this time, Irving was already included, as a "soft" variant of the phenomenon. Gill Seidel devoted a whole section to him in her 1986 study The Holocaust Denial: Antisemitism, Racism & the New Right, judging that "David Irving makes a very decisive contribution to the 'soft revisionist' literature on the second world war."

Yet as Seidel's book appeared, Irving began to move closer to the position occupied by hard-core Holocaust deniers. In a lecture entitled "Censorship of History," given in Runneymead, Australia, Irving went out of his way to challenge the evidential importance of the appalling situation in the concentration camps revealed in the Spring of 1945. According to Irving, "the starvation, the epidemics, the typhoid had only broken out in the last two or three weeks of the war." And it was not the Germans, but the allies who were to be partly blamed.

However Irving was not prepared, yet, to deny the Holocaust as such, or in any case not the fact that many Jews had died. He did, however, reject the notion that the genocide of the Jews was a centrally managed, state-approved enterprise, and even began to become silent about the role of the men like Himmler who, in his earlier writings, he had still blamed for the Holocaust. Obviously Himmler was too close to Hitler, and it was not very probable that Himmler would have exterminated a good part of European Jewry without Hitler's knowledge. Irving began to shift the responsibility to the actions of "nameless criminals" of various nationalities. In a radio interview, given during the same Australian trip, he stated that between hundreds of thousands, or even millions of Jews, had been liquidated, "by the Germans, or the Latvians, or the Ukrainians, or all the rest who carried out liquidations." When his interviewer Terry Lane asked him if his remark about the "hundreds of thousands or millions" of Jews implied that he rejected the figure of six million Jewish victims, Irving replied tergiversantly that "when you are a statistician as I am, and you've studied statistics, you know that figures don't compact, they don't come rounded up to six figures like that, with zeroes at the end. There is one school of thought that says 4 million. Another school of thought may say 6,500,000. Another school of thought, right out at the fringe, says it was only 100,000."846 Irving was not yet willing to come down on one or the other side.

In 1986 Irving visited Toronto on a world-encompassing lecture tour. He had arranged for a driver to pick him up at the airport, but instead Zündel showed up to greet him. According to Zündel, "David Irving was visibly shocked." In order not to give the wrong impression to his audience, Irving asked Zündel not to show up at his lecture. Zündel complied, and so did his supporters. As a result, attendance of Irving's lecture was very poor. Worst of all, no journalists had shown up.

After Irving left, Zündel sent him a long letter in which he reviewed the disappointing results of the trip, and sought to draw some lessons from it. The German-Canadian Mephistopheles had found his English Faust. And in the remainder of the letter Zündel persuasively laid out more schemes that would enrich Irving, whom he characterized as a "promoter's dream." All of these talents were, of course, wasted if no-one was to market them properly. Zündel, who identified himself as "an advertising man," made it clear that he saw all the   possibilities. But, after having made the suggestion he wanted, he did not push it any further, for the moment.

In the year that followed, Zündel and Irving began an informal cooperation. Zündel was interested in pursuing legal action against an American soldier said to have killed German guards of Dachau after their surrender to the American army. This soldier had never been brought to trial for war crimes--a fact that clearly illustrated according to Zündel that the post-war allied war crime trials of German military personnel had been merely instances of victor's justice. He asked Irving if he could help him obtaining relevant documentation.850 Irving obliged.851

In late 1987, after having established a practice of collaboration, Zündel raised once more the issue of a possible appearance by Irving as a witness in his second trial. Zündel proved a master of persuasion. He suggested that Irving could use his stay in Toronto to give lectures and promote his books, offering to provide "frontmen" to organize the book-promotion campaign.

Zündel repeated his presentation of the trial as a catalyst for a successful book-tour in another letter sent in early January, 1988. After having expressed his dismay for the fact that Irving had to personally deliver his books to London booksellers, and once more offering to organize help with such pedestrian chores so that Irving could concentrate on the important task of revising history, Zündel came to the point.  

Irving remained cautious. In his reply to Zündel Irving established clear conditions to make the whole thing worth it to him: the whole operation was to be essentially risk-free as far as the authorities were concerned.

In early March Zündel became suddenly nervous about Irving's appearance when two of the expert witness he had called--Dr. Russell Barton and Dr. Kuang Fann--agreed during cross-examination with the Crown's argument that the Nazis had murdered six million Jews, and that Did Six Million Really Die? was a repugnant book. He contacted   Irving again, writing that he could not afford anymore to have one of his witnesses "in the final analysis agreeing with the Crown prosecutor that 'It really did happen.'"

Then Zündel received Leuchter's report, and with that he acquired the opportunity to force the issue with Irving. The question became now very easy: would Irving be prepared to endorse, in court, Leuchter's findings. In an interview given in 1998, Zündel told the American film-maker Errol Morris what happened next. For Zündel the chase had ended. Irving was to testify on his behalf, unequivocally endorsing Leuchter's findings.

Irving testified on Friday 22 April, and Monday and Tuesday, 25 and 26 April, 1988. As an expert witness for the defence, Irving endorsed in general terms the main object of legal contention, Harwood's Did Six Million Really Die?

Given Irving's general endorsement of Did Six Millions Really Die?, it is good to repeat once more the book's central claim that the whole Holocaust was a piece of atrocity propaganda not different from the stories that circulated in the First World War, and that credited the Germans with transfixing Belgian babies on bayonets and operating "corpse factories" where they extracted from the corpses of their own dead glycerine and other useful commodities. Yet the big difference between the First and Second World War was that, after the former, the truth had been re-established, while no such action had happened after the latter. To the contrary, according to Harwood the atrocity propaganda had become more intense. "Gruesome paperback books with lurid covers continue to roll from the presses, adding continuously to a growing mythology of the concentration camps and especially to the story that no less than Six Million Jews were exterminated in them."859

During his testimony, David Irving did not merely give credence to the theory that the stories about gassings were allied atrocity propaganda through his general endorsement of Did Six Million Really Die?. He also addressed the issue directly when crown-attorney Pearson confronted him with a passage from his Hitler's War In this book, Irving described the impact at Hitler's headquarters of the publication of a Soviet report on the camp, which had been liberated in the Summer of 1944. Cross-examined by Pearson, Irving now stated that the "gas chamber story" was allied propaganda.

Both his statement in the Toronto court, and Irving's more recent attempts to discredit the evidence about the extermination camps by placing them in the context of "more far-fetched atrocity legends" which accused the Germans of using bodies as the raw material for the production of soap,863 confronts us once more with the question if, indeed, there exists a historical link between the allied atrocity propaganda of the First World War (which wrongly did accuse the Germans of producing soap from corpses) and the revelations about the German extermination camps in the Second World War. As we have seen at the beginning of Chapter Three, there is a link---but not on in which the accounts of the mass-murder of people in gas chambers are simply recycled atrocity stories from the First World war. The historical link is that during the Second World War the general public showed a great reluctance to believe accounts of atrocities because they remembered how they had been fooled by wild stories and outright lies of a quarter-century earlier. Unlike the men and women who opposed the Kaiser, those who fought Hitler were sceptics. Irving's claim that the accounts of the German death camps, and Auschwitz in particular, were the result of allied atrocity propaganda has little claim to truth. The only historical link between the notorious Kadaververwerkungsanstalt and the killing machinery in Auschwitz is that, during the Second World War, many refused to believe accounts of the latter because of memories of the former. In 1988, when he endorsed Did Six Million Really Die? Irving had ceased to care about history. On the witness stand, testifying for a well-known Holocaust denier, Irving turned into a denier of history. As I have demonstrated in Chapter One, the fact that Jews survived for example Auschwitz does not mean that either Auschwitz was not an extermination camp, or the Germans were sloppy. Many Jews who could work were imprisoned in Auschwitz as slave labour, and in the Summer of 1944 tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews were temporarily admitted in Auschwitz as so-called Durchgangsjuden, to be transported on as slave labour to other camps.The survivors of Auschwitz belonged almost exclusively to these two categories of prisoners.

When Irving testified that the existence of survivors meant that Auschwitz could not have been an extermination camp (as the Germans were no sloppy executioners), he stated what had become by 1988 a well-known negationist argument. At other moments during his testimony he quoted and affirmed fuerther well-established negationist doctrine. For example, when Pearson confronted him with Karl Bischoff's letter of January 29, 1943, Irving repeated Butz's interpretation of the word Vergasungskeller

Or would he? German documents show that the adjective Vergasungs- was commonly used to qualify means or procedures used in the gassing of people. For example, in the notorious letter of October 25, 1941 which Dr. Erhard Wetzel, Advisor for Jewish Affairs in the Ostministerium, drafted for Alfred Rosenberg, Wetzel mentions that "Oberdienstleiter Brack of the Führer's Chancellery has agreed to assist in the construction of the necessary buildings and gassing apparatus (Vergasungsapparate)....In the present situation, there are no objections to getting rid of Jews who are unable to work with the Brack remedy."867 The "gassing apparatus" was a gas van. In his memoirs,   written after the war, Adolf Eichmann was to call these gas chambers on wheels "gassing cars" (Vergasungswagen).868 And when, also after the war, Erich Bauer testified about the extermination of Jews in Sobibor, he also used the word Vergasung as an adjective: "The doors were sealed airtight and immediately the gassing procedure (Vergasungsvorgang) commenced. After some 20 - 30 minutes there was complete silence in the gas chambers; the people were gassed (vergast) and dead."869 And both Walther Dejaco and Fritz Ertl, testifying during their trial in 1972, used the term gassing spaces--"Vergasungsräume"--to denote gas chambers. For example, in his testimony given on January 19, 1972, Dejaco denied that he had transformed the morgue of crematorium 1 into a "gassing space."   Ertl commented on January 21, 1972 that when he wrote in his report of August 19, 1942 about the so-called "bathhouses for special actions"--"Badeanstalten für Sonderaktionen"--, "I knew at the time, that this concerned gassing spaces."871

Furthermore, I have never found an example of Germans using the adjective Gasung in the context of a discussion on the killing of people in gas chambers. Hence Irving's argument is non-sensical. While indeed the word Gaskammer is more common when referring to a (homicidal) gas chamber, the common use of the adjective Vergasungs- in conjunction with a noun in the context of discussion on the gassing of people fully explains why Kirschneck, who had drafted the letter for Bischoff, would have formed the composite neologism Vergasungskeller when referring to a basement that was to function as a gas chamber.

Pearson did not press Irving on the issue of the (Ver)Gasungskeller He did, however, try to pin Irving down on the precise meaning of words the latter had written more than ten years earlier, in the Introduction to the 1977 edition of his own Hitler's War.

As he explained, the reading matter that had changed his mind was Leuchter's conclusion that "none of the facilities examined were ever utilized for the execution of human beings and that the crematories could never have supported the alleged work load attributed to them."873 In court, Irving publically embraced Leuchter's conclusions. "I'm very impressed, in fact, by the presentation, by the scientific manner of presentation, by the expertise that's been shown by it and by the very novel conclusion that he's arrived at," and Irving admitted that "as a historian I 'm rather ashamed it never occurred to me to make this kind of investigation on the particular controversy." In conclusion, Irving endorsed the report wholeheartedly. "I think it is shattering in the significance of its discovery."874

It is good to remember that, when Irving offered his wholehearted endorsement of the Leuchter Report, its author had already admitted in court that he had gone to Poland minimally prepared, having read three works by Holocaust deniers, two documents on the use of hydrocyanide, and some pages from Hilberg's Destruction of the European Jews.875   Then, too, Leuchter had admitted that he never tried to cross-reference his own observations by looking at the German blueprints, or by studying the testimonies of eye-witnesses.876 This attitude should have troubled a historian who took pride in his own research skills and his undisputed tenacity in uncovering new material. Indeed: Irving completely ignored Leuchter's sorry performance on the witness stand which he admitted he had witnessed. Let us, for the record, recall some of the main issues that had come up. Leuchter had stated that ninety percent of his conclusions were based on his engineering opinion, and only ten percent on the analysis of the samples that he had taken.877 Yet during cross- examination, he had to admit that this engineering opinion was very flawed. For example, Leuchter assumed that hydrogen cyanide was very combustible, and that because the gas chambers were located not too far from the incineration ovens, there ought to have been a danger for explosion. Yet during cross-examination he admitted that while hydrogen cyanide became combustible at 60,000 parts per million, it was lethal at 300 parts per million, that is at 0.5 percent of the combustion point.878 Irving was in the audience and watched it all. It obviously did not leave an impression. Furthermore Leuchter flatly stated that the build up of hydrogen cyanide in the brick and mortar would make the gas chambers very dangerous to use for the SS, yet under cross-examination he had to admit that hydrogen cyanide had only a very short life, and that it quickly combined with iron present in brick or mortar to make the harmless pigment ferro-ferri cyanide, also known as Prussian blue.879 Then Leuchter stated that the alleged gas chambers could not have worked because there was no ventilation system to extract the gas from the gas chambers. Without a proper ventilation system, the basement of   crematorium II could not have been used as a homicidal gas chamber.880 During cross-examination, Pearson produced a copy of a German document that stated that the gas chamber was to be equipped with an installation for aeration [Belüftung] and ventilation [Entlüftung], effectively demolishing Leuchter's argument.881 Then Leuchter had to admit that his calculations as to the very low capacity of the gas chambers were based on the assumption that the Germans would have followed American practices, which aim to kill the victim very fast in order to spare the victim "unusual and cruel punishment." As the Germans were not very interested in ensuring a quick and painless death of those to be murdered, Leuchter had to admit that his calculations were irrelevant. 882 He also had to admit that his assumption that the only way to understand the gas chambers in Auschwitz was through comparison with American gas chambers, and that if the former did not conform to the principles of the latter, the German gas chambers could not have worked, was fallacious.883 Particularly embarrassing for Leuchter had been the interchange with Pearson about Leuchter's claim that those who inserted the hydrogen cyanide through the roof vents into the gas chambers of crematoria 2 and 3 would die themselves from exposure to the poison.884 After some simple questions, Leuchter had to admit that, once again, he had been wrong.885 He also had to admit during cross-examination that he had no expert knowledge of crematoria.886

When Irving publically announced in the Toronto courtroom that he changed his mind about the historicity of the Auschwitz gas chambers, he turned against a consensus held for more than four decades by scholars, judges, and the general public that Auschwitz had been the site where Germans operated gas chambers for the execution of human beings, and that in these gas chambers very large numbers of people had been killed. At the time of Irving's "conversion," the informed estimate of the number of victims ranged between a little under a million people (Reitlinger) to 2.5 million, with a clear tendency in more recent scholarship to put the number of victims between one and 1.5 million people. Rejecting the various results of careful analyses done by many historians, Irving hastily embraced, on the basis of a document that purported to be a forensic analysis of the remains of the Auschwitz gas chambers, a piece of scientific garbage.

Irving's public conversion had made him the new hero of Holocaust Deniers everywhere. One negationist magazine, Instauration celebrated his testimony as "traumatic for world Jewry."887 Mark Weber wrote Irving that "[w]ith your support of holocaust revisionism, the outcome is no longer in doubt."

It is clear that Irving did not need Weber's flattery to fully appreciate the impact of his testimony. In August 1988 he returned to Canada for a talk. In it, he stated that since he had been a small boy he had enjoyed to see important people, or people with reputation and prestige, with "egg on their face." With Holocaust denial, he had found a way to act out his boyhood dream. Reviewing his own journey towards his endorsement of the Leuchter Report earlier that year, Irving described his thesis that Hitler knew nothing of the Holocaust as "aa kind of half-way house in m conversion." But his full conversion only came when he saw the scientific evidence. In fact, during the lecture he mentioned that the old-style Holocaust deniers had done the revisionist cause harm, "because they have not used the necessary scientific methods in making their claim on Auschwitz." Irving argued that all the evidence had a very narrow basis--"one, or two, or three documents and eyewitness accounts." Speculating on the origin of the Vrba--Wetzlar report, issued by the War Refugee Board, Irving stated in 1944 some thought it to be Nazi propaganda, because it revealed that "the Jews themselves were the people responsible for the 'atrocities' at Auschwitz, that "the people whose job it was to select, and deport, and ship into the gas chambers, and carry out the bodies and so on, were all Jews themselves....The real atrocities were committed by the Jews themselves in the camp at Auschwitz." A more likely scenario, however, was that the British government "masterminded the gas chamber lie" in order to motivate Allied soldiers "so that they would fight even harder." Interpreting the Cavendish-Bentinck minute of 27 August 1943, Irving argued that the authors of the lie thought that by 1943 it had served its purpose.   And he added, "here we are 44 years later and that hare is still running, bigger and stronger than ever, because nobody dares now stand up and kill it."

Irving predicted that soon the whole exterminationist edifice was going to come down, and people would realize that while Jews may have suffered, "along with a lot of other minorities and ethnic groupings," the Jews did not suffer proportionally more than other groups. "I don't think that their suffering can be said to be worse than the sufferings suffered by the Germans after the war, in the great mass expulsions, the great population movements." All of this was to become the subject of a new book--to be published in five years.

Irving did not (yet) keep his promise to enlighten the world with a study of Auschwitz. Instead he bought from Zündel the right to publish through his own publishing venture "Focal Point" the British edition of the Leuchter Report. In the spring   of 1989 everything was ready for the book-launch. The spirit of the day suggested that revisionism was on the rise. In April a storm broke loose in the United States about the a book published half a year earlier by the respected Princeton historian Arno Mayer. Entitled Why did the heavens not darken? The Final Solution in history. Mayer argued that the Holocaust, which he termed "Judeocide," was not the result of antisemitism, but of antibolshevism. It did not arise from the National Socialist phantasy concerning the so-called "Jewish Question," but resulted from German frustration when the Wehrmacht failed to defeat the Soviet Union in the Summer and Fall of 1941.

While this thesis could perhaps be accepted for the operations of the Einsatzgruppen Mayer went farther: Operation Barbarossa also provided the cause and context for the death camps, including Auschwitz.

Mayer included in his boo a specific chapter devoted to Auschwitz. While Mayer did not deny the presence and importance of the gas chambers, he gave a particular importance to typhus as a cause of death. To be sure, Mayer's discussion on the selections started conventionally enough. So far so good. Yet quickly his account moved beyond legitimate caution about the exact statistics into an irresponsible description of the purpose of and conditions in Birkenau that had no relationship whatsoever to the historical record. And, without discussing the purpose of those gas chambers, Mayer immediately proceeded to a well-meant but ill-considered reflection on the causes of death in Auschwitz--a reflection that ended with a sentence that, introduced with the oddly chosen adverb "besides," ceased to make any sense whatsoever.

Mayer's book did not include any annotation that provided an insight into his sources. Neither did he refer to the work of other scholars in his text. The book did contain a bibliography. It included both Butz and Rassinier.

Of all books published on the Holocaust, essential passages of Why did the heavens not darken? approached some of the core arguments of the negationists. For example   Mayer's thesis that typhus had been one of the main causes of death in Birkenau could only bring happiness to negationists like Faurisson, who had always maintained that all the Zyklon-B shipped to Auschwitz could be easily explained because of the in his opinion endemic prevalence of typhusbearing lice in the camp. Indeed: many passages could provide Holocaust deniers with useful quotations. Yet none of those connected with the Institute of Historical Review noticed Mayer's book. This changed when in April 1989 The New Republic published an angry and devastating six-page review entitled "False Witness," written by Daniel Goldhagen. He summarized Mayer's book as "an artful construction of half-truths" that was "riddled with extraordinary factual errors, which amount to a pattern of falsification and distortion."898 Goldhagen observed that Mayer's "outrageous" account of Auschwitz showed "the spirit of revisionist apologia." Goldhagen had no difficulty in demolishing Mayer's account of Auschwitz.

Goldhagen's review had unintended consequences: it alerted the negationists to the fact that a major historian had produced a work that, with admittedly considerable distortion, could be presented as an endorsement of the revisionist position. Consequently the May issue of the newsletter published by the Institute of Historical Review carried a review entitled "The Holocaust: A Sinking Ship?" It described Mayer as "one of the leading lights of his profession," and his book as a justification of "the approach and methodology of Revisionist scholars of the Holocaust like Paul Rassinier, Arthur Butz, Robert Faurisson, Wilhelm Stäglich, Walter Sanning, David Irving, Mark Weber, Fritz Berg, Carlo Mattagno, Henri Roques and a growing cohort of other researchers."900 It   defined Mayer's text as a "minefield of hoax-boasting concessions "--a place "where Exterminationist angels fear to tread "but an "intrepid Harvard graduate student" had rushed in. And it ended with the question "What to make of it all?"