Holes (slight spoiler)

Irving made a lot of arguments that were blown out from under him in the trial, and only a few could make it into the movie. One of the most interesting claims, and one that wasn’t actually fully put to rest until the appeal, was the bit about “no holes, no Holocaust.”

The Nazis dynamited the Auschwitz gas chamber Krema II, not once but twice, as van Pelt notes in the movie. (Holocaust deniers have to argue, I suppose, that the Nazis were not trying to cover up an extraordinary mass murder, oh no, not that, and were simply extremely that worried superior German shower technology might fall into the wrong hands.) But the Nazis forgot to destroy the architectural drawings. They’re not complete drawings of every gizmo and doodad, but they helped historians reconstruct what the building would have looked like, inside and outside.

Those architectural drawings of Krema II don’t include the mesh gassing columns into which the Zyklon-B was poured. There are a couple of possibilities for this. One is that the columns were implied but not drawn, as part of their general practice of creating plausible deniability where possible. Another, which is what van Pelt argues, is that the building was initially designed as a crematorium and morgue, as reflected in the blueprints, and the area intended for the morgue was repurposed as a gas chamber with the later addition of the mesh columns.

But a Holocaust denier named Robert Faurisson thought otherwise. He said, look, there simply weren’t any holes, at all, ever. The Jews made it up. And if there were no holes, then you couldn’t get the gas into the gas chambers, so they weren’t gas chambers. And he coined a slogan: “No holes, no Holocaust.” Irving then picked that up, and deployed it in the trial.

As the movie shows, the columns are visible in the air reconnaissance photos (the US was watching the industrial plant I. G. Farben had built at nearby Monowitz, but the flight path went over Auschwitz). But the roof of Krema II was so thoroughly demolished, the photos van Pelt took of the site didn’t show any obvious holes for where the columns went through, not that he’d gone looking for them. The defense hadn’t planned on the no-holes gambit, and so they hadn’t taken the photographs that would have refuted it.

Irving, naturally, tried to argue that “no photographic evidence for the holes” really meant “photographic evidence of no holes.” In the verdict Justice Gray says that, on the basis of the evidence that had been submitted to the court — which, by the rules of evidence, was all the judge could call upon — there wasn’t enough to show definitively that the holes existed, but neither was there enough to consider their existence refuted, and that on the basis of the totality of the rest of the evidence there was no substantial reason to doubt their existence.

Irving tried twice to appeal the verdict against him, first on his own and then with a lawyer. Irving also tried, as part of this process, to reopen the gas chamber issue with a new-and-improved Fred Leuchter, a bozo named Germar Rudolf. As part of the refutation van Pelt prepared to the Rudolf report, he included a freshly taken photo of one of the holes, clearly a square hole in the concrete in which the rebar had been visibly bent back. The photo is shown in van Pelt’s book on the Irving trial. 

Either Irving or his lawyer had second thoughts about Rudolf — maybe after they’d seen van Pelt’s demolition — and withdrew the Rudolf Report. In the ruling turning down the appeal, the three-judge panel expresses some dismay about how much of everyone’s time had been wasted reading and refuting a detailed submission from Irving (and Irving's bozo) that Irving yanked at the last minute, most likely because he knew it would go down in flames.

So the reason the movie doesn’t quite wrap up the “no holes” issue is that the issue itself wasn’t totally wrapped up until the appeal, which took place after the movie’s conclusion. But that conclusion ended up being: yes holes, yes Holocaust. And Holocaust deniers — usually very loathe to abandon one of their own arguments, no matter how silly and no matter how thoroughly demolished — pretty much stopped playing that card.