An Auschwitz expert told the High Court yesterday that there was a "massive amount of evidence" of the use of the camp as a site for mass extermination. Prof Robert van Pelt of the University of Waterloo in Canada said evidence had become slowly available during the second World War through reports from escaped inmates.
He said it was "highly implausible" that the existence of the gas chambers was a piece of "atrocity propaganda" fabricated by the British. The evidence that Auschwitz was equipped with homicidal gas chambers had "emerged cumulatively from a convergence of independent accounts". It had become possible to assert as "moral certainty" the statement that Auschwitz was an extermination camp.
Prof van Pelt was giving evidence for American academic Prof Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books in their defence of a libel action brought by the historian Mr David Irving (62). Mr Irving is seeking damages over a claim that he is a "Holocaust denier".