Glossary

Indexed binders of documents prepared for trial, every exhibit, expert report, witness statement, pleading, and authority cited. Both sides' counsel and the judge each receive identical sets, cross-referenced by tab and page. "K3/15A/6" in this trial means bundle K3, tab 15A, page 6.

The party suing, here David Irving, who issued the writ in September 1996 alleging libel by Lipstadt and Penguin. "Claimant" replaced "plaintiff" in English civil procedure with the 1999 Woolf reforms; the older term still appears in some trial documents.

Once a witness has given their evidence-in-chief (their own side's questions), the other side's counsel cross-examines them. Cross-examination tests the witness's claims against the other side's argument.

The party being sued. Here, two: Penguin Books Ltd. (D1, the publisher) and Deborah E. Lipstadt (D2, the author).

The witness's own party's counsel questions them first, drawing out the testimony for that side. This is followed by cross-examination and then re-examination (where own counsel may rehabilitate the witness's evidence on points raised in cross).

The customary form of address for a High Court judge in England and Wales (informally also "my Lord" or "your Lordship"). Mr Justice Gray, the trial judge here, was always addressed this way by counsel and parties.

A witness becomes "sworn" by taking the oath (or affirming, for those who object on conscience grounds). Until then they can't give evidence. Irving is sworn at L0162 of day 2, until that moment he had been addressing the court as advocate; from this point on he is also a witness subject to cross-examination.

The code name (after Reinhard Heydrich) for the operation under Odilo Globocnik that murdered well over 1.5 million Jews of the General Government in the Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka death camps in 1942–43. The Höfle telegram of January 1943 noted 1,274,166 arrivals at the four camps (including Majdanek) through the end of 1942 alone.

The 'euthanasia' program that, from 1939, murdered tens of thousands of disabled people in gas chambers disguised as showers. Its personnel and techniques were later transferred to the Aktion Reinhard death camps.

The largest Nazi camp complex, in annexed Polish Upper Silesia, combining the Auschwitz I main camp, the Birkenau killing center and the Monowitz labor camp. About 1.1 million people, the great majority Jews deported from across Europe, were murdered there, most gassed with Zyklon B soon after arrival. Irving denied that homicidal gas chambers operated there; van Pelt's evidence for the defence answered that denial.

'Eradication' or 'culling': another of the killing euphemisms found in the documents.

'Extermination' or 'rooting out' (with verb forms ausrotten, auszurotten, ausgerottet). Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels all used the word about the Jews, and the dispute over whether it meant literal killing was argued at length.

'Emigration': the earlier policy of forcing Jews to leave, used as a euphemism even after the shift to mass murder.

A camp in northern Germany where tens of thousands died of disease and starvation. It had no gas chambers. The films shot at its liberation by British troops in April 1945 shaped Western memory of the camps.

The first Aktion Reinhard death camp, opened March 1942 in the Lublin district, where about 450,000 Jews were murdered with engine-exhaust gas. Only a handful of prisoners survived. SS officer Kurt Gerstein's report describes a gassing he witnessed there.

Auschwitz II, about two miles from the main camp, where the four large crematoria (II–V) with their underground gas chambers stood, alongside the earlier converted farmhouse 'bunkers'. It was the main site of the mass gassing of deported Jews. Its architecture and the surviving Zentralbauleitung construction documents formed the core of van Pelt's report.

The account of Wehrmacht general Walter Bruns describing the Riga shootings, captured because British intelligence secretly taped German prisoners at Trent Park (CSDIC). It is contemporaneous insider evidence of mass shooting.

The first Nazi camp to kill by gas, operating from December 1941 in the Warthegau, where at least 150,000 Jews from the Łódź ghetto and the surrounding region were murdered in mobile gas vans using engine exhaust. The Just memorandum on van modifications is a key document.

The fuel burned in the crematoria; delivery and consumption figures are used to estimate how many bodies were cremated.

The trial held by the Polish Supreme National Tribunal (Najwyższy Trybunał Narodowy) in Kraków, November–December 1947, of forty former Auschwitz personnel including commandant Arthur Liebehenschel, Maria Mandl, and others. Twenty-three were sentenced to death; the newsreels Irving plays on day 2 report the verdict.

The ovens and buildings used to burn the dead. At Birkenau, Crematoria II–V combined gas chambers and incineration; their Topf-built ovens, and how many bodies those ovens could burn, were argued over at length.

The Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre, where captured German generals were held at Trent Park and secretly taped: the origin of Walter Bruns's candid account of the Riga shootings.

The lethal agent released by Zyklon B. Leuchter argued from low cyanide residues in the gas-chamber walls that no gassing occurred; the Krakow Institute of Forensic Research and subsequent analyses addressed his sampling method and his reasoning from the residue figures.

British wartime decrypts of German Order Police radio traffic, which noted numbers of Jews shot in the East in 1941: contemporaneous evidence of the killings, discussed in relation to what London knew.

Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung, the company that held the distribution rights to Zyklon B.

Hygienic fumigation of clothing and barracks with Zyklon B to kill typhus-carrying lice: done at very high concentrations over several hours, unlike the lower concentrations and shorter exposures of the homicidal gassings. The distinction was disputed at trial.

Deborah Lipstadt's 1993 study of Holocaust denial. Its passages describing Irving as a denier who distorts evidence were the statements he sued over, and which the defendants then had to prove substantially true.

Another word for the pest-eradication use of Zyklon B, as opposed to homicidal gassing.

The German city heavily bombed in February 1945. Irving's 1963 book advanced death tolls far above the scholarly number of roughly 25,000, relying in part on a forged casualty document (a faked version of Tagesbefehl 47). His handling of the death toll was relied on by the defendants as an instance of the alleged falsification of the historical evidence.

A subunit of an Einsatzgruppe: the mobile SS-and-police squads that shot Jews, Roma and officials behind the Eastern Front. Karl Jäger commanded Einsatzkommando 3.

'Final Solution of the Jewish Question': the Nazi euphemism for the program to murder all of Europe's Jews. Adopted in late 1941 and coordinated at the Wannsee Conference, the term recurs across the documents the trial examined.

'Ventilation': the systems that extracted gas from the chambers so the Sonderkommando could enter; their design is part of the architectural evidence.

'Disinfestation': the delousing of clothing and rooms to kill typhus-bearing lice, using the same Zyklon B at far higher, longer doses than a homicidal gassing. The same compound was used in the homicidal gassings at lower concentrations and shorter exposures.

A camp built specifically to kill (Chełmno and the Aktion Reinhard camps Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka; Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek combined killing with other functions), as distinct from a concentration camp meant to hold and exploit prisoners.

'Field oven': the open-air burning pits used at Birkenau and the Reinhard camps when the crematoria could not keep pace with the killing.

The Nazi regime's term for its program to murder the Jewish people of Europe. Adopted in late 1941 and coordinated at the Wannsee Conference (January 20, 1942), the policy combined mass shooting (the Einsatzgruppen) with industrialized killing in the camps of Operation Reinhardt and Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The gassing of spaces or objects to kill vermin: the benign industrial use of the same poison used to murder people.

The long-running historical question of whether Hitler issued a single written order for the Final Solution. No such document survives; historians infer Hitler's authority from his speeches, the chain of command and circumstantial evidence. The question was argued at trial.

The sealed rooms in which victims were murdered with gas. Whether homicidal gas chambers existed at Auschwitz, and how many people they could kill, was directly litigated; the architectural, written and eyewitness evidence all pointed the same way.

Sealed trucks that killed those locked inside with engine exhaust, used at Chełmno and Semlin and by the Einsatzgruppen. The Just memorandum discusses modifications to them.

German for 'gas chamber'.

Killing by gas: at Auschwitz with Zyklon B, in the Reinhard camps and the gas vans with engine exhaust (carbon monoxide).

A Nazi regional party boss. Several, including Greiser in the Warthegau, were directly implicated in deportations and killing.

The zone of occupied Poland not annexed to the Reich, administered by Hans Frank, within which the Aktion Reinhard death camps operated.

The Secret State Police, the political police arm of the SS-RSHA that arrested, interrogated and deported, headed by Heinrich Müller.

Joseph Goebbels's voluminous diaries, partly preserved on glass-plate microfiche in the Moscow archives. Irving's handling of that material and his readings of diary entries on what happened to the Jews formed one of the sub-allegations at trial.

Irving's 1996 biography of Goebbels. Its withdrawal by its US publisher, after criticism including Lipstadt's, formed part of the background to the libel action.

A postwar lobby of Waffen-SS veterans that worked to rehabilitate the SS's reputation.

Records of Hitler's wartime monologues, transcribed by aides. Passages were argued over for what they show about his knowledge of, and attitude to, the killing of the Jews.

How many corpses the crematoria could burn in a given time: a quantitative test of the killing's scale that the coke-consumption records and Topf correspondence bear on.

The Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, a center for documenting the Nazi period and a custodian of key sources, including the scholarly edition of the Goebbels diaries.

'The Jewish question': the Nazi framing of the supposed 'problem' of Jewish existence, to which the 'Final Solution' was the murderous answer.

'Jewry' or 'Judaism': used in Nazi rhetoric to name the supposed collective enemy.

Hitler's order of June 1941 that captured Soviet political commissars be shot: an early, explicit license for mass killing on the Eastern Front.

Kaunas, Lithuania, where Einsatzkommando units and local auxiliaries shot tens of thousands of Jews in 1941. The killings are tallied in the Jäger Report.

The nationwide pogrom of November 9–10, 1938, in which synagogues were burned, Jewish businesses destroyed and tens of thousands of Jewish men arrested. The question of who ordered it, and Goebbels's role, featured in the evidence.

'Corpse cellar': the underground mortuary rooms of the Birkenau crematoria. At Crematoria II and III, Leichenkeller 1 was fitted out and used as a homicidal gas chamber, a central point in van Pelt's architectural evidence.

Lwów (now Lviv), a Galician city where Jews were murdered in pogroms and shootings and deported to the Bełżec death camp.

A 1988 report by Fred Leuchter, commissioned for Ernst Zündel's Canadian trial, claiming forensic proof that the Auschwitz gas chambers never operated. Its sampling method and chemistry were rebutted in evidence; Irving's endorsement of the report was examined in cross-examination.

'Liquidation', i.e. killing. The phrase 'keine Liquidierung' ('no liquidation') in a Himmler note about a Berlin transport was argued over for what it implied about a halt or an exception.

Peter Longerich's expert report for the defence, setting out the written evidence for the Nazi extermination policy and Hitler's role in it.

A city in occupied Poland that was the headquarters of Aktion Reinhard under Odilo Globocnik, and beside which the Majdanek camp stood.

A 1940 German Foreign Office scheme, associated with Franz Rademacher, to deport Europe's Jews to the island of Madagascar. It collapsed once the war made it impossible; its replacement by mass murder is treated by historians as part of the radicalising path to the Final Solution.

A combined concentration and killing camp on the edge of Lublin, with gas chambers using both Zyklon B and carbon monoxide. It was overrun by the Red Army in July 1944 largely intact, providing some of the earliest forensic evidence of the killing apparatus.

Capital of Belarus and a major killing site, where local Jews and Jews deported from the Reich were shot in mass operations from 1941.

'Mixed marriages' between Jews and non-Jews, a category the regime treated differently and debated at and after the Wannsee Conference.

'Mixed-bloods': people of part-Jewish descent, whose treatment under the racial laws and at Wannsee was a distinct policy question.

Auschwitz III, the labor camp built beside IG Farben's Buna synthetic-rubber works, where prisoners were worked, often to death. Primo Levi was among those held there.

A crematorium mortuary room. At Birkenau, the underground Leichenkeller were repurposed as undressing rooms and homicidal gas chambers.

The glass photographic plates of the Goebbels diaries held in the former Soviet archives in Moscow. Irving obtained access; the defence questioned how he handled and represented the plates.

The combustion chamber of a cremation furnace. The number of muffles, and how fast each could work, drive the estimates of how many bodies the crematoria could burn.

A short film of current events shown in cinemas before the main feature, common from the 1910s through the 1960s. The German Wochenschau and the British Pathé and Movietone newsreels were among the period's main means of moving-image news distribution. At the opening of day 2, Irving plays a German newsreel whose transcribed narration says that nearly 300,000 people died at Auschwitz, invoking it to argue that estimates changed.

The German city where the International Military Tribunal tried the major war criminals in 1945–46 and the subsequent American trials followed. Its document series (PS, NO, NG and others) and sworn affidavits are a major part of the evidence about the extermination.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union launched on June 22, 1941. Behind the front, the Einsatzgruppen and Order Police began the mass shooting of Soviet Jews, the first phase of the Final Solution.

Poznań, where Himmler delivered secret speeches to SS and Party leaders in October 1943 that spoke openly of the 'extermination of the Jewish people'. The speeches were relied on as evidence of leadership knowledge and intent.

An iron-cyanide pigment that forms when cyanide reacts with iron in masonry. Its heavy presence in the delousing chambers but not the gas chambers was relied on in denial writings; the defence experts gave evidence that the homicidal chambers would not be expected to show it.

Heinrich Himmler's rank and title as head of the SS and, from 1943, Interior Minister: the official most responsible for organizing the extermination.

The German civil administration covering the occupied Baltic states and western Belarus: a major theatre of the Einsatzgruppen shootings.

Capital of Latvia and site of the Rumbula massacre of November–December 1941, where Friedrich Jeckeln's men shot some 25,000 Jews, and of the killings General Walter Bruns described in his secretly-taped account.

The Reich Security Main Office, created in 1939 under Heydrich, which fused the security police and SD and ran the Einsatzgruppen and the deportation machinery.

An undated note from the Justice Ministry that Irving read as Hitler wanting the 'solution of the Jewish question' postponed until after the war. The court examined its dating, provenance and meaning and found no evidence for Irving's reading.

Sajmište, a camp near Belgrade where most of Serbia's remaining Jews, chiefly women and children, were murdered in a gas van in 1942.

An Aktion Reinhard death camp in eastern Poland where between roughly 170,000 and 250,000 Jews were gassed. A prisoner revolt in October 1943 prompted the SS to close and raze it.

'Special action': bureaucratic cover for a killing operation.

'Special treatment': a euphemism that in SS usage routinely meant killing. Identifying where it does and does not mean execution was a recurring point of historical dispute in the evidence.

The prisoner units forced, under SS guard, to work the gas chambers and crematoria. They moved bodies, extracted valuables and burned the dead. Several members buried written accounts or survived to testify (Tauber, Olère).

The SS paramilitary grades (Obergruppenführer, Gruppenführer, Brigadeführer, Sturmbannführer and so on) that recur in the documents and help place who ordered what.

'Order of the day'. A forged version of Dresden police 'Tagesbefehl 47' was used to inflate the bombing death toll; Irving's reliance on such material was scrutinised.

The Hamburg firm (Tesch & Stabenow) that supplied Zyklon B to Auschwitz; its head Bruno Tesch was convicted and hanged after a 1946 British trial.

A garrison-town ghetto in the Czech lands used as a transit camp and as a propaganda 'model' shown to the Red Cross, from which most inmates were ultimately deported to Auschwitz.

'Death factories': a term for the industrialized killing centers.

J.A. Topf & Söhne of Erfurt, the engineering firm that designed and built the Auschwitz-Birkenau crematorium ovens and ventilation; its correspondence is written evidence of the installations' purpose and capacity.

An Aktion Reinhard death camp north-east of Warsaw where roughly 800,000–900,000 Jews, chiefly from the Warsaw ghetto and the General Government, were murdered with engine-exhaust gas between July 1942 and autumn 1943. It kept almost no long-term prisoners. The Höfle telegram and survivor accounts document the toll.

A louse-borne disease that repeatedly swept the camps. Controlling it motivated the delousing program: the legitimate use of Zyklon B around which much of the chemistry argument turns.

'Resettlement': a euphemism that masked deportation to the killing centers; victims were told they were being moved 'to the east' for labor.

The room where victims were made to undress, told they were going to shower, before being driven into the adjoining gas chamber.

'Gassing cellar': the word appears in a January 29, 1943 letter from the Auschwitz Zentralbauleitung (signed under Bischoff) about Crematorium II. A mortuary has no innocent need for a 'gassing cellar'. The document was relied on at trial as evidence of homicidal intent.

German for 'annihilation' or 'extermination'. Its appearance in orders and speeches, including Himmler's Posen address, is part of the written argument for intent.

'Extermination through labor': the policy of working prisoners to death, applied especially to those not killed on arrival.

On January 20, 1942, fifteen senior SS, party and government officials met at a villa on Berlin's Wannsee lake, chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, to coordinate the 'Final Solution of the Jewish Question' across occupied Europe. The surviving minutes, taken by Adolf Eichmann, tabulate some eleven million Jews and show the bureaucratic coordination of the policy.

The Reichsgau Wartheland, the part of western Poland annexed to the Reich, containing the Łódź ghetto and the Chełmno killing center.

The German weekly cinema newsreel, issued 1929–1977 in various forms. Irving's "German official newsreel produced in early 1948" (L0015) is a Wochenschau report on the conclusion of the 1947 Cracow trial of Auschwitz personnel.

The SS Central Construction Office at Auschwitz, which designed and built the crematoria and gas chambers; its surviving plans and letters (including the 'Vergasungskeller' letter) are key documents.

'Gypsies'. Roma and Sinti, also targeted for extermination; the phrase 'Vernichtung der Zigeuner' appears in the evidence.

A hydrogen-cyanide pesticide (cyanide adsorbed onto a carrier, released as gas) manufactured under license and distributed via Degesch. Used both for legitimate delousing and, at Auschwitz, to murder people in the gas chambers. The chemistry of its two uses was central to the Leuchter dispute.

The second-largest ghetto in occupied Poland, in the annexed Warthegau; its deportations fed the Chełmno killing center.

The RSHA official who organized the deportation of Jews to the killing centers and took the minutes at Wannsee. Tried and executed in Israel in 1962; his testimony and memoirs are evidence of the apparatus.

Führer of the German Reich. Whether he ordered and knew of the extermination, and how directly the documents tie him to it, is the central historical question the trial turned on; Irving's argument was that Hitler was largely unaware.

Deputy head of the German State Railway; his 1942 letter to Karl Wolff documents the daily transports of Jews to Treblinka: direct evidence of the deportation machinery.

A long-standing organizer of the German militant neo-Nazi scene.

A Sonderkommando survivor and artist whose postwar drawings reconstruct the killing process at Birkenau; their detail matches the surviving construction records.

A Sweden-based denier propagandist associated with Zündel's circle.

A German-Canadian publisher and propagandist who commissioned the Leuchter Report for his own trials for spreading false news. He was a principal publisher and distributor of denial material internationally.

A German neo-Nazi activist of the early 1990s who appeared in footage with Irving.

The German Foreign Office's 'Jewish affairs' official, author of the Madagascar Plan and involved in deportations.

Acting Reich Justice Minister 1941–42. The disputed 'Schlegelberger note' is the document Irving used to argue Hitler wanted the Jewish question deferred.

Commander of Einsatzgruppe A, which operated in the Baltic and whose reports tally its killings.

An American maker of execution equipment who, lacking needed scientific training, produced the 1988 'Leuchter Report' claiming the Auschwitz gas chambers were impossible. His methods were discredited under cross-examination in the Zündel trial.

A Higher SS and Police Leader responsible for some of the largest shooting massacres, including Babi Yar, Rumbula and Riga. Tried and hanged in Riga in 1946.

A chemist who produced the 'Rudolf Report', a successor to Leuchter arguing from cyanide-residue chemistry that the gas chambers were impossible. The report's chemistry was rebutted in the defence evidence.

An Austrian neo-Nazi activist.

A leader of the German NPD convicted for Holocaust denial.

A physician who survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen and testified at the Belsen trial about the gas chambers and the medical block.

An Auschwitz camp officer whose captured postwar statement describes the gassings.

Reichsführer-SS, the official most responsible for building and running the machinery of extermination. His Posen speeches and appointment-diary entries were relied on as evidence of leadership knowledge and intent.

A Sonderkommando survivor of Birkenau whose detailed 1945 deposition to the Polish investigators describes the gas chambers and crematoria from the inside. Van Pelt and Pressac both rely on it.

The second-ranking Nazi who in July 1941 instructed Heydrich to prepare a 'total solution' of the Jewish question: a key document in the chain of authority.

A German denier author who minimized Nazi responsibility for Kristallnacht.

The Polish investigating judge who interrogated Rudolf Höss and assembled much of the early forensic and written evidence of Auschwitz.

A French researcher whose technical studies of the Auschwitz crematoria, built from the camp's own construction records, document the buildings; he began as a skeptic and was persuaded by the records.

Propaganda Minister and a driving radical on the Jewish question. His diaries, central to one sub-allegation, show both the policy and his own role in events such as Kristallnacht.

Head of the Auschwitz Zentralbauleitung, under whose office the crematoria were built and the 1943 'Vergasungskeller' letter was issued.

Commander of Einsatzkommando 3, whose 'Jäger Report' is an itemised, dated tally of the Jews and others his unit shot in Lithuania in 1941: one of the most explicit killing records.

Himmler's chief adjutant and liaison, party to the 1942 correspondence with the Reichsbahn (the Ganzenmüller letter) arranging the trains to Treblinka.

Chief of the Order Police, whose battalions carried out mass shootings in the occupied East.

An SS hygiene officer who procured Zyklon B and witnessed a gassing at Bełżec, which he described in a postwar report widely cited in scholarship.

The senior Topf & Sons engineer who designed the Auschwitz crematorium ovens and corresponded with the SS about their capacity.

A leader of the militant German neo-Nazi movement in the 1980s.

The SS and Police Leader in Lublin who ran Aktion Reinhard, the murder of the Jews of the General Government.

Head of the SS-WVHA, the office that administered the concentration camps and their forced labor and looted property.

A former Wehrmacht officer who became a prominent postwar neo-Nazi and denier.

A former French concentration-camp inmate who became an early Holocaust denier and minimized the gas chambers and the death toll.

An SS man in the Auschwitz Political Department whose postwar report gives a detailed account of the gassing process.

Author of 'The Destruction of the European Jews' (1961), an early structural study of how the genocide was carried out.

Head of the RSHA and Himmler's deputy, who convened the Wannsee Conference and oversaw the Einsatzgruppen until his assassination in 1942.

A French literature professor and Holocaust denier who promoted the statement that the gas chambers never existed and helped shape the Leuchter Report.

Commandant of Auschwitz, whose postwar interrogations, Nuremberg affidavit and written memoir describe the gassings in detail. Tried in Poland and hanged at Auschwitz in 1947.

A prisoner who escaped Auschwitz in 1944 and, with Alfréd Wetzler, produced a detailed report (the Vrba–Wetzler report / 'Auschwitz Protocols') that alerted the world to the gassings.

A former SS man and author of the denial pamphlet 'Die Auschwitz-Lüge' ('The Auschwitz Lie').

A German neo-Nazi activist of the 1990s.

A senior official in Hitler's Chancellery who helped organize and run the day-to-day T4 'euthanasia' program (formally headed by Philipp Bouhler and Karl Brandt), and arranged for its gassing personnel and methods to be transferred to the Aktion Reinhard camps.

A Wehrmacht general whose candid description of the Riga shootings was captured when British intelligence secretly taped him at Trent Park.

An architect in the Auschwitz Zentralbauleitung who drew the crematoria plans; tried (and acquitted) in Vienna in 1972.

A German denier and author of 'Der Auschwitz-Mythos', stripped of his doctorate for the work.