Deborah E. Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (New York: Free Press, 1993).
An extended version of Van Pelt’s expert report was republished as: Robert Jan van Pelt, The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002). Van Pelt’s work is one of the main inspirations for Forensic Architecture.
Van Pelt, The Case, 2–3. The holes were since found; see Daniel Keren, Jamie McCarthy, and Harry W. Mazal, “The Ruins of the Gas Chambers: A Forensic Investigation of Crematoriums at Auschwitz I and Auschwitz-Birkenau” →, reproduced from Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 18, no. 1, (Spring 2004): 68–103. Thanks to Patrick Kroker for this information.
David Irving v. Penguin Books, Day 11 →.
That was Robert Faurisson. Van Pelt, The Case for Auschwitz, 3ff., 24ff., and 458ff.
Keren, McCarthy, and Mazal, “The Ruins of the Gas Chambers.”
For van Pelt this “negative evidence” demonstrated the opposite: that the Nazis were covering their own traces; they were the first deniers, he explained. He stated that none of the drawings of the gas chamber showed the holes, because the architects were not allowed to draw in these pieces of incriminating evidence. In any case, the absence of evidence was certainly not evidence of an absence.
David Irving v. Penguin Books, Day 10 →.
Dino A. Brugioni and Robert G. Poirer, “The Holocaust Revisited: A Retrospective Analysis of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination Complex,” February 1979 →.
Irving was referring to a 1992 study by John C. Ball. See Van Pelt, The Case, 56.
Van Pelt, The Case, 84 and 353.
David Irving v. Penguin Books, Day 11 →.
The relation between the single pixel and the human figure is a constant challenge in aerial and satellite image interpretation. The Tolimir case, one of the last of the Srebrenica cases judged at the ICTY (decided 2012, currently on appeal), has the following quote in regards to an aerial images of the Nova Kasaba soccer field. The Trial Chamber accepted the explanation of the witness on identifying darker pixels as people rather than shadows as claimed by the accused: “THE WITNESS: I have spent numerous and numerous hours analysing all these pictures and identifying what reference they can have on the ground … It’s a football field. There are no bushes in the middle. So these grey zones are not shadows. Though, indeed, a shadow has the same pixel than a group of people on the picture, but if you compare what is officially said on the photograph and the corroboration you can make of what a man represents in terms of a pixel on such a photo, this is why I allow myself to say that the dots that I have marked previously are people.” (March 29, 2010, p. 933, witness Ruez →.)
His evidence also included the interpretation of architectural plans drawn from the archive of the Auschwitz Central Construction Office, aerial photography, letters, diaries, logbooks, testimonies, and ground-level photographs. On Van Pelt’s evidence, see also: Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Auschwitz, 1270 to the Present: A History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002); Robert Jan van Pelt, Architectural Principles in the Age of Historicism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); and many other articles and essays.
See →.
The investigation was undertaken on behalf of various political and legal groups and was presented at the UN General Assembly in 2013 by the UN Special Rapporteur for Counter Terrorism Human Rights, Ben Emerson. The work was also presented in the context of legal action brought about by Pakistani lawyer Shahzad Akhbar in the UK Court of Appeal and in collaboration with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ). The team was coordinated by Susan Schuppli (research and coordination), Jacob Burns (research), Steffen Krämer (video compositing and editing), Reiner Beelitz (architectural modeling), Samir Harb (architectural modeling), Zahra Hussain (research assistance), Francesco Sebregondi (research assistance), and Blake Fisher (research assistance). Some cases were undertaken in collaboration with Situ Research. Other partner organizations included the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (Andreas Schüller), One World Research (Bridget Prince, Nasser Arrabyee, and Anis Mansour), Al Jazeera English (Ana Naomi de Sousa), Chris Woods (freelance journalist), Edmund Clark (photographer), Chris Cobb-Smith (munitions expert and consultant), and Myra MacDonald (freelance journalist).
See Weizman, “665: The Least of All Possibl Evils," e-flux journal 38 (October 2012) →; and The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza.
The US 1998 Land Remote Sensing Policy Act. In 2014, after lobbying by satellite companies, American satellite companies were allowed to provide images in a slightly sharper a resolution—about 30 cm/pixel. They successfully argued that private identity would still be masked at this resolution. See “US lifts restrictions on more detailed satellite images,” BBC, June 16, 2014 →. The European satellite Pléiades, unaffected by the American restrictions, has since the end of 2011 provided 50 cm/pixel images of Palestine/Israel. See also Hito Steyerl’sbeautiful film How Not To Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013. The size of the pixel in relation to the size of the body makes camouflage unnecessary.
In a further radicalization of the geopolitics of resolution, US satellite image providers make an exception to the 50 cm rule in Israel and the Palestinian territories it occupies. An amendment to the US Land Remote Sensing Policy Act, which sets the permitted resolution of commercial US image satellites, dictates that these areas are shown only in a resolution of 2.5 meters (later effectively eased to 1 meter per pixel) in which a car is made of two pixels and a roof—another common target—is depicted by 6–9 pixels. The snow screen placed over Israel’s violation of Palestinian rights in the West Bank and Gaza contributed to Turkey’s decision, after the Gaza Flotilla incidents, to send its own image satellite into space and make available 50 cm/pixel images of Palestine/Israel. William Fenton, “Why Google Earth Pixelates Israel,” PCMag, June 14, 2011 → Maayan Amir, “Gaza Flotilla,” →.
Heather Linebaugh, ”I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on,” The Guardian, December 29, 2013 →.
The Federally Administered Tribal Areas are officially a “Prohibited Area” for which nonresidents require special permission to enter. A complete list of Prohibited Areas can be found here, in Annex 1 →.
Jacob Burns, “Persistent Exception: Pakistani Law and the Drone War,” in Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, ed. Forensic Architecture (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014).
Rachel Maddow, “Victims of secretive US drone strikes gain voice in Pakistani lawyer,” MSNBC, June 29, 2012 →. See also Rabih Mroué, The Pixelated Revolution, 2012.
This situation recalls the photographs secretly taken by prisoners in 1944 inside one of Auschwitz-Birkenau’s gas chambers. A large part of the image is a thick black frame—the room—because the light is calibrated to the outside. Beyond the door of the gas chamber, dead bodies are seen being burnt. Often when used in books and articles about the Holocaust, the dark frame is cropped off. In his seminal reading of these images, George Didi-Hubermann objects to this cropping because for him the frame is a crucial part of the image: not only is it the only documentation of the interior of a gas chamber, but it testifies to the mortal danger in taking this image →. Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
In the same way that human bodies created voids in the ash layer over Pompeii, or that a nuclear blast famously etched a “human shadow” onto the steps outside the Sumitomo Bank in Hiroshima.
This process of mediation based on embodiment recalled other experiments in “situational awareness” undertaken in the context of US military immersive training environments and post-trauma treatment as captured in Harun Farocki’s Serious Games (2009–10).A classic predecessor to this practice is narrated in Frances Yates’ magnum opus about the Roman and medieval tradition of mnemonic techniques. The Art of Memory emphasized the relationship between memory, architecture, and destruction. Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Pimlico, 1992).
Deborah Brauser, “Novel ‘Avatar Therapy’ May Silence Voices in Schizophrenia,” Medscape, July 3, 2014: “Avatar therapy allows patients to choose a digital face (or ‘avatar’) that best resembles what they picture their phantom ‘voice’ to look like. A therapist, siting in a separate room, ‘talks’ through the animated avatar shown on a computer monitor as it interacts with the patient.”
As such, both these testimonies exemplified the power of parrhesia. Michel Foucault took parrhesia to be the courage to risk one’s life in order to speak an unpopular truth. The parrhesiastes “is always less powerful than the one with whom he or she speaks. The parrhesia comes from ‘below,’ as it were, and is directed towards ‘above’ (literally) … and in its extreme form, telling the truth takes place in the ‘game’ of life or death.” Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, trans. Joseph Pearson(New York: Semiotext(e), 2001), 15–16; and Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
An earlier version of this essay was published as an introduction to Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth (Sternberg Press, 2014) and was the basis for a film that Harun Farocki planned to make using other elements from Forensis shortly before his death. This essay is thus dedicated to his memory.