The GUARDIAN
http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk/irving/article/0,2763,135468,00.html February 11, 2000
David Irving did not deserve to be called a historian, a leading academic told the high court yesterday.
Richard Evans, professor of modern history at Cambridge University, said that he was not prepared for the "sheer depth of duplicity" which he encountered in Mr Irving's treatment of historical sources relating to the Holocaust.
Mr Irving, the 62-year-old author of Hitler's War, who is suing for libel over claims that he is a "Holocaust denier", said that Professor Evans's "sweeping and rather brutal" dismissal of his career stemmed from personal animosity.
"I think you dislike what I write and stand for and what you perceive my views to be," he told Prof Evans, who has been called as an expert for the defence by author Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books. Prof Evans, who has produced a 740-page report on Mr Irving's historical method, said he had no personal feelings towards him and had tried to be as objective as possible.
He said he previously had little knowledge of Mr Irving's work - although he knew of his reputation as someone who was in many areas a sound historian - and was "shocked" at what he found.
He said that the proceedings had reinforced his view in the report that Mr Irving "has fallen so far short of the standards of scholarship customary among historians that he doesn't deserve to be called a historian at all".
Mr Irving said that he was "scrupulously fair" in everything he did in public life - "the total opposite of being unscrupulous and manipulative and deceptive as you say in your report".
Prof Evans said he agreed that Mr Irving had a very wide knowledge of the source material for the Third Reich and had discovered many new documents.
"The problem for me is what you do with them when you interpret them and write them up."
Prof Evans said that Mr Irving's published writings and speeches contained numerous statements which he regarded as "anti-Semitic" - to the extent that he blamed the Jews for the Holocaust.
He dismissed the theory that there was a "worldwide Jewish conspiracy" to suppress Mr Irving's works - or undermine Germany in the 1930s - as "a fantastic belief which has no grounds in fact".
Prof Evans said that he had examined a sufficient selection of Mr Irving's output to justify his view that he did not use acceptable methods of historical research.
In his report, he said that Mr Irving had relied in the past, and continued to do so, on the fact that readers, listeners and reviewers lacked "either the time or the expertise" to probe deeply enough in the sources he used to discover the "distortions and manipulations".
He accepted that people should be allowed to challenge the "general consensus" of history but asserted that there was a duty to conform to academic standards in the evaluation of evidence.
Mr Irving, who is representing himself, is claiming damages over the 1994 book, Denying the Holocaust The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, which he says has generated waves of hatred against him.
The defendants have accused him of being a liar and a falsifier of history. [Note de l'AAARGH: and now they are trying to find a piece of evidence...]
The hearing continues.
The Independent, February 11, 2000
http://www.independent.co.uk/
A CAMBRIDGE university professor told the High Court yesterday that the right-wing author David Irving "doesn't deserve to be called a historian at all".
Richard Evans, a professor of modern history, said that he was not prepared for the "sheer depth of duplicity" which he encountered in Mr Irving's treatment of historical sources relating to the Holocaust.
Mr Irving, the 62-year-old author of Hitler's War who is suing for libel over claims that he is a "Holocaust denier", said that Professor Evans's "sweeping and rather brutal" dismissal of his career stemmed from personal animosity. "I think you dislike what I write and stand for and what you perceive my views to be," he told Professor Evans, who has been called as an expert witness for the defence by the author Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books.
Professor Evans, who has produced a 740-page report on Mr Irving's historical method, said he had no personal feelings towards him and had tried to be as objective as possible. He said he previously had little knowledge of Mr Irving's work - although he knew of his reputation as someone who was in many areas a sound historian - and was "shocked" at what he found.
The proceedings, Professor Evans said, had reinforced his view given in the report that Mr Irving "has fallen so far short of the standards of scholarship customary among historians that he doesn't deserve to be called a historian at all".
Professor Evans agreed that Mr Irving had a very wide knowledge of the source material for the Third Reich and had discovered many new documents, but said his problem was "what you do with them when you interpret them and write them up". He added that Mr Irving's published writings and speeches
contained numerous statements which he regarded as "anti-Semitic" - to the extent that he blamed the Jews for the Holocaust.
Professor Evans dismissed the theory that there was a "worldwide Jewish conspiracy" to suppress Mr Irving's works as "a fantastic belief which has no grounds in fact". Mr Irving said that he was "scrupulously fair" in everything he did in
public life - "the total opposite of being unscrupulous and manipulative and deceptive as you say in your report".
Mr Irving, who is representing himself, is claiming damages over Ms Lipstadt 's 1994 book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, which he says has generated "waves of hatred" against him.
The hearing was adjourned until Monday.
The Evening Standard, February 11, 2000
http://www.thisislondon.com/
Hitler, the Holocaust and the minutiae of mass murder are being re-examined daily in a libel action brought by controversial historian David Irving. CAL
McCRYSTAL reports
In the visitors' book at Auschwitz, the Jewish Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal has written: 'Information ist Verteidigung' - 'Information is defence'. According to his biographer Hella Pick, what he meant was that 'historical truth becomes an essential deterrent to the practice of evil'.
Wiesenthal's words might aptly be chalked on the door of Court No 73 in the Royal Courts of Justice, where, for the past four weeks, Auschwitz and other Holocaust horrors have been revisited daily and where arguments about their malevolent originators and expositions as to their motives fume and flare discordantly.
Yet, for many of us squeezed into the court, there are times when the sheer volume of information being exchanged seems almost a barrier to historical truth, as the Hitler historian David Irving pursues his libel action against American academic Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books. Having claimed that Irving is 'a liar and falsifier of history', they deny libel and plead justification.
To settle the argument - without the help of jurors, it being thought the intricacies would daunt them - Mr Justice Gray is obliged to graze upon the communal pastures of recorded history and scraps of paper that are capable of misleading as well as informing. He will look out for ideological partisanship as much as for scientific errancy, and be reminded from time to time that the continued influence of the past upon the present is inexorably manifested in all our destinies. Irving, asserts Richard Rampton QC, for the defendants, has made statements deliberately 'designed to feed the virulent anti-Semitism still alive and kicking throughout the world'.
The judge may give thought to Heinrich von Treitschke's advice: 'The historian must candidly explain the moral significance of the confused facts with which he is dealing, and this is why the compelling force of a historical work subsists ever in the strong personality of the narrator.'
And he will have to decide whether David Irving, 62, has been stigmatised as a mere contrarian, or may be regarded as a panegyrist of Adolf Hitler.
So stupefying is the information overload that nerves occasionally fray, and the usually unflappable judge vents his distress. 'Really, this is most irritating,' he exclaims on failing to locate a document concerning an order to liquidate Jews. And later: 'I am still trying to find this ...' Later still: 'I have tracked down the document, and there appear to be two versions in German. It is not for me to plough through these with my inadequate German. What I'm looking for is an English translation, which I think is not an unreasonable request for a document that is quite important.'
Rampton gazes pinkly around him and jiggles his knee. David Irving, conducting his own case, drops his spectacles on the floor. The courtroom lapses into a three-minute reverie.
'Well,' says the judge, breaking the silence and startling his interlocutors. 'Am I going to be supplied with it or not?'
Irving: 'My lord, I will prepare a translation of that document overnight.'
Stacked in teak bookshelves around the walls are nearly 400 files of information. Teak tables groan beneath the weight of further boxes, books and laptops. A large number of Jews are in the public gallery - a veritable yarmulka archipelago in a teak sea - listening intently to every word, many of them Holocaust information repositories in their own right.
This trial is stuffed with the minutiae of mass murder: Zyklon B pellets, racism, the operations of the Einsatzgruppe, the Nazi military mission in the Ukraine and Crimea, and the geography of a war which for many of us still seems recent, even though time has already consigned it to the last century. Irving insists he never has claimed that the Holocaust did not occur, but he questions the number of Jewish dead (usually estimated at six million) and the manner of their destruction. He has suggested that British intelligence spread the 'propaganda story' about Germans systematically using gas chambers to kill millions of Jews and other 'undesirables'. And he claims to be a victim of a 'global conspiracy', led by Jews, of which Professor Lipstadt is, he says, a major part.
It is a case that should interest sociologists as much as it does historians. One finds traces of the mind-set of Middle England as well as Mittel Europe where, to this day, xenophobia determines caste and fuels politics. During the giving of evidence and in cross-examination, I pick up little sighs and gasps from the gallery and ominous pleasantries from the well of the court as adversaries rake over the smouldering past for what they call the 'smoking gun' - an order signed by Adolf Hitler himself for the liquidation of the Jews. Since this has failed to turn up - and seems unlikely to do so - the dispute revolves around 'circumstantial evidence', 'inference', 'context', 'atmosphere', Hitler's speeches, Himmler's diary, Heydrich's communications, Eichmann's testimony, Britain's intercepts, and so on.
Grotesqueries are matched by bizarreries. The words 'deny' and 'denier' are uttered often. Irving says he intends to show that 'far from being a Holocaust denier', he had repeatedly drawn attention to major aspects of the Holocaust. Early in the proceedings, a line from Goethe spins into mind:
Ich bin der Geist, der stets verneint - 'I am the spirit that ever denies' -
as Mephistopheles declares when Faust demands his name. 'The word 'denier' is particularly evil,' Irving says, 'because no person in full command of his mental faculties, and with even the slightest understanding of what happened in World War Two, can deny that the tragedy actually happened, however much we dissident historians may wish to quibblebout the means, the scale, the dates and other minutiae ... It is a poison to which there is virtually no antidote, less lethal than a hypodermic with nerve gas jabbed in the neck, but deadly all the same; for the chosen victim, it is like being called a wife-beater or a paedophile ... It is a verbal Yellow Star.' One morning Irving draws the judge's attention to a report that the German government has asked for his extradition over a statement years ago that the Auschwitz gas chambers were a fake. 'I mention this in case this end of the bench should suddenly be empty.' Judicial eyebrows lift almost imperceptibly as the historian says he has written to Jack Straw, warning him that if the Home Office tried to serve a warrant on him he would prosecute the Home Office for assault. At one point, Irving calls an American witness, Kevin MacDonald, to give evidence on his behalf. MacDonald, professor of psychology at California State University and an author of books on Judaism and anti-Semitism, is asked by Irving: 'Do you consider me to be an anti-Semite?' MacDonald: 'I do not consider you to be an anti-Semite. I have had quite a few discussions with you and you almost never mentioned Jews, never in the general negative way.' Next day, however, Rampton questions Irving on his 'utterances both in public and private on the subject of Jews, blacks, etcetera', and reads out a ditty which he says Irving sang to his nine-month-old daughter while walking past mixed-race children in 1994. The QC reads out the lines, extracted from the historian's diary:
'I am a baby Aryan, not Jewish or sectarian. I have no plans to marry an Ape or Rastafarian.'
Irving says he doesn't think it anti-Semitic or racist. Rampton: 'The poor little child is being taught a racist ditty by her perverted racist father?' Irving: 'I am not a racist.' Disclosure of the 'baby Aryan' ditty has an unexpected consequence. Four days later, an emotional Irving complains to Mr Justice Gray that sections of the media have declared open season on him. 'The principal of the school attended by my little girl - the ballet school ...' He pauses, lowers his head, does not finish the sentence. He refers to 'waves of hostility affecting this court'. The judge regards him sympathetically. 'As long as you can carry on ... The newspapers don't have the last word.'
No one is likely to have the last word. As another American academic, Professor Christopher Browning, observes under Irving's questioning: 'There is no last chapter.' [Note de l'AAARGH: please compare with the smug absurd statement of 34 French historians in 1979: "There is not, there cannot be any debate about the existence of gas chambers" [Il n'y a pas, il ne peut pas y avoir de débat sur l'existence des chambres à gaz"]
Irving has a dry sense of humour, which
sometimes serves him well and sometimes not. In one exchange over
the name of a German adjutant on a document, Browning says: 'I am not as familiar as you are
with the initials of adjutants. I defer to you on the initials
...'
Irving throws an amused glance at the defence table. 'Professor, I don't think Mr Rampton
would wish you to defer to me on anything.'
A ripple of laughter runs through the gallery. But Irving's wit
assumes a blunter edge in a 1992 speech of which Rampton reminds
him. In this, Irving declared:
It was, Irving explains, the kind of speech a stand-up comic might give at the end of Brighton pier. In court, however, it has lost its hilarity. Similarly, one feels a chill in court as Rampton recalls a Canadian audience in Calgary laughing when Irving told them in 1991 that 'more people died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz', and that he had referred to 'Auschwitz survivors, survivors of the Holocaust and other liars' as 'A-S-S-H-O-L-S'. To this the supplicant historian replies: 'I have the utmost sympathy for people who genuinely suffered the torments and horrors of Auschwitz and the other camps - But spurious survivors who tried to cash in and say they too were there - I have the greatest contempt for these people trying to climb on the Holocaust bandwagon.'
Irving clearly is endowed with extraordinary critical insight. His contentious book, Hitler's War, shows a literary style that is often vivid, attractive and lucid. But even those who decline to demonise him say he
lacks the power of an elementally great and continually growing individuality. In interviews he has described himself as 'stubborn'. He seems able to live with much of the obloquy surrounding him as a dissentient chronicler.
In this, curiously enough, his experience resembles that of Simon Wiesenthal who, according to his biographer, was to his detractors 'an egomaniac who has lost sight of honesty and straightforward action', and whose writings had been accepted only with great reluctance by academics as 'major contributions to Holocaust literature'.
However, Wiesenthal's reputation was more than buoyed up by admirers, among them an American ambassador to Austria who defined the Nazi-hunter as 'raw goodness crushing raw evil'. From the tone of some of the High Court exchanges, it is clear that the defence sees itself as embarked on defining Irving as quite the reverse.
BBC NEWS 02.10.00
http://news2.thls.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/newsid%5F638000/638285.stm
Author David Irving is not worthy of the title "historian", a leading academic has told the High Court.
Richard Evans, professor of modern history at Cambridge University, told the libel trial brought by the writer that he was not prepared for the "sheer depth of duplicity" he encountered in Mr Irving's analysis of Holocaust-related historical sources.
Mr Irving, 62, the author of Hitler's War and Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich, is seeking damages against academic Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books, over a claim that he is a "Holocaust denier".
Professor Evans made his comments after being called as an expert for the defence.
The academic has produced a 740-page report on Mr Irving's historical method, which he insisted was objective as he had no personal feelings towards the author.
He said he had been "shocked" at what he found, adding that Mr Irving "has fallen so far short of the standards of scholarship customary among historians that he doesn't deserve to be called a historian at all".
'Brutal' assessment
But his comments were challenged by Mr Irving, who said that Professor Evans' "sweeping and rather brutal" assessment of his career stemmed from personal animosity.
"I think you dislike what I write and stand for and what you perceive my views to be," he said.
Mr Irving said that he was "scrupulously fair" in everything he did in public life - "the total opposite of being unscrupulous and manipulative and deceptive as you say in your report".
Professor Evans said that he acknowledged Mr Irving's wide knowledge of source material relating to the Third Reich, but questioned his interpretation.
He said the author's published writings and speeches contained numerous statements which he regarded as "anti-Semitic" to the extent of blaming the Jews for the Holocaust.
His report also concluded that Mr Irving relied on the fact his audience lacked "either the time or the expertise" to check his sources for the "distortions and manipulations" he allegedly perpetuated.
Professor Evans said he accepted that people were entitled to challenge the "general consensus" of history, but asserted that there was a duty to conform to academic standards when evaluating evidence.
Mr Irving, who is representing himself, refutes the defendants' claims that he was a liar and that he falsified history.
The hearing, expected to last several months, was adjourned until Monday.
The Skeptic Magazine February 11, 2000
http://www.skeptic.com/
This week (17 January 2000) begins what could be one of the most important trials ever in the ongoing debate about the limits of free speech. British author David Irving is suing American author Deborah Lipstadt for libel. Specifically, Irving is suing Lipstadt for comments about him and his work in a book she wrote on Holocaust denial. As an Englishman Irving is taking advantage of British libel law that puts the burden on authors to prove that their statements are not libelous. The stakes are made even higher because in England loser pays, including all court and legal costs for both parties.
Irving claims, among other things, that Lipstadt has damaged his reputation and thus attenuated his opportunities as an independent scholar to obtain book contracts and other income-generating activities such as lectures.
Irving told me and others at a conference sponsored by the Institute for Historical Review--a group who calls themselves "Holocaust revisionists"--that Lipstadt is part of a worldwide conspiracy of censorship to silence him. The conspiracy is being orchestrated, Irving says, by "the traditional enemy"--code phrase for "the Jews."
Irving's claims that only one million Jews died in the war, that gas chambers and crematoria were not used for mass extermination, and that the Nazis never intended to exterminate European Jewry, are easily refuted.
Indeed, I do so in my forthcoming book Denying History (co-authored with Alex Grobman), in which we address all of their challenges as well as demonstrate that these "revisionists" are really "deniers," because they deny these three key components that are generally accepted as defining the Holocaust. But the real controversy in this trial, for my money, is whether Irving and his ilk should be allowed to proffer their views without restraint.
In America, the First Amendment protects the right of all citizens to question the existence of anything they like, including the theory of evolution, the death of Elvis, and even the Apollo moon landing. No matter how much one may dislike someone else's opinion--even if it is something as shocking as denying that the Holocaust happened--it is protected by the First Amendment. In fact, the First Amendment was written to protect the speech of the very people we dislike the most.
In most countries of the world, however, this is not the case. In Canada there are "anti-hate" statutes and laws against spreading "false news" that have been applied to Holocaust deniers. In Austria it is a crime if a person "denies, grossly trivializes, approves or seeks to justify the national socialist genocide or other national socialist crimes against humanity." In France it is illegal to challenge the existence of the "crimes against humanity" as they were defined by the Military Tribunal at Nuremberg.
In Germany, where the legal precedence began, the Auschwitzluge, or "Auschwitz-Lie" Law, makes it a crime to "defame the memory of the dead."
This was the result of a judgment by the Federal German Supreme Court on September 18, 1979, when a student whose Jewish grandfather was killed in Auschwitz sued for an injunction against an individual who had posted signs on the fence of his house proclaiming that the Holocaust was a "Zionist swindle." The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the plaintiff: "In calling the racist murders by the Nazis an invention, the statements complained of deny the Jews the inhuman fate which they have suffered on account of their origin. This means an attack on the personality of the people who have been singled out by the anti-Jewish persecutions in the Third Reich. Whoever tried to deny the truth of past events, denies to every Jew the respect to which he is entitled."
Switzerland, Belgium, Israel, Italy, New Zealand, Sweden, and Australia have similar laws and statutes on the books. These laws are all ambiguous enough to allow courts to interpret various Holocaust deniers' activities as illegal. Irving, for example, has been banned from numerous countries around the world. And while he cannot be legally prohibited from speaking in America, he can be so loudly shouted down that he is, essentially, banned. On Friday, February 3, 1995, for example, Irving was invited by the Berkeley Coalition for Free Speech to lecture at the University of California. The university allowed it but the students did not. More than 300 protesters surrounded Latimer Hall to prevent Irving, and 113 ticket holders, to enter the campus building. The police were unable to control the crowd, fistfights broke out, and Irving was forced to leave before he could speak.
There are three reasons why this reaction was practically and morally problematic:
1. The Holocaust deniers have used this event as a rallying point for their claim that the establishment is censoring the truth. The last thing they want is to be ignored or debunked.
2. Lies and falsehoods are most effectively exposed when illuminated by the light of truth. Ignore or debunk David Irving, but don't censor him.
3. Let us pretend for a moment that the majority of people deny the Holocaust and that they are in positions of power. If a mechanism or precedence for censorship exists, then the believer in the Holocaust may now be censored. Would we tolerate this? Of course not. The human mind, no matter what ideas it may generate, must never be quashed. Sir Thomas More said it best in his exchange with William Roper in Robert Bolt's play A Man for All Seasons:
[Note de l'AAARGH: Robert Bolt est le scénariste des mélodrames hollywoodiens Laurence d'Arabie et Le Docteur Jivago. Il ne faut pas mépriser ces opérettes qui ont leur public. Chacun ses références!]
DDG: Well, in her book, which is called Denying the Holocaust, she calls Irving "one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial." Now, Irving says that those words are libellous and he's filed suit against Deborah Lipstadt and against her publisher in England, Penguin Books.
DDG: That's right. Unlike some of your listening audience in the United States will be used to hearing the burden of proof being on the ...
DDG: ...The plaintiff in a libel trial. In England and, I believe, in Canada as well, the burden of proof is on the defendant. So. She has to prove, essentially, three things. She has to prove that certain events happened; that the evidence existed that Irving should have been aware of that these things happened; and that he distorted or suppressed evidence. I mean, that's essentially insofar as the Holocaust itself is an issue, and it is an issue in this trial -- that is why it's an issue.
DDG: Well, it is a pretty heavy burden and, in a sense, a British libel court is a pretty bad place to try and prove these things because the record of British libel courts on matters of history is not fantastic. On the other hand, so far her team has been doing a very good job.
DDG: Well [laughs]. I'm glad you put it like that. His statements on the Holocaust have a kind of quicksilver quality. He's perfectly capable of saying -- as he has to me -- 90 percent of what they're, meaning the defence experts, are going to say I'm going to agree with. Just this afternoon [February 8], at the trial, they were taking evidence from a Professor Christopher Browning, who's a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And they were talking about two of the Nazi death camps -- Belzec and Treblinka. And Irving was saying... Well, first he was appearing to say that he didn't deny that Jews were killed in large numbers, in other words, hundreds of thousands, at these camps. But then he appeared to suggest that, well, actually, he himself wasn't convinced, but for the sake of making the trial quicker he'd concede that it was true. I mean, even under oath, even in a trial, it's still very difficult to get him to be specific about what it is he believes. He has been specific about what he doesn't believe. What he doesn't believe is that Jews were murdered at Auschwitz in gas chambers in large numbers.
DDG: He's not a historian by training, but, although, as he frequently says, neither was Herodotus or Thucydides. So. You don't have to have a PhD to be a historian.
DDG: No, that was Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair.
DDG: But Gordon Craig of Stanford says that... he pays tribute to Irving's energy as a researcher and to the scope and vigour of his publications. And John Keegan, who's the author of The Face of Battle, and other books on military history, has said that Irving's work is "indispensable to understanding the Second World War in the round."
DDG: Well. That's one of the questions at issue in the trial, in a way. I mean, up until now Irving has had a kind of an interesting ride, facing two ways. In other words, facing to the community of historians, he's been regarded as a documents man, industrious, somebody who likes to winkle things out of archives. And, meanwhile, his growing sort of camp of fellow ... they call themselves "revisionists" -- Lipstadt calls them "Holocaust deniers" -- he's been their most respectable spokesperson. And one of the questions that the trial will address, and does address directly, is whether you can face both ways at once like that. In other words, the defence isn't just saying David Irving is wrong about the Holocaust, although they are saying that, they're also saying -- and next week they'll be hearing evidence on this -- that he has distorted or suppressed or misused evidence all the way along through his career. In other words, from his first book, The Destruction of Dresden, which was published in the early 60s, up until now, he's always been, as they say in Britain, "bent."
DDG: Well [pause]. That is a good question. I mean, he would say that he concedes that, for example, I mean, as he has at the trial, probably over a million. I mean, it's hard to get him pinned down on numbers; probably over a million Jews were killed on the Eastern Front by the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units that the Nazis sent in behind their troops during the invasion of the Soviet Union. And he's never disputed that vast numbers of Jews were killed by these groups, which would be hard to do because we have the groups' reports on how many they've killed. I mean, there's a very good paper trail for this. But what he's said is that these killings were not systematic and that they were not planned or ordered by Hitler. Now in the course of the trial he's appeared to backtrack on both of those assertions. But, in a sense, he's all along... what he's all along denied is the existence of large-scale homicidal gas chambers. Now, some people may say -- "Well, so what?" I mean, if somebody's killed, you know, a million people...
DDG: ...They're killed. But, you know, there is an argument, a serious argument, that says that what makes the Holocaust different from other mass murders, 'cause we've had plenty of mass murder in this century -- or the past century, unfortunately, is precisely its mechanized, industrial quality.
DDG: Why -- or what are his grounds?
DDG: I think Why is in some ways the more interesting question. I'll answer that first, if I might, even though you sort of didn't ask it. You know, if you argue in favour of Fascism, if you say that, after all, all the Germans were doing were fighting the Russians and that we know that the Russians were these evil communists and therefore the Germans were actually, in a sense, on our side -- and there's a strain of right-wing thinking that argues that way -- you have a problem. And the problem is that the most vivid association that most people have with Fascism is gas chambers and the Holocaust. So if you want to rehabilitate Fascism as an ideology, then you have to do something to attack this association. So, that, I think, is The Why. The "on what grounds" -- because there is not the same kind of paper trail for the death camps; the death camps that were solely devoted to killing Jews -- Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka -- were destroyed by the Nazis as they retreated from the Red Army and also were liberated from the Red Army... by the Red Army. In other words, they were captured by Russian troops. The pictures that were all seen of, you know, British Tommies or American GIs handing out chocolates or strolling among the cadavers at a place like Belsen or Buchenwald or Dachau -- those were not death camps.
DDG: They were concentration camps. They did not have gas chambers. They may have "ovens," i.e., crematoria, in some cases, but people died of typhus, they died of starvation, they died of overwork. But they were not, in the phrase that Irving disputes, "factories of death." In other words, no reputable historian now pretends that they were "factories of death." And yet, if you ask a lot of people, including -- I have to say -- myself, before I started looking at this trial, there hasn't been that sharp differentiation in the public mind. So that, when Irving says "Well, these places weren't 'factories of death,' therefore, no place was a factory of death" -- you know, for half a second, people think, "Well, how do I know this?"
DDG: Well, that was last week, and the week before, the court heard from Prof. Robert Jan Van Pelt, who's a professor at the architecture faculty at the University of Waterloo, in Canada. And he's the author of a book called Auschwitz 1290 to the Present. And he presented in really staggering detail the kind of evidence that there is, that we now have. This evidence hasn't always been available. And some of it was only released by the Soviet Union who held it in their archives after, you know, the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It was only released by the Russian archivists in the last few years. But there are architectual blueprints, there are plans, there are purchase orders for Zyklon B, which is the gas that was used to kill the Jews. So, there is, in fact, a lot of evidence. But it is also true, and has to be said, some of the evidence -- now whether Irving would say most of it, most other people would say almost none of it, but nonetheless some of it, has to be conceded, can be interpreted two ways.
DDG: Well, he claims, for example, --or he now claims -- 'cause I should say he has said there were never any gas chambers at Auschwitz.
DDG: Now he says, "Well, yes, I see the plans for gas chambers at Auschwitz, but they were for gassing corpses, they were for gassing cadavers. Now, so why you would want to gas a cadaver before you burn it -- as my 9-year-old son asked me [laughs] -- is a question that I can't answer.
DDG: She's an American historian, born in New York. Her first book was called Beyond Belief, and it was an account of the press accounts of the Holocaust as it was going on. In other words, why was so little reported and who reported and what was said and why was it not believed. She's now the Dora Professor of Jewish Studies (I think it is) at Emory University. She has made a speciality of "Holocaust denial," as she calls it, and wrote a book about it in the mid-90s.
DDG: The whole trial is about "quibbling" about it.
DDG: I think that's reasonable.
DDG: Yes.
DDG: That's a very good question. You have to go back to 1996, which is two years after her book came out, when there was an uproar in the United States because David Irving was under contract to St. Martin's Press in New York to publish a book called Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich. And, shortly, before the book was about to be published, the publishers came under a large pressure campaign, basically, saying, "What you doing publishing this guy?" And they dropped the book. And as a result of that campaign, and their dropping the book, and Irving's response to the campaign, he has essentially become a pariah to respectable publishers. So he says... In a sense, this is true, that he had no choice but to try and vindicate himself. The problem is that his means of vindicating himself is basically to continue to dig himself deeper into the same hole.
DDG: Well, in other words, he's not saying, "Oh, it's terrible to say that I'm a Holocaust denier -- I never said any such thing." He's saying, "You can't call me a Holocaust denier just... just because I say nobody was gassed at Auschwitz, because nobody was gassed at Auschwitz."
DDG: Exactly.
DDG: And of course because of the fact the burden of proof is on the defendant, it's a kind of legal jujitsu, in which she has to prove he is wrong. He doesn't have to prove that he's right.
DDG: Yes, it is.
DDG: David Irving is representing himself. He's what they call a litigant in person. On the other side of the courtoom is rather more crowded because there's Deborah Lipstadt's solicitors, and the most notable of those is Anthony Julius, who may be known to some of your listeners as Princess Diana's divorce lawyer. He's also the author of a scholarly book on T.S. Eliot and anti-Semitism. And then there are lawyers for Penguin Books, who are the publisher. And then there's a QC, who does the actual cross-examination -- Richard Rampton, who's a very colourful man.
DDG: Well, they keep saying that isn't their job.
DDG: They keep saying their only job is to show that Irving suppressed, twisted or distorted evidence. But then you have to ask yourself, "Oh?, evidence about what?" And if he hadn't suppressed, twisted or distorted it, "What would it tell us?"
DDG: So. There's a way in which both sides are kind of, to my mind, colluding in this kind of illusion that history has nothing to do with this trial; that it's only about what happened in David Irving's study. But, in fact, as everyone seems to agree, they have to show... if they want to show that he's ... that he's wrong, they have to show that it happened, that he had evidence that it happened and ignored it.
DDG: That's right.
DDG: Which they have amassed; they have amassed an enormous amount of evidence. I mean, in addition to Prof. Van Pelt, who, by the way, didn't only give testimony, he also submitted a report of several hundred pages, specifically, about the evidence for Auschwitz. Today there's Prof. Browning, who's submitted a very lengthy report on the evidence for the systematic nature of the Final Solution. They'll also hear evidence from Peter Longren (sp?), who's a historian at the University College in London, about the organization of the Final Solution and the Nazi hierarchy and also about Hitler's involvement in the Final Solution. So there's a parade of world-class historians as expert witnesses.
DDG: That's right.
DDG: His name is Charles Gray, Mr. Justice Gray. He's only been a judge for 18 months. But before that he was one of the most eminent libel lawyers in Britain. He runs a very tight trial. In other words, if he feels that witnesses are straying he will bring them back to the point. It does provide a distorted picture, though, from the press box, because most of the press won't have seen any of these reports; nobody who's sitting in the public gallery will have seen any of these reports. The judge will see a report; for example, the judge will have read Browning's report. Browning will come into court, he'll be sworn in, and then Irving will start cross-examining him. In other words, Rampton won't lead him through his report. So all you'll see if you're sitting in the public gallery or if you're sitting in the press box, is, whether or not, Irving is able to attack the witness' credibility. You don't get what the witness' actual testimony is because it's in these written reports.
DDG: Well. That kind of grows out of what I just said because I think Irving is operating on two tracks. One track is... he's trying to prosecute a libel case -- and, clearly, you know -- if he wins this case, it will be a huge victory for him and for revisionists. And even if he wins it on a technicality, they will make a great deal of it. On the other hand, if he loses it, he will probably have to go bankrupt to pay the other side's cost. But it's also true that he will carry on and he will say what he's saying, but his mainstream credibility will be destroyed. In other words, he will no longer be able to face in both directions. He will only face in the direction of Nazi revisionists or the fans of Adolf Hitler, the kind of people who collect Nazi memorabilia -- things like that. He will not have a mainstream audience anymore. So. That's the trial track. But the other track, which Irving is conducting as well, is this kind of... he's got this captive audience of the world's press, and he's making the most of it. He's conducting a big public teach-in on revisionism. I would say that on that track he's not doing badly. I don't mean that he's persuading me, but I mean that he's making the most of his opportunities. He is not an idiot; he's an intelligent man; he's not a clown; and his arguments are serious and they come across, on the surface, as plausible. The defence will obviously try and probe below the surface -- and, certainly, with the judge, I think, they're doing that with great effect. But in terms of the public and the press, I think it's much more of a mixed bag.
DDG: That's right! I've read part of the transcript of the Zundel trial and Irving... this is much less of a circus. The judge has a much tighter control on the trial and, in an odd way, even though Irving isn't the defendant -- I mean, that's the other main difference -- he's not the defendant.
DDG: Right! They had no choice. So they have to defend themselves. But they're doing it in a much more well-organized way. There's... I wasn't at the Zundel trial, but if you read the transcripts, there's a kind of chaotic quality -- you can't believe this is being allowed to happen ... in the way that some of the witnesses were treated, in the abusive nature of some of the questioning. Irving is not like that. He is not an abusive questioner. He has not been... He's very politely accused witnesses of lying and faking evidence, but it's been very polite.
DDG: Yes. I've interviewed him a couple of times. A couple of times in person and a couple of times by phone.
DDG: Uh. Bizarre. He's, as I've said before, intelligent. He makes an effort to be -- at least with me -- personable. Uh... He likes to shock you, or try and shock you, but you get the sense that partways, at least, when he's not in court, it's a kind of game for him. It is also true that there's an almost hypnotic quality to the way that he has an explanation for everything. You know, if you say to him, "Well, what happened?" In other words, one of the big piles of evidence for the Final Solution is the fact that we know that there were all these people sent by train to places like Auschwitz and Belzec and Sobibor -- and then we never heard from them again.
So, You know, you say, "Well, what happened? Where did the Jews go - if they were exterminated?" And he'll give you this rap about how some of them went to Israel and some of them went to the United States. And, you're listening and you're thinking, "Well... I dunno...could be..." And it's only afterwards you realize that it's... it's insane, that it, you know, basically, implies that Jews are not like other people; they wouldn't seek out their families after the war, you know...
DDG: Exactly. But, while he's telling you it, it definitely has a kind of surface plausibility.
DDG: Well, that depends on... Well, the difference between 6 million and many hundreds of thousands is an order of magnitude, so that's pretty important. And again, you have to look at The Why -- not on the sort of "on what grounds?" -- but The Why. The point of minimizing the numbers for revisionists -- if you take them at their own label -- is to, and Irving is very explicit about this, is to say that, "Well, all wars are dirty; and there were lost of crimes in World War Two; there are lots of innocents killed; and that the Germans killed hundreds of thousands of Jews, but the Americans killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese, the British killed, you know, tens, hundreds of thousands of Germans in fire-bombing Dresden and Hamburg and Pforzheim. So, really, you know, nobody's worse than anybody else. It's this kind of what Deborah Lipstadt called "false equivalency." And that's really their goal. Whether it matters that 5.1 million or 6 million were killed, I think it matters a great deal because I think facts always matter.
DDG: Thank you.
DDG: OK. Bye-bye.
AIH: Bye-bye.
D.D. Guttenplan is writing a book about
the Irving libel trial. His feature-length article on the subject appears
in the February issue of Atlantic Monthly. Mr. Guttenplan spoke to us from London.
<end>
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Relayed feb. 11, 2000, by Ingrid Rimland Zgrams. See <http://www.lebensraum.org/>
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