AAARGH
In his crushing judgment on David Irving's credentials as a historian, Mr Justice Gray dealt a body blow to the Holocaust denial industry around the world. Irving was not the first to falsify the history of Nazism in order to rehabilitate Hitler, but he was for a while the most dangerous. Irving was the respectable face of neo-Nazi propaganda, whose repute as a writer enabled him to insinuate his poisonous views into people's living rooms.
That threat has been blunted, although the question remains how Irving was allowed to get away with it for so long. If it was because he operated in the penumbra of academic freedom and exploited the popular confusion about the nature of history, then Gray has performed another invaluable service.
His meticulous judgment is an exemplary exercise in differentiating real history from pseudo-history; between legitimate interpretation of evidence in the search for truth and distortion for the sake of a political ideology [AAARGH: about genocidal ideology and Lipstadt's role in the forgery, see Hobsbawm].
To those familiar with Holocaust denial literature, it was always clear that veracity was subordinate to ideology. After all, denial of the Final Solution was built into the mass murder process itself. The Nazis bequeathed a legacy of euphemism and obfuscation designed to camouflage their crime and make it easier to deny in years to come. Holocaust denial is their post-humous alibi.
The roll of dishonour begins with Paul Rassinier, a French socialist and resister, who was sent to a concentration camp. Post-war, however, his crude anti-semitism prompted him to allege that the real villains were the "kapos", not the SS. He also claimed that Zionists fabricated Jewish suffering as a gigantic swindle to get compensation, an accusation echoed by nearly every subsequent denier [AAARGH: the whole of Rassinier's work is available on this site. We refer the reader to his books, where it would be hard to find a single sample of his "antisemitism.].
This was articulated again in America in the 1950s and 1960s by Harry E Barnes and his protégé, David Hoggan. In 1973, Austin App, a German-American college teacher, published The Six Million Swindle, which systematised the main themes of existing denial literature. These were that Jews had not been murdered, they had disappeared into the Russian interior; that there was no proof of gas chambers being used for exterminating Jews, but the allegations served Israel well.
App was published alongside Barnes in The Myth of the Six Million, a book financed by the right-wing and racist Liberty League led by Willis Carto. However, their blatant anti-semitic, pro-German agenda restricted their influence. Arthur Butz, a professor of electrical engineering in Chicago, learnt the lesson. He avoided the appearance of Nazi sympathies in his 1976 treatise, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, although it repeated every calumny deployed by its predecessors.
Butz's technique helped to inspire the establishment of the Institute for Historical Review two years later. The IHR made links with Rassinier's European followers, such as Robert Faurrison and Henri Roques. Their antics were serious enough to provoke the French government into passing legislation outlawing Holocaust denial, in turn causing the deniers to form an international network, hinging on the regular conferences of the IHR.
They co-operated to fight a rash of trials resulting from attempts to contain their activity. Irving gave evidence at one, involving the Canadian Ernst Zündel, in 1987.
Britain was not immune, but the very marginality of Holocaust denial here up to the 1980s was what made Irving such a menace when he returned from the Zündel trial "converted" to the belief that there had been no gas chambers at Auschwitz. Onto a glittering reputation he proceeded to bolt all the paraphernalia of the Holocaust deniers.
To close watchers of Irving, such as the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight, this was no surprise. He was already regarded as a "soft-core" denier thanks to Hitler's War, which appeared in 1977, and became notorious for the claim that Hitler had not known about the Final Solution until October 1943 and, rather illogically, had actually ordered the liquidation of Jews to be halted two years earlier.
Should the alarm bells have been ringing earlier? From Irving's literary debut in 1963, with his book on the bombing of Dresden, his writing was distinguished by three features: sympathy for Germany and the minimisation of German crimes; antipathy for the allied leadership and the maximisation of allied misdemeanours; and the problematic use of evidence.
His Dresden book put the number of German dead at 135,000, although he was soon made aware that the number was more like 25,000-30,000. Despite this, he stuck to a figure he knew was inflated. In 1979, his German publisher, Ullstein, had to pay compensation to the father of Anne Frank after it printed in the introduction to the German edition of Hitler's War Irving's claim that Anne's diary was a fake.
Irving is celebrated for identifying the Hitler diary, "discovered" in 1983, as a forgery. But it is less well known that he did a U-turn once he found there was some useful material in them for exonerating the Führer of responsibility for the persecution of Germany's Jews.
By contrast, in a study of Churchill he depicted the wartime prime minister as lazy, drunken, cowardly, and duplicitous. It is remarkable that his avowal of patriotism withstood his trashing of the greatest Englishman in modern history.
It was not until he issued the Leuchter Report, a pseudo-scientific farrago "disproving" the existence of murderous gas chambers at Auschwitz, in 1988 that perceptions of Irving changed. In subsequent years his activity on the far right in Britain and Germany revealed the propagandist hidden in the garb of the historian.
Ironically, the libel case which he instigated triggered the process that unmasked him. It supplied definitive proof that he was not interpreting evidence differently - he was violating it. For example, Irving claimed that Hitler was innocent of the November 1938 pogrom called Kristallnacht and, when he found out about it, tried to limit the destruction. In support of this claim, Irving cited a telex by the head of the German police which, Irving claimed, ordered the force to prevent damage to Jewish property.
But Irving neglected to mention that the property in question was only business premises: not synagogues or private dwellings. Nor did Hitler tell the police to prevent German Jews from being mistreated or killed. No amount of legitimate interpretation could present Hitler benignly on this occasion: it was only possible by twisting the evidence. Gray ruled that Irving "pays little attention to the evidence which implicates Hitler".
Was it possible to argue legitimately from the evidence that Hitler was unaware of the Final Solution and inclined to stop it? A document crucial to Irving was a telegram from Hitler's headquarters in November 1941 requiring that a transport of Jews from Berlin to the east should not be liquidated. Although the document referred to one transport of Jews whom Hitler wanted to spare from the massacre and retain as hostages, Irving misconstrued it to mean that no transports of Jews should be murdered.
Anyway, it ran counter to all the other reports of a systematic slaughter. Gray commented that "any objective historian is obliged to be even-handed in his approach to the evidence: he cannot pick and choose without adequate reason".
Is Irving's characterisation of the past, shared with the Holocaust denial industry, simply unorthodox? Listen to Gray: "Irving has seriously misrepresented Hitler's views on the Jewish question. He has done so in some instances by misinterpreting and mistranslating documents, and in other instances by omitting documents or parts of them.The picture which he provides to readers of Hitler and his attitude to the Jews is at odds with the evidence."
In other words, the Irvingites have been saying that two and two make five. The same applies to his mishandling of evidence concerning the gas chambers. While the judge acknowledged that documentary sources for them are "fragmentary" and some eyewitness testimony is unreliable, the totality of evidence is such that "no objective, fair-minded historian would have serious cause to doubt that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz and that they were operated on a substantial scale to kill hundreds of thousands of Jews".
Irving's contentions thus bear no relation to the genuine historical disputes that animate Holocaust studies or debates in other fields. Real historians monitor bias and are scrupulous about using evidence: objectivity can be compatible with strongly held opinions, if the will exists.
A man branded by a judge "anti-semitic", "racist" and a "neo-Nazi polemicist" engaged in the "vilification of the Jewish race and people" is clearly outside of legitimate debate. Why then is he still courted by the media? This question goes to the heart of how British society treats the Holocaust and racism.
There is a backlash against memorialising the Holocaust, a notion that society has been "forced" to swallow too much of it. Equally, there is a backlash against "political correctness". When this intemperance combines with shallow ideas about freedom to "interpret" the past, the door to Irving remains half-open.
SUPPORTERS of the racist historian David Irving are to be pursued for payment of £2m in costs incurred in his libel action which failed last week.
Although Irving appears to have little money, defence lawyers say they will not let the matter go. "Irving will be pursued for every penny of the costs, and if we don't get the money from him we will go to the judge and ask him to order Irving to divulge the names of his financial backers," said Mike Whine, a spokesman for the Board of Deputies of British Jews and a member of the defence team in the action.
Irving sued Deborah Lipstadt, an American academic, and her publisher, Penguin Books, for libel, claiming she had accused him of denying the existence of the Holocaust. He lost the case and was described by the judge as a racist who falsified history to exonerate Hitler of involvement in the mass murder of Jews.
Facing humiliation, Irving said he received backing from about 4,000 supporters, including 2,000 in the United States, 900 in Britain and 1,200 in other parts of the world. He has said that donations to his "fighting fund" have ranged from £1 to £50,000, reaching a total of £340,000.
These donors will now be chased for payment of costs by Mishcon de Reya, the lawyers who acted for Lipstadt and Penguin, on the grounds that they helped to sustain the case. A similar move was made earlier this year when defence lawyers in a failed libel case brought by Neil Hamilton, the former MP, decided to pursue his backers for costs.
Irving has few funds to meet the bill. His income appears to have declined in recent years and he has a history of financial difficulties. He has faced at least three bankruptcy hearings on petitions brought by former solicitors whom he had failed to pay, although each time he then managed to produce funds at the last minute.
His prime asset is a flat in Duke Street, central London, but it is heavily mortgaged to the Bradford Bingley building society. It has also been beset with claims including a caution in favour of Rowohlt, the German publisher, and a petition for bankruptcy from a firm of London solicitors.
There have been at least six other charges on the property, mostly resulting from disputes over legal fees during the past eight years. Nor has he always managed to maintain his mortgage payments. In 1998 his arrears on the property were over £65,000 after he had not paid his monthly mortgage for two years.
Irving also has a number of county court judgments against him, mostly for small amounts.
Although discredited, Irving may hope to earn some money from lecture tours, but even his "fighting fund" support is patchy. In Germany and the United States - where he has an account at a bank in Florida - his funds have received only modest donations on a regular basis and are both effectively inactive.
His main source of income continues to be from his books, which still sell reasonably well in American and produce a monthly income in the region of $10,000.
When in America, where he has spent a great deal of time, Irving often stays in Key West, Florida, in a house owned by Sam G Dickson. There were calls to exclude Dickson from Britain in 1992 when he was due to speak at a conference organised by Irving and others.
Dickson supports an organisation called American Renaissance, whose website carries advertisements for the American Friends of the British National party.
According to Irving's website, the historian is likely to resist any move to unmask his supporters. "They know what is at stake and they have wholeheartedly supported him," it stated last week. "He has no intention of revealing their names and identities."
If he cannot meet the costs himself and refuses to divulge the names of his backers, it is possible that he could face jail. In another financial dispute in 1994 he refused to disclose details of his assets and spent a short spell in Pentonville prison for his trouble.
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