A paper Eichmann?
When David Irving looks down from the witness box he does not see a friendly audience. There are a handful of his supporters scattered through the courtroom: a pair of tall, balding men in shapeless sweaters, one of them wearing a swastika ring; the pock-marked, scholarly-looking man in perpetual need of a shave who runs Irving’s website; a bullet-headed man in a leather jacket. After the first few days an elegant older blonde woman, whose presence at Irving’s table prompts several reporters to mistake her for his wife, can usually be found seated incongruously beside a couple of students in cheap suits and a short, plump man who keeps wiping his forehead with a large silk handkerchief.
But there are also a number of men with yarmulkes—the skullcap worn by observant Jews—and some young Asian men, one wearing a turban. There is a stylish young Israeli woman, dressed entirely in black, from the Shoah Foundation, and a very tall, white-haired American who is married to Gitta Sereny. Several elderly men and women have numbers tattooed on their forearms. They are survivors of the concentration camps: Dachau, Buchenwald, Belsen, or Plaszow, where Oskar Schindler’s workers lived. One or two may even have been through Auschwitz—a vast complex that included mines and slave-labor factories as well as the extermination camp at Birkenau.
Irving ignores both of these groups. His testimony is directed at the judge, and the tourists in the public gallery, and most of all at the reporters in the press seats. He tells of his struggle to learn who was behind the campaign against him. “It was,” he said, “like trying to put a hook in a custard pie.” And he refers, yet again, to his expectation that he would “be able to cross-examine Professor Lipstadt when the time comes . . . and, of course, now we will not.” But mostly what he does is tell stories.
Irving’s stories have several aims. Some are war stories, meant to illustrate links in what Irving calls his “chain of documents, of varying magnitudes of integrity and weight, which indicate that Hitler”—far from being the instigator of the Jews’ destruction—“was a negative force in this matter.”
Some are designed to portray Irving the intrepid researcher: “I visited the widow of Ernst von Weiszäcker, Ribbentrop’s private secretary. . . . She had all her husband’s diaries and letters, which she made available to me. I was rather puzzled that she had not made them available to the German historians, and her reply was, ‘Mr. Irving, they never asked.’”
Some are designed to distance him from his associates. The problem with Ernst Zündel, Irving tells the judge, is that “you had to realize that he was a man with a certain intellect, a certain sense of humour and execrable private opinions. That is the only way that I can characterize him.” To Irving, Zündel’s lapses in taste, however regrettable, don’t make him an extremist. “In my book,” he explains, “an extremist is somebody who plants bombs under motor cars, somebody who plots the overthrow of governments, somebody who goes around with a gun in his pocket. Somebody who holds views which are extreme—this is a very subjective concept. It depends on which viewpoint you view those views from.”
Irving tells the judge that in his view the whole fuss over numbers—whether of the dead at Dresden or the victims of the Nazis—is meaningless. “My Lord, 35,000, 135,000—you may disagree with me, but I see no difference between these figures. Any more than somebody who says it was not six million who died in the Holocaust, it was only one million. Which is the kind of sentence I would never utter because each one of those people being killed is a crime.”
This may be special pleading. It was after all Irving who not only drew attention to Dresden but, according to the defense, hyped the figures to do so. Just as it is Irving who makes speeches and publishes literature taking issue with the numbers killed at Auschwitz. But it is special pleading of a very high order. How high becomes clear when Irving turns his attention to the question of what it means to deny the Holocaust.
“The Holocaust,” he says “was the tragedy that befell the Jewish people during World War II. I would set it as broadly as that. One could even set it more broadly and say the Holocaust was the whole of World War II and that the people who died and suffered in that Holocaust were not necessarily confined to the Jewish religion, but any number of innocents, whether Gypsies, homosexuals, the people in Coventry, the people in Hiroshima. I think it is otiose to try and define the Holocaust just the way you wish to define it in order to snare somebody, which appears to be what happens in a case like this.”
The judge tries, in a non-adversarial way, to get Irving to be more precise. “I understand what you are saying about the Holocaust being a term you could apply to World War II generally,” he says, “but if you take it as meaning, for the purposes of this question anyway, a systematic program of exterminating Jews . . . can I just ask you this, do you accept that there was any such program first?”
“No, I do not, “ Irving replies.
“The systematic program to exterminate the Jews,” he explains, “is the cause, whereas the Holocaust, the word ‘Holocaust’ as I would see it is the effect, the result, the tragedy that results. When we are looking at the Holocaust we are looking at the victims. We are looking at the mass graves. We are looking at the people being machine gunned into pits. The Holocaust in my submission is not the machinery which produced the result, it is the suffering and not the murderer, shall we say.”
Mr. Justice Gray tries again, inviting Irving at least to agree that there was a systematic character to this slaughter. Irving demurs. “I am not caviling, but these are important definitions, my Lord. If the definition—if by using the word ‘systematic’ you are implying that the system, the Third Reich as such originated these massacres, then I would have to quibble with that.”
The judge’s questions are designed to identify common ground on the Holocaust, thereby keeping history in its place. But even when they do elicit, for example, Irving’s acknowledgment that killing by poison gas was also one of the “effects,” this apparent concession soon evaporates.
MR. JUSTICE GRAY: Can I ask a similar question? Do you accept or deny totally that there was any systematic gassing of Jews in gas chambers, whether at Auschwitz or elsewhere? I know we are not dealing with Auschwitz but I think that that ought to be part of—
MR. IRVING: Yes, I think if we can leave out the word “systematic” which is contentious, I do not deny that there was some kind of gassing at gas chambers in Birkenau, it is highly likely that there was.
MR. JUSTICE GRAY: —on a solely experimental basis or—
MR. IRVING: That is the word I have used to give an indication of scale and to give an indication of the authority on which it was conducted, and, well, I leave it at that.
In a sense, Irving’s argument—his “suit”—is that he has every right to “leave it at that.” Tall and stocky, Irving squares his bulk against the wooden witness enclosure like a sailor heading into the wind, presenting himself as a reasonable man who has made his fair share of mistakes. “I admit I made a mistake in the transcription,” he says of the Himmler phone call concerning the Jews from Berlin. The Holocaust, he told me before the trial, is “not my patch.” Why then should he be expected to adhere to some orthodoxy about an event whose causes are still the subject of intense historical controversy, and whose deplorable effects he neither condones nor disputes? On its face this is a fair question, and if Irving can keep the trial on this ground he will prevail.
Irving ends his testimony with one last story. “My Lord, I had the great misfortune in September to lose my eldest daughter. After we buried her, I received a phone call from the undertakers that another wreath had come. When the wreath was delivered late that afternoon, it was a very expensive and elaborate wreath of white roses and lilies . . . with a card attached to it saying, ‘This was truly a merciful death,’ signed ‘Philipp Bouhler and friends’.” Philipp Bouhler, Irving explains, was the name of the head of the “Nazi extermination program for the mentally and physically disabled—the Euthanasia Program.”
If the whole of Irving’s evidence can be seen as an attempt to take and hold the high ground, Rampton’s cross-examination is an attempt to push him off. He rises irritably to his feet. “This is the most ghastly inconvenient and uncomfortable court I have ever been in,” he complains. The witness is too far away from his documents, there is a column blocking his view, and the steamy, overheated courtroom gives Rampton “the feeling I’m being boiled alive.
“I am sorry to be a little facetious,” Rampton says, smiling and turning toward Irving. “Mr. Irving, that is an elegiac story that you told us just now. I do not mean that sarcastically at all; it is perfectly true. It is.” Rampton pauses. “You blame that appalling note on the wreath on Deborah Lipstadt’s book, is that right?”
Irving counters with a reference to a “climate of hatred.” Rampton, undeterred, and with the same wan smile, asks, “If what the book said about you is true, then it would not—perhaps you would agree—be the book’s fault but yours, would it not?
“In 1977, when Hitler’s War was published,” asks Rampton, shifting gears, “you accepted the Holocaust in all its essential details in its ordinary sense . . . its generally understood sense?”
Irving asks what he means.
“The systematic mass murder of millions of Jews by the Nazi regime during the Second World War,” Rampton replies.
“I do not accept the word ‘systematic,’ but for the rest of it, then that is an accurate précis,” Irving says.
Rampton tries again: “Until 1988 you accepted the Holocaust, however it be precisely defined (and I am not quibbling about minutiae) in its generally understood sense, that is to say, a mass killing of Jews by the Nazis during World War II, did you not?”
“I did not use the word ‘Holocaust,’” says Irving, “but I did quite definitely accept that the Nazis engaged in mass killing of Jews during World War II.”
Rampton then asks Irving about a speech he made in connection with the 1991 publication of a revised edition of Hitler’s War: “And did you regard that proposition, that the Germans had factories of death with gas chambers, plural, in which they liquidated millions, plural, of their opponents, at this date in November 1991 as a lie?”
“A big lie, yes.”
“A big lie?”
“Yes.”
Rampton quotes from Irving’s speech: “If you look at my great Adolf Hitler biography here, this bumper Adolf Hitler biography that we have only just published, in fact, it literally arrived off the printing presses today, you will not find the Holocaust mentioned in one line, not even a footnote. Why should we? If something didn’t happen, then you don’t even dignify it with a footnote.”
“Do you accept,” Rampton asks, “that the Nazis killed, by one means or another—and I am not talking about hard labor or exposing people to typhus—shot, murdered, gassed, kicked to death millions of Jews during World War II? Or not?”
“Yes,” says Irving
Rampton, confused: “You do?”
“Yes, whether it was of the order of millions or not, I would hesitate to specify, but I would say it was certainly more than one million, certainly less than four million. But that is not a very useful answer to you, the limitation I put on that. I do not want you to say, ‘You said millions, therefore, it is more than two million,’ for example.”
“Would you accept,” Rampton resumes wearily, “that one version of the Holocaust which is generally understood, accepted and perceived—”
Irving interrupts: “Will you avoid using the passive voice so we know precisely who is generally accepting, understanding and perceiving?”
“Call it the public at large,” says Rampton, “the audiences to whom you speak.”
“Have you stood in Oxford Street with a clip board asking them, the public at large?” Irving asks.
“You will not commit yourself to a generally understood sense of the Holocaust then?” says Rampton.
“I do not know what the generally understood sense of the Holocaust is,” Irving replies. “I have given my version of it. You are giving the court your version of it.”
Rampton keeps coming. “You deny that the Nazis—do not let us talk about Germans, let us talk about Nazis—that the Nazis killed millions of Jews in gas chambers in purpose-built establishments?”
“Yes.” Rampton finally gets the answer he wants, but his satisfaction is short-lived. “Is the reason really why you deny that,” asks Mr. Justice Gray, “because you do not accept there were any such purpose-built factories?”
“Well,” says Irving, smiling, “the word ‘purpose-built’ made my answer much easier, my Lord. You will understand why I say that when we turn to the architectural drawings and we bring in the evidence that I have.”
“And Leuchter?” asks the judge.
“Leuchter I think is something that I am not going to rely on at all,” Irving replies. At this Rampton begins tugging on his ear and shifting his wig forwards and backwards with his hands. “As I said in my introduction to the Leuchter report,” Irving continues, “the Leuchter report is flawed. We now have very much better expertise.”
Rampton erupts. “Mr. Irving, you do tempt me very sorely. When Leuchter first swam into your view, you had no expertise about Auschwitz or about gassing or extermination or anything like that, did you?” Rampton reads from Irving’s remarks at the conference to launch his publication of the Leuchter report: “After Fred Leuchter did his truly epoch making investigation of the gas chambers at Auschwitz, the forensic laboratory tests . . . yielded the extraordinary result which converted me, made me into a hardcore disbeliever.”
Rampton looks at Irving. “It was Mr. Leuchter’s report and the bit about the laboratory tests which converted you into disbelief that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz, is that right?”
“That is correct.”
“As a consequence of that,” Rampton continues, “you have come to believe, perhaps it was a matter of protest, perhaps not, I do not know, that the Nazis did not use gas chambers for the extermination of Jews—let alone millions of Jews?”
“Yes, I have become very skeptical of that element of the story.”
“And you have publicly expressed your disbelief?”
“Skepticism, yes.”
“So if and in so far as that forms a part of people’s belief about the Holocaust, you are a Holocaust denier?”
“No.”
“Are you not?”
“No,” Irving repeats. “You do not have to believe in the whole to be a believer. How many of us are Christians who do not believe in every aspect of the Christian ethos?”
For the moment, Rampton is beaten. “All right. I do not think we ought to argue metaphysics, Mr. Irving.”
In The Technique of Advocacy, a handbook for lawyers, the barrister John Munkman sets out four possible aims of cross-examination: (1) to destroy the evidence-in-chief; (2) to weaken the evidence; (3) to elicit new evidence; (4) to undermine the witness. In the movies, aggressive cross-examination can break down witnesses, force confessions, win cases. But in real life, says Munkman, “even the most devastating cross-examination” seldom succeeds on its own.1 Irving’s obduracy made the first three objectives impossible; even undermining his credibility would take time.
Rampton needed help—which, eventually, he would get, thanks to the documents thrown up by discovery. When it was the defense’s turn to call witnesses, there would be no shortage of new evidence with which to challenge Irving’s version or to demonstrate the selectivity of his vision. Until then, Rampton was reduced to trying to refute Irving using internal evidence—the inconsistencies in Irving’s own account of events—and appealing to the court’s common sense, to what “everyone knows” about the Holocaust, to counter Irving’s claims.
Irving’s stubbornness, the complexity of the case, the efforts of the Nazi perpetrators to cover up their crimes, their frequent resort to what Eichmann called Amtssprache (bureaucrat-ese) and euphemism—Rampton’s “seminar” faced many obstacles to understanding. But none, perhaps, so persistent as the belief that we already know all about it.
In a way, a little metaphysics in the courtroom might have helped. Because despite Irving’s claims, the fundamental difficulty in “proving” the Holocaust isn’t an absence of evidence. The destruction of European Jewry was, in Raul Hilberg’s central insight, essentially a bureaucratic process, the result of “a series of administrative measures.” In their pursuit of the Endlösung—the Final Solution—the Nazis left all the detritus of any large organization: memoranda, requisition forms, purchase orders, files, and blueprints.
Approximately one million Jews were murdered at Auschwitz, for example, and all of them had to be taken there by train from somewhere else, in the middle of a war in which the railways were the lifelines of the German army. The gas to kill them—Zyklon-B—had to be paid for. The trucks that delivered it had to get travel permits. And the ovens that disposed of the bodies had to be specially built—by Topf and Sons, a German firm that patented the design. Finally, for each Stück—“piece,” as the Nazis referred to a Jew—processed, certain items had to be accounted for: money, jewelry, personal effects, dental gold, hair.
Hilberg’s mapping of this bureaucracy fills three volumes, but the essential facts of the Holocaust are contained in a series of tables at the end. “Deaths by Cause,” for example, shows that more than 800,000 Jews died as a result of “ghettoization and general privation,” more than 1.3 million were killed by “open-air shootings,” and up to 3 million were murdered in camps—as many as 2.7 million of these in specialized extermination camps. By comparison Hilberg says that 150,000 died in other camps, including concentration camps such as Dachau and Buchenwald. In “Deaths by Country,” Hilberg’s list ranges from the up to three million Jews of Poland to the fewer than 1,000 from Luxembourg, and in “Deaths by Year” he charts the genocide’s rise and fall. But in all three tables the total is the same: 5.1 million Jews.
Other historians dispute Hilberg’s arithmetic, arguing for a figure closer to six million. Scholars also remain divided on exactly when and why the Nazis shifted from a policy of encouraging Jewish emigration (which saved half of Germany’s Jews) to a policy of extermination (which murdered perhaps 90 percent of Greece’s Jews). And they argue about the role of the camps in the German economy. They even disagree about Hitler’s role in the decision-making process.2 Irving makes use of these divisions—just as he makes use of ambiguities in the Auschwitz complex, where factories run by Krupp and IG Farben all co-existed with Birkenau, a highly specialized killing center in which nearly a million people were gassed to death. But his argument is something different.
The first glimpse of a chink in Irving’s armor comes on the third day. Rampton opens his cross-examination by returning to Himmler’s November 1941 telephone log, with its order that a trainload of Jews were “not to be liquidated.” The previous day, Irving had admitted he’d made a mistake, transcribing Judentransport, a German singular noun meaning “Jew transport,” as the plural Judentransporte, which he’d translated as “transportation of Jews” in Hitler’s War (turning an order against killing one trainload of Jews into general prohibition). It was, Irving said, “a silly misreading”; he’d brought in a letter from 1974 to demonstrate how long ago in the past the mistake had occurred. After noting that his previous testimony had been “sworn evidence on oath,” Rampton asks Irving to turn to that 1974 letter, where, it turns out, “you have transcribed it correctly.”
“Yes.”
“The answer you gave yesterday was wrong, was it not?”
“That is correct.”
Rampton presses hard on the implication that Irving deliberately mistranslated the phrase to falsely suggest that Hitler opposed the killings, but at this early stage the judge has no reason to deny Irving the benefit of the doubt. Later that morning Rampton takes up another document from Irving’s opening statement, the remarks of Major-General Walter Bruns, secretly taped when he was in British captivity. Rampton reads from a transcript of the conversation filed in the Public Record Office in London: “I told that fellow Altemeyer—in fact, Altemeyer, whose name I shall always remember and who will be added to the list of war criminals—‘Listen to me! They (that is Jews*) represent valuable manpower.’ Altemeyer: ‘Do you call Jews valuable human beings, sir?’ I (that is Bruns*) said, ‘Listen to me properly. I said valuable manpower, I did not mention their value as human beings.’ He said (Altemeyer said*), ‘Well, they are to be shot in accordance with the Führer’s orders!’ I said: ‘Führer’s orders?’ He said, ‘Yes!’ whereupon he showed me his orders.
“Now that”—the mention of “Führer’s orders”—“has never appeared in any of your books, has it?” asks Rampton.
“Too true, yes, absolutely right,” Irving replies.
“Why not?”
“I discounted it.”
“Why do you discount it?”
“Ah, at last,” Irving says. “Because other evidence shows that Hitler had not issued the order. Firstly I said that nowhere in all the documentation of all the world’s archives has any such order turned up.”
“That’s not evidence,” says Rampton, “that is an absence of evidence.”
“It is evidence in a very powerful sense,” says Irving.
“It is a negative piece of evidence.”
“I hate to remind you of the basic principle of English law that a man is innocent until proven guilty. Am I right?”
“Hitler is not on trial, alas,” observes Rampton.
Which prompts Irving to ask: “Is Hitler somehow excluded from this general rule of fair play?”
The question of fair play recurs repeatedly when the trial resumes on the Monday. Gray has managed to get the proceedings moved to Court 73 in the newly refurbished East Block, a more spacious courtroom specially reserved for cases involving a large number of documents. Before resuming cross-examination, Rampton mentions he has not yet received Irving’s “bundles”—the selection of documents upon which he and his experts will rely. “We will do so with the utmost reluctance,” says Irving, “but if it is the law, then we will do so. But it is rather like playing poker with the other person having a mirror over your head.”
“Mr. Irving,” says Rampton, “may be under a misapprehension about the way litigation is conducted nowadays in these courts. . . . Of course, litigation is not poker any more. All the cards have to be on the table anyway. It is like playing—what is the other game?—patience.”*
The morning’s topic is Hitler’s responsibility for the massacres of Jews in Poland and the Soviet Union. In his previous day’s testimony, Irving had claimed the shootings “appeared to be chaotic, disorganized and arbitrary.” Rampton shows Irving another Himmler note, this time from his desk diary, recording a meeting with Hitler on December 18, 1941.
MR. RAMPTON: Himmler has written “Judenfrage”?
MR. IRVING: The Jewish question.
MR. RAMPTON: And under “Führer” in the right-hand column he has written “Als Partisanen auszurotten,” has he not?
MR. IRVING: “To be wiped out as partisans.”
MR. RAMPTON: . . .This is evidence that Hitler gave authority for the massacre at least—
MR. IRVING: Of Jews.
MR. RAMPTON:—of Jews in the East?
MR. IRVING: Yes. . . . I do not think there is any dispute between the parties on this.
This clearly comes as a surprise to Rampton, as does Irving’s readiness to agree that “at least half a million, and probably as many as one and a half million” Jews were killed by shooting.
At this point the judge intervenes. “Berlin must have known that the shootings were continuing on, as you would accept, a massive scale?” he asks.
“I accept this, my Lord, yes,” says Irving.
“To that extent, would you accept it is systematic,” asks Gray, “or would you say not?”
“I think to the extent that My Lai was systematic,” says Irving, “the Vietnamese war was systematic, and these things happen. They are subsequently covered up by the people in charge.”
Rampton, understandably, finds this unsatisfactory. He shows Irving an order from Heinrich Müller, chief of the Gestapo, to the Einsatzgruppen—the mobile killing squads—stating that Hitler would be kept constantly informed of their activities. Dated August 1, 1941, the order advises Einsatzgruppen commanders to be on the lookout for “visual materials” to supplement these reports. Irving says the document is interesting but that he’d never seen it before.
Rampton next asks Irving about one of these reports, which has survived the war. Meldung 51, sent from Himmler on December 29, 1942, lists 16,553 “partisan accomplices and suspects” taken prisoner, of whom 14,257 were executed. Under the category “Jews executed,” the report gives the total as 363,211. The document, retyped on the special large-type “Führer typewriter,” bears a handwritten notation attesting it has been vorgelegt (“laid before”) Hitler.
This, too, Irving accepts—perhaps less surprisingly since he quotes these figures himself in Hitler’s War, though in the 1977 edition he never identifies his source. In his own book, Irving referred to Himmler’s “report to Hitler”; here in the courtroom Irving argues Hitler may never have seen it. Or if he saw it, he was too busy to notice it. Besides, says Irving, the document is “an orphan, because it is so totally impossible to fit it into the general framework of all the other documentation which is of equal evidentiary weight.”
Again Mr. Justice Gray breaks in: “I must say, that I hesitate to accept. For this reason: it is quite a simple document, and it is referring to the killing by shooting of 300,000 Jews. Well, you have to be quite a man to just pass over that, do you not?”
“My Lord,” Irving replies, “as is quite evident from a study of the history of that period, at this moment in time . . . Hitler’s primary concern was focused on saving the Sixth Army in Stalingrad.
“Mr. Rampton,” Irving continues, “this [Meldung 51] is not a hanging document. I think if this document were to be shown to an English jury in a murder case they would say, well, it is interesting and probably the guy did it, but I will not send him to the gallows just on the basis of this one document.” Rampton in turn reminds Irving that “Hitler, as we observed before, is not on trial here,” before resuming his enumeration of the evidence for Hitler’s responsibility.
Finally Rampton reads out an excerpt from a lecture Irving gave to the Institute for Historical Review in 1992, where he’d said that the gas chambers were “Hollywood legends” but that “there were certain My Lai-type atrocities by troops in Russia.” He asks: “The words ‘My Lai-type massacres’ mean this, do they not, to any educated or half-educated audience? These massacres were done by criminal gangsters . . . in the East without the approval, consent or knowledge of the people in Berlin?”
“That is correct,” says Irving.
“That is correct, and it was wrong, was it not?”
“That was wrong, yes.”
“And you knew that it was wrong?”
“No, I did not, not at this time.”
“Not in 1992?”
“No.”
“When did you learn that it was wrong, Mr. Irving?”
“I suppose once I began studying the documents for this case in detail.”
On the fifth day of the trial Rampton begins his cross-examination by reading Irving’s account, in Hitler’s War, of a document known as the Korherr Report on the Final Solution to the Jewish Problem in Europe. Richard Korherr was Himmler’s statistician, and in March 1943 he informed his boss that “of the 1,449,692 Jews deported from the Eastern provinces, 1,274,166 had been subjected to Sonderbehandlung (special treatment) at camps in the General Government.”*
Rampton then points out that, when the report was retyped on the “Führer typewriter,” Himmler ordered the words “subject to special treatment” changed to “channeled through the camps” to Russia. Why?
Irving suggests Himmler “does not want Hitler being told, he does not want his nose being rubbed in it.” Rampton disagrees; he argues Hitler knew perfectly well what was happening. But Irving has already conceded Rampton’s main point, namely that while to our ears “special treatment” is a euphemism, to Himmler or Hitler its meaning was obvious to the point of crudity.
Rampton then takes Irving through all the places Jews were sent for “special treatment,” quoting again from a passage in Hitler’s War: “Hitler might still be dreaming of Madagascar, but the head office of the Eastern Railroad at Krakow reported since July 22nd one train load of 5,000 Jews has been running from Warsaw . . . to Treblinka every day and in addition a train load of 5,000 Jews leaves Przemysl twice a week for Belsec [Belzec].” There is a brief exchange about whether, when Hitler proposed sending Europe’s Jews to Madagascar, he meant it seriously, and then Rampton asks what Irving thinks happened to the Jews on those trains.
“The documents do not tell us,” Irving replies, “but perhaps it might be useful if we had a look at a map which will show us exactly.”
Rampton hands up a German army railway map. He then calls out a series of routes: from Warsaw via Malkinia to Treblinka; from Lublin via Chelm to Sobibór; or Lublin via Zamosc to Belzec. “Those, Mr. Irving, were little villages in the middle of nowhere, and from the 22nd July 1942, if these figures you have given in your book are right . . . hundreds of thousands of Jews were transported from Lublin and Warsaw. . . . What were those Jews going to do in these three villages on the Russian border?”
“The documents before me did not tell me,” says Irving.
Rampton invites Irving to “construct in your own mind, as a historian, a convincing explanation.” When he declines, Rampton says his next exercise will be to show the scale of the operation, and to demonstrate that “anybody who supposes that those hundreds of thousands of Jews were sent to these tiny little villages, what shall we say, in order to restore their health, is either mad or a liar.”
“Mr. Rampton,” Irving responds, “can I just draw one parallel and say during World War II large numbers of people were sent to Aldershot, which is also a tiny village, but I do not think anybody is alleging there were gas chambers at Aldershot.”
“I suggest, Mr. Irving,” Rampton responds, “that anybody—any sane, sensible person would deduce from all the evidence—all the available evidence, including, if you like, the shootings in the East which you have accepted—would conclude that these hundreds of thousands of Jews were not being shipped to these tiny little places on the Russian border in Eastern Poland for a benign purpose?”
“Mr. Rampton, what possible other conclusion could somebody have drawn from reading that page in my book? You are implying that the reader is being invited to draw a different conclusion.”
“No, I am wondering what your position is, you see, Mr. Irving, because if it is simply this: ‘I accept that the Germans systematically murdered Jews in vast numbers throughout 1941, accelerating through 1942, 1943 and reaching a crescendo in 1944, but I simply do not accept there were any gas chambers,’ then I am not bothered because it does not matter how it is done, the fact is it is a systematic genocide. I want to know whether you accept that; if you do accept it, then we can forget Professor van Pelt and all his works and everything else beside in relation to Holocaust denial.” (Robert Jan van Pelt is an expert witness for the defense, and the author of a 700-page report to the court on Auschwitz.)
Earlier, Rampton chided Irving for comparing the trial to poker. But this offer is surely a bluff. A position that affirmed the systematic murder of millions of Jews but denied that any of them had been killed in gas chambers might make sense rhetorically. Indeed, Irving’s fluctuating numbers—“certainly more than one million, certainly less than four million”—at times seemed to flirt with such a position. But as a symbol and a historical fact, Auschwitz is far too important to both sides.
Irving doesn’t accept. “It is my belief,” he says, “that Professor van Pelt’s purpose in coming here is prove to us that the gas chambers at Auschwitz existed.”
Irving sends a note to the judge. A magistrate’s court in Weinheim, Germany, has issued a request for his extradition based on a 1996 indictment for racial incitement. It seems that in 1990 Irving made a speech in Weinheim arguing that Hitler had not been to blame for the war and that the gas chambers were a hoax. Günter Deckert, a right-wing politician who shared the platform with Irving, has already been imprisoned under Section 130 of the German Criminal Code, which says that “any person who publicly denies the historicity, expresses approval or plays down the importance of the racial murder committed under the National Socialist regime in a manner calculated to disturb the public peace is liable to a prison sentence of up to five years or a fine.”
Irving suspects that the warrant’s timing is designed to discredit him. He worries that, as the British government has apparently given permission for the request to go forward, he might actually be extradited in the middle of the trial. Mr. Justice Gray assures him this won’t happen. But the incident is also a reminder that Irving’s “case”—and the whole controversy over the gas chambers—has a history outside Britain and the United States.
In France, like Germany a country with a guilty conscience about the fate of its Jews during the Second World War, those who seek to deny or denigrate their suffering are also subject to criminal penalties. In the late 1970s French intellectuals were convulsed over l’affaire Faurisson, which began when Robert Faurisson, a professor of literature at the University of Lyons, published an article in Le Monde proclaiming the “good news” that the gas chambers did not exist. “The alleged Hitlerian gas chambers,” said Faurisson, “and the so-called genocide of the Jews form a single historical lie whose principal beneficiaries are the State of Israel and international Zionism and whose principal victims are the German people, but not its leaders, and the Palestinian people in its entirety.”3
Faurisson’s only previous claim to fame was as a literary critic, the author of “A-t-on lu Rimbaud?” (Have You Read Rimbaud?), an essay maintaining that the poet’s celebrated “Voyelles” was really the disguised erotic reverie of a young schoolboy, and that Rimbaud’s play with vowel sounds—the voyelles of the title—was actually a coded reference to female anatomy, with “A” standing for the genitalia and “E” signifying a woman’s breasts. Published under a pseudonym—at the time Faurisson was teaching at a girls’ high school in Vichy—the essay achieved a kind of succès de scandale, and was followed by a book, A-t-on lu Lautréamont? (Have You Read Lautréamont?) performing a similar operation on the author of Les Chants de Maldoror.4
As an interpreter of history, Faurisson was far less original, deriving some of his arguments from the English neo-Fascist Richard Verrall’s booklet Did Six Million Really Die? and the writings of Arthur Butz, and the rest from Paul Rassinier, a French socialist who spent the war as a political prisoner in Buchenwald and Dora and emerged with admiration for his jailers. Faurisson was physically attacked, and his classes at Lyons were suspended after the university authorities pronounced themselves unable to guarantee his safety. He was also prosecuted, once by a private citizen, who accused Faurisson of defaming the dead (an offense under French law), and once under a new law making it a crime to teach a false history of the Second World War.5
Though his aims were the rehabilitation of Nazism and its collaborators, Faurisson’s public supporters were found mostly on the far left of French politics—which is what gave the affair its frisson. When the linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky lent his name to campaigners defending Faurisson’s freedom of expression, the controversy became a trans-Atlantic one.
At the time Chomsky was under constant fire for his early and outspoken criticism of America’s policy in Vietnam, and for his early and lonely advocacy of the Palestinian cause. So when Chomsky went further, and allowed a statement he’d written defending Faurisson’s rights to be used as a preface to Faurisson’s pre-trial Mémoire en défense, the thunder of hoofbeats from his critics on their high horses was positively deafening. While Chomsky could dismiss most of these attacks as just further evidence of the kind of intellectual bad faith he’d been writing about for years, one of his critics was far more formidable.6
Pierre Vidal-Naquet is a classicist, France’s greatest living authority on the history and culture of ancient Greece. He is also the author of a number of books denouncing the French government’s use of torture during the Algerian war. His credentials as an engagé and as a man of the left, in other words, were fully the equal of Chomsky’s. He, too, is a long-standing supporter of Palestinian rights. However, perhaps because both his parents had died at Auschwitz, Vidal-Naquet felt it was just as important to expose Faurisson’s lies as it was to support his right to lie.7
To Vidal-Naquet, Chomsky’s actions were “scandalous” because they furthered the charade that Faurisson’s claims were “findings”—the “result of a historical investigation, one, that is, in quest of the truth.” Chomsky’s remark that, “as far as I could judge, Faurisson is a sort of relatively apolitical liberal” sent Vidal-Naquet into a fury.* Yet note his conclusions: “To live with Faurisson? Any other attitude would imply that we were imposing historical truth as legal truth, which is a dangerous attitude available to other fields of application.8
“Confronting an actual Eichmann,” Vidal-Naquet continues, “one had to resort to armed struggle and, if need be, to ruse. Confronting a paper Eichmann, one should respond with paper. . . . In doing so, we are not placing ourselves in the same ground as our enemy. We do not ‘debate’ him; we demonstrate the mechanisms of his lies and falsifications, which may be methodologically useful for the younger generations.”
The parallels are imperfect. Lipstadt’s immense debt to Vidal-Naquet is clear the moment we set the above passage from Assassins of Memory, his elegant, restrained, yet devastating response to Faurisson, beside a similar passage from Denying the Holocaust:
Not ignoring the deniers does not mean engaging them in discussion or debate. In fact, it means not doing that. We cannot debate them for two reasons, one strategic and the other tactical. As we have repeatedly seen, the deniers long to be considered the “other” side. Engaging them in discussion makes them exactly that. Second, they are contemptuous of the very tools that shape any honest debate: truth and reason. Debating them would be like trying to nail a glob of jelly to the wall.9
“Like trying to nail a glob of jelly. . . .” Though she relies on his arguments, Deborah Lipstadt is no Vidal-Naquet. She lacks his intellectual breadth, his clarity of thought and expression, and, most regrettably, his stature as a Jew who has never confined his political engagement to Jewish causes. And though she, too, opposes “legal restraints,” Lipstadt seems to be setting aside the state’s power to silence offending views on tactical grounds—“they transform the deniers into martyrs”—rather than as a matter of principle.
If Vidal-Naquet’s remark that “In the Diaspora, Israel is frequently judged only in light of the Nazi experience, which is not a particularly lofty perspective for the state” would be inconceivable from Lipstadt, her book nonetheless sounds a warning about a phenomenon that Vidal-Naquet would be the first to agree deserves our attention.10 Besides, Lipstadt’s debt to Vidal-Naquet pales beside David Irving’s debt to Faurisson.
Though he offered many times, David Irving told Robert Faurisson not to come to London to testify as a witness. Instead, Irving asked John Keegan and Donald Cameron Watt, two British historians who’d written favorably about his books, to repeat their comments in front of the judge. When they both declined, he subpoenaed them.
During the trial Irving often makes derogatory reference to “establishment historians” who, shunning the hard work of ferreting documents out of aging Nazis and their relicts, prefer to remain sequestered in their “book-lined caves.” Like all caricatures this is a partial view, but when Donald Cameron Watt climbs to the witness box we can see what Irving had in mind. Professor of International History at the London School of Economics, where he has been for the past 39 years, Watt served in the British Army Intelligence Corps in Austria from 1947 to 1948, working on the captured archives of the German Foreign Ministry. He was also attached to the Foreign Office Research Department for many years.
In the late 1960s Watt wrote an introduction to one of Irving’s books, a collection of documents from the German “research office”—the Nazi counterpart to the codebreakers at Bletchley Park. Irving, who has resumed his place at the counsel’s table, asks Watt to describe the book. “I find it—invaluable is perhaps too strong a word,” Watt replies, “but a very, very effective piece of historical scholarship, and it is one which does not deal with the issues on which Mr. Irving is complaining.”
On those issues, Watt says, “I find your version of Hitler’s personality and knowledge of the Holocaust, a knowledge of the mass murder of the Jews, a very difficult one to accept. That, of course, is a view that I have expressed in the reviews I wrote of your Hitler’s War.”
Rampton doesn’t bother to cross-examine, leaving Mr. Justice Gray to satisfy his own curiosity. “Can I just ask this, as a military historian, and I underline the word ‘military,’ how do you rate Mr. Irving?”
“I think Mr. Irving is not in the top class,” says Watt “but as a historian of Hitler’s war seems to—”
“That is what I meant.”
“I think his is a view which, even if one disagrees with it, has to be taken seriously. He is, after all, the only man of standing, on the basis of his other research, who puts the case for Hitler forward and it seems to me that it is mistaken to dismiss it. . . . I must say, I hope that I am never subjected to the kind of examination that Mr. Irving’s books have been subjected to by the defense witnesses. I have a very strong feeling that there are other senior historical figures, including some to whom I owed a great deal of my own career, whose work would not stand up, or not all of whose work would stand up, to this kind of examination.”
As if in penance for his earlier disavowal, Watt adds: “The challenge of putting forward the sort of views you [Irving] did and basing them on historical research, rather than ideological conviction, or at least seemingly so, has directly resulted in an enormous outburst of research into the—”
“Holocaust?” suggests Irving.
“—into the massacres of the Jews, into the Holocaust and so on, which is now so large an area of historical research that it can support journals, it can support conferences. I see that there are three scheduled in Britain this coming year and that I myself am appearing in one in America in March. This, I think, is a direct result of the challenge [of] Mr. Irving’s work.”
Irving’s next witness is less helpful. On Day 11, Irving tells the court he reckons he’ll need three days to question Kevin MacDonald, an American academic who is flying from California to testify on his behalf. But when MacDonald appears in court the following Monday, his testimony is over by lunchtime.
Tall and thin, wearing a grey pinstriped suit—in an American rather than English cut—and black wire-rimmed glasses, MacDonald is Professor of Psychology at California State University at Long Beach. MacDonald is an evolutionary psychologist, a field which grew out of sociobiologist E.O. Wilson’s view that there is a genetic explanation for human behavior. Wilson’s theories are based on his research on ants. Evolutionary biologists like Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer, authors of A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion, start by studying humans. Kevin MacDonald studies Jews.
In his book A People that Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy, MacDonald tells the court, “I’m just basically describing Judaism from the standpoint of my evolutionary biology, including the ideology of Judaism, the segregation of the Jewish gene pool from surrounding peoples, resource competition between groups, and so on, co-operation within the group and so on.”
The second volume of MacDonald’s Judaism trilogy, Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism, forms the basis for MacDonald’s expert report, in which he writes: “While anti-Semitic attitudes and behavior have undoubtedly often been colored by myths and fantasies about Jews, there is a great deal of anti-Jewish writing that reflects the reality of between-group competition.” MacDonald’s view that Jews bring hatred on themselves is spelled out further in The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements. Here MacDonald concludes his trilogy by arguing that psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School of German social criticism, and “New York intellectuals” are all part of a plot “to alter Western societies” for the benefit of the Jews.
Irving’s apparent belief that MacDonald’s grotesque parody of the social sciences can help his case is a gift to Rampton, who again doesn’t bother to cross-examine. Even Irving’s use of MacDonald to introduce into evidence his weighty “Bundle E”—the dossier of what has apparently been a long-term endeavor by Jewish organizations to discredit Irving’s views, and which includes Lipstadt’s correspondence with Yehuda Bauer—is of dubious benefit, since Irving’s understandable irritation with this campaign is now associated with MacDonald’s loony conspiracy theories.
MacDonald’s testimony ends on an almost comic note, with Irving asking, “Do you consider me to be an anti-Semite from your knowledge of me?”
The absurdity of posing this question to this witness is lost on MacDonald,* who solemnly replies: “I do not consider you to be an anti-Semite. I have had quite a few discussions with you now and you have almost never even mentioned Jews and, when you have, never in a general negative way.”
Irving’s third witness is Peter Millar, whose apple-cheeks, affable manner, and curly blond hair give him a cherubic demeanor only slightly at odds with the lined face and red nose more typical of his profession. Millar is a reporter, and like MacDonald has appeared in court voluntarily. But there the similarity ends.
When the Sunday Times commissioned Irving to go to Moscow to bring back the Goebbels diaries, the paper sent Millar along to babysit. In her article “Spin Time for Hitler” Gitta Sereny charged that Irving, learning about the diaries’ existence from Elke Fröhlich, a friend at the Institute for Historical Research in Munich, promptly “talked his way into the Moscow archives.” Sereny said that Irving borrowed “a dozen” of the glass plates containing microfilmed diary pages, then “smuggled the plates out of the country.” Finally, “knowing Dr. Fröhlich to be on holiday,” Irving, Sereny wrote, had copies of the plates made at her Munich institute, then claimed credit for the whole discovery.11
The question of whether Irving took advantage of his relationship with Fröhlich, who once worked for him as a researcher,* is central to Irving’s suit against Gitta Sereny. But in Lipstadt’s book the whole episode is literally reduced to a footnote. Lipstadt accused Irving of violating his agreement with the Russian archives when he “took many plates, transported them abroad, and had them copied without archival permission.” There was, she wrote, “serious concern in archival circles that he may have significantly damaged the plates.”12 Fröhlich is never mentioned.
In court the defense claims merely that Irving risked damaging the plates, whose numbers are reduced from “many” to a few. In his diary Irving describes his behavior in Moscow as “illicit.” Irving does not deny smuggling a set of glass plates out of the archive during a lunch break, wrapping them in cardboard and leaving them on some waste ground near the archive, to be retrieved that evening so that they could be shown to Andrew Neill, the Sunday Times editor who was in Moscow at the time. Nor does he deny, once these plates had been returned, removing two more and taking them first to Munich, where he had copies made, and then on to London so they could be subject to forensic tests—again without asking the Russians for permission.
A freelancer fluent in Russian and German, Millar confirms all this, and under cross-examination by Rampton makes clear his disapproval of Irving’s conduct both at the time and afterwards. Irving himself says he is “deeply ashamed to have done that. You do not normally go into archives and remove materials, even though of course you are going to put them back the next day.” This is exactly what Irving had done with Lord Cherwell’s papers at Oxford thirty years earlier, and that hadn’t turned out too badly.
Millar backs up Irving’s contention that he made no written agreement with the Russians, whom he depicted as operating on a cash-and-carry basis. He also says he knows of no reason to doubt Irving’s claim that he first heard about the Moscow diaries from a friend at the Institute for Historical Research in Munich.
Millar adds that on his visits to Irving’s flat he never saw the portrait of Adolf Hitler which Lipstadt said hung over Irving’s desk.* “There was,” he adds, “a water colour which I was extremely interested in, and [Irving] said that it had been painted by Adolf Hitler and I said it was rather better than my mother-in-law’s.”
“Your mother-in-law has got a picture by Hitler as well?” asks the judge incredulously.
“My mother-in-law does water colours, sir,” Millar replies.
When Millar is dismissed there are still forty minutes before lunch. In the time remaining Rampton badgers Irving about the risk that the plates might have been damaged en route to London, asking too whether the Munich hotel safe they’d been left in was fireproof, but his heart isn’t in it. He cheers up after noticing that Irving’s account of the trip in his diary mentions a meeting with Ewald Althans, who has arranged for Irving to speak at a meeting also featuring Ernst Zündel. Who is Althans? Rampton asks.
“A young German hothead,” says Irving. Asked to be more specific, he adds, “I think he was a revisionist. I think that is a fair word to pin on him.”
“Certainly I would accept that he was a revisionist,” says Rampton. But is Althans on the right? “By ‘on the right’ I mean somebody who would not approve of colored immigration into Germany or anywhere else in Europe.”
“I do not think he would actively advocate it,” Irving replies.
By that standard Irving’s last witness might also be considered on the right. John Keegan is long-time defense editor of the Daily Telegraph, the broadsheet voice of respectable Conservative opinion in Britain, and the author of The Face of Battle and many other books on modern warfare. A few weeks earlier Keegan’s name appeared on the Queen’s New Year’s Honours list: he was given a knighthood “for services to military history.” This gives Irving the chance to address him as “Sir John.” Writing in the Times Literary Supplement in 1980, Keegan had declared, “Two books in English stand out from the vast literature of the Second World War: Chester Wilmot’s Struggle for Europe, published in 1952, and David Irving’s Hitler’s War.”
As Keegan, who is disabled and walks with difficulty, sits in the witness box, Irving says he wants “first of all, to make it perfectly plain to the court, you are here pursuant to a witness summons, in other words, what used to be called a subpoena.”
“I was subpoenaed by you,” Keegan confirms. “I would also like to say that until this moment I have never met you, never spoken to you and never corresponded with you.”
Irving asks Keegan if he has had cause to revise his high opinion of his work. “I often say you have to read Hitler’s War,” he says. But Keegan also reminds Irving of a sentence from his book The Battle for History that Irving hasn’t read out in court: “Some controversies are entirely bogus, like David Irving’s contention that Hitler’s subordinates kept from him the fact of the Final Solution.”
“That is, of course, still your opinion, is it not?” asks Irving. “That I am wrong on the Holocaust, or that my opinion on that is flawed?”
“That Hitler did not know,” says Mr. Justice Gray.
“Well, I read Hitler’s War, the appropriate passages, very carefully over the weekend,” says Keegan, “and I continue to think it perverse of you to propose that Hitler could not have known until as late as October 1943 what was going on to the Jewish population of Europe, and indeed many other minority groups as well, not only minority groups.”
In fact Keegan’s asperity does Irving no harm. Though they differ on the question of Hitler’s knowledge, they both share a view of history as basically “maps and chaps.” To read Keegan’s account in The Second World War is to enter a world of staff officers and battlefields in which the “ordinary men” whose complicity in genocide so exercises Daniel Goldhagen and Christopher Browning barely merit consideration. Indeed, in a 500-page book which takes pains to convey why, to the Germans who overran Poland, “Blitzkrieg seemed a magic which had taken over the army itself,” and which allots an entire chapter to the invasion of Crete, and the better part of another chapter to Italian campaigns in Libya and Ethiopia, the Holocaust merits precisely two paragraphs.13 In one of them, Keegan describes the killers as “German SS and securitymen and locally enlisted militias.” That many thousands of Jews were killed by ordinary German soldiers is a point of agreement between Browning and Goldhagen,14 yet the effect is almost as if Keegan is trying to preserve the honor of the Wehrmacht—as if the murder of the Jews had nothing to do with the war or the course of the fighting.
Military history may be a stunted discipline, the province of retired generals and armchair generals who actually take pride in their ignorance.* Asked by Irving to respond to a comment by Eberhard Jaeckel, Keegan says, “I never heard of him, but then I am a military historian of a rather technical sort and it is not necessary that I should have heard of him.” It is Jaeckel, as much as anyone, who is responsible for bringing together the Holocaust and the battlefield. Still, attacking Keegan’s public schoolboy’s notion of history isn’t going to score the defense any points with Wykehamist* Charles Gray.
Keegan, who has apparently never heard of Raul Hilberg either, does praise Gerald Reitlinger’s The Final Solution (1953) “which I read as an undergraduate” and is “the source of everything substantial that I know about the Holocaust.”† In his bibliography to The Second World War Keegan also praises Reitlinger—with these caveats: “though the historiography of the Holocaust has since been greatly elaborated, and while his book is largely concerned with the Jews, rather than the many other groups systematically massacred by the Nazi extermination apparatus.”15 The language here echoes the “many other minority groups” whose fate was equated with that of the Jews in Keegan’s testimony. Apart from the Gypsies, who were indeed systematically slaughtered in much the same fashion as the Jews (and who don’t merit even a single mention in his book), it is hard to know which “other groups” Keegan has in mind.
The appeal to Keegan of Reitlinger’s long-outdated survey, however, is far easier to understand. The Final Solution offers what might be called a public schoolboy’s view of the Holocaust. Reitlinger, the son of a prominent Jewish banker and himself educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford, describes the destruction of the Jews as an “attempt” which had not succeeded. But then how could it have when the perpetrators were, in Reitlinger’s words, “puerile” and “ridiculous.” He stressed Belsen, the only major camp liberated by British troops, in his narrative. Famous for his country-house parties in Kent and Sussex, which earned him the nickname “The Squire,” Reitlinger’s patriotism even led him to deny that Britain’s Foreign Office had obstructed efforts to rescue Jews.16
On its own, Keegan’s reluctant tribute to Irving’s skills as a researcher posed no problem for Rampton, either. But even if it couldn’t be attacked directly, the view of history he represented—and recognized in Reitlinger—would have to be overcome. It had been Reitlinger, after all, who, declaring his preference for research based on wartime German documents, warned that skepticism was “particularly necessary when approaching survivor accounts.”17 Yet, as the court was about to learn, without survivor accounts, the history of Auschwitz would still be a puzzle.