Massive confrontation
“I am considered to be a danger to something, and the word ‘danger’ is what puzzles me. I am not a member of the IRA. I do not go round blowing up cars. So what am I a danger to?”
Ostensibly addressed to van Pelt, this question, like many of Irving’s sallies, is rhetorical, and really intended for the judge. Hanging in the air long after van Pelt leaves the witness box, it can be unpacked in many different ways: a claim that he is harmless, and in any case bears no malicious intent; an insistence that the defendants have over-reacted; an insinuation that they act to protect some illegitimate or shadowy interest; a reminder that historians who take only a peripheral interest in the Holocaust—in Irving’s eyes more dispassionate observers than his accusers—have welcomed his researches.
It was the Economist, after all, that dubbed Irving “the forensic pathologist of modern military history”; William Casey, the Wall Street lawyer turned CIA director, once wrote him a fan letter. What makes Irving dangerous is precisely that he has been able to keep what Michael Naumann, the German Minister of Culture and a former publisher, called Irving’s “brown underwear” carefully hidden from public view beneath his banker’s pinstripes.
Van Pelt’s report—especially his excavation of Irving’s various “revisionist” borrowings—hints at this. But in the courtroom Irving’s intellectual antecedents have gone largely unmentioned. And if van Pelt’s report effected a thorough demolition of Irving’s various postures in relation to Auschwitz, the van Pelt we heard on the stand was far more diffident. Irving’s cross-examination fought that van Pelt more or less to a standstill, leaving it to the judge to decide which van Pelt to credit: the unprepossessing witness or the prodigious scholar.
When Rampton resumes his cross-examination of Irving he sets about tipping this balance in the defense’s favor. He starts with Irving’s account of a two-day meeting between Hitler and the Hungarian Regent, Admiral Horthy, in April 1943. “Horthy apologetically noted,” Irving had written, “that he had done all that he decently could against the Jews: ‘But they can hardly be murdered or otherwise eliminated,’ he protested. Hitler reassured him: ‘There is no need for that.’” In Hitler’s War, Irving puts Hitler’s soothing remarks at the end of the second day. Yet in the source he cites, says Rampton, they come at the end of the first day.
“I got the date wrong by one day,” says Irving. So what?
Rampton replies that what really happened on the second day was that in response to Horthy’s query, “What should he do with the Jews then, after he had pretty well taken all means of living from them—he surely couldn’t beat them to death?” Ribbentrop, who accompanied Hitler to the meeting, responded: “The Jews must either be annihilated or taken to concentration camps. There was no other way.”
Hitler, says Rampton, then explained: “If they couldn’t work, they had to perish. They had to be treated like tuberculosis bacilli, from which a healthy body could be infected. That was not cruel, if one remembered that even innocent natural creatures like hares and deer had to be killed so that no harm was caused.”
It was his desire to conceal this openly murderous Hitler from his readers that led Irving to his “mistake,” Rampton says. “Hitler jumps in with an analogy which is based on the justification for killing wild animals—killing wild animals!—in case they should cause damage. Now, that left the matter as plain as a pikestaff!” he barks.
Rampton turns next to Irving’s Goering biography, reading out his account of Hitler’s trial following the 1923 putsch attempt. “Learning that one Nazi squad had ransacked a kosher grocery store during the night, he [Hitler] sent for the ex-army lieutenant who had led the raid. ‘We took off our Nazi insignia first!’ expostulated the officer—to no avail, as Hitler dismissed him from the party on the spot. . . . Goering goggled at this exchange.”
“How do you know Goering was there?” asked Rampton.
“Have you ever heard of author’s license?”
“Are you criticizing ‘Goering goggling’ or being there?” asks Mr. Justice Gray.
“I am asking both questions, I think, am I not, Mr. Irving? Do you know that Goering was there?”
“Yes,” Irving replies. “It is—he was there because it is evident from the timetable. . . .”
“And how do you know that Goering goggled?”
“That was author’s license.”
“You mean it was an invention?”
“Yes.”
Rampton’s questions lack any apparent sequence, having no discernible purpose beyond pointing up some mistake or distortion of Irving’s. Likewise, the impression he gives when producing a document is of an immense disorder, restrained, like his temper, only by the heroic diligence and saintly character of his junior counsel, Heather Rogers. By the middle of the trial Rampton’s choleric outbursts, his muttering about papers he can’t find—or can’t read, being either in German or in print too small for his glasses—and the inevitable resolution of these outbursts when Miss Rogers manages to unearth the desired document, have assumed an almost Punch and Judy character.
So on Day 12, when Rampton hands up a disorderly sheaf of papers, Mr. Justice Gray asks, “Mr. Rampton, I am just a little puzzled by great stacks of documents in German being handed up. . . . What am I meant to do with all this?” Irving, sitting in the witness box awaiting cross-examination, says nothing.
“If the witness has translated them in the witness box,” says Rampton, “and I have not contested his translation, then one can take it—his German is very good—that what he said is accurate.” Again Irving says nothing.
And when Rampton, who for some reason can’t seem to find his own translation, asks Irving to translate the text of a telegram sent by Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, in the early hours of November 10, 1938, as the pogrom known as Kristallnacht raged through Germany, Irving is delighted to oblige.
“I know the text of that telegram off by heart. I have quoted it so often in speeches,” says Irving.
“I bet you do,” says Rampton. “Now tell us what it says, would you?”
“ ‘On express orders from the very highest level,’ which is always—”
“That is Hitler.”
“—which is always a reference to Hitler.”
“I agree.”
“‘Acts of arson against Jewish shops or the like are under no circumstances and under no conditions whatsoever to take place.’”
“Good.”
Unlike Irving, Rampton is a professional. When he sets a trap, as he has just done, he makes no announcements. His gratitude for Irving’s assistance seems as genuine as his previous befuddlement. Irving has no way of knowing that his opponent actually possesses a photographic memory. Nor does he suspect that each of Rampton’s tiny points— “pinpricks,” Irving calls them derisively—is laying the ground for an onslaught that will reveal Irving’s entire career and reputation as little more than a house of cards. But he is about to find out.
Rampton’s next piece of stage business involves Hans Aumeier. For about a year—from early 1942 to the spring of 1943—Aumeier was Höss’s deputy at Auschwitz. Arrested after the German surrender, Aumeier wrote a series of confessions for his British interrogators. According to Höss, the events Aumeier witnessed at Auschwitz led to a drinking problem, and eventually, to the edge of mental collapse. Höss had him transferred to Estonia. In his report, van Pelt enumerates the various inaccuracies and inconsistencies which mar Aumeier’s confessions. Nonetheless, he concludes, they provide crucial detail on both the gassing process and the conversion of Crematoria 2 and 3 into killing installations. They are also independent corroboration of Höss and Broad’s confessions, and of the Sonderkommando testimony.
Van Pelt never mentioned Aumeier’s name in court—because David Irving never asked. Yet as van Pelt says in his report, it was David Irving who first discovered Aumeier’s hand-written confession in the Public Record Office files in London.
“Mr. Irving,” Rampton begins, “Hans Aumeier, I think you first discovered him in June 1992? Your diary entry reads—you can see it if you like, we have it here— ‘Later at PRO all day. Finished reading file of interrogations and manuscript by one SS officer, Hans Aumeier, a high Auschwitz official. . . . His reports grow more lurid as the months progress. I wonder why? Beaten like Höss or was he finally telling the truth? A disturbing two hours anyway.’ Do you remember that entry?”
“Very clearly, yes.”
Irving did not publish his discovery. Instead, he wrote a letter to Mark Weber at the Institute for Historical Review which Rampton proceeds to read into the record:
Working in the Public Record Office yesterday, I came across the 200 page handwritten memoirs . . . of an SS officer, Aumeier, who was virtually Höss’s deputy. They have just been opened for research. He was held in a most brutal British prison camp, the London Cage (the notorious Lieutenant Colonel A Scotland). These manuscripts are going to be a problem for revisionists and need analysing now in advance of our enemies and answering. I attach my transcript of a few pages and you will see why. It becomes more lurid with each subsequent version. At first no gassings, then 50, then 15,000 total. Brute force by interrogators perhaps.
“Why,” asks Rampton, “are the manuscript notes, or whatever they are, memoirs of Aumeier, going to be a problem for revisionists?”
“I think because they refute a number of the tenets of the revisionist bible, if I can put it like that.”
“What is the revisionist bible?”
“Well, the revisionist credo.”
“Which is?”
“Oh, at its most extreme, it is that not a hair was harmed on the head of the Jews—which was the most extreme and indefensible position.”
With uncharacteristic reticence, Irving sat on his scoop until 1996, when, writes van Pelt, “seeking to make the best from a very bad situation, he buried a reference to Aumeier’s statement in a footnote in his 1996 book on the Nuremberg Trials.” In the footnote, Irving implies that Aumeier’s confession had been beaten out of him by Colonel Scotland.
Rampton is indignant: “Mr. Irving, you have made a suggestion . . . that this man gave a fallacious account because he was tortured or threatened with torture by the Brits. You have absolutely no basis for that whatsoever.”
“Mr. Rampton, when the time comes to cross-examine your expert witnesses, I shall be putting to them documents which show very clearly what methods were used to extract information from witnesses. . . . I shall invite them to state whether they consider this kind of evidence is dependable.”
“Mr. Irving, I am tempted myself to resort to such methods to get a straight answer to my question, I have to say. You have no evidential—”
“It included, for example, crushing the testicles of 165 out of 167 witnesses. Is that what you are proposing to do to me?”
What Rampton proposes to do to Irving—indeed, has just done to Irving—is to show that he is a man who will invent evidence, distort evidence, and even suppress evidence when it suits his purpose. He has also neatly managed to tip the balance away from van Pelt’s cross-examination and in the direction of his report. What he hasn’t done, yet, is to more than suggest what Irving’s purpose might be.
Months earlier, in the discovery hearings, Anthony Julius set out one of the legal authorities for the obligation to provide the other side with materials that might damage your own case. This, said Julius, referring to the decision by name, “is Peruvian Guano.” In the next few days, as Richard Rampton dumps the more fetid contents of his discovery over David Irving’s head, the citation seems particularly well named.
Though his family comes from the administrative, rather than patrician class, Irving, like many a public schoolboy before and since, has learned the manners of his betters. Indeed part of his courtroom strategy has been to use those manners—and the innate institutional decorum of the courts—as insulation between himself and his unsavory ideas and associates. In order to get past that barrier—and under Irving’s skin—Rampton deploys a variety of means. One is his own manner, which without warning can swoop from slightly pompous barrister-speak to the depths of demotic when he wants to emphasize a point. Another is insult.
“When I asked you about this document before,” he says to Irving, “it was ages ago, you denied ever having seen it.”
“Now I am seeing it for the first time, yes.”
Rampton all but shakes his head. “So you say.”
“I beg your pardon,” says Irving, drawing himself up like a stage dandy who’s just been called a cad. “I am on oath and, if I say I am seeing this for the first time, then I am seeing it for the first time.”
“Mr. Irving,” says Rampton, “you have said many things on oath which I simply do not accept, so we can get past that childish stage of this interrogation.”
“I think this is probably the time to have it out,” says Irving, taking off his metaphorical gloves. “Where you think I am lying on oath, then you should say so.”
“He is saying so,” explains the judge.
A few minutes later, when Rampton hands the judge a pair of thick loose-leaf binders containing “Mr. Irving’s utterances on the subject of Jews, blacks, etc.” and a short catalogue of Irving’s more farouche pronouncements, Irving, still smarting from Rampton’s accusation, protests.
“These little catalogues of excerpts that they are presenting your Lordship with, appear . . . to me not so much like case management as case manipulation,” says Irving, making his own accusation.
But Irving’s indignation is no match for Rampton’s hauteur.
“Mr. Irving,” he says, “can I suggest that every time you think we have tried to distort the record—”
“‘Manipulate’ is the word I used.”
“Yes, great, ‘manipulate the record’—I must remember that—for the purposes of presenting a skewed picture to the court, please mark beside whichever quote I refer to [a] ‘check’ because then when you re-examine yourself you can show his Lordship how bad our manipulation has been.”
Branding someone a bigot has an etiquette all its own. Britons pride themselves on not being hobbled by American-style “political correctness,” so it is important that Rampton not appear over-fastidious or prissy. Rampton can display a manly disdain for Irving. Scorn is fine, even sarcasm, as long as it’s not supercilious. The object is to hammer home the point that Irving is a nasty piece of work and not deserving of common courtesy.
Rampton begins his exhibition of David Irving’s underside with a reading from Irving’s on-line newsletter: “Why are they [the Jews] so blind that they cannot see the linkage between cause and effect? They protest, ‘What, us?’ when people accuse them of international conspiracy. They clamor, ‘Ours, ours, ours’ when hoards of gold are uncovered and then when anti-Semitism increases and the inevitable mindless pogroms occur, they ask with genuine surprise, ‘Why us?’”
Irving protests that the quote is partial, and himself reads out the previous paragraphs discussing efforts to have him barred from Australia: “‘The Prime Minister of Australia this morning has criticized me. This kind of thing generates the anti-Semitism in countries,’ and this is precisely what this is about.”
“You do not see anything in what I have just read,” asks Rampton, “which might account for the Australians’ unwillingness to have you on their shores?”
“On the contrary,” says Irving, “this is saying cause and effect. Why is there increasing anti-Semitism in Switzerland today when it is going down everywhere else in the world? Answer, we know why.* Why is there anti-Semitism in Australia today? Answer, we know why.”*
“But you are adopting it, are you not? You are saying the anti-Semitism is justified on account of the fact that the Jews are greedy?”
“Did I say justified or explicable? Is there a subtle difference there, do you think?”
In Rampton’s next example, the difference between justifying hatred and explaining it is perhaps even subtler. “You people,” Irving tells an imaginary Jewish interlocutor, “are disliked on a global scale. You have been disliked for 3,000 years and yet you never seem to ask what is at the root. . . . I am just looking at this as an outsider; I come from Mars and I would say they are clever people. I am a racist, I would say they are a clever race. I would say that, as a race, they are better at making money than I am.”
After lunch Rampton plays a video of Irving speaking to a National Alliance meeting in Tampa, Florida. Irving tells the group about an encounter he had a few days earlier, in Shreveport, when a heckler, a British Jew, interrupted his speech to demand: “‘Are you trying to say that we are responsible for Auschwitz ourselves?’ and I said, ‘Well, the short answer is, yes!’” His audience in Tampa roars with laughter.
This is the audience to whom Irving explains: “If you [Jews] had behaved differently over the intervening 3,000 years, the Germans would have gone about their business and would not have found it necessary to go around doing whatever they did to them, nor would the Russians, the Ukrainians, the Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvians and all the other countries where you have had a rough time.”
“Your thesis,” says Rampton, “is that the Jews have deserved everything that has been coming to them.” Irving shakes his head.
The climax of the day, though, is Rampton’s recital of Irving’s doggerel verse “I am a Baby Aryan.”
“Racist, Mr. Irving? Anti-Semitic, Mr. Irving, yes?”
“I do not think so.”
“Teaching your little child this kind of poison?”
“Do you think that a nine month old can understand words spoken in English or any other language?”
“I will tell you something, Mr. Irving. When I was six months old, I said, ‘Pussy sits in the apple tree until she thinks it’s time for tea.’”
The weeks of trainspotting debate have taken their toll on the press corps, but Irving’s poem makes the front page of the Times, and the next morning the court is once again full to bursting. It is to this packed house that Rampton opens the second act of his morality play. In 1993 Irving told an Australian radio interviewer that black men on the English cricket team made him feel queasy.
“Why does it make you feel queasy,” asks Rampton, “that black Englishmen should play cricket for England?”
“My reply to him on air,” Irving answers, “was, ‘What a pity it is that we have to have blacks on the team and that they are better than our whites.’”
“Why is that a pity?”
“It is a pity because I am English.”
“Are they not English too?”
“Well, English or British, are you saying?”
“I am saying that they are English. Most of them are born here, just as all the Jews in England were born here—most of them.”
“Are we talking about blacks or Jews now?”
“It does not matter. They are all English.”
Actually, they are not all English. Certainly not in the eyes of the law, since—as Rampton must surely know—under Margaret Thatcher’s 1981 Nationality Act being born here doesn’t even make you British, let alone English. Rampton’s performance of outraged liberalism contains no acknowledgment of this contemporary reality: that he speaks his lines in a country that changed its very definition of citizenship to keep out the Hong Kong Chinese who thought their British passports would save them, yet somehow manages to find room for whites fleeing Zimbabwe. It is also devoid of any sense of history.
England is the home of the “blood libel,” the accusation, first recorded in Norwich in the year 1144, that Jews required the blood of freshly killed Christian children to celebrate the Passover. By the time Geoffrey Chaucer repeated it in the fourteenth century, in “The Prioress’s Tale,” there were no Jews left in England—they had been expelled in 1290, centuries before Spain or Germany. When Shylock made his London debut three centuries later, he did so in a country that still had no legal Jewish residents, though a handful of illegal immigrants had begun to slip back in during the reign of Henry VIII. It was the middle of the nineteenth century before a Jew was allowed to sit in the House of Commons—long after the emancipation of French Jews. It might have taken even longer if the Jew in question hadn’t been Lionel de Rothschild.
Jews were barred from Oxford and Cambridge, and excluded from those professions—such as law or medicine—that required their members to take an oath “upon the true faith of a Christian.” It was Matthew Arnold, bard of “sweetness and light” who campaigned against removing these restrictions, finding Jews an “unamiable people” and declaring: “England is the land of Englishmen, not Jews.”1 The influx of Jewish refugees from the pogroms of Tsarist Russia led to the passage of the 1905 Nationality Act—the first in Britain’s century-long history of efforts to bar the doors against foreigners.
Many Britons of Irving’s generation take pride in the country’s generosity toward the Kindertransporte—the 7,500 Jewish children admitted as refugees from Hitler. The fate of their parents—the hundreds of thousands of adults refused admission, and condemned thereby to certain death—is seldom mentioned. In this respect, of course, America’s record is little better. We have our own history of racism, our “gentleman’s agreements” and segregated South, our immigration quotas and Ku Klux Klan, to live down. And of course these days many of David Irving’s most energetic supporters live in the United States.
Yet to American ears there is still something shocking about British prejudice, and that is its unabashed quality. Modern Britain may be developing a multi-cultural society, but the dominant culture is still dominant—and homogeneous—in a way that is no longer possible in the United States. The National Curriculum requires every schoolchild to learn the tenets of the Christian faith in Religious Education, and though there are neighborhoods in London or Manchester that are every bit as Jewish as their counterparts in Philadelphia or Los Angeles, the Jews who live in them live very different lives.
“English anti-Semitism was, and remains, an affair of social exclusion,” wrote Anthony Julius in his critique of T.S. Eliot. “Jews have not been harried, but kept at a distance. The dominant note since their readmission in the seventeenth century has been one of fraught accommodation.”2 And if fraught accommodation is the lot of some Jews, surely a corresponding level of discomfort is to be expected on the part of at least some Englishmen. So why does the defense pretend that Irving’s nostalgia for the England of his childhood is a sign of his monstrous character—or even particularly unusual for a man of his age and background?
“I regret what has happened to our country now,” Irving tells the judge. “Sometimes I wish I could go to Heathrow Airport and get on a 747 and take a ten hour flight and land back in England as it was, as it used to be . . . the England of the blue lamp and Jack Warner and when there was no chewing gum on the pavements, and all the rest of it.” Whatever these references mean, there is no doubting the intensity of his sentiment—or that these tokens of lost Empire and innocence seem to move Irving far more than his many objects of hatred.
Of course, as Anthony Julius points out, when we judge racism we must take the perspective of the victim. Whether Irving really “meant it” or not doesn’t mitigate the harm he causes. Even so, it was hard not to feel queasy listening to Rampton quiz Irving about his attitude to “intermarriage between the races”—on behalf of a defendant who has written, “We know what we fight against: anti-Semitism and assimilation, intermarriage and Israel-bashing,” but who uttered not one word of public protest when her American publisher issued Charles Murray’s neo-eugenicist tract The Bell Curve.3
Coming as it does in the wake of the court’s consideration of the high tragedy of Auschwitz and the low farce of Irving’s social views, the arrival of Christopher Browning in the courtroom brings a moment of relief. Browning’s firm grasp of the Holocaust in history—as neither a Jewish sideshow nor a theological “Tremendum”—is immediately evident, and in sharp contrast to John Keegan, that morning’s previous witness.
Taller than Irving, with an open face and a tight, slightly nervous smile, Browning gazes at Irving through square aviator glasses waiting for his cross-examination to begin. Browning’s expert report is on the “Evidence for the Implementation of the Final Solution.” He is the author of five books on the subject, including The Path to Genocide and Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers. A professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Browning has been an expert witness in a number of war-crimes trials. He also testified in the trial of Ernst Zündel, where like all the prosecution witnesses he was abused by Zündel’s attorney.
Browning’s testimony in these cases has made him a hate figure among “revisionists,” and as he sits clenching and unclenching his fingers he may be expecting Irving to give him a rough time. What happens instead is more like a colloquium or a tutorial than an inquisition.
“Am I correct in saying,” Irving asks, “that there has been one school of thought . . . that the Operation Reinhard had been named after the late lamented or unlamented chief of the security police, Reinhard Heydrich?”
“That is one suggestion,” says Browning, “made because the files on personnel in Berlin spell it with just a ‘D’ [“Reinhard” as opposed to the more common “Reinhardt”] which is the way he spelt his name, so that was one suggestion that has been made which I do not endorse.”
Like a butterfly collector with a rare species, Irving wants to show Browning a security classification “AR” he’s just noticed on some Nazi documents produced as evidence in this trial.
“Is there any significance you would attach to the fact that that had the initials ‘AR’ on it?” Irving wonders.
“It could indicate that a copy of this was to be filed in some file called Aktion Reinhard,” says Browning, confirming Irving’s hunch.
“So we are constantly discovering new things, is this correct?”
“Yes.”
“So that the last chapter on the Holocaust really still has to be written?”
“We are still discovering things about the Roman Empire. There is no last chapter in history.”
Irving’s evident eagerness for some kind of recognition from Browning lowers the courtroom temperature considerably. Even so, after several days of Peruvian Guano, it is almost shocking to hear Browning say to Irving: “What had not been studied before you published was a particular focus on decision-making process and Hitler’s role. That is one part and, in so far as we can confine ourselves to that, indeed, your publication of Hitler’s War was the impetus for the research in that area.”
Irving, delighted by this, asks, “What was the reason for this 20 year, 22 year, lack of interest in examining whether the decision had been given or how the decision had been given for the Holocaust?”
“I think probably several things,” says Browning. “One, the person who had focused mainly on the German documents, Raul Hilberg, was very interested in the bureaucratic structure, but not terribly interested in dating decisions. This happened to be his focus.”
“Have you discussed this matter personally with Raul Hilberg?”
“Yes and he is more interested in bureaucratic structure than he is in linear or chronological decision-making process. I am more interested in chronological process than bureaucratic structure.”
“Do you know what his opinion is on whether Adolf Hitler actually issued an order or not?”
“I think his feeling is,” says Browning, “if you are looking for an order in a formal sense, that such a thing probably was not given. If you are looking at it in the way that you described earlier, calling it the ‘Richard Nixon complex’—that Hitler made very clear to Himmler and Heydrich what he expected, and they understood what was expected of them— I cannot speak for him, but I believe he would not have been uncomfortable with that formulation.”
The following day, Irving asks Browning, “How realistic was the Madagascar plan?”—a scheme to ship Europe’s Jews to this French island off the coast of Africa.
“Do I think they took it seriously?” An experienced witness, Browning rephrases the question he wants to answer. “Yes, I do think they took it seriously. It is fantastic but of course Auschwitz is fantastic, too.”
“In what way is Madagascar a fantastic plan?” asks Irving.
“Fantastic in the sense that it is bizarre, the notion that you could take four million Jews and put them on ships and send them to Madagascar, and that anything other than the vast bulk of them would die under the conditions of being dumped into the jungle of Madagascar.”
But when Irving pushes his luck, calling the plan Hitler’s “pipe dream,” Browning balks.
“I would not call it a pipe dream,” he says, “because I think, if England had surrendered, they would have tried to do it. They would have tried to implement it just as they tried to implement the Lublin reservation plan* and just as they tried and succeeded in implementing the death camp plans.”
Still, on the question of whether Irving’s doubts that Hitler gave an explicit order for the extermination of the Jews are tantamount to Holocaust denial, Browning is equally forthright: “[Hans] Mommsen and [Martin] Broszat have argued for a long time, as you have, they do not think that Hitler gave an explicit or formal order.”
“It would be a grave injustice to call either of those two professors Holocaust deniers, would it not?” asks Irving.
“Yes. The argument over whether Hitler gave an order or not is not commonly part of the issue of Holocaust denial.”
“Thank you very much for saying that.”
Not all of Browning’s testimony is so welcome to Irving. His confident reading of the Himmler telephone log’s reference to Keine Liquidierung— “No liquidation”—as clearly indicating an exception to a standing policy in favor of liquidation is unshakable by Irving. And though he may himself be agnostic on the question of a formal Hitler order, Browning points to Hitler’s December 12, 1941 speech to the Gauleiters as “the point at which Hitler makes clear . . . they will proceed with the extermination. Up until that point they used two phrases ‘after the war’ and ‘next spring’ [to refer to the timing of the extermination]. After Pearl Harbor, one has to clarify which of those two it will be and, in my opinion, this is the point at which Hitler says it will be next spring even though it will no longer be after the war.”
Nor does Irving find any comfort in Browning’s account of what we know of the scale of the Holocaust. “Is it not right, Professor,” asks Irving, “that our statistical database for arriving at any kind of conclusions for the numbers of people who have been killed in the Holocaust—by whatever means—we are really floundering around in the dark, are we not? Is that correct?”
Browning’s response is both blunt and comprehensive: “No. I would not express it that way. I would say we have a very accurate list of the deportation trains from Germany. In many cases we have the entire roster name by name and we are not floundering. We can tell you, as we have seen in the intercepts, 974 on one train. . . . In terms again of France, the Netherlands—the countries from which there were deportations from Western Europe—we can do a very close approximation by trains, the number of people per train.
“In the area of Poland,” Browning continues, “there were at least statistics in terms of ghetto populations and these ghettos were liquidated completely, so we can come to a fairly good rough figure of Polish Jews. We also have a fairly reliable prewar census and postwar calculations so that one can do a subtraction. So, in terms of Holocaust victims from Poland westward, we are not floundering. We are coming to a fairly close approximation. Where historians differ and where you get this figure of between five and six [million] is because we do not have those figures for the Soviet Union.”
And when Irving attempts to recruit Browning to his view that eyewitnesses are under no circumstances to be trusted—”Rather like Rommel, I am coming round from the rear and attacking . . . the eyewitnesses”—Browning again declines.
“Did he [Adolf Eichmann] once testify,” asks Irving, “or write in his papers—in fact, in my collection of papers too—did he write that he got so close to one shooting that bits of babies’ brain were splattered across his nice leather coat?”
“He complained that at Minsk that happened and, of course—”
“Is that credible in your view?”
“I have written on Police Battalion 101 where the men came [back] routinely with their uniforms saturated in blood. When you shoot people at point blank range, you get bloody.”
It is Browning’s pioneering work on Battalion 101 of the German “Order” Police4 that attracted such hostility from Daniel Goldhagen, whose book Hitler’s Willing Executioners is in part an extended polemic against Browning’s view that a complex interplay of peer pressure, careerism, and socialized conformity were to blame for the fact that so many ordinary Germans participated willingly in mass murder. In his book, and in an attack in the New Republic accusing Browning of fabricating his evidence “out of thin air,” Goldhagen advances instead a monocausal theory of German “eliminationist anti-Semitism.”
With regard to “the crucial motivational element which moved the German men and women . . . to devote their bodies, souls and ingenuity to the enterprise,” writes Goldhagen, “for the vast majority of perpetrators, a monocausal explanation does suffice.”5 What is this explanation? The belief, supposedly shared by all Germans, “that Jewish influence, by nature destructive, must be eliminated irrevocably from society.”6
There are so many flaws in Goldhagen’s account it is difficult to know where to begin. His simple-minded theory of the cultural transmission of anti-Semitism (a kind of dumbed-down version of Chomsky’s account of how we learn grammar)? His promotion of an “explanation” that accounts neither for those Germans who never hated Jews, nor for the eagerness of many Lithuanians, Latvians, Romanians, and others reared outside the eliminationist umbrella of German culture to participate in the genocide? A supposedly unique eliminationist ideology that (substituting Arabs for Jews) applies to Meir Kahane’s Kach party and others on the far right of Zionism as readily as it does to the Nazis? His pornographic reveries about the sex lives of camp guards? Or his assertion that “contrary to both scholarly and popular treatments of the Holocaust, gassing was really epiphenomenal to the Germans’ slaughter of Jews. It was a more convenient means, but not an essential development.”7 David Irving could hardly have put it better himself.
As Raul Hilberg points out, in place of complexity, “Goldhagen has left us with the image of a medieval-like incubus, a demon latent in the German mind . . . waiting for the opportunity to strike out.”8 Irving’s gloss on Goldhagen is his view that if Jews provoke this demon, they have only themselves to blame.
Browning’s very presence on the roster of Lipstadt’s witnesses is itself testimony to the wide range of views within the bounds of legitimate scholarly debate on the Holocaust. As is the presence of Peter Longerich, who testifies later in the trial, and who disagrees sharply with Browning’s stress on a sudden change at the time of Operation Barbarossa, putting the decision for genocide back to the fall of 1939. These men’s work is a rebuke to any reductionist explanation of the Holocaust; their prominence in the defense’s case is a refutation of those who accuse Lipstadt, or her lawyers, of enforcing a rigid or parochially Jewish orthodoxy of interpretation.
Browning’s easy American manners make Irving’s slightly sheepish effort to discredit him for accepting a commission by Yad Vashem look ridiculous. “I have contracted to write a book for them and that has not been completed,” says Browning cheerfully.
“They paid you $35,000?” asks Irving.
“No, they have paid me, I believe, $27,000.”
“Yes. Yad Vashem is an institution of the State of Israel, is it not?” asks Irving.
“Yes.”
“So you are, in that respect, a paid agent I suppose of the State of Israel—using the word ‘agent’ in its purely legal sense?”
“If that was the case,” Browning replies, “then since I had been at the [US] Holocaust Museum, I would also have been an agent of the American government, and since I have received scholarships in Germany, I would be an agent of the German government, so I must be a very duplicitous fellow to be able to follow these regimes.”
While Irving is unable to damage Browning, it is far from clear how much damage Browning has done to Irving. On all their areas of disagreement the judge might well trust Browning’s greater expertise. Irving agrees with Browning that while all historians make mistakes, it would be suspicious if the pattern of mistakes all went in the same direction. “You mean . . . like a waiter who always gives the wrong change in his own favor?” says Irving helpfully, articulating a standard he will have cause to regret. But all this collegial goodwill also sends a message: if Irving’s views on the Holocaust are acceptable in the Senior Common Room, then even if he is a bigot that doesn’t make him a Holocaust denier.
The most powerful weapon which can be used to destroy false evidence is the technique of massive confrontation. This technique, at its best, may be compared to a creeping artillery barrage, driving back the enemy foot by foot. For this purpose it is essential to have ammunition, consisting of damaging facts and documents which cannot be denied. The ammunition should not be fired all at once, but by degrees.
John Munkman, The Technique of Advocacy (1991)
It was Chekhov who famously said that if you put a pistol on the table in the first act, one of the characters must pick it up and fire it by the end of the play. On Day 18—in trial terms at about the beginning of Act IV—David Irving walks into the courtroom with a desktop calculator, an old tan model with rubber feet and a little roll of paper tape, and puts it on the desk in front of him. Given Irving’s enthusiasm for back-of-the-envelope figuring—he’s already done crematorium capacity, coke consumption, and gas-van through-put—it is hard to imagine what calculation he deems so important as to require mechanical precision.
When Richard Evans takes the stand the bonhomie of the previous few days disappears almost immediately. A short, squat man with beetle brows and an expression of faint disgust, Evans is not an ingratiating witness. Irving first asks him about his political views.
“I am a member of the Labour Party,” he replies. “I do not suppose that means that one is left wing these days.”
Irving also asks Evans, who has taught courses on the Third Reich, if he ever thought of putting Hitler’s War on the reading list.
“Not really,” says Evans. “I think it is more concerned with military history than anything else.” Though this slight may be unintentional, Evans is a man spoiling for a fight. His opening comes in just a few moments.
“Professor Evans,” says Irving, “you expressed the opinion in your report that my diaries may have been written for some ulterior motive.”
“Could you point to the page in my report where I say that, please?” Evans’s report is over 700 pages long.
“That sounded to me as though it was a rehearsed remark,” says Irving, who may be right. “Is it true that it is your opinion that I may have written the diaries for some reason other than one would normally write a diary? What are your suspicions about why I wrote that?”
“Would you like to point me to the page where I—you see, I have a problem, Mr. Irving, which is that, having been through your work, I cannot really accept your version of any document, including passages in my own report, without actually having it in front of me, so I think this may be a problem for us.” And with that, the hostilities commence.
Since he was first approached by Anthony Julius in the fall of 1997 Evans and his young assistants have had access to videotapes and audiocassettes of Irving’s speeches, tens of thousands of pages of documents, his complete private diaries, thousands of letters, and a great deal of other material. Though he began his research with Irving’s “chain of documents”—the material Irving cites to support his claim that Adolf Hitler was “probably the biggest friend the Jews had in the Third Reich”—Evans looked at the totality of Irving’s career, from the Dresden book to the Goebbels biography. What he found shocked him deeply:
Penetrating beneath the confident surface of his prose quickly revealed a mass of distortion and manipulation . . . so tangled that detailing it sometimes took up many more words than . . . Irving’s original account. Unpicking the eleven-page narrative of the anti-Jewish pogrom of the so-called Reichskristallnacht in Irving’s book Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich and tracing back every part of it to the documentation on which it purports to rest takes up over seventy pages of the present report. A similar knotted web of distortions, suppressions and manipulations became evident in every single instance which we examined.
I was not prepared for the sheer depths of duplicity which I encountered in Irving’s treatment of the historical sources, nor for the way in which this dishonesty permeated his entire written and spoken output. It is as all-pervasive in his early work as it is in his later publications. . . . It is clear . . . that Irving’s claim to have a very good and thorough knowledge of the evidence on the basis of which the history of Nazi Germany has to be written is completely justified. His numerous mistakes and egregious errors are not, therefore, due to mere ignorance or sloppiness; on the contrary, it is obvious that they are calculated and deliberate. That is precisely why they are so shocking.
If Evans’s verdict on Irving’s methods is unequivocal, he is equally hard on Irving’s defenders in journalism and the academy: “Irving has relied in the past, and continues to rely in the present, on the fact that his readers and listeners, reviewers and interviewers lack either the time, or the expertise, to probe deeply enough into the sources he uses for his work to uncover the distortions, suppressions and manipulations to which he has subjected them.”
Evans’s very recalcitrance on the stand underlines the gravity of his findings. A pedant’s pedant, there is not an ounce of banter in the man. And however apparently obstructionist he may seem, Evans’s obvious unwillingness to take anything Irving says on faith, no matter how innocuous, serves to reinforce the scathing conclusion of his report: that Irving is simply not a man who can be trusted.
“In your expert report,” says Irving, “you said that I was obliged to turn over my diaries to the defense. What did you mean by that?”
“Could you point to me the page where I say that?”
“Oh, dear!”
Even the judge seems exasperated. “Well, do we really need to go to that?” he appeals to Evans. “I expect you probably did say that.”
“Well, I really, my Lord, would ask I be pointed to where I say that.”
“All right,” says Gray resignedly, “if you really want it?”
“I am afraid I do, yes.”
Although his cantankerous attitude risks alienating the judge, it also shows Evans has understood (or been told) the most important lesson a witness can learn: You are not there to be agreeable. Irving’s chances depend on his rolling back the juggernaut Evans has aimed at his reputation. Evans’s job on the stand is to make him sweat for every inch.
So when Irving turns on his calculator, he gets no help from Evans. “You have had all these diaries which go very clearly to my state of mind, my private state of mind, and you have found at the end of this enormous mountainous task: one ditty?”
“That is not my report.”
“To prove that I am racist?”
“I am sorry, that is not quoted in my report.” Evans is right. The now infamous ditty is quoted only by Brian Levin, a former New York City Police Officer who teaches at Stockton College in Pomona, New Jersey, where he is Director of the Center on Hate and Extremism. Levin isn’t coming to London, so Gray suggests Irving ask Evans if, having read the diaries himself, he finds the poem unrepresentative.
“It was 19 words out of 30 million,” says Irving.
“It is not quoted in my report, Mr. Irving. I am here to answer questions on my report. You may ask other witnesses on their reports.”
“Do you know what percentage of me is therefore racist?” says Irving, hellbent on firing up his calculator with or without Evans’s co-operation. Irving squints down at the keys through half-glasses perched on the end of his nose. “Point 00016 percent of me is racist,” he says.
“Is that a question?” says Evans.
“Which means,” Irving announces triumphantly, “that 99.9984 percent of me is not, according to the diaries.”
Evans is supposed to testify for three and a half days. For the first two of those days the central allegation of his report—that Irving repeatedly, consciously, and wittingly distorted or misrepresented the sources he used in writing his books—barely comes up. Instead Irving hands around photos of the “colored people” he has employed on his staff over the years.
“Would you accept from me that they were all my personal assistants over the years concerned, and that they received a proper salary from me?”
“Have you got documentary proof of that?” says Evans.
“Yes.”
“Could I have a look at it, please?”
“Well, let us take it as read,” says an exasperated Mr. Justice Gray, “that these ladies were all employed by Mr. Irving.”
Irving asks Evans about the affidavit that got him expelled from Canada. Evans protests: “I mean, I do find it very difficult to answer questions on other people’s reports.” And again, the judge intervenes.
“Mr. Irving is representing himself. I am, therefore, giving him what I hope is an appropriate but quite a wide degree of latitude. He is accused of various things, like racism and anti-Semitism. He has been cross-examined vigorously on that topic. The Defendants had experts who produced great long reports, as you know, dealing with those topics and the Defendants have decided not to call them.
“Mr. Irving is, therefore,” Gray continues, “in the position of being the subject of the criticisms that they make of him, albeit no longer part of the Defendants’ formal case, and he wishes to put one or two points to you as being somebody who is there to be shot at, as it were. I have decided that it is proper that he should do so.”
Given leave to fire at will, Irving engages Evans in a war of attrition over the initial sections of his report, where Evans summarizes Irving’s reputation and treatment by other historians. With one exception, all of Irving’s questions aim at minor points. Indeed, he seems to be trying to turn Evans’s pedantry—his reluctance to let the smallest error pass without comment—against him. If he can make the court choke on minutiae, and then convince the judge that all of Evans’s criticisms are equally petty—and some of them mistaken—Irving may just manage to deflect the heavy artillery in Evans’s report.
More a siege than an attack, Irving’s strategy of massive resistance quickly empties out the press section. Yet the stakes couldn’t be higher. Five weeks into the trial Irving is still standing. Van Pelt and Browning have come and gone, and though the two men offered accounts of the Holocaust that were both more coherent and more plausible than Irving’s version, neither delivered a knockout blow to Irving’s credibility. Van Pelt may have persuaded the judge that Irving’s views were mistaken, but, at least in the witness box, he hadn’t quite managed to show they were perverse or dishonestly maintained. Everything now hinges on Evans.
Though excruciating to sit through, Irving’s strategy appears to be paying off. When Rampton rises to protest— “We have done 45 pages in a day and a half. At that rate Professor Evans will be in the box for another three weeks!”—the judge verbally slaps him down.
“The difficulty, Mr. Rampton, if I may explain, is that Professor Evans has made reference to these other historians and their views. That does rather open up cross-examination.”
Rampton persists: “It does seem to me that this is a rather futile game of ping pong that is going on at the moment, and far better to get on to the detailed criticisms.”
“In that case,” says Irving, “it would have been well if Professor Evans had not written the initial 100 pages in his report.”
“I think I said that myself,” Gray pronounces, “and I do rather take that view. He did. You know my view of it.”
The defense does get one lucky break. Early on, Irving asks Evans if he was “shown at any time any law report that had been produced by Penguin books in this country, any libel reading [or] report on [Lipstadt’s] book.” When Evans, quite truthfully, answers “No,” Irving drops the matter. He never asks—and Evans never volunteers—any information about the book’s American libel reading. If he had, and if Evans had seen the American publisher’s report, the resulting disclosure of the inevitable list of cautious lawyer’s reservations could have seriously embarrassed the defense.
Irving also makes one major tactical mistake. The judge may have thrown the first 100 pages of Evans out the window. But the 600-plus pages that remain are a catalogue of misrepresentation, mistranslation, misleading phrasing, and imperfectly varnished deceit. Persuading Mr. Justice Gray to disregard the balance of Evans’s report—the heart of the defense case—will take every ounce of credibility and evident reasonableness Irving can muster. Yet when, at the very end of Evans’s second day, Gray refers to Irving’s position on the use of gas to kill Jews as having “evolved” in the course of the trial, Irving demurs: “My recollection of the matter is that in order to speed the trial along we have streamlined a lot of the arguments and concentrated on certain institutions and centers, and left it like that.”
The first problem with this formulation is that it isn’t true. Irving had indeed conceded ground during cross-examination. The second problem is that Irving’s attempt to resile or step back from his concessions looks slippery and casuistic precisely when he needs to appear ingenuous and reliable. Whether motivated by his own vanity or the need to keep his revisionist backers—who may hold to their credo more fiercely than he does—on board, Irving’s attempt to save face will prove costly.
On Tuesday, Evans returns to the witness box, and though the pace of Irving’s cross-examination has, if anything, slowed down, an electric current of loathing now arcs and crackles between the two men. An eternity ago—the previous Thursday—Irving had asked “You don’t like me, do you?” and received a laconic “I have no personal feelings about you at all.”
To a casual observer, the two antagonists have much in common. Evans grew up in Theydon Bois, three stops into London on the Central Line from Ongar, Irving’s childhood home. He, too, had been a scholarship boy, first at the local grammar school, then at Jesus College, Oxford. Both men had achieved success at least in part by simply working harder than anyone else around them; Evans was every bit as much of a “documents hound” as his adversary. And of course they had both been drawn to Germany at a time when the country was profoundly unfashionable, both within the academy and in Britain generally.
Look closer, however, and you see two lives whose trajectories point in opposite directions. Evans’s father, a clerk, and his mother, a schoolteacher, were both Welsh-speaking. And though his parents trekked to a Methodist chapel in the East End every Sunday, they raised their son to speak English as his native tongue. Evans is not a particularly modest man—his letterhead proclaims his fellowship in the British Academy, and he clearly enjoys his status as a member of the country’s intellectual establishment—yet for all his laurels he seems ill at ease, retaining the coiled tension and “chippy” truculence characteristic of the British outsider. Irving’s nostalgic yearning for Britain’s past glory finds no echo in Evans.
As for Irving, his contempt for Evans combines the traditional scorn of the déclassé for the rising man with his self-definition as a “shirtsleeves historian” who can beat the academics at their own game. Plus of course the Englishman’s boundless condescension toward the inhabitants of the country’s Celtic fringe. In his diary, Irving refers to Evans as “that horrid little Welshman.”9 At the trial he confines himself to the observation that “the Welsh are famous for their loquacity—and I hope that this will not be taken by Mr. Rampton as yet another example of my racist predilections when I say that—but your answers sometimes do tend to run overboard.” At one point, when Evans asks to see a document whose translation is in dispute, Irving walks up to the witness box, turns away from Evans so that he is neither facing him nor looking at him, picks up a loose-leaf binder from beside Evans’s chair, drops it in front of Evans and says “The original German is here.”
Personalities aside the two men have every reason to be wary of one another. In his report, Evans lays out the roadmap for the defense case. Though he is not a specialist in either the Holocaust or the Second World War, Evans devotes nearly a hundred pages to a consideration of what “Holocaust denial” might mean and whether Irving’s writings and speeches meet that definition. The meat of his report, though, and the pillars of the defense case against Irving, are two sets of case studies. The first examines the nine links in Irving’s “chain of documents.” The second set, which takes up over 200 pages of the report, looks at Irving’s use of evidence at three different stages of his career: his first book on the firebombing of Dresden, his treatment of the testimony of Hitler’s adjutants in his book Hitler’s War, and the explanation Irving gives for Nazi anti-Semitism, taken mostly from his Goebbels biography. In every single case Evans finds the historical equivalent of fraud.
The Destruction of Dresden launched Irving’s career; first published in 1963, it is still probably the most widely read of his books, and certainly the most widely admired. Yet Evans reveals that Irving (1) fabricated a strafing attack on German civilians and refugees by British and American pilots, rearranging dates and misattributing testimony to bolster his account, (2) knowingly took an account of a bombing run on Prague and pretended the events happened over Dresden, (3) derived his own initial estimate of 135,000 dead from the testimony of a lone source who supplied no documentary evidence of any kind to back up his figure, (4) raised the count to 202,040 on the basis of a typed copy of a document which later turned out to be a forgery, (5) refused to modify the figure even when the man who supplied the document wrote Irving to complain that he had been wrongly identified as Dresden’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer when he was merely a urologist at the local hospital and “only heard of the numbers third-hand,” (6) suppressed internal evidence suggesting the document was a fake, and (7) also suppressed testimony—a letter to Irving—from a man whose job had been to tally the dead, and who put the number at just over 30,000, (8) grudgingly acknowledged the discovery of an official “Final Report” that estimated the death toll at 25,000, but later discounted it, and finally (9) ignored the discovery of the genuine document whose forged copy was referred to in (4) above. The authentic total was 20,204—the forgers had simply added an extra zero!
Evans’s dissection of The Destruction of Dresden runs to over sixty pages; his analysis of the way Irving “uncritically accepts the testimony of members of Hitler’s entourage when it is suitable to his arguments, but ignores it, suppresses it, manipulates it, or attempts to discredit it when it is not” goes on for more than a hundred pages. Neither gets more than a glancing mention at the trial.
What does get discussed—at almost unendurable length—is a passing remark that Evans made casting aspersions on the 1938 German plebiscite in which Hitler received 99.8 percent of the vote. Irving, bizarrely, seeks to defend the fairness of the vote, asking Evans if he had any “proof” that voters were intimidated. This is too much for Mr. Justice Gray: “Mr. Irving, will you listen to me for a moment, because I think we probably have spent long enough on the 99.8 percent. There is a danger I think, and this is designed to help you, that we are missing the wood for the trees.”
“My method, my Lord,” Irving replies, “. . . has been to graze through this passage and come across these occasionally indigestible rocks where he picks on something where I know I am right and where your Lordship probably does not appreciate that I am right.”
“If that is what you are planning to do for the next 550 pages of this report,” Gray warns, “I am not going to find that helpful.”
Evans began his testimony standing in the witness box, hands thrust deep in his pockets. By the fourth day he appears slumped over in his seat. Mr. Justice Gray has been trying desperately, but without much success, to get Irving to engage with the substance of Evans’s charges against him. He has, however, managed to elicit Irving’s views on his associates at the Institute for Historical Review.
“So your case is—I want to be clear about this—you do regard the IHR as an organization consisting of cracked anti-Semites, is that your case?”
“I think that the correct thing to say there,” Irving replies, “is that it consists of some elements which are cracked anti-Semites. I do not think I would wish to brand an entire organization. As far as I know, some of the officers of that organization, I would regard them as cracked anti-Semites.”
In his report, Evans spends over 80 pages tracing the various misrepresentations and distortions in Irving’s account of the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 9–10, 1938. Wearily, Gray tries one more time to get Irving to answer these criticisms: “This cross-examination does not appear to me to be grasping the nettle of the criticisms against you. You are finding tiny little points on which you hope, and sometimes succeed, in tripping up Professor Evans, but you are not grappling with what the criticisms are of your account of Kristallnacht. . . . There is no point in, if I may put it this way, pussyfooting around the borders of the issue because that is not going to help me, is it, really?”
But when he finally does begin to deal with Kristallnacht Irving immediately finds himself in the trap Rampton had set nearly a week before, when he’d asked Irving to translate Rudolf Hess’s telegram. In Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich Irving had written: “At 2:56 a.m. Rudolf Hess’s staff also began cabling, telephoning and radioing instructions to Gauleiters and police authorities around the nation to halt the madness.” Hess was Deputy Führer, and the document Irving cites in the book to support this passage is a cable indicating that the order comes from “the highest level,” i.e. Hitler. The relevant passage is read out: “Brandlegungen an jüdischen Geschäften oder dergleichen . . .” which Evans translates as “acts of arson on Jewish shops and the like.” Irving argues that the phrase oder dergleichen— “and the like”—modifies “acts of arson,” and thus justifies his interpretation of the order as calling for a general halt to the violence. At which point Evans reminds Irving that when he had so helpfully translated this very document for the seemingly befuddled Rampton, he’d given the meaning as “acts of arson against Jewish shops or the like.”
Since the Jewish shops “and the like” were often in German-owned buildings, far from being, as Irving would have it, an indication of Hitler’s outrage at the pogrom, the order indicates at best a desire to limit collateral damage. Yet Irving, entirely unabashed, merely asks Evans if his interpretation is “based on your superior knowledge of the German language?”
“I am not claiming my knowledge is superior to yours,” Evans replies. “You also have a very good knowledge of the German language. That is why I say this is a shameless manipulation of the text. It is not due to mere ignorance.”
“A historical fact,” Evans writes in his book In Defence of History, “is something that happened in history and can be verified as such through the traces history has left behind.” As rough-and-ready definitions go this is not bad, but as a guide to conduct it begs all kinds of questions. Who decides whether the thing “happened” in the first place? What are the procedures for verifying these facts and who sets them? How do we select our facts? What do we do when the “traces” admit more than one explanation? Can there be events that happen outside of history?
The philosopher Hayden White thought there could. White distinguished between “events”—things that happened in the past—and “facts”—things made by historians or found in a document or a record. As a self-styled defender of “objectivity in history” Evans has limited sympathy for White, and quotes with disapproval his claim that “when it comes to the historical record, there are no grounds to be found in the record itself for preferring one way of construing its meaning rather than another. . . . We can tell equally plausible, alternative, and even contradictory stories . . . without violating rules of evidence or critical standards.”10
Evans seems to read this as a conflation of history and fiction, and to be fair, a lot of White’s acolytes have made precisely that argument. But if we amend the claim to “there are often no grounds,” and we attend to White’s insistence that historians still need to respect the rules of evidence—not to mention “critical standards”—we come pretty close to what it must mean to do history in an epistemologically reflective way.
The odd thing is that Evans’s own books offer as good an example as any of what this might look like in practice. Indeed his focus on subjects like disease, capital punishment, and the history of feminism shows not only an acute awareness of “facts” that wouldn’t even be visible to a “maps and chaps” historian, but a sophisticated understanding of the factors, cognitive and institutional as well as social, which turn one historian’s background noise into fundamental data for someone else.
But like the proverbial man on the bicycle who falls off when he contemplates the underlying physics, Evans’s theoretical pronouncements can be a bit wobbly. At one point in In Defence of History Evans argues that historians ultimately stand or fall “on the extent to which their historical arguments conform to the rules of evidence and the facts on which they rest. . . . In other words, they have to be objective.” A few pages later he is far more modest: “Through the sources we use, and the methods with which we handle them, we can, if we are very careful and thorough, approach a reconstruction of past reality that may be partial and provisional, and certainly will not be objective, but is nevertheless true.”11
Given the choice between Evans the scourge of postmodernism and Evans the “careful and thorough” advocate for the “partial and provisional” I prefer the latter. Unfortunately, at the trial we saw mostly the former. This might not have been entirely his fault.
Something about the Holocaust as a subject seems to rein in the critical impulse. Indeed Evans relates with satisfaction that Hayden White himself “retreated from his earlier position to defend himself against the accusation that his hyper-relativism gave countenance to . . . ‘Holocaust denial.’”12 Though the Holocaust can present a kind of boundary marker for theoretical speculation, its use as a chain on the limits of discussion strikes me as unfortunate. “Auschwitz was not a discourse,” writes Evans. Fair enough. But that doesn’t mean Auschwitz is outside discourse either. Anything which acts to remove the Holocaust from history, or to insulate it from the kind of speculation and skepticism that ought to be brought to bear on all historical narratives, only serves to bring it that much closer to the realm of myth.
The more tentative, more reflective, more theoretically heterodox Evans might have just as much reason to be outraged at the kind of fraud and deceit he found pervading Irving’s work. And though there would be no professional obligation to disapprove of Irving’s bigotry or its political expression, such a historian would be as free as anyone else to do so for his own reasons, whether as a matter of political engagement or from common humanity. And as an added bonus, he would be far less likely than the Richard Evans we saw in court to be flummoxed by a document which, shorn of its context, appeared to mean precisely what, given its context, it couldn’t mean.
The “Schlegelberger Memorandum,” as Irving called it, is a short typewritten text on unheaded paper. There is no date, no signature, no security classification and no clear indication of the recipient. The text, in full, states:
Reich Minister Lammers informed me that the Führer had repeatedly explained to him that he wanted the solution of the Jewish Question put back until after the war. Accordingly the present discussions possess a merely theoretical value in the opinion of Reich Minister Lammers. But he will be in all cases concerned that fundamental decisions are not reached by a surprise intervention from another agency without his knowledge.
The document was first discovered—not by Irving, but by Eberhard Jaeckel—in a collection put together after 1945. Within this collection, it appears to also belong to a file of five documents gathered by the Allies in preparation for the Nuremberg prosecutions. A staff analysis by the US war-crimes prosecutor’s office lists these five documents as coming from Ministry of Justice archives. Using these indications, in his report Evans outlines three possible interpretations: first, that the document might have been written in 1940 or 1941, in which case the reference to postponing the Final Solution might mean just what it says (but Hitler must have changed his mind). Alternatively, the document might be linked to one of the other four in the file, dating from November 1941 and dealing with the right of Jews to appear in courts of law, in which case it also means what it says (suggesting that Hitler decided on extermination rather late). Finally the memo might be linked with the three remaining documents in the prosecution file, all of which were concerned with the treatment to be accorded Mischlinge—“half-Jews”—or Jews in mixed marriages. This topic was the subject of a number of meetings in the spring of 1942, all of which were held under the rubric Endlösung der Judenfrage—Final Solution to the Jewish Question.
In his report, Evans opts for this last interpretation, which as he says is also the view of both Jaeckel and Irving himself. But in the witness box he stumbles, not so much over the interpretation itself as over the fact that the other two alternative explanations can’t be eliminated. His discomfort is obviously increased by the circumstance that, having dated the memo to 1942, Evans must then argue against Irving’s claim that when it says Hitler wanted to postpone the “solution of the Jewish Question” until after the war, that is exactly what it meant. Instead, says Evans, the words “solution of the Jewish Question” really refer to the Mischlinge question.
Evans points out that by the spring of 1942 the mass murder was well underway. He also points out that, by the criteria Irving used to attack some of the Auschwitz documents—that a document is not found in its original file, there is no clear indication of when it was sent or why, and it has no security classification—the “Schlegelberger Memorandum” should be a highly suspect document. Yet because it suits his purpose, Irving embraces it without reservation. Still, Evans doesn’t propose to reject it either. Faced with exactly the kind of ambiguous situation suggested by Hayden White, and forced to make an interpretation at least partly on the basis of external factors, all Evans can say is “It is not entirely implausible whether he [Hitler] was giving this kind of meaning to the Mischlinge.” As grounds for rejecting Irving’s interpretation, “not entirely implausible” is not a very strong claim.
As Irving seems to understand, our very desire for certainty, for comprehensiveness—for historical neatness—operate to his advantage. “It is a terrible problem, is it not,” he asks Evans later in the day, “that we are faced with this tantalizing plate of crumbs and morsels of what should have provided the final smoking gun proof, and nowhere the whole way through the archives do we find even one item that we do not have to interpret or read between the lines of, but we do have in the same chain of evidence documents which . . . quite clearly specifically show Hitler intervening in the other sense?”
This time Evans responds more robustly: “No, I do not accept that at all. It is because you want to interpret euphemisms as being literal and that is what the whole problem is. Every time there is a euphemism, Mr. Irving . . . or a camouflage piece of statement or language about Madagascar, you want to treat it as being the literal truth, because it serves your purpose of trying to exculpate Hitler. That is part of . . . the way in which you manipulate and distort the documents.” Still, this has been Irving’s best day since Evans was sworn in—and he knows it. Agreeing to the judge’s suggestion to adjourn, Irving says: “I think we have broken through the barbed wire. We are right through the mine field now and we are out in the open desert and our guns are blazing.”
With a weekend to recover, both sides return to court refreshed. Irving has a new haircut. Evans has regained his early form.
“Can you accept,” Irving asks, “that Dr. Goebbels, in the year 1942, saw Adolf Hitler about ten times all told? I mean in private.”
“I do find it difficult,” Evans replies, “to accept anything you say, Mr. Irving, without looking at the documentary basis for it.” Perhaps because this is his last day, he even shows flashes of dry wit. When Irving, referring to a comment by Hitler invoking the Madagascar option in May 1942, suggests “either Hitler is totally in the dark as to what is going on, or he is the biggest hypocrite there has been?” Evans responds: “I would go for the second of those two alternatives, Mr. Irving.”
There are also signs that Mr. Justice Gray has gotten over his initial irritation at Evans. When Evans yet again refuses to answer a question without having the relevant document in front of him, Irving chides him: “I am not going to keep on falling for this game throughout the day, Professor Evans, because we have to get through a great deal today.” This time, though, when Evans says his reluctance to take Irving’s word for the content is “perfectly reasonable,” the judge agrees.
“I am afraid it is,” he tells Irving. “It does slow things down but I think, if you put a proposition to the witness, and he is not inclined to agree to it unless he sees the document you rely on, then he is entitled to ask you to look at it.”
Later in the day, when Irving yet again asks Evans to comment on whether Hitler’s remark proposing the Jews be sent “to Siberia” was merely a euphemism for murder, the judge cuts him off: “I know what you say about it, I know what Professor Evans says about it and, in the end, I have to decide what a sensible, objective historian would make of it.”
When I first read the Evans report I sent Irving an e-mail saying I frankly found it a convincing “demolition” of his scholarship, but presumed he disagreed. A few weeks later he replied: “I have now begun reading the Evans report. I am eagerly looking forward to the cross-examination. If he ventures into the box, I shall tear him to shreds.” This did not happen. Instead, Irving attempted to grind Evans down, using the historian’s own abrasive personality and pedantic manner as his instruments. Yet here, too, he seems to have failed, and when Irving concludes his cross-examination at the agreed time Rampton has very little damage to repair. He does produce a Nazi court report in which the Hess telegram that trapped Irving is summarized as simply forbidding “arson on Jewish shops.” With this slight twist of the knife, Evans is dismissed.