9

Germans

After so many weeks arguing about the meaning of German words, and German deeds, the court is finally about to hear from a real live German. Perhaps as a cautionary gesture, perhaps as a sort of amulet, on the morning Peter Longerich testifies for the defense David Irving sets down a leather-bound volume in the same spot to the right side of his table briefly occupied by his calculator. The title, embossed in gold gothic letters on the cover, is unmistakable: Mein Kampf.

Compactly built, with sloping shoulders and a mop of thick black hair falling over thick eyebrows, Longerich looks more like a Black Forest woodcutter than one of the most accomplished German historians of the Holocaust in the generation born after the war. His books—which include a history of the Nazi stormtroopers, a history of Hitler’s Party Chancellery, and an analysis of the Nazi propaganda machine, as well as a comprehensive history of Nazi persecution of the Jews—are at present available only in German, and as Longerich walks to the witness box he is shadowed by a primly dressed woman who is sworn in at the same time. She is the translator. For the past six years Longerich has been on the faculty of London’s Royal Holloway College, and although his syntax is occasionally Germanic to the point of incomprehension, the translator is rarely needed.

Indeed the first topic Irving raises in cross-examination is Longerich’s “Glossary of some terms used by the NS regime in connection with the murder of European Jews.” A short dictionary of Nazi euphemism, the document, prepared for the defense and offered in evidence after the trial began, contains entries such as:

Umsiedeln, aussiedeln (noun: Umsiedlung, Aussiedlung), English: resettle. This term was first used from summer 1941 onwards in the occupied Soviet territories to refer to the systematic murder of the Jews. . . . On 5.2.43 the commander of the security police . . . in White Ruthenia issued a command ordering the “resettlement” (Umsiedlung) of the Jews living in the city of Sluzk. The order continued: “At the resettlement site are two pits. A group of ten leaders and men work at each pit, relieving each other every two hours.”

Longerich quickly demonstrates that he is not only perfectly comfortable in English, but also perfectly at ease with the kind of hermeneutic considerations Evans found so troublesome. “What a historian has to do,” he tells Irving, “[is] . . . look at each document and . . . look at the context and then try to reconstruct from the context what actually the meaning of this—of this passage might be.”

“But is not the danger there,” asks Irving, “that you then come back using a priori methods, that you extrapolate backwards from your knowledge and assign a meaning to the word rather than using the word to help you itself?”

“That is the problem with all interpretations,” Longerich replies. “You have to come back. Of course, you cannot analyze the word completely, you know, outside. You have to look at the meaning of the word, but always in a historical context. I am not a linguist, so I prefer to actually, as I said, to look at the context.”

And as Longerich observes, though the Nazis almost always cloaked their murderous intent in various euphemisms, there were significant exceptions. In October 1943 Heinrich Himmler addressed a meeting of senior SS officers in Poznan, Poland:

I also want to talk to you quite frankly about a very grave matter, we can talk about it quite openly among ourselves, but nevertheless we can never speak of it publicly…just as we did not hesitate on the 30th June 1934* to do our duty as we were bidden and to stand comrades who had lapsed up against the wall and shoot them, so we have never spoken about it and will never speak of it.

It was a natural assumption, an assumption which, thank God, is inherent in us, that we never discussed it among ourselves and never spoke of it. Each of us shuddered, and yet each of us knew clearly that the next time he would do it again if it were an order, and if it were necessary. I am referring here to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. This is one of the things that is easily said: “The Jewish people are going to be exterminated,” that’s what every Party member says, “sure, it’s in our program, elimination of the Jews, extermination—it’ll be done.” And then they all come along, the eighty million worthy Germans, and each one has his one decent Jew. Of course, the others are all swine, but this one, he is a first-rate Jew. Of all those who talk like that, not one has seen it happen, not one has had to go through with it. Most of you men know what it is like to see a hundred corpses side by side, or five hundred, or a thousand.

We have been through this and, disregarding exceptional cases of human weakness, have remained decent. That is what has made us tough. This is a glorious page in our history, one that has never been written and can never be written.1

“Of course,” says Longerich, looking up from his reading, “the last sentence is a kind of challenge for historians, I think.”

At the very beginning of the trial Irving produced a British decrypt of a coded German railway message concerning a train load of 944 Jews that left Berlin for Kovno in Lithuania in November 1941. The report noted that the train also carried 3,000 kilograms of bread, 2,700 kilograms of flour, 200 kilograms of peas, 300 kilograms of cornflakes, 18 bottles of soup spices, 47,000 Reichsmark in credit and various “appliances.” When Rampton asked him, in cross-examination, what all this might mean, Irving’s answer was succinct: “It shows that these trains were actually well provisioned.” Irving offered the document as an explicit challenge both to “the image we have from the literature . . . of coal trucks and cattle trucks” and also to the defense experts, who he said ignored it “because of course it does not fit into the perception they are trying to create.”

A lawyer would have left it at that. Instead, Irving now reintroduces the decrypt to illustrate what he thinks is an innocent use of the word Evakuierung—evacuation. With no more than his own mental agility to go on, Rampton had done his best to cast doubt on Irving’s interpretation. But Longerich knows all about this particular evacuation, pointing out that the tools and provisions would have come from the Jewish community in Berlin, and can hardly be taken as evidence of Nazi benevolence. “Do you think,” he asks Irving, “this is money from the Gestapo . . . to buy food for the Jews?”

What makes Longerich so sure? Because although Irving’s document is silent on their fate, Longerich also knows that the Jews on this particular train “were all killed in Kovno” immediately upon arrival. The provisions furnished by the community to aid their resettlement, he now tells the court, would have been confiscated by the SS. This is clearly news to Irving, who utters a mumbled “Thank you for telling us. That is very interesting to know that” and then drops the subject as soon as he can.

Yet perhaps because—unlike Irving or Evans—the Holocaust is very much Longerich’s patch, he seems far more tolerant of uncertainty. Irving asks him about a 1942 conversation in Hitler’s “Table Talk”—a record of the Führer’s mealtime utterances as preserved by his faithful adjutants*—where, with Goebbels present, Hitler still talks of sending the Jews to Siberia or Central Africa. As Longerich points out, the killings at Semlin, Chelmno, and Belzec have been underway for some time. “I have difficulties, I have to say, to find, you know, an easy answer to this document because, I mean, they are in the middle of mass extermination and Goebbels is quite aware of that, and they are still talking about the idea that they could force the Jews out of Europe. I find this really difficult to explain.”

In an odd way, Longerich’s modesty, his ready willingness to admit he can’t always make sense of the evidence, seems to encourage Irving to come out of his defensive crouch. What we see is not only the biographer who regards Adolf Hitler as a familiar presence—at one point Irving asks Longerich if a particular document “is a very shaky kind of testimony, is it not, so far as Adolf’s responsibility is concerned?”—but whose identification with his subject is far stronger than he seems to realize. Irving wants to use the Mein Kampf on his desk to support his claim that Hitler, though an anti-Semite, had no genocidal intentions toward the Jews when he wrote it. This particular coup de théâtre is foiled when Longerich declines to disagree, again saying the evidence is inconclusive. Instead Irving wonders “whether he [Hitler] was a cynical anti-Semite and used it in the same way that an Enoch Powell might use immigration—as a means of establishing a political position—or whether he was profoundly viscerally anti-Semitic.”

“Which option are you going for?” asks Mr. Justice Gray.

“I am going for the cynical version, my Lord.”

“So he was not really an anti-Semite, it was just a political gambit?”

“He was when it served his purpose. He was a beer-table anti-Semite. He used it to whip up support, but in private—and this is what counts—his state of mind was slightly different.”

Irving’s assumption that cynical anti-Semites are somehow less offensive, or less dangerous, than sincere bigots is debatable. While a cynical anti-Semite might abandon his prejudice once it has served its purpose, he might also cleave to it long after the visceral anti-Semite’s hatred has burned out, so long as there is some advantage in doing so. But what really makes this exchange remarkable is the unconscious self-revelation that comes from the way Irving framed his question: as a man clearly fascinated by the political vistas opened by the resort to prejudice.

Though Longerich’s testimony marks the climax of the trial’s historical phase—Evans was the climax of the historiography section—as a foreigner and a non-celebrity his appearance has been largely ignored by the press. One morning Greville Janner, the Jewish MP who spearheaded the campaign to get the statute of limitations lifted for war crimes—and who has called for laws criminalizing Holocaust denial in Britain—sits unnoticed behind Anthony Julius. The next day half the press seats are filled by French Explorer Scouts—boys and girls in blue uniform, with neckerchiefs, and patches that say “Union des Etudiants Juifs de France.” They are on the March des Vivants—March of the Living—a pilgrimage organized by various Zionist organizations that sends young people to Israel by way of Auschwitz.

Ironically, many of these scouts also belong to Betar, the youth wing of Revisionist Zionism, whose founder Vladimir Jabotinsky was an avowed admirer of Fascism (he preferred Mussolini to Hitler). Though they sit radiating both sectarian contempt and hormonal restlessness, few of them seem able to follow Longerich’s testimony, which is perhaps just as well, especially when Irving asks him if the infamous “Commissar Order” calling for the elimination of “the Jewish Bolshevik intelligentsia” was motivated primarily by racism or ideology.

“Both,” Longerich replies. “You cannot separate that. You cannot separate anti-Semitism from the anti-Communism. This is one thing.” An acknowledgment which says nothing about any relationship between Jews and Communism, but which would nonetheless have distressed Jabotinsky as much as Lucy Dawidowicz or Daniel Goldhagen—and which probably doesn’t make Lipstadt’s backers in the Anti-Defamation League too happy, either.

Longerich’s views are at wide variance with the kind of simple-minded demonology found in Dawidowicz and Goldhagen, and he is very much in the mainstream of Holocaust scholarship. His presence in court, like Christopher Browning’s, seems calculated to reassure Mr. Justice Gray that there is nothing parochial about the case against Irving.

How much the judge is paying attention is another matter. Despite numerous exchanges on this topic, at the end of Longerich’s testimony the judge interrupts:

“I am sorry to ask you this (and I think I have asked you before and I have forgotten the answer). The Hungarian Jews were not in the end handed over, were they?”

“They were handed,” says Longerich. “In 1944 they were handed over.”

“Is the evidence there,” asks the judge, “that they were killed at Auschwitz, that they were gassed?”

“Yes, the evidence is there.” Perhaps out of tact, Longerich says no more. But Rampton wants to make sure the judge remembers this time.

“It was called the Hungarian action,” he says, “and 450,000 Hungarian Jews . . . were gassed at Auschwitz.”

When Rampton re-examines Longerich, his voice bounces on certain words: “Can we compare for a moment what Himmler wrote in that letter about the very difficult order that the Führer had laid on his shoulders with what Mr. Irving relies on as evidence of the truth?” Partly he seems to be winding up to his closing argument, and briskly takes Longerich through some of the themes he stressed in his opening: the movement of Jews from east to west, the chronology of which death camps became operational when, the absurdity of Irving’s claim that the deported Jews might have simply been resettled “in White Ruthenia.”

But Rampton also seems to be trying to rouse the court—and himself—from the profound lethargy of a long trial. He has one more witness to call, one more leg to his case: Irving’s political extremism. He’s only going to go through this material once, and this time he needs to be sure everyone is paying attention. Whether by design or coincidence, he is immensely aided by a story in that morning’s Israeli newspapers reporting that, in response to a request by Lipstadt’s lawyers, the Israeli government is considering releasing Adolf Eichmann’s prison notebooks, which have been locked away in the Israeli archives for over 30 years.

The prospect of a direct link to the most celebrated Holocaust trial in history—-the chance that, speaking from beyond the grave, Adolf Eichmann himself would provide the evidence that sends David Irving down to defeat—is a scenario as irresistible as it is unlikely. And since getting this particular deus—or diabolus—ex machina out of the machine takes several days (the notebooks were sent to the defense lawyers from Israel as an e-mail, and there is some difficulty opening the file) only on the very last day of the trial does it become clear that while of immense potential interest to historians, from the point of view of both claimant and defendants the Israeli material is completely irrelevant.

Once again the court is packed with reporters—who each afternoon, having sat through the day’s testimony in vain hopes of an Eichmann scoop, instead file stories about Irving’s connections with German extremists. Some of these stories make it into print—a circumstance which, even allowing for the high level of interest in the trial and the long-standing fondness of the press for “guilt-by-association” stories, is still probably attributable to the elusive Eichmann connection. Because if ever a man seemed destined to be overshadowed by an e-mail, Hajo Funke, a professor of political science at the Free University of Berlin and author of an expert report on Irving and “neo-National Socialism in Germany” is that man.

Dressed in a fashionably cut grey suit, grey shirt, and grey tie, Funke at first appears determined not to be outdone by Evans in the wariness of his replies, asking to see the text of the oath before he agrees to be sworn in. But as Funke begins his testimony, another basis for his caution emerges. Though he, too, declines the services of the translator, Funke’s English is much more unpredictable—in his case the result of translating not just from another language, but from the peculiar dialect of German social science.

When the judge, trying very hard to follow Funke’s rambling commentary, larded with compound nouns and with vast stretches between verbs, asks him “Can you explain what you mean by [Irving’s] interactions or contacts?” Funke replies:

It is all sorts of interactions: to prepare things, to take sides, to be invited. So, for example, at the 3rd March of ’90 David Irving was invited to the group. He especially had, I have to say, in Hamburg, the so-called nationalist, this is a bunch of little tiny groups. So he was invited to give one of David Irving’s speeches there, and there were, of course, the Nationalists, so part of this neo-Nazi camp, in that region, that is to say in Hamburg, and, on the other hand, new invited East Germans around the new built other group like the Deutsche Alternative. So just to say the minimum that groups of the neo-Nazi camp around Hamburg and groups of the new organized groupings of East Germany came together to hear David Irving at the 3rd March of ’90. This kind of interaction, preparing speeches, tours and the like. . . .

Fortunately for the defense, Funke comes prepared to show as well as tell the court what he means. The five videos that accompany his testimony show Irving speaking in a variety of settings. In Hagenau, a town in Alsace, he is shown telling the joke about the one-man gas chamber. The German-speaking crowd laughs appreciatively. At the same meeting the tape also shows Ernst Zündel referring to their opponents as a “Judenpack.”

At an outdoor rally in the east German town of Halle, a trenchcoat-clad Irving is shown addressing a crowd of young skinheads. This particular tape has been the subject of vociferous objections by Irving, who was inadvertently given a copy of it when the defense returned his discovery material—and it is easy to see why. As the ranks of skinheads march in front of him stamping their Doc Martens and waving the red and black Reichskriegsflagge—Reich battle flag, emblem of German irredentism since the turn of the century, and a stand-in for the banned Nazi swastika—the image is every bit as eerily evocative as it was doubtless intended to be. Then, in response to a burst of German rhetoric from Irving, they begin chanting: Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!

“I should never have started public speaking in Germany,” Irving told me the summer before the trial. “It is very easy to rouse a rabble in German.”

Funke’s videos link Irving with, in Irving’s phrase, “a rogue’s gallery” of German right-wingers. Wilhelm Stäglich, author of The Auschwitz Myth, is seen in the audience at one speech; Thies Christopherson, author of The Auschwitz Lie, helped to organize the Hagenau rally.

Some of the connections seem tenuous. Otto Ernst Remer, who played a key role in crushing the July 1944 attempt to depose Hitler, was a leader in post-war attempts to revive the Nazi philosophy. Irving offered readers of his Action Reports a “magnificent souvenir color photo of Remer in full uniform,” and wrote a warm eulogy after his death in 1997, but seems to have only met the man once, when he interviewed him for the Goebbels book.

Others, like his long-standing association with Gerhard Frey, leader of the right-wing (and virulently anti-foreigner) German People’s Union (DVU), or his close collaboration with Gunter Deckert, of the German National Party (NPD), are more substantial. According to Funke, under Deckert the NPD, still a legal party in Germany, functioned as a front for various banned groups united by a hatred of asylum-seekers and migrant workers and a shared language of Holocaust denial. Irving himself used the example of “Gunter Deckert, who is admittedly a friend of mine,” and currently in jail for Holocaust denial, to demonstrate Germany’s supposed lack of intellectual freedom.

The aim of Funke’s testimony is twofold: to show that Irving is not just a harmless crank who likes to sound off about the Jews, but a calculating political operator who sounds off about the Jews in front of groups who not only share his prejudices but may be inclined to act on them (if not against Jews, whose numbers in contemporary Germany are somewhat diminished, then against Turks or other foreigners). By demonstrating the role of Holocaust denial as both a shibboleth and a crucial element in the repackaging of Fascism, Funke is also supposed to flesh out the motive that unites Irving’s personal prejudice with his perverse interpretation of history.

Or as Funke tells the judge: “By denying, by relativizing, by blaming the Jews as those who made it up or who did it or who let it do, so by all various kinds of rhetorics, agitations, to downplay this Nazi period, to restore, you know, the kind of proud of the extreme Aryan racist anti-Semitic nation.”

This is not a particularly subtle point, yet once again Irving declines to meet it head on. He first argues that “non-violent extremism is not defamatory, if I can put it that way round. If I were to associate with somebody who held extremist views, this would not be in the least bit reprehensible.” Though his language is confusing, Irving’s argument isn’t really about extremism. This is neither Barry Goldwater’s famous “In defense of liberty, extremism is no vice,”—in other words that extremist views are often vindicated by history—nor an appeal to relativism, but a narrow legalistic argument: if calling someone an “extremist” isn’t defamatory, then testimony about extremism should be inadmissible. In other words, he wants Funke thrown out.

Mr. Justice Gray disagrees. “I think it may be defamatory of somebody to say that he or she consorts or associates with what you might call extreme extremists,” he says, perhaps in unconscious homage to Funke.

Irving’s second front is to claim that the Halle video has been deceptively edited, and that though it couldn’t be seen on the tape, when he realized the marchers were chanting Sieg Heil! he told them to stop. Irving walked the fine line between provocation and prudence for a long time in Germany (before he was officially banned from the country in 1993) and this claim may be true. But Irving would have an easier time convincing the judge that he not only voiced disapproval, but actually meant it, if he hadn’t adopted the same pose of outraged innocence over the slogan of a 1990 conference in Munich: Wahrheit Macht Frei (The Truth Makes [or Sets] Free).

Does this phrase, Rampton asked Funke, “have any resonance with some language used during the Nazi period?”

Mr. Justice Gray answered for him: “I think we all know.” Indeed, one of the many true things “everybody knows” about the Holocaust is that the gates to Auschwitz were decorated with the phrase Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Makes [or Sets] Free). Yet in his cross-examination of Funke, Irving claims the Munich conference organizers—who scheduled Irving back-to-back with Wilhelm Stäglich, author of The Auschwitz Myth—were merely quoting from John 8:32, and that Auschwitz was the furthest thing from their minds. “It had nothing to do,” he insists, “with whatever private obsessions Mr. Rampton may have with that phrase.”

Rampton says nothing at the time, but when Irving returns to this theme the next day, Rampton is ready for him. “In Mr. Irving’s diary for October 3rd 1989 when he was in West Berlin, he writes this: ‘At 11 a.m., a well attended press conference at the Kampinski, around 20 writers, six or seven genuine journalists . . . closed with my new slogan Wahrheit Macht Frei. The lefty journalists got the allusions.’”

The good-humored reference to “lefty journalists”—the opposing team in some great game—is typical Irving. So, too, as we have seen, is a tendency to play fast and loose with historical evidence. But until this point in the trial, Irving has managed to avoid getting caught actually lying to the judge.

The timing is particularly unfortunate for Irving, since he seems to be arriving simultaneously at the end of the trial and at the end of Mr. Justice Gray’s enormous forbearance. His patience already worn by Irving’s foot-dragging with Evans, Gray has stopped dropping hints— “it is really the big picture you must tackle, not whether particular footnotes are accurate”—and bluntly asked Irving to state his case. Finally his patience snaps.

“Mr. Irving, I think you have been cross-examining for nearly a day now. I have to tell you that I am not much the wiser as to what your case is in regard to what this witness has said, namely that there are these individuals with whom you have a close association and they are all on the extreme right-wing fringe. I cannot let the cross-examination go on. I keep asking you to focus on what matters.”

“On individuals,” Irving suggests.

“And you are continuing to go through footnotes and trivial points. I think the point has come where, unless Mr. Rampton discourages me, I must say to you: ‘You must at 2 o’clock put your case in relation to these individuals and the organizations so that I understand what it is,’ because I do not think it is right for me to let the court’s time be taken up with cross-examination which seems to me to be achieving virtually nothing.” Rampton does not discourage him.

At 10:45 a.m. on Thursday, March 2—Day 29 of the trial—David Irving returns to the witness box for the last time. Having established Irving’s unreliability as a historian, and his aggravated unreliability as a historian of the Holocaust, Rampton devotes his final cross-examination to establishing that the errors and distortions in Irving’s books and speeches were deliberate. Rampton has suggested as much all through the trial, but proving it is far more difficult. He needs to show not just that Irving is capable of lying—most of us are—but that he does so habitually, without hesitation, almost as a reflex. Wahrheit Macht Frei is a start, but Rampton will need more than that.

He begins by playing a tape of Irving speaking in Milton, Ontario, telling an expanded version of the one-man gas-chamber story. “Where did the telephone box come from?” asks Rampton. “Where does that little anecdote come from? How many sources?”

“The phone ringing is an embellishment,” Irving admits. “But the [gas chamber] disguised as a telephone box is in the eyewitness account.”

How many eyewitnesses? “Certainly one,” says Irving, who cannot produce it.

Rampton plays a bit more of the same tape:

Ridicule alone is not enough. You have got to be tasteless about it. You have to say things like more women died on the back seat of Senator Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick than died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

As the audience on the tape clap appreciatively, Irving addresses the judge: “The applause drowned the rest of the sentence, unfortunately, which is ‘in the gas chambers of Auschwitz which are shown to the tourists.’ I always say exactly the same thing.”

“Oh, no you do not,” says Rampton.

“Is it on the video?” asks the judge.

And so the video is rewound and replayed, and indeed, as Irving is forced to admit, “In that particular one I did not put in the rider” about the tourists.

“Frequently you have not,” says Rampton. “Not only have you not put in the rider, you have added other gas chambers elsewhere: Treblinka, Belzec. . . . I have put the question already. You made a statement not more than a couple of minutes ago that you never make reference to the non-existence of gas chambers except in relation to what you call the fake gas chamber at Auschwitz 1. That statement was false, was it not?”

Irving reads from a transcript of one of his speeches: “‘The dummies were still standing in Auschwitz . . . and probably in Majdanek, Treblinka and in the other so-called extermination camps.’ I think the word ‘probably’ therefore has to be looked at and emphasized.”

Entertaining as they are, Rampton’s fireworks have so far been relatively small-caliber. But he begins to pick up the pace, quoting from Irving’s response to a written interrogatory (the equivalent of sworn testimony) denying any association with the American white-supremacist group the National Alliance and specifically denying that he has ever spoken at an Alliance meeting. Rampton produces an invitation to an Alliance meeting from Irving’s discovery (the note is on Alliance letterhead), then reads out Irving’s diary entry describing the same meeting.

“There is not the slightest reference either in that diary entry or in any other diary entry to the NA or the National Alliance,” says Irving, “. . . which confirms what I said about having had no knowledge of them.”

“I asked you to be patient,” says Rampton, picking up the diary again. “Five days later: ‘Drove all day to Tampa, phoned Key West, etc. etc. etc. Arrived at the Hotel Best Western at 4:00 p.m. Sinister gent with pony tail was the organizer. Turned out the meeting here is also organized by the National Alliance and National Vanguard Bookshop. Well attended.’ Now, Mr. Irving, do you want to revise the answers you have just been giving me?”

Throughout the trial Mr. Justice Gray has maintained a perfect poker face and impassive demeanor. But when Rampton confronts Irving with his own diary, the judge looks at Irving dubiously, under hooded lids.

“What do you know about the British National Party, Mr. Irving?” Rampton continues.

“I know more about them than I know about the National Alliance.”

“You speak to them, do you not?”

“No.”

“Or you have done?”

“No.”

There is nothing equivocal about Irving’s answers. At least not until Rampton produces a letter, again from Irving’s discovery, from one “Geoffrey D Brown. British National Party, Yorkshire region. ‘Dear Mr. Irving, further to our telephone conversation today, I am writing to confirm that we would be very happy for you to come up to Leeds on Friday 14th September to address a special northern regional meeting.’”

“It is very similar to the functions in America,” says Irving, “where somebody who is a local functionary of some political group is inviting me to come and address an umbrella body . . .”

The judge cuts him off: “Mr. Irving, come on, that letter is on the stationery of the British National Party!”

There is a brief interval of light relief, when Rampton asks Irving about the political beliefs of his printer, British National Party activist Tony Hancock.

“I think he is a right-winger,” says Irving.

“What do you mean by a right-winger? Free market?”

“Somebody who is to the right-wing of me, shall I say. If I describe him as being right-wing, then he is right-wing.”

But Irving’s credibility with the judge is badly shredded, and when, in response to yet another of Rampton’s little blasts, Irving claims his answer of “Yes,” now shown to be false, was merely meant “to say, ‘Yes, I hear what you are saying,’ right? This should not be taken as being, ‘Yes, I agree with what you are saying,’ but, ‘Yes, I hear what you are saying,’” Gray comments acidly: “I hope we are not going to treat all your answers in that light.”

Like any good pyrotechnician, Rampton saves his best display for last. And for this trick, he’ll need the co-operation of David Irving. The preparation is technical, revolving around Adolf Hitler’s December 12, 1941 speech to the Nazi leadership. Goebbels quotes the speech in his diaries for that date: “The world war is there, the annihilation of Jewry must be the necessary consequence.” Yet in his Goebbels biography, though Irving cites the speech, he leaves out Hitler’s reference to the Jews. Why?

Earlier in the trial Irving claimed that when he’d gone to Moscow to read the Goebbels diaries for the Sunday Times he had a “shopping list” of specific topics, such as Pearl Harbor or the invasion of Russia, and that this speech wasn’t on the list. First Rampton shows that Irving’s notes indicate he did read the entry for December 12. Irving replies that he only read part of that day’s entry, stopping four lines down on the glass plate that held the remainder of the day’s entry. So Rampton produces a photocopy of the plate in question, from the Russian State Archives, showing that Irving quoted from material much further down on the glass plate—well into Goebbels’s account of the speech.

Irving admits he appears to have read on further than he’d thought, but repeats his claim to have stopped well before the reference to the Jews.

Rampton raises his voice. “Are you seriously telling me that you resisted the temptation to read this important speech of the Führer from end to end, start to finish?”

Irving says he just didn’t have time. Besides, how was he to know there was anything special about this occasion?

Rampton responds: “Why was Hitler speaking to the Gauleiters [the Nazi Party leadership] on 12th December? The reason is that he declared war on the United States the day before. . . . This is the date, is it not, Mr. Irving, on which in effect Hitler, having declared war on the United States and thus having brought about a world war, declares war on the Jews?”

“No.”

“He says to them, does he not: ‘Right, mates, you brought about the first war, I told you that you would be for it if there was a second war. Now this is it. Face the music.’”

“Actually,” says Irving, “the declaration of war was the next day.”

“What, the 13th?” asks Rampton.

“That is right. Hitler declared war on the United States on 13th December, and the speech is on the 12th.” And with that, Richard Rampton stops dead in his tracks.

“Just pause a moment,” says Mr. Justice Gray superfluously. The courtroom has suddenly become so quiet you can almost hear the whispers of the two graduate students, who flip feverishly through Irving’s books. Rampton, Heather Rogers, and Irving himself all do the same. Some of the trial regulars turn to the last row of spectators, where on most days Sir Martin Gilbert sits in the middle seat, but Gilbert, biographer of Winston Churchill and author of numerous books on the Holocaust and the Second World War, is not in court today.

“I think it is a ‘Who wants to be a millionaire?’ question, is it not?” says Irving dismissively.

Finally Rampton speaks. “This is Professor Irving writing his Goering book . . . page 337: ‘It is probably only now that he’—that is probably Hitler, might be Goering—‘learned that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. At the Reichstag session on December 11th Hitler declared war on the United States.’”

“I found it at the same time, yes,” says Irving.

“Well, who is right,” asks Rampton, “you or you?”

“Luckily I haven’t lost a million quid,” Irving says in a voice too quiet for the transcriber to hear.

To which Rampton, in a louder stage whisper, replies: “Yet.”

The next day is very brief, taken up mostly with scheduling. Both sides will be given a week to write their final arguments. “I shall reserve to myself the right to pick out major points,” Irving says, noting that since “the onus is on the defense to justify” they will have to address every item on the lengthy list of points at issue handed out by the judge.

Irving prefaces his remarks “by expressing words of my appreciation for the work put in by the defending firms of solicitors. They have had an extra burden put upon them by the fact that I am a litigant in person and I deeply appreciate their efficiency in this matter. I appreciate their help in this matter.” Despite this flourish of manners, Irving launches almost immediately into a furious attack on Mishcon de Reya’s handling of the Halle video. This last-ditch effort fails, but not before prompting Anthony Julius to rise to his feet for the first and only time in the course of the trial to defend his firm’s conduct.

Normally in a case tried by a judge alone both sides would submit written statements to the judge; in this case it is agreed that in addition each side will be allotted court time to make “statements for public consumption” as well. And though the only jury he will be addressing will be the jury of public opinion, as the claimant, David Irving will have the last word.