Numbers
A sophist, says Aristotle, is “one who makes money from an apparent but unreal wisdom.” This description comes from the opening of his treatise On Sophistical Refutations, by which the philosopher means those arguments that “appear to be refutations but are really fallacies instead.”1
This is a very old game, and though most of the essential moves were analyzed by Aristotle both here and in his Rhetoric, new variations are always possible—and often profitable. History does not tell us whether Dio Chrysostom, who lived and wrote some four hundred years after Aristotle, composed his “Eleventh Discourse” as a work for hire. Nor is it known if the “Trojan Discourse,” as it is also called, was intended as a kind of advertisement for his talents as a sophist—considerable enough to earn him the name Chrysostom (Golden-Mouth)—or as a cautionary example of the dangers of sophistry, written after its author’s conversion to Stoicism. What can be seen, nearly two millennia later, is the rhetorical brilliance with which Dio, a Greek-speaking native of Asia Minor, sets out to convince his contemporaries in Ilium (Troy) that they have been duped by Homer into believing that their ancestors lost the Trojan War.
According to Dio, the poet’s tale of Helen, taken against her will to Troy, and her subsequent rescue after ten years of war, is just so much Greek propaganda. Instead of her abductor, Paris was really Helen’s lawful husband. Even Homer couldn’t dispute his good looks—and as heir to the throne of Troy, chief city of Asia Minor, he was a great catch. But if Helen and her family were happy, the rest of the Greeks were not, and it was their jealous rage at the famed beauty’s choice of a foreign husband that launched the thousand ships—though in Dio’s version there were far fewer, owing to the unpopularity of the Greeks’ unjust cause.
With “no other means of refuting [Homer] than his own poetry,” Dio argues that the Iliad is a tissue of lies whose falsehood should be evident from the way Homer includes details no mortal could have known, such as the domestic disputes between Zeus and Hera. He points to the improbability of the poem’s hero Achilles refusing to rescue his fellow Greeks, and to the suspicious fact that the death of Achilles isn’t even mentioned. Nor for that matter is the supposed capture of the city which gives the epic its name. Instead Homer ends with the burial of Hector—a bald stratagem to cover up what actually happened, as recounted to Dio by “a certain very aged priest in Onuphis,” which the editor identifies as a “city in Egypt whose location is uncertain.”2
In this “revisionist” Iliad, the dead body inside Achilles’ armor belongs to Achilles—not, as in Homer, his friend Patroclus. Their greatest warrior slain, the Greeks sue for peace. But Hector is reluctant to let them get away, and it is only when Odysseus, a member of the Greek peace mission, proposes leaving behind “a very large and beautiful offering” in the form of a statue of a horse, that the Trojans agree. It was this peace offering, so massive that a portion of the city wall had to be removed to allow it to pass inside the gates of Troy, that, says Dio, accounts for “the ridiculous story of the capture of the city by the horse.”3
Dio never uses the phrase “blood libel on the Trojan people.” Nor does he accuse the Greeks of conspiracy. He merely purports to show how a legend, arising out of the vicissitudes of war, gained a life of its own. But he does suggest to his putative audience in Ilium that “you . . . should be grateful and hear me gladly, for I have been zealous in defense of your ancestors.”
No record survives to tell us how the discourse was received. We do know that Dio visited Rome during the reign of Vespasian (when he became a Stoic), fell afoul of Domitian (who banned him from Rome), and became friendly with Trajan. We even know (or so scholars believe) that Dio was involved in a lawsuit in his birthplace of Prusa (now known as Brusa, in Turkey), over some improvements he hoped to make in the town. But it is probably safe to assume the ups and downs of Dio’s career were unconnected with what might be called his Iliad denial.
On one view, David Irving is simply Dio Chrysostom in a three-piece suit, offering an outwardly plausible, internally consistent fiction that plays on the prejudices of his audience. At times I have heard similar arguments from Irving’s critics—and from his defenders. In my own view, these dismissals underestimate both Irving and what he represents.
If Irving were simply a “clown”—as one academic I know argued, complaining about the media’s fascination with the trial—it would hardly have been necessary to commission a team of scholars to oppose him. Indeed, such a contest would have been grotesque. It would arguably have been similarly excessive if he were merely the harmless Führer-fancier depicted in Selling Hitler, Robert Harris’s amusing account of the “Hitler diaries” fiasco. Though Richard Evans prevailed in the end, the 28 hours he spent demolishing Irving’s scholarship in the witness box was not just an academic exercise.
But for all his command of historical detail, at times Evans seemed to show little understanding of why the details matter. In his book In Defence of History Evans draws an uncharacteristically crude connection between “the increase in scope and intensity of the Holocaust deniers’ activities since the mid-1970s” and “the postmodernist intellectual climate, above all in the USA, in which scholars have increasingly denied that texts had any fixed meaning . . . and in which attacks on the Western rationalist tradition have become fashionable.”4 As his quotation from Denying the Holocaust on the same page makes clear, Evans was here following Lipstadt, who laments that “an atmosphere of permissiveness toward questioning the meaning of historical events . . . fosters deconstructionist history at its worst. . . . Holocaust denial is part of this phenomenon.” Surely even a curmudgeon like Evans, sworn foe of “fashionable” cant, ought to balk at the notion that Holocaust denial is merely an epiphenomenon of postmodernism?
David Irving is no postmodern prince of our disorder. His distaste for theory of any kind is far too strong for that. If Irving has any critical beliefs, they are far more likely to be in line with his comrade Faurisson’s insistence that “every text has only one meaning or it has no meaning at all.”5 That false choice, restricted in the present instance to the Holocaust as either evidence of the Jews’ malignity, or a collection of meaningless numbers, comes much closer to what was really at stake in this trial. “You may disagree with me,” Irving told the judge, remarking on the disparate numbers he has given for the dead at Auschwitz, “but I see no difference between these figures.”
And if Evans’s apparent confusion can be explained by his reliance on Lipstadt, her own invocation of “deconstructionist history,” though it glances at the discredited figure of Paul DeMan,* is really there just to spice up her argument that Holocaust denial “is not an assault on the history of one particular group. Though denial of the Holocaust may be an attack on the history of the annihilation of the Jews, at its core it poses a threat to all who believe that knowledge and memory are among the keystones of our civilization . . . [and] to all who believe in the ultimate power of reason.”6 In other words, it’s not just a problem for Jews.
Like a lot of the arguments in Lipstadt’s book, her conclusion is correct, but her premises are deeply flawed. “At its core,” that is when considered as a set of propositions about how it really was during the Second World War, Holocaust denial is, as van Pelt observes in his report, a series of wild surmises that never add up to a coherent narrative. Exposing them all may be tedious—and, when done before a judge in a court of law, incredibly costly—but the idea that Irving and his band of “cracked anti-Semites” at the Institute for Historical Review pose some kind of threat to “our civilization” or the “Western rationalist tradition” is simply absurd.
They do, however, pose a threat to Jews. This is a claim that, perhaps paradoxically, Lipstadt and the defense seemed reluctant to make. Indeed, the desire to avoid making this claim is what appears to be behind Lipstadt’s bizarre assertion that those who describe the Holocaust as a hoax are not committing “an assault on the history of one particular group.” In that sense, at least, Irving was right to speak of the “real defendants.” His quarrel really is with Jews. Of course it is not only with Jews.
Yet this is an argument that the defense has almost seemed afraid to make: that you can’t isolate Irving’s anti-Semitism from his writing without isolating Jews from the rest of humanity. It might even be said that effecting this isolation is precisely the anti-Semite’s aim. That was why the judge’s question about whether Irving was an “honest” anti-Semite was so troubling—and so irrelevant. Whatever its rationale, to deny the reality of the Holocaust is prima facie an attack on Jews, and should be treated with just as much seriousness as any other racist attack. Or as little.
Which may be the rub. There are two possible grounds for appealing to the world when Jews are attacked. One is guilt. Addressing non-Jews, guilt says: “You abandoned us to Hitler, and now you owe us.” Or, when speaking to fellow Jews: “You didn’t do enough to save your brethren from the Nazis. Now you must be blindly loyal (for example) to the current government of Israel, whether or not you believe in the wisdom or justice of its policies.”
The link between guilt over the Holocaust and support for Israel is so obvious as to hardly bear repeating. As everyone knows, Israel itself was born out of the world’s guilt toward Jews. So it comes as something of a shock to read Peter Novick’s patient dismantling of these myths in The Holocaust in American Life.
It is true that after the war, when the dimensions of the Jewish catastrophe became clear, Zionists moved quickly to turn guilt into political capital. What is notable about this effort, says Novick, is that it failed. With the possible exception of Britain, where fear of being compared to the Nazis may have prevented a more forceful response to the Zionists’ unilateral declaration of independence, countries responded to the birth of Israel on the basis of their own national interests. The Soviet Union, eager to undercut British influence in the Middle East, supported it. Countries with ties to the Arab states—like Britain—did not. President Harry Truman, who recognized Israel over State Department opposition, may have been motivated by domestic political considerations—or by a sincere concern for Jewish refugees. But there is no evidence that guilt played any part in his decision.7
Indeed, the initial responses to the Eichmann trial revealed a mistrust of Israel’s motives which, coming little over a year after President Dwight Eisenhower had condemned Israel’s actions in the Suez Crisis, was perhaps understandable. Novick barely mentions Suez, which is a shame since the whole episode provides strong support for his view that, at least in the 1950s, the Holocaust provided Israel with no useful “moral capital.”8
Novick also appears not to notice that just as the Cold War shaped American responses to the Holocaust it also shaped responses to Israel. Because until June 1967 it was far from clear that Israel was on “our” side. Israel’s founders were socialists. In their war for independence the Israelis were armed with Czech machine guns; from 1956 to 1967 Israel bought the bulk of its weaponry from France, a country whose discontent with American power (and British servility) actually led it to withdraw from NATO’s military command.9 Only after the Six Day War did Norman Podhoretz argue that Israel was the religion of American Jews. Until that point, support tended to come from the left, from places like The Nation and the newspaper PM, whose columnist I.F. Stone was an early and vocal advocate for the new state.10
After 1967 everything changed. Novick doesn’t draw an explicit connection between Israel’s debut as America’s strategic asset in the Middle East and the explosion of Holocaust discourse in the United States, but what he does say is suggestive. The image of Jews as military heroes effaced “the stereotype of weak and passive victims which . . . had previously inhibited Jewish discussion of the Holocaust.”11 More importantly, in Cold War terms Israel was now unambiguously on America’s team. And if circumstances made it easier for American Jews to talk about the Holocaust—to draw on the “moral capital” which Israel had miraculously accumulated—that was just as well.12 For in its determination to hold on to the territories gained in battle, Israel began to forfeit whatever sympathy it had attracted as an underdog.
The view from London has always been slightly different. For one thing, British Jews never had the political influence of their American counterparts. And the combination of oil and empire meant that Arab voices were always heard more sympathetically in Britain—at least when their grievances were directed at the Jews. But in both countries by the late 1970s the organized Jewish community devoted a large portion of its efforts to defending the “moral capital” supposedly represented by the Holocaust.*
One way of doing this was by fetishizing the “uniqueness” of the disaster. To Israel Gutman, co-director of Yad Vashem and author of the article on “Holocaust Denial” in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, “tendentious and trivializing claims that the Holocaust was not unique and that there had been precedents” are tantamount to denial. Comparisons with the Cambodian genocide and the slaughter of Native Americans have both drawn fire from Jewish groups; the government of Israel, in response to pressure from its military ally Turkey, has even attempted to quash efforts to recognize the Armenian genocide. Lipstadt herself seems of two minds, writing that to question the uniqueness of the Holocaust “is far more insidious than outright denial,” while assuring me, “You have to make comparisons. We only learn by comparisons.”13
Another is by stifling debate. When Norman Finkelstein and Ruth Birn published a book pointing out the many scholarly defects of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, they were subjected to a sustained campaign of personal abuse. Their book, A Nation on Trial, was no more extreme in its condemnation than Raul Hilberg, whose essay deploring “The Goldhagen Phenomenon” in Les Temps Modernes described the Harvard professor’s work as “lacking in factual content and logical rigor” and casting a “cloud . . . over the academic landscape.”14 That didn’t keep Abraham Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, from trying to discourage the publication of A Nation on Trial.*
Journalists who exposed “Binjamin Wilkomirski’s” bogus memoir of his childhood in Auschwitz and Majdanek found their motives impugned. Hadn’t Goldhagen himself certified Fragments a “small masterpiece”? Israel Gutman still defends the imposture: “Wilkomirski has written a story which he has experienced deeply, that’s for sure. So that, even if he is not Jewish, the fact that he was so deeply affected by the Holocaust is of huge importance. . . . The pain is authentic.”15 It isn’t only anti-Semites who, in T.S. Eliot’s infamous phrase, find a “large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.”16
The lever of guilt doesn’t work. More importantly, to continually insist that Jewish suffering is a special case is to collaborate in the very isolation that anti-Semites like Irving seek to accomplish. And when frustration turns that lever into a club, whether directed at Jews or Gentiles, whether wielded by Jews who feel the Holocaust belongs to them alone or by Zionists seeking to preserve Israel’s “moral capital,” the result is a blurring of distinctions between memory and propaganda that serves only the interests of the Nazi perpetrators and their political legatees.
So why not give it up? Perhaps because there is no guarantee an appeal not grounded in guilt will be heard either. And while guilt assumes that Jews owe the rest of humanity nothing—Novick quotes an Anti-Defamation League memorandum advocating increased emphasis on the Holocaust as a “bill ‘for Sufferings Rendered’” —the alternative, an approach based on what might be called “solidarity,” imposes obligations that may not be so congenial.
In Facing the Extreme, his finely drawn study of moral life in the camps, Tzvetan Todorov distinguishes between “caring” and “the solidarity felt by members of a group among themselves.” He prefers caring, since “solidarity with our own implies the exclusion of all others.” I disagree. It may be that as a refugee from Bulgarian Communism Todorov hears the word differently than do I, the grandson of a garment worker, brought up in a household where “we don’t cross picket lines” was as much an article of faith as the Exodus from Egypt or the story of Esther and Haman. But I accept Todorov’s observation that “solidarity is a political, not a moral, act.”17
Indeed it is precisely as a political act that I wish to commend solidarity as a response to attacks on the reality of the Holocaust and as a replacement for appeals based on guilt, which are also political acts. Solidarity says: “We are in this together.” As Todorov notes, solidarity is based on the anarchist principle of mutual aid, and though this may be inadequate to the Hobbesian nightmare of the camps, in the world outside it seems less demeaning to begin by treating others as equals than as either instruments of our deliverance or objects of charity.
In concrete terms an ethic of solidarity says that when Jews are offended as Jews, they should stand up and say so. They would then have a right to expect from the rest of the community exactly that degree of outrage and sympathy which they have afforded others. In America, this might mean talking less about the Holocaust and listening more to those for whom the artifacts of racism and oppression are not yet shut away in a museum. In Britain, it might mean a greater willingness to speak out on issues like police brutality or justice for asylum seekers. What does it say when the two recent Home Secretaries—one Conservative, one Labour—who have done most to restrict the rights of refugees are themselves respectively the son and grandson of Jewish refugees?
Jews would face a choice. They could own up to—even enjoy—the prosperity and access to power that have come to large numbers of Jews since the end of the Second World War. Or they could—as a political act, an existential gesture, a religious observance, even a moral choice—throw in their lot with the excluded. But they couldn’t have it both ways—wearing the Holocaust as a badge of martyrdom on the robes of power, a kind of amulet to ward off criticism and secure a share in whatever consolations society affords its disadvantaged members.
The basic idea is, whenever possible, to substitute the complex web of mutual obligation and association that constitutes civil society for the coercive powers of the state. In the United States, with its free-speech tradition and plethora of Jewish organizations, state action would be needed rarely if at all. In countries where anti-Semitism was still a real danger—or where the general problem of incitement to racial hatred was still considered a serious threat to public safety—the state’s role might be greater. Even there, though, it would be far better to give people the chance to respond themselves rather than assuming the government will step in to enforce the limits of permissible expression.
One of the strengths of solidarity as a political principle is that it must always begin locally—in a neighborhood, an ethnic group, a religious community—and can only spread outward through mutual consent. This is a long way from the perpetual defensiveness entailed by, in Hannah Arendt’s phrase, the “doctrine of eternal anti-Semitism” which was also such an article of faith for my parents’ generation.18 But the alternative—to call for yet more coercion on the part of the state, not only to outlaw Holocaust denial, and hate speech generally, but to use such laws as tools for breaking down the protections erected around speech and writing over hundreds of years—seems far more risky. And more naïve. In a forum held after the judgment, David Cesarani, director of the Wiener Library, suggested the media response to Irving’s defeat showed that such laws were indeed necessary. Freedom of speech, he argued, was a relic of eighteenth-century liberalism—a luxury we could no longer afford. His remarks struck me as more dangerous than anything David Irving has ever said or written.*
Yet Irving does represent a real danger. Partly this is political. The laundry list of names Hajo Funke read out in court aren’t primarily concerned with Jews. Chances are, most of the skinheads we saw marching and chanting in the Halle video have never even met a Jew. For them, Holocaust denial is just a means to an end, a verbal sign of recognition that sorts out the hard cases from the fellow travelers. Their end—Irving’s project—is the rehabilitation of Fascism. And given Jörg Haider’s success in facing down his critics in the European Union, and Jean-Marie Le Pen’s durability on the French political scene, and the rising fortunes of neo-Fascists in Italy, an American must at least hesitate before assuming that fears of a far-right resurgence in Europe are purely delusional.
But not all of Irving’s defenders are Fascists, or anti-Semites—or even right-wingers. For every cretin who laughs at Irving’s jokes about the one-man gas chamber there are probably thousands, like John Keegan, who assume Irving is wrong about the Holocaust but wonder why they should be expected to mind. For every goose-stepping neo-Nazi in thrall to Irving’s rhetoric there are hundreds of readers drawn in by his narratives. And for every Michele Renouf (the mysterious blonde at Irving’s table throughout the trial, an Australian taxi-driver’s daughter who, thanks to a six-week marriage to the late Sir Francis “Frank the Bank” Renouf, a New Zealand financier, now styles herself “Lady Renouf”) affecting interest in “open debate” but suspiciously alert to Jewish peculiarities, there is a Christopher Hitchens, whose genuine commitment to freedom of speech (and a fondness for seeing “egg on faces” even greater than Irving’s) led him to forget the sound advice he’d once offered Noam Chomsky.
There is, Hitchens once wrote regarding Chomsky’s role in l’affaire Faurisson, “no obligation, in defending or asserting the right to speak, to pass any comment on the truth or merit” of what the speaker says. Indeed, as Hitchens gently reminded Chomsky, the suggestion of something rank about a person’s views is “all the more reason not to speculate” about those views. True enough. So why call Irving “a great historian of Fascism”? Perhaps because the urge to speculate is too strong to resist. As is the urge to doubt. Despite the trial, despite the facts, despite the verdict, doubt persists. To pretend otherwise is to deceive ourselves.
It is after all one thing to say, as Charles Gray did in his judgment, “no objective, fair-minded historian would have serious cause to doubt that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz.” It is another thing to know that in a given building hundreds of thousands of people were murdered. How do we know anything beyond what we ourselves have experienced? How do we put our doubts to rest?
Several months before the trial opened, the London Review of Books ran a newspaper reporter’s account of her attempts to corroborate accounts of atrocities in Kosovo. Her tale was inconclusive, honorably so. But her final words made me deeply angry: Maybe the truth here is not one thing: but I don’t want to be an accomplice to a lie. . . . Nobody much wants to return to Jean Cocteau, but there was something soothing in the words my friend quoted. “History is a combination of reality and lies,” he said. “The reality of history becomes a lie. The reality of the fable becomes the truth.”19
That seemed to me a fancy argument for letting herself off the hook. Maybe she couldn’t find out what happened. Maybe she should have tried harder. And if she believes that reporting the facts makes no difference to whether the fable becomes the truth, and even finds the prospect “soothing,” then maybe she should find another line of work. Still, I understood the temptation.
I had nothing but sympathy for the reporter who sat through Irving’s “no holes, no Holocaust” argument feeling “like a man in some kind of Kafkaesque dream.” After reporting Irving’s insistence that the elevator to the ovens simply couldn’t have carried as many bodies as van Pelt had claimed, he confessed:
on the way home in the train that night, to my shame, I took out a pocket calculator and began to do some sums. Ten minutes for each batch of 25. I tapped in. That makes 150 an hour. Which gives 3,600 for each 24-hour period. Which gives 1,314,000 in a year. So that’s fine. It could be done. Thank God, the numbers add up. When I realised what I was doing, I almost threw the little machine across the compartment in rage.20
Even for those of us who never thought Irving might be right, there was still doubt. Not about the facts, but about what would happen if the facts somehow made no difference.
What pulled me back was a memory: I am six years old and my father has brought his best friend home for dinner. After we eat, the friend takes the back off our television set and shows me the tubes lighting up inside. One is burned out, and as he replaces it I notice a line of numbers on his arm, just below the wrist. “What are those, Uncle Mike?” He tells me that the Germans put them there when he was a little boy “so I wouldn’t get lost.”
My Uncle Mike was never a little boy. When he was 12 or 13, the Germans occupied Hungary, and his entire family was put on a train to Auschwitz. Big for his age, and claiming to be older, he was sent to work in the mines. This was 1944, and Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army in January 1945. By then the rest of his family had been gassed.
The truth is, I can’t be certain of all these details, and my Uncle Mike has been dead for some time. I was reminded of him while listening to Irving’s response to the obvious questions: What happened to the missing Jews? If they didn’t die in the camps, where were they? Irving talks about “the large number that turned up in the state of Palestine, what’s now the state of Israel,” and sometimes, as if acknowledging that this number isn’t nearly large enough, claims that others might have been killed in Dresden. The rest, he suggests, fled to the Soviet Union or the United States. As a simple matter of accounting, this is preposterous. As an explanation it is also monstrous. Because the assumption behind it is that, lured by the good life to the United States, or chasing the workers’ paradise in Russia, or seeking the Zionist dream in Israel, people like my Uncle Mike would simply forget that they had once had mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, grandparents, children, and wouldn’t bother to look for them, which is why so many Jews are still unaccounted for. In other words, it presumes that Jews are not human beings.
No one knows this better than Raul Hilberg. The Politics of Memory tells the story of Hilberg’s Uncle Josef, interned by the Vichy French in 1940:
My father, by then in New York, received Josef’s frantic appeals for help, but there was no money for tickets which might have enabled Josef to escape to America. When the deportations from the Vichy-French zone began in 1942, Josef disappeared. “The blood of my brother is upon me,” my father would say.
Hilberg, who spent years of his life in archives, never forgot his Uncle Josef. In 1978 he found him, on list of deportees from France: Joseph Gaber. “He was deported on August 19, 1942 and arrived in Auschwitz two days later. Since he was already forty-eight years old, he must have been gassed immediately.”21
Yet when St. Martin’s canceled Irving’s contract, Raul Hilberg stood up for David Irving. “If these people want to speak,” he told Hitchens, “let them. . . . I am not for taboos and I am not for repression.”22 Hilberg reaffirmed these views to me over the telephone in the summer before the trial, with two minor modifications: “Denial hurts people. There are survivors. That should not be forgotten.” Speaking personally, “I believe in the freedom not to be responsible. But that doesn’t mean I endorse it.”
The Holocaust happened in history. The rape of Helen, as the classicist M.I. Finley reminds us, did not. Archeology may furnish evidence about a city in a place we can identify with Troy, but the stories in the Iliad happened “once upon a time.” There are lots of numbers in Homer—ships, warriors, even dates—but none of them, says Finley, allows us to attach the story to any larger chronology. 23
When I arrived at Raul Hilberg’s house in Vermont a few months before the trial, we began by talking about numbers. In The Destruction of the European Jews, Hilberg lists one million Jews killed at Auschwitz. His total number for the Holocaust, however, is 5.1 million, not 6 million, a conclusion that led David Irving to cite his work at the trial, and which has caused Hilberg no end of trouble. Does it really matter? I asked.
“Yes it matters,” Hilberg said. “It matters on a variety of counts. When you segment these losses by country, you find that the major difference between my count and those who say six million . . . is the Soviet Union. Which means, if they didn’t die they’re there. . . . That matters—because you are talking about a substantial part of Jewish history. And you’re talking about current Jewish history!”
Hilberg launched into a learned and fascinating lecture on the vagaries of the Soviet census, the politics of census data, and the dangers of accepting unsourced estimates. “The German statisticians called it a house number, whenever a number like that appears [that] you can’t prove.”
I asked about gas chambers. Irving devotes so much energy to creating doubt about gas chambers. Why? “People are shot or hacked to death in other countries, even after World War Two—Rwanda, for example. You built the gas chamber with a view to killing a mass of people. Once you have a gas chamber, you have a vision, and the vision is total annihilation. In a gas chamber, you don’t see the victim. So the gas chamber in that sense is more dangerous, the gas chamber is more criminal. The gas chamber has wider implications. So when you deny the gas chamber, you deny not just a part of the event, you deny one of the defining concepts. Auschwitz has become the synonym for the Holocaust. And of course you deny, apart from anything else, the death of several million people.”
At the trial, Irving also cited Hilberg in support of his claim that Hitler never ordered the Jews killed. It’s true that while earlier editions of The Destruction of the European Jews refer to an “order,” more recent editions do not. But as Hilberg explains, he made this change in the interest of precision about the evidence, not because he agrees with Irving: “The prevailing notion in Germany is that Hitler did it. As it happens, this is also my notion, but I’m not wedded to it.”
Hilberg does have strong views. “The way in which the Holocaust is now spread in the high schools and so on makes me gag. To teach the Holocaust to people who don’t know where Hungary is!” He is disturbed by “people who misrepresent history, who talk about resistance as though there was a massive attempt. . . . The resistors were, first and foremost, confronted by Jewish opposition. That was their first obstacle.” The rhetorical posturing and pressure tactics employed by some of the lawyers and politicians who campaigned to force Swiss banks to pay reparations offended him deeply. And he is still scathing about Goldhagen’s “turgid book, with its endless repetitions, lack of substantiation.”
Whatever we talked about, though, we seemed always to come back to numbers. “These numbers do matter,” Hilberg said. “They also matter for the very simple reason—call it religious if you like.” At this point he saw my gaze shift from the Teletubbies magnets on his refrigerator to the menorah balanced on top of his television set.
“I’m an atheist,” he said. “All these things belong to my wife, not me. I am an atheist. But there is ultimately, if you don’t want to surrender to nihilism entirely, the matter of a record. Does the record matter? In my judgment it is not discussable, it is not arguable. It matters because it matters to me—it’s my life.”
The sanctity of facts. As the trial wore on, I often found my mind returning to the afternoon I’d spent with Hilberg gazing out over his weathered deck to the trees in his garden, just beginning to take on their fall foliage. After a lifetime of studying brutality, inhumanity, murder on an industrial scale, after personal tragedy and professional conflict, this is what he has to hold on to: the sanctity of facts. Was that enough?
Charles Gray’s reasoned judgment ratified every major proposition the defense sought to establish. David Irving had indeed been shown to be a liar, a bigot, and a distorter of historical evidence—a man whose word could no longer be relied upon for the smallest detail, let alone a reliable interpreter of major historical events. It had also established, if only by implication, the right of Jews and other maligned ethnic groups to respond robustly, and in an organized manner, when they are attacked. Indeed it affirmed their right to do so even when the attacks are “merely” verbal—so long as the response is also limited to speech. And, despite considerable reluctance, the judge also issued a number of findings on the destruction of the European Jews, holding that, solely on the basis of the evidence available to David Irving—not the totality of the evidence, or even all the evidence presented in the trial—the “historical data” were clear enough to compel the conclusion that the Holocaust had indeed happened, that Hitler had at the very least been aware of what happened, and that only a prejudicial cast of mind could account for the refusal to acknowledge the reality of the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
Insofar as it was attainable under the laws of libel, justice had been done. Was that enough?
Irving’s ability to disturb Jews has been diminished, and will probably be curtailed further as he is forced to either pay his opponents’ costs or submit his finances to the bankruptcy court—a far harsher regime in Britain than America, which would likely result in the loss of his home. His fellow “revisionists,” too, will now have to do without Irving as their respectable frontman. But it is doubtful the judge’s arguments will themselves make any impact on the paranoid adherents of Holocaust denial or other believers in Jewish conspiracy. Their views are, by their very nature, impervious to reasoned judgment. Within months of his loss, Irving was already being received in the United States as a martyr to their cause. To the deniers, the magnitude of Irving’s defeat merely demonstrates the power of the forces arrayed against them.
Nor does it seem likely that even this triumph will encourage Irving’s opponents to relax their eternal vigilance. Lipstadt’s backers among Jewish organizations have their own reasons for making sure the struggle continues. And though she and her publishers deserved to win, the encouragement their victory will give to groups like the Anti-Defamation League or the Board of Deputies in their efforts to police public discussion, not just of the Holocaust but of American and Israeli policies, is no cause for celebration.
But there was something else that troubled me, something beyond my own political unease and my inability to fully embrace Raul Hilberg’s heroic pessimism. There was something, I realized, that struck me as missing all along: witnesses. I understood perfectly why Lipstadt’s lawyers had decided that calling witnesses would be a distraction. They had a case to win. Besides, they quite rightly sought to avoid giving Irving a chance to vent his hostility on people who, by definition, had already suffered more than enough.
But Irving’s whole approach to history was based on the premise that witness testimony is essentially worthless. Sure, he used it when it suited him—and, as the defense proved, ignored it when it didn’t. But on the larger question of whether we can really understand the Holocaust—or any historical catastrophe—without witnesses, the lawyers, and the judge, mostly went along with Irving’s premise. The only challenge to this consensus came from Robert Jan van Pelt, whose report quoted extensively from witness testimony, but even he, under cross-examination, seemed embarrassed about the need to rely on that kind of evidence.
In his essay on “Archaeology and History” M.I. Finley argues that “unless one is prepared, in the study of the past, to abandon all interest in change, growth . . . or the interrelationships among different aspects of human society, I see no virtue in the insistence that any one type of evidence” be elevated above the rest.24 Arnoldo Momigliano, urging a history based on original authorities, explains: “By original authorities we mean eyewitnesses, or documents and other material remains that are contemporary with the event they attest.”25 As classicists, Finley and Momigliano presumably found witnesses harder to come by than historians of the Holocaust, yet they saw no grounds for minimizing their importance—Momigliano placed them first on his list.
This must be right. As a reporter, I know perfectly well that witnesses can mislead—not always innocently. But without them—or our own eyewitness testimony—there would be nothing to report. Even if there were sound reasons for not calling living witnesses, there might have been a place found in court for the voice of Salmen Gradowski, a member of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz who was killed in the fall of 1944. Knowing that his own death was imminent, Gradowski took the notes he’d managed to make during the previous nineteen months and put them inside a metal canister, which he buried in a pit of human ash. Found after the war, Gradowski’s journal asks: “Dear discoverer of these writings! I have a request of you: this is the real reason I write, that my doomed life may attain some meaning, that my hellish days and hopeless tomorrows may find a purpose in the future.”26
Facts are crucial. Facts are sacred. Facts are indeed what give history its dignity. But they are not the whole story. The struggle to find the right way to describe the destruction of European Jewry is sometimes depicted as a contest between history and memory.27 And as we have now all been taught, memory is a terribly unreliable guide to wie es eigentlich gewesen ist, “how it really was.”
And so we take refuge in history, in documents, in facts—cool, detached, silent, precise.
Thanks to Deborah Lipstadt and her lawyers the facts about the Holocaust are indeed safer—and for that perhaps we should be grateful.
But witnesses, memories, testimony—all that was left outside the courtroom. And that seems to me cause for regret.
Witnesses are always partial. Memory is by definition selective. And testimony—not the sworn responses of expert witnesses, but the still-vivid responses of people whose history is lived, not studied—can be treacherous.
Yet without witnesses, without human voices to put flesh on the facts, we have something that, while it may pass muster as history, can never tell the truth.