First published 2001 by Granta Books
Copyright © 2002, 2001 by D. D. Guttenplan
First American edition 2001
Originally published in England under the title
The Holocaust on Trial: History, Justice and the David Irving Libel Case
First published as a Norton paperback 2002
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Guttenplan, D. D.
The Holocaust on trial / D.D. Guttenplan.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-393-02044-4
1. Irving, David John Cawdell, 1938– Trials, litigation, etc.
2. Lipstadt, Deborah E.—Trials, litigation, etc. 3. Penguin (Firm)—
Trials, litigation, etc. 4. Trials (Libel)—England—London. 5. Holocaust
denial literature—Great Britain. 6. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—
Historiography. I. Title.
KD379.5.I78 G+
940.53’18—dc21 2001030370
ISBN 0-393-32292-0 pbk.
eISBN 978-0-393-34605-3
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.
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* The result, like the prosecutor’s decision to charge Dejaco only with the murder of a single inmate on the building site, says more about Austria’s difficult relationship with its own past than it does about the evidence for the Holocaust.
* Penguin’s corporate parent, Viking Books (at the time an independent company), published his book Hitler’s War in 1977.
* Hitler’s field headquarters at Rastenburg in what is now part of Poland.
* One of the most striking yet least remarked on aspects of the St. Martin’s fiasco was the relatively small amount of money involved. That Irving, a supposedly bestselling author, would accept such a low advance is further evidence of his desperation.
* Lipstadt, too, is an accomplished storyteller. So it is perhaps worth noting another version of this incident, from an article in the June/July 1993 issue of Hadassah Magazine. In this telling, Lipstadt is also at the synagogue on Yom Kippur 1972 and again she offers her prayer book: “One older woman indicated that the prayer book was useless since none of them could read Hebrew. I told her I would recite the prayer for her and when it came time to mention the name of the person in whose memory the prayer was being said I would pause so she could insert it. . . . For what seemed like an eternity Jews came forward so I could act as their mouthpiece. Emotionally drained at the end of the episode I realized that the small siddur [prayer book] had linked me with generations of Jews who had long been shut off from us.” Titled “Benefits of Belonging,” this uplifting account never mentions her subsequent detention and harassment.
* My father, for example, who was in the first class to go all the way through Brandeis, graduating in 1954, majored in what was then called Judaic studies before entering Hebrew Union College, the Reform seminary.
* Maxwell, a Czech Jew who began his career in Britain denying his Jewish origins, ended up buried on Israel’s Mount of Olives. Maxwell’s habitual use of the British libel laws to silence his critics—he once sued The New Republic, which at the time had a total UK circulation of 135—meant that the full details of his fraudulent dealings didn’t emerge until after his death in November 1991.
* But not all. The visibility of the Rothschilds made attacks on Jewish capital irresistible for some on the left, even as the prominence of socialists like writer Harold Laski and publisher Victor Gollancz drew attacks from the right. George Orwell, who wrote that “neo-tories and political Catholics are always liable to succumb to anti-Semitism” was baffled by the persistence of prejudice on the left. Orwell himself was far from immune, writing in the Labour newspaper Tribune in 1940 that “for the time being we have heard enough about the concentration camps and the persecution of the Jews.”
* The Woolf Report on Access to Justice (1996) recommended a number of changes in the discovery process, including its name, which became “Disclosure.” But since Parliament did not act on these changes immediately, Irving v. Lipstadt took place under the old regime, properly called “Discovery,” and I will generally follow that usage here.
* When I called Penguin publicity in London in June 1999 and asked for a copy, the woman I spoke with said, “I very much doubt it’s still in print.” This was not, strictly speaking, true, but there were very few copies left.
* Rampton’s interpolation.
* In America the game is known as solitaire.
* The General Government was the name given to those portions of Poland not destined for incorporation into the German Reich.
* The inspiration, perhaps, for David Irving’s incredible description of himself as “a laissez-faire liberal”?
* And on the British Press Association, whose report on MacDonald’s testimony went out under the headline “Irving Not Anti-Semitic Judaism Expert Tells Court”!
* She later married the Institute’s director, Martin Broszat, whose 1977 article attacking Hitler’s War first raised questions about Irving’s use of sources and documents.
* Though Lipstadt’s description, which Irving protested bitterly at the trial, is clearly taken from Selling Hitler by Robert Harris (London, Arrow Books, 1996, p. 189), Irving has never sued Harris.
* Michael Geyer, Professor of Contemporary European History at the University of Chicago, and a scholar whose own work integrates military and social history, suggested to me that this pugnaciously parochial worldview accounts for Irving’s high reputation among military historians.
* An alumnus of Winchester College, i.e., a former public schoolboy himself.
† Keegan’s lack of familiarity with contemporary scholarship about the Holocaust hasn’t kept him from making public pronouncements on the topic. In November 1996 he wrote an article for the New York Times intervening in the controversy over whether Britain could have done more to assist in the prosecution of war criminals, claiming that Soviet hostility prevented the handover of intelligence derived from German police decodes. But as Richard Breitman points out in Official Secrets, the Order Police decodes were not based on ENIGMA decrypts, and had in any case already been disclosed to the Russians during the war. (Breitman, pp. 241–244)
* Though Lucy Dawidowicz comes close. In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that if “twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas” during the First World War, “the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain.” Dawidowicz wonders: “Did the idea of the Final Solution originate in this passage, germinating in Hitler’s subconscious for some fifteen years before it was to sprout into practical reality?” Yet even she recognizes that “the idea of a mass annihilation of the Jews” had been around for some time. And of course you don’t need gas chambers to kill 15,000 people. (The War Against the Jews, p. 27.) Goldhagen goes further, claiming that Auschwitz was “conceived by Hitler’s apocalyptically bent mind as an urgent, though future, project, [but] its completion had to wait until conditions were right. The instant that they were, Hitler commissioned his architects, Himmler and Heydrich, to work from his vague blueprint in designing and engineering the road.” (Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, London: Little, Brown, 1996, p. 425.) Even so, one has to assume he’s speaking metaphorically.
* Sicherheitsdienst (Nazi Party Security Service).
* Though there were gas chambers at Majdanek, captured more or less intact by the Russians, most of the camp’s victims were killed by shooting, not gas.
* The numbering of the various buildings at Auschwitz–Birkenau was a source of some confusion during the trial. In the interests of clarity I have generally followed van Pelt’s practice of counting the crematorium inside the Auschwitz main camp, or Stammlager, as Crematorium 1, with the gas chamber/crematorium buildings at Birkenau numbered 2–5. Prisoner accounts often include only the installations at Birkenau, and when those are quoted I again follow van Pelt in using roman numerals (so that Crematorium 5, for example, becomes Krema IV. I have also followed van Pelt in referring to the gas chambers by the labels for those rooms on the architects’ blueprints, namely as Leichenkeller or Morgue. These rooms were all located inside the crematorium buildings.
* Auschwitz was out of range of Allied bombers until early 1944, when an airbase was established at Foggia in Italy. On April 4, 1944 an Allied photo-reconnaissance plane flew over Auschwitz to gather intelligence on the “Buna” synthetic-rubber factory at Monowitz. On August 20, a squadron of 127 B-17s from the American 15th Air Force dropped over 1,300 500-pound bombs on Monowitz. Three further raids in September and December dropped an additional 2,000 bombs. The Polish government-in-exile had been begging for Auschwitz itself to be bombed since August 1943; in the spring of 1944, British and American Jewish groups pleaded with their governments to bomb either the gas chambers or the railway lines leading to the camp (thus halting or slowing the deportations). Not a single bomb was ever intentionally dropped on either.
* The notion that only Jews are somehow licensed to comment on such matters is, of course, equally bigoted.
† Evans made this observation at a public forum on the trial sponsored by the Wiener Library in London. The next morning I received a telephone call from Anthony Julius, who also spoke. Declaring his indifference to Irving’s state of mind, Julius assured me that Evans was mistaken.
* In a criminal trial, a witness with a financial stake in the verdict—a contract to sell his story to a tabloid newspaper, for example, with the promise of a bonus upon conviction—can have his testimony set aside. But Irving v. Lipstadt was a civil case, and van Pelt testified as an expert witness, not a witness of facts. Richard Evans, Anthony Julius, Hajo Funke, and Deborah Lipstadt all planned to write books drawing on their experiences at the trial; doubtless Irving someday will follow suit.
* The Sonderkommando (special commandos) were prisoners assigned to work in the gas chambers and the crematoria. Periodically they would themselves be gassed, but some of those working at the end of the war survived. Two of them, Szlama Dragon and Henryk Tauber, escaped when the Nazis evacuated the camp in January 1945, but returned to give evidence to Soviet and Polish investigators. Dragon also remembered where his fellow Sonderkommando Salmen Gradowski had buried a journal, written in Yiddish, in an aluminum canteen. Though Gradowski had been killed, his canteen was dug up in the presence of the members of the Soviet prosecutor’s office.
† Crematorium 3 was built from the same plans as Crematorium 2, but the plans were “flipped,” making the buildings mirror images of one another. In both cases the room designated as Morgue 1 functioned as the gas chamber. Similarly, Crematorium 5 was the mirror image of Crematorium 4.
* In Crematorium 2 and Crematorium 3, where the gas chambers were located in underground buildings, the Zyklon pellets were inserted through holes in the roof. In Crematorium 4 and Crematorium 5, which were at grade level, they were tossed in through window-sized openings covered with metal shutters.
* A muffle is a chamber in an oven. Crematorium 2 (and 3) had five triple-muffle ovens; Crematorium 4 (and 5) had two four-muffle ovens. In each muffle an average of five bodies could be incinerated at one time.
* Though Majdanek was largely ignored by the West, this was far from the case in Eastern Europe, and in the Soviet zone of influence generally.
* Presumably because Jewish groups have demanded restitution for gold and other monies retained in Swiss banks after their owners perished in the Holocaust. But you don’t have to be an anti-Semite to feel profound disquiet at the vigor with which massive sums in compensation have been pursued on behalf of an ever-dwindling number of survivors—most of whom never dreamed of opening a Swiss bank account.
* Presumably because David Irving has been barred from the country. This kind of false analogy is indicative of what happens to Irving’s powers of reason when the subject is anti-Semitism.
* A 1939 scheme whereby Czech Jews and Jewish prisoners of war were deported to the region around Lublin, where they were forced to build a camp for themselves.
* The Night of the Long Knives, when Hitler ordered the murder of the SA brownshirt leadership in order to consolidate his own grip on the Nazi movement.
* Hugh Trevor-Roper edited the English edition, which was published in 1953.
* In his diary entry for March 15, 2000, Irving writes that his father was “aboard one of the bombarding British battleships, so he probably had it rather cushier than the grenadiers who were ashore.” See Action Report, 17 (July 20, 2000), p. 29.
* For some reason identified as Kurt Aumeier in the judge’s text.
* As for the argument stressed most by Irving at the trial: “The apparent absence of evidence of holes in the roof of Morgue 1 at Crematorium 2 falls far short of being a good reason for rejecting the cumulative effect of the evidence.”
* A leader of the “Yale School” of deconstructionist criticism, DeMan died in 1983. Four years later it was revealed that as a journalist in occupied Belgium during the 1940s DeMan had written 180 articles for a collaborationist newspaper, several of them on anti-Semitic themes.
* As Anne Karpf points out in her fascinating and brutally frank memoir, The War After, such efforts did not extend to much in the way of help for actual Holocaust survivors, who were “left largely to their own devices.”
* In his letter to the book’s editor, Foxman argued that Finkelstein’s views on the Holocaust are “tainted by his anti-Zionist stance.” Though Finkelstein is indeed a fervent anti-Zionist, there are several ironies in this line of argument. The gas chambers, after all, did not distinguish between Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews. And as the son of Holocaust survivors, Finkelstein was certainly entitled to his views—which were, in any case, far more representative of the scholarly consensus on the Holocaust than Goldhagen’s. But the final irony is that much of the animus toward Finkelstein stems from an essay he published in 1984, while still a graduate student at Princeton. The subject was Joan Peters’s From Time Immemorial, a book purporting to show that the Palestinians never existed as a people and that consequently their claims on Israel were essentially baseless. Using a technique similar to Richard Evans’s examination of David Irving, Finkelstein demonstrated that the book, which had been hailed as definitive by the New Republic, “the historical truth” by Lucy Dawidowicz, and a “historical event in itself” by Barbara Tuchman, was little more than a farrago of fraud, distortion, and plagiarism. Finkelstein’s refutation of the book’s “Palestine denial” still rankles, and is I believe at least as relevant to the controversy over his recent attack on The Holocaust Industry as the author’s deliberately provocative tone and occasional exaggerations.
* Cesarani’s comments seemed so off the wall I sent him a note asking if he meant them in earnest, and if I might have a text in order to quote him precisely. Cesarani responded that he did not want to be quoted.
*Only evidence not available at the time of the trial can be introduced on appeal, and Irving told me he realised that the “Scheerer” affidavit would be inadmissable on those grounds.