The Claimant
There are not many comic moments in Irving v. Lipstadt, but one of them occurs at the point when, in an ordinary libel trial, the claimant’s lawyer, having made his opening speech, would begin presenting his evidence. In an ordinary libel trial the theatrical aspects have a point, an audience: the jury. It is for their benefit that the show and tell of the trial take place. The rest of us are just bystanders.
But there is no jury in Court 37, only a judge. This means that what we do see and hear in court is but a fraction of the evidence, a situation hinted at by the judge when he observes that, “having now spent quite a lot of time with the papers, in a curious way [this] is a case that does not depend to a very great extent on the oral evidence.” The heart of the case—the ground on which the trial will quite likely be won or lost—are the expert reports whose thousands of pages the judge has read before the first witness is sworn in. Since no representative of the daily press has the time to read these reports, media accounts of the trial have a certain air of unreality. Yet the script still has to be followed, the witnesses duly sworn. And what that gives rise to is the spectacle of David Irving standing at the counsel’s table and calling his first witness, David Irving, who then strides to the witness box where the clerk asks him how he’d like to be sworn. He appears not to understand the question. “Which oath do you want to take?”
“C[hurch] of E[ngland],” Irving replies after a rather long pause. “I had to think for a moment,” he explains.
The aim of Irving’s testimony—his direct evidence—is the same as his opening statement: to present himself as a reasonable man who has been badly wronged. But the means are different. The opening was rhetoric, and although lawyers are supposed to be truthful, as counsel Irving wasn’t yet under oath. What comes next is narrative, his story of how he ended up in this courtroom, and every detail has the added weight of being sworn to be the truth.
Irving is a talented storyteller, but after Rampton’s opening he has some damage to repair. “The Defendants have chosen to refer to my politics and they wrongly categorize them. They say that I am extreme right-wing or something like that. I have never belonged to a political party, left or right, except I think I joined the Young Conservatives at University. My father stood as a Labour candidate in the 1945 General Election.”
As for his own views, “I regard myself as a laissez-faire liberal. . . . I do not look down on any section of humanity, either coloured immigrants—I have regularly employed them—or females.
“I admit to having little patience with smokers and none at all with drug abusers,” he adds. And then, lest he be accused of political correctness, he goes on: “This is not to say that I have applauded—I have to state this because I will probably be asked about it—I cannot say that I have applauded the uncontrolled tide of Commonwealth immigration into this country.”
Irving’s language might hint at the unacceptable—most Commonwealth immigrants are non-white—but his imagery is reminiscent of Enoch Powell, a former Conservative cabinet minister who prophesied “rivers foaming with blood” if immigration proceeded unchecked. The echo may well be deliberate since Powell, who died in 1998, though condemned as a racist during his lifetime, was eulogized by Prime Minister Tony Blair for his “brilliant mind” and “the strength of his convictions.” Indeed, instead of the dangerous extremist described by the defense, in Irving’s self-portrait the dominant note is nostalgia: “Like most fellow countrymen of my background and vintage, I regret the passing of the Old England. I sometimes think, my Lord, that if the soldiers and sailors who stormed the beaches of Normandy in 1944 could see what England would be like at the end of this century, they would not have got 50 yards up the beach. I think they would have given up in disgust.”
Before the trial began, Mr. Justice Gray told me that part of his job will be “to ensure that [Irving] is not disadvantaged by not having the legal expertise available to the other side.” As Irving begins giving his evidence, Gray suggests, “I think the best thing is if I give you a little bit of a steer, if I can put it that way.”
“I’m not sure I need scaring,” Irving replies warily.
“No,” says the judge, “the word I used was ‘steer’ not ‘scare’, simply so that your evidence has a shape that might make it more comprehensible.”
The judge’s first “steer” comes after Irving complains that although he made his entire collection of reviews and press clippings available to the defense—“they were shown 16 ring binders full of chronologically organized, properly pasted-up reviews and press clippings in which, who knows, they might have found some goodies they could have used against me, I do not know—but they did not bother with them.”
“Take your own course, Mr. Irving,” says the judge, “but do you now want to deal with the publication of Denying the Holocaust?” His own course or not, Irving takes the hint. “The publication of the book. I paid no attention to that book, my Lord, until 1996. It did not come into my ken until 1996. I believe it was published in 1994, but in April 1996 we published in this country my Goebbels biography, Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich. . . .”
In fact, Deborah Lipstadt’s book was in Irving’s “ken” long before 1996—and their encounter in the courtroom on the first day of the trial was not their first meeting. That took place in November 1994, in Atlanta, when Irving turned up at a talk Lipstadt was giving at DeKalb College. Lipstadt’s text was the danger of legitimizing Holocaust deniers as “the other side” in historical debate—the theme of Denying the Holocaust, which had been published the previous year. Irving describes the encounter in his diary, which he later posted on his web site (and which in any case he had to disclose to the defense): I then politely put up my hand. Invited to speak, I boomed in my very English, very loud voice to her: “Professor Lipstadt, I am right in believing you are not a historian, you are a professor of religion?” She answered that she was a professor of religion but (something special else) in history too. I then waded in with verbal fists flying: “I am the David Irving to whom you have made such disparaging reference in your speech.”
Brandishing a wad of $20 bills, Irving repeated his standard offer of $1,000 to anyone who could provide documentary evidence of Hitler’s guilt in the extermination of the Jews. Lipstadt attempted to take other questions, but, again in Irving’s account: several times I wagged the bundle of $20 bills aloft, as she was speaking, and hissed: “One thousand dollars!”
Irving goes on to savor his success in giving away 72 free copies of his Goering biography to the students, who duly lined up afterwards for his autograph: Sweet victory. Then students came to me with copies of the printed invitation to autograph: I did so—they were blank, which meant that either they had not asked Lipstadt for her autograph, or she would have to sign after me. Total Victory! Revenge!1
Why should Irving lie about such an easily checkable fact as his first encounter with Lipstadt? Perhaps because, as this account suggests, far from feeling aggrieved by his little skirmish with Lipstadt, Irving was enjoying himself. No matter how much Lipstadt “disparaged” him, as long as the question was “Why won’t you debate me?” the advantage was with Irving—who saw no need to seek redress in a court of law. What changed his mind? Here his evidence came closer to the truth: “In April 1996 we published in this country my Goebbels biography. . . .”
David John Cawdell Irving was born on March 24, 1938, the youngest of four children. His father was a naval officer, and in some interviews Irving strives to give the impression of Country Life. “My mother,” he told me, “was an artist.” Then he caught himself. “A commercial artist. She did pen and ink drawings for Nursery World.” For an Englishman with Irving’s keen sense of social distinction, the difference is considerable. The Irvings lived in Essex—“Ongar, the end of the Central Line”—a dreary suburb made drearier by their lack of money.
Irving’s family belonged to that nomadic horde of soldiers and bureaucrats who kept the Union Jack flying over what Britons of his generation still call “the pink bits” of the map. A maternal uncle was in the Bengal Lancers. A great-great-uncle on his father’s side, Alfred Dolman, followed Livingstone to Africa where, on his second trip, somewhere in Bechuanaland, he was supposedly eaten by his bearer. Irving’s father saw action in the First World War Battle of Jutland, and spent the 1920s helping to survey the Antarctic. “Two of the South Sandwich islands are named after my father and my uncle: Irving Point and Carey Point.”
In the Second World War, when Irving was four years old, his father’s ship, HMS Edinburgh, was torpedoed by the Germans. His father survived, but he never returned to his wife and family. “I saw my father about twice in my whole life. . . . During the war years we had a motorcar which was up on blocks, it was a Ford, and I remember as a child climbing through the door. Underneath the car I found a battered old board suitcase, which my mother had obviously thrown there, and it was full of a very musty naval uniform, which was beginning to rot, and ancient brown faded photographs of the Antarctic.”
The war dominated Irving’s childhood. “I remember standing on the beach at Southsea and watching the invasion fleet sail in June 1944. My mother said that most of them probably wouldn’t be coming home.” Recalling a time of rationing and genteel poverty, Irving said that by the end of the war he and his twin brother were so thin their mother told them “You look like Belsen children.”
Sent as a day boy to “a minor public school,” Irving was “beaten repeatedly. . . . The final beating came when I’d hung a 12-foot hammer and sickle flag over the main entrance to the school. They had to call the fire brigade to come and bring it down. . . . I was a scamp.”
A year earlier, Irving had won the school prize for art appreciation. The award was a book of his choice—to be presented by the Deputy Prime Minister. “I filled in the form saying the prize I wanted to receive was Mein Kampf. I arranged for the local press to be there en masse to take a photograph of the deputy Prime Minister giving me a copy of Mein Kampf. I went up on stage and picked up this prize—and it was a German–Russian technical dictionary! I’ve never read Mein Kampf from that day to this.”
Irving’s desire to shock also got him into trouble at Imperial College, where he’d been given a one-year scholarship. The student magazine “ran a headline in 1956 that I’d said that 17 per cent of London university students were extreme left-wing or Communists. The figure of 17 per cent was straight off the top of my head. I just picked a prime number. I attained a certain degree of notoriety,” he recalled. Irving lost his scholarship after failing his math examination—a failure he blames on his professor, “a known Communist.”
To finance his second year of studies, Irving took a job on a concrete gang. He also joined “an organization called Common Cause. Rather like Aims of Industry or the Economic League, bodies like that are funded by industry and given the task of keeping dossiers on troublemakers.” In other words, he became a labor spy—a strange pastime for a “laissez-faire liberal.” At a rally for Oswald Mosley, the former head of the British Union of Fascists, who was running for Parliament, Irving found himself entranced: “I was fascinated—fascinated by the techniques of it, fascinated by the mechanisms of street politics. Years later I’m working in Mussolini’s archives and I found the evidence that he [Mosley] was being paid by Mussolini; then I was in Moscow and found he’d been paid by Hitler as well.” An attempt to enlist in the Royal Air Force failed when Irving was turned down on medical grounds.
If Mosley was an odd inspiration for the son of a Second World War veteran, Irving’s response to his rejection by the RAF was odder still. He wrote a letter to Krupp, the former Nazi armaments manufacturer, asking for a job in its steel mill.2 Seized by the Allies after the war, the firm was unable to oblige. But Krupp’s rival Thyssen, whose owners had fallen out with Hitler after helping him to power, offered Irving a year’s work. His fellow steelworkers added a rough-hewn fluency to Irving’s high-school German; one of them, a native of Dresden, gave Irving the subject of his first book.
This man had lived through the Allied fire-bombing of the city in February of 1945; his harrowing account of the raid came as a revelation to Irving, who set to work interviewing survivors and combing through German and Allied archival material. After a six-month stint in Spain as a clerk-typist for the Strategic Air Command, Irving returned to London, where he’d been given a place at University College to study political science and economics. To support himself he worked as a nightwatchman on the site of the Commonwealth Institute. “I slept in the pay hut—a little wooden hut with a cot and a table. During the day, I’d write letters [asking about Dresden] to the Air Ministry from ‘The New Commonwealth Institute, Kensington High Street’. They’d reply very deferentially; I got a lot of information out of them.”
Published in 1963, The Destruction of Dresden was an immediate bestseller. The book’s gruesome photographs of the Germans burning their dead, which Irving secured from one of his new contacts, ensured maximum press attention for Irving’s claim that the Allied bombing raid of February 1945 had killed over 100,000 people—a figure that was more than twice official estimates.
“I imported Dresden into the vocabulary of horror,” Irving says proudly. “So that people now say Dresden in the same breath as they say Auschwitz and Hiroshima. That’s my small contribution to the vernacular.”
In later years Irving’s estimate of the Dresden death toll would fall as low as 35,000 and rise as high as 250,000, just as, in later years, he would sometimes make direct comparisons between Dresden and Auschwitz. “About 100,000 people died in Auschwitz,” he told an interviewer in 1991. “So even if we’re generous and say one quarter of them, 25,000, were killed by hanging or shooting. 25,000 is a crime, that’s true. . . . But we killed that many people burning them alive in one night, not in three years, in a city like Pforzheim. We killed five times that number in Dresden in one night.”3
At the time, however, The Destruction of Dresden was important to Irving for other reasons. The book’s financial success prompted him to abandon efforts to complete his degree. Irving’s publisher offered him a contract for two more books: a history of the German rocket program and a biography of Adolf Hitler.
Irving learned that Lord Cherwell, Churchill’s scientific adviser, had kept tabs on the German V-weapons. Cherwell’s papers were at Nuffield College, Oxford, and when Irving presented himself he was given the run of the archive. He soon realized he’d stumbled on the historian’s equivalent of a treasure trove. He also discovered something else: “From the papers it was obvious that we were reading all the German codes.” This was in the early 1960s, when the feats of Allied codebreakers were still top secret. Fearful that he would be found out—or even worse, denied access to the archive—Irving “did the unthinkable. I began borrowing documents, taking them down to London to copy. But I always sedulously returned them.”
Since he had never been a government official, Irving was not bound by the Official Secrets Act. The first draft of his book The Mare’s Nest contained an entire chapter about the ENIGMA code, but “one night I was visited at my flat by men in belted raincoats who came and physically seized the chapter. I was summoned to the Cabinet Office, twelve men sitting around a polished table, where it was explained to me why [the information] was not being released and we appeal to you as an English gentleman not to release [it].”
Irving withdrew his chapter. By then he had copied enough material from the Cherwell archive “for my next three or four books.” Irving’s willingness to co-operate paid a dividend. “Ten years later I got a phone call from the Cabinet Office saying ‘Irving, you’re writing a book about Rommel, aren’t you? If you come around here we’ve got something for you.’ I went to the same room, and on the same polished table there was this big, thick file. It was Rommel’s personnel file—the original file. The last entry on the file was Rommel’s letter to Hitler explaining why he was committing suicide.”
During this period Irving learned his trade, applying what are essentially the methods of a journalist—interviews, cultivation of sources, the ability to follow a paper trail—to the raw materials of history. He also learned something else: for the kind of books he was writing—popular history, military history, books aimed at a mass readership rather than at the academic market—there were essentially no rules. Despite the generosity of his cabinet sources, when Irving turned in his Rommel biography, his American editor, Tom Congdon, felt the book lacked immediacy. “He asked me to write a set-piece description of what it’s like to be in a tank.” Irving obliged, and as he’d never been in a tank, he simply made it up. “I’m the only one who knows it’s completely phoney,” he told me gleefully.
Throughout his long apprenticeship, Irving kept storing up contacts and material against the day when he finally felt ready to begin his Hitler biography. “I’d translated the memoirs of [Field Marshal] Wilhelm Keitel, who was hanged at Nuremberg. Keitel’s son introduced me to Otto Günsche—the man who burned Hitler’s body. He was Hitler’s SS adjutant. And Günsche decided he would talk to me, because I was the Englishman who had written about Dresden. That gave me an edge.”
Günsche became Irving’s passport into “the inner circle—of all Hitler devotees—the servants and the adjutants and the colonels and the secondaries. Who would meet around the graveside when one of their number died. And the word was passed: ‘He’s okay.’ And after a while they started producing their diaries and private papers.” The result was Hitler’s War, published in 1977.
Writing in Time magazine, Lance Morrow found Irving’s portrait of “the Führer as a somewhat harried business executive, too preoccupied to know exactly what was happening in his branch offices at Auschwitz and Treblinka” diffficult to credit.4 The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper’s review in the London Sunday Times referred to Irving’s “consistent bias” but went on to say, “No praise can be too high for Irving’s indefatigable scholarly industry. . . . I have enjoyed reading his long work from beginning to end.”5 The military historian John Keegan called Hitler’s War “Irving’s greatest achievement . . . indispensable to anyone seeking to understand the war in the round.”6 The book reached number eight on British bestseller lists. Irving moved to Mayfair, and bought a Rolls-Royce.
There were dissenters. Martin Broszat, director of the Munich Institute for Contemporary History, thought Irving had misunderstood the nature of Hitler’s authority.7 But Broszat’s lengthy article was never translated into English. Charles Sydnor’s devastating critique of Irving’s handling of documents appeared in 1979—in the journal Central European History.8 The only noticeable dent in Irving’s public credibility, however, came when writer Gitta Sereny and reporter Lewis Chester checked Irving’s documents and re-interviewed his sources—including Otto Günsche—on assignment for the Sunday Times. Their article contains some damaging details—including Günsche’s admission that “one must assume that he [Hitler] did know” about the extermination of the Jews—but ultimately posed little obstacle to Irving’s continued prominence.9
One reason for this was the authors’ focus on the narrow question of Hitler’s personal culpability. Doubtless a response to Irving’s much publicized $1,000 offer, the emphasis on Hitler diverted attention away from the issue of Irving’s fidelity to his sources. And as a fellow writer on Nazi themes, Irving could—and does—simply dismiss Sereny as a jealous competitor. Finally—and perhaps most importantly—though his account of Hitler’s role was hard to swallow (not even admirers like Keegan or Trevor-Roper took his behind-Hitler’s-back thesis seriously), in 1977 David Irving’s views on the Holocaust itself were fairly unexceptionable. Under “Jews: extermination of,” the index to Hitler’s War lists 17 separate entries. There are references to “the extermination camp at Chelmno” and “the extermination center at Treblinka.” And Irving’s argument that “the burden of guilt for the bloody and mindless massacre of the Jews rests on a large number of Germans, many of them alive today, and not just on one ‘mad dictator,’ whose order had to be obeyed without question,”10 while debatable, is not very far from the thesis of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, another book whose dismissal by knowledgeable specialists has done little to hinder its success with the general public.11
But by 1981 it should have been obvious to anyone who looked that David Irving had a Jewish problem. In that year Irving published Uprising!, an hour-by-hour reconstruction of the 1956 Hungarian revolt. In the Observer, Neal Ascherson took issue with the book’s “two insinuations: first, that Hungarian Communism up to 1956 was a Jewish dictatorship, and secondly that reforming Communists are more deadly enemies of liberty than the . . . Stalinists they try to overthrow.”12 Citing Irving’s description of Hungarian dictator Matthias Rákosi as possessing “the tact of a kosher butcher,” and noting his remark that before the war Jews “had overrun the more lucrative liberal professions,” Ascherson concluded: “Irving is Jew-obsessed.” Writing in the New Statesman, Kai Bird noted “Jews weigh heavily on Irving’s mind.”13 Both reviewers also contrasted Irving’s contemptuous treatment of the leader of the revolt, Imre Nagy—“a crop of hemorrhoids sprouting a Joseph Stalin moustache”—with his assertion that János Kádár, the Soviet puppet installed after the invasion, is “today one of Hungary’s most genuinely popular citizens.”
Bird, an American journalist who would go on to publish his own authoritative studies of John J. McCloy, the US High Commissioner for Germany, and cold warriors McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy, warned that, “if nothing else, Uprising! should lay to rest the charitable assumption made by gentlemen historians that men like Irving would never stoop to dressing up their evidence.” Such strictures did little to dampen the enthusiasm of Peter Israel, who acquired the book for Putnams in the United States.
Besides, any damage to Irving’s reputation was more than recouped by his involvement in the 1983 debacle over the “Hitler diaries,” when Newsweek, the London Sunday Times, and the German magazine Stern, which had rushed to publish the diaries in a fanfare of publicity, were forced to admit they’d been conned—or in the case of Newsweek, which breezily declared “genuine or not, it almost doesn’t matter,” at least deeply embarrassed. Foremost among the victims was Hugh Trevor-Roper—by now ennobled as Lord Dacre—who’d authenticated the volumes for the Sunday Times. Irving crashed Der Stern’s Hamburg press conference in April 1983, and his comments casting doubt on the diaries’ provenance were repeated on the “Today” show. It was his finest hour, recalled with glee by his defenders—most recently Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair, who cited the incident in support of his view that “David Irving is not just a Fascist historian. He is also a great historian of Fascism.”14
A gratifying example of the amateur besting the specialist, this account, which turns up in most profiles of Irving, omits a few details. For one thing, it was Irving who first approached the Sunday Times in 1982 with an offer to go to Germany and inspect the diaries for the paper. And although he did denounce the diaries at Der Stern’s press conference, so had Lord Dacre. A week later Irving changed his mind yet again, and pronounced the diaries genuine—a dizzying sequence which shed little light on the fake diaries but generated a great deal of publicity for Irving’s own Adolf Hitler: The Medical Diaries, an anodyne collection of notes by the Führer’s physician, Theo Morrell, which just happened to be published that week.15
Whatever his merits as a historian, as a self-publicist Irving has few peers. Journalists across the political spectrum testify to his unfailing helpfulness, his willingness to make archives, clipping files, and documents available without any precondition.16 On two occasions I was left alone in Irving’s study for over an hour. If Irving has anything to hide, it is hidden in plain sight.
My first impression of Irving the man was unavoidably colored by sorrow. We had spoken on the phone several times, and had been exchanging e-mails for several months, before the gray autumn afternoon when I presented myself at his flat in a redbrick Victorian building off Grosvenor Square, just around the corner from the American Embassy. I’d read enough of his interviews to know that Irving could be provocative, truculent, or charming. But when I came to see him, he was none of those things. He seemed deeply tired (he was due to leave for a lecture tour of the United States the following day) and more than a little sad.
A few days earlier the oldest of his five daughters had committed suicide. Irving’s first wife was a Spaniard; their daughter Josephine Victoria was born in 1963 on the anniversary of Franco’s victory. She’d been schizophrenic, Irving said, for “half her life.”17 More recently she’d lost the use of both legs in a car accident. She’d seemed “level headed” lately, but there was, he said, no way to predict when “the meniscus of rationality” would break. “At the hospital they said to me, ‘You know, she must have been very determined.’ For someone who is legless to pull herself up and throw herself out of a fourth floor window. . . .” Irving stopped, then continued, responding to a question I hadn’t asked: “Do you ever wonder whether you are mentally unsound or not? How do we know? There is no thermometer you can stick in your mouth that will say, oh, today I’m a bit unbalanced.”
I’d been to his flat once in the summer to pick up some material, but Irving had been away. “Contact my staff (Bente) in London,” I was instructed. Bente turned out to be the mother of Irving’s youngest daughter, Jessica, who had to be collected from school, and so I was left there, seated in Irving’s study leafing through his press clippings under the gaze of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose portrait on the wall above Irving’s desk was flanked by a pair of framed front pages from the Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi Party daily.
The lead story, Irving later told me with a certain amount of malicious pleasure, was headlined “Prophetic Warning To Jewry”—the paper’s report of Hitler’s famous January 1939 speech to the Reichstag:
Today I want to be a prophet once more: If international-finance Jewry inside and outside of Europe should succeed once more in plunging nations into another world war, the consequence will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.18
This time—perhaps in deference to his siblings, who, though embarrassed by Irving, had come to London for the funeral—the papers had been taken down. Nor was Irving’s famous self-portrait of Hitler, given to him by the Führer’s secretary, anywhere in evidence. Irving himself was a husky, square-jawed man with a weakness for martial metaphors. “It may be unfortunate for Professor Lipstadt,” he’d remarked to me on the telephone, “that she is the one who finds herself dragged out of the line and shot.” On the telephone, Irving had seemed both brusque and a bit wary. But when I arrived he was on his best behavior.
When he’s among friends Irving’s manners are less fastidious. At a meeting in Alsace a few years ago, he opened with a joke: There’s the one-man gas chamber, carried by two German soldiers looking for Jews alone in the Polish countryside. This one-man gas chamber must have looked like a sedan chair, but disguised as a telephone kiosk. How did they convince the victim to step, of his own free-will, into this one-man gas chamber? Apparently there was a phone in it which would ring, and the soldier would say, “It’s for you!”19
And there is his light verse, to be recited, according to Irving’s diary—which he had to make available to Lipstadt’s lawyers—when out with his daughter and “half-breed children” are wheeled past:
I am a Baby Aryan
Not Jewish or Sectarian
I have no plans to marry an
Ape or Rastafarian.
But since Jessica, now six, was barely a year old at the time, the intended audience was probably her mother, whose reaction, Irving noted with satisfaction, was “suitably shocked.”20 Irving later told me he knew I was a Jew “from the moment I saw you.” So I was curious to observe how he would react when Jessica, who had been running in and out of his office, came and climbed into my lap. Irving barely noticed. In the American south, where I grew up, even “liberal” whites would get uncomfortable if their daughters got too close to a black man. Anti-Semitism is a different kind of racism, but there are certainly anti-Semites whose distaste for Jews is visceral. Irving, however, is not one of them.
Irving is a prodigious diarist, and though the entries I’ve seen read more like the first drafts of a press release than a record of his inner life, the need to fill up the pages does sometimes allow something personal to slip through. His love affairs, for example, are apparently recorded in a code based on the word “amiable” as in “Caroline came round and was amiable.”21 But even the sections cited by the defense in various expert reports hardly reveal a passionate Jew-hater. Irving believes in a worldwide Jewish conspiracy both to discredit him personally and to exploit the Holocaust for political and economic ends. He habitually refers to Jewish groups as “traditional enemies of the truth,”22 and as far back as 1963, describing a speech by Oswald Mosley at Kensington Town Hall, noted: “Yellow Star did not make a showing.”23 But his recurring preoccupations are money and his career, not Jews.
Irving likes to point out that at one time both his lawyer and his publisher were Jews. The lawyer, Michael Rubinstein (who insists he is not Jewish), told me relations with Irving had been proper and professional. As for Lord Weidenfeld, the assumption of mutual utility can be gleaned from a letter he sent Irving after a newspaper article, obviously inspired by Irving, suggested that Weidenfeld had been pressured not to publish Hitler’s War. “I have every reason to believe,” Weidenfeld wrote, “that it was the reporter’s tone and not your intention to disturb a businesslike and friendly climate of cooperation between us.”24 The firm of Weidenfeld and Nicolson went on to publish Irving’s biographies of Field Marshals Erhard Milch and Erwin Rommel.
David Irving didn’t sue Deborah Lipstadt because she is a Jew. On the same day in September 1996 that Irving issued his writ against Penguin and Lipstadt, he also sued Gitta Sereny and the Observer, which had published an article by Sereny accusing Irving of peddling “a clever mixture of truth and untruth” in his book on Goebbels. Sereny is not Jewish, and although the two complaints differ, Irving’s reasons for suing both women are essentially the same, namely that, unlike his other critics, whose attacks merely raised his public profile, theirs had threatened his income. Because by 1996 David Irving had long since used up any credit he’d gained from the “Hitler diaries.” Banned from Austria because of his views on the Holocaust, barred from archives in Germany for the same reason, his Rolls-Royce long gone and his Mayfair flat heavily mortgaged, Irving was, in every sense, seriously overdrawn.
The road that led David Irving to Court 37 began with a phone call from Toronto. The voice on the other end belonged to Ernst Zündel, a German immigrant to Canada who supplements his income as a commercial artist by distributing a selection of neo-Nazi and racist literature, including two works of his own: UFOs: Nazi Secret Weapons and The Hitler We Loved and Why.
In 1984 Zündel had been charged with contributing to anti-Semitism by knowingly spreading “false news” about the Holocaust—at the time a crime under Canadian law. Though Zündel’s lawyer bullied and insulted the prosecution witnesses—calling Raul Hilberg “a historian of sorts” and hectoring one survivor to give him the full names of each of the 20 members of his family who had perished in the camps—Zündel was duly convicted and sentenced to 15 months in jail. But the conviction was overturned on technical grounds, and for the 1988 retrial the defense team wanted reinforcements.
Would Irving be prepared to appear as an expert for the defense? A fan of Hitler’s War, Zündel had been courting Irving for years. In 1986, when Irving visited Toronto on a lecture tour, Zündel picked him up at the airport. Irving, who knew Zündel only by reputation, was far from pleased. “He wanted nothing to do with me,” Zündel wrote in a newsletter to his supporters. “He thought I was some ‘Revisionist-Neo-Nazi-Rambo-Kook!’” Thirteen years later Irving saw no reason to revise his first impression. “Zündel is a Nazi,” he told me. “There’s no question about it. He’s proud of it.”
What prompted Irving to make common cause with a man he describes as “very far out on the branch which he’s cut off”? Doubtless part of the impulse came from the same need to provoke that sent him up the ladder with that hammer and sickle as a schoolboy. Irving has a love/hate relationship with respectability. “You want to see egg on faces,” he admitted.
Zündel also knew his customer. In 1986 he had kept his distance from Irving—and so had the press. In his letter commiserating over the meagre results from Irving’s Canadian tour, Zündel sketched out a plan for Irving to turn his book audience—his “grassroots support”—into a distribution network “which you yourself would control and of course, make most of the editorial decisions and, in the end, retain most of the profit yourself.”25 The letter following up his request for Irving’s assistance recommended he combine his testimony with a book tour “to take advantage of the publicity. . . . During the first trial, we received coast-to-coast coverage virtually every day.”26
When Irving arrived in Toronto, he met Zündel’s other new witness, an American named Fred Leuchter, billed as an engineer specializing in the design and operation of execution apparatus. Leuchter had flown to Poland with a cameraman, draftsman, and translator, and the group spent three days at Auschwitz–Birkenau and one at Majdanek chipping off bits of brick and concrete from a number of buildings. These “forensic samples,” as Leuchter described them, were then taken to a lab in Boston, where the technician was told the material was from a workman’s compensation case.27
Under questioning by the judge, it emerged that Leuchter’s engineering training consisted of a few undergraduate science courses taken while completing his B.A.—in history—at Boston University.28 His “report” purporting to demonstrate the non-existence of gas chambers—on which the defense had spent nearly $60,000—was ruled inadmissible. Leuchter was allowed to testify on the use of hydrogen cyanide (the gas which, under the tradename Zyklon-B, was used by the Germans) in American prison gas chambers, and to give his opinion that the structures he had seen in Poland “wouldn’t have been efficient” if used as gas chambers, but the second jury was not convinced either, and Zündel was again found guilty.
Leuchter did acquire at least one convert. For David Irving, who followed him to the witness stand as an expert on German documents and the Second World War, Leuchter’s account of his Polish field trip apparently struck with the force of a revelation. “My mind has now changed,” he told the court, “. . . because I understand that the whole of the Holocaust mythology is, after all, open to doubt.”29 The Leuchter report, Irving declared, “is shattering in the significance of its discovery.” Back in London Irving’s new Focal Point press—the base of his “distribution network”—published the results of Leuchter’s amateur chemistry experiment as a 66-page booklet with an introduction by David Irving. Irving also removed all mention of gas chambers from his revised edition of Hitler’s War. “If something didn’t happen,” he said, “then you don’t even dignify it with a footnote.”30
Jewish groups were predictably outraged, but they hadn’t liked Irving since Hitler’s War. At the time, Irving dismissed the furor, which he said was only “because I have detracted from the romance of the notion of the Holocaust—that six million people were killed by one man.”31 He’d been through a few rough patches, but thanks to “Hitler’s diaries” he’d bounced back triumphant. As publishers once again became hesitant, and newspaper editors once more stopped returning his calls, Irving plotted his comeback. His new book would do more than silence his critics—it would rewrite the history of the Second World War, not only proving that Hitler had indeed been led astray, but showing who was really behind the anti-Semitic outrages that still unfairly blackened the Führer’s name.
Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich was going to be the book that redeemed David Irving’s career. Based on his usual prodigious mining of wartime archives, the book was nearly written when, in the spring of 1992, a German friend told Irving that the complete set of Goebbels’s diaries, which had been microfilmed and stored on glass plates, had recently surfaced in the Russian State Archives. Armed with a commission from the Sunday Times, Irving raced to Moscow to secure his scoop. Though much of the diaries had already been published, there were substantial gaps, and Irving’s “discovery” put him back on the front pages.
Not all publicity is good publicity. Irving’s return to prominence courtesy of the Sunday Times, which agreed to pay him £75,000 to “edit” the Goebbels diaries, sparked a wave of protests from London to New York. The intensity of these protests lost Irving his fee from the Sunday Times, who cancelled their agreement; he also lost his American publisher, Scribners, and his British publisher, Macmillan, who not only rejected the Goebbels manuscript but also ordered the remaining stocks of two of his other books destroyed. All of this, it is worth noting, happened before Deborah Lipstadt published a word about David Irving.
Still, when St. Martin’s Press in New York agreed to publish the Goebbels book in February 1995, Irving’s rehabilitation appeared back on track. Tom Dunne, a senior editor, had read the book and was eager to go ahead. Even so it took until May to agree on the advance: $25,000, the first installment of which went directly to pay off the arrears on Irving’s mortgage.* Dunne later claimed to be ignorant of Irving’s history, but it’s not as if he made a rushed decision. Besides, anyone with a library card or a modem could have predicted the ensuing controversy.
What perhaps couldn’t have been predicted were the craven contortions and witless hypocrisy of St. Martin’s as the book’s publication date drew nearer. For months Irving heard nothing but praise from St. Martin’s (who, having bought the rights to reprint the British edition, never planned to edit the book themselves anyway). When Publisher’s Weekly pronounced Irving’s book “repellent,” and Jewish organizations expressed outrage, and the Washington Post, in a column attacking the book, quoted Deborah Lipstadt asking rhetorically if St. Martin’s “would . . . publish a book by Jeffrey Dahmer on man–boy relationships?”, the publishers stood firm. For about two weeks.
Sometime between the March 22 Daily News report, “Nazi Big’s Bio Author Sparks Uproar,” and Frank Rich’s April 3 New York Times column calling Irving “Hitler’s Spin Artist,” Irving’s publishers lost their nerve, announcing the next day that they were shocked—shocked!—to discover that the book they were on the very brink of shipping to stores was in fact not quite . . . kosher?
The principal effect of this decision, as Christopher Hitchens properly pointed out in a caustic résumé of the scandal in the June 1996 Vanity Fair, was to transform a man with “depraved ideas” about the Holocaust into a poster-boy for free speech. One ancillary effect was to lend the Goebbels book the cachet of suppressed literature. Another was Gordon Craig’s lofty declaration, in the course of a four-page review of the Goebbels biography in the New York Review of Books, that “silencing Mr. Irving would be a high price to pay for freedom from the annoyance that he causes us. The fact is that he knows more about National Socialism than most professional scholars in his field, and students of the years 1933–1945 owe more than they are always willing to admit” to his research. “Such people as David Irving . . . have an indispensable part in the historical enterprise, and we dare not disregard their views.”32
Irving’s defenders assumed that what he really wanted was a debate with his critics. If that were indeed his objective, all Irving had to do was bide his time. “Someone,” Hitchens asserted confidently, “will no doubt pick up where St. Martin’s left off.”
What Irving did instead was sue Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher for libel in England (where even if she won Lipstadt’s costs would amount to hundreds of thousands of pounds). At which point it became rather more difficult to defend the proposition that what was at stake was David Irving’s freedom of speech.