The Defendants
On the second day of the trial two video clips are shown in court. The first is a black-and-white German newsreel from January 1948 reporting the judgment in the Auschwitz trial, held in Cracow after the war. The voiceover refers to “nearly 300,000 people from the most different nations [who] died in the Auschwitz concentration camp,” and the point of the exercise is that number: 300,000.
The second clip is much more recent, a 1994 Australian current-affairs program, and shows a woman with reddish-brown hair and strong features. A man’s off-screen voice asks if people who deny the Holocaust should be taken seriously. “What they’re saying,” the woman replies in an unmistakable New York accent, “is the equivalent of ‘the Earth is flat’ or ‘Elvis Presley is alive and well’ or ‘there was no slavery.’” When the man asks “How overwhelming is the evidence for the Holocaust?” she answers, “The facts are beyond belief and beyond question.” The voice belongs to Deborah Lipstadt, who sits silently in court watching herself on the video monitor. This is the only time her voice will be heard in the courtroom during the entire trial.
There is no obligation for a defendant in a libel action to testify. Leon Uris, for example, sat mute through the Exodus trial. Since there was no dispute about what the words he’d written might mean, or to whom they were intended to refer, there was nothing for him to add. Exodus, after all, was a work of fiction, and though that didn’t protect its author from being sued for libel, Uris never claimed to be a historian.
But Denying the Holocaust is not a novel, and until the trial began Irving was under the impression he would have the chance to cross-examine Lipstadt. There were questions he wanted to ask her, and documents he desperately wanted to introduce in evidence, such as a 1992 letter from Yehuda Bauer, director of Hebrew University’s Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism, which funded Lipstadt’s research, complaining that in her first draft “Irving is mentioned, but not that he is the mainstay of Holocaust denial in Western Europe.”
By not calling Lipstadt, the defense keeps the focus on Irving, his methods and his associates. They also spare their client what would doubtless have been an uncomfortable experience. In a jury trial, Lipstadt’s silence might come at a price. At the very least, her lawyers would have to remind the jury not to hold it against her. With a judge sitting alone, the decision is much easier. Irving seems affronted; though Lipstadt’s testimony would probably have made little difference to Irving’s suit, it might well have helped his “case.” But the judge’s demeanor suggests he should have seen this coming:
MR. IRVING: Your Lordship will see that this interview provides the Second Defendant, Professor Lipstadt, with a chance to express her opinions unopposed.
MR. JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
MR. IRVING: I feel it is appropriate to allow her some minutes of the court’s time in this rather oblique manner to express her opinions.
MR. JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
MR. IRVING: I understand that she will not be testifying in person in this case.
MR. JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
An experienced barrister might still have made something of this, particularly in light of the defense claim that Irving is not a historian at all. In rough form the argument (which will be presented at great length and with considerable subtlety by Richard Evans, one of the defense experts, during his testimony) is that while credentials don’t make a historian—Herodotus, after all, never got a Ph.D.—there are canons of conduct regarding the handling of documents, footnotes, and sources to which historians must adhere. All sorts of assumptions are folded up in this argument, such as how these rules get set and who enforces them, and though Evans will be fairly scrupulous in acknowledging this, Irving never presses the point.
A lawyer whose own ego wasn’t at stake might have lifted his gaze—and the court’s attention—to the shaky scaffolding surrounding this portrayal of history as a guild activity. After all, Irving’s books sell in the history section of bookstores, and are shelved with history books in various university libraries. If, to take what might be called an operational approach, history is what historians do, then any definition which excludes Irving, who has spent years of his life in archives, is bound to seem arbitrary. Shifting the ground to whether or not he is a good historian might have helped Irving, if only by giving him an opening to examine Lipstadt’s own handling of material.
But Irving is curiously unwilling to relinquish the spotlight even when it shows him to least advantage. So intent is he on proving that he is indeed a historian, with the kudos to prove it, that he never bothers to make the simple point that by some measures Deborah Lipstadt isn’t a historian either.
On her father’s side, Deborah Esther Lipstadt is descended from a prominent German rabbinical family. Erwin Lipstadt came to the United States from Germany in the 1920s “because of the economic situation. Nothing to do with anti-Semitism,” she offers before being asked. Her mother Miriam was born in Canada. When Deborah was born in 1947 the family lived in Manhattan, but moved to Far Rockaway in Queens soon afterwards. “I went to Jewish day schools there, and got an intensive Jewish education, both at home and in school.”
The Lipstadts considered themselves “modern Orthodox”—partly to distinguish themselves from the black-hatted, caftan-wearing Hasidim, and partly to signify that although they observed the Jewish dietary laws, and regulated their lives by the Hebrew rather than the secular calendar, they did not set their faces against modern life. “We were very much of this world,” says Lipstadt. “Theater, opera, books, journals, museums.”
Lipstadt grew up in a mixed neighborhood, but her interactions with non-Jews were limited. “When you’re an observant family, you go to day schools, you keep kosher—just technically you march to the beat of a different drummer.” Class may also have been a factor. The comfortable, parochial, culturally voracious, slightly smug yet socially conscious world of German Jews is difficult to convey to outsiders, though the fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer provides a wry introduction. It would be unfair—and probably untrue—to say that German Jews look down on other Jews. Perhaps a better way to describe the self-consciousness of German Jews is as a kind of mission civilatrice —the Jewish version of noblesse oblige.
After her family moved back to Manhattan in the mid-1960s, Lipstadt says, I.B. Singer lived next door. But she is just as proud of the fact that civil-rights worker Andy Goodman’s family also lived on her street. When Goodman’s murdered body was finally found in Mississippi, along with those of his comrades James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, Lipstadt’s father, who had a small headstone business, was commissioned to make his monument. “In the summer of the freedom rides,” Lipstadt says, “I was too young to go down to the South, but I knew that if I had been older I would have. I remember going with my mother—this was . . . 1964 or 65—we drove up to Harlem on a Sunday to participate in a march. It was my mother’s idea.”
At City College, Lipstadt says ruefully, she was part of “the last generation where you could get a good education.” She majored in political science and history, spending her junior year at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “I took a couple of courses on the Holocaust, met more survivors than I’d met before—though I’d met survivors growing up, I didn’t know they were survivors. . . . My parents had lots of German Jewish friends, but I didn’t know them as survivors, I just knew them as the Peisers or the Ullmans.”
According to Peter Novick, author of The Holocaust in American Life, such reticence was the norm until the late 1960s. As Art Spiegelman’s father says in Maus, his “survivor’s tale” in cartoon format, “no one wants anyway to hear such stories.”1 But Lipstadt’s father had left five sisters behind in Germany, and tried desperately but vainly to get them admitted to the United States. Though all five survived the war, and though he, too, seldom mentioned the Holocaust, the emotional toll on him was evident every Passover.
“I remember as a teenager, at the Passover seder, my father would read a memorial prayer put out by the organization of the survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto, saying ‘Tonight we remember the millions who died.’ And he would cry as he recalled friends, relatives, and classmates with whom he had grown up in Hamburg who had perished. And I remember that as an adolescent this would be very unnerving to me. But I don’t ever remember being sat down and told anything.”
As Lipstadt’s junior year in Israel was ending, the Six Day War broke out. “There was great fear. They dug 800 graves in Jerusalem,” she recalls. The children’s home where Lipstadt worked as a volunteer had a number of Holocaust survivors on staff, and suddenly, spurred by fear, they began to talk graphically about their experiences.
Lipstadt decided to remain in Jerusalem another year. “If I’d been there in June of ’67, to go home in July ’67 made no sense.” After returning to City College to finish her B.A., Lipstadt enrolled in the graduate program in Jewish Studies at Brandeis. Her priorities were shifting, but the 1960s didn’t pass her by.
“I lived in Cambridge! You had to be living under a rock not to have a Sixties. I even remember showing up at the synagogue my parents went to on the Upper West Side, wearing my SNCC [Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee] button, and somebody yelling at me ‘They’re leftists, anti-Semites and terrible people!’ I went berserk!”
Like many other Jews of her generation, Lipstadt’s first steps on the path from civil rights to Jewish causes were prompted by the bitter 1968 struggle between the mostly black parents of Ocean Hill and Brownsville in Brooklyn and the largely Jewish teachers’ union over community control of the schools. Neither side had a monopoly on racism—and there were Jews on both sides of the picket lines once the union went out on strike rather than cede power to the parents—but what Lipstadt saw was “overt anti-Semitism coming from people whose struggle you had always thought . . . cut to the core of America.
“Over the years finding myself more and more intellectually—and politically—first confused, and then to some degree angry and resentful, I became a sort of New Republic Democrat. I never went as far as Commentary and [Norman] Podhoretz—or saw it [black anti-Semitism] as a personal insight.” And in the late 1960s, there were other reasons to take to the streets.
“Before I went to Israel and after I came back, I went on marches, I was at rallies [to protest America’s involvement in Vietnam]. Was I a great activist? No. Was I at rallies? Sure. I remember coming home and my father was very excited. He’d gone out to walk the dog and there was a rally on the corner of 86th street and Broadway, an anti-war rally, and they were giving out candles and he stood with a candle, this very distinguished German-Jewish gentleman walking his cocker spaniel.”
In 1972 Lipstadt visited the Soviet Union. On Yom Kippur, she found herself at the synagogue in Czernowitz, a city whose Jewish community had been decimated by the Holocaust. In her affidavit for the defense, she writes: “I lent my prayer book to an elderly woman. Shortly thereafter, an official of the synagogue who, I subsequently learned, worked for the government, accused me of being a provocateur . . . [and] of distributing religious ritual items, which was forbidden by Soviet law. . . . The next day . . . my traveling partner and I were taken from the hotel by the KGB police, brought to a remote train station outside of Czernowitz, held for an entire day, questioned separately, strip-searched, forced to sign statements about our contacts with Jews, and forbidden from contacting American authorities.*
“Though I was well aware that what I had seen could not be compared to the persecution Jews had suffered under the Nazis,” she continues, “I became greatly interested in the invidious nature of anti-Semitism. I began to intensely study the history of the Holocaust.”
Lipstadt’s first book, Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust 1933–1945, is a scathing indictment of American press coverage of the Holocaust. Even when confronted by the evidence, she argues, many correspondents were reluctant to admit “to themselves—and to their readers” the reality of genocide. Lipstadt attributes a least a portion of this reluctance to anti-Semitism.2
Like Denying the Holocaust, Beyond Belief can be found in both the history and Jewish studies sections of bookstores. Her first teaching job, at the University of Washington, was a joint appointment in history and comparative religion. But her next job, at the University of California at Los Angeles, was in Jewish studies. Denied tenure, she moved on briefly to Occidental College, a small liberal-arts college also in Los Angeles, where she taught courses on the Holocaust. At Emory, Lipstadt’s chair is in the Department of Religion.
Unlike David Irving, Lipstadt is a bona fide academic, and her first degree, from City College, is in the related disciplines of political science and history. She long ago mastered the skills and methods necessary for admission to the guild of scholars. Her graduate degrees are in Jewish studies, a field which, like history, often concerns itself with the past, and with the interpretation of documents. But Jewish studies is not history; it isn’t even—or always—Jewish history.
As an intellectual endeavor, Jewish studies is the confluence of two sometimes conflicting streams. One is wholly secular, and places Jewish studies among other minority and ethnic disciplines, such as gender studies, black or African-American studies, Asian studies, Hispanic studies, and women’s studies. In the aftermath of the 1960s there was an explosion of such departments on campuses across the United States. Indeed in some famous cases the departments themselves were the results of campus revolts. Though there are no recorded instances of Jewish students rioting to demand the teaching of Jewish studies, once a university decided to fund minority-studies programs Jewish studies was often among the beneficiaries. To do otherwise would have meant discriminating among minorities—an unpromising route to a peaceful campus.
Jewish studies was in a position to benefit from the turn toward cultural studies because, unlike the more militant disciplines, which in many cases were struggling for recognition as well as funding, by the late 1960s Jewish studies already had its own history. The field had its origin in the study of biblical texts that always formed part of the traditional rabbinic training. By the twentieth century this training was already moving out of the yeshivot and into the universities—especially in Germany and the United States, where the non-Orthodox branches of Judaism were growing in strength, and where it was considered an advantage for a rabbi to have academic credentials.
The program at Brandeis straddles these two streams both chronologically and temperamentally. At least in the early days undergraduate majors generally went on to seminary training.* But as the years passed students in the graduate department, which awarded its first Ph.D. in 1958, came to have more in common with their counterparts at Columbia, where Salo Baron occupied a chair in Jewish history, or other purely secular institutions.
The inbuilt tension between the sacred and secular streams is perhaps unique to Jewish studies, and distinguishes it from similar programs in modern Greek studies or Italian studies or Irish studies that in many cases also pre-dated and benefited from the growing interest in ethnic studies. But what all these programs, including Jewish studies, have in common, at least in the United States, is their intellectual debt to nationalism, and their more tangible debt to a politically conscious, financially assertive community of benefactors. During the 1930s, for example, Columbia University’s Casa Italiana was a notorious center of pro-Fascist agitation.
Nowadays the pressures are likely to be more subtle. The Dorot Foundation, which funds Lipstadt’s chair, “has a strong tradition of commitment to Israel [and] to the Jewish community in North America,” according to its literature. And it is noticeable that when she comes to consider the actions—and inactions—of American Jewish leaders in Beyond Belief, Lipstadt’s fury turns to sympathy and understanding.
Lipstadt herself views her close relationship with the Jewish community as essential to both her work and her personal identity. An observant Jew, Lipstadt describes herself as “not Orthodox.” The exclusion of even the mention of women from so much of Orthodox ritual disturbs her. “I want them to at least acknowledge that you’re only talking about the men. Because if the rabbi stands up and says, ‘We need as many people as possible to come tomorrow morning,’ I’ll come.” But her estrangement from organized religion—“I’m equally unhappy in any synagogue I go to,” she jokes—does not extend to estrangement from organized Judaism. “My professional and personal lives are really integrated. Because so much of my personal life is tied up with being Jewish. Being a Jew and being Jewish. Culturally, religiously, intellectually—it’s what I know best.”
This coziness has prompted some academics to patronizingly dismiss Lipstadt’s work as a “JCC [Jewish community Center] version of history.” The implication is that while Lipstadt’s books may make Jews feel better, or give them an opportunity to vent their anger, they have little to do with the hard work of presenting evidence, criticizing sources, and weighing interpretations that give history its analytical rigor and epistemological dignity. There is a measure of truth in such criticism, but there is a much greater measure of naïveté.
History, like war, is always a form of politics by other means, and it is perfectly proper, even prudent, to bear in mind a historian’s known prejudices, political engagements, and sources of funding. But it is sheer intellectual laziness to suggest that such information obviates the need to come to grips with the work itself. Lipstadt’s first book, Beyond Belief, though perhaps excessively kind to American Jewish and Zionist leaders, is nonetheless a pioneering work on how Americans came to learn the facts of the Holocaust. If her second book is more problematic, part of the reason may be that in Denying the Holocaust Lipstadt was following a fairly well-established route. Unfortunately for her, it was not always a clear path.
As Lipstadt herself documented, at the end of the Second World War the fact that there was something distinctive about the fate of Europe’s Jews and their treatment by the Nazis was not widely acknowledged. In Edward R. Murrow’s famous 1945 broadcast from Buchenwald, for example, the words “Jew” and “Jewish” are never spoken. Nor do they appear in the text that accompanied Margaret Bourke-White’s photographs of the camp inmates. A reporter for Life described the prisoners liberated from Dachau as “the men of all Nations that Hitler’s agents had picked out as prime opponents of Nazism.”3
Lipstadt suggests this was willful blindness—a view whose partial truth is further diminished by Peter Novick’s observation that, during the war, most Jewish organizations vigorously resisted attempts to describe Nazi persecution as specifically aimed at Jews. “It should always be pointed out,” said a 1942 American Jewish Committee memorandum, “that Nazi tyranny does not discriminate between Jew and Pole.” After Pearl Harbor, the director of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith worried about an increase in domestic anti-Semitism: “There will be hundreds of thousands of bereaved families, a substantial part of whom have been conditioned to the belief that this is a Jewish war.”4
Besides, in the concentration camps liberated by American GIs or British Tommies—Dachau, Buchenwald, or Bergen-Belsen—Jews were a minority. In Buchenwald and Dachau only about a fifth of the prisoners were Jews. As the British historian Tony Kushner points out, the very term “concentration camp” lends itself to obfuscation: “In location, and sometimes even in name, those concentration camps could be seen as part of a continuum, however horrific they had become, with the Nazi atrocities of the 1930s” which had mostly been directed at Hitler’s political opponents. When these camps were liberated, says Kushner, they confirmed a pattern which seemed to foreclose “the possibility of different camps in other localities—of death factories in Poland such as Treblinka.”5
Though he speeds through the period covered by Lipstadt, Peter Novick’s provocative survey of the Holocaust’s post-war career offers a further reason for American reticence: with the realignment brought about by the Cold War, talk of the Holocaust was positively inimical to US interests. “In 1945,” he writes, “Americans had cheered as Soviet forces pounded Berlin into rubble; in 1948, Americans organized the Airlift to defend ‘gallant Berliners’ from Soviet threat.” The accompanying ideological retooling took place at breathtaking speed, but in 1950s America few besides Communists shouted “Remember the six million!” Mourners at the funeral of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed as Soviet spies in 1953, sung the “Song of the Warsaw Ghetto.” For most Americans, though, including American Jews, the Holocaust was, says Novick, “the wrong atrocity”—mention of it was at best an embarrassment, at worst a cause for suspicion.6
In Britain, where the wartime alliance with Stalin was even more of a shotgun marriage, suspicion of Soviet sources kept the Red Army’s July 1944 liberation of Majdanek off the front pages. Majdanek was a death camp, a place where the Nazis had exterminated two hundred thousand people, yet even with the war still raging the BBC refused to broadcast a word about what the Soviets had found. Alexander Werth, the first British journalist to visit the camp, had his report spiked because “they thought it was a Russian propaganda stunt.”7 The liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops in January 1945 met with a similar reception in the West.
Location is as important in history as it is in real estate. At Sobibór, Treblinka, and Belzec the killers were efficient enough to leave only a handful of surviving victims: of the 600,000 men, women, and children deported to Belzec, there are precisely two known survivors. On Himmler’s orders the camps themselves were razed to the ground before the Russian advance. But the fact that all the Vernichtungslager—the extermination camps—were behind what would become the Iron Curtain was at least as important a factor in obscuring the truth about what happened there as any cover-up by the retreating Nazis. Long after it had outlived its Cold War usefulness, skepticism about the evidence left behind at Majdanek, where the Red Army found the machinery of murder intact, or at Auschwitz, where efforts to efface what had happened were only partially successful, would resurface as one of the main strands of Holocaust denial.
Nowadays the Holocaust is ubiquitous. Films such as Schindler’s List and Sophie’s Choice, television programs, novels, memoirs, and works of history all add to the sum of what we know—or think we know. We need merely consider the reception of Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments to see how much has changed. Decorated with endorsements by famous academics, Fragments won the National Jewish Book Award for biography/memoir, beating out works by Elie Wiesel and Alfred Kazin. Even after evidence mounted that “Wilkomirski” was really Bruno Dössekker, a Swiss musician whose account of a childhood in the camps was completely fictional, Fragments continued to attract readers.8 Such is the public appetite for Holocaust literature.
How did this change come about? Peter Novick mentions various factors: a gradual easing of the Cold War, outbreaks of neo-Nazism in Germany, the 1952 publication of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, later adapted to stage and screen. But the single greatest catalyst, he says, was the kidnapping and trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Here, too, initial response was negative: The New Republic said Israel should “confess error and hand Eichmann back” to Argentina. The Wall Street Journal worried that the proceedings would only benefit the Russians. But as the trial wore on, the sheer mass of detail evidently overcame such skepticism. The trial was televised, and for the first time the American public was confronted with the Holocaust as an event distinct from the general carnage of war.9
Much of what the Eichmann trial revealed was set out in even greater detail in Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews. Hilberg’s opus was first published in 1961 by Quadrangle Books, at the time a small independent publisher, but only after having been sat on by academic presses at Columbia and the University of Oklahoma, and rejected outright from Princeton, and only after a Czech refugee donated $15,000 toward the cost of publication. The book’s early reviews were mostly hostile—with one notable exception.10 Writing in Commentary, Hugh Trevor-Roper declared that Hilberg’s analysis of the Nazi machinery of extermination carried “a profound social content.” Trevor-Roper’s review, which ran in the period between Eichmann’s abduction and his trial, also contained a warning. The “most surprising revelation,” he wrote, would also be “the least welcome”—namely Hilberg’s depiction of the extent to which the Nazis relied on the Jews to assist in their own destruction.
The magazine, published then as now by the American Jewish Committee, hastened to counter Trevor-Roper’s praise with an article by Harvard historian Oscar Handlin entitled “Jewish Resistance to the Nazis.” Handlin accused Hilberg of “impiety” and “defaming the dead.” This response became so widespread that in 1968, when Hilberg went to Israel on sabbatical, officials at Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial, refused to allow him into the archives (a situation anticipated by the way Yad Vashem Studies had treated his book. The review was titled “Historical Research or Slander?”).11
Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt’s report on the Eichmann trial, fared no better. Arendt’s focus on Eichmann’s ordinariness, on what she called “the banality of evil,” struck some commentators as overly sympathetic. In the New York Times Book Review, Barbara Tuchman accused Arendt of “a conscious desire to support Eichmann’s defense.” The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith condemned what it called an “evil book,” reminding its members:
It is common knowledge that Eichmann himself deliberately planned the cold-blooded senseless liquidation of an entire people. . . . Eichmann personally conceived the idea of liquidating Jews as a means of “solving” the Jewish problem. . . . He probably could have successfully proposed mass Jewish emigration to his superiors [but] instead he selected the gas chamber, the crematorium and the soap factory.”12
These attacks, as Peter Novick points out, were “not just false but the reverse of the truth.” Like Hilberg, Arendt was assailed for highlighting the role of the Jewish communal leadership in the tragedy—perhaps even more virulently than Hilberg, because in her view Jewish leaders had been particularly culpable. “Wherever Jews lived,” she wrote,
there were recognized Jewish leaders, and this leadership, almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis. The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million people.13
Once again Commentary, the voice of the American Jewish leadership, pronounced its anathema, with the editor, Norman Podhoretz, personally declaring Arendt’s reports “complex, unsentimental, riddled with paradox and ambiguity”—all, in Podhoretz’s mind, terms of abuse.14
In 1988 Arno Mayer, a professor of European history at Princeton, published Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? Subtitled “The Final Solution in History,” Mayer’s book intended to rescue the Holocaust from a “cult of remembrance” which in his view had “become overly sectarian” and thus impeded historical understanding. “Whereas the voice of memory is univocal and uncontested, that of history is polyphonic and open for debate,” Mayer wrote. History “calls for revision.”15
To the Anti-Defamation League, those were fighting words. Even worse, Mayer argued that the Nazis were motivated not by simple anti-Semitism, but by a hostility to “Judeo-Bolshevism”—the Nazi word for the belief that Jews controlled both Communism and capitalism. Mayer wrote that there was no evidence to suggest that when Adolf Hitler invaded Poland his objective was “to capture the maximum number of Jews for slaughter.”16 Indeed the Nazis went to great lengths to push Jews to emigrate. Contrary to Lucy Dawidowicz’s The War Against the Jews (1975), which claimed that genocide was one of the Nazis’ principal war aims, Mayer held that Hitler was far more concerned with his “crusade” against Communism, and that only after the failure of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, did the Nazis vent their murderous frustration on the Jews of Eastern Europe.17
Mayer’s thesis was sloppily presented. His book had no footnotes, and his contention that anti-Communism was more important in Nazi ideology than anti-Semitism was certainly open to argument, as was his account of events leading to the Final Solution. But argument was just what Mayer didn’t get from his critics, who preferred insult and innuendo. “‘A mockery of memory and history,’ ‘outrageous,’ . . . ‘bizarre,’ and ‘perverse’” were, said historian Richard Evans, reporting the controversy for a London newspaper, “just some of the more printable” responses. Leading the charge was The New Republic’s reviewer, a young Harvard graduate student named Daniel Goldhagen.
Goldhagen’s rage seemed particularly aroused by what he called “Mayer’s enormous intellectual error,” namely his joint consideration of Nazi anti-Semitism and anti-Communism.18 This is an old story, whose roots lie in the 1950s, when Lucy Dawidowicz was the American Jewish Committee’s resident expert on Communism and the organized Jewish community resisted any suggestion of a shared fate.19 Communist governments returned the favor, resisting efforts to even recognize Jews as a category among the victims, which is why the commemorative plaque at Auschwitz, like the many Soviet monuments to the Great Patriotic War, contained no mention of Jews. But the geography of the Final Solution wasn’t just coincidence. On the eve of Operation Barbarossa Hitler issued the infamous “Commissar Order” authorizing the execution of Communist officials and “Jews in Party and State functions.” This was followed by a directive enjoining “ruthless and energetic measures against Bolshevik agitators, guerrillas, saboteurs, Jews.” The camp at Auschwitz–Birkenau housed Soviet prisoners of war before Jews were sent there; in the first mass gassings, in August and September 1941, the victims were Soviet POWs identified as political commissars.
The close association in Hitler’s mind between Jews and Bolsheviks doesn’t mean such a relationship existed in reality. But it doesn’t mean there was no relationship, either. And since Hitler’s views had fatal consequences, as when he told Himmler in December 1941 that the Jews were to be extirpated “as partisans,” the tidy separation so dear to Goldhagen, like the simplicity so cherished by Podhoretz, can only be maintained at the cost of considerable distortion. Thus Goldhagen writes that to the German soldiers at Auschwitz, “the deaths of non-Jews were understood to have been incidental to the enterprise, mere tactical operations,” yet even he is later forced to acknowledge that at Auschwitz and elsewhere such mere tactical operations “killed, mainly by starvation, 2.8 million young healthy Soviet POWs in less than eight months.”20
When aimed at their targets, this distortion is merely disgraceful. Hilberg, Arendt, and Mayer are all not just Jews but refugees from the Nazis. There can be no doubting their obvious, sympathetic, personal identification with the victims of the Holocaust. “By 1942, in her eighties and blind,” Raul Hilberg’s grandmother “lay in bed most of the time,” Hilberg writes in The Politics of Memory. “Apparently that is where the German raiders found her and where they shot her on the spot.”21 Hannah Arendt had been arrested for illegal Zionist activity, and interned by the Vichy French, before escaping to the United States.22 Arno Mayer’s book opens with “A Personal Preface” telling of his own hair-raising escape from Luxembourg and occupied France, and of the fate of his grandfather, who refused to leave Luxembourg and died in Theresienstadt.23 Such personal bona fides didn’t prevent the Anti-Defamation League from including Mayer in its 1993 report “Hitler’s Apologists: The Anti-Semitic Propaganda of Holocaust Revisionism,” where his work is cited as an example of “legitimate historical scholarship which relativizes the genocide of the Jews.” Mayer’s crime is to “have argued, with no apparent anti-Semitic motivation”—note how the absence of evidence becomes itself incriminating—“that though millions of Jews were killed during WWII, there was actually no premeditated policy for this destruction.”
Far more dangerous is the effect on what “enforcers” like Goldhagen or the Anti-Defamation League believe they are protecting. There is a kind of consolation in believing that the Second World War was really “a war against the Jews,” just as there is a kind of comfort in the view that the whole German nation were uniquely and murderously anti-Semitic. But these are not the consolations of history. History is messy, complex, contingent. Emptied of its contingency, history becomes myth, which the French critic Roland Barthes defined as “depoliticized speech.” In a myth, said Barthes, “history evaporates.”24 In other words, by describing a Holocaust outside politics, by reducing it to good Jews and bad Germans—or in Lucy Dawidowicz’s formulation “the Devil and his hosts”—these writers have, however inadvertently, made the deniers’ task easier.
“I’m always fighting. I’m a great dinner party guest if you want a lively dinner party; if you want peace and quiet, don’t invite me.” The voice of Deborah Lipstadt is a big instrument—big enough so that in the months between talking with her in the autumn and the opening of the trial I had in mind a much larger woman than the silent, actually rather petite person in a beige trouser-suit sitting between her lawyers.
In the preceding pages, as at the trial, Lipstadt’s voice has been barely audible above the contentious chorus that surrounds any discussion of the Holocaust. Once the trial began, Lipstadt herself would become merely a figurehead—a hate figure for Irving’s supporters, a heroine worthy of her biblical namesake to her admirers. Before that happened I wanted to get Lipstadt’s sense of her own role. Did she see herself as a dragon-slayer? The victim of a legal mugging? A Jewish avenger?
What I found was a woman with a bad back and a New York manner—more Bette Midler than Bess Myerson—undiluted by her years in California and Georgia. A veteran of hundreds of interviews and dozens of television appearances, Lipstadt is perfectly at ease with the press, slipping on and off the record with the agility of a politician. She’d been forbidden to talk about the specifics of the case, but happily rehearsed the themes of her book: “Don’t ask Stephen Jay Gould to get into a debate with people from Kansas who want to teach creationism. I’m not going to get into a debate with a denier.”
But if Holocaust deniers are merely a nuisance, why bother to denounce them? “It’s not that they are a clear and present danger,” she replied. “I like to say they are clear and future danger.” Pressed further, she responded with some heat: “Hello! I’m the defendant here. If I hadn’t fought this he would have won by default. If he had won by default, he could have said—it would have been said—the High Court in London recognizes his definition of the Holocaust. Now some people would say, ‘Oh that’s ludicrous. Who would believe that anyway?’ But it’s naïve to think you can just say ‘Oh, I’m going to ignore this.’”
Lipstadt did not seem naïve. However as we sat talking in the coffee shop attached to her London hotel she did give the impression of having been metaphysically wrenched out of her orbit. “I’d much rather be hanging out in the fall foliage in Georgia, hiking the Appalachian trail,” she said. When we first spoke on the telephone she described her experience as “pretty chilling” and in free-speech terms that is hard to dispute. Though Irving tries repeatedly to make his right to speak an issue, it is Deborah Lipstadt who has had to put her own work aside, move to London, hire lawyers, do fundraising to pay them, and then sit and watch while men—all of the witnesses in this case are male—argue about words she wrote.
Before we met I thought perhaps it was conflict that made her uncomfortable. This illusion was swiftly dispelled. “My mother will tell you that she was called to the principal’s office more times because of fights I’d gotten into, that had nothing to do with me,” she said. This is very much her fight, “and if I’m going to fight it, you gotta fight it no holds barred.” Remaining silent, letting others do the fighting for her—that will be the hard part.
Denying the Holocaust began life as a piece of commissioned research. In 1984 Yehuda Bauer, director of Hebrew University’s Vidal Sassoon Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism, asked Lipstadt if she might be interested in undertaking a study of the historical development of “Holocaust revisionists, i.e. those who deny that the Holocaust happened.” She replied with a three-page proposal on “the American school” of revisionists, focusing on “their historical and historiographic methodology.” Among the questions Lipstadt proposed to answer in her monograph was how the writings of Harry Elmer Barnes, a once prominent historian and author of a revisionist account of the First World War, might have influenced “those such as David Irving who, though they do not deny the existence of the Holocaust, do shift the blame from Hitler.”25
Completion was estimated for the fall of 1986, but in May of 1988 Lipstadt received an additional grant from the Center. By that time David Irving had testified in the Zündel trial, and Lipstadt had published her first book with the Free Press in New York. The editor-in-chief, Irwin Glickes, asked Lipstadt what else she was working on, and she mentioned her research project.
“I don’t think she saw it as a book,” says Adam Bellow, who became Lipstadt’s editor. “We had a fascinating abstract colloquy in Irwin’s office” about whether publishing the study would do more harm than good. Lipstadt was worried that the ensuing “publicity would benefit the deniers.” Bellow describes her as “reluctant to write it and reluctant to publish.” Another complication was that, legally, the Sassoon Center owned the rights to Lipstadt’s still-uncompleted research, and was already in negotiations with Pergamon Press, whose owner, financier Robert Maxwell, was a Center benefactor.*
By March 1991 terms had been agreed, and Lipstadt told Bellow she was “beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel.” Six months later she reported “the work is moving along nicely” but expressed concern about her January deadline. “I have also spoken to people in England who have a large cache of material on David Irving’s ‘conversion’ to denial,” she added, asking for extra time to “give a really contemporary slant to the story.”26 Bellow agreed.
“Deborah worked very hard for very little money,” he says. In her affidavit Lipstadt says she received about $20,000 over the course of four years to cover travel, research assistance, and expenses. “According to my calculations I spent far more than that on my research,” she adds, noting that despite an agreement calling for her to receive half of any royalties, “Hebrew University only sent me a small portion of the very first royalty payment they received (approximately 2,500 dollars). After that I received no royalties on this book. I received no other funds for the writing of this book. I received no funds when the rights to this book were sold to other countries, including the United Kingdom. I have earned nothing from this book since the first year in which it appeared, in 1994.”
Lipstadt sent her finished manuscript to Yehuda Bauer in the fall of 1992. Bauer found it “well-written and fascinating,” but complained that Lipstadt’s perspective was too narrow, and asked her to include more material on Europe, especially relating to David Irving. “If you decide not to deal with it” Bauer suggested changing the book’s title: “it is not about Holocaust denial, but about Holocaust denial in the U.S. and France.” Lipstadt dealt with it, writing in December 1992 to the head of London’s Institute of Jewish Affairs asking for additional material on Irving. When the book came out in 1993 Irving still didn’t get his own chapter (unlike American deniers Austin App and Arthur Butz) but he was more than mentioned in passing.
Though it may not have made much money, in every other way the American edition of Denying the Holocaust was a publishing triumph. Hailing it on the front page of the July 11, 1993 New York Times Book Review as “important and impassioned” reviewer Walter Reich wrote: “it illuminates, with skill and clarity, not only the peculiarly disturbing world of the Holocaust deniers, but also the methods they have used to distort history [and] the motives that have driven them to do so.” New York Newsday, the Boston Globe, and the Atlanta Constitution agreed. The Los Angeles Times called the book “an antidote to the moral and intellectual virus that has spread from the crackpot fringe to the very heart of public discourse.” Lipstadt, who arrived at Emory as an associate professor, was named to the Dorot Chair in Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies; she also received a Presidential appointment to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council.
Her British experience was rather different. In March 1995 Penguin issued a paperback edition, which sold 2,088 copies in the United Kingdom in its first year. Outside the Jewish press, reviewers ignored it. In 1996, the year Deborah Lipstadt was served with David Irving’s writ, net British sales for Denying the Holocaust numbered exactly 21.
This put the First Defendants in an awkward position. Penguin is owned by Pearson, a public company, and even if they won, defending a libel action would cost Pearson’s shareholders many thousands of times the book’s minuscule earnings. By the time lawyers’ fees are figured in, the trial itself could easily cost £10,000 a day—not to mention pre-trial expenses like expert reports. The most cursory credit check would have made it clear how unlikely Penguin were to ever recover even a tiny fraction of this money from the much mortgaged David Irving.
As a purely business proposition a publisher involved in a libel action is nearly always advised to settle. Irving was well aware of this, having recently won a settlement from a London newspaper after a columnist attributed to Irving a phrase that had actually been a quote from Adolf Hitler. A settlement would be far cheaper than fighting the case even if Penguin won—and given the British libel laws, winning was far from certain.
Yet Penguin decided to defend the suit. Anthony Forbes-Watson, who became the company’s CEO after a stint running its Ladybird Books, a juvenile division, cited a company tradition of “upholding the right to publish” running from the Lady Chatterley trial through Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. But Penguin’s conduct regarding Rushdie, though perhaps understandable, was far from heroic. Subject to death threats themselves, Rushdie’s publishers didn’t disavow his book, or turn him over to the fatwa, but they declined to issue a paperback edition, or to reprint the book in hardcover.
Penguin may have stood by Lipstadt out of principle. Besides, controversial books often make money, and while Denying the Holocaust did not, a publisher known to cut and run at the first sign of a libel writ will have a hard time attracting certain authors—not to mention setting themselves up as easy pickings for would-be claimants. The unusual background of Pearson’s CEO Marjorie Scardino, who published a crusading weekly newspaper in Savannah, Georgia that won a Pulitzer Prize before being forced out of business by the targets of its exposés, may also have helped to stiffen Penguin’s resolve.
But there is one other factor worth mentioning. Lipstadt’s American publishers had her manuscript read for libel—in other words they’d asked a specialist in defamation law to read it and flag potential trouble spots, suggesting changes if necessary. A routine precaution in the United States, libel readings are less common in Britain. Penguin hadn’t bothered—a dereliction described as “unconscionable” by Adam Bellow, and which certainly would have increased Penguin’s discomfort had they abandoned Lipstadt.