ONE-PERSON GAS CHAMBERS AND WHITE PEOPLE’S POLKAS
“So how do you feel, now that we can see the light at the end of the tunnel?” Anthony smiled at my question, which I posed as I caught up with him on the stairs to the courtroom. Today was the last regular session. We would then recess for a week to prepare for closing arguments. I told Anthony that I was finding it hard to fathom that we were approaching the end. The team that had worked so closely together was about to disband. I expected him to find this a bit maudlin and to protest—a bit too much—that this was how trials worked, a group comes together, works intensively, and then disbands. Instead, with unmistakable melancholy, he agreed it would be hard. “This was a good team and an important battle.” Just then Janet called for silence. Anthony looked relieved.
STRATEGIC TASTELESSNESS
Rampton began by playing a videotape of a 1991 speech Irving had given in Ontario. Irving had repeated for his audience the “one-person gas chamber” anecdote about the telephone booth that, he said, was carried around the Polish countryside by two Germans. Irving claimed that according to “eyewitnesses” the Germans convinced people to get in the gas chamber by ringing the phone inside. His audience laughed. Rampton turned off the tape: “How many eyewitness accounts and who were the people that told these stories?” Irving was emphatic: “Alleged survivors of Auschwitz.” “How many?” Rampton demanded. “Certainly one account,” Irving responded. That was all Rampton needed. Relying on a rhetorical device he had used before, he repeated one word from Irving’s Ontario speech and added his own commentary: “‘Eyewitnesses,’ plural?” Irving brushed away his use of the plural. It was just “a slip of the tongue.” “It is not,” Rampton said. “It is a deliberate exaggeration. . . . You got some good laughs with this little story.” Irving defended telling this anecdote. Not only was it a “ludicrous story” but it illustrated how historians selectively use the eyewitness accounts. “They take the ones that they like and they ignore the ones that are obviously baloney.” Rampton wondered why a serious historian would recite a story that was “obviously untrue.”1
And why, he continued, did the Ontario audience find this anecdote so funny? Irving claimed he kept his audience interested “by interlacing the serious documents that you want them to listen to with material to keep them awake.” Rampton offered a different explanation. “What you are doing is . . . mocking the survivors and, indeed, the dead from the Holocaust.” When Irving insisted he was not mocking survivors, Rampton countered by reading Irving’s comments about the stories spread by people who “went to Auschwitz or . . . who believed they went to Auschwitz, or . . . who can kid themselves into believing they went to Auschwitz. . . .” Irving had told his audience that these “little legends” must be treated with “ridicule and . . . bad taste. . . . [But] ridicule alone is not enough. You have got to be tasteless about it. You have got to say things like more women died on the back seat of Senator Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick than died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.”2 Rampton pointedly noted that Irving’s quip had been met with applause.
Rampton’s voice bristled: “Mr Irving, what you are doing here—” Irving interrupted to finish Rampton’s sentence: “Mocking the liars.” Rampton, looking away from Irving: “Oh yes, Mr Irving, but why the applause?” Irving responded, “Because I am a good speaker, Mr Rampton.” His answer caught Rampton off guard. “What?” In a tone suggesting that the answer was self-evident, Irving repeated, “I am a good speaker.” Rampton, having regained his footing, had a different explanation: “You are . . . feeding, encouraging, the most cynical radical antisemitism in your audiences.” Irving shot back, “Do liars not deserve to be exposed as such?”
The judge interrupted this heated interchange to ask Irving to clarify his statement about survivors: “Are you saying that they have come to believe what they say about their experiences and that is why they need psychiatric treatment? Or . . . that they are collectively telling lies, deliberate falsehoods?” Appearing happy to expand upon his views directly to the judge, Irving described Auschwitz as having become akin to a religion. “As with any religion, there are hangers on, people who believe they were there, people who believe they touched the cloth.” Irving admitted he had been tasteless. Rampton interjected, “And your audience absolutely love it. . . . It is music to their ears.” Irving stood up straight and possibly forgetting the context of the question, rather proudly responded, “They travel 200 miles sometimes to . . . hear me speak.”3
Rampton looked like he was about to respond. Then, apparently having decided that Irving’s answer spoke for itself, moved on.
IRVING AND THE NATIONAL ALLIANCE: AN INADVERTENT CONNECTION?
From Irving’s diaries and correspondence files, we discovered that, during visits to the United States, he had spoken on a number of occasions at meetings sponsored by the National Alliance (NA), an organization whose goal was to build societies “throughout the White world which are based on Aryan values” and to thoroughly root out “Semitic and non-Aryan values and customs everywhere.”4 The NA’s founder, William Pierce, authored The Turner Diaries, which had become the underground bible of American far-right extremists.5
In response to our pretrial interrogatory about his NA connections, Irving had denied ever having spoken at any of their meetings. Rampton now asked Irving to concede that this statement was false.6 When Irving insisted that it was not, Rampton reminded him of a video we had found in his collection that showed Irving giving a speech with an NA banner by his left shoulder. Irving insisted he was completely unaware of the banner’s significance, therefore his denial was earnest.
Rampton looked skeptical, but did not challenge Irving’s disclaimer. Instead he introduced a letter Irving had received detailing the arrangements for a June 1990 speech in Ohio. In the corner were the words “National Alliance” and the group’s logo. Irving insisted he had paid no heed to either one. Once again Rampton looked unconvinced, but did not challenge him. He then asked Irving to look at a National Alliance bulletin that reported the following: “On October 1st, the Cleveland unit hosted a very successful lecture by the British historian and revisionist author, David Irving. More than 100 tickets were sold . . .” Irving’s photograph accompanied the article. Irving, assuming he knew what would be Rampton’s question, jumped right in: “Have I ever seen that before? The answer is no.” Rampton asked Irving to be patient and assured him that his question would come, but only after several more documents. Rampton continued and read Irving’s diary entry about the Cleveland meeting: “Fine meeting, around 150 people, many ethnic Germans. Gate of $500 was agreed plus $1700 book sales.” Irving emphatically noted that “there is not the slightest reference either in that diary entry or in any other diary entry . . . to the National Alliance.” Rampton reproved Irving in a tone a parent might use with an obstreperous child: “I asked you to be patient. You have jumped in as you so often do.” Then, rather nonchalantly, Rampton asked Irving to turn to the next document. As he did, Heather passed a copy of it to me. A quick glance revealed Rampton’s strategy. On October 6, 1991, five days after the Cleveland meeting, Irving wrote in his diary: “Drove all day to Tampa. . . . Arrived at the Hotel Best Western. . . . Turned out the meeting here is also organized by the . . . National Alliance” (emphasis added). A flicker of surprised recognition crossed Irving’s face. “It just goes to show how bad my memory is.” Then, trying to extricate himself from this predicament, he continued, “Yes, but it . . . illustrates, does it not, the fact that . . . I had not the slightest notion who these people are.” In a tone I had not heard previously, Irving rather plaintively asked Rampton, “Would that be a proper interpretation to put on that entry?” Not surprisingly, Rampton disagreed. He reread Irving’s diary entry: “‘[T]he meeting here—Tampa—is also organized by the . . . National Alliance.’ In other words you knew that both meetings were organized by the National Alliance?” When Irving declared that he learned who the organizers were after the meeting, Rampton reminded him that in the videotape of his speech in Tampa the host opened the meeting by announcing: “On behalf of the National Alliance and National Vanguard Books I would like to proudly welcome Mr David Irving.” Rampton, rather solicitously asked Irving, “Do you want to revise your evidence?”7 I whispered to James, “Did Rampton just ask him if he wanted to admit he had lied?” James smiled. Irving insisted that the man in the video had simply put in a “plug” for his own organization and that he had not “the faintest notion” of who organized this meeting. Rampton declared, “I take leave, . . . Mr Irving, to inform you that I reject every word of that answer.”8
In 1998, Irving had spoken at yet another National Alliance meeting. A representative from the American Jewish Committee had attended and picked up National Alliance books and tapes. When Rampton asked Irving to look at this material, Irving dismissed it as irrelevant: “What possible relevance [could] whatever leaflet was on the table 100 feet away from me [have]?” Before Rampton could respond, Judge Gray interjected, “I regard it as being relevant to know what sort of an organization it is that you have addressed on three occasions.” Irving, looking a bit surprised, turned toward the judge and declared, “My Lord, I object to the suggestion that I was addressing an organization. I was addressing my people who had come from all over Northern Florida to hear me speak. . . . I am sure it was a slip of the tongue, but I would hate it to go on the record unchallenged.” Judge Gray ignored Irving’s protest. Rampton did likewise. I wished he had asked Irving what he meant by “my people.”
In an effort to illustrate what the NA stood for, Rampton took out its Statement of Belief. He warned that it sounded like a “modern English American version of Nazi ideology.” Irving protested. “What has that got to do with me?” Rampton angrily responded, “You fuel these people with your thoughts about the Holocaust, Mr Irving. That is why [sic] it has got to do with you.”9
From a section entitled “White Living Space,” Rampton read: “After the sickness of multi-culturalism . . . has been swept away we must again have a racially clean area of the earth for the further development of our people.” On its website the organization promised the creation of an “Aryan Society” in which young men and women would dance “polkas or waltzes, reels or jigs, or any other White dances, but never undulate or jerk to Negroid jazz or rock rhythms.” Rampton asked Irving if the Alliance’s warning about the “sickness of multi-culturalism” resonated to him. When Irving said no, Rampton reminded him of his declaration about “feeling queasy” when he saw blacks playing for the English cricket team, his description of AIDS as God’s Final Solution against black Africans and homosexuals, and his proposal that a black newscaster be “relegated to reading the news about muggings and drug busts.” Irving insisted these were jokes, not “racial in citement.” Rampton looked up at Irving over his gold-rimmed spectacles. His raised eyebrows clearly indicated what he thought of Irving’s explanation.
Rampton returned to the NA’s statement. “We must have White schools, White residential neighborhoods, and recreational areas, White workplaces, White farms and countryside.” Again Irving protested, “But what has it [to] do with me?” Rampton angrily insisted, “It has everything to do with you.” Before Irving could respond, Judge Gray interrupted: “You say that this is . . . news to you? . . . How [then] do you react to this sort of stuff?” Irving declared, “It is a most appallingly badly written piece of propaganda.” Even the unflappable Charles Gray seemed caught off guard. Unable—or possibly unwilling—to camouflage his surprise, he repeated, “Badly written?” The statement, Irving continued, did not “interest me in the slightest . . . and I do not intend to retain it in my memory quite frankly.”10 Rampton stared at Irving for a moment and then rather deliberately laid the NA’s manifesto down. He seemed glad to be rid of it.
While questioning Irving, Rampton suddenly asked him if he had been reading the Eichmann manuscript. When Irving said he had not, Rampton suggested that he do a word search for the word Vergasungslager (gas camps).11 That alone would demolish deniers’ arguments. Though the manuscript had really come too late to be of much help to us, I knew how grateful Rampton was to the Israelis for releasing it to us. Rampton knew how pleased I was that historians would now have free access to this material. This was, I assumed, his way of signaling our appreciation.
Moving on to a new topic, Rampton asked Irving what he knew of the British National Party (BNP), which opposed nonwhite immigration into the United Kingdom and endorsed repatriation of blacks and Asians already living there. It had links to the National Front, a group with a reputation for ruthless violence against immigrants. The leader of the BNP used to be photographed in jackboots and armband in front of pictures of Adolf Hitler.12 Irving told Rampton that he knew no more about the BNP than he did about the NA. Rampton asked Irving, “You speak to them, do you not?” Irving responded, “No.” Rampton continued, “Or you have done?” Again, Irving responded, “No.” Once again Irving walked into a trap of his own making. We had found his correspondence with the BNP in his files. After Irving’s second—very unqualified—“No,” Rampton asked him to look at a letter that was written on BNP stationery. “British National Party, Yorkshire region. Dear Mr Irving, further to our telephone conversation today, I am writing to confirm that we would be very happy for you to come up to Leeds on Friday 14th September to address a special northern regional meeting.”
When Rampton finished reading, Irving protested that this was just like functions in America where a “local functionary of some political group is inviting me to come and address an umbrella body.” Judge Gray, who sounded more than a touch annoyed, interrupted Irving’s answer: “Mr Irving, come on, that is letter [sic] on the stationery of the British National Party.”
This back-and-forth was followed by one of the stranger and more revealing non sequiturs by Irving. Earlier, in his diary, we had found an entry made while he was in Key West, Florida. “12 midday. Kirk Lyons phoned. Going to London . . . for BNP meeting.” Rampton asked Irving about Lyons and his connection with the BNP. After identifying Lyons as an American lawyer and insisting he had no idea of his connection with the BNP, Irving said, “Speaking of my first lawyer, who was Michael Rubenstein who was my lawyer for 25 years . . . and may be familiar to this court.” Rampton, looking rather disgusted, responded, “Many of my best friends are Jews too, Mr Irving.”13
JEWS AND CRIME
Rampton now turned to the section of Irving’s book Goebbels that attributed the Nazi propaganda chief’s antisemitism to his encounter with Jewish criminals in Berlin in the late 1920s. From then on, Irving wrote, Goebbels “would highlight every malfeasance of the criminal demi-monde and identify it as Jewish.” Irving had then told his readers that Goebbels “was unfortunately not always wrong,” Jews were heavily involved in crime:
In 1930 Jews would be convicted in forty-two of 210 known narcotics smuggling cases; in 1932 sixty-nine of the 272 known international narcotics dealers were Jewish. Jews were arrested in over sixty percent of the cases concerning the running of illegal gambling dens; 193 of the 411 pickpockets arrested in 1932 were Jews.
Irving concluded this section of his book with a startling assertion: “In 1932 no fewer than thirty-one thousand cases of fraud, mainly insurance swindles, would be committed by Jews.” Irving accompanied this sweeping indictment of Jews’ criminal actions with a footnote containing four different sources.
Interpol figures, in Deutsches Nachrichten-Büro (DNB), July 20, 1935; and see Kurt Daluege, ‘Judenfrage als Grundsatz’ in Angriff, Aug 3, 1935 . . . ; on the criminal demi-monde of 1920s Berlin, see Paul Weiglin, Unverwüstliches Berlin . . . and Walther Kiaulehn, Berlin: Schicksal einer Weltstadt.14
Rampton began by asking Irving to identify Kurt Daluege, whose article Irving had cited in the footnote. Irving responded, “He was the head of the Ordnungspolizei which is the Order Police in Germany.” Rampton’s Scottish brogue sounded a bit more pronounced than usual, as he rather casually added, “Yes, Mr Irving. Tell us a wee bit more about him.” Irving responded so matter-of-factly that he could have been recounting the man’s university activities: “Oh, he was a mass murderer later on. He was in charge of all the killing on the Eastern Front.” Daluege had joined the SS in the late 1920s. In 1935 he became chief of police in the Interior Ministry and eventually was in charge of the Order Police, the reserve police units that participated in the murder of Jews in the East. After Heydrich’s assassination in 1942, he became acting Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia. It was under his watch that the infamous Lidice massacre occurred. In 1946, he was executed by a Czech court for these and other crimes.
Rampton, rather drolly, observed, “One should be rather cautious, perhaps, about what one is told by Mr Daluege.”15 Rampton noted that Irving’s statistics about Jewish criminal activities came from Daluege’s July 1935 press conference at which the Nazi leader told foreign reporters that Jews were criminals. In a subsequent article in Der Angriff, a major Nazi propaganda outlet, Daluege reiterated his accusations about Jews and posited that the “number of cases of fraud in the Reich’s capital . . . [were] 31,000 in 1933.” Under the Nazis, Daluege wrote, this number had dropped to eighteen thousand but “a considerable part, if not the largest of these fraudulent manipulations are still committed by Jews.”16
When Evans and his team compared Daluege’s statement with Irving’s rendition in Goebbels, they found dramatic discrepancies. Whereas Daluege had blamed a portion of the eighteen thousand cases of fraud on Jews, Irving wrote: “In 1932 no fewer than thirty-one thousand cases of fraud, mainly insurance swindles, would be committed by Jews.” Dismissing Irving’s mix-up of 1932 and 1933 as irrelevant, Rampton observed that Irving had almost doubled the number of fraud cases Daluege attributed to Jews. Furthermore, Daluege had not mentioned “insurance fraud.” Irving, apparently, had invented that. Rampton did not stop there. Though Irving’s footnote cited the authoritative-sounding “Interpol figures,” this too, apparently, was an Irving creation. There was no reference to Interpol in the DNB press release. Irving also failed to inform his readers that the DNB was not a traditional press agency, but was an arm of Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry.*
“Even assuming, which I do not,” Rampton continued, “that this was an innocent mistake on your part to double the number of offences attributable to Jews, do you think it right, when your source is this man Daluege, [to] uncritically simply to take his figures as being right?” Ignoring the fact that Daluege, as a leading Nazi, was not the most unbiased source on Jews, Irving defended him as a reliable source. “He was the head of the German police system. He was in a position to know.” Rampton dismissed Irving’s explanation. “This is a case of deliberate distortion by you so as to inflate the number of wicked, dishonest Jews in Berlin in 1932. . . . You double Daluege’s numbers . . . you have relied on an unreliable source, you have attributed his figures to Interpol and you have spoken about insurance swindles which are not mentioned in Daluege’s document.”17
Irving now insisted that the information on Jewish criminal activities came from the two books cited in the footnote. Nik scribbled a note and passed it to Rampton. Rampton quickly read it and announced, “All the figures, I am told, come from Daluege.” Irving, abandoning the two books, now insisted that he had relied on the German Federal Statistical Office for his figures of Jewish criminal activity. Rampton took a quick look at the clock on the side of the room. It was 12:50. He seemed anxious to make his point before we broke for lunch. He handed Irving a copy of a page from the official German Criminal Statistics. He directed Irving to a line on the ledger that showed there had been, in fact, a total of seventy-four cases of insurance fraud in all of Germany in 1932. The thousands of cases of insurance fraud by Berlin Jews alone was clearly a figment of Irving’s imagination. Holding this page out in front of him, Rampton said, “Any reputable historian would have gone to this document, as opposed to some rabid Nazi’s utterance, to find out what the truth was.”
Irving, no longer insisting his figures were correct, now argued that, if he had committed errors about Jewish criminals, they were not deliberate. “You do not establish a reputation by making deliberate errors.” Rampton, shaking his head in great—and somewhat theatrical—dismay, said, “Well, I think I have about 25 in my pocket by now Mr Irving and that is the 26th.”18 With that we broke for lunch.
During lunch, Rampton and Anthony got into a debate over deconstructionism, the literary theory that challenges attempts to ascribe an ultimate meaning to a text. Using linguistic analysis, it “deconstructs” the ideological biases that shape literary, historical, and philosophical texts. Rampton challenged Anthony to explain why deconstructionism was not just another version of skepticism and, therefore, was not of particular interest or importance. Anthony argued that, while it may be a form of skepticism, it was also a disciplined method of reading. Though I thought deconstructionism, taken at its most simplistic level, had fostered an attitude of “the text can mean whatever I think it means,” I did not participate in the debate. I just sat back, sipped a glass of 1992 Clos de La Roche, Dujac, and reflected on the delicious irony of this conversation, of these two men who had spent innumerable amounts of time on this case, only to devote its final moments to a debate about literary theory. Happy that the trial was nearing its end, I knew that I’d miss, not only the legal team, but moments such as these with their fine wines and clever repartee.
After lunch, Rampton asked a few follow-up questions and then, with no fanfare, announced that he was done. Judge Gray reminded Irving that he could reexamine himself. Irving declined. The substantive part of the trial was effectively over. We would gather in two weeks for closing speeches but the nine-week daily court routine was done.
The next day a few of us gathered for a celebratory lunch. Rampton chose Livebait, a fish restaurant in Waterloo, which, with its tiled floors and waiters in big white aprons, was a nice change from London’s trendy minimalist restaurants. Over a lunch of Dover sole and carefully chosen white wine, we analyzed the preceding weeks. Rampton praised Hajo for having put Irving on the defensive. “I did not have to cross-examine Irving on his German right-wing connections. You did it for me.” He then handed Peter the sketch he had made while he testified. Peter smiled when he saw himself depicted as Saint Peter standing in the witness box. As we talked, drank, and laughed, I could feel the tension dissipating. We were emerging, Hajo said, from a “cosmos of death.”
JUDICIAL RESTRAINT AND LIMITED EXPECTATIONS
I looked forward to continuing this celebratory atmosphere that evening at Shabbat dinner. Generally, I declined invitations because at the end of each week I felt exhausted. This time, I had made an exception in part because the hostess mentioned that one of the guests was a judge at the High Court. “Though he has nothing to do with your case he had to obtain permission from the Lord Justice to attend because you are coming.” I thought he might help me deconstruct—in the nonliterary sense—some of the events of the previous weeks.
The judge was affable and the evening informal and relaxed. As dinner drew to an end and the Fortnum and Masons chocolates I had brought were making the rounds, he turned to me and said, “The perception at the Law Courts is that your defense team is doing well. Everyone seems to think you will win.” Thinking he might have some inside information, I asked as dispassionately as I could, “What’s your source?” Understanding my drift, he chuckled and said, “Oh, no one knows what Charles Gray is thinking. This is strictly the impression of the many people who have attended the sessions.” Even his clerks, he added with a wry smile, had found time to attend.
Buoyed by his words, I declared, “I want an unequivocal victory. I want to beat this guy. Bad.” The judge suddenly grew serious and, in a cautionary tone, added, “Allow me to give you fair warning: Do not anticipate a rousing condemnation of Irving from Charles Gray. British judges practice judicial restraint. A judge who believes a witness lied will say: ‘I did not find this witness helpful.’ Everyone at the Law Courts knows this is judicial shorthand for ‘He’s a liar.’ The judge, however, is not going to say so.”
My heart sank. I heard the voices of those who had predicted that, irrespective of the outcome, this would be a lose/lose situation. “You might win the battle,” they had said, “but lose the war. Even if he loses, he will reinterpret the verdict to make it sound as if the judge found for him.” They had warned that Irving would take any ambiguity in the judge’s decision and twist it to his advantage. My feelings of an imminent victory evaporated. A restrained judgment would be the equivalent of a defeat.